uh-oh

I think I over did it today.

It was the first sunny day since I have begun to recover from that gawd-awful cold that smacked me down so badly for TWO WEEKS. You know, I can handle being sick occasionally, I understand that it happens to us all and I'll take my turn like everybody else, but for TWO FULL WEEKS? That was just unreasonable. I tried to recover, but ended up doing more than I should have and got smacked back down for another four days. Bleh.

So today was beautiful. After almost 10 straight days of rain and crap, we woke to sunshine and blue skies. I left the house by 8 and went to the garden shop to pick up the rest of a client's order. If the sunshine holds, I can get those planted this coming week (fingers crossed). Then I stopped at the hardware store for some advice, then at the boneyard of a contractor for some junk pieces of pipe. I'll explain that quest in another post, maybe tomorrow. You'll like it, I promise.

So I got home at 11 and started working out in the yard. Within an hour I was back inside to trade my t-shirt for a tank top. It was HOT out there! I had about four things going at once today. I needed to clean out my tool chests in preparation for a trip out of town beginning next weekend. It's going to be a work trip, so I need to maximize what I have and what I am bringing.

The first step to organizing such a project is to remove the contents from all of the tool chests (keep in mind these are HUGE chests - four feet wide, two feet tall and two feet deep, BOTH of them) and strew them about the yard. Good. Then I remembered that I had planned to actually build some stuff today, too. Oh, that's kind of a problem. But, hey, I have the tools out already...
so I started building a bookshelf out of some scrap lumber. It's not pretty, the lumber was not perfect, but it's for some friends who have a greater need for a bookshelf that works than they have for fine furniture. So I put that together, and then I started working on a box to house my newest tool acquisition.

Feast your eyes on this:


Yeah, baby. It's a Shopsmith Mark V. It does a ton of stuff - it is a table saw, a drill press, a lathe, a lateral boring machine and a disk sander. And the one I am getting is old, probably a 1960's vintage, but it is in fantastic condition and has all kinds of do-dads and whatsits that come with it. And it was free. Yeah. That was an amazing thing. Seems the old gent who so loved this thing has passed on, and his widow nor his kids really have any idea how to use it or any inclination to try, so they decided to check out how to donate it. Only it is old enough that it doesn't have any of the new-fangled high-tech safety gizmos that come on modern machines, so no non-profit wanted to get near the thing. But a friend of mine at one of those non-profits suggested that they could get a warm fuzzy feeling (if not the tax break) by donating the monster to a hard-working tradeswoman in their area. And that tradeswoman would be me! I went over to check it out last week and was just amazed at the shape the thing is in. It is simply beautiful.

It won't fit in my basement workshop, though. So one of my projects today was to build a box (on wheels) in which to store and transport the thing. After the bookshelf, I started on the box. It turned out to be quite a substantial thing, this box, using almost all of three sheets of 5/8 inch plywood, plus eight or ten of those little not-quite-two-by-somethings. You know, they're smaller than a two by four, but still enough to put a nail into. Yeah, those. And I put some wheels on the bottom so I can get it in and out of my truck.

The tool itself measures just about six feet long at the base and 22 inches wide, and it is about 40 to 42 inches high. The box will keep out most of what mother nature wants to throw at it, although I think I need to get some handles to help steer it. It's a bit of a beast to negotiate. Oh, and it does not fit in my truck. Allowing for six feet of tool I built the platform to that specification, but the added thickness of the plywood walls made it just an inch too long to let me close the tailgate. Dammit. Oh well. I'll get some good tie-down straps to secure it. For now it is tied in with some rope.

Like I said, I did a lot today. I emptied both tool boxes, burned a ton of scrap lumber that was cluttering up the yard, then built the bookshelf and the cool box, and tomorrow I have hopes to build a box to transport my air compressor. The thing is a lifesaver, but it is heavy and awkward to carry as is. I want to make a box with handles so I can lift it with a helper or move it by myself using a hand truck. And if it is in a box, I won't have to scramble to get it indoors and down the cellar stairs if it is the back of my truck when the rain starts. Maybe. We'll see if there is anything left of me when tomorrow gets here.

Now I think I am off to find the aloe. Ouch.

Fortified

Ha!

I have erected a battlement - of sorts - in my yard in preparation for this weekend's coming storm.

Regular readers will know that I lost a great number of tools during some nasty flooding a couple weeks ago when Hurricane Hanna blew through. We had something like 40 inches of water in the basement. I was down there yesterday with my brother-in-law and showed him the high water mark on the furnace. He was duly impressed.

We didn't used to get floods like that, but it seems that in recent years things have gotten worse. A few years ago, when the state highway department re-built Route 3, which is the main (only) road through town, for some reason storm drains and culverts and ditches were eliminated. Don't know why. Only know that now our neighbor has to replace his crushed rock driveway at least three times a year because it all washes into our yard (hell on the mower!) and the water flows around and heads straight into the bulkhead and my cellar. It is most frustrating.

So anyway, we're due for a zinger again this weekend. Weather guy on TV says something like 4 to 6 inches of rain for our area. The low pressure pattern is familiar to us - it is a cyclical formation, less defined than a hurricane, that travels up the east coast and blasts Maine. The storm rotates counter clockwise as it travels to the northeast, which means our winds here on the coast tend to come from out of the east-northeast, as the storm swirls around. It hits us generally after spending some time over the ocean picking up additional moisture, which it drops when it gets over the land.

That may all be very wrong, but it is my understanding of what happens. If you can explain it better, have at it.

So anyway, we've got this nasty Nor'easter headed our way and I don't want to spend another Sunday morning sloshing around my basement chasing flotsam and waiting for the waters to recede.

Back to the battlement.

It's not a huge thing, really, just a row of regular cinder blocks laid end-to-end, holes up, in a rough kind of semi-circle around the uphill side of my house. On one side of the bulkhead, I built a deck. No sense in having a wall to keep the water out if it also makes it a pain in the tuckus to take out the trash or grill a steak, so I built above the wall. Actually, I incorporated the wall into the plan, running my joists out between every third block (three 16s make 4 feet) and building the thing so that the planks lay nearly on top of the blocks. This allows for support between the four-foot joists, and it covers the holes of the blocks.



I framed it together yesterday with the aforementioned brother-in-law, then banged down the planks this morning with my new nail gun. Let me say here and now, for the record, and in all seriousness: I have lived too many years without an air compressor and a nail gun. Damn, but that thing is a dream! That decking went on in less than an hour, and the most time-consuming part of it was carrying the planks from the delivery pile across the yard and laying them in place. That thing is awesome!

So anyway, I have a wall. And I think it will hold out the flood waters.

But I am still keeping the welder locked in the garage, well above the flood zone, until I know just how well my little invention works.

Uninsured losses

Hanna's a bitch.

Hurricane Hanna, that is.

What was supposed to be a rainy Sunday spent watching football and eating pot pie began instead with a phone message at 7 a.m. from the landlord. "You've got water in the basement. DON'T USE ANYTHING ELECTRIC. I'm coming over to pump it out."

We were up and out of bed in a hurry. We poked our heads out the door to see what looked like four feet of water sloshing around in the bulkhead. No shit. there were only two or three steps visible. The others were under water. Several hours and two sump pumps later (one was already in the basement, trying like hell and making not much headway, the other was lowered into the bulkhead) the landlord got in with his hip boots. We shut the furnace off early in this adventure. Good thing. All but the top two inches of it were under water.

So now I have come up from several hours of cleaning downstairs. It is nasty down there.

Stuff that I valued and carefully put away in cases and placed on shelves up off the floor is soaked and ruined. Shit I didn't care about that was stacked willy-nilly in buckets everywhere floated and is fine. The high water mark measured 40 inches on the furnace (now shot) and hot water heater (rumored to be ok).

The welder was completely under water. It is drying on a table in the landlord's garage. Its fate is uncertain.

The 4 1/2 inch angle grinder spilled water out of its guts when Laura picked it up off the workbench. Seems the water did go that high. It is drying as well and will take some time before I can tell if it can be salvaged.

The bench grinder has a water mark approximately half way up the motor casing. It, too, is drying.

The jig saw was in its case on a shelf under my workbench and thus ensconced in water. It is drying and the case is draining - it is a hollow plastic thing that now holds water within the confines of its own walls.

The bridge squisher I've been working on did get wet (it is the gray metal structure to the left of the picture - on the table), but had already been primed and has thus suffered very little damage. There are some rust spots on the underside, but they can easily be cleaned up and painted. The wood base that it gets bolted to is shot, though. Soaked and mildewed, it will never recover.

The metal cut-off saw was on the bench, but in the up position, so the motor escaped damage.

The lower two drawers on my upright toolbox were filled with water. The tools there are drying and will probably survive. The vice-grips will probably need grease to work properly, though.

Three separate coils of good rope were soaked and are now hanging on various clothes lines to dry.

Approximately forty-eleven gloves were soaked and are also hanging. They look a little silly, to be honest.

Above is a picture of the corner where I do most of my work. You can see the orange cut-off saw. My inhaler is resting on its cutting surface. It had been on the work bench beside it yesterday. It floated and came to rest where you see it. You can see the water mark on the bench grinder on the right table - about halfway up the big barrel part of it. My welder has already been removed to the garage. It normally lives beneath the workbench, on a shelf eight inches off the floor. That's the most water we've ever had before. The water lapped at the bottom of the shelf, but never got deeper than that.

You can see the buckets and pails strewn everywhere. The gray tote in the middle is holding a bunch of tools to be taken upstairs and dried in the sunshine. The yellow bucket toward the back on the left holds my scrap metal. It is full of water.

Everything got tossed around as though the cellar was picked up and shaken. Things floated all over and came to rest in unexpected places. It will probably take more time today and again tomorrow to get this anything like close to fixed. The tools may need to dry out for a week before I try to do anything with them. I am glad that many of my tools were in my tool box on my truck or at the job site. That was a blessing, at least.

I have not decided yet whether to file a claim on our new renter's insurance just to make them deny me so I can have a fit and yell at someone. I think yelling might help right about now. Beyond that, there is not much to do besides clean up, count the losses and mourn them.

Cool Junk

It's junk week in my town. Next week is April vacation for the local school system, and the week in which the town hires a couple of burly young high school fellows to ride around with the trash pick-up guys and pick up piles of brush and old, dead washing machines from people's yards. In some yards it is difficult to tell exactly which hulks of metal are junk and which are art or being saved for some later purpose, so the town asks that unwanted stuff be dragged to the edge of the road for easy identification and removal.

Tradition in this town means that for the week prior to junk week (each village and neighborhood has scheduled pick-up days) everybody drags their stuff to the curb in the hopes that some entreprenurial soul will find value in it and cart it off to drag to curb in front of their house next year. In an odd kind of one-up-manship, we won the local contest for baddest thing hauled to the curb. We threw out a cast iron furnace.

Yesterday, we hauled the old, dead furnace out of our basement to make room for workspace and tool storage. It weighed a ton. It's about the size and shape of a rectangular dorm refrigerator - the ones that will hold two or three cases of beer, not the little cubes that only hold one case - and it is made out of big pieces of cast iron bolted (and now, rusted) together. I got a nice piece of steel cable from Marden's and a come-along, and I wrapped the furnace sixteen ways with the cable, secured it with a shackle, and hitched it to the come-along, which was hooked to the bumper of my van. Laura cranked the come-along while I guided the furnace up the bulkhead steps. Metal creaked, concrete blocks crumbled. The neighbor came to watch and give advice. The neighbor went away and came back with another neighbor and a length of pipe, and they both tried to help.

Boards and pipes were pressed under the furnace and lifted and rolled and shrugged and broken. The come-along eventually ceased to go click click, and I got fed up. I told everyone to stand clear and I drove 10 feet in the van. The furnace made it up over those last two steps with a sickening crunch of metal and concrete, but at least it was in the yard. We bent the hand cart/four-wheel dolly getting it to the curb, but now it is done. I'd love to see someone try to make off with that thing. Heh.

So with all this wide open space in our basement (ha!), Laura and I went junk hunting today. We got rid of one furnace and returned with four lengths of thin metal pipe (painted white - from a hammock frame) two plastic pails, a plastic mobile tool caddy, a gasoline powered ice auger, a plant hanger bracket, and a frame for a full sized bed (I wanted the angle iron for welding). We had traveled less than a half-mile. We unloaded in the yard and went out again. The second time we had to travel further and came home with a nice length of 1-inch steel pipe, five good pieces of 4 by 4 timbers, a big piece of sheet metal (I may go back for the other piece that was there), and a stackable shelf of red cube-looking things that say Canada Dry. It will fit nicely in a corner of my shop that presently is dead space. The timbers will become shelf supports, the sheet metal will go on the back of the shelves to protect the stuff on the shelves from the water that pours in through the cellar walls, the pipe will go to make a new bridge squisher for Women Unlimited, and the other stuff was just cool. I shall try to post pictures of how all this stuff works out as we go. I figure I have until the middle of next week to either find a use for this crap or get it to the curb for pick-up.