Saturday Morning Home Repair is a weekly community gathering where we talk about all things houses. Bring your projects and your problems, and a gifted team of amateurs and professionals will do our best to help. We're a pretty friendly bunch, so don't be afraid to post what seems like stupid questions. We save all scoffing for the idiot who owned the house before you.
It's been a while since I posted, but join me after the orange danish for some pictures of stupid, cool, and more.
First the cool. May was a month of family projects, so I haven't been here very much. The first big even was the Quick & Dirty Boatbuilding Competition. The goal: build a boat out of $100 in materials in 6 hours, then race it in the marina. This happens every year on the second Saturday in May on the Seattle waterfront. This year was my fourth or fifth time competing, and was special because my two daughters (10 and 15) were in the competition with me. Here's our finished boat, built on a wood frame with a tarp skin, with two paddlewheels. Unfortunately, we had mechanical difficulties with the axle bending leading to the paddlewheels hitting the hull. We weren't the slowest boat, though.
Last weekend, my older daughter's rocketry club went to an event in Eastern Washington called Fire in the Sky. At this event, children of all ages (including children on Social Security, if you get my drift) launch rockets of all sizes, from 6-inch models on an A motor that go to a couple hundred feet to two-stage beasts on M motors going to the ceiling of 14,000 feet. The shot below is a 6-foot tall rocket lifting off of the high-power pad. That one went up to about 4 or 5,000 feet. The rocket on the far right was built by a senior at my daughter's school.
These are a bunch of 6-foot tall Saturn V models that one of the attendees was flying.
On from rocketry to civil infrastructure. We're building the world's largest deep-bore tunnel in Seattle right now, with a finished inside diameter of 54 feet. It will carry four lanes of traffic under Downtown Seattle. I happened to see the 750-ton cutter head being lowered into the pit this morning on my ride to work.
And finally, it's time for the stupid. Almost two months ago, I was out helping my grandmother clean up her house for sale. It had gotten to be too much for her, especially after my grandfather died about a year ago. In the process of cleaning up, we found some extremely, um, interesting work that Grandpa had done on the house. He had many fine qualities, but he was not one to let good sense or anything else stand in the way of an idea he had gotten. This was the result, which I believe started life as a lawn edger. See if you can count all of the stupid on this item. One per customer please, no pushing, there's plenty for everyone.
I believe that this piece of work was used to cut a water pressure tank in half so that it could be used as a planting pot in a water feature. If it wasn't a water tank, it was a propane tank, which scares me even more.
On my plate today is caulking the joint between the brick and the wooden eaves all around my house. I'm about half done, so the end is in sight.
What are you working on this weekend?