Got my lighting in my diorama model railroad in recently. It could be a bit brighter, but the even light is much better than the simple pot lights around the room. Those LED strip lights are so reasonable as well. Just testing out the backdrop panorama. Pics to come eventually.
It went on OK and seemed to stick. While I was in the shower I noticed a small patch where I'd overapplied it so tried to get the excess off, and it was much easier than I'd expected. I thought this stuff was waterproof and suitable for bathrooms but now I'm having doubts. I'll keep a close eye on it and replace it with 100% silicone if it turns out I need to.
Yeah. Silicone with 36hrs cure is almost perfect, in my experience. If you apply the seam between 2 strips of masking tape it will be neat & straight.
Note to self: Use masking tape next time Usually I can get a seam pretty straight but sometimes there's a bit of overspill. A full 36 hours cure is difficult because we can only go so long without showering. Unless we hit a point where it needs attention as a matter of urgency I'll leave it until the other bathroom is back in commission. It's currently ripped apart with the water turned off.
Not so easy when caulking into an empty space (i.e. between a countertop and window), but yes, masking tape +1000000.
Fun With Bricks was today's episode from Tango Breaks His House. I'm trying to get rid of a chimney stack. I had hoped to be able to chisel the mortar away but it's proving reluctant to break and I can only swing a club hammer at a masonry chisel so fast. So I figured an angle grinder might do the job. First of all I needed to drill holes in the mortar to get the stumps of nails out. I tried removing them with a 36-inch wrecking bar but all that happened was that the heads broke off. I figured a cutting wheel hitting them at speed might result in pointy bits of metal being thrown around at speed, which seems like a Very Bad Thing. Having got the nails out I tried the angle grinder. I only have a 6" cutting wheel so figured I'd have to cut relatively small pieces at a time out and work my way up and down. Sadly the amount of dust the process generates is ridiculous and managing the dust is an exercise in frustration. A fan in the window will pump some of it out but the wind was so variable that much of it just got blown right back in again. And of course what the fan doesn't get hangs in the air and settles all over, well, everything within a huge blast radius. The next step is to try an SDS drill with a chisel bit. I have a friend who works for an electricians so he may be able to source one for me to borrow/rent. If not I've got the local hardware store to get one in. They had it in their other branch, so could get it in without a committment to buy it. I hope I don't end up having to buy one but if I do I can just chalk it up as another cost of the project. Once I'm done with it I can probably sell it and recover most of the outlay. At least with a chisel bit on an SDS drill I should be able to chip away at the mortar and lift out large pieces of concrete block, rather than turning everything in sight into dust.
That would be the most fun way of getting rid of it. Sadly there is a minor complication, in that I don't really want to get rid of the wall that is about 1/8" behind the chimney stack. Yes, someone really did build a chimney and a wall with such a tiny air gap between them. The wall has to stay, at least until it warms up enough that I won't go bankrupt heating the outdoors while I repair the wall
Assuming you don't have access to a portable air compressor - otherwise, the small, hand-held air chisel with pointed tool will take it out with minimal dust. Or use a vacuum hose with it. Make a wide hole in the morter and insert a wrecking/pry-bar. Bust it out.
Interesting.... I have a six gallon air compressor. Would that be enough for the job? I'm a little wary of using a wrecking bar because I want to maintain reasonable control over where the pieces land - I've got holes in the floor where the bathtub used to be and I really don't want lumps of concrete falling through the ceiling below. But if I can get an air powered chisel that is meaty enough for the job that looks a whole lot cheaper than $4-500 for a cordless SDS drill. If I can chisel out the mortar I can lift out the bricks, whether I lift them out as intact bricks or look to break them in half or third or something. Either way I'd much rather be working with big lumps of brick than big piles of concrete dust. I hate that stuff.
I would suggest renting a 20 gal. and run it at 75-85lbs. Not to heavy but noisy. If you can remove the mortar around 1 brick and use the chisels to pry the brick out, then it's relatively easy to pry the rest, one at a time. You can also break each brick apart with the tool before removing it. The flat chisel does that well. This is not overly dusty. Some.
An even better solution. My friend managed to borrow an SDS for me to use. Because he works for the company they don't charge him, so it looks like my payment is going to be the ordeal of having some beer with my friend.
A couple of hours of Fun With Bricks. The SDS drill works a lot better starting from the very top of the stack. That was tricky, because it involved working in a very confined space in the attic crawl space, lying on my belly on a couple of boards and reaching over my head. Then lifting out big lumps of concrete was also tricky. Thankfully there were only maybe five blocks to remove that way, then I could get back to the regular room. The first several bricks needed the ladder and once the ladder was out of the way I could really move. What helped a lot was when I figured to use the SDS and wrecking bar in a kind of tag-team, where the chisel bit would make a hole between blocks, then the wrecking bar would force them apart and break the rest of the mortar, and I could just lift huge great lumps out. Based on how fast I could work yesterday I was expecting the job to take all day and probably spill into tomorrow as well, if not into the weekend. As it happened I was done within two hours. Now I just need to figure out what to do with a pile of concrete blocks.
I needed to do some additional work to extend the ceiling joist that was cut short because of the chimney stack. It was kinda-sorta supported with a beam across the top of it and a couple of others nailed into place but it seemed surprising that walking on it didn't cause problems. Anyway, I cut an extension long enough to rest on the end wall and bolted it to the joist. Then I cut a support for a rafter that was also cut short. Probably not needed, given it's been there for 90 years and hasn't fallen in yet but I'd rather be safe. Then I got a scrap of drywall screwed into place to cover the 18-inch square hole in the ceiling, and stuffed some fiberglass around the gaps.
Today's fun was hauling the concrete blocks that used to be the chimney stack out of the house. Lots of going up and down stairs, because they are too heavy to carry more than one at a time. So, one block at a time, I shifted it all outside. My initial estimate were that I had about 800lb of blocks. Having carried them and counted them I think it's more like double that. I have a friend with a construction business, so I'm hoping he can use them as rubble. If not I'll have to figure another way to get rid of them. Taking them to landfill is tricky because my car can't haul that much and the truck my friend is usually willing to let me borrow is rated for half a ton. So whatever I did it would require at least two trips to the landfill. This is the bit where I wonder whether a honking great rotary hammer would smash them into pieces small enough to bag up and put out, 40lb or so at a time, with my household garbage. It would take most of the rest of the year to be rid of it but, you know....
Ha! Got all my ID issues under control; new cards etc plus new phone. Have good ID protection. Scammers and hackers seem to invariably, subtly, use incomplete or broken English.