Watcha doin???

Got the room I've been working on ready to be used again. It's not finished but can be used, which is handy. Dust sheets are gone, tools are put away, and the floor has been cleaned and cleaned again after the dust had another chance to settle. Along the way I fitted a central light, which is already nice to have.

 

Not looking forward to more snow shoveling.

 

The sun was kind enough to melt most of ours. Before it melted it was rather curious, we thought we heard something and looked out of the window to see next door shoveling the driveway (it's a shared drive, so we all at least try and pull our weight). So we put on coats and boots, only to find next door had more or less done all the work already. Not sure how they did it without us noticing but there you go.

I like to be doing at least some of the work, but next door is a family of five with three drivers and frequent visitors, while on a snowy day it's entirely possible we'd just stay home, so I don't feel too bad if they end up doing more of the work than we do - they benefit from a clear drive much more than we do. In many ways I'd rather not have a shared drive, simply because on a snowy day when we're not going anywhere it gets a bit tedious feeling at least somewhat obligated to pull on warm clothes and go out and shovel, when normally I'd just leave it for later, but there ya go.

 

Fun with Sabre Saws.

I needed to cut the lid off a metal barrel. It once had engine oil in it but I got it from a local business and I'm going to use it as a dust separator. But first I need to get the top off. My first attempt with a metal cutting disk on my angle grinder was less than a resounding success. It threw sparks everywhere, cut parts of the lid out but cutting curves was tricky. I turned a 6" cutting disk into a 2" cutting disk and wasn't even close to finished.

Then I had the idea, why not put a blade in my sabre saw and do it that way? So I got a blade designed for cutting metal and set to work. It made quite a lot of noise but now I've got the lid removed. Crucially, I removed the inner part of the lid, rather than simpy cutting the entire top off. This means any remaining cut edges are on the inside rather than the top, and I retain the strength of the top of the barrel.

Next up I'll probably look to use a grinding disk to cut it back where the sabre saw struggled and take out the odd corners I'd rather not have to deal with later, then look to smooth off any sharp edges. Then I can clean the remnants of the oil out of it, and start cutting wood to make a separator to sit on top of it.

I'm also planning a work bench for my basement so I can organise my larger tools more effectively. I will need a router soon but it's really hard to find a router that is a sensible price (i.e. not a $1000 Festool offering) and doesn't have the same failure as a recurring theme among the online reviews. It is rather depressing the way companies still want to charge $300 for a tool but then make key components out of plastic rather than metal.

 

You mean "cake decorations"...?

 

That sort of thing, but the amount of noise this thing made would have woken the guards. Even the ones who were off duty and on vacation in a foreign country. The chances of getting caught when cutting metal bars using a sabre saw are pretty high.... and smuggling a sabre saw into prison is a little tricker than a hacksaw blade.

I was surprised just how warm the battery got and how fast, and how quickly it ran down. It was only a 2Ah battery but it went from three bars of power to one in the space of little more than 10 minutes. I guess it draws a lot of current cutting through metal. It made me wish I'd gone for the 60V version instead of the 20V.

 

Pulled a bit more wall down today and found - you guessed it - more unbelievably shoddy workmanship in the brickwork. So I mixed up batch after batch after batch of cement to plug all the gaps. Some of them are behind wall studs so I used up another can of building foam trying to fill them as best as I could.

There are still a few gaps remaining but that part of the house is holding steady at 59 degrees with the heating turned off, so that's probably a good sign. I can tell there are a few more patches I need to cement in but they are above the ceiling level. It's entirely possible I'm going to end up just pulling down a few ceiling tiles so I can get at them - I'm thinking the long term plan is probably going to involve pulling down all the ceiling tiles and putting up a drywall ceiling.

Just another job for the list. At least now it's slowly getting warmer so I have a sporting chance of getting to some of the electrical work I've been putting off for months because I didn't feel like working in a confined spcae in temperatures well below freezing.

 

Or you can wait until summer when it will be suffocatingly hot and humid...

 

That's why I didn't do much of it last summer.... there was work to be done but it had to wait until it cooled down a bit. When I put my thermometer in there and it read 125 I decided I wasn't going to go in there at all.

That time did show that the insulation between upstairs and the attic is working. It was 100 degrees in the attic and the upstairs ceiling registered 75.

 

Putting a cat down that we’ve had for 6 years. Cancer.

 

We've almost broken down on getting a dog.

 

Our neighbour mortally wounded our fish after we asked him to look after it. Executing the fish was too much for my wife, so no pets (not that she likes dogs or cats anyway).

 

How do you mortally wound a pet fish?

 

Freeze it, chop it's head off, then flush it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯