Sweating... That's what today has been about... Both kinds mind you...
There's the sweating of pipes... That mystical process where you heat pipes, melts solder, and watch it suck UP in to the fittings... Capillary action is a wonderful thing... We sweat enough pipe today to run out of solder, and I still haven't left the boiler room with any pipe...
Then of course there's your run of the mill sweat... The kind that pours from your skin when its hot... Sure, I have air conditioning units... I don't have any in the basement though, and even if I did, fresh air is very important when you are dealing with the aforementioned kind of sweating... Toxic smoke and all that...
The hybrid of the two is what I'm dealing with now... The normal sweat has managed to mix with the byproducts of the pipe sweat, and the crud that is on my arms and face has a greenish tinge to it... This I can assure you is a vile condition, and shall be rectified shortly by the shower... I did however have to get my mail, and see just how bad it was down south before the shower and bed...
Ya know, its hard to complain today when people down in the south east are having their lives ripped apart by the weather... I tried to keep that in perspective all day... Somehow though, today just decided to screw with me...
I've been dealing with the headache of plumbing for some time now... It doesn't seem to get much better, but tomorrow, I start actually putting pipe and fittings together. That should make that a bit better mentally... I was foiled yet again today in trying to get the fittings I need, but the hard one is on order, and should be in soon. Until then, I will be installing fittings, with valves on them, so the missing components can go in later, and I can still pressure test the system once I'm done... It still causes a headache though...
I came home from my office to work on the plumbing plans today. I told the client that called with the very rough design to call me at home as I had sent him a very rough estimate. I knew it was a high number, and since they had supposedly sent it to another shop, I thought they might not bother calling back. Apparently either they only sent it to us in reality, or the other shop was even higher, which I doubt... At any rate, we chatted a bit, and I managed to get out of him what their budget was. They have less than a quarter of what I guessed the show would cost. Yes, I can cut costs for the show... Yes, I can even cut my profit margin a bit... Yes I can suggest things that will bring the price down... In the end though, I don't think I can cut the budget in half, let alone a quarter and still put what they want on stage... I don't like doing half-assed scenery, and generally I won't try... However, a little payroll would really help at the moment, so I'll re-do the quote with some changes in mind...
I then went up to Home Desperate, as I had to pick up some screws... Naturally, they didn't have them, so since the project isn't that important I decided to come home again... Walking toward my truck, I noticed the tail pipe looked off a bit... Sadly, it sheared off the muffler such that I can't just stick a new pipe on there, I will have to replace the muffler and tailpipe... Glad I have so much extra cash hanging around right now...
So all I really wanted to do was sit outside, with a beer, and try to forget the day... So as I sat there, talking to my girlfriend who also had a shitty day, the strapping on my chair broke, and I almost broke my skull falling through it...
It's too early to crawl in bed and sleep the day off, but I'm somewhat worried that the day has more time left to get me some more... Somebody get me another beer...
Well oil is up to a new record again... Seems like we set a new record every couple days now... Naturally everyone feels the bite of those higher prices... So why is it that my clients still expect that my pricing will be the same or lower than last year?...
Yes, my big clients represent a huge portion of our gross income, and therfor they tend to demand good prices. That's not a problem, since they are essentially volumn buying from me... The problem is now that if I stik to the established prices for mundane things like carpet, I loose money. Yea, carpet will become a looseing item... Carpet is nylon, and nylon is made from chemicals which are made from oil... Naturally trucking is up too... With real estate what it is, my rent keeps climbing...
My clients are in for a shock this season. By the end of the week I'll have a new pricing schedule for everything. I don't think I should be the one sucking it up to absorb all the price increases... I guess now we'll see how much they like our work... I can always go back to freelanceing if I really had too, but that's about the worst possible option in my mind... I think I'd consider a career change if I have to give up my shop...
Ya know, I had a few good posts spinning around in my head this weekend... I'm sure I'll get to venting about them by mid week... Somehow though, it just doesn't seem right for me to be complaining tonight when a section of the gulf coast is about to get put through a blender...
I'm not going to pretend to know what that's like... Last thing we got that was horrendous was Floyd in '99 and that was down to a tropical storm by then... Hell we get noreasters that tear up the place, and we occasionally get dumpped on with a blizzard, but Katrina isn't playing like that... Remember '92?... Hurricane Andrew scraped a section of Florida off the map... That was the last time a Category 5 hit the US... That's in a area where they're used to getting hit, and they tried to build to stand up to it...
Catagory 5... Scary stuff...
Good luck down there folks...
Tuesday, we were contacted regarding a set for a show. They asked if we would have the time, and were we interested... Even though we're dead right now, I always want to see what we'd be getting in to, so they faxed over a sketch... They called it a rendering, but it was a sketch... Also there were some rough dimensions on a separate sheet.
There are some clients that I have worked on many shows with, and have developed an understanding of what they need in an end product. In this case, this is a new client, and the show is going in to a space we have never worked in before. So when they called, I told them we had the time and were interested... That is where the conversation should have ended except for them to tell me a bid pack would be sent out... But they just kept pausing...
Naturally they called my cell, and naturally I had just woken up again after driving all night, so I wasn't too quick on the pickup... What they really wanted was a price... They wanted a price based on a poor quality fax, with rough numbers... They never said they wanted a price in their previous contacts, but that was their goal I guess...
Can I do a price?.. Sure, I can do a price, and pending everything goes exactly as I can guess it would go, that would be fine... The problem here is I'm not working with anything that's accurate... Its all in black and white... And the contact I have isn't the designer, its the stage manager... What the hell are they thinking?.. It really wouldn't be fair to them or me for me to give them a price based on this little bit of info... The odds are simply too great that something will change, and that will affect the price... Then you end up in a fight over the increased cost, and nobody is happy... If you send accurate paperwork, through a designer who knows what the producer/director is looking for, then I can develop a quote that I will stick to, unless they make some wild change...
All in all, this is clearly going to suck... If it wasn't so damn dead, I'd consider telling them we couldn't help them without a full bid pack... In reality though, I will develop a quote, and has no specifics, only ranges, and a big fat disclaimer that it all might change based on actual drawings...
And people wonder why I am so down on "art"...
There is nothing in the world worse that waiting to hear from the one you love when they are in the ER, and you are too far away to be there with them...
My calander will be officially cleared shortly, and I'll be going there tommorow if there is either no word, or bad news...
I hate this.
Update:
I couldn't take it, so I went down last night at 2:30am, and got there just before she got home. All is well basically...
So I headed off this morning to get all the parts for the heating plumbing... This shouldn't be a problem, as I'm not really ordering anything strange...
As I'm standing there at the parts desk at my usual plumbing supply, the guy is shaking his head as he enters part numbers... This is typically not a good sign...
Apparently they are out of normal gate valves... They have gate valves, but rather than $5.00, they have $30 and $45.00 valves... Hello, its a gate valve, its the single most common valve there is... So I asked why the ones they had were so expensive, and they could not give me a reason... They told me they had no idea what made the valves in back special, and recommended I get normal valves someplace else if I needed them today... Since I wanted everything today, I had them switch the gates to ball valves, and that was fine...
The next problem was they were confused why I wanted a globe valve along with all the gates... I didn't think they had to know why, but since I had time, I explained I needed to be able to throttle down one of the radiators in case it didn't balance with the others since it was new... That should have made sense, and he nodded, and disappeared in to the back to collect everything...
When I got home and sorted the fittings, I found one of the super expensive gate valves rather than the globe I asked for... The pull ticket had a cheap gate valve listed... I am very confused... So rather than going back to try to return something that isn't on the sales ticket, I picked up a globe at Home Desperate...
Strange, the guy didn't seem brain dead...
Incidentally, the crazy expensive valves are made of bronze rather than brass, and they are rated for steam rather than just hot water... Why nobody at the counter knew that I can't imagine... It took me all of 5 minutes to find out, and only that long since I'm still stuck in the dark ages of dial up...
At least I have everything now, and I don't have to go deal with them again for some time...
Have I mentioned that I hate plumbing?... Let me reiterate the fact... I Hate Plumbing!!
Now, its not that I can't sweat a joint with the best of them, its something more complex... Plumbing while seeming simple as in connect the pipes and the water flows, is not quite so... You have to consider flow rates, pressure drop across fittings, pressure loss to head, pump capacity, temperature, pressure, mounting, solder and flux type, electronic controls, and any number of other things I can't recall at the moment... Most of this crap is general plumbing stuff, but some is just significant to hydronic heat, which is my current headache...
Of course, it only makes it worse that I'm short some of the paperwork from my boiler, and I didn't write down the pertinent temp and pressure info when it was running, but that can be overcome... Then I've complicated it further by deciding on 3 zones rather than the single zone it was... That means you get dropped in to the world of zone valves, or circulators. (I picked valves since the circulator was already big enough to handle the full load) So I spent 4 hours today translating the specifications of zone valves in to something I could understand... Sadly the valve manufacturers print their paperwork for the benefit of people that work with their gear all the time, so its full of engineering specifications, but no explanations of what they relate to... For example they all have a Cv rating on each valve... I'd never heard of such a thing, but based on the context, it had to do with the flow capacity of the valve... Turns out it stands for Characteristics of Valve, which is still meaningless... However, on further investigation, it is the product of an equation that takes in to consideration the specific gravity of the fluid, the flow rate, and the desired pressure drop across the valve... Do I ever want to need that formula again?... Hopefully not...
At any rate, after giving myself a splitting headache getting the parts specifications together, and the quantity of fittings, I finally have the list of things I need to make it all go together... Unfortunately, I can't get my dad down here to help me until next week... So I guess once I have all the parts here, I can go on to something else... Probably landscape work that has been waiting until I got the right rocks... Fortunately, the landscaper I know turned up the better part of a pallet of what I need late last week... At least I know what I'm getting in to with dirt work and rock... I imagine it will actually be refreshing after the aneurism of plumbing...
While driving home from Baltimore today, I was as usual doing about 75 in the middle lane... Generally I don't do much over that as my truck really isn't intended for that kind of performance... Usually I actually keep it around 70, but all conditions were excellent, so 75 was fine... At 75 on the I-95 corridor you are usually keeping with the bulk of traffic. You pass some folks in the right lanes, and the insane speeders go blowing by on the left... Well someone clearly didn't read my previous post... They came screaming up behind me some place in Maryland, and didn't disappear until I got off on I-295 in Delaware... During the ensuing time, I couldn't see their hood over my tailgate... I can't even tell you what make the car was as I could see so little of it... Clearly they must have been drafting... Hell, if they had asked nicely, I could have towed them, and we both would have had a more pleasant trip...
Usually someone will do that, get frustrated, and go zooming around in the left lane after a short period... That's what the left lane is there for... Other people in the front might get intimidated and more right, but that wasn't happening... If I had been holding up traffic, I'd move, but traffic was light, and the left lane was pretty open...
I was good, I never once tapped my brakes... I wasn't a saint, I did flip on my lights so the tail lights came on, and watched the guy nosedive a bit... Amazingly, he was right on my bumper again in a few minutes...
I was happy when I hit 295... While I wasn't moving right for the asshole, I didn't really enjoy the drive with him basically in my back seat...
I think I need some of those James Bond gizmos like oil slick, or smoke screen, just to make my drive more enjoyable... Though I would have liked to find a chunk of truck re-tread to run over and kick up, I sadly seemed to be on a very clean stretch of highway today... Just my luck...
Way back in March, I mentioned that the town my company sit in was doing some work on the streets, and lighting... I complained about the lights as they were too bright, and the island seemingly pointless...
How little I knew then... Let me explain...
Back in march, they did the island, and the lights... They had to tear up some brand new paving to do so, but the patch wasn't terrible, and I figured they were done screwing up the roads... Now, months later, I can see, that was only the beginning... Once it got hot out, the heavy equipment came back... They cut slots across the road, and all the side roads right were the crosswalks would normally be. This confused me, as the slot was only about 3/4" deep, and I know damn well that's too little for pavers or bricks, and too deep for a paint treatment... Following the slotting, new signs appeared beside the road. "Bump" they say... Strange think I as its really a dip, so obviously they were going to fill the slot with something... And so they did... A rather large truck shows up, and pours some cocktail in to the slots, which then gets stamped to look like brick pavers... They paint it all red, and then broom sand in to the grooves between the "bricks"... It looks fabulous... Too bad they can't get it flush with the damn road, which seems strange since they basically pour the crap... So now rather than getting a nice smooth road, we have "bump" signs everyplace, and our suspensions get pummeled...
And foolishly, I thought they were done...
They came back again, and chewed up big sections of the road in between the nice new "brick" sections... Back comes the truck, and the pour out more crap, and now we have beige "brick" intersections... They couldn't even get one section of "brick to be flush with the other section of "brick...
And it keeps spreading... Without a single bit of organized thought as to where they're going to grind and pour the next time...
What happens when they need to fix a pipe under this stuff?... I'll tell you... We're going to have asphalt patches in there... What happens to that stuff when a plow hits all those bumps?... How about the freeze thaw action in all the grooves? Who is going to re-paint the red sections when they fade from sun/tires/chemicals?... Who the hell decided this was a good idea?
Don't bother doing it right folks... Obviously using pavers (imagine using something called a paver for paving) just managed to elude them....
Idiots...
Last weekend, I was down in Baltimore, as I am about every other weekend, to see my girlfriend... She comes up the other weekends for the most part... There is a tendency for us to work on some project in either location, my house, or landscaping here, or her classic car and apartment down there... This weekend was a car weekend.
We were doing some rust abatement on the floor pans and toe boards, when they swarmed... Now, I grew up in suburban New Jersey, and rural Pennsylvania... I've spent a year in Mississippi, and weeks in just about every other state east of the Mississippi... I've done lots of outdoor work, as well as hiking/fishing/outdoorsy stuff all over the place... I am familiar with mosquitoes, and I don't fear them... If I get bit, it swells up and is gone in a day pretty much...
They must be raising a special mosquito in Baltimore... Not only did they attack in force IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, IN THE BRIGHT SUN, WITH A SLIGHT BREEZE, but the bites are still driving me nuts 2 days later...
I’m going to have to re-acquaint myself with DEET and Sting Kill…
This house never ceases to amaze me... I've spent the last couple days cutting out the old plumbing for the heating system. While the boiler and radiators worked great last winter, whoever did the plumbing on it was a hack. All and I mean all the joints were cold soldered... Hell just by chance you would think they might have gotten one of the hundred or so joints hot enough to get a nice flow of solder, but it was not to be... While that drives me crazy, I probably still would have left it alone for a while. The thing that pushed me over the edge was that the pipes ran randomly all over the place, and in many cases, they were so low that almost everyone had to duck under them... There was no reason the pipes could not have been run up in the joists, but mostly they hung sickly down from incorrect hangers...
At any rate, the odd thing is that the system didn't leak... I mean nary a drip was ever seen... Clearly the gods of plumbing (Dripicus, Flushicus, and Flowicus) were smiling on whoever put the thing together... They let me get through last winter, and for that I'm thankful, but I wasn't going to push my luck again... The whole system should be able to be put in, in a couple days I think, with the exception of the radiator that comes in, in September naturally... Now I just need to work out where all my pipes are going to run, and get the right fittings, pipe and control valves... I'll have to make an offering to the gods of burnt copper and solder so what I put in doesn't leak too...
It's been since March that I had an internet connection at my house... I could steal a bit of Wi Fi in a pinch, but the signal is really weak from the 2 sources I can catch...
Tonight, I got to recall just how much I enjoy sitting down here (seems like my office is always in a basement) (laptop will be upstairs eventually after DSL so I can be a surface dweller again) with a pizza and a beer, and reading blogs until my eyes can't focus... (I'm at that point, so I'm sure this will be a mess of mistypeing...)
I swear, I don't think I'm ever going to catch up on everyplace I used to frequent... But I'm trying... (I'd like to say the DSL will help, but I can only read so fast...)
Just because you drive an expensive car that has good handling, and way too much acceleration, does not mean I am going to get out of your way.... You are of course welcome to try to push though...
Just because you drive an SUV does not mean I will be intimidated and yield the right of way... There is plenty of thicker steel in my truck frame than your SUV frame, so if you really feel the need to, go ahead and try to make me let you in...
Just because you drive some tiny car that can zip in and out of traffic as easily as a bike, do not expect me to cut you any slack... You swerve in front of me at your own risk since odds are I wouldn't feel much running you down...
I first saw my current house when it was cold out... The second trip to take a look found it to be freakin' cold... The day of close I recall being bitter, and there was snow predicted... Then I had to go to Florida for a couple weeks for business, and when I got back there was snow, and it was still bitter cold... Inside the house, for all its clearly visible faults, it was always nice and warm... Through the inspection, I found my boiler was 10 years old, and considered a mid-efficiency unit... I didn't think much about the heating system then until the summer, except to know I was going to have to re-run most of the piping, which is simple basic plumbing and requires not too much mental effort on my part... The radiators are all in very good shape and are probably only 10 years old as well, so I thought I'd be good there, and for the most part I am... I decided I needed to replace the radiator in the living room because of space... The unit is very large in there, and it simply isn't going to work with my two monster recliners... So I found some nice wall mount panel style radiator, and figured I was set... Now of course by now its summer and the boiler is off, and drained since I had to cut out the old radiator to put down the cherry floor... So as I try to figure out the exact size I need, I find that not only do I need to know what the general temperature I want in the room is, but also the operating pressure of the unit, and the input and output temperatures of the boiler... This is the point at which I bang my head against the wall for not noting what the gauges said in the middle of the winter...
So the process went this way... Track down a manual for the boiler that has been discontinued... Find out the base line for that particular unit in terms of pressure, and temp ratings... Gusesstimate what the boiler output temperature setting is (no digital gear here folks, its a rough dial, and I'm sure you set it by trial and error)... Then I researched what the BTU output of various kinds of cast iron radiators was to get a good estimate of what was being put out last winter... (you would not believe how many different shapes and sizes of those bloody things there are) Then with that info, I delved in to the paperwork on the new stuff I like... Problem is they only rate it at 180 degrees, and my boiler is running around 235... Now as a side note, I recall the radiators were freakin' hot last winter, to the point you didn't want to touch them... That works well with the 235 number for sure... However, we all know water boils at 212 right?... However, under pressure, the boiling point goes up... My handy dandy Pipe Fitter's Guide tells me it boils at 239.4 at 10psi, and 249.8 at 15psi... The boiler tops out at 240 supposedly, so I should be safe in terms of not getting steam, so long as I maintain that 12psi... If it were to get down to 8psi, I end up with steam, and that's not good... But I digress...
After calling the company and confusing them as to why I'm running at 235, they did come up with the needed BTU output of their equipment for me...
Realistically, I am only replacing the one radiator, so I don't want to effect the balance of the whole house, which is why I'm working with the numbers assuming 235deg water... If I get the correct size replacement to correspond to what was there which I know will be sufficient, I know I'll be ok... Also, I will be able to roll the temp on the boiler down a bit to around 215, which makes the likelihood of getting steam almost nil... Doing that means the boiler will run a bit more frequently, however it should run a bit more efficiently since I've added insulation to the house, and I'm separating the basement from the main floor with zone valves and a separate thermostat... (basically I won't be wasting heat all the time in the basement which holds it quite well to begin with, and the boiler can do its thing more efficiently for upstairs...)
At any rate... 6 weeks from now, the new radiator comes in... Right at the end of September... Just on the cusp of potential cold... Its gonna be close...
...and with a wave of my hand I said Let There Be Connectivity.... and there was connectivity.... and it is good....
Or something along those lines...
I have managed to get the phone lines all installed, and terminated today along with getting the phone company to turn on the service... (Thanks for doing a same day deal Verizon...)
Does this mean a return to regular blogging?... Its possible, if not assured... There have been an unending list of things I could have been typeing about since I moved here, but without the ability to strike when the iron was hot, they just never happened... DSL should go live in 10-15 days here, and assumeing that the gateway/switch I bought arrives before that, I'll have hard lines in all the rooms I've been working on, as well as a good wireless signal throughout the property... Why put in wire when I'm getting wireless?... Lets face it folks, wireless is nice, but it can be annoying... Copper is still more reliable, and usually faster... Besides, I put all the conduit in anyway for phone, so running eathernet in there too was a breeze, and it leaves me the ability to rip that out in the future when things go to fibre... (though by then the wireless should be pretty bulletproof...) ('course who knows what the next thing will be... I'm ready for almost any contingency here...)
At any rate, what it all boils down to is I'm back!...
And as soon as the DSL kicks in, I'm going to have to do a serious cleaning up around here... My links are a bloody mess... Geesh...
I remember growing up, and when I needed some electronic something or other, you could always go to Radio Shack to pick it up... It could be anything from a single little resistor, to a CB radio that was hundreds of dollars... Batteries, switches, wire.... You name it, and it was there... If you couldn't find it, you asked the guy behind the counter (who hadn't hassled you with a hard sell) and he knew it all... He was an electronics geek of the first order... Most likely, he was one of those guys that bought all the parts and made himself one of the first computers just to watch some LED's flash in patterns... Phone stuff?... They had enough there to set up a small phone company of your very own...
It's not like that now... I needed a punch down tool to do the phone wiring in my house yesterday... The thought of going to Home Depot sickened me, and besides, the Shack was closer... Since I don't spend a lot of time there now, I don't know the store layout, so I asked the guy behind the corner. (he looked way to well quaffed to know anything, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt) As soon as I said punch down, his eyes glazed over... He led me down an aisle, and told me all the tools were there... A quick look told me they didn't have one there... So I asked where the phone blocks are, to which he said "what's that?"... It was at that point that I ceased to care if it was there... I would go anyplace to find what I needed, but it wasn't going to be there...
On my trek out the store, I looked around... Cheap TV's, and radios were present as always... But the main thing in there was cell phone crap... And then it all made sense... The old Radio Shack geek had evolved from a knowledgeable electronics guy in to a lower form of life in the cell phone salesman... I could get 17 different color covers for my phone there, but I can't get the tool that lets you connect real phone systems...
I drive a blue pickup... It's quite nice, even though it's a '97, and it runs quite nicely... Naturally, it has picked up nicks and scratches over the years, and those in turn have started to rust ever so slightly... So I thought I'd get to work on touching them up after treating the rust... No big deal...
I got my preferred rust treatment after a bit of trouble locating it in the brush on format. (I said small scratches... I don't want to spray paint my truck...) Next I thought I'd pick up the appropriate blue from a car parts place... The truck is a Dodge, and the color code is PCH... Shouldn't be a big deal right...
Dupli-Color seems to have a lock on supplying paint to all the parts places around here... Normally that wouldn't bother me too much since they have always had what I needed... According to their book though, not only does PCH not exist, but Dodge/Chrysler didn't produce a single blue car of any color in '97... So I went outside that year, and find no PCH in any year... Strange... So I checked the decal under the hood again, and yep, it's PCH...
I know it's not a custom paint job... I've seen other trucks with the same color scheme from Dodge... I really didn't want to go to Dodge for this, but I guess I'll have to...
Ugh...
I stopped by Rocket Jones, and I found he's having a bit of a wasp problem... I can sympathize... I've got one of my own, though the spray is working nicely... However, on the other side of the insect size scale is a bug which I am having issues with... Now, understand, these bugs don't bite, nor do they even swarm humans... On the whole, we don't even exist in their buggy brains... What they do however is to reproduce like crazy (1 turns in to 16,000 in an average growing season up here). They live on the sap from plants, and they seem to truly love tomato plants...
I couldn't care less about tomato plants since I don't like tomatoes, but my girlfriend does, and I have the space to grow them, so as such I do... My plants are now almost 8 feet tall, and one of them has over a hundred tomatoes on it in bunches sort of like grapes... Now while I don't care for tomatoes, I'll be damned if some bug is going to kill a plant that I want to be there for whatever the reason... So off I went to get some pesticide at Home Depot...
Just a bit of info here... The bug in question is the Whitefly... Those of you with gardens probably just twitched... I know your pain...
Well the bugs laughed at what I got from HD... I thought that strange, because every other bug in the vicinity seemed to be dead on the ground around the tomatoes... So I thought I'd do a bit of research on these minute tomato terminators...
Turns out that these things are hardy to the extreme... And they develop immunity to new pesticides faster than McDonalds can find ways to re-market their greasy food... So after an extensive search, the end result is that the best way to control these things isn't really chemical in nature.... In enclosed spaces, you can use biological warfare on them in the form of a specific wasp, and a specific lady bug... That doesn't work for me since I'm outdoors... So I'm left with the other option... Smoother them... No, now with a little pillow over their face... You get horticultural oil (preferably from the Neem tree extract) mix it with a little bit of dish soap as an emulsifier, and then mix that with water in the proper proportion... Then you hose down the entire plant... Everything... Leaves (both sides) stalks, stems... Naturally the solution is a little sticky since its oil, and soap, so it sticks to the bugs, and completely coats the plant... The bugs can't breath, and smoother or drown... Their corpses tend to get stuck to the plant, and wherever you've blasted them with the spray... Somehow that's terribly satisfying... Only thing better would be to mount them all on very tiny pikes as a warning to their friends which will be back in a few days...
As you know, I'm renovating my house. No small project, even though its a small house. One of the benefits of doing everything yourself is that you can work with more unique or expensive materials since you are saving on the labor. What I can tell you is that I have expensive taste in wood species... One the up side is that I have access to piles of such wood due to my fathers pack rat nature, and not being able to pass up a bargin at an auction...
The floor in my living room is solid cherry. Now, before you think its that crappy pre-finished stuff, or the engineered crap with a veneer on it, shame on you... Solid cherry to me means solid cherry, and you have to install it, then sand and finish it... I'm sure the pre-finished stuff may hold up fine, but it hasn't survived the test of time in my book, and honestly, I know how well plywood holds up with age, so I'm just leery... I've seen hundred year old solid wood floors that look great, so that's the route I'm going...
The cherry I put down is quite old already... It's been sitting around the family farm for years, and we picked it up at an auction... So the real age is unknown... What is unique about this stack of flooring, is that it is various widths from 3" up to 7"... That make it a bit harder to put in, but I survived, and after 2.5 days of sanding (cherry laughs at floor sanders) and 3 layers of polyurethane, it looks fabulous... The next step is molding... Since the floor came out so nicely, I couldn't imagine putting anything but cherry molding up to finish the room...
Over the weekend, my dad planed down a pile of cherry planks we have in storage to 3/4". I brought them back to my shop, and I've now run them through the table saw on a sled to get a straight edge. (this lumber came straight from the mill, un-dressed, so I have bark on most edges, and it has warped a bit as it dried over the years...)
Next step is to slice it down to very close to the finished width, before running it through the jointer to get a nice square edge to work with on the router tables... (yea, it's basically square off the table saw, but it's not perfect due to some twist in the boards) Then off to the router tables to put the molding profile on the boards... Hopefully the router bits come in today, or tomorrow, and I can get rolling on that aspect...
After making rough lengths of molding, it goes to the house where it gets cut to finished length... I decided to use rosettes at the corners and plinths at the base of the door casings, which gets me off the hook from making perfect miter joints... (I happen to like the rosette look, and I can do the miters, but it is a pain to make them absolutely perfect) The molding will be attached to the walls using trim head screws (color matched of course) so I can remove the molding to both finish it, and to re-paint some day in the distant future.
Once cut, and dry fit with the screws, it will come back here to my shop to get probably 2 layers of gloss poly, and then a layer or two of satin. I like to put the gloss on as a sealer, and protectent, and then the satin takes the edge off the gloss. It you put lots of cotes of satin on, the grain looses some depth, and looks a bit washed out...
Then its back to the house to install...
After that comes the low voltage electrical (phone, cable, network, and speaker cable), after which I can finally move my living room in to the house from the garage... Oh how I miss my recliners...
I spent the weekend out in Pennsylvania at my parents farm... My crazy aunt (everyone has one don't they?) and a family friend were also up from Florida... My family has the possibility of being highly frustrating at times as I'm sure everyone's does... And while I'm sure I'm not alone in this particular situation, it always drives me batty... Let me explain briefly...
My family likes to eat... I mean they all love food to the extreme... Most of the members of the family could stand to loose a few pounds, but for the most part that's all... Of course they all complain about having to loose that weight, and how har it is to keep it off if they manage to do so... That's all fine up to the end of the meal... At the end of any given meal (well not breakfast) comes desert... I've grown up like that so it doesn't seem odd, nor do I find an issue with the concept... Where I go off the rails is when there are 7 people at the table and there are no less than 8 different deserts... Not 8 kinds of cookies... Last weekend it was either pie or cake... All fresh made... And there were plans for different deserts the following day... Did I miss something?.. While I could eat an entire pie if I had to, that's not normal naturally... I tend to have a piece of one kind of pie... The others tend to have smaller pieces of two kinds... So in a given day, its possible I suppose to kill perhaps a third of that many deserts... Why in the world would you make something else for the next day?... Why make that much to begin with?... Hey, I love desert, but I'm really willing to commit suicide by desert...
Step away from the pie....
Sadly, I had to take my truck in for a brake leak on Tuesday... I also happened to need new tires on the front, so I decided to get it all done at once and minimize the time I didn't have the truck...
When I dropped it off, I told them about the leak, and while I didn't know where it was for sure, the master cylinder seemed to be awfully oily... Then, I wanted the same model of tire that was on the real of the truck to replace what was on the front... Rotate the rears to the front, and put the new tires on the rear. Finally I'll take the old tires with me, so I'm not paying for disposal, and they will end up on a piece of agricultural equipment in PA.
I don't think I asked for anything exotic...
Well the brakes turned out to be a massive job as the real seals were shot, killing the drums and shoes. Since the rears went, I was stopping just on the front, and put enough pressure on them to crack the rotors (how I can't imagine since the rotors on that truck are massive, but there was certainly a crack there) which ate my pads... I didn't tell them to check the rear seals, or the front rotors, but they should have gotten to them after looking at the master cylinder... When they called and told me the story, they didn't mention the master cylinder, so I though I was good on that aspect... They didn't find the leak there until they had done everything else...
They called me a couple times about the tires. Did I want this brand or that brand?... No, I want the same model as is on the truck... Why is this so confusing?... They tell me the tires are hard to find to which I respond that I really don't care if they have to stay on the phone all day, get the tires... The tires are not exotic folks, they're just good quality Michelin truck tires with an E load range (heavy duty). They called again to say they had found them, like I am supposed to give them a gold star for the effort...
I picked up the truck, drove home, opened a nice cold beer and sat down outside. As I'm sitting there, I figured I'd take the tires out of the back, and put them in the garage since I need the truck bed available. Open the tailgate (I have a cover on the bed) and look in to find no old tires... So off to look at the receipt, and yep, there is the 6 dollar charge to dispose of tires... The bill was almost $1750, so that $6 got lost in there... Call them, and they tell me no problem I can come get them... I'm waiting until the morning at that point for sure... So I sit back down, and I'm wondering what I drove through that messed up my new tires on the back... Its been dry here, so mud is right out... It then hits me that they didn't rotate the rears forward... Yep, the new rubber is on the front... Ugh... Not a huge deal, just annoying... So I sit and kind of daydream a bit, until something is bothering me about the truck, and I can't place it... It took me a while, but eventually I noticed the pintle claw (towing hitch) was upside down... Now I keep a lock on the hitch so nobody will steal it, so I know either I put it in upside down last time, or they mechanics unbolted it for some reason. Get up, go look, yep, there are fresh tool marks on the bolts and nuts... And oh look, they didn't seat the bolts properly anyway... Its a tire place, so I'm damn sure they did the bolts with an impact wrench, so on top of that all, I'm sure they over torqued the bolts... Thank goodness they put the think on there wrong, or I might not have caught the bolts not being seated, which might lead to me looseing a trailer... (they took it off as the truck was just slightly too long to be able to close the door behind it)
Overall, the brake job is great, and I'm pleased with that. They managed to really get me pissed off though over some minor details... So I chewed a bunch of ass, and got my $6 back plus my old tires, and really got into it with them over the hitch... And now I feel better, but I suspect that the idiots that made the mistakes will never even find out...
The parts for my tools came in yesterday morning... I was quite impressed with how quickly they got them to me... Then I thought the box was sort of light for what should be in there... I knew I was about to have a headache...
Open the box...
Look at packing list... Everything looks good there...
Pull out individual parts bags... There is a bag or tag for everything on the list...
Unfortunately the tag for the heavy guide rods isn't attached to anything...
There are two neat round holes in the shipping box...
My headache hits me like 2 long steel rods flying through the air...
Call the distributor, expect to get an argument... Strangely enough, they have no problem finding the order, and tell me there will be two more drop shipped from the warehouse immediately...
Must be one crusty old repair guy still out there....
We got an email late on Friday asking us to put a lightbox display in on Monday... No real big deal, as we have the box, and graphic already... I shot one back asking when and where and that should have been it... Reply came back with 8am, and the spot in question...
So I went home, planning on throwing everything in the truck early Monday, and dropping it off... I had one of my employees over Sunday for a barbeque, and he told me the job wasn't confirmed yet... (funny I thought I was the owner of the company and I'd hear about something like that...) So I called my partner to find that the producer had called him, and changed the time to 2pm, and the dock was reserved, etc...
This unit is too big for the dock...
Phone calls ensue.
Make it 3pm at the back entrance.
The unit only will go through the front door.
Make it 11am at the front...
Ok...
Wait make it 5:30pm...
Ok...
3...
4:45...
This continued through Monday with them moving the time around, until it was finally 5pm at the front....
When are we taking this down I ask...
We don't know...
Fine, I'm thinking it'll be there for some time...
At noon Tuesday, they call to remove it at 2pm... Can we take it out the back?...
No...
Ok, them why don't you take it out the front...
That's a novel idea... We'll take it out the front...
We didn't make nearly enough money on this job to pay for the phone bill it created I imagine...