Notes to my future self

1. Urea nitrate. Read up on Haber process.

2. The reason to buy individual panelling over sheets of wainscotting is because it's possible to adjust the individual panelling per piece to accommodate for walls being non-vertical. With a sheet-form, you have one cut to get it to work out.

3. Liquid Nails adhesive caulk-style tube was blocked at the end because the stuff had dried -- visibly, through more than half the nozzle. Wrapped 14ga wire around screwdriver into tight coil, pulled in vise waaay out to form a long thin spiral like a corkscrew, drove that into the dried caulk mixture, pulled out with vise-grips. Worked very well, saved an almost-full stick of structural adhesive.

4. When working with synthetic/composite fake-wood materials, always use edge-cutting drills rather than standard twist drills: they won't rip out at all. Also start holes on front (paint) side so the departure tear-out will be on the back side.

5. Hole-saw hole offset, need to redrill. Grab bit of scrap plywood, shoot hole saw through it. Screw plywood onto wall, use hole in plywood as external guide bearing for holesaw. Don't try to hold the plywood in place by hand: you're not strong enough.

The nice guy at Home Depot gave me a pro tip on setting marble tiles flush: put down the mortar, put down the tile, then run a thin bead of color-matched caulk along the edges and put down the next tile, snuggling it up to the first one. That way it's sealed (essential) and the sealant line is nigh-invisible. Then cut off the excess, re-caulk along the top, and while it's still wet, spray the whole floor with windex or something else slightly soapy, and strip off the excess caulk with the edge of something hard. That way the caulk won't stick to the adjacent tiles, and you'll end up with something that looks just about seamless.
Nice idea. If I were way better at tiling it might've worked. As it was, the caulk got down in the setting mortar, and when I nudged adjacent tiles up beside each other, a slurry of mixed caulk and mortar squoze out between them, making clean-up very difficult.
Neat idea, tricky implementation.

Notes to my future self: welding aluminum

Dude. Every time I try welding aluminum it's like the first time, and it always SUCKS. I make the same mistakes, make the same assumptions.
It's not like steel. Not even a little bit. I can't extrapolate my kinesthetics because it *will* *not* *work*. Stop trying.

• Thin sections *will* melt. If I need a thin section I need to weld in a thick section and then cut it out afterwards.
  
• All joints need filler, and a LOT of it -- more filler than the running length of the joint. If it's possible to weld without filler, boy, I sure don't know how.
  
• Just as critical: do not start adding filler, don't even think about it, until there's a decent-sized puddle, because it'll freeze *instantly* when the filler drop touches it, and until there's a puddle the filler will just bead up on the surface and be wasted. Stop trying to add filler too early.
  
• Corollary to 'thin sections will melt' and 'do not add filler until there's a decent puddle' -- don't start at an edge or corner, because they're too thin and you can't run a puddle cold to keep from melting the corner away because you can't get the puddle started. Start in the middle of a joint and weld to each end.
  
• Don't forget how much aluminum distorts.
  
• Don't forget how soft it is and how easy it is to flatten it again by welding just a little on the other side.
  
• The starting arc *must* be with the tungsten pointed at, *and* nearer to, the thicker-section piece of metal. With that said, you can't make a puddle in the thick-section and push it up to the small piece and expect it to bridge over and finish the weld like steel does -- some heat has to go into the small piece to get an adjacent puddle and then add filler there.
  
• Despite the AC, the oxide layer is still an arc-starting issue. Hit it once with sandpaper just before starting a weld.
  
• Hot aluminum welds better, faster, than cold aluminum. Hot-restarts are viable.
  

It's cold -- Seattle weather, where you wear a coat but don't need gloves. I rototilled half the garden, leaving the other half under black plastic. (Interesting note: I weighted the plastic with heavy timbers and paving stones. There was nothing alive under the plastic itself, but wherever there was a weight on top, weeds had grown: the insulation of the weight kept them from being baked. Next year, shift the weights a couple times.) I planted four columbine in amidst the 30 strawberries we planted next to the MadSciHut, and put in roughly 18 tomato plants and one pepper in the main garden. Not sure what'll go in the other half or up by the fence, although that'd be a great place for tomato or some other viney/creeping plant that needs support.
I broke the trowel, so it needs welded, after I make dinner.

ARRRRGH.
Rule number one -- no, rule number zero, when buying stuff from Home Depot -- is to always check that what you grabbed from bin X is, in fact, what should've been in bin X. Like the other day when I grabbed a ballvalve from the 1" OD box, and got home, and it turns out it was a 3/4" ballvalve, so: entirely useless. Likewise, at the same time I grabbed a replacement sprinkler head from the 90 degree box, and it was a 180 degree sprinkler head.
NEVER TRUST ANYTHING.
Sigh.

With that said, I got the sprinkler system waterbreak taken apart and the trashed valve replaced, plus most of the other pieces I had to remove put back together save for a 20 cm length of PVC tubing that refused to come loose from the barbed plumbing fittings. Sooo I went to HD and bought some new tubing and will cut the old tubing off the existing fittings with a box knife, I guess.

I stapled up the 6 mil sheeting along the west wall of the bathroom, ready for cementboard. The east wall is waiting for the replacement shower mixer/valve.

Right now I am obsessed by pulsejets and H2O2 rockets, and the thought of building my own.

N's car sold for twice what she expected. She put it up on craigslist and the first offer hit eighteen minutes later. Something like twenty people emailed her in the next couple of hours.
My coworker has a Honda Insight. He said cars like his are selling for $15K -- only a thousand or so less than when he bought it new, seven years ago.
We've all noticed a *lot* more people riding bikes, especially people without helmets, on '80's bikes, all awkward with their knees out. Exciting times... I need to get my recumbent finished.

We're trying to get the old house ready to sell. It needs a lick of paint and an atom bomb dropped on the garage. The big question is: make it look all pretty or just expect that the people who buy it are going to demolish it and put up an apartment complex? I'd say that's not unlikely, given the way things are going hereabouts -- the weirdest psychology I've ever seen. If houses are selling, well, build apartment buildings and make a profit! If houses aren't selling, well, buy them cheap and build apartment buildings and make a profit! There's something wrong with that equation, and I'm glad I'm on the selling side rather than the buying side.

Work had a graceful layoff. Fritz won't be glad to hear this, but they terminated 130 positions (out of roughly 10,000) and in most cases took the people whose jobs were gone and found them new ones in the company. We now have a digital designer, which is sort of odd, given that we're, y'know, The Analog Company. But hey. I just thought it was surprisingly civilized -- they said he can work where he currently does for as long as he wants, but if he wants to start working where we are, they'd be happy.
Still, the storm clouds are never good to see.

I think, as I've said before, we are living in the tail end of what we'll look back upon as a golden age of sorts, one where Stuff was almost free. Kirk bought a tripod for $6 the other day -- full-size, with every adjustment you can think of. I bought a USB hub for $10. In neither case are the *materials* that cheap. We both know this is part of the US selling itself to another country, trading money for cheap stuff, no differently than one company doing a gradual leveraged buyout of another. For the people involved, it's very nice until the buyout is complete and the changes start happening.

Car's broken still/again. Needs to go to the shop, because I don't have either the experience or documentation to even begin to diagnose the problem. I bet they'll say the head needs replacing, but I sure hope not. Urk.

Last night I read "Nacky Patcher and the curse of the dry-land ships" (I believe) and it reminded me, perhaps inevitably, of "Holes". Young Adult book about ships in the desert, full of grim power-mad authorities and flawed people trying to make their lives work. One of the weird things was that both the protagonist and his ... henchman? assistant? had a crippled limb. Maybe that's just symbolic of their similarly crippled mindsets. Anyway, slow start, depressing, but once it got going it was excellent.

Right now I'm working through an *enormous* book about medieval technology. It's full of little gems that probably aren't important to anyone else. Roman ploughs only cut a trough, but medieval ones could actually lift and turn the earth. Why is that important? Because over time, you form serious ridge/valley formations on your fields, allowing farmers to plant on the crest in wet years or in the valley in dry ones, which greatly increased their yields. Stuff like that. Useless (unless I get stranded on a desert island that just happens to have oxen and iron ore) but endlessly fascinating.

What all.

It snowed yesterday -- intensely, although not for long. There was a bit of time where it was blue skies and sunny and still snowing. We went to Home Depot and bought a buttload of stuff, and came home and deployed a lot of it: repairing loose electrical boxes, removing obsolete window sconces, things like that. I have to figure out how to etch the bathroom floor, next.

Today we went to the old house, mowed the lawn, dumped half a ton of dirt in the flower beds, seeded them with wildflowers. I have to get over there tomorrow and turn on the sprinkler system. I'll get a bike ride in today, then back to HD to buy plywood and hardiboard for the mad sci hut and bathroom, respectively. If I have time I'd like to get the cantenna built around the big tub of basil oil we found at Big Lots yesterday.

The recumbent is ready to start welding, but I have to build a frame jig. I think I know how. Still don't know how I'm going to route the chainline. I'll need an old Hyperglide cogset and thrashed freewheel, though. Too many variables to decide until I have the first frame mocked up.

So far behind.
Lessee. Focus windshield got a crack in it while I was borrowing it, just sitting in the driveway. This was during the 89 degree - to snowing and freezing -- and back to 85 degrees, in two days, bit. Yeah.

My car still reeks of hot oil. I think the whatever problem is still there. I don't know what to do about it.

The workshop has squirrels living in the walls. I have ripped off a big chunk of siding and am trying to find inexpensive siding to put up in its place.

The recumbent is getting closer to happening: I now have the front end cut out from the next door neighbor's kid bike, and the back end of Dad's old LeTour that David sprinted into a VW, and am getting ready to start welding the main frame.

I'm playing with cantennas, so hopefully at some point I'll be able to get internet in the workshop via a beamed directional antenna. In an ideal world I'd build a second one based off the directv dish on the garage, and build an automated netstumbler setup. That'd rock.

Mostly just tired, though.

Catch-up:
I put the new valve gasket on the Soob. I'm not convinced it's the problem, but the car's working, which is nice. It even had the 'check engine' light off for a little bit.
I went by Altitude Steel and got some more 1/2" square tubing. I'd like to like them, since they're so convenient, but they're expensive. It annoys me that I'm buying crap they're going to melt down, digging it out of the scrap bundles, and they're charging me $1/pound for it. I'll just have to keep going to K&K. Grumble. Anyway, I converted all the newly-acquired tubing into curves for the base of the bathroom sink, the support for the glass shelf on which the towels will some day sit. Lots of mandrel-bending around a bit of cedar from a fence slat that I cut into a disc. I'm not yet good at compensating for welding curvature: I set the whole thing up flat, tack-welded along one side, flattened it back out because the tack-welds twisted it all, then turned it over and ran nice beads along that side to hold it together permanently -- and it twisted up again, like a dry leaf. Sigh. I'll try jumping on it for a while: I SHALL BE VICTORIOUS. It'll look good anyway.
Rode out to Golden along Ralston Creek, back via the Clear Creek, along the Giant Spider Trail -- out at Blunn Lake, I've found two enormous spiders and I'm always looking for more. The wind was consistent and fairly strong: headwind all the way out, grinding up hills, then blazing back along the CC. I saw two people dredging the CC beside where the offagain-onagain Cabela's is supposed to be: one with a jet-dredge, the other with a high-sider. The bike path is rerouted through where Cabela's is supposed to be, on a lovely bit of concrete, but it's kind of weird because in one direction, the old route is closed and the concrete dug up, but in the other direction the new route is all fenced off. Either way, it's offroad. (Speaking of which, a couple days ago I rode up to Brighton and they've finally rebuilt the road under, uh, hm, basically 54th and Franklin, where the Sherman Tank lives and the old Globeville waste treatment plant has been turned into a park, so you can climb around in the sediment ponds -- thrill a second!)
I made tuna fish sammiches and we bought a kite but as soon as we got home the wind died. Forsooth. So instead we're making duck-and-stuff soup and reading comic books and I'm researching how to set up the vapor barriers underneath/behind the tile in the bathroom. Thrill-a-second indeeeeeed.

engines, big and small

The soob is leaking oil into the top of the spark plug. I have convinced myself that it's a blown valve cover gasket. Coworker suggested just reefing on the cover bolts: it did nothing. New gasket ordered, driving borrowed Ford Focus in meantime. But: am I right? Doesn't the valve cover gasket just go around the outside? The spark plug's a hole in the middle, like unto an old flathead engine. What if there's something totally different, like some weird flaw in the head itself?
Sigh.
The rototiller is tilling. After rebuilding the starter, I was running it and it started lugging down. I opened the ... I guess it's simultaneously a choke and a throttle, even though it's not intended for either: the tiller's supposed to just run at a single setting, but it has a valve at the venturi to limit airflow. Anyway, I opened it, let more air in, and it ran better. I kept doing that and it kept doing better. Weird. Then I was poking at it and realized that the whole carb was sort of rattly and stuff. The two bolts that hold it to the engine were loose, and it was in the process of falling off -- which process meant that it was sucking air in and blowing fuel/air out the gap that had opened between the carb and the intake. That could've been FUN had enough fuel/air gotten over to the exhaust. I tightened it as best I could, given the constraints of the design. Poor old thing. It needs loctite.

Rototilling is done. Crop circle is implemented. It'll be poppies, apparently: the veggies will go in the garden area and maybe along the fence where the schnauzers play.

Meanwhile I'm tired to the point of incoherence.

Rototiller madness!

I went to work and taught myself PADS, a new circuit-board layout program. It sucks. The first time I learned one of these, they sent me to a $4000 class for a week. At this point I can pretty much just learn it in two days of screwing around.

Work sucked.

I came home and started wrestling with the rototiller. It's older than I am. It might be older than my mother. It's a Craftsman, all welded together out of rusty angle-iron. Every year something different isn't working. Last year I couldn't get it to start and the pull-starter was misbehaving: it wasn't retracting correctly. So, given that there's no way I'll remember what I did, I'm going to write it down. Here.

Pull-starters are sort of sprague clutches: they turn one way and lock the other. That's controlled by a friction-driven dog that sticks out when the cord is pulled and retracts otherwise. The retract mechanism for the cord uses a big coil spring inside two nested cylinders. They *have* to be closed and flush against the housing face, so the cord tracks through the hole. The reason they don't is because the coil spring butt end goes through a slit in one of the cylinders, and the other cylinder hangs up on the butt end, so that needs to be bent flat. Otherwise the cylinder pack jams against the crankshaft and it won't ever retract right. You'll know it's put together correctly when the shoulder nut that holds the entire starter system together can be fully tightened without screwing up how everything works.
The coil spring gets really nasty. It needs to be cleaned and oiled every now and then. If it comes out of the casing it's going to basically explode all over everywhere. WATCH for this. When you go to rewind it do NOT try to coil it up in your hands and jam it back into the cylinder. It won't work. It will escape and damn near cut off your finger and you'll bleed everywhere. Wrap it back into the cylinder starting from the outside and winding towards the inside. Wear gloves next time, yo.

We slept in.
At noon we went over to my brother's and had Easter Food. They gave us an enormous bag of jellybeans: vanilla, jalapeno, kiwi, and mango flavor. L's dad and brother talked extensively about horrible houses they've cleaned -- houses waist-deep in beer cans, houses where the people left their pets when they left, houses partially collapsed without bathrooms where the people living there used buckets instead of toilets. I'm glad I wrangle electrons instead.
From there over to Nikki's parents' house, where we played Boggle (which meant much less arguing than usual.) It was fun. We gave them half the jellybeans and they gave us satanic chocolate sheep.
Now we're sitting in front of the fireplace reading comic books and falling asleep. A frustrating weekend insofar as getting stuff that needs to be done finished, but that's okay: next weekend will be better.
I'm trying to organize social stuff for the week ahead.

Boring, but I'm going to try and write down something each day, as an actual diary.

I got up too early and went up to Maggie's. She lived across from Boulder High, in a weird little enclave right beside Boulder Creek, -- weird, because you can't get there directly as it's all one-way streets pointing the wrong way. You have to sneak in a couple blocks in advance. We loaded like crazy, got everything into the trailer or the two Subarus, save two boxes. Maggie felt like she was incredibly fuzzy and confused, and needed coffee, and we thought we needed hex keys to take apart the futon so we went over to McGuckin's, where we had a huge intense discussion with the four hippies who ran the key-duplication machine (four, seriously) about 'rock papers scissors dynamite' vs. 'rock paper scissors bomb'. The key they gave Maggie was leopard-print and sticky, so they washed it in Goof-Off, and then it was stinky instead. We bought a big ol' Bondhus metric hex set and started off home. There was a charming, very pale young lady on the sidewalk, wearing an electric blue blouse/skirt thing that stopped about a foot above her knees: if she stood very still, her butt didn't show. Well, she was running, as it happened, and wasn't wearing panties, as it happened. Maggie began yelling, something like "dammit, dammit, there should be a law! It's not fair that there are hot chicks wearing short skirts running down the street when someone replaced my brain with a cupcake and I can't think and today I NEED TO BE ABLE TO THINK and it's NOT FAIR! ARRRRRGH..." and we drove home and finished loading. The cats fit in the cat boxes.
We drove down to the new place and loaded everything into the house. Cassandra kitty got stashed in the bathroom, a small room with two doors and one closed window and nothing else of note, and we went out for another load and Dyson kitty. When we came back there was no sign of Cassandra. Doors closed, window closed, toilet lid closed. Nothing. So we stashed Dyson in there and went looking for Cass, poked hither, poked yon, nothing, and in confusion we went back to see if maybe possibly there was a spot to hide.
Dyson was gone.
It was the bathroom of vanishing cats.
Turns out they were hiding under the sink, in a space that couldn't've been more than 3" high, with a slit thinner than that for egress. I had no idea a cat could fit through a hole that thin. Desperation is an amazing thing.
Finished moving. I pulled out of her driveway and reverse-jackknifed the trailer, leaving another ding in the side of my beat-up car.
As I was driving along Thirteenth, I saw a dozen guys playing foot-down on a basketball court just before Washington. They all had chopped-bar fixies, mostly with matching anodized rims.
Nikki rebuilt the whole back yard this AM. I came home, we admired each other's work, and went to the Lakewood library, loaded up.
I read all of Megatokyo #1 and am working through a book on tile technique.
Out for a quick snack at some frightening diner in Broomfield.
It was hot yesterday, but snowing now. Fie.

I made a stand for the sink. It was about 3 cm too wide to fit through the bathroom door. Tears were shed, bitter bitter tears. HOWEVER, help arrived in the form of a Horrible Freight abrasive cutoff saw: I cut what I'd welded all to pieces and rewelded it. It no longer sits quite flat, but hey, I can always cut more off.
I got the steel from Altitude Steel, under Colfax and I-70. The pieces were rusting in with a bunch of other stuff, bundled to be dragged off to a minimill and melted down into new steel, but we rescued them and dragged them home in the Soob. Cutting the cross-pieces was really tricky, where they attached to the twisted legs: they were all cut to the same length, then counter-ground to have helical ends. The front-side welding isn't bad. The back-side welding doesn't bear looking at. However, this is going to be a New Art bathroom, so that's okay, in its own way.
Rough draft:

Close-up:

The faucet is eccentric.

I intend to weld up a fancy bit of architectural sculpture that'll span the crossbars at the foot of the sink. They'll support a sheet of glass (with some carefully drilled holes) for a shelf for towels. Just beneath the sink/tabletop, there will be a sliding drawer, probably made of poplar, because I love working with poplar, and something exotic for the face.
The drawer will be traditional, with side-runners, rather than ball-bearing slides, I think. I just realized that if I yaw the drawer runners slightly trapezoidal, opening towards the back, I think it will be impossible for the drawer to ever jam in the opening, as so many do when the slides are parallel and just a bit wider than the drawer. I've never heard of anyone doing this, though, so I'll do a mockup first.

The bathroom window is horrible. I'm paying someone to put in a nice vinyl double-insulated window. That's a job I don't think I can do myself.

Lily has been coiled like a spring for the last week. She suspects the squirrels of a cabal, a dog-overthrowing conspiracy, so she dashes from window to window and stands, staring intently, looking for signs of their operation, their acorn-fueled putsch. She attempts to sleep, poised like the lions in front of a NYC library, hips jutting out and head down but ready to leap at a moment's notice. This is a very tiring way to sleep, apparently: she quivers constantly.

Giraffes only have to sleep 2 hours a night. Bullfrogs do not sleep at all. Dolphins -- and many other aquatic mammals -- sleep, such as it is, one hemisphere at a time, maintaining CONSTANT VIGILANCE, as Mad Eye would put it, while still resting. People taking Modafinil can go sleepless for several days, without suffering large performance reductions in analytic thought. Pigeons can be kept awake for a month at a time without any noticeable side-effects (although maybe that's just because they're too stupid to get dumber when they lack sleep.)

With all that said, it's 7:15 on a Friday and I want to go to sleep so much right now I'm having trouble typing this in.

I shall go weld. UV exposure will surely cure my somnambulism, or at least refresh my Vitamin D levels.

Frist psot.

TIG welding:
My ex-boss told me to make the joints between pieces I was welding as tight as possible -- until I couldn't fit a piece of paper between them.
That's what I've been doing.
It's not the best way.
When you weld eg. a pipe to another pipe, you tack-weld a single point on one side, then do it again on the other, so things hold together, and then you run a bead around the joint. When the two pieces of metal have, essentially, zero gap, that first tack-weld cools quickly and contracts, pulling the two pieces of metal apart where the next tack-weld should be.
You actually want a gap, maybe half a millimeter or so, and then things work much better.
It is possible to fill arbitrarily large gaps with a TIG and a bunch of filler, but it's very unpleasant.