Oaken Gearbox

I noticed earlier this summer that my 5.5hp Briggs & Stratton powered push mower was constantly revving up to a fevered pitch, and then dropping to an idle and nearly stalling. Over and over again every 10 to 15 seconds. Quick Diagnosis (so you can get back outside and enjoy the summer weather): The air-fuel mixture was off. In my case, due to a plugged air filter. It was gross. I can't believe the engine ran as well as it did. A dirty carburetor could also cause these symptoms. That should look like a sponge... Explanation (for those of you who have to know why): A lot of newer lawnmowers use a governor to control engine speed (rather than the classic "Rabbit-Turtle" throttle lever). If the carb cannot achieve an efficient air-fuel mixture, the system just fluctuates between over-revving and almost stalling. After washing my filter out with degreaser and warm soapy water the mower runs just like new. Moral of the story: always try the simple stuff ...

I recently spent a night at Wild River State park with my brother and my two year old son. I found it to be an enjoyable park to visit, although I still prefer Afton for a quick get-away close to the Twin Cities. Check out my Flickr page for a few photos of the campsites and trails. We opted to staying the backpacking sites, rather than the car camping park, so I'll speak only to those. Although they call them backpacking sites, they are treated more as car camping park; you pay and select your site at the office and they give you a tag to hang at a post in front of your site. That being said its only a couple mile walk, so changing sites would be a simple matter. The actual trails are cross country ski trails--mowed in the summer--that pass through new growth forest as well as prairie. Although winter camping is permitted, no hiking or snow shoing is allowed on the groomed trails, so you would have to ski in with your gear. The trails were full of short steep hills. I've be...

There are likely many ways to complete this task. The method below uses GIMP 2.8.8, an opensource (and free) competitor to Adobe's Photoshop and a pretty generic Cannon Scanner. Scan your artwork in Black and White (not greyscale) at twice your intended resolution (I chose 600dpi, the highest offered by my scanner software) and save to a format of your choice. I used .tif because there is no quality loss, but it's not really very important for this application. Don't be alarmed if the result has ugly, jagged edges and extraneous stray pixels. We'll take care of that later. Your scan will look something like this Open the saved file in GIMP. Rotate if needed. Note GIMP's "Select by color" feature didn't seem to work if I didn't first rotate the image (presumably a bug?). Crop out the unwanted margins. Select Image>Mode>RGB Color Go to Image Size and set the resolution to half of what it was before. This will eliminate a lot of ...