Fix Stuff - Don't Throw It Out! Replacing a broken suitcase wheel

If you have a broken thing, chances are, you can fix it.  And if you can't fix it, you can at least take it apart and see how it works as you break it some more.  For Cindy's birthday (which was in February), I fixed her suitcase.  It was a simple job, but I got more than I bargained for.  Watch, learn, and enjoy:

I'm intending to make more how-to and little diary style videos.  I've been filming most every project I've worked on for months... now the task is learning how to fold editing time into my regular day!

Let me know what you think and what sorts of videos you'd like to see in the comment section below:

Roof Railing Update - July 2014

This summer, I've been working on installing the wooden handrail along the tops of the steel railings I made for the green roof.  It's been semi-slow going, though, because my attention has been pretty divided between getting soil and fabric pots set up with vegetables for the growing season, installing drip irrigation for all the container plants, dealing with the plumbing and washing machine issues we've had (more plumbing is in my future for this weekend, in fact - there's a water hammer and a shower faucet leak to solve), and babysitting our godson, Axel.

Oh, and I had a good meeting with a roofing guy about the parapet wall and roof hatch leak problems.  He happens to be a Certified Green Roof Professional in addition to being an experienced roofer, and I had a great time chatting with him.  Here's hoping all of that works out.  I'll give you his name if it does.

But back to the railing project!  As I wrote on the PHL page describing how I made the roof railings (found here or on the left hand side of the PHL web site), I bought a bunch of lumber reclaimed from the rubble of the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk after Super Storm Sandy by Sawkill Lumber.  It's a mix of tropical hardwood species that do very well outdoors in the elements, so I won't have to worry about replacing it any time soon.

I started in April.  The first step was to pull all of the old boardwalk nails out of the lumber.  Alan from Sawkill told me that the "P" stamped on the heads of each nail stands for the NYC Parks Department.

Then, I had to work out the angle of the miters for the ends of the boards.  I laid pieces out on the railing tops and marked the intersections where the boards meet to find the angles. 

For cutting the miters, I could choose between two evils: climbing up and down the ladder and stairs between the basement and roof as I refined the fit of each piece, or I could use a hand saw.  I chose the hand saw for most pieces and went downstairs to my electric compound miter saw for the cuts that needed to be done at precise-yet-unknown compound angles.  That reminds me, I need to learn how to sharpen my handsaws.

And here are the first two pieces laid out.

As I worked my way along the railing, I discovered one spot in particular where one of the boards is sloping into the corner, and one is more or less level.  That's a problem I'll have to figure out how to solve later.  

And here's one of the uprights with the short boards roughed in. 

Now I'm starting to see how the finished railing is going to look.

 And a couple of wide shots of the whole back railing.  FYI - I still haven't started on the front.

By the way, I attached the wood with self-tapping screws from the hardware store.  I drilled holes through the steel slightly wider than the screws, and I ended up needing to drill pilot holes up through the railing lumber, because the self-tapping screws couldn't handle the hardwood.  The whole thing was rather finicky and took longer than I had hoped.  But it's nice to see the complete form of the steel and wood railing together for the first time.

I bought an Arbortech Turboplane for my grinder to do the shaping.  I had been concerned it would dull quickly with this tropical hardwood, but I wrote to the manufacturer and they pointed me to a youtube video of a guy grinding epoxy off a concrete floor without the blade getting dull, so I gave the Turboplane a try.  It worked very well.  I discovered the undersides of the boards and the corners were particularly difficult to shape without getting a lot of chipping and tear-out, so I'm doing a certain amount of shaping with a rasp by hand.  Here are some shots of what I did initially:

I was feeling pretty good about how things were going until I went up to the roof in May and discovered that the screws had snapped on some of the smaller pieces.  We had had some rain, so the best I can figure is that the wood expanded and sheered off the screws.  BUMMER!

I mail-ordered some stainless steel lag screws and spent a couple of days in June taking everything apart and replacing all the initial screws with the lag screws.  All of the broken ones had to be extracted from the wood.  I tried drilling them out, but it didn't work (the screws were too hard to be drilled through), so I stumbled upon this method.  First, chip out some wood around the screw.

Then, grab the end with vice grips and back it out of the hole.

After doing that for all the broken screws, and re-drilling all the holes in the steel and the pilot holes in the wood, I realized I should take the opportunity to do the initial power-shaping on all the pieces before I screwed them back down (to prevent the tear-out on the corners I had experienced back in April).  So, I held the pieces to the top of the railing with clamps and shaped the edges before lag screwing them onto the railing.  Here's the finished product.

After seeing this picture, I decided that's the best place I've found for the home-made digital antenna, so I've since gone up and secured it in place and run the coaxial cable in such a way that it is hardly visible.  After this one dies of rust, I think I'll make one that looks more integral to the fence - like a bug, but hopefully not in a cheezy way.

I've still got the hand-shaping and sanding to do on this railing, and of course, I still have to do the whole front railing, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's turning out so far.  What do you think?

P.S. Happy Birthday to Axel, who turned 1 year old last Sunday.  Cindy and I went to his party to celebrate.  Here he is with his mom and a fiendish face full of ice cream cake and zeppole (or "fried dough" for you non-Italians):

Water Main Leak Repair

Two weekends ago, Ian came up from doing laundry (with our new used washing machine) in the basement and mentioned that there was water on one of the pipes down there.  I had just been running the cold water (trying to make wine bottle planters, but not having too much success), so I made the hopeful assumption that he was seeing condensation on one of the drain pipes down there.

But, as you will have already guessed, I was wrong.  When I went downstairs a couple of days later to start brewing our first batch of compost tea, I saw the long trickle of water that Ian had been talking about.  It was coming from a rusted plug nut on the top of the main water line coming into the house.  BIG BUMMER.  

First of all, someone had used a steel plug in a water system, which is incredibly lazy, stupid, or both, because water makes steel rust.  Second of all, that plug had started letting a slow trickle of water leak into the basement, which wasn't great for the basement floor, and it certainly wasn't great for water conservation.  And lastly, it wasn't hard to imagine that leak getting worse some day soon and essentially letting a geyser of full-pressure water erupt into the middle of the basement while we were all at work and unaware.  It was obvious that I had to embark upon another plumbing project ASAP.

I managed to get all the parts I needed while on a break from work last Thursday.  The guy at the plumbing store very sweetly saved me some money by having me buy fittings that could be sweated (soldered) together, rather than threaded fittings.  Threaded fittings require thicker metal and more machining to produce, so they're much more expensive than sweat fittings.  He also took a guess at why a T fitting was used here where an elbow would have worked just as well: a place to drain the plumbing system for maintenance?

Since someone had used that steel plug, I doubt the T fitting had been used for any other reason than it's what the plumber had on hand.  But I did like the idea of a place to drain the system, so we kept the T fitting and added a spigot.

While waiting for Ian to finish showering and getting ready to depart on Sunday morning, I sweated all the pieces together that I could:

And after both upstairs tenants were gone for the day, I shut off the water, and went around the house, turning on a couple of faucets on each floor so that air could get into the pipes and allow the water to drain out the open garden hose spigot in the basement faster.

I cut the 3/4" horizontal pipe coming off the T fitting, and I disconnected the main pipe just above the water meter at a union fitting.  That allowed me to take that section of pipe with the rusty T fitting, put it in my work bench vise, and unscrew the T fitting with a plumber's wrench and my giant muscles.  Once I had it off, it was obvious that someone had tried to cover the steel plug with some putty from the inside to prevent rust.  There you have it: that plumber was too lazy to get a proper brass plug.  Jerk.

I cleaned up the threads of the pipe end.

And with some plumber's putty, I assembled all the pieces and put the pipe with the new T fitting into place.  I'm using a spare washing machine hose to guide water down to a bucket next time I have to drain the pipes.  This spigot is probably 7 feet off the floor.

It took some finagling and a little teflon tape to get the union joint to stop dripping.  In my experience, those union joints are always a little finicky.  But if I ever have problems with this section of plumbing again, I won't have to cut any pipes; I can just disconnect at the union.

After about an hour and a half, the water was turned on, I had chased down the one drip that was occurring with the new pieces, and a potential plumbing crisis was averted.  It cost me $55 in new parts and my own time.  If you think you always have to call a professional plumber, but you like taking on challenges and working with your hands, think again.  If I can do this, you can too.  Neat, right?

The Washing Machine Saga

In non-gardening-related news, our washing machine (a freebie from 2008, when Blue Man Group closed its costume shop in Red Hook, Brooklyn) committed hara-kiri.  See the huge hole in the outer drum?  That shouldn't be there...

I took the washer apart to try to fix it, but replacement parts would cost $750.  

Seven Hundred and Fifty American Dollars.

So I went down the rabbit hole of researching new washing machines, versus used washing machines, versus home made, pedal-powered washing machines, versus old fashioned electric and hand activated washing machines...  According to my own comparisons between amazon.com reviews and Consumer Reports reviews, it seems machines can be found these days that are quiet and work well, but it also seems no one is making good and quiet machines that are also built to last.  The same machines that got the highest Consumer Reports ratings also had high volumes of customer complaints about the machines quickly breaking down or never working well in the first place.

I took a house-hold survey.  I was starting to get excited about pedal powered and hand washers, but Cindy and our upstairs tenant and friend, Ian, brought my head out of the clouds and overruled my hippie washing machine dreams on the grounds of time management.  Fair enough.

Cindy and I bought a used washer from a guy on e-bay for $200 plus the cost of a zipcar to go get it.  It makes a knocking sound when it agitates, which seemed to get better when I leveled the washer, but the knocking has come back again.  I've opened the front cover and can't see anything actually wrong with things as it's operating, so I'm going to hope for the best.  Plus, I really like this washer.  It's a top loader.  The old kaput one was a front loader.  As my grandmother used to say, "We shall see..."

Still, you should check out this video of a home-made pedal powered washing machine.  The couple who made it seem sweet:

I also stumbled on this video, which basically got me all excited about the possibilities of life:

Inspired by the above video, and wanting to salvage what we can, I'm keeping the old washing machine motor (for unknown future projects), I've turned the stainless steel drum into a fire pit for the back yard (we haven't tried it yet), and I took the glass out of the door for a mixing bowl.  I think I'm going to dismantle and keep the metal sides of the washer, too.  You never know when you might need some sturdy sheet metal.  Good materials are expensive and hard to get.  The rest (computer controls, all the plastic bits, the pumps, etc) is getting recycled, because it doesn't seem like there's a market for used parts for this machine.

In case you're curious, we don't have an electric dryer.  We hang-dry everything in the basement on two racks I made with a bunch of dowels and some scrap wood a few years ago.  Here's one of them:

By the way, that's the old washer (in pieces) on the left, and the new washer (under Ian's laundry basket) on the right.  I keep a dehumidifier running in the basement, because I don't want my tools to get rusty.  It also helps the clothes dry faster in the humid, Summer months.  And, with the top-loading washer, I can use the dehumidifier water in the washing machine.  Neat, eh?

Special thanks to Ian for helping us bring the replacement washing machine down into the basement.  And when I say "helping," I mean he did most of the work.

Green Roof Two Step

Hello, pals!  Here's a mid-May update on the green roof.

The last couple of weeks have been what I like to call, a "green roof two-step."  In other words, we've been going two steps forward, one step back.  Is there such a thing as a project without successes and disappointments?  I doubt it.

The first and most stress-inducing problem is that the roof hatch is letting in a slow leak when we have hard rain.  I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with the green roof system and is more related to the way the hatch was built and installed.  But I'm trying to get a hold of the contractor we used to re-roof the house so he can come and take care of it.  We're within the 10-year warrantee on the work.  I left him a phone message a couple of days ago (without answer), and I sent him an email last night after going up and taping some plastic around the outside of the hatch to see if I can prevent the leak in today's rain storm.  We'll see.  Here's a picture of that bummer from the last rain storm:

There are two other leaking issues that need to be addressed.  One has to do with moisture somehow coming in between our side wall and our neighbor's side wall (our two houses abut each other - I'll take a picture of that some other time).  The third issue has to do with water finding its way into the upstairs apartment's kitchen ceiling through a vent pipe boot when the silt from the drainage rock on the green roof gets washed down to the roof drain and slows the flow of the water off the roof.  For more depression, here's a picture of what that kitchen ceiling looked like in the last storm as well:

Luckily, I can prevent this leak by keeping the drainage rock cleared from the roof drain.  If you ignore the loops of cable (which is for our home-made digital TV antenna), that's the vent pipe on the left, and the water flows down to the roof drain on the right hand side of this photo.  I want to have the contractor look at this issue, because we need a more permanent fix than this.

Come to think of it. I'd say those roof leaks are more than one step back.  Let's say that's two steps back.

But, a few days later, we got some un-related good news!

News 12 Brooklyn sent a reporter, Kena Vernon, out to do a little story on the green roof!  They found us through this blog, which was really pretty neat.  If you'd like to see the story Kena did, you should be able to watch it by following this link to the News 12 Brooklyn site.  Or, here's a copy of the video right here:

Let's hear it for Cindy Keiter wearing her pink pants, ladies and gentlemen!  Also, in case you're wondering what's up with my shirt, I was wearing my roof garden shirt.  See?  There are vegetables flying off the rooftops...

But before we get too happy, and since this is a good news/bad news post, we've got more to talk about.

Now, I've been working on the wooden hand rail that goes along the top of the metal railing on the roof, and after some amount of visiting hardware stores in the area (does no one carry anything better than drywall screws these days?!), I found some self-tapping screws that I decided to use to screw the wood to the steel railing.  After a certain amount of trial and error, I finally got a little system working, and I managed to get all the pieces cut and installed for the back railing.  I'll do a full blog post about the hand rail install process later, but here's the bummer:

Went I went  up to the roof to check it out before the reporter came, I found a piece of the railing section laying on the roof - totally broken off from where I had attached it!  

Well!  At first, I thought, "Who came up here and broke this off?  Were there vandals on the roof?  Did a neighbor come up and stand on this section to look at the chimney?  What the hell happened?!"

But then I noticed that another smaller piece of wood which had been firmly screwed down was completely un-attached, but it was still resting in place.  Did someone break that too and put it back?  I ran around the roof, checking all the pots, looking in my tool bin to see if anything was stolen.  Everything was just as I had left it.  No vandals.

So I went back and looked at all the sections of wood.  A couple of the other small pieces had one of their two screws broken off - all of them broken off right at the top of the steel where the screws enter the wood.  The only answer is wood movement caused by the rain had sheared the screws off.  

I realized all the broken screw ends would have to be drilled out, and I'd have to replace the screws with something stronger, and drill wider holes in the steel to allow for more wood movement.  I calmed down, but was a little wary the whole time that the reporter was going to go to the back of the roof and see my mistake.  While I'm happy to share it with you, I was too embarrassed to have it broadcast on TV.

Luckily, she never wanted to see the back of the roof - probably because the poor dear had to lug her own camera around (I brought it up and down the ladder for her), and she didn't want to navigate the stepping stone path with it.

Then there was another Unfortunate Situation on the roof.  

A couple of days after the news story, while chatting on the phone with my mom (hi, Mom!), I was putting in some drip irrigation fittings to keep these big pots watered.  The main drip line runs behind the pots, and I was trying to keep the little individual lines to the pots semi-concealed, so it was tight quarters.

I was squatting down to do the work, and I was right in front of the first of the four pots - the one on the right.  See that?  The one right next to the skylight...?

Yup.  I cracked a pane of glass in the skylight with my butt!  Such a bummer.  I made a crack - a butt crack - in the skylight.  I put some duct-tape on my butt crack to keep it from leaking...  There's a new glass shop in the neighborhood, and they made us a replacement piece, but it took them a week.  It was a real pane!

A few days after that incident, I came up on the roof to check how the potted plants were doing.  I had moved last year's sage and lavender to two of the fabric pots, and I sewed seeds in the self-irrigating planters and the rest of the fabric pots.  I had gotten drip irrigation fittings installed on all the pots near the sitting area, and I was eager to see if any seedlings were sprouting.

The sage was busy making blossoms (wonderful news!), but the squirrels had dug holes in the soil of all the pots (boo!).  I filled all the depressing squirrel holes (squirrel depression?) before I took a picture, but at least here are the nice sage blossoms.

Ignoring the squirrels for a moment, there were a couple of other nice things.  These hairy hens-and-chicks in the back are making little satellite babies.

And here's Cindy, hand-modeling a little green strawberry:

But, the ding-dang squirrels are a problem.  So I made some chicken-wire basket things to go over the tops of the pots.  I also got some organically raised seedlings from the excellent Silver Heights Farm Nursery at the farmer's market in Union Square last weekend, and our friend Robin (hi, Robin!) came over to help me do some gardening.  I don't have enough dirt to fill all my pots yet, so we stuck some of the seedlings in with seeds I had sewed previously - I wasn't sure if the squirrels had eaten all the squash seeds I planted anyway...

As I said, I was up on the roof last night putting some plastic around the roof hatch to see if that prevents leaking when it rains today, and I took the opportunity to check all the plants with my little flashlight.  The watermelon and squash seeds I thought the squirrels had gotten are now starting to sprout.  They weren't eaten after all!  And the rest of the plants look great.  In fact, the green roof sedum are starting to bloom, and for me, that makes all our little set-backs completely wash away.

Well, not completely, but you know what I mean.

P.S. Special thanks to my dear friend Dave for the pane of glass pun.  The butt crack was entirely my own.