Rebuilding a cheap door

Preparing to put new veneer on bathroom door. Fist holes courtesy of male son, years ago. Required every clamp I own.

Non compost compost

My favorite gardening technique is letting things plant themselves…

These little squash plants (what kind, who knows) are growing from my “compost” (noun) for a transplanted palm that didn’t in fact compost (verb).

Meanwhile, my recent re-jiggering of my non-composting compost has resulted in another little accidental garden. (I have no idea what that big-leaf plant in the background is, but it’s obviously happy and it’s not bothering me.)

Closer view of the non-garden “garden.”

Como trasplantar

I had a problem. A little palm plant wouldn’t grow in the sandy soil of our home near the beach, so I moved it to the country as a little accent. A year or two later, that little accent was three meters high, growing inside as well as outside the carport, which I had obviously placed it way too close to.

I cut it down to under a meter high, and here it is a couple months later.

Time to move it again. So, with pick and shovel I worked and worked and worked and … that thing might as well have been set in concrete. So I wondered if my neighbor Jerry might enjoy a little challenge. I have never operated a backhoe, so the chances of me getting the thing out of the ground without also removing the carport as well were slim to none.

Jerry thought it sounded like a fine idea. And so…

The face-off.

Jerry comes in on the left.

And on the right, within an inch of the concrete pad. At this point, the plant is still showing little to no sign of budging. So…

… taking the plant off guard, he comes in from the side. And the plant comes out of the ground.

I spent 40 minutes chipping at the root ball to remove clay, and the thing was still too heavy for me to lift. But with an AAAAARGH!!!! I did anyway, got it in the car, and brought it to Atlántida.

Here it is in its new home, planted in sand but with a wheelbarrow full of compost, and my promise to give it as much water as it could possibly want.

Ya veremos. We will see.

Compost attacks

Something — a comedreja, possum — has been attacking my worm composter the last few nights.

The door I didn’t install real well on the compost barrel, thinking i could harvest from the bottom, is at present also no match for the little critter(s).

The barrel has a metal lid after this incident three years ago:

I still don’t know why it ended up dead, even if it couldn’t get out. Plenty to eat, and it wouldn’t have been more than 24 hours.

Oh, sorry, you wanted to look inside the worm composter? Pieces of orange and onion got in there by mistake. The slugs are a new addition.

What a difference a ladder makes

Several years ago, I created a wood-slat drop ceiling with fiberglass insulation on the north (sun) facing roof over our bedroom. With only an extension ladder it was quite precarious and rather scary. Returning Americans gifted us a tall step ladder, and so I’m finally getting around to necessary repairs.

And it’s no big deal. Now.

Shipshape

I’ve always liked autumn. “Back to school” was an exciting for me as a kid. New clothes! New faces! New things to learn!

Autumn here is familiar: crisp air, blue sky, bright sun (and a few sort-of-almost-colorful leaves). But northern hemisphere signals persist, and part of me thinks it’s spring cleaning time: focus on clothes, tools, organizing nooks and crannies, passing on unused items.

One morning my little tinkering-space caught my attention. It was trivial to cut a shelf in half to make cans more organized, but what a difference in terms of quickly locating nails and screws. Then it occurred that I had measuring tools scattered in different places. Since most projects start with measuring, I consolidated them:

Now, in the space of a few inches, I have two types of carpenter’s square, calipers, folding rule, measuring tape, and bevel gauge. All that’s missing is the framing square, which remains elsewhere because of its size. Bring it on!

Of course, none of my most recent projects — painting ironwork, pressure washing, disassembling a decrepit table, re-wiring a kitchen stove, reorganizing the patio and repairing masonry — has required any measuring at all. But the next one will, for sure.

Or at least the one after that.

More laser discovery

As I stood in my little workshop, waiting for glue to set on the fake Crocs from which the puppy removed significant portions, I noticed the laser portion of my printer dissection. I assumed it would need to be broken open, but now picked it up and saw it had four little plastic tabs – piece of cake!

And very cool! The laser is at the arrow on the right. The hexagonal disk has mirrored edges, and is attached to a motor. The bizarrely-shaped plastic lens is obviously very carefully designed to very precisely deliver incredibly tiny dots at incredibly high speed. The arrow on the left points to a tiny mirror whose purpose remains a mystery to me. Amazing technology.

The plastic bits on the right represent a slightly less amazing technology. I was unable to plug in a Schuko plug to an adaptor (maybe the very one labelled C in this post from 2012). I thought I’d take it apart, which it turns out involved breaking it, but the stuck safety gate shown here dropped out. So I glued the broken parts back together, and voilà – another silly little project done.

Laser printer dissection

You may have read my account about dissecting the dead kitchen scale, and maybe thought well, that’s a silly thing to do. And maybe you’re right.

I had pulled my wife’s desk back so I could work on a window, and a certain dog who is not allowed upstairs apparently got upstairs while we were out, went to look out the window, got tangled in wires, and pulled a computer and laser printer from the desk. I immediately ran diagnostics on the computer (a Mac Mini) and it seemed to be fine. The 9 year old printer, on the other hand, wasn’t working right at all.

The local computer place techie looked at it, identified one part was cracked and basically not replaceable. So I had two challenges: 1) find another printer, and 2) take this one completely apart without breaking anything.

68 screws, 17 springs, and 12 gears later, it was done! The heating element (black and red rollers to the left) was the single most difficult challenge. Amazing the ingenuity that goes into putting pieces together – little tabs, rotate this, pry back that….

The number of springs surprised me. I did break a couple of small pieces of plastic, but on purpose to save time, not because I couldn’t figure out their assembly.

In addition to admiring the design and engineering wizardry, I can hardly imagine how they created the incredibly intricate molded plastic parts.

As with the kitchen scale, there’s nothing particularly useful for other projects, though I’ll save some of the bits of wire and springs, and chuck the rest.

But wait! I see at the large plastic pieces are identified as ABS for recycling (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, but you knew that). So in addition to having a fun hour or so, disassembling the printer allows for recycling at least some of it (bits of aluminum as well) that otherwise would have gone to a landfill.

And oh by the way, I found no evidence of a crack or break in the part the techie indicated. But it doesn’t matter: the printer no longer worked, and wasn’t about to get fixed.

Fake Croc Mods

This is a pair of fake Crocs my wife bought at Géant for a few bucks. They turned out to be just a half size too small for comfort.

And she prefers open-toed shoes for summer.

All it took was a few minutes with a razor blade and voilà!

Do they sell razor blades in Uruguay? I have no idea. I almost didn’t bring these from the United States. I’ll explain.

When we flew to New York in 2012 for my niece’s wedding in Connecticut, we had offered to bring an absurd amount of stuff back to Uruguay for people.* My last-minute packing operation occupied a significant part of my sister’s living room floor. I kept reassigning goods to different suitcases. It took a while, but finally everything fit.

But just before we headed out the door for the airport, I suddenly realized I needed one more item reassignment…

…because going through airport security with two box cutters and 100 razor blades in my carry-on bag didn’t seem like something that was going to end well.

*no more!

G-clamps

I bought a hand truck (dolly) a couple years ago from some departing Americans. They warned that one of the tires loses air over time, an issue I tried to deal with a couple times at local tire places. Eventually, though, to no avail. With no inner tube, you can’t get air back in with something as slow as a bicycle pump.

So I brought an inner tube back from the US, since I happened to be going and was an easy add-on to an existing free-shipping order.

It took a bit of work to get the tire lose, and then putting the tube in was no big deal. But getting the tire back on? Impossible!

Then I found this wonderful video. My solution! But I needed some C-clamps, which understandably are called “G” clamps here.

So I immediately set to work with them, and …

… *sigh* later I’ll be taking the hand truck to the local tire place, to see if they have a way to get the tire over the rim.

The “G” clamps will prove themselves useful in other ways, no doubt.