Boxerworks.com

Mice and ground squirrels love the comfort of a weather-proof aluminum enclosed home
followed with a tasty diet of electrical wire insulation !

Those dirty little bastards !

Ken, consider that you are fortunate.
A failed start, no power, and subsequent testing ultimately led me to pull the Gen cover
which revealed nesting all about the bean-can and alternator –
Damn near every wire under the cover needed to be replaced ... insulation missing ...
some wires chewed right to bits !

justoneoftheguys wrote:Now that is weird.

Yep, I figure it was an ant "graveyard", I've seen similar piles in nature. The fact that they crawled all over the car and found the route up the tailpipe and through an open exhaust valve and decided, "oh yeah, this will work..." (?)

No wildlife, but a PO surprise:



Breather tube extended, running through hole pierced in filter element. If the breather valve had failed, it would have exposed the crankcase to unfiltered atmosphere.



On the upside, the PO did upgrade the breather to the late reed valve.

Ken in Oklahoma wrote: My fear too, though my dominant emotion is simply that they need to be dead. Spiders need to be upside down, all eight legs bent in funny directions, and with big black X's on all 4, or is it 6, eyes.




Ken

I think 8 eyes Ken. One eye for each foot.

I have an irrational love of spiders!

The nursery:



Perhaps you would like to put together the puzzle?

Major Softie wrote: ... seeing as how I have a completely irrational fear of spiders ...

<steady voice> There's nothing irrational about that.</steady voice>

Mike

So Mike, first post eh? And from Australia to boot?

Welcome to the forum.

Say, you're not personally acquainted with any of those other strange Blokes down there are you?




Ken

Spiders are cool !
I have a bunch of spiders living in my garage
that are nearly 100% accurate in predicting rain (short term forecast).
Several hours before the rain comes, they begin furiously building webs, knowing full well, as they do,
that insect activity increases dramatically before a rainfall ...
and spiders do love to eat bugs !

When I go out to the garage anticipating getting on the bike,
I will know to expect rain when I walk through the door
and suddenly find myself wearing the webs !

vanzen@rockerboxer.com wrote:Spiders are cool !
I have a bunch of spiders living in my garage
that are nearly 100% accurate in predicting rain (short term forecast).
Several hours before the rain comes, they begin furiously building webs, knowing full well, as they do,
that insect activity increases dramatically before a rainfall ...
and spiders do love to eat bugs !

When I go out to the garage anticipating getting on the bike,
I will know to expect rain when I walk through the door
and suddenly find myself wearing the webs !

While I like the insect catching ability of spiders (hate the mosquitos) there are a few varieties I could live without. Here in Hawaii invasive species can be a real problem, especially with our lack of natural predators to control populations. One of the more recent imports are crab spiders: These little !@#$% like to band together and cover trees, bushes, eaves, etc with their webs, hurt to step on... and BITE!

No natural predators, that would be a problem.
Now if you were to have a good sized volcano erupt...