Homestead Maintenance Day: Slime, Shredder & Sphere Floor

Welcome to Occupy the Land. This week we turn the root cellar floor into something we can actually work on. After setting laser-leveled conduit markers, we wet the soil, spread shredded straw so we’re not walking in mud, and start laying sifted on-site gravel to the finished height. We also show homestead maintenance that keeps everything moving: Marvel Mystery Oil in the chipper, slime in a leaking Polaris tire, and a reminder of how many water and power stations we now run. Next week we assemble the top half of the 20ft sphere, set it with the tractor, and wrap the fence over it. Small steps, still hot, still moving forward. Peace.


Transcript:
Then you see how that works. We’ll go ahead and get the tractor and I’ll just make it dump here one time. You can see what’s up. Then we’ll go down. Well, here, take a look over here. We hadn’t even looked at it this morning, so we got it pretty level.

One going to do is I had these shortened, like, foot long, three quarter inch conduits that we have as trim on making a lot of these struts. We get the laser level out there, get it, get it down and have exactly level all throughout this because it’s hard from side to side and get in the middle of the ring.

So I’m going to hammer those down to where the top of those conduits sticking out of the bottom soil is exactly where I need it, and I know where to put the gravel and make sure we get a level floor. So that’s one thing that we got to do. Then we’ll wet it again, you know, kind of just a little bit more than that.

And then we’ll put the gravel on and tamp it down. So that’ll give us about this level of floor that we can get to start with the concrete that will go on. Then you’ll see the concrete start to go up. Now over on the side of the opening, the door. That’s what we got to finish. You know, bringing up that fence on both sides have the mesh behind it.

And I got to create a loop that will go from the wall around over here to kind of contain all that soil from when I put it in with the tractor, it’ll stay there and it’ll harden, and then we’ll start doing the concrete on that and fashion the doorway. So that’s what we’re doing. So Don is now going to go ahead and dampen this a little bit more.

Kind of wet the outside. We need to make sure that this you know solidifies. And we’ll start doing the straw. We’ll dampen this while she’s over here. When this you’ll wet that over there. I’ll go ahead and get ready to start doing the separation of the gravel in here. And it will take but a few of these that only take less than an hour.

We’ll have the gravel down in there at the floor level. So it’s a little bit at a time. I’m going to go ahead and I have to take time, I promise Miranda, to have some drone footage and then I can narrate through it so you can see where check dams go, where everything’s oriented, where the water flows and how.

So you get a lot better idea instead of, you know, just seeing bits and pieces of me going around. So that’s what we’re going to do. We’ll get to it.

Okay. I’m going to do the.

Occupy the land and bring water. One of the things I go around just to check on things. Every now and then every few months or so, I’ll bring out the Marvel’s Mr. Marvel mystery. Because this stuff’s been around for 100 years. My father used this word. We’ve been using it in our family since forever, and I want to maintain these vehicles.

They last while, and it clears out a lot of stuff. And that reminded me of it, is I haven’t started the chipper shredder for a while, and and I knew it had because I leave it open and running with the fuel valve closed and then eventually just runs out. So just to, you know, put a little bit in there when you fill it up with gasoline and so on.

Kind of clear stuff out and keeps it clean. So there’s that then, you know, have a oil that take around and, you know, just maintenance trying to keep this stuff to last. And for me is water. Now this is one thing that take. But a bunch of times I got this for well we have a couple of them and this one goes in Donna’s Polaris.

And what it is, is you turn it on. And then I set the PS. I is already set at 30 which is what these little tires are. And.

I don’t want to set it down in the dirt. Now you just hang it there and come back later because it takes a while. But, please little tires. I won’t take that long. It was this heavy alone gravel. Just take it over there in one. Oh heck no. I’m hearing up these tires make that a lot easier.

So when you’re out homesteading on the grid, off the grid and stuff, you know you need to be mobile. We have a wagon that has a mobile, power station. It’s got about ten kW on it, a 3000 watt inverter and a charge controller. And I just bring it around, plug it in different solar panels, charge it or charge it in the workshop, and I just take it anywhere on the land.

Now, normally where we’re working, we have a lot of, extension cords are long enough to go to the pumps and everything, so we’re fine.

Look at it. 22, 2523.23.524. So it goes up pretty quick. And once I get all these aired up, it’s going to go pretty fast. So. We need to have a list of all the things that we’re thinking of homesteading that you need to keep in mind. Because it’s always that one. My my kingdom for a horseshoe nail. I mean, you know, it’s that kind of stuff because it’s always that one little thing that hold you up.

So you want to be prepped and make sure you have maintenance and a lot of backup stuff, especially when it comes to power and water. Now power. We have three stations, really two main ones. And then, we have 3 or 4 water stations for we have the workshop water that have a little sink at, we have the construction water and the pump for that, the water, two water tanks for Donna’s garden area, one for the chickens, one for the pool and one for the bus.

So that’s like a lot. So this is and we’re going to be picking up next month. It looks like we’re probably going to be getting our big main tank and then the draw tank for the sand pond. And then we got to get the sand pond liner that we have. We got to take a all day trip to go get that.

And so when we do the drone footage, hopefully with the narration, you’ll get the idea. There’s an overall plan and that it’s all in parallel. That’s what’s taking so long. And, but we’re getting we’re making progress. We know where the end goal all of a sudden it’s going to be. Hopefully before it starts getting hot again, you go ding!

We get it. Okay. Well that’s what we’re shooting for. Peace.

This is where I keep the spare bales of straw for the chicken coop. And we’re going to be taking about half of a bale of this straw. I’ve already put it in the back of the ranger over here, and then we’re going to take it over there. We have a shredder, and we’ll shredded smaller pieces so it’s easier to manage.

All right. These predator motors, they usually use the same one for a lot of stuff. The chipper shredder, the compactor. You know, a lot of the machines that they do, and they seem to be, you know, fairly reliable. They just start, you know, I don’t know how efficient they are or fuel efficient or quiet or emission or anything.

They work, you know. I like that now. I just put a little bit of Marvel’s mystery in the fuel tank and in the crankcase just a little bit. You know, the maintenance side. Now I just turn on the switch. This is on the fuel. On the choke. Maybe not so much, because it’s kind of warm. Draw it a little bit, and hopefully it’ll just start right up.

Now the flywheel in there gives it a lot of mass. So. Yeah. Okay so take off the joke.

Okay. It looks like one bag does a pretty good job. We might do a second, but this is what I wanted to do is that we’re not walking around the mud and that compacts. So we’ll go ahead and just kind of walk over this and get it spread out a little bit more. And then, we may do it again later, but this is pretty good.

This is what I was looking for. Easy. Cheesy Japanese. Just got to where we have a floor to walk on. Do this without getting muddy or dirty and find bolts. That was the plan. Now we’re going to go down and, show you how we’re going to be doing the gravel. I’m going to be bringing that over.

But another segment on how we fix the tires. We’ll be right back.

Okay. Next week’s video will show you how we constructing the top of the sphere, the root cellar, and doing the dome. We’re putting the pieces back together. The reason we did the straw was because we wanted the a nice area to work on and, you know, not lose bolts and stuff and everything and not get muddy when it rains.

And just so that’s why we did the straws too long and unwieldy in its raw form. So we shredded it down and just spread it around here. Just have a nice work area. So next week you’ll see, us putting it together. This right here only took on a night about an hour and a half, and we suspended it from the tractor, that we had, you know, from the loader and just did that.

And then I propped it up because I needed the tractor. It rained, and I needed the tractor to kind of contour a lot of the land and everything. So we just took these square tubing, aluminum and just stuck them up and kind of did it funky and it held it up and it’s working great. So we’ll go ahead.

After we got to do some maintenance, one of the hydraulic lines on the tractor went one that did before because they positioned it wrong and rubbed through. So they got to do that again. And then we’ll go ahead and finish this. Use the tractor to put it on top.

Of the sphere. And then we’ll get have fun with that.

It’s kind of flat. Oh, the wire went in the tire. Yeah. Oh, you little pain. But.

Well, I know how to fix it. Okay. What we’re going to do is avoid the wire. Now. Now, what we did is we used a laser level to get this. Exactly the level of the gravel that we need all the way around. You can see it was pretty close. So I’m going to go ahead and take and do with the ho what I’ve done here.

Kind of pull it, get a little bit more level and then I’m just going to dump it and then level it out. So we’ll do that a little bit. Well I can show you a little bit of what I’m going to do. Where’s the hose. Oh there’s a more.

So since we know this is the level, I just start here.

Start pulling this stuff back.

Trim around the edge.

See, we don’t usually get super perfect because it takes so much extra time. And in the end, it’s not really beneficial because you got to do all this stuff anyway. So now when we get down to the final stuff and everything, we take more time and kind of get it the way we want.

All right. So you don’t have to watch paint dry for so long. We’ll go ahead and come back when I get done with this. And then we’ll put the I get this level. Donald wetted a little bit, and then we’ll start putting the gravel on and I’ll level this out.

Occupy the land. Tire repair. All right. This is what we’re going to do. Now, this slime I buy, I don’t know, I probably gotten like 2 or 3 of these I’ve gone through already. And those that aren’t familiar with it when I was a kid, you just take your bicycle inner tubes out and you would do contact adhesive and press it.

And then sometimes they had vulcanization. You’d light it and it would melt it on all kinds of different things. That was before slime. Well, Syme works really well, especially out here in the desert a lot of times on the ATVs, whenever I have to do a tire or maybe preventative on the bicycles, I just put this stuff in because, you know, there’s all kinds of sticky stuff out here and it helps stop that.

Now you take this top off and inside it has a valve stem remover. So what I’m going to do to cap off.

And then you just twist out the valve stem.

Not lose anything.

So I’m going to set this here on my leg. Then you take there’s a little hose that comes with it.

Just put it over the valve stem.

And I think I might have to camp on it, you know.

And you remove the inner cap so you can get it to go through.

And then you put it on and that just goes in and it has different amounts for, you know, bicycle, you know, whatever.

It probably put more in than I need to. But this stuff is.

This thing will last me year, you know, a long time. And you put the valve stem back in.

Now they used to say, I’m sure it was a marketing thing for the patch kits that don’t do this on tires. And you take this warranty or any of that crap. And our tire guys, we do Discount Tire here in Arizona and they’re like, no, we don’t have any problem with it. You know, it works fine. So I’m like, okay, so don’t have that worry.

And yeah, I do like putting that little cap back on.

Just doesn’t leak.

Okay. Then we put our inflator on. Now what I did is all four tires. The other three stayed up. And this one, you know, went down. So I’m going to come on. My fingers are slippery from the slime.

We already went through this. So you don’t have to repeat this, but, you know, you just turn it on.

So you set it 30.

And then my time, I roll it over there. I don’t have sealed it up about 90% of the time where it doesn’t do it. And even after it goes down there it up again, you drive it around. So I even done one of my big back tires on my tractor because it wouldn’t. The rim is tubeless and it wouldn’t seal right.

So I had to, you know, clean it off and put some slime around the bead. And it worked on. So I really like this stuff. One of those things you need on a homestead.

Occupy the land with attainable housing, which means you do it all yourself. That’s what it means. And have the material on the land. And you see the gravel. This is just sifted and expanded metal out of the soil that we have. And and it varies in size, but, you know, it’s gravel. So we have more than enough. Now some of the gravel over here is a little bit large.

This is the largest that we get. Now normally this probably wouldn’t be a big deal. And there’s a lot of it in here. But I’m kind of raking out the big stuff and we’ll remove it. And I’d like to get more like this. And we have the levels here as conduit is where we put to put this up.

So I’m trying to I got a bunch of these around so that we can tell how high we get it. And it’s taken about five of those wagons so far of doing this to be nice. If I could just, you know, get the trommel, start loading it and have a shoot, just come down here, which is future. You know, this is what’s going to happen because this is just, you know, work man in 100 billion degrees.

So I’ll go ahead and I might finish this today. We need to work on the door stuff, and, but this is step next. Go ahead and get this level and gravel out, and then we’ll be ready to do the concrete. But we probably won’t do the concrete right away. We’re going to kind of incorporate it with everything else.

But you can kind of see how it blend right into the wall, and it’ll just kind of go up. So it’ll it’ll be nice, and then I’m gonna have it drain over to where those buckets on and and some I have it drained. Go in and show where the buckets are there. And I put a sump pump there.

I think that’s what I’m going to do. And then where the ramp comes down into the dome, that would be concrete. Have a little concave to it. Any water it comes in. But go to the sun and have this drain a little bit over that way. So I take care of any water issues. And then, we’re going to have to start constructing the dome.

We got Don and I worked on the pad over there so that we can just start putting we got our bolts in. Don went and got them at the post office and the nuts that we needed, and we’re going to go ahead and start assembling the top. And then we’ll just set it on here and, connect it and then we’ll take the fence, put it over.

I mean, man, I’m hoping it starts getting cooler because damn, you know, this has been, you know, a long summer, but we’ve survived it. We get a lot of stuff done because the days are so long, but we’re so busy with so many other things. You know, one of the things you see, we have clouds everywhere. It’s just this is rare that you get this kind of cloud.

Donna should walk up this walk up there and done down here for a day.

And show you the clouds all around the horizon. And it’s really cool. I’m going to walk up there. I will ride my electric, but.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/x5OTvtNRh2iA

Homestead Maintenance Day: Slime, Shredder & Sphere Floorhttps://t.co/W44pKvDiKK

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) September 19, 2026