CHECK VALVE SUPPLIER

(Photo taken while crossing the Snake River on my drive home from work)

Written October 9th. 2007

The drive home from work this evening was as typical as any other. There was nothing significant about the route I took or the people I shared the pavement with. There was neither an over abundance of red lights or green lights, and most of the tree limbs that had been ripped from the tree tops during Saturdays freak snow storm had now been cleared away. It was a typical drive home, and yet there was something about it that was different. Despite an overwhelming sense of exhaustion in both mind and body, my senses were active, and my mind wondered in ah at the world around me. Everything seemed brighter for some reason, almost amplified in away, and I soaked in the details as best I could without losing track of the road ahead of me. By the time I’d reached city limits I’d counted no less then four attempts to flip on the radio, before reluctantly reminding myself “Oh, that’s right. I don’t have one anymore.” For some reason it just didn’t bother me, and I allowed a grin to cross my face as I thought to myself “Well. Don‘t have to worry about that anymore”.


It’s been a curious week so far, and I’ve been faced with some curious situations. Perhaps I merely needed a moment to put things into perspective. Perhaps I’d found my moment on the drive home.

I had found nothing significant about Monday morning. The alarm had sounded at it’s standard time, I’d thrown the coffee on like clock work, and gotten my yaw yaw’s out waking up to Pink’s reruns and music videos on VH1. Equally the drive into work had been undistinguished, and even the news that the boss would be out for a spell again had not been an overly monopolizing issue. I’d been in a typical mood, on a typical Monday morning, and typically pulled the first trucks in a few minutes early and started in on them by myself, while the rest of the crew stumbled in half awake. It seemed normal. I even allowed myself the pleasure of mind wondering, as I fired up “Thelma” and pretended I was Kermit the frog, along side Ms. Piggy in the pilot episode of “Pigs in space, the red neck series”. Then Thelma coughed, and the colors began to change. It was almost as though that estranged machine set the stage for the rest of the week. It was the way she’d sounded that drew my attention. Or rather the way she didn’t sound. When the side brushes engaged, I didn’t hear the familiar sound of air being feed into the rams. A closer observation confirmed my concern. The side brushes were not extending, Thelma had no air.

A moment of ponderous thought, and a recall of the weekend power outages, again a result of Saturdays freak snow storm, and I bid Ms. Piggy a fond far well as I returned to the land of Static, mild mannered truck wash foremen. It didn’t take long before an idea manifested itself, and I headed for the north back room and the air compressor with a steady pace, while the rest of the crew lethargically assembled in the bays. “HI HO Static, away!“ A quick inspection of the air compressor, and then a look inside the breaker box, and the problem is solved. A simple flip of my finger reconnects the electrical circuit, and the air compressor rumbles to life. Problem solved and on to the next task. It’s not the task I was expecting.

By the time I’ve rounded the entry to bay two I can already hear the woo fully familiar machine gun like rattle coming from the south back room. I pick my pace up into a run, and scramble into the bay screaming “Shut it down, shut it down, it’s sucking air.” The air compressor isn’t the only thing the power knocked out, our water well apparently isn’t working either.

An inspection of well house one, six phone calls, and fifteen minutes later, and I’m finally standing over the valve that junctions our well house with the truck stop’s well house, and I have a six foot long valve key in my hand that looks kind of like Conan the barbarians battle axe, and a Norman Baits looking grin on my face. The wash runs off of three phase power. Lose all three legs and you get a black out. Lost just one or two legs and you’ve got a brown out. Black out’s shut things down. It’s annoying at best, but eventually everything comes back on. Brown out’s have a habit of destroy things. Saturday the wash lost power, but not all of it. A brown out, and with no one around to care for the situation it has fried several components in our well house, leaving me little other option then to slave well house two to our building. I open the valve and offer the world a chuckle. “Bring it on.” It’s another problem solved, and I wave the valve key clumsily around over my head like a Tusken raider out of Star Wars. Fifteen minutes later and we’ve finally finished the first truck of the day and roll on one. I’d figured at that point, that must be the weeks hiccup.

In hind sight, I don’t think there are going to be any hiccup’s at all this week. I’m beginning to wonder if per

A few days ago I decided we were past any more hard freezes so it was time to hook up the windmill. The lines to and from the windmill are less than a foot deep and the cylinder is completely exposed, so I need to drain the whole system each winter. I do this using two valves, one by the foot valve in the pond and the other one at the bottom of the upper line going up to the tank. I take all of the leathers out of the cylinder in the fall and keep them in a container of water to keep them from drying out, and then I can use them the next year. If they dry out, they are no longer any good. Years ago my brother found some 3 inch stainless steel pipe that we use as a cylinder using both ends of an old cylinder that had the threads rusted and striped out. This is all held together using three threaded rods going through some rings on each end of the cylinder assembly. It does make it easier to get into the cylinder this way.
When I have it all together I prim the whole setup using the fill pipe and valve coming off of the pipe under the cylinder extending up over the cylinder with a valve to cut off the air from entering below the cylinder, yet letting me add water by opening it.