Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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His Divine Shadow
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Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by His Divine Shadow »

I made a post in the TIL thread but I felt it was worth posting more detail in a dedicated thread. I figure I might just post random stuff to show how I waste my life. I don't have insta or social mediaI post to so I'll just post here where hardly anyone is. Very hipster, you wouldn't have heard of it.

Recently I cold smoked some bacon that I have cured and dried. I vacuum packed the bacon, I used nitride cure to get the right color and for safetys sake.
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Into the fridge for two weeks. Then I took it out and let it dry out in the fridge for another week to form a pellicle.

I built a cold smoke shack meanwhile:

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I had to keep a small charcoal fire going to keep the inside warm enough because the electric generator gives no appreciable heat and it was -5 outside, the day before it was -20C so comparatively mild.

Eventually I replaced the coal pile with an off-cut of chimney pipe and put a grate in the pipe to keep the coals up from the bottom. This made a sort of chimney starter, much easier to keep the charcoals going then. Worked real well actually, threw wood chips in there for extrra smoke but it dissipated quickly. With wood chunks I tihnk it would've given a steady smoke but I am out. I think it works better than the electric smoke generator frankly. It does put out more heat so it might not be suitable outside winter conditions.

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Slice & vacuum pack the remainder, some cubes too that I will use to make a bean & bacon stew, goes nicely with some rice & barley.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Oh and my shed I been working on since June 2020, it's done! Done enough anyway. It was done a while ago, the last thing I did was build the double doors.

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I screwed some wood into the door opening to butt the door up against that to get it sitting correctly, then I screwed it in place. The door frame was made from 125x22mm panel boards, I laminted two layers with the grain in opposite directions to stop the door warping. Then I fitted an outer skin of plywood, with narrower and planed boards to create details.

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Then a 2nd door
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Then I painted the doors white:
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The hinges are temporary, I really want to forge my own hinges but there's been no time for that. I am so behind on my smithing, haven't fired up the forge all summer and now winter's nearly here. I got some bricks and fittings and stuff and am contemplating a small propane forge in addition to the coal forge.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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It's christmas time now too. I do enjoy christmas as it gives me the excuse to do traditional dad stuff. It's just too bad all the modern lightning is so sterile and boring, and bad for the environment to boot.

Here in Finland and probably the rest of the nordics you can't find christmas lighting anymore with replaceable lights in stores, I've looked. We never had the tradition with colored lights either, white lights rule supreme here. I am a color heretic however, since childhood and have always loved colored lights over white ones.

I tore down a permanently mounted LED strip from my roof this year because 20% of it was dead, no replaceable lights in it. So I bought a heavy duty 230V light string and LED bulbs and made my own light string. I hope this one lasts until I die, lamps might need replacing tho. I am considering changing the pattern to having 2x or 3x of each color in a row.

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I also bought this set of vintage incandescents, series connected lamps, one of them didn't work and I got to trouble shoot the whole string. That's the kind of deep spiritual dad enjoyment denied to modern people wih their fancy parallel connected light strings. You can get these in stores, they look the same but are LEDs, I do not know if they can be replaced or they merely look like old timey lights. I didn't find an open box to inspect them more closely.

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The incandescents give a nicer glow however, IMO. It's because they produce warm white light and it's sent through a painted glass. The led ones use colored diodes which looks wrong. You can buy warm white LED ones and paint them yourself according to this guy. I think I will do that sometime... I will still use my incandescent 80s set until i can't get spare bulbs, but I got enough to replace the set completely.



This here is finnish christmas stuff is making christmas tarts, love these, made with puff pastry.

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Feeling like christmas
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Today is Winter Solstice.

This is when traditionally, in my part of the country people used to raise Yule crosses (this might be older than christianity in these parts). It fell out of vouge in the late 19th century except in a few localized places. But I think more people are getting aware of them again, I remember seeing them scattered on house tops as a kid while sitting in the backseat, they where fitted with colored lights and looked real pretty. It was raised on the darkest day of the year to scare away evil spirits.

I don't have one to put up this year but I thoght it would be cool to forge one from metal. They're mostly made from wood.

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So now you know a very, very obscure piece of local history. Limited to a few villages on the finnish coast.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by madd0c0t0r2 »

Very pretty. hyvää päivänseisausta!
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Thanks! Yesterday and today we've been away and I've taken the long way around the countryside driving back in order to keep a lookout for the crosses, I have counted at least 9 of them.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Here's another thing I dragged home before christmas because it was very cheap. A 1970s pressure washer! Three phase driven!

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It has a yellow cover that makes it look like a minion. God I hate those...

My old pressure washer froze a winter ago and it was a consumer unit only 230v single phase, I wanted something more reliable and generally when you go backwards in time equipment like this, tends to be better made, made to be repaired instead of thrown away. So I'm gambling 40 bucks on that I can put it into working order. It works, but leaks around some joins. Hoping it's just bad gaskets due to age.

Looks pretty simple in principle to me. Water intake on bottom, four pistons of some kind that all build pressure, the high pressure output is on the top. It doesn't seem to be going from one piston to another for sequentially higher pressures, but to all four at once and then to a combined high pressure manifold.

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Interesting to note! Max temperature 80C, so this pressure washer could be used as a hot water pressure washer...

Brass construction, can't see no cracks which is good.

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It has two adjustable valves, they are connected to nothing, two hoses go around the frame to the back where they end. I suspect some OEM equipment has been deleted. Likely a venturi based injector was located near the front and the valves controlled how much detergent was mixed into the water. These injectors rob power, in some cases 20% or more so I can see why it might have been removed. I will not restore the function either. Better to buy a foam gun attachement.

I plan to use this for regular car washing, cleaning carpets, wet sandblasting and cleaning the underside of cars. If I can get it working. It should work, but it leaks around some seams. Which I hope is just bad gaskets.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Experimented with firewood combustion as of late. I have this heater in my sauna and it's terribly simple and inefficient. I added a flue gas thermometer and the temperature can sometimes be over 500 C if the fire is burning real well. Thanks I hate it.

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I also experimented with adding ceramics on part of the inside (homemade) of the firebox. This increased the temperature of the flue gasses even more (top end didn't move much but the low end did). Basically I was burning for the crows as the local saying goes.

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Interestingly the overall heating effect of the heater went down too, because the factory design means for an air stream to flow over the steel firebox itself for part of the heating, so if you insulate it with ceramics, you reduce the overall heat transfer to the room even if the combustion is made more efficient.

So my plan is to buy one of these (they're quite cheap) and also fit it with a fan to get more heat out of the flue gasses.

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I have already experimented with this to heat the entire house using improvised fans that blow on the heater and stovepipe and it works. I have a HRV ventilation system that recovers heat from the exiting air and pre-heates incoming air into the house. I have tested the system to be around 70-75% efficient in my house. The sauna has an air inlet but the next room has an air outlet and using a fan to blow the hot air into that room means there's a lot of warm air that goes to the heat exchanger and I have measured that the air coming into the house in other parts of the house can get up to 10 degrees C warmer from this. It's a quick way to add more warmth to the house in addition to the masonry heater.

Because of the electricity prices which are kicking us in the balls we are relying a lot more on firewood and the heat pump only heats our house to like 16C, we use firewood to get it to 19-20 C. That's why I am looking into improving the efficiency of this primitive stove.

Some might object and say this will cause deposits of tar and the like, this is only true if you have really bad combustion of your firewood and not using dry firewood. Combining this with ceramics would create more efficient combusion and I only use seasoned, dry firewood. There's more stuff to consider but keeping it simple here.

I might write something on finnish and swedish masonry heaters later.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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So about finnish and swedish masonry heaters then... It's an old fashioned but still popular method of heating your home, or providing additional heat or backup heat if there is a power outage. The first proper masonry heater using the contra flow principle was invented back in the late 1700s in Sweden back when they where managing to use up their forests for charcoal to fuel their industry and tar exports (which mainly came from the finnish side in ostrobothnia btw, but it all had to go via stockholm for tax purposes).

The government at the time was worried about the depletion of the countrys forests and charged a C.J. Cronsted and Fabian Wrede to come up with a more fuel efficient way to heat homes. The norm at the time where the very inefficient open fireplaces. Masonry heaters of a sort existed from the 1500s, they originally came from germany, but they did not yet use all the modern features.

So anyway they came up with a design where the smoke was led a long path through pipes before it exited for the chimney, extracting a lot of heat out of the wood and storing it in the mass of the masonry heater.

Blueprint of one of the first types, one can see how the smoke is led upwards and then down again. This basic layout is still very close to how it would remain for a century. But developments did happen.
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The most iconic style that I think of when I think of a classic masonry heater is the round style:
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These are often made according to the classic swedish five-channel design which is stil in use in modern swedish heaters. Basically the flue gasses go upwards and then down the sides into the two front channels, then at the bottom they turn and go up again at the two rear channels, they merge again the top and exit for the chimney.

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While I think the round style is the iconic one. The more prevalent style in swedish homes is probably he "rörspis" or "pipe oven" however. It's a cheaper version but it's as efficient. Instead of expensive fancy tiled exterior it instead is simply made from brick, usually square-ish design and render is used as finish and to keep it from leaking.

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It even sorta looks like an open fireplace, but internally it has all the works. The reason it was made like an open fireplace was because the average person in the 1800s in sweden could not afford candles or kerosene or oil. Having your heating source to be a light source was thus a good way to economize. Otherwise they also tended to use sticks made from fatwood pine as small torches instead of candles, they where not pleasant by comparison.

Imagine to live in a place where the winter is so dark you only get a few hours of sunlight a day or less, and you don't have any artificial lights, everything goes dark when the sun goes down and human activity outside crawls to a halt. Someone did think about that.
The second consequence of the supremacy of darkness was a strong fear of the dark and a corresponding tendency towards superstition. There is an intimate connection between material and spiritual enlightenment. Where the former is deficient, where from sunset one is inexorably at the mercy of dusk and darkness, without the ability to quickly obtain light on one's own, there the mind is quite naturally subdued to belief in the powers of darkness. (Troels-Lund p.19)
Anyway the consequence of not having doors on your heater is that they cannot be as effective as the types with doors. The doors are actually extremely clever designs, but their main benefit is they shut in the heat and reflect it back into the fireplace, making the fire hotter and burn cleaner, when it gets hot enough you get more complete combustion of the flue gasses. So an open fireplace simply cannot burn as efficiently as an enclosed one.

But the doors are so much more clever than that. There is a double door design actually with inner and outer hatches. The inner hatches have valves to control the air flow. They are open when you start the fire, then as the fire gets going you close the valves and then the outer brass hatches. Air now flows in through the gaps of the inner hatches, at the bottom and at the top of the inner hatches. The air that is sucked in at the top will aid secondary combustion of the flue gasses making for a hotter, cleaner burn. Since the air also passes between the two layers of doors, this heats the air as well, further improving combustion.

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A typical masonry heater of this time was between 75-85% efficient. Compared to an open fireplace which can have a net cooling effect.

As the 19th century moved on these became the most common source of heating the home. And towards the late 1870s the swede E.A. Wiman refined the design thusly:
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What he did was:
1. The exterior tile is replaced with cheap and durable sheet metal. Using premade hoops of sheet metal instead of tiles you overcome a long time weakness of both the pipe oven and tile oven. That is material moves when it gets warmer. The movement from heating could crack the tiles and render and cause leaks of flue gas into the room. So you have to be careful in how much you fire them, twice or once a day was the custom. Putting a tight metal skin around the heater eliminated this problem, you could now fire the thing even hotter.

2. The material still moves on the inside however, the innermost wall gets hotter and moves more than the outsides so the movement is uneven to boot. This stresses the construction and eventually you have to tear it down and rebuild it. The metal hoops can be reused. Adressing this is the second change Wiman introduced. Instead of having a bunch of channels, he made the interior core freestanding from the outer walls, it's instead one big circular gap that the flue gasses move along.

3. He also put the flue gas exit on the bottom instead of the top, becase this was also a problem when the whole thing moved and was supposed to be connected to the wall behind it.

Now I would like to say this was a big hit and the Swedes accepted it readily, but you'll be hard pressed to find a tile oven like this in sweden. You can sometimes find them in the north, but for most intents and purposes the swedes stopped developing the tile oven with their tiled exterior, 5 channel design. Likely because Sweden was rapidly moving into modernity and getting stuff like central heating and coal. In the late 19th and early 20th century the tile oven was quickly replaced as the main source of heating by central hydronic heating.

Not so in Finland, we would not move towards that until the 1950s. Wimans design would find a foothold here. The typical finnish tile oven has no tiles, it has metal. They look like these:

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This dual pair of copper clad ones are some of the nicest examples I've seen:
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And inside they follow WImans principles too:
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Of course there are lots of hybrids and variations, for instance in swedish ostrobothnia where I live, they are way more likely inside to be built like a swedish 5-channel design, but with metal skin. Likely because this area has a lot of culturual exchange with Sweden and the books popularizing the design and building of finnish masonry heaters where only ever published in finnish. So a lot of people here simply could not read the books from Finland and probably used books from sweden for teaching material.

There's no hard and fast rule for the chimney exit being on the bottom either, it's quite common for the design to have it on the top still. This does mean you can make it go a longer path through the heater so it's a bit more efficient.

In the 1940s G.E. Asp (definitely a swedish speaking finn by the name) came up with even more refinements.
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The big change is the inclusion of a grate. This means you don't need to remove the ash after every firing and primary air can come from below. If you look closely you can see a small channel from the ash dump that leads fresh air above the fire, this is secondary air for more cmplete combustion. Now you are not as reliant anymore on the dual door style to control the fire, just use the ash dump hatch. Can have a simple glass door instead if you like. Or keep using old style doors.

He also had an idea of using a type of corner stone to increase surface area, but this never took off. Would also make sweeping harder. BTW all these ovens from the very first ones, typically have several hatches for cleaning so you can clean the channels without too much effort.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Also a look at the masonry heater in my home. It's square, it's got a rendered exterior and some tiles on the front. It's built on the wiman princple but not form bricks, it's built from pre-fabcriated segments of some kind of refractory that is based on crushed olivine rock.
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Has a grate
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Note the rectangular hole, goes down into the ash dump. This brings up fresh air infront of the fire, this is secondary air for better combustion, so in the front instead of the back, this also cools the glass.
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Once the fire gets hot enough the soot just burns off, leaving the walls clean.
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View from inside of the top, up there the flue gasses turn around and go down the sides, at this point in time the heater hasn't been swept for several years (forgot to call the sweeper) but it doesn't look bad.
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Really got going there
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The chimney basically just has a heat haze now when looking outside.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Shoulda written "almost as efficient" 'bout the pipe oven btw but too late for edits.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Here's how I beat the italians at their own game. I make a gravy sauce instead of a tomato sauce.

Fry the meat well, with onions and garlic, salt & pepper, paprika, chili, basil and or oregano. Add tomato paste, mix it in with the meat and fry that good too. Then sprinkle over flour and fry it some more (until you fear burning the flour, itll stick, scrape scrape) before adding water, then some heavy cream.

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Also like to add worchestershire sauce, soy also is good to add instead of salt if you find the sauce needs more salt. Adds a more nuanced flavor than just more salt.
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And it's not proper spaghetti meal without the ketchup. You hear that italians, I put ketchup on it!
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Lingonberry squares. This recipe was actually made for a small half sheet style pan. I didn't know that, so I had some difficulty fitting itinto a full size pan that's as big as the oven itself (36x43 in my case). Annoyingly they don't have different names here like half or full sheet...

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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Started taking apar that high pressure washer.

Motor off, pretty simple but robust powertransfer. Can tell it's 1970s design, this would've been rationalized to something cheaper pretty soon:
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Removed the cylinder heads, doesn't look very nice inside... Hard chromed pistons and the chrome is flaking. In a modern pump they use ceramics for this reason.

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Vacuumed it out
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Took apart a 2nd cylinder, similar but better shape
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Both seem to have rusted out in the middle around the center holes. The center hole is threaded and I think the piston rod is screwed into it.

Cylinder tops looks OK. Next step is to contine disassembling all the cylinders. Some kind of rubber washer seals the tops, might still be OK even.
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After taking it apart further I can say that none of the pistons look good on the ends. The piston marked as 1 is the most corroded.

The pump becomes smaller and more manageable the more parts I remove and I can work on a more comfortable height:
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This is the return from the relief valve (hex shaped part). That is if the handle is not pressed, the water will go back into the intake manifold and go around the pump in a loop. first place I find a crack.
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Worst piston, nr 1
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3 and 4 look something like this. 2 looks the best.
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This is the cast iron part (or is it steel) that sits between the brass cylinder and the pump body, looks OK, some sort of plastic seal there probably PTFE, this part is in contact with the oil in the pump and I'm guessing it's to make sure the oil doesn't leak out and it also lubricates the cylinder which looks to be in good shape further down.
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The brass cylinders look like this. Inside there is some kind of piston ring that seems to be a whole ring and I guess it does the job of keeping water out.

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On cylinder 2 which otherwise looked the best, the ring looks like this.
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So on cylinder 1 the piston is most corroded although it doesn't seem to have spread all the way around the seal yet. This is the cylinder the seller claimed was leaking. Based on the pictures, it feels like cylinder number two should be the one that is leaking since the seal is shot. But it could be that the seller was wrong. I haven't actually tested it as I don't have any outside water to test with during the winter.

Here's the ring taken out:
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Based on rough measurements and measuring the piston, it's 32x42x7,3mm U-profile PU piston seal, good for 400 bar. Standard part that can be bought new. I will try and replace all the seals and leave the pistons as is. I am consdering trying to repair them. The brass cylinder walls are surprisngly in fine shape despite all the crap inside. A quick check shows they are a sloppy fit against the pistons, the fit is much tighter further back where the piston is rubbing against the cast iron bore, but which is also oil filled. But it does not need to be a tight fit since the seal handles that.

I have considered machining away the damaged section and replacing it with an identical sized bit of a different material. I am not sure what, have to consider galvanic corrosion issues. Plastic, brass, bronze, stainless.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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A big assumption on my part has been that the cylinders are brass. They could be bronze. My initial impression has been brass tho.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Todays dinner was lasagna. Lasagna here is always a bechamel and bolognese style sauce thing. I was really confused the first times I saw americans make their ricotta lasagna. Never tried that in my life. Ricotta only recently started being found in stores here, but it costs about twice as much as meat so lol.

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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Pork (cutlets?), pan fried then into the oven on low heat and an hour minimum, with a sauce made from heavy cream, creme fraiche, soy sauce and a lot, lot of sambal oelek. Also garlic and onions that I softened in the pan I fried the pork in before, deglaze the pan with the onions & garlic with a little bit of water and mix into the sauce.

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Rice mixed with barley.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Finally got the damn thing apart completely, been cleaning all the parts in the ultrasonic cleaner and by hand. Now I was finally able to try and machine the thing, I wasn't sure it would be doable on a lathe, particulary my lathe which is the equivalent size wise of a Southbend 9.

WNMG inserts did work well on machining away the hard chrome layer though. After I used the angle grinder anyway to lob off the corroded end anyway, once it got under the thin layer it was doable. Thank god for carbide.

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I was thinking of threading the replacement rod in place, and maybe using a carefully turned shoulder to make sure it's aligned. I don't really have the ability to do any further turning once I fit the pieces together, then it has to be on and be concentric.

Also I don't know what purpose if any the hole in the center of the piston played, I had not planned on replicating that feature.

Actually I do, but as a threaded hole to fit a stainless face cover.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Todays dinner, patties with feta cheese, basic meat & potatoes fare.
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Also semlor, traditional to make them this time of year both in Sweden and Finland:
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The scooped out innards are mixed with melted butter, chopped almonds, sugar and eggs and cooked on low heat, then returned back to the buns:
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Then spritz some whipped cream and put the lid back on
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

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Got my new bar & chain for my chainsaw. The chainsaw is from 1976 and still going strong, in a lot of ways I like it better than a modern saw. It has more grunt at lower RPMs unlike modern saws which need to rev really fast to have any power.

The only negative thing about it is that the chain brake which breaks the chain if it kicks back is less effective than a modern one. This uses a brake pad that stops the "roundy spinny thingy" I think the english name is? Flywheel! A modern one has a wire that loops around the whole thing and tightens in case of kickback, it should be readily apparently that's a whole heckuva lot more surface area to brake with than a brake pad, so it stops instantly. Whereas this one only stops almost instantly. Being careful I can live with it however.

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The bar is japanese, solid metal bar instead of a laminated one. Specs are .325 13" and 1.5mm wide chain. This also reminds me that when looking at americans, they tend to equip their chainsaws with way longer bars for some reason. But the 13" is the most common length used here, it's considered safer, more versatile and lighter. I don't think america has that much old growth left that would require 20 inch bars. But I guess it's cultural inertia and probably some machoing. I know in america it was common and many old timers still do it on what I can only assume is macho grounds, i.e. they remove the chain brake if their saw comes with it.

Also getting some proper snow after a very varm january
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Gotta plow a path so I can have my coffee outside in the sun, while it's still up
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LaCroix
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by LaCroix »

I don't know about tree size - though I do quite often encounter trees with 50+cm trunks, last 3 I cut down were 60-ish, and Black Locust, so a bigger chainsaw does come handy.

Mostly, I prefer longer bars for the chain lenght, and longlivity - longer chain equals more cutting time between sharpening, as you have more teeth doing work.
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LadyTevar
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by LadyTevar »

THe Semlor look amazingly tasty.

What kind of rolls are used?
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His Divine Shadow
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by His Divine Shadow »

It's a sweet wheat bun with cardamom. Here's an american doing a very good recipe:


As for the size of trees, you can cut larger trees than the bar length by cutting from both sides. This is how was traditionally taught here anyway. You can use a larger bar but a larger bar is more tiring to wield and clumsier to limb with, though you don't have to bend over either with a long enough bar. Safety is generally considered here to be better with a shorter bar too.

Based on opinions on the net on local communities, 15" might be considered the new allround length it seems.
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by Tsyroc »

Everything looks awesome.

I've really liked your photos and description on how the heaters work. I tend to really enjoy old technology that works well and is cleverly thought out. I recently read up on the Franklin stove and it appears to use some of the same basic ideas as the heaters you showed but I think the ceramic heaters look like they are more effective and efficient. At least from what I can tell.

The holiday crosses are really cool and beautiful. That's a tradition I'd like to see spread around a bit more.
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His Divine Shadow
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Re: Cooking and puttering about the finnish countryside

Post by His Divine Shadow »

The good thing about ceramic or masonry is that it doesn't have the same thermal conductivity so when it gets hot, it makes the fire burn hotter. The hotter the fire can burn the better. Up to a point anyway, too hit and it starts making nitrogen oxides, but you generally don't get to that temperature ever. The 2nd advantage is that all that heat once absorbed is released slowly, so you get even heating, instead of going from very cold to very hot.

I drew up in CAD how I would machine the plungers to repair the pressure washer.

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