Ode to the Helpful Homebuilder

Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...

A flaw in the construction of my home revealed itself this past weekend
when my favorite porcelain fixture suddenly lurched to one side
slamming me into the tiled wall as the service pipe snapped and a spray
of water filled the room.

I thought it was an earthquake. Finding out it wasn't made it okay,
even though it was still a hell of a mess.

Tried to shut off the valve on the service pipe and the shaft snapped
in my hand, corroded through at the packing gland. A towel over the
broken pipe converted the geyser into a flood. More towels, most of
the Sunday 'Times' and a hunka wood created a diversion channel,
directing the water out of the house, giving me enough time to run
outside and shut off the water.

Whoever installed the toilet failed to provide a foundation for the
bowl, causing most of its weight to be borne by the cast-iron soil pipe
flange, stabilized only by a rime of tile grout. Thanks to the wax
seal being squashed out of position by the lack of support, the
sanitary flange began to rust. Fifty-four years later it finally
fractured, bucking me off in the process.

Like everything else, a house requires maintenance, the older the home,
the more maintenance it requires and our place was built in 1952. Being
poor (by American standards) the maintenance chores fall to me - -
carpentry, cement work, roofing, glazing, electrical, plumbing,
tile-setting, cabinetry, carpeting. . . you name it, I can do it.
Not to mention outside chores such as paving, fencing and painting,
along with vehicle maintenance, including everything from alignment and
wheel balancing to overhauling the engines and trannys every few
hundred thousand miles. (You can do that kind of piece-meal
maintenance with older vehicles having a conventional frame and
rear-wheel drive, like my 1965 VW bus or my wife's 1986 Toyota.
Newer, unibodied front-wheel drive stuff, forget it.)

I didn't set out to became a Jack-of-all-Trades, I simply had no
other option. I may not do it as fast as some folks, surely not as
well as someone who specializes in doing just one thing but the work
gets done properly if not prettily and always at a price I can afford.

House, car, airplane or boat, doing your own maintenance takes up a
significant amount of time, enough to justify applying the principle of
Preventative Maintenance, replacing/repairing things BEFORE they go
bad, allowing you to order the parts, assemble the tools and schedule
your time so the chores don't impact more important activities, such
as writing the Great American Novel. Or sneaking off and going flying,
now and then.

My wife is off to Hawaii this week (she surfs more than I do),
providing me the opportunity to get at a lot of chores that would have
gotten in her way, such as rebuilding the clothes dryer, replacing some
window screens in her studio and resetting a door (old houses shift
about). Plus the usual stuff, already scheduled. If I get all the
maintenance chores done in a timely manner it will leave about twenty
hours - - for the whole week - - to call my own.

Now I had to add Toilet Repair to the list.

Not a problem. I have the tools, know what needs to be done and had
most of the required parts on hand. (With three bathrooms (it's a
BIG old house) it's prudent to keep a stock of spare parts.)

The toilet is a close-coupled American Standard round-bowl, a design
popular fifty years ago. 'Close-coupled' means the water tank is
mounted directly to the bowl rather than up on the wall. This is
old-fashioned stuff designed to last forever and is nearly twice as
heavy as the stuff they sell nowadays, the combined weight of the tank
& bowl about a hundred and fifty pounds. The weight and the shape and
the fact the bathroom, a small one near the back porch, has only a
24" door makes the toilet too awkward for me to handle without removing
the tank from the bowl. After disconnecting the tank I grab it in a
bear-hug and I'm side-stepping my way over the dyke and out the door
when someone comes crunching down the back drive.

No one has called; no one is scheduled to visit until Wednesday, when
I've promised to show a fellow how to measure & adjust the volume of
his cylinder heads. Unannounced, unwanted and uninvited, a total
stranger has come to call, complete with a six-pak of cheap beer.

The unwelcome stranger is Joe Homebuilder, who has decided to build a
Teenie Two and seeing as how I'm such a helpful sonofabitch, he and
his six-pak are there to convince me to weld him up the landing gear
for his Dream Machine, preferable while he watches. He hasn't
brought any steel, figuring I'd have lots of that stuff on hand, for
which he's more than willing to pay me. Along with the six-pak of
beer, which he plunks down on the patio table with a Significant
Glance. (Everyone knows old sailors will do anything for beer, right?)

All this while I'm standing there with sixty pounds of toilet tank
stuck in my boly-holy. "I'm a bit busy at the moment," I hint.

No problem, he can drop by the next afternoon to pick it up although
he'd kinda like to watch; mebbe even lend a hand. Being a
homebuilder he's a very handy fellow although he doesn't weld, of
course. Nobody welds nowadays, heh heh heh.

Hitting him with the toilet tank might break it. Plus there'd be all
the blood to clean up and the body to get rid of. "Actually, I could
use a bit of help. What do you know about toilets?" I ask. He
thinks I'm kidding. If he needs to know something about toilets
he'd call a plumber. "Maybe clothes dryers? You any good with
them?"

His eyes are starting to dance around a bit. Big, ugly, old man
carrying a weird porcelain box getting right in his face with all these
dumb questions. Hell, he's brought me some BEER for crysakes; he's
even willing to PAY to have a little welding done. What's the big
deal?

"You ever re-set a door?" I ask. Solid Douglas Fir, thirty-four by
eighty-four. Weighs a ton, which is why it's got three hinges but
the lock's been reset twice, the bottom trimmed at least that many
times and now it needs a shim across the top plus a new jamb and
striker plate.

He doesn't have any idea what I'm talking about, is looking
seriously nervous, starting to edge toward the gate and his car beyond
it. "I've got all the stuff you'll need; shouldn't take you
more than a couple of hours, you being so handy and all."

"I guess I caught you at a bad time," he sez as he opens the gate.
But I'm keeping right up with him. "Howzabout window screens?
Gotta build a couple of new frames but two of them only need new
screening, take you half an hour, tops." But he's not looking at
me any more. He climbs in his car and gets the hell outta there,
leaving me standing in the back drive cradling a toilet tank in my
arms. I croon it a little lullaby as I carry it back into the patio,
lay it gently on the patio table, note that Joe Homebuilder has taken
his six-pak with him.

I found a few pounds of Portland cement that was still good, sealed up
in a plastic bucket, use it and some #80 sand from the blast cabinet to
build up a proper foundation The sanitary flange needs to be replaced
but there's still enough lip for the wax seal. I'll get a new
flange and schedule its replacement for another time. Once it cures,
which should take about two days, the new foundation plus two new bolts
anchored in the concrete will provide a strong, stable footing. I
install a new service valve, turn the water back on and go to work on
the dryer.

As with toilets, clothes dryers are easy to work on, although awkward;
a spare pair of hands can cut the time in half. But by noon the dryer
is back together with its new belt and new idlers, all the stray lint
sucked out, a couple of scratches touched-up with appliance paint, good
for another four years of trouble-free service.

After lunch I flip a coin, the door loses and I go to work on the
screens. The frames are aluminum, corroded beyond repair by fifty-four
years of western exposure within sight of the ocean. I use anodized
stuff to fabricate the new frames. The east-facing frames are still
sound although the original fiberglas screening is not. I replace it
with aluminum screening, etch it, then apply a thin coat of flat black
paint which I'll renew every five years or so. By the time I'm
done the sun is over the yardarm.

Then comes a good sweep-down, putting away the tools, five cats to be
fed and me too - - a sandwich, carried out to the shop, where I spend a
couple of happy hours making bits & pieces of an aluminum airplane
whilst thinking of a wooden one. There's lotsa little parts in an
aluminum airplane and although I use tumblers for most deburring chores
and drill jigs to assure proper location of the holes, fabricating
small parts still takes large amounts of time. As my hands work with
metal my head is working with wood, calculating the weight of wooden
stringers. .

Aluminum is smarter than wood, requiring fewer tools and skills to
produce a sound structure. But having made a gun-rack or bird house,
most Americans consider themselves to be woodworkers and are more
willing to consider a wooden airframe than one made of aluminum or
welded steel tubing. If I can come up with a safe, simple airframe
using Box Store lumber it may help stem the steady decline of
grass-roots aviation.

It's kinda boring, making a batch of identical parts but the numbers
aligning themselves in my head are exciting. Even at twenty-eight
pounds per cubic foot -- a fair average for box-store lumber -- the
frame of a wooden fuselage should weigh less than twenty pounds.
I'll need to make some drawings to confirm that, and build a couple
of mock-ups to verify the strength where the landing gear and wing
fittings attach to the fuselage, but the testing should be interesting.
If only I had a little more time I could...

-R.S.Hoover

PS -- I've created a Yahoo Group for the wooden airplane ideas. When
it comes to designing a plane from scratch there's more I don't know
than do. Which means a lot of problems to solve and that's always fun.
As I solve the problems -- or find solutions worth stealing :-) --
I'll post the solutions along with drawings and photos, warts and all.
If/when it flys, I'll tell you how good or bad. Odds are it won't come
to anything. Like the fellow said, nowadays nobody welds. Nor do they
hang doors, fix dryers or do any number of other useful things
including building airplanes from scratch. But a few do and we swap a
surprising number of messages, drawings and so forth. Putting the
stuff where it's easy to get at will save ME some time. Since it's
primarily for my benefit rather than the looky-loos, I won't bother to
mention its name. I figure anyone with a sincere interest will track
it down. -rsh

wrote:
Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...
SNIP
**************************************************
Is my observation, that most "Jack of all Trades" types are seldom
Rich,
spending too much time saving themselves money and not enough
leveraging their talent to produce wealth, correct?

Reggie

Please write a book... Great story, been there and done
that with both ham radio and computers.


wrote:

Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...

A flaw in the construction of my home revealed itself this past weekend
when my favorite porcelain fixture suddenly lurched to one side
slamming me into the tiled wall as the service pipe snapped and a spray
of water filled the room.

I thought it was an earthquake. Finding out it wasn't made it okay,
even though it was still a hell of a mess.

Tried to shut off the valve on the service pipe and the shaft snapped
in my hand, corroded through at the packing gland. A towel over the
broken pipe converted the geyser into a flood. More towels, most of
the Sunday 'Times' and a hunka wood created a diversion channel,
directing the water out of the house, giving me enough time to run
outside and shut off the water.

Whoever installed the toilet failed to provide a foundation for the
bowl, causing most of its weight to be borne by the cast-iron soil pipe
flange, stabilized only by a rime of tile grout. Thanks to the wax
seal being squashed out of position by the lack of support, the
sanitary flange began to rust. Fifty-four years later it finally
fractured, bucking me off in the process.

Like everything else, a house requires maintenance, the older the home,
the more maintenance it requires and our place was built in 1952. Being
poor (by American standards) the maintenance chores fall to me - -
carpentry, cement work, roofing, glazing, electrical, plumbing,
tile-setting, cabinetry, carpeting. . . you name it, I can do it.
Not to mention outside chores such as paving, fencing and painting,
along with vehicle maintenance, including everything from alignment and
wheel balancing to overhauling the engines and trannys every few
hundred thousand miles. (You can do that kind of piece-meal
maintenance with older vehicles having a conventional frame and
rear-wheel drive, like my 1965 VW bus or my wife's 1986 Toyota.
Newer, unibodied front-wheel drive stuff, forget it.)

I didn't set out to became a Jack-of-all-Trades, I simply had no
other option. I may not do it as fast as some folks, surely not as
well as someone who specializes in doing just one thing but the work
gets done properly if not prettily and always at a price I can afford.

House, car, airplane or boat, doing your own maintenance takes up a
significant amount of time, enough to justify applying the principle of
Preventative Maintenance, replacing/repairing things BEFORE they go
bad, allowing you to order the parts, assemble the tools and schedule
your time so the chores don't impact more important activities, such
as writing the Great American Novel. Or sneaking off and going flying,
now and then.

My wife is off to Hawaii this week (she surfs more than I do),
providing me the opportunity to get at a lot of chores that would have
gotten in her way, such as rebuilding the clothes dryer, replacing some
window screens in her studio and resetting a door (old houses shift
about). Plus the usual stuff, already scheduled. If I get all the
maintenance chores done in a timely manner it will leave about twenty
hours - - for the whole week - - to call my own.

Now I had to add Toilet Repair to the list.

Not a problem. I have the tools, know what needs to be done and had
most of the required parts on hand. (With three bathrooms (it's a
BIG old house) it's prudent to keep a stock of spare parts.)

The toilet is a close-coupled American Standard round-bowl, a design
popular fifty years ago. 'Close-coupled' means the water tank is
mounted directly to the bowl rather than up on the wall. This is
old-fashioned stuff designed to last forever and is nearly twice as
heavy as the stuff they sell nowadays, the combined weight of the tank
& bowl about a hundred and fifty pounds. The weight and the shape and
the fact the bathroom, a small one near the back porch, has only a
24" door makes the toilet too awkward for me to handle without removing
the tank from the bowl. After disconnecting the tank I grab it in a
bear-hug and I'm side-stepping my way over the dyke and out the door
when someone comes crunching down the back drive.

No one has called; no one is scheduled to visit until Wednesday, when
I've promised to show a fellow how to measure & adjust the volume of
his cylinder heads. Unannounced, unwanted and uninvited, a total
stranger has come to call, complete with a six-pak of cheap beer.

The unwelcome stranger is Joe Homebuilder, who has decided to build a
Teenie Two and seeing as how I'm such a helpful sonofabitch, he and
his six-pak are there to convince me to weld him up the landing gear
for his Dream Machine, preferable while he watches. He hasn't
brought any steel, figuring I'd have lots of that stuff on hand, for
which he's more than willing to pay me. Along with the six-pak of
beer, which he plunks down on the patio table with a Significant
Glance. (Everyone knows old sailors will do anything for beer, right?)

All this while I'm standing there with sixty pounds of toilet tank
stuck in my boly-holy. "I'm a bit busy at the moment," I hint.

No problem, he can drop by the next afternoon to pick it up although
he'd kinda like to watch; mebbe even lend a hand. Being a
homebuilder he's a very handy fellow although he doesn't weld, of
course. Nobody welds nowadays, heh heh heh.

Hitting him with the toilet tank might break it. Plus there'd be all
the blood to clean up and the body to get rid of. "Actually, I could
use a bit of help. What do you know about toilets?" I ask. He
thinks I'm kidding. If he needs to know something about toilets
he'd call a plumber. "Maybe clothes dryers? You any good with
them?"

His eyes are starting to dance around a bit. Big, ugly, old man
carrying a weird porcelain box getting right in his face with all these
dumb questions. Hell, he's brought me some BEER for crysakes; he's
even willing to PAY to have a little welding done. What's the big
deal?

"You ever re-set a door?" I ask. Solid Douglas Fir, thirty-four by
eighty-four. Weighs a ton, which is why it's got three hinges but
the lock's been reset twice, the bottom trimmed at least that many
times and now it needs a shim across the top plus a new jamb and
striker plate.

He doesn't have any idea what I'm talking about, is looking
seriously nervous, starting to edge toward the gate and his car beyond
it. "I've got all the stuff you'll need; shouldn't take you
more than a couple of hours, you being so handy and all."

"I guess I caught you at a bad time," he sez as he opens the gate.
But I'm keeping right up with him. "Howzabout window screens?
Gotta build a couple of new frames but two of them only need new
screening, take you half an hour, tops." But he's not looking at
me any more. He climbs in his car and gets the hell outta there,
leaving me standing in the back drive cradling a toilet tank in my
arms. I croon it a little lullaby as I carry it back into the patio,
lay it gently on the patio table, note that Joe Homebuilder has taken
his six-pak with him.

I found a few pounds of Portland cement that was still good, sealed up
in a plastic bucket, use it and some #80 sand from the blast cabinet to
build up a proper foundation The sanitary flange needs to be replaced
but there's still enough lip for the wax seal. I'll get a new
flange and schedule its replacement for another time. Once it cures,
which should take about two days, the new foundation plus two new bolts
anchored in the concrete will provide a strong, stable footing. I
install a new service valve, turn the water back on and go to work on
the dryer.

As with toilets, clothes dryers are easy to work on, although awkward;
a spare pair of hands can cut the time in half. But by noon the dryer
is back together with its new belt and new idlers, all the stray lint
sucked out, a couple of scratches touched-up with appliance paint, good
for another four years of trouble-free service.

After lunch I flip a coin, the door loses and I go to work on the
screens. The frames are aluminum, corroded beyond repair by fifty-four
years of western exposure within sight of the ocean. I use anodized
stuff to fabricate the new frames. The east-facing frames are still
sound although the original fiberglas screening is not. I replace it
with aluminum screening, etch it, then apply a thin coat of flat black
paint which I'll renew every five years or so. By the time I'm
done the sun is over the yardarm.

Then comes a good sweep-down, putting away the tools, five cats to be
fed and me too - - a sandwich, carried out to the shop, where I spend a
couple of happy hours making bits & pieces of an aluminum airplane
whilst thinking of a wooden one. There's lotsa little parts in an
aluminum airplane and although I use tumblers for most deburring chores
and drill jigs to assure proper location of the holes, fabricating
small parts still takes large amounts of time. As my hands work with
metal my head is working with wood, calculating the weight of wooden
stringers. .

Aluminum is smarter than wood, requiring fewer tools and skills to
produce a sound structure. But having made a gun-rack or bird house,
most Americans consider themselves to be woodworkers and are more
willing to consider a wooden airframe than one made of aluminum or
welded steel tubing. If I can come up with a safe, simple airframe
using Box Store lumber it may help stem the steady decline of
grass-roots aviation.

It's kinda boring, making a batch of identical parts but the numbers
aligning themselves in my head are exciting. Even at twenty-eight
pounds per cubic foot -- a fair average for box-store lumber -- the
frame of a wooden fuselage should weigh less than twenty pounds.
I'll need to make some drawings to confirm that, and build a couple
of mock-ups to verify the strength where the landing gear and wing
fittings attach to the fuselage, but the testing should be interesting.
If only I had a little more time I could...

-R.S.Hoover

PS -- I've created a Yahoo Group for the wooden airplane ideas. When
it comes to designing a plane from scratch there's more I don't know
than do. Which means a lot of problems to solve and that's always fun.
As I solve the problems -- or find solutions worth stealing :-) --
I'll post the solutions along with drawings and photos, warts and all.
If/when it flys, I'll tell you how good or bad. Odds are it won't come
to anything. Like the fellow said, nowadays nobody welds. Nor do they
hang doors, fix dryers or do any number of other useful things
including building airplanes from scratch. But a few do and we swap a
surprising number of messages, drawings and so forth. Putting the
stuff where it's easy to get at will save ME some time. Since it's
primarily for my benefit rather than the looky-loos, I won't bother to
mention its name. I figure anyone with a sincere interest will track
it down. -rsh

Reggie wrote:

wrote:
Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...
SNIP

**************************************************
Is my observation, that most "Jack of all Trades" types are seldom
Rich,
spending too much time saving themselves money and not enough
leveraging their talent to produce wealth, correct?

Reggie

This is certainly true in my case However it
is a fulfilling lifestyle anyhow. Wealth per se
is not what motivates everyone, although it
certainly motivates some people.

Don W.

It seems like I know you...

Once upon a time...in a land far away...


wrote in message ups.com...
:
:
: Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
: with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
: door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...
:
: A flaw in the construction of my home revealed itself this past weekend
: when my favorite porcelain fixture suddenly lurched to one side
: slamming me into the tiled wall as the service pipe snapped and a spray
: of water filled the room.
:
: I thought it was an earthquake. Finding out it wasn't made it okay,
: even though it was still a hell of a mess.
:
: Tried to shut off the valve on the service pipe and the shaft snapped
: in my hand, corroded through at the packing gland. A towel over the
: broken pipe converted the geyser into a flood. More towels, most of
: the Sunday 'Times' and a hunka wood created a diversion channel,
: directing the water out of the house, giving me enough time to run
: outside and shut off the water.
:
: Whoever installed the toilet failed to provide a foundation for the
: bowl, causing most of its weight to be borne by the cast-iron soil pipe
: flange, stabilized only by a rime of tile grout. Thanks to the wax
: seal being squashed out of position by the lack of support, the
: sanitary flange began to rust. Fifty-four years later it finally
: fractured, bucking me off in the process.
:
: Like everything else, a house requires maintenance, the older the home,
: the more maintenance it requires and our place was built in 1952. Being
: poor (by American standards) the maintenance chores fall to me - -
: carpentry, cement work, roofing, glazing, electrical, plumbing,
: tile-setting, cabinetry, carpeting. . . you name it, I can do it.
: Not to mention outside chores such as paving, fencing and painting,
: along with vehicle maintenance, including everything from alignment and
: wheel balancing to overhauling the engines and trannys every few
: hundred thousand miles. (You can do that kind of piece-meal
: maintenance with older vehicles having a conventional frame and
: rear-wheel drive, like my 1965 VW bus or my wife's 1986 Toyota.
: Newer, unibodied front-wheel drive stuff, forget it.)
:
: I didn't set out to became a Jack-of-all-Trades, I simply had no
: other option. I may not do it as fast as some folks, surely not as
: well as someone who specializes in doing just one thing but the work
: gets done properly if not prettily and always at a price I can afford.
:
: House, car, airplane or boat, doing your own maintenance takes up a
: significant amount of time, enough to justify applying the principle of
: Preventative Maintenance, replacing/repairing things BEFORE they go
: bad, allowing you to order the parts, assemble the tools and schedule
: your time so the chores don't impact more important activities, such
: as writing the Great American Novel. Or sneaking off and going flying,
: now and then.
:
: My wife is off to Hawaii this week (she surfs more than I do),
: providing me the opportunity to get at a lot of chores that would have
: gotten in her way, such as rebuilding the clothes dryer, replacing some
: window screens in her studio and resetting a door (old houses shift
: about). Plus the usual stuff, already scheduled. If I get all the
: maintenance chores done in a timely manner it will leave about twenty
: hours - - for the whole week - - to call my own.
:
: Now I had to add Toilet Repair to the list.
:
: Not a problem. I have the tools, know what needs to be done and had
: most of the required parts on hand. (With three bathrooms (it's a
: BIG old house) it's prudent to keep a stock of spare parts.)
:
: The toilet is a close-coupled American Standard round-bowl, a design
: popular fifty years ago. 'Close-coupled' means the water tank is
: mounted directly to the bowl rather than up on the wall. This is
: old-fashioned stuff designed to last forever and is nearly twice as
: heavy as the stuff they sell nowadays, the combined weight of the tank
: & bowl about a hundred and fifty pounds. The weight and the shape and
: the fact the bathroom, a small one near the back porch, has only a
: 24" door makes the toilet too awkward for me to handle without removing
: the tank from the bowl. After disconnecting the tank I grab it in a
: bear-hug and I'm side-stepping my way over the dyke and out the door
: when someone comes crunching down the back drive.
:
: No one has called; no one is scheduled to visit until Wednesday, when
: I've promised to show a fellow how to measure & adjust the volume of
: his cylinder heads. Unannounced, unwanted and uninvited, a total
: stranger has come to call, complete with a six-pak of cheap beer.
:
: The unwelcome stranger is Joe Homebuilder, who has decided to build a
: Teenie Two and seeing as how I'm such a helpful sonofabitch, he and
: his six-pak are there to convince me to weld him up the landing gear
: for his Dream Machine, preferable while he watches. He hasn't
: brought any steel, figuring I'd have lots of that stuff on hand, for
: which he's more than willing to pay me. Along with the six-pak of
: beer, which he plunks down on the patio table with a Significant
: Glance. (Everyone knows old sailors will do anything for beer, right?)
:
: All this while I'm standing there with sixty pounds of toilet tank
: stuck in my boly-holy. "I'm a bit busy at the moment," I hint.
:
: No problem, he can drop by the next afternoon to pick it up although
: he'd kinda like to watch; mebbe even lend a hand. Being a
: homebuilder he's a very handy fellow although he doesn't weld, of
: course. Nobody welds nowadays, heh heh heh.
:
: Hitting him with the toilet tank might break it. Plus there'd be all
: the blood to clean up and the body to get rid of. "Actually, I could
: use a bit of help. What do you know about toilets?" I ask. He
: thinks I'm kidding. If he needs to know something about toilets
: he'd call a plumber. "Maybe clothes dryers? You any good with
: them?"
:
: His eyes are starting to dance around a bit. Big, ugly, old man
: carrying a weird porcelain box getting right in his face with all these
: dumb questions. Hell, he's brought me some BEER for crysakes; he's
: even willing to PAY to have a little welding done. What's the big
: deal?
:
: "You ever re-set a door?" I ask. Solid Douglas Fir, thirty-four by
: eighty-four. Weighs a ton, which is why it's got three hinges but
: the lock's been reset twice, the bottom trimmed at least that many
: times and now it needs a shim across the top plus a new jamb and
: striker plate.
:
: He doesn't have any idea what I'm talking about, is looking
: seriously nervous, starting to edge toward the gate and his car beyond
: it. "I've got all the stuff you'll need; shouldn't take you
: more than a couple of hours, you being so handy and all."
:
: "I guess I caught you at a bad time," he sez as he opens the gate.
: But I'm keeping right up with him. "Howzabout window screens?
: Gotta build a couple of new frames but two of them only need new
: screening, take you half an hour, tops." But he's not looking at
: me any more. He climbs in his car and gets the hell outta there,
: leaving me standing in the back drive cradling a toilet tank in my
: arms. I croon it a little lullaby as I carry it back into the patio,
: lay it gently on the patio table, note that Joe Homebuilder has taken
: his six-pak with him.
:
: I found a few pounds of Portland cement that was still good, sealed up
: in a plastic bucket, use it and some #80 sand from the blast cabinet to
: build up a proper foundation The sanitary flange needs to be replaced
: but there's still enough lip for the wax seal. I'll get a new
: flange and schedule its replacement for another time. Once it cures,
: which should take about two days, the new foundation plus two new bolts
: anchored in the concrete will provide a strong, stable footing. I
: install a new service valve, turn the water back on and go to work on
: the dryer.
:
: As with toilets, clothes dryers are easy to work on, although awkward;
: a spare pair of hands can cut the time in half. But by noon the dryer
: is back together with its new belt and new idlers, all the stray lint
: sucked out, a couple of scratches touched-up with appliance paint, good
: for another four years of trouble-free service.
:
: After lunch I flip a coin, the door loses and I go to work on the
: screens. The frames are aluminum, corroded beyond repair by fifty-four
: years of western exposure within sight of the ocean. I use anodized
: stuff to fabricate the new frames. The east-facing frames are still
: sound although the original fiberglas screening is not. I replace it
: with aluminum screening, etch it, then apply a thin coat of flat black
: paint which I'll renew every five years or so. By the time I'm
: done the sun is over the yardarm.
:
: Then comes a good sweep-down, putting away the tools, five cats to be
: fed and me too - - a sandwich, carried out to the shop, where I spend a
: couple of happy hours making bits & pieces of an aluminum airplane
: whilst thinking of a wooden one. There's lotsa little parts in an
: aluminum airplane and although I use tumblers for most deburring chores
: and drill jigs to assure proper location of the holes, fabricating
: small parts still takes large amounts of time. As my hands work with
: metal my head is working with wood, calculating the weight of wooden
: stringers. .
:
: Aluminum is smarter than wood, requiring fewer tools and skills to
: produce a sound structure. But having made a gun-rack or bird house,
: most Americans consider themselves to be woodworkers and are more
: willing to consider a wooden airframe than one made of aluminum or
: welded steel tubing. If I can come up with a safe, simple airframe
: using Box Store lumber it may help stem the steady decline of
: grass-roots aviation.
:
: It's kinda boring, making a batch of identical parts but the numbers
: aligning themselves in my head are exciting. Even at twenty-eight
: pounds per cubic foot -- a fair average for box-store lumber -- the
: frame of a wooden fuselage should weigh less than twenty pounds.
: I'll need to make some drawings to confirm that, and build a couple
: of mock-ups to verify the strength where the landing gear and wing
: fittings attach to the fuselage, but the testing should be interesting.
: If only I had a little more time I could...
:
: -R.S.Hoover
:
: PS -- I've created a Yahoo Group for the wooden airplane ideas. When
: it comes to designing a plane from scratch there's more I don't know
: than do. Which means a lot of problems to solve and that's always fun.
: As I solve the problems -- or find solutions worth stealing :-) --
: I'll post the solutions along with drawings and photos, warts and all.
: If/when it flys, I'll tell you how good or bad. Odds are it won't come
: to anything. Like the fellow said, nowadays nobody welds. Nor do they
: hang doors, fix dryers or do any number of other useful things
: including building airplanes from scratch. But a few do and we swap a
: surprising number of messages, drawings and so forth. Putting the
: stuff where it's easy to get at will save ME some time. Since it's
: primarily for my benefit rather than the looky-loos, I won't bother to
: mention its name. I figure anyone with a sincere interest will track
: it down. -rsh
:

".Blueskies." wrote in message
om...
It seems like I know you...

Once upon a time...in a land far away...

Although that was a excellent post by VeeDub, no need to repeat it all. Be
kind; trim when you respond.
--
Jim in NC

Great post and thanks for sending a smile to everyone, it was well
received.

Being a Jack of All Trades will not likely make you rich but it will
probably save you some money along the way and the satisfaction of a
job well done is very rewarding.

I loved the part about Joe Homebuilder, I think he lives down the
street from me.

BobR

wrote:
Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...

Great post and thanks for sending a smile to everyone, it was well
received.

Being a Jack of All Trades will not likely make you rich but it will
probably save you some money along the way and the satisfaction of a
job well done is very rewarding.

I loved the part about Joe Homebuilder, I think he lives down the
street from me.

BobR

wrote:
Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...

Great post and thanks for sending a smile to everyone, it was well
received.

Being a Jack of All Trades will not likely make you rich but it will
probably save you some money along the way and the satisfaction of a
job well done is very rewarding.

I loved the part about Joe Homebuilder, I think he lives down the
street from me.

BobR

wrote:
Recent posts to this Newsgroup made some folks think I'm sitting here
with nothing to do, eager to help any homebuilder who wanders in the
door, which caused several to do just that. Fer example...

wrote:
A flaw in the construction of my home revealed itself this past weekend
...
sanitary flange began to rust. Fifty-four years later it finally
fractured, bucking me off in the process.

designs with time between failures of fifty four years are considered
flaws?

nice story though

Like the fellow said, nowadays nobody welds.

just started

Nor do they hang doors,

done that

fix dryers

only twice

or do any number of other useful things

like????

including building airplanes from scratch.

well, now you are going a bit too far veedub admittedly, I finally
got off my arse and bought a house with enought room on the property to
build a large workshop. while building an airplane isnt on my priority
list right now, it is on my list of "i'll do it before i die"

we had some conversations a bit ago, also along some of the lines your
prose spoke of here.
I'll admit thatthe past 6 months for me have put quite a few projects
on the back burner, but they have not been totaly cancelled.

(too verybody else) I am one of the nutjobs that wants to build his own
working rocket ship, so just smile nicely and quietly stick me in your
kill file......

BTW know anything about replacing steel roofs of 1940s vintage?