YakovGYP | Life Works with Yakov: August 2016

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Day Trip : August 6th 2016

We took an unplanned trip up north towards Santa Fe after leaving the movie theater. On the way home I asked her if she wanted to go and she agreed. We picked up our cameras and headed out. We got off on the exit after the exit to Cochiti Lake and took the back road. There was one or two cars total passing by in the other direction. Everything was quiet and peaceful on that road. It definitely felt like there was no one else left on the planet. Once we got to the campsite we used the facilities and turned back around and finished heading up towards Santa Fe for a wonderful dinner at an Indian restaurant.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

The swamp cooler is finally fixed. Got up to the roof at around 10:00am this morning. Checked to see what size shaft the cooler used so I could go to the hardware store to pick up the right size bearings. Went and can came back. Got up there again and started working on it. The hardest part was taking off the wheel on the shaft which the belt wraps around. There was so much rust and gunk it was almost impossible to pull off. I got it off about halfway until I decided to take a break from it and wait until my father arrived. In the meantime I sized up the bearings and when Ingo the garage to grind / cut off a few inches since the arms were to long. Got up and added only one since the other was behind that wheel. My dad arrived at about 1:30 and we started brainstorming on how to take off the wheel. We tried a few different things and it was so exhausting I cannot remember exactly what we did but we got it off. Then we replaced the bearing on the other side. I also bought a new shaft since the current had some rust. After trying to pull the shaft out and failing we decided the existing shaft was still good and will stay for now. It should be good for another few years. By then we hope to convert the house to air conditioning. We finally finished with the work on swamp cooler and tested it. It seemed to work pretty good and it didn't make any more noise. We did tighten a lot of the bolts since the vibration caused them to get loose. The cooler is purring and I'm glad it works. Spent about $40 and most of the in the hot sun but it was better than paying a couple of hundred dollars to have someone else do it.