New Deck

Ok its not the kind of deck most people think of but it is a deck.

The side of the driveway drops off into a rainwater wash which didn't allow the the trash cans to sit flat, so I decided to build a smal 3'x5' deck to put them on. Now they dont tip over into the bushes and its much easier to put items in them. Matty had a good time cutting up the boards.

Movers From Hell Pt5

After 80+ hours of my own time, numerous phone calls, 30+ emails and much frustration. I was able to sign an agreement for pretty much every cent I felt we lost through the move.

Now its just a matter of if they lose the check or not.

Dining Room Table

Tania and I finally finished up a project that we both thought would not take nearly as much time as it did.

When we first moved into our home in Indy, 14 years ago we bought our first dining room table from one of those generic oak furnature stores. Within a year most of the finish on it had come off and from that point on we talked many times about sanding it down and refinishing it. In reality putting a table cloth on it was a much easier solution.

The last week of November we decided to go ahead and refinish it. Because of its condition finish stripper wasn't the way to go, so we completely sanded it to the natural wood. After staining it for the first time, it was apparent that 220 wasn't fine enough and had left scratches. We sanded it down with 320 and applied another coat of stain. Once that was done we waited for a clear warm weekend to spray on a clear finish. I didn't thin the finish enough and it came out with valleys in the wood grain. So we sanded it down again, restained it and because of the rain that weekend I decided to brush the finish on it. Again it was too thick and again we sanded it back down, restained it and last weekend I brushed on the first of two very THIN coats.

Saturday I sanded the first coat with some 320 and put on another very THIN coat of clear and for the first time in two months its back in the dining room looking all shiney and new. I don't know if I will ever get all of the sawdust out of the garage, but on the plus side I don't think Tania is any hurry to do the chairs.

Work

I don't ever post much about work, too many issues with doing so. The last few weeks I have been working 70+ hours a week and by the time I get home I eat and pass out. The following picture is one of the reason for being so busy.

I am posting this picture because it is fairly unique. I barely understand how to operate my camera and between the logistics of positioning the aircraft and the time of day I was happy with how the picture turned out. A nice sunny evening in Tucson, with snow on the mountains and an CRJ that is thousands of miles away from where it belongs in northern France.

Old Snap-on

Since I bought my roll away in 89 I have always wanted a top box for it. When I was actually using the box in San Fran it would have been easy to justify buying one but I never did. After the side box was stolen in the move I started looking a bit harder for one.

My roll away is one of the smallest Snap-on makes, the closest one to it today retails for about 1,000.00. Unfortunately its cheaper than the top box which retails for around 1,200.00 and the middle box for around 700.00. So when I seen an add on Craigslist for an "older" Snap-on top and middle box for 250.00 I had to go take a look.

The gentleman that had them for sale was probably in his late 60's and they were buried in the corner of his garage. After looking them over a bit and a small amount of negotiation we loaded them in the back of my truck for 220.00.

The paint isn't perfect on them and there are a few dings, but the drawers work perfectly and he had the original matched keys for the locks.

I started to wonder if there was any collectors value to them being by the appearance of the logos they were "older" boxes so I did some searching on the internet.

There were actually very few sites that even cover old Snap-on boxes. From the small amount of time I spent looking it appears that the collectors value of them is minimal because most mechanics want large boxes and this was as big as it got for their time.

From what I did find these were made sometime between 1950 and 1953 and the same model was made up until the mid 90s. I can't be exact on the date because Snap-on was not consistent at using date codes on everything during this time period. Another reason there probably isn't a huge collectors market.

Regardless I am more than happy with the cost and the functionality of the boxes, now I am finding out just how expensive foam is to shadow the drawers.

The Bench

Now that I have a nice stand for my mitre saw I decided to build something. Decisions like that are made much easier when it's actually something you can use. Working nights I get ready for work around 11:00 pm and usually Tania is asleep by then. To keep from waking her I get dressed in the bathroom. The only problem with this is the only place to sit and put my shoes and socks on is the edge of the tub. Our tub has a narrow, short, slick edge which makes this a bit difficult. After sliding around on it one too many times I decided to build a bench.

Since the engine was stolen for the father son project I had planned with Matty, I decided to get him involved with this.

Tania and I spent a Saturday afternoon at the home improvement store picking out pieces of pine for the bench. Because it was just going to be painted to match the bathroom, pine was more than good enough for what I needed.

The hardest parts of the build were keeping Matty interested in it and painting it.

After finding an old can of paint from when our house was built we got it matched and even with the "No primer needed" paint it still took three heavy coats of paint to cover the bench.

The bench was made with a small compartment inside because you cannot ever have enough spaces to put stuff you dont need and never use.

I haven't made anything from wood in over 25 years and while this is far from any sort of masterpiece, I am happy with how it turned out. Tania didn't see a need for it but she uses it every morning.

Garage Updates

I had my the lighting in my garage 50% completed when I decided to do something different. I wasn't happy with the amount of light it was putting out and was less happy with how it looked.

Initially I had purchased some very cheap four foot lights that were designed to hang from chains and plug into an outlet. I drilled holes through these and screwed them directly to the ceiling. While researching  electrical code for hardwiring the lights, I found out that not only could I not hardwire them, I should not have mounted them any way other than by chain. It appears that the design of the light does not let the transformer cool properly unless its hanging.

The following weekend I purchased the lights I should have bought in the first place, they were five times the cost of the ones I had originally purchased. This is a case of you get what you pay for and I am very happy with the lighting in the garage now.

I have four of the six lights I purchased, installed, I stil need to move the Nova and put the remaining two lights above it. They don't take that long to install, its the decision I made to run the wiring internally that takes a lot of time.

Internet Problems

Since we have moved into our new home our internet access has been very poor. In Indiana we had Comcast cable internet and while it wasn't the fastest it did work very well. Moving into our new home our choices were limited to either satellite or Cox cable. The advertized connection speeds through Cox were much faster than Comcast but of course the reality once we were connected was quite different. After numerous service calls, replacement of F-connectors and splitters I felt we had a stable connection. Two weeks ago it quit working again.

This time it appeared to be a hard fault and after a few hours I was able to determine it was our six year old wireless router. After some research and a quick trip to Best Buy I was back home with a new WNDR3700 Netgear Dual Band N-Draft router. The setup was quick and easy although the only real way to do it was manually, the supplied software is not compatible with 64 bit operating systems. My home network speeds both wired and wireless immediately jumped from transfer rates of 2.0mbps to 10mbps, unfortunately my internet access was virtually nonexistent. Feeling good that my equipment was in order I made the call to Cox again and to my surprise they had a tech at my house the very next day, a Sunday even.

The tech could find nothing wrong with the connection he changed a couple of F-connectors and replaced the cable modem as a precaution. The connection was working as he packed up and before he had been gone for five minutes it went down again.

That week it worked sporadically and by that Friday night had gone completely out again. After screwing around with it all week and researching the problem I found I was not the only one having this problem with this router and I was unable to find a positive fix for it. Since I did not feel I should need to spend 170.00 on a router that obviously required a lot of troubleshooting to make it work, I packed up the new Netgear router and headed back to Best Buy to exchange it for another. They of course had no more of Netgear’s flagship so I picked up a Cisco WRT610N which didn't have as good reviews and was 30.00 more expensive.

Once I had it hooked up my internet worked flawlessly and the speeds were better than even advertized by Cox.

Speed achieved with new Cisco N-Draft router

The last speed test was done connected wirelessly. My laptop does have an Intel 5100 series wireless card which supports N-Draft at a connection speed of 150 Mbps versus the draft speed of 300 Mbps. The G connection speed was of course 54 Mbps. I never have seen much of a difference (with the original router) in either internet connection or my home network speeds wither I was using wireless or wired. The best speeds I had seen with the old G router were in the 7Mb/s range, with an average of around 4Mb/s.  The disparity between the download speed and upload speed is due to Cox using upload compression.

I'm very happy with the new router, I had not been really looking at them or keeping up on what was available. It has a USB port for ftp,http and network access to a drive. Being dual band my wife’s laptop or Matty’s PSP/PS3 connecting to it won’t drop my connection to the slower G band.

Hopefully I'll be able to get another six to seven years out of it before I need to go through that again.

Blog Move

Over new years the SQL database for my blog became corrupted again and I lost many of my older posts. Because I don't really have the time to figure out what is causing the problem on my server, I have decided to move my blog to Google. It also eliminates the issues with my ISP blocking ports and using redirects.

Christmas

Tania, Matty and I had a nice Christmas with just the three of us.

Because of the school canceling the orchestra, I wanted Matty to continue playing his bass. To keep his interest active with it we decided to buy him an electric bass and amplifier for Christmas.

It's hard to see in the picture but the Ibanez bass is a dark blue sunburst. The amplifier is a 10 watt studio amp with multiple sound functions. It also allows for music player amplification as well as headphones (very important).

He has played it non-stop for the last week.

Tania is a bit harder to buy for, she normally buys whatever she needs. This year was much easier, her watch had stopped working properly for the last few weeks so I got her a Citizen Eco Drive solar powered watch. Tania has a thing about watches without numbers on the face, so this one fit the bill perfectly

Knowing me like she does, she bought me an awesome stand for my Rigid saw. Something I had been looking at for a while but had not bought because I could not justify the cost versus need.

It is a Rigid MS-UV or Miter Saw Utility Vehicle. It has extensions on both ends which pull out to triple its length and those extensions have support legs that are inside the extension. The entire unit folds up and stands on end with the saw attached for storage. No more kneeling on the floor to cut wood!