POTD- PROJECT OF THE DAY: What Did You Make In Your Shop Today?

[GoceKU]

please tell me you don’t have to pay income tax on that too….

Oh yas, this year taxes are even higher. It seems whenever the government needs to raise money they add another tax deduction. We don't have tax on cars, and houses and land has cheap tax.

 

[matthewsx]

POTD is more of a POTM. And the best part is I don't have to do anything! We live on 64-acres with about 5/8 mile of river as our South border. I brush hog a trail along the river but am continually losing ground to the vegetation (mainly Hawthorne- nasty, thorny stuff; also nettles about 5' high) growing up and over the trail from the river bank. About 20 years ago I spent a summer cutting everything back to the bank, ended up with lots of battle scars. And my lack of continual clean-up resulted in nature taking over the trails again.

Our county drain commission contracted a local excavating company to clean up the river bank and dredge the river to control flooding upstream. Even though it's not my POTD/M, I thought members would like to see what's being used to clean up the trails. I have no affiliation with the company, but Burkett Excavating of Belleville, MI is doing the work. I couldn't be happier with the job they've done.

Thanks for looking , Bruce


This is our place; about 3000' of river frontage with lots of vegetation
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Well this is easier than walking a trail with a chain saw! The excavator has a grapple on it also, cut with the 4' blade, grab and dump
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Now that's an insert!
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This is what's ahead of the excavator
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And a few weeks after the initial "blast-through" the woods/trail. I didn't catch the dozer model, but it'll be back. They still need to dredge the river and re-groom the trail after dredging.
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Gotta love it when you have work done by a consciences company. The trees they had to take that were either in the river or about to fall in the river are neatly stacked right next to the trail. Gonna be easy work cutting firewood for the next few years.
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My dad lived in
Bellville as a kid.

 

[Larry$]

This has been an interesting discussion.
I looked up the weather in Macedonia. A little nicer than where I live, Nebraska. But here everything is pretty well insulated. Natural gas is available in all the cities and is the cheapest way to heat. I copied this from out electric company:
"Rates apply to houses and apartments with one residence. Customer Charge - $5.00 per month Facilities Charge per month $20.00 Level 1 $29.50 Level 2 $46.50 Level 3 $46.50 three-phase Energy Charge Summer (June 1 - Sept. 30) 7.10¢ per kWh Winter (Oct. 1 - May 31) 5.47¢ per kWh."

Hardwood pellets $5.55/ 40 # bag locally. This is at a retail store.

Wage rates$16/ hr. for a high school kid part time at a burger joint. $22/hr. is the lowest paid person in a wood shop, didn't go to high school. Very poor language & math skills but a nice guy.

House prices have been going up. One similar to mine recently sold in this area for $290K. 2 story, 4 bedroom, 2200 Sq. Ft. + basement, 2 stall attached garage, built 2000, lot 80 x 140'. A decent middle of the road house.

Lincoln is a university town & capital of the state. Almost 300,000, very low crime rate. Almost a city.

 

[Nutfarmer]

Greece sounds like a nice place to retire if one has an outside income.

 

[GoceKU]

Greece sounds like a nice place to retire if one has an outside income.

Greece, is a beautiful country especially in the tourist places. In the tourist season the people that work there are nice and easy going. But in the winters is a different story, it's almost deserted and the everyday people are not so nice. I've dealt with every layer of society there, the worst are rich people and con men and they are everywhere. To have a Summer house there is great but all year round you better be a bigger con men then them.

 

[GoceKU]

Today was a long day of caring staff up and down in my yard. Yesterday i started with organizing my shed, it was very hot and i had other things to finish. Because of that i got up at 5 o'clock and continued getting everything that was on the ground out. I had some help mid way from my father he come to make jokes but his jokes were short lived i put him to work, many of the rims got moved by him. There is couple of tons of steel that pass thru my hands, but i did take short brakes when my injured back started to hurt. Tomorrow i'll be making a shelf and only the good parts are going in, all others are getting junked.

 

[BGHansen]

Yeap 400, and i'm in the middle, with two university degrees. That may explain why so many people work in other countries.

My wife used to be a contract designer for Mann & Hummel; they make air boxes for the automotive industry out of their Portage, MI facility. Her pay was $30 / hour, worked for them from around 2009 - 2012. They brought a guy over from the Czech Republic to train with her, she knew what was going on but he didn't. We had him over for a cook-out and she commented to him that he would very likely be replacing her. He was paid $1000 / month, my wife $5K / month; easy math for the bean-counters. The engineers at M&H could interface through Skype or something similar as there was a little overlap in the work day with the 6-hour time difference. She picked up another design job locally making the same money, so we weren't impacted. She kept in touch with a few of her coworkers. Imagine the look on the engineers faces when a couple of guys from the Czech Republic showed up for a month to cross-train with them!

She liked the work, but not the 64-mile drive one way. The new job worked out to be better in the long run. We had no animosity toward the guy from the Czech Republic, he was just looking for work trying to feed his family. He was really taken back by how we lived in the USA. We've got it pretty d*mn good here!

Bruce

 

[great white]

He was really taken back by how we lived in the USA. We've got it pretty d*mn good here!

Bruce

Very true. One thing 30 years of travel in the military taught me was there’s nowhere better on this ball of rock than NA.

We’ve got our problems, but nothing like the rest of the world, including europe….

 

[GoceKU]

Yeah, lots of companies do that, couple years back i worked for Van Hool busses, there i was being paid 300 euros a month. And the Belgian guy who come to teach me and assess me openly said you do the job much better and twice as quick as me too bad you only get paid 10% of my paycheck.

 

[GoceKU]

Today was a busy day for me, but i did find some time to plan and build a set of shelves to arrange the parts i just took out of the shed. Price of material is higher then ever so i decided to use what i had in the scrap corner. I had to drive over couple pieces with a car just to straighten them. After some struggles mainly because of the heat and the shed is like an oven, i managed to weld the uprights and cross bars. For the deck i plan to put a pallet. I also did lots of digging and raking on the ground to make the bottom pallet is level. My land is up hill do it took couple of wheel barrels to make that. I'll start moving and shorting the parts tomorrow early in the morning to avoid the heat.