Well, if you are going to buy a brand new LA, you might as well spend a few hundred dollars more and get an X300. The X300 is miles away better than the LA series. It will run much longer and smoother with less trouble and better comfort, and the X300 will have much better resale value. You get what you pay for. Personaly, I would buy a 1-2 year old garden tractor for the same price. There are some great deals out there on used GT and GX series tractors. Deere has really screwed the pooch with the cheap LA series in the box stores. They've watered the brand reputation down. Should have kept with the Saber or Scotts line or some other brand differentiation to avoid harming the Deere brand.

Tmajor, A helicopter engine in an airplane? Hey, why not? The 250-20J in the Bell 206 I trained in (Navy TH-57) put out 425 shp if I remember correctly. Not bad for a little trombone. The Rolls Royce AE1107C "Liberty" turboshaft in the V-22 is basically a helicopter engine serving as a turboprop. It's not a whole lot different from the AE2100 powering the new Herc (KC-130J). Now that you've mounted one in a cessna, how about a GT? The PTO might be tricky, since they typically run directly off the engine. I think my hi-lift blades would probably lift the sod out of the ground, spinning at 30,000 rpm. Wankel, Put a tube in it. Problem solved. I recently put a 1" slice in my sidewall. New tire: $80. New tube: $20 (from JD dealer; Walmart probably sells them for half that--but made in CHINA). Of couse when I took the tire off the rim I found the previous owner had already put a tube in it (and a failed patch in the tread). Had I known that I would have just patched that one and saved $20. That tire had a rough life before even wearing the nubs off. I'll put the repaired tube in the other side eventually (if that doesn't already have one too). If you do happen to find a puncture, you can certainly use one of the plug kits sold in auto parts and hardware stores. Just pull the offender out, ream out the hole, put the plug in halfway, pull out the insertion tool (wihout pulling out the plug). No glue required. You can cut the exposed half off to as short as 1/2" but it's not necessary. Butch, I worked my way through college in a garage, mostly installing tires. Nothing used to piss us off like Fix-a-flat spraying all over your legs and chest while breaking the bead on the machine. That's just nasty stuff. If anyone ever uses it, please let the poor guy know when you get new tires. Better yet, pry off the center cap or hubcap, and write FIX-A-FLAT IN TIRE on the wheel with a black sharpie. Bushleague, That's one of the things I love about the V22. After a cursory 2min walkaround (looking for open panels, bird guts in intakes, etc) we fire up the APU, run the preflight BITs for the Flight Control System, Fuel System, Emergency Lube System, and Oxygen Generation System, which the plane does itself while we sit in the air conditioned cockpit and watch the displays. It even wiggles the flight control surfaces. Gone are the days of climbing all over helicopters. It takes pilots 30 minutes to preflight a CH-46, 40 minutes for a CH-53. That's not fun in the blazing sun, or when you're climbing on the tail of a helicopter 80' up in the air over blue water, hanging off the edge of the carrier. Speaking of people not checking their tire pressure, here's a public service announcement: If you have a compact spare (donut), check it ASAP! Those things need to be maintained at 60psi, twice your big tires' pressure. Due to the high pressure and low volume of air, they lose their pressure much more quickly than your real tires. Even an air-tight tire will lose about 3 psi per year. The compact spares are more like 5. If your car is 5 or more years old and you haven't checked your compact spare, I bet you it's half full. Even fully pressurized, it can barely hold your car's weight and can't be driven over 50mph. At half pressure, it can't hold your car's weight. I made it a habit to check customers' donuts every time I had their cars in the garage whether they asked or not. I don't think I ever found one over 30psi. Most were 15psi. That's a flat tire! Here is a link that might be useful: AE1107C

Well guys, We still live in the house we bought to in 2014 in order to move Donna's aging mom who was (at that time) showing symptoms of dementia. The dementia progressively took its toll on her mind, and then in October of 2016, she was diagnosed with stage 4 bladder cancer. She lived until early February 2017 and died here at home with us, as she wished and she had made us promise not to let her die in a hospital or nursing home. She died surrounded by family and a hospice nurse was present. I only relate this story because Donna's mom's health situation was the reason we bought a house big enough for all of us to live in, under one roof.........and the subsequential multiple projects and renovations.........were the reasons I dropped off of the forum. As soon as we moved into the house, I had a long list of things that HAD to be done, and a long list of lesser things we WANTED to do......so my time on the forum just could not be justified.....I simply had too much to do. The first things to be done were to come up with safety measures to help prevent an elderly woman with dementia from injury by being proactive about preventing her from "escaping" the house. I had to equip all exit doors with a deadbolt lock keyed inside and out (all keyed alike) and we had to come up with a nearby "hiding place" close to each lock location for spare keys in case of emergency. This house has a full basement with stairs, and we did not want her mom to have access to the stairs, so I included the same deadbolt on that door too. The sliding door to the second floor deck was a challenge in that it had a key lock on the outside ONLY with just a paddle lock lever on the inside. I had to come up with a way to make that door lockable with a key from the inside. My solution was to remove the lock assembly from the door and "reverse" location of the paddle lever plate and the key tumbler plate, so that the key tumbler would be on the inside. I stripped out the guts relating to the paddle lever and covered the hole where the paddle shaft came through with a small brass plate.....heavily epoxied in place from the backside (inside the door). All you can see from outside is a small hole blanked off with brass. The deck is on the second story on the backside of the house with stairs leading down the the pool, which is enclosed inside a fence, so we never use the sliding door as a "key entry" point anyhow. Then there is the attic storage space epic adventure. The attic space when we bought the house, was almost non-existent. There was a total of 4 sheets of 4' X 8' plywood (128 sq. ft.) on the joists at the top of an extremely rickety pull down wooden stairs. Stairs were the first to go. Replaced with a sturdy aluminum pull down folding stairs. Then I hauled 22 4' X 8' sheets of 3/4 OSB into the attic space.(each sheet was cut in half lengthwise to fit through attic stairs opening). We now have about 800 sq. ft. of usable attic storage space. I built 2 inverted trusses (strong backs) to attach to the joists on the sections spanning the 12' kitchen and the 18' den. These trusses ensure that the load imposed by the extra OSB and stored material are ultimately borne by the load bearing walls at the hallway, den, and both walls of the kitchen. The addition of the trusses assures that the ceiling joists do not assume a sway back shape over time resulting in cracked ceiling gypsum board. I assembled the trusses in the attic and fabricated them to have about 1/2" "preload bow" on the 18' truss and 3/8" preload bow on the 12' truss. This was to ensure that the trusses were actually carrying some load right from the start. After I got the trusses built and fastened onto each joist they served with metal strapping, I built a 30' long, 2 tier shelf system into the truss structures. Shelves are 24" wide and the bottom shelf is 20" off the floor, while the second shelf is 46" off the floor, so you have the attic floor under the shelves, and the 2 shelves themselves for storage, That yields 180 sq. ft. of space, plus the remaining 720 or so sq. ft. of attic at various head space. The tallest overhead clearance is about 6'2" at the rafter collar ties (and I added collar ties so that every rafter has a tie, instead of every third rafter as the house was built). There were 4 rafters that had "split" open due to improper orientation by the rough carpenters. They had placed rafters with knots situated on the lower chord of the rafter (tension side), which is a no-no. These rafters had to be jacked back into place and reinforcement panels of 3/4" plywood "scabbed" onto each side, glued and screwed. The original scheme had the ventilation exhaust fans from both bathrooms simply dumping into the attic space, another no-no. I extended the exhaust hoses over to the gable area of the house and busted through the brick and installed 2 bona fide exhaust hoods with insect screens. On the longest hose, which was a 4" hose....I built a booster fan box in the middle of that run and wired it so that it turns on when the original fan turns on. I felt that a 16' run of 4" hose would probably need all the fan power it could get to keep from simply "stalling out". The other hose was 6" and only 8' long, so I felt it was adequate with no additional help needed. I could go on and on about other projects, but these were some of my most major undertakings, Now, about my employment. I no longer work as a forklift mechanic in the shop. In midsummer 2015, I took over running the parts department when our longstanding partsman retired. This was challenging in that it put me to the task of acquiring and dispensing the parts instead of installing them on vehicles. It has also been challenging in that I was the first partsman in our history to actually have the capability of searching the Volvo and Daimler websites to look up parts. It was in the summer of 2015 that the company finally got onboard with software to enable this. Prior to that advent, our method of ordering parts involve looking the parts up in hard copy paper parts manuals, or talking to a vendor/dealer on the phone and trying to describe what you wanted, it was sometimes a crap shoot whether you would get the right parts or not. The outgoing partsman never had to use the computer to look up and order parts, and when it was introduced, he refused to do it saying that his time was too short to need it, so he told me to get all the training and he would just watch. LOL He and I worked side by side for 3 months while he showed me most of the ropes before he retired in October 2015. That is a summary of what I have been up to. I know this was completely off topic, but since the request was posed here, I felt OK in responding here.

Kawasaki 3/4" X 16 threads Gasket 2.475"OD 2.173"ID 0.233" thick. Length" Wix Purolator Hastings Baldwin AC MotorCraft Fram JD Walmart 2.98" 51394 L14476 LF410 B33 PF1233 FL836 PH4967 AM107423 ST4967 3.4" 51396 L14477 LF413 B37 NA NA PH4386 NA ST4386 Wix makes NAPA Gold and CarQuest Blue filters For a NAPA filter, use the last 4 digits of the Wix# For a CarQuest filter, replace the first 2 digits of the Wix# with 85. Example. Wix 51334 becomes CarQuest 85334 or NAPA Gold 1334.