Making Crackers and Working On the Crab Snares

Thursday December 31, 2020 Guerneville CA.

Making crackers

Last night I tried making crackers this new way I learned. It uses the discards from a sour dough starter and two tablespoons of butter and some salt and  sesame seeds and some herbs and that’s all. Mix it all up good and spread the mixture out on a piece of parchment paper or like me on a silicone sheet to cook. No rolling which is nice.

I overcooked them and the chickens got most of them but I know what and how to do it now so I’ll give it another try soon.

Crab snare molds

Last night I also worked on making some crab snare molds to pour lead in the crab snare cages for weights.

My brother Barry got some half inch welded wire and made these little crab bait cages as part of the crab snare we are constructing to catch crab of course.

So I wrapped some blue masking tape around a couple of them to make some molds out of Plaster of Paris.

I mixed up the plaster of Paris and put it in this little plastic dish to make the molds.

Once the  mold material hardened I removed the cages and now I have these molds to put the wire cages in and pour molten lead in them to make weights for each one.

I can do better

But once I finished those I had a better idea on how the mold should be made so I’ll make some more maybe tonight with the modifications.

Where’s my lead

So this morning the first thing I did was to hunt up some of my lead I had stored in the yard. I have quite a bit of it. Here’s just a little of it in these six inch or so blocks. Eventually I’ll melt it down and pour some in each cage.

I hosed off the lead and put it in the sun to dry for now.

Fueling the dozer

Then I filled the dozer’s fuel container that I use to take fuel up to it and took the fuel up to where the dozer is parked and dumped the fuel in the dozer.

I then checked the fluids and found the transmission fluid to be a little low so will bring some of that up next time I come up to grease the dozer.

Little walk

From there I rode the quad runner up to here for a little walk to check out an area.

I was checking out this forest fire break area noting that the grasses are coming up nicely.

Then I walked down through this creek to see how it was doing and it all looked good.

I walked through here to get back to where I parked the quad runner.

Buckets

Back home I got all the mostly empty transmission oil containers together and removed their tops so I’d have some more buckets, draining the little bit of oil left in each bucket into the bucket that had the most oil to use in the dozer.

The tops sure were some of the hardest ones I’ve ever taken off. I really had to work on getting them off, showing draining the last bit of oil out of each bucket.

Fixing the wire cutters

Once that was done I got the defective wire cutters I’d gotten from Barry the other day and worked at repairing them so they’d cut and grinding enough off the side so I could get a closer cut on the crab cages I was going to make.

The wire cutters ground and ready to go.

Cutting out the crab cage wire

The wire cutters now worked well and got a fairly close cut so I cut 8 crab snare cages out.

Bending the wire

I used this hand metal bender to bend them into cages.

Crab cage boxes are formed

All the 8 crab snare cages are formed and the doors are also made. Now I need to make the lead weight molds again and pour some lead into each cage when I get the molds done.

It was getting dark as I finished up the crab cages so I closed the chickens up for the night and went in the house.

Nice day puttering around getting stuff done.