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Apr. 7th, 2019 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randomdreamsThe 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.
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.
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Date: 2019-04-08 04:15 am (UTC)