Early Saturday morning, Finn woke up from a bad dream and called to us from her crib. I went in (Mama has weekends off) and soothed her, laid her back down and tried to leave quietly, but she wasn’t having it. After I settled her down again and laid on the spare bed in her room, she snuffled her way back to sleep, leaving me to try and catch a few more Z’s before dawn broke. I’d just found my way back to REM sleep when it was time to get up for some breakfast, and we went downstairs to find Mama was already out the door on her mission for the morning: to check out the nearly new sale at the Howard County Fairgrounds. No sooner had I hit the bottom step when she called in to check on us; she’d seen a used red wagon that had been snatched from her grasp at the last second and wanted to know if we’d left the house yet. Finn and I wolfed down some breakfast, changed into dayclothes, and hit the road for our mission: picking over the community yard sale across the street.
In years past, we’ve found all sorts of useful things for sale in the surrounding area, from cameras to toys to cars. We were hoping to fill some of the small gaps in Finn’s wardrobe and maybe find some larger used items so that we weren’t paying full dealer price; the depreciation on little red wagons is atrocious as soon as you’ve driven them off the lot. Because we’d gotten a late start, she and I didn’t hit the bricks until 9:30, a full hour and a half after the official starting bell, so much of the good stuff was gone by the time we made the rounds.
This year’s sale seemed to favor fussy wingback chairs, Christmas decorations from the Reagan era, a metric ton of stupid glassware (always with the glassware, these people) and ramshackle pressboard furniture, but little or no interesting or useful stuff. There were some isolated deals on children’s books, and when Mama joined up with us, we scored a pair of $.50 Converse lowtops with room to grow in for the girl, but otherwise the local selection of kids items was thin. Perhaps the biggest surprise, then, was when Jen pointed out a sign at an otherwise uninteresting sale which mentioned radiator covers. Curious, we followed the seller back and peeped out a metal cover in excellent condition stored in the back of a garage; we hurried home with measurements and a phone number, and confirmed that it was perfect for our dining room.
After returning home, we bundled up the girl and headed out to her swim lesson. She’s doing really well with the stuff that scared her the first couple of weeks, like being underwater and floating on her back. She still has a look of confusion when she comes back out of the water, but she’s not as prone to crying about it like before. We played together until I could feel her shivering in my hands, and then it was time to go home. But not before checking out a fire engine in the parking lot! The local volunteer department brought it down for kids to check out, so Finn got to sit in the rear jumpseat and poke around the cabin while we chatted up one of the firemen.
Saturday afternoon I started working on cleaning up the clutter in our basement, first by hauling our old kitchen cabinets from of the center of the floor and hanging them on the back wall of the garage. At that point I realized the garage was in far worse shape than the basement, and commenced to organizing and cleaning as much as I could in there. Into the cabinets went the piles of debris from the workbench, a crate of motor oil, and a crateful of garden fertilizer and tools. I pulled the remainder of the rodent-chewed insulation off the walls and bagged it for disposal, reorganized the handtools, and put parts spares up into the attic. Nothing is going to make the floor any cleaner, but having the raised portion cleaned up is very nice. And when I’ve got a dumpster parked outside for the side porch, I’m going to find a way to disconnect the old gas stove and make that disappear as well.
One of the things I keep running into as I’m working on our cars is an unorganized toolbox filled with an explosion of wrenches. I’ve got two sets of SAE and one set of metric box-heads, and being able to find them quickly would be really helpful. After looking through the organizational section at the Home Depot and coming away unimpressed, I decided something simple would be the best solution—I’ll be happy to buy a couple of these when our budget allows. I’ve also got to find a way to organize sockets by size and type so that I’ll wind up with the correct handle for the right socket.
Sunday was just as busy. Finn’s friend Stella turned 2, so we stopped by her birthday party and sang, danced, painted, and played games with a group of other children the same age. By the time we left, she was pooped, and slept pretty much the whole way home.
While she was down I continued working outside, getting the back lawn mowed for the first time, then doing some battery swapping with the Slattern. It looks like the battery I bought last fall to replace the original is bad, but I’m not 100% sure; I replaced it with the Jeep battery and the car seemed to fire over a lot more happily. I also switched out the taillight wiring on the off chance there was a short in the original, but I’m going to try to see how well Pep Boys honors their 1 year replacement warranty this evening before I call this fixed.
As a gesture of appreciation for finally receiving a new taillight, the Saturn has decided that it doesn’t want to start. I noticed the available gusto with which it usually cranks over its sewing-machine engine was a bit lacking the other day, and yesterday morning it simply sat and made the click-click-click noise that cars make when the battery is either almost dead or connected with a wire dripping with corrosion. I’m currently borrowing my neighbor’s charger in order to get the Scout’s battery working again (that saga has taken another negative course correction, BTW) so I pulled the Saturn’s four-month-old battery last night and hooked it up, thinking the alternator isn’t providing a charge anymore. But after about 15 seconds, the charger reported the battery as being full.
Curious.
So this morning, I dropped it back in, cleaned the contacts off (the positive side was, indeed, flaky) and tried it about four times with no success. Last night I was really bummed, because I noticed for the first time that the alternator is buried behind the transversely mounted engine block and under the cowling, making its replacement more than this shade-tree mechanic is able to take on right now. But now, I’m just perplexed. If it’s not the battery, then it’s either the starter solenoid or the relay.
The plan to diagnose is as follows:
- Try using the Jeep battery to start it.
- Try jumping it from the Jeep.
- Check or replace the starter solenoid.
- Check or replace the starter relay. ($~11)
Update: Jumped it almost immediately off the jeep. So I’m thinking it could be the battery. I have to do some more sleuthing.
After some wrangling, several phone calls, and a weekend of frightening media darkness, we’re back online. A Verizon dude came to the house, looked at the outside boxes, mumbled something to Jen about “going back to look at the mainframe”, and left. Hours passed, and then another nice man came out to make sure service had been restored. His efforts to make sure the DSL was working were thwarted by the updates I’d made to our cable routing during the downtime; I set up a honest-to-god punchdown block in the basement and commenced to rerouting and sorting miles of data cable hanging from the rafters like so many burmese pythons. After I got home from work, I made a few quick changes to the patch cables and restored the internet to glorious cinemascope. I still have to tighten up the remainder of the wiring, reroute coax that’s mixed in with the data cabling, and finish cleaning up the punchdown block before I can call it done, but it’s better than before. Oh, yeah, adding a 24-port switch to add into the rack would be nice…but it’s not necessary.
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Over the weekend our neighbors invited us to a “green” meeting (local folks coming together to talk about environmentally friendly methods and practices at the Lutheran church), and while the speaker was relatively good (a semi-nervous woman who sells eco-friendly products), it just so happened there was a used tool sale going on in the back of the room. For $15, we walked away with a 22″ hedge clipper, a full-size shovel, edging tool, and gravel rake, a pipe cutter, two channel locks, several snap-on wrenches, two unused paint scrapers, a sharpening stone, and the big find: a shaft-driven Bolens edging trimmer in unknown condition for the princely sum of $3. If I can get it running and swap out the gas tank (there’s a hole in it), my days of hauling 150′ of electrical cord around the yard will be over for good.
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After some confusion and a misplaced paper were cleared up last week, I finally got a box this afternoon containing ten window balances from Pullman, which will go into use just as soon as I can block the time out to install them.
Check it—an episode of BoingBoingTV with a cameo by my friend John, about TechShop, a Silicon Valley community tinkering space. Instead of a normal tool library with hammers and drills, this is a shop with stuff like CNC plasma cutting machines, full-size hydraulic presses and three-dimensional printers. The last time I was out in San Francisco, I met up with John for dinner, and he was telling us all about this place—this is yet another reason I would love to move to California.
I’ve found all kinds of evidence of cost cutting here at the Estate, perpetrated by contractors, handymen, journeymen and bums who may have been “going through rough patches”, trading services, or simply drunk on the job. Scavenged, straightened nails, scrap lumber joined to form studs, leftover wire joined by junction boxes doubling back and forth through walls where it could reach the farthest. THis kind of thing is so common now that I’ve factored in the added cost of redoing everything I touch, and my SOP is to gut everything to the bones so that I can fix everything possible.
With that in mind, I had to pull a section of floor underlayment out in order to install a wall between the bathroom and the office last week. As I started levering out the fibrous board, I realized the floor tile installers were probably the only professionals ever to enter the house, because they used approximately three metric tons of ring shank nails to hold everything down. Now for a little tool edumocation: Ring shank nails are specially designed with threads along the body to go into wood and stay there, offering twice as much withdrawal resistance than an average nail of the same size. This makes them specially suited for jobs like floor underlayment, where thousands of pounding feet over the course of years on the corner of a board will eventually work the average nail loose, leaving a maddening squeak in its place.
I’ve had experience, too much experience, with ring shank nails. They were used elsewhere in this house but applied with a fraction of the brio evidenced here: one nail every two inches, and on sixteens (every foot and a half, following the floor joists). Using a hammer to pull them is a joke, because they’re designed to go in but not to come out. The heads shrivel and wilt like flowers in August drought, leaving their sharp stems sticking defiantly out of the wood. Of course, they can be driven below the surface with a hammer and a punch, but they have little or no shear (side to side) strength, so more often than not they’ll bend or twist with one good hit. And if the floor has a date with the sander, the law of averages says they’re going to shred a few belts.
My Dad had an old, blackened tool in his collection I always assumed was (and used) for snipping wire, but it was only recently that I learned of its purpose. End cutting pliers have a misleading name, because their primary design is not for cutting, it’s for pulling. It’s a blunt, wicked-looking tool with a shallow bite and a wide, curved jaw, designed with the same efficiency as a pitbull: It grabs the shank of a nail right below the head, and does not let go.
The curved edge is a lever very close to the fulcrum, which provides more focused power than a hammer and doubles to hold the jaw closed as that little SOB comes out. If, by some chance, the nail gives way before it comes out, a squeeze on the handle will snip the head as close the floor as you can get it. A tap with a punch will drive the remainder into the wood below sander depth.
I had to do some sleuthing to find a new one, because your average Home SuperStore doesn’t carry them (or, at least, their websites don’t) and I’ve got better things to do than wander the aisle of a Tool Corral trying to find where a stoned 17-year-old hid them last year.
I found mine at the local Ace hardware in under two minutes, and after I got it home I was pulling ring shank nails like daisies. I bought the 8″ Ace store brand for $13. Buy something large enough to fit comfortably in your palm, because if your job is anything like mine, you’ll be pulling nails for a long afternoon.
This is a link for the Hitachi P20SB Hand Planer. Mine came with a case and a tool for aligning the blades; it’s got a heavy action while still being very light, and the blades are strong and sturdy (unlike the thin, easily chipped blades on a Bosch model I rented.) I’d recommend this. I paid somewhere around $99 for it at Lowe’s.
Our visit to Pax River was good. We visited with Mrs. Lockard for the afternoon, and she was better off than I was hoping. She was mentally sharper than I’ve seen her in a long time, even if she’s physically weaker. We took her out for an early dinner, and hopefully brightened an otherwise dreary Saturday afternoon. I really hope we’re able to celebrate the holidays with her and show her a good time. Of course, the Ghost of Dysfunctional Christmas is standing between us and those plans, but we’ll have to deal with that when it comes.
Hard On My Toys. I’ve had a Delta table saw for about the past five years. I bought it at a time when I didn’t have outrageous amounts of money, but decided that using a handheld circular saw to rip 10′ boards lentghwise was getting to be tiresome. I went out to the Home Depot to browse, and after half an hour of looking through the field, I selected the best American-made unit I could find for under $150. Since then, I’ve ripped a couple miles of board-feet between two houses’ worth of projects. During that time I found that the saw had a number of shortcomings (cheap fittings, a very wobbly motor, few allowances for attachments, a small fence) and only a few pluses, but I was able to jury-rig it enough to get it to work for me.
This past week, I’ve hustled to finish a bunch of outstanding projects so that I could get to one that I was looking forward to: finish carpentry around the front window in the dining room. I bought some very clean, expensive wood for the trim (the good stuff is hard to find) and had just begin to rip the sill to size when the saw cut out. I unplugged it, applied Dugan’s Second Law Of Fixing Stuff (unbolted the motor, took it apart and put it back together) and got another five seconds of juice out of it before the whole thing died in a puff of ozone.
Add this to the Skilsaw circular I burned out milling the door down this spring and that makes two expensive tools I’ve killed this year. It’s not like I’ve been throwing these things off the roof or leaving them in the rain; this is everyday use we’re talking about. I think I’m going to have to stick with the brands I trust at this point—A DeWalt cordless that actually has fallen off a roof and continues to work flawlessly; a Makita circular that’s followed me through two years of High School setbuilding, four years of college, and two houses; a Porter Cable sander that’s touched every woodworking project I’ve done; and a Craftsman ¾” drill that’s older than I am and deserves a new set of bearings.
I always wanted to buy the best tools I could afford and have them for the rest of my life, and this is one of those times when a compromise burned me. And the killer is that I don’t have the cash to buy that beautiful DeWalt replacement I saw last month. I can’t say that the Delta owes me anything, but I’m probably going to have to buy another 5-year saw and kill it as well.