Workshop Jobs, Economising on Sanding Belts, Baling Twine and Twins

Calving wise it's been a busy day. A fresh one on the river who looked like she might be having trouble but in the end performed perfectly. Another 3 up on the hill all doing well. And finally twins over the river to the leader of the herd Z3. A boy and a girl unfortunately meaning the girl is very likely to be sterile because of the influence of testosterone from the bull calf.
Count as follows:
On the River 4 from 7
On the Hill 5 from 16
Over the River 3 from 25 i.e. 3 calves from 2 mums

Notice the ear tags have been added before they the get too feisty

Being a bit of a miserable windy day the fencing was put off and apart from checking on different herds and putting out hay and silage the rest of the day was spent cleaning up some odd jobs in the workshop. 

Sanding belts can be a bit pricey and they get used up pretty quickly. Instead of buying the 50 mm wide belts needed, the purchase was 100 mm and these were cut into two.  Easy to do and halved the price.

The ride mower needed a new outlet chute. Again these are expensive and don't seem to last all that long mainly due to clipping various obstacles in the yard and Orchard. Using bits and pieces from the workshop a new chute was assembled at no cost other than a little labour.

The last job in the workshop involved cutting a large pile of scrap wood into smaller lengths for the fireplace. These offcuts were from a local saw mill and too thin and fiddly to be cut by a chain saw. The bench saw with an old ripping blade made short work of the task and yielded 3 barrow loads of starting sticks.

A little trick with baling twine. When starting the knot start with two loops before tying the bow. This creates a lot more friction and prevents slippage when finishing the loop.

single loop

single loop

double loop

double loop

finished knot