randomdreams | (no subject)

The sun visor on the driver's side of

threemeninaboat's car kept falling in her lap while she was driving. This is very distracting. I unbolted the bracket to find that it was broken internally. There is a long plastic cylinder into which the steel visor rod fits, and at the top end there are four little sprung teeth that engage a recess on the steel rod. Two of the teeth and half the cylinder were gone, broken off.
I made a spring by winding a piece of spring steel (a street sweeper blade I found in the gutter, as it happens) around a bolt to make an omega-shaped spring that fits around the remaining plastic and fits in the steel visor rod recess, so at least it's not falling in her lap anymore. I'll go over to the junkyard and get an actual replacement bracket at some point.

The window that got blown out in the Big Storm is finally done. I had to completely disassemble and rebuild the frame for it, as all the joints were shot and falling apart. I scraped all the glue out and reglued it, then redoweled the reinforcements, then bolted corner brackets on as well. The glazing strips were all trash so I cut some new ones out of redwood, which should resist rotting away from moisture, and used actual glazing compound to adhere the new glass into the frame. Apparently silicone is not long-term stable, while glazing compound is, so it's the right choice. Now the window can swing open so I can cool the place off in August when it's well above body temperature in there.

I thought I'd repaint the windowframe while I was doing this, and hey while I have the white exterior paint out, maybe I should touch up the rear porch fascia... and next thing I know, I ended up repainting around the garage, much of the carport, and most of the porch.

There weren't any corner brackets in my big bucket of rusty old brackets, so I ended up going to the hardware store for that. The Spitfire needs more exercise. The only available parking place was in front of the store on the right, which is about a 10% grade. This is interesting because the Spitfire's emergency brake doesn't work. It exists. You can pull it. The car slows slightly. The cables that pull on the rear drums, and the brackets they run through, are corroded enough that there is lots of friction. As a result, if the ebrake is adjusted tight enough that it works, it drags heavily when it's off. If it's adjusted so it doesn't drag, it doesn't apply enough force to stop the car, or keep it from drifting. So I put the car in first and got out. This means the only thing keeping it from rolling is the piston compression against the valves, and it's an old engine. Result is that about every five minutes one piston will leak enough to let the engine turn over to the next piston and the car will roll back just a little bit. That gets me motivation to shop fast. Ish two is that the Spitfire shipped new with grossly inadequate seatbelts and by the time I got it they were both inadequate and worn out. (Seatbelts in convertible have a lifetime and it's not long.) I replaced them with much better modern lap-and-shoulder belts, which is really nice, but non-modern-electric-intelligent-car retract seatbelts typically use a combination inertia reel and anti-rollover mechanism to hold the belt tight in the event of a crash. 10% grades are enough to activate the anti-rollover mechanism. (It's kinda cool: just a heavy ball bearing in a cup with a mechanism to detect when the ball bearing rolls up out of the cup past a certain amount.) So I couldn't pull my seatbelt out. Oh well. Roll back into the parking lot and get the seatbelt latched. I need to put airplane belts in that car.

Today was removing, cleaning, and reinstalling the drain in the bathroom sink, because it plugged up like it does every three months. The drainline to the main stack doesn't have enough slope to it. The fix is to tear out the bathroom wall and raise the line, but I tried that when I redid the kitchen. It's 3" copper pipe. Getting a three way joint in 3" pipe hot enough to shift the tubing is almost impossible. Maybe next time I'll insulate behind it with unitherm or something and use the glass torch.

I'm almost finished cleaning up all the mess from the flood when the window blew out in the middle of a blizzard. Almost.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I am glad that you finally got that window done. It was a long process.

uggghhh it was so painful, but it also resulted in me replacing two other windows that needed replacing years ago so it was a good thing in a way.

Life requires a lot of maintenance, doesn’t it. Much more than books and movies prepared me for.

I feel like this is why I have eleventy beers.

So you just connected the dots for me on those steel bits from street sweepers. I remember finding them frequently when I was younger and assumed that they were shims for alignment work or something.

I haven't thought about parking on hills in a while. When I lived in San Diego, my street was about a 15% grade. I quickly learned that it was not only beneficial to cut your wheels into the curb, it's also a law out there. weird.

I use them for all sorts of stuff. I collect them when I'm out walking my dog, and have a lifetime supply.

Your industriousness never ceases to amaze me.

The number of broken things around the house amazes me...

At some point in or after the industrial revolution the average Euro-American male decided that The Real Good Things Are Forever, and anything requiring periodic maintenance, redoing, or repetition is clearly sneer-worthily trivial.

I congratulate you on your resistance to this misgynistic folly.

Randomdreams 4, entropy 1?

Entropy always wins. I'm just ahead in the big battles right now.

Good ol' street sweeper blades!

I'm still tempted to pick those up when I spot them, even though I have no purpose for them or shop to work in. I just hate to see good steel bits go to waste!

Congrats on fixing the custom shop window. I never thought much about glazing compound. Is that the same thing as glazing putty? (I've never glazed a window, I'm a bit embarrassed to say.)

This stuff was in a tube so I could use a caulking gun to extrude it. I think it is the same as putty, though, or at least very similar.

A lot of work. But you have rebuilt it better, stronger, though presumably without a squint.

Many, you guys are handy! and I know what you mean about one task bleeding into another!

One day, I half expect to read something along the lines of "When there's an ambient temperature between 65F and 68F, and the gas in the Spitfire's tank has an average octane value of 88, overcompression in the engine causes the alternator to spike in voltage and cause the windshield wipers to activate themselves."

For a long time the wipers didn't even work. I put a new washer pump (and container) in there and the first time I tried it, it shot right over the windshield and into the inside of the car. (The place where the washer pump and container used to be is now filled with an epoxied-in fan that drives the Ford truck heater core inside the car, as if that car needs more heat. I've never been cold in that car.)