Spring Gleaning...

No Typo, but a word borrowed from Ruzter via Sox. It's that time of the year where many people do their spring cleaning, which then makes for good spring gleaning, the better term for garbage picking. Sunday we went for a walk, and some early garbage had a long-handled grass edge cutter that needed some TLC but is working again now. Tonight netted what must be an original series Workmate - the thing ways way more than my modern model. I had my workout for the day holding it in one hand riding the bike home for about 2km. Also found an old busted stereo I tore apart for kicks (I am easily amused). I left the metal table legs where they are because I was on my bike. Same goes for at least three vacuums. That part I found kind of amazing. Is there a sale going on? Or have people not vacuumed since Christmas, so at Easter they tried their machines and decided they are no longer good enough?
Either way, here is your reminder: It's spring, best gleaning time of the year, so mind the next garbage day in your area :-)

I Don't Need No Stinkin' Pipe Bender!

Here's how you make a turn in a pipe without a bender:

Step1: cut the pipe at an angle. The angle doesn't matter as long as it is at least 1/2 the angle of the first "step" in the turn.

Step 2: Rotate the end till the desired first bend is made. By rotating the pipe back and forth, you can set the angle of the bend.
Step 3: Tack weld in place. Repeat TACK weld, you may (will) end up grinding the welds off and fine tuning later!
Step 4: Repeat for as many steps as you want so the bend isn't so "sharp". I only did 2 steps to make the bend since it wasn't that big of an angle. The first cut could be any angle but the other cuts must be more precise because you can't rotate the pipe to adjust the angle like you did the first cut. I tried: you end up with a strange goose necking of the pipe. I should have taken a picture.

Step 5: Once the piece has been test fitted, weld away. Ignore the horrible looking welds in the picture. I was having trouble with the feed on my welder. The welds are all solid and I only had to touch up one tiny pin hole after the pipe was installed. I could have ground the welds to make them look pretty, but it was getting late at night and no one but the next person fixing the exhaust would ever see it.

Finished pipe. It's not pretty but it is solid and it fits!

A Question about Pencils...

As I was looking for a pencil this afternoon, something odd struck me. I don't know about your place, but at mine there are a bunch of pencils lying around since I prefer them over pens. Pencils working the way they do, you can get a good idea how much one has been used. And this is what strikes me. I can't think of ever throwing out a pen because the final nib has become unservicable. Further, there seem to be far more greater-than-half pencils around than smaller-than-half. So, then: where are all the pencils? Are they in the same place where all the socks go that are missing from pairs after the laundry? And, where is that place, and how do they get there? Could whatever property allows these items to disappear also be used in other ingeneous, techneaks-like ways?

Flatten Warped Boards

I have some old 9" oak baseboards that came with my house. I toolk them all off months ago to insulate and rewire and am now ready to put them back up. Problem is, the face side is varnished and the back is not, so over the years the back has dried out and the boards are all warped now. This isn't a problem in the center of a wall, but makes it just about impossible to make nice mitered corners. The boards are abou 3/4" thick, so just bending them straight isn't going to happen.

Some book once told me that to bend or round a moulding, i.e. something non-structural, you can cut slots about 2/3 of the way through the material from the back, in parallel with the direction in which you want to bend the wood. The material will then act as if it were only 1/3 as thick as the original, making it that much more flexible. The more slots you cut, the more even your bend will be.

I made 7 cuts along the back of the boards on my tablesaw. At that point I could bent the boards straight, but they wanted to bend into a "W", so I think for future reference there will be more closely spaced cuts nearer the edges. I am sure there would be a way to calculate the ideal spacing, but I won't even go there.

With the cuts spaced as it is I was able to clue up the corners in a decent mitre joint.

New Contributers

Just a quick note to welcome our new contributers, SEO Guru (Carey) and Berserk (Tina). SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization (I believe) and he might give up a glimpse into the esoteric world of getting your web page to the top of the Google searches. Berserk has already (finally) shown us how to more effectively cut ourselves. I am hoping Sox can sometime give us something on wood spirits and Yantski on photography, or whatever they desire!

Welcome to all!

Give Knives a Quick Bite

Well, here I am finally getting around to signing up, since I finally thought of a brief little techneak.
If you have a kitchen knife that just skids off the tomato you are peeling, you can give it a rough sharpening on the bottom of a mug. Turn over your mug, make sure it has an unglazed ring around the bottom. Drag the edge of your knife across that at a ~30 degree angle a few times. This should give you a rougher and sharper edge.
Sharp knifes are less likely to hurt you than blunt ones, but still, don't blame me if this Techneak helps you draw blood :-)

Track new blog posts with Google Reader

Google has a fabulous new tool - go to http://labs.google.com/ and click Google Reader. There's a short tutorial, after which you spend a few minutes trying to figure out how to add blogs. Then it becomes easy.
(1) At the bottom of the "Browse" page, go to the area called "Search and browse".
(2) Just paste the URL of the blog into the field, and then click Search for feeds.
(3) When you see the right results, click Subscribe.

If you have the customized Google home page (requires a Gmail address), you can add a Google Reader gadget to your home page. Then you can see all the new posts to the blogs that interest you without having to visit each one individually.

Thank Google! ;D