Huge job getting everything stowed in prep for relocation to Bay Area, California. Time is of the essence - snow & cold impedes progress. Packing PCs, printers, monitors etc is the most fun. Have an enclosed cargo trailer - Thank The. Lord!
My wife and I spent the afternoon wrestling with 80 pounds of vinyl. Yes, you read that right. But it's not what some might suspect. It's finally time to start fitting the sound proofing to the room. We've been putting it off for what feels like ages but isn't really all that long. Today was the day we started fitting it. We got about 3/4 of a roll fitted to one wall and the last 1/4 roll to the ceiling. The key thing I want to do is cover the side wall and ceiling around the space that was once closed in with stud walls. Once I've got that much fitted I can reframe the stud wall, rest the old drywall panels against it, and then I can remove the temporary door and enjoy the study rejoining the heated part of the house. At present it's in the unheated part, and working in 55 degrees isn't always a whole lot of fun.
My boys were selected, along with a couple other students, to go to the National Science Fair event. I was pretty surprised, mainly be cause the project was not particularly novel (looking at human reaction times). Anyway, they are excited. All expenses paid trip to Edmonton.
First attempt at brazing. The base of my French press fell apart, and not being able to make coffee is a disaster of near Biblical proportions. Never mind the 10 plagues of Egypt, taking their coffee away would have been far worse. Anyway, I got myself a brazing rod, spent some time botching together a support for the two pieces, and then brazed it. It's not a hideous job - you can tell I'm not a professional by any means and one piece moved slightly during the process so it's not perfectly straight, but it means I could make coffee this morning and that's the main thing. The least desirable aspect of trying to support everything while I brazed it was that all I could find to support it was a wood offcut. Wood supporting something I was cooking with my blowtorch. Yes, it caught fire. I figured it would, but it was only a single flame and from previous experience of charring wood with a blowtorch for the visual effect I knew I'd be able to just blow out the flame. So anyway, now I have a fully intact French press, even if the base shows signs of mediocre workmanship now. Maybe if I ever need to do this again I'll be better at it.
New french press: $58.95 Brazing tip: $19.37 Blowtorch: 82.15 New 2nd floor to house: $189,243.11 That's how it would have ended up if I had started that project...
For me it was easier. I already have a blowtorch so all I needed was a $6 brazing rod and I still have most of it for the next project. And the only fire, aside from the flame on the blowtorch, was a small flame that was expected. The next brazing project is to attempt to make a longer tool rest so I can turn wood on my engineer's lathe. I have a very small tool rest that's great for turning very small parts, and want to make a different insert for it so I can work with longer pieces of wood. In theory I can put something 17" long on the lathe, it just can't take anything very wide. But maybe I can turn a small bowl or vase or something with some wood offcuts.
I rigged up an interesting contraption to help support my soundproofing material. It wedges into the steps of my ladder and is designed so I don't have to support as much weight when holding the end in position. Then I can move the ladder with the material on it without anything being too precarious. I used a simpler version when working with a smaller (20lb or so) piece of material. It kinda worked, but was a bit clunky. This new piece makes it easier to clamp it to the ladder, adds more support to stop it tipping over, and will soon be tested with a 50lb piece of material. If you hear a loud crash, you know it didn't work....
My contraption works very well. I've got another 50 square feet if material screwed to the ceiling, and it's easier than I had hoped.
The second sheet went up easier than the first. 50 square feet screwed to the ceiling in less than 30 minutes. I might just be an expert at this around the time I don't need to do it any more....
Looking forward to more fun with vinyl today. Part of the job will be interesting (you know, in the same way that sharing a bath with a bucketful of electric eels is interesting). I need to fix some vinyl to the ceiling over the stairwell. The parts with the highest drops are protected because I put a temporary floor in place. The parts at the top of the stairs have no such floor, so I'll need to figure where I can put the ladder such that I can get at the ceiling while not suffering the less desirable effects of gravity along the way. I had planned to visit the brewpub last night with my wife. We went out to collect something I bought through a local sale, only to find the car wouldn't start when we left. Thankfully the lady's husband was able to give us a jump start but it took a while to get enough juice into the battery, so we decided not to chance the car not starting when we were ready to leave the brewpub and went home. We took the scenic route home to give the alternator as much chance as possible to charge the battery. Soon we'll find out if it took the charge or if we need a new battery. It's been a few years since we bought the car and I don't think we've replaced the battery in that time, so it might be overdue. That said we've had my car for seven years and it's still on the same battery.
"Fun with Vinyl" sounds like something that could be contained in many different media presentations...
Indeed. Today's episode of Fun With Vinyl was about cutting 2' strips of it and screwing it onto the ceiling between the full-width strips. I cut things that way so the seams would be positioned somewhere other than near the edges, although with the benefit of hindsight I might have been better off doing it differently. Working with strips 12' long it looks like I've ended up with a gap 3/4" wider at one end than at the other, which is annoying in that I'll need to cut a slightly wedge-shaped piece to fill the gap, but pleasing that the gap isn't actually particularly big. I also needed to cut a 4" hole in one piece to poke a light's backbox through. I measured as best I could, drilled the hole, and found I was close enough to accurate that I could pull the material ever so slightly to make it fit. I was expecting to have to trim a little with a Stanley knife. Having hung a couple of narrower strips and only hit my head on my wooden contraption once in the process, I decided to go for a run. Maybe this evening I'll hang another piece, and then think about another electrical back box for a light fitting that was screwed directly to a ceiling joist. At present it's just a bulb holder strapped to the cabling with wire nuts, but could really do with being a properly mounted back box so I can fit a small fan in the future. So far I haven't attempted the section over the stairwell. I may need to move a radiator first, which will be fun because it weighs more than I do. I really hope I can work around it, but fear that might not be an option.
The section over the stairwell was surprisingly easy. The ladder had to straddle the temporary floor and the regular floor, so I needed to use an extra board to keep it level. To extend the temporary floor I simply moved the one section the ladder rested on, and cut a small strut of wood to support the end of it over the top step. When I could stand and bounce on it I figured it was safe to trust the weight of the ladder to it, and got the material screwed in place. I didn't need to leave the ladder on an extended piece of wood for very long before I could move it across the top of the stairwell onto the regular floor. So now I have another piece of material mostly in place. I'll need to do some trimming, and think at least part of my problem is the house being slightly out of square. Which is frustrating, but hardly unexpected. If I live to be over 100 years old I'll probably be a bit out of square too....
Today's excitement is pulling down a strip of fiberglass in the ceiling so I can run some new cabling for a new light fitting. Then I can secure the new cables, put the fiberglass back in, and mark out where I'm framing a stud wall. Then I can fit soundproofing to the rest of the ceiling and actually build the stud wall. The really fun bit with the soundproofing is trying to fit it around wall studs and the chimney stack. Where nothing is quite straight, and I want to eliminate as many gaps as is humanly possible, it could be a challenge. At least it cuts easily enough with a Stanley knife, so I can get it mostly into place and cut around corners. At least that's the theory, we'll see how well it works in practise.
I didn't get the wiring done yet. The day I planned to do the wiring I tried to cut a piece to fit an awkward shape, after finishing off a couple of loose ends. Then I noticed I'd cut the exact opposite of what I needed - where I should have cut a step out in the material I cut a step in, so I had the precise inverse of what I needed. I decided to call a halt rather than wasting another piece of material - it's not cheap so I don't want to waste any more than I need to. Today I had another go. I cut a length of material, measured twice, double-checked I had everything the right way round, and cut it. This piece was tricky to get into position, and also needed a hole in it to go around a light's back box. Eventually I got it all into place, screwed into position, and a temporary bulb holder put back on the back box. Tomorrow's fun includes the next piece along, which will have to feature a small hole to feed a wire through. Maybe I'll also get to the last piece of wiring I need to do in the area. As a temporary measure I wired the light in the nearby space to the power circuit, so it will still give me light in the space when I need to kill the lighting circuit to do my work. Once I've got some more vinyl into place I can rebuild the walls I took down.