Porch roof progress

Last time I promised photos of the progress on the office exterior.

This is an example of the trim that had to be taken down. There is some pretty bad cracking of the wood, and there were areas of rot on them as well.

Here we can see that I have removed some of the ceiling panels and installed a temporary brace.

This is looking underneath the roof at the exposed sheathing. I’m fairly confident that the OSB is practically brand new because the building had a new roofing job done last year. Obviously I’ve got some patchwork to do.

This is directly above the middle porch column. I had been banging on the back side of these pieces to loosen them from the joist and all the rotted wood fell to the ground. Yes, you can see the underside of the roof through the hole in the joist. Looks like plenty of bugs have called this place home over the years as well.

Wide shot of the roof after the front joists have been removed. As you can see on the left, one of them is currently serving as a temporary support column. That whole end of the roof sags down almost a foot without it there. As part of the rehab, after this photo was taken I sistered some 2x6 boards onto the ends of the joists to provide a stronger nailing surface for the front joists.

Alright, this particular view made me angry when I saw it. The old joist is barely above the center porch column. The new piece of lumber seen here is one I put in there, and I added another after this picture was taken. Basically, the column was holding up the roof by the 3/8” plywood. I certainly hope the original builder didn’t do other jobs like this!

The new front joists are now installed. I’d like to keep the temporary supports in until I have finished repairing the roof sheathing, but since the one on the far left is standing in one of our driveways, I may not have a choice in how soon I need it gone.

That about sums up the progress made on the porch roof so far. I’ll talk about the rest of the exterior work in a separate entry. And I’ll have a new video to debut. So keep checking in!

Has it really been that long?

My word, time flies when you are busy. I’ve had quite a bit of stuff going on, but haven’t felt inspired enough to relate any of it. I will now try to get you all caught up.

A while back I posted about the curiously conductive mortar I had used to encase my souped up crock pot. The video was pretty self explanatory. To solve the problem, I bought a tube of some stuff designed to repair holes in exhaust systems. I don’t know if it is technically an epoxy since it did not require mixing, but it seemed to act like an epoxy. After it dried, I ran my multi-meter test again and there was no stray voltage. I then did a bench test of the crock to see how hot I could get it. I was VERY pleased! With no top on, the wax inside the crock got to 220F and it did not take long to do it. My thinking is that I’m going to have to put a limiting thermostat in to keep it in that range.

The project taking up the majority of my time lately has been repair and repainting the exterior of my wife’s office building.

Be honest, if your building was this drab, wouldn’t you do something about it? You can tell I’d done some spot repair of the paint in the past. Utilitarian, but not pretty. And really, it just demonstrates just how faded the paint on the building really was. My available time has been, for the most part, devoted to surface prep. Quite a bit of powerwashing to remove loose paint and heat gun stripping some areas that had so many layers of paint that the details were lost. The heat gun, by the way, is a new store bought one. I gave up on my repair of the old one. I actually completed it, but on the first test run the heat inside melted one of the soldered wire connections. Too much trouble to go in and re-do things so I just put it aside and chalked it up as a learning experience. The surface prep phase revealed several issues that I felt I needed to take care of. Rotting trim pieces needed replacement. Taking down moldings to strip paint off of them revealed a gap that opened up into the wall interior. That gap needed a couple of cans of spray foam insulation to seal off properly, much to the dismay of the local yellow jacket population. (found an old nest in there, and I’m guessing there was one active somewhere as I got stung) The front of the office is proving a more difficult challenge.

I decided after the powerwashing that the trim on the porch roof needed replacement. A coat of paint was going to hide the rot for only so long. An afternoon of pulling that trim down revealed that the structure underneath had some significant rot as well. I’m currently prepping to take those rotted pieces out. I need to install some temporary supports to hold up the joists that will not be connected to the columns when I do that. I also need to remove all of the nails coming from the roofing above that were nailed into the old trim pieces. I started just popping them up, but some are in pretty good so I’m planning on cutting the rest off under the drip edge.

Yesterday at the workshop I had some prep for the porch work and some for the upcoming winter. For the porch work, I had to do a bit of rehab on my framing nailer. I thought I was going to have to replace a gasket or two, but what it really needed was a thorough cleaning and oiling of the piston and trigger. For the winter, I have been working on rehabbing the snowblower attachment for my tractor. Mainly this involved stripping off loose paint and rust, then repainting. One problem I had noticed while doing this was that the drive chain had some frozen links. I soaked it in CLR and left it in there for the entire week. This, as I found out yesterday, was a fairly large mistake! I returned to find the entire chain frozen tight in this whitish, crusty gunk. After the obligatory curse-fest, I started the troubleshooting. Long story short, it took a couple of hours of soaking the chain in heated Simple Green and working each link loose by hand. By the end I had a chain as lithe as a ballet dancer’s spine. But now I had to keep it that way, and I knew that if I didn’t get the watery Simple Green out of the chain it would flash rust in no time. First, I applied a liberal dose of this stuff called PB Blaster, which is a product similar to WD-40 in that it displaces water. Then, I placed the chain in a pot of heated motor oil. This had the effect that one sees when french fries go into the fryer. The water boiled off and was replaced by the oil, leaving a completely lubricated drive chain. I’m almost psyched for winter now. :)

That’s about it for now. I hope to get some in-progress shots of the building to share with you all next time.

Kudos to an unknown putterholic pioneer

If you’ve never experienced the site Freecycle.org I highly recommend you give it a try. For one thing it got me some of my used motor oil for furnace fuel. Sometimes though some really interesting finds can be had even when you aren’t looking for them.  Case in point was yesterday. A lady a few blocks away was cleaning out the garage of what I gathered was a deceased relative. She had had a yard sale last week and was now looking to just get rid of what was still a sizeable inventory. I think she posted at least a couple dozen posts on the local freecycle board. I sent out a reply on a couple of them and went there just expecting to get a ladder and a couple of floodlights. Well, there was still quite a bit of unclaimed stuff at the place when I got there and the owner encouraged everyone there to take what they wanted. I took a look around and there was some neat old stuff that many would just consider junk. Most of it I left because I had zero use for them. One thing in particular though caught my eye and I knew I had to have it just for the parts alone! Let me show you what I’m talking about:

You are looking at a home made air compressor!  I just think it is so cool that someone was able to put this together to satisfy their need for compressed air. The drive motor is a 1/3 HP unit made by the Packard Electric Division of GM. So far I have yet to figure out its manufacture date. The compression unit is made from a small engine. There are no identifying marks for me to ID the make or model. The exhaust port has been sealed off with a plug and a small pipe inserted where the spark plug should be. The rubber hose, though in rough shape, still holds air.  Given the whole unit’s overall condition, I would say that it has got to be pretty old.

Does it work? See for yourself:

 

Now, what exactly am I going to do with this piece of ingenuity? When I first saw it, I thought it was going to be parted out for use in other things. But after I fired it up and saw how quiet the thing is compared to my store bought compressors, I may use this as the compressed air source for my Babington burner furnace. I’m going to have to replace that rubber hose and run some tests to determine if it can supply enough pressure and air volume. It will be great if this old find can make its way into my own creation.

The case of the conductive mortar

I’ll expand more on this later, I just wanted to get this linked here before I went to bed.

My (electrical) Connections

Back when TLC actually was a place where you could watch educational programming, they would occasionally run a BBC production entitled  Connections. In it, presenter James Burke explored the often unlikely connections linking the technological advances that make modern life possible.  I make no claim that my connections are as life changing, just that it is interesting how work on one thing can lead to another.

I said in the last entry that I was putting the burner project on hiatus. And at the time, I meant it. But things don’t always work out as planned.  Last week I was troubleshooting my little problem with the Harbor Freight heat gun. Still haven’t figured it out, but in taking apart the donor hair drier it occurred to me to test the resistance of its heating coils. This particular model had three separate strands of heating wire. Lo and behold, the resistance of the two smaller wires put them in the range I needed for ramping up the power of my crock pot heater. Just to review, the first crock pot heater drew about 40 watts. The upper limit for the new and improved model has to come in at under 400W since that is the rating on my car’s DC to AC inverter which will be keeping the unit hot during transport. Using the electrical equations P=VI and V=IR, we input our knowns. 400W=120V x I. Solving for I gives us. 3.33 amps. Then we put that into the second equation and solve for R to get 36 Ohms.  I set a target of 40 Ohms for a safety factor. The final product ended up in the 50-55 Ohm range. Here is a picture of the windings on the crock.

The grey electrical tape was there to hold the insulator strip as I did the winding. The strip allows you to have the connections to a cord be right next to one another. I really like this setup instead of my original idea of buying 28ga steel wire as it accomplishes more resistance in 12 windings than the steel could in 60 (which I was having trouble fitting onto a crock anyway). By the way, this operation was not without casualties. That wire is wavy because it was coiled up like a spring and needed straightening. Evidently, too much of this kind of activity is hard on the fingers:

Only that long one going from top right to bottom left cut deep enough to hurt. Think paper cut only more efficient.

After placing the windings, they needed better contact for heat transfer. That waviness of the wires not only went up and down, but also in and out so not all the wire was touching the crock. My initial plan was to just put a coat of thin set mortar over the wire and call it good. This would fully bury the wire to prevent shorts. But as I was nearly done with that, I found that I had a good deal of mixed up mortar left over. So I thought, aw, what the heck. I’ll fill the entire cavity between the crock and outer shell with mortar.

In this photo we are looking at the underside of the unit minus the bottom plate. I only filled in the space around the sides where the heating elements are. After that cures, I’ll likely stuff some fiberglass batting into the bottom to minimize heat loss there.

Well, that is the extent of my progress. I look forward to sharing more with you all later.

Oil furnace on hiatus

I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks partly due to lack of any real progress (had to start on a new centrifuge bowl), but partly due to other things coming up that need my attention. I’m planning to share one of them here in video format. I filmed a repair job I did on the front axle of my tractor. I’m very frustrated though with either the editing software or the computer not being able to keep up in playing the video while I try to make edits.  Anyway, summer is in full swing around here, and I need to catch up on some other things while I can. The boat and jet ski are out of the pole barn, which means that I now have the room to do some major reorganization. If you’ve studied the backgrounds of the photos and vids I’ve posted, you know I’ve been forsaking neatness quite a bit. Now is the time to regroup.

Though I won’t be working on the furnace project, it does not mean I won’t have stuff to talk about. I mentioned the tractor repair which I hope to bring to you soon, but I also had to do a little bit of transplant surgery on my gas weed trimmer.  A little while back, I made the mistake of buying a heat gun from Harbor Freight. The thermal protection died after the first test! I’m currently figuring out how to wire the heating element from that into the body of a regular blow drier. If I get the wiring right, I can’t see there being much of a problem. The gun was rated at 15oo watts and the hair drier pulls 1600 watts. All a matter of how the heat is distributed I guess. Big plans are brewing at my wife’s office building too. We may finally be getting up the resolve to repaint the exterior. Plus, I’ve begun acquisition of parts to install an underground sprinkler system. Lowe’s had a box of pop up sprinklers on clearance for 75cents each when they were usually $2.17. So I got all the sprinklers I will need for just $6. I’m looking into the possibility of retrofitting an old (30+year) timer/distribution box to use electric solenoids instead of water pressure to open zone valves. I don’t know how farking pleased with myself I’ll be if I can pull THAT one off!:) After that I might try water into wine or a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.:)

Enough dreaming big, I’ve got to get to bed. Night all!

A $350 jigsaw puzzle

This is going to be fairly short since I didn’t do any project work at the shop this week. I did start a small painting project. My wife bought a couple of metal toddler bed frames at a garage sale (where else?), and my job is to paint them pink. Right now I’m just working on sanding the old paint so the new paint will grip.

Anyway, I thought I’d get around to sharing about the mega deal my wife and I scored a few weeks ago. What would you pay for a 1997 SeaDoo GTS with trailer? $1000? $1500? Would you believe $350? You would be hard pressed to find just the trailer for that price! Of course, there is a catch, and you can see what that is in the photos below.

 

Yep, that’s right. Low low price of $350, but some assembly may be required! I’m not too concerned about this aspect. I had to take apart much of our other GTS last summer to replace the starter. What I don’t know is will I be able to find any parts that I will need during the re-assembly. I know that there is a bad bearing on the crankshaft, that’s why the seller tore it up. He just didn’t know how to keep going, ran out of patience, whatever. His loss will be my gain. Even if, for some reason, I am unable to make it run, it is the exact same model as our other GTS (same colors even) and will be great for providing spare parts. And I get a trailer out of the deal. I do not have one for the other GTS, and it is a pain transferring it from its stand onto my flatbed utility trailer in order to get it in the water.

Nothing else to report, except to say congratulations to my brother on his wedding this past weekend.