Storage 2

Saturday I spent most of the day on my stairwell access door. It was much more work than I had anticipated, mostly due to me wanting it to look good when it was complete and trying to do it as cheap as possible. Cutting the door at around 4.5 feet and remaking the jamb to compensate were just a couple things that added to the time.

Because I did go cheap I had to replace all the hardware on the door hinges with longer screws going into inserts, the original screws were loose and stripped.

The only items I have left to finish up are putting in the threshold, finishing up some of the insulation inside and painting it.

The area inside is smaller than I had envisioned but well worth the effort, it should make a good area to store odd shaped large items like the fenders off the Nova.

Storage

There are things in life that just seem to be a rule, make more money, have less, get a better job, work harder, buy a bigger house, have less room.

For the last one I have an answer.

Our new home is much larger and much less cluttered but our storage areas are much less. Our last house had a walk up ceiling ladder in the garage leading into the attic. It was useful for a lot of my spare parts etc in the garage. If I really wanted to I could carry all the same items upstairs into the access hole in my sons room and try to move them up a ladder into a much more limited attic. For now though I decided to try something different.

The front wall of my garage is common to the pantry and staircase in the house. The pantry occupies the area under the staircase landing and is quite big, but until Tania mentioned it, I never really thought about the rest of the staircase. With ten foot ceilings and another three feet of dead space, the staircase is rather long. So last weekend while I was buying wood for my mini deck, I bought a door and a few other items to go through the wall in the garage and on into the stairwell.

After measuring twice and still cutting in the wrong spot I now have an opening started in the right area. Right now it's slow going because I had no idea how it was laid out inside. It looks like I will be able to put in about a five foot tall door. Its much higher than that inside but due to the way the staircase is built I can only take it up that tall.

The amount of money I spent on the door and supplies makes this some very cheap stoarge and most of the large items I had in the attic of my old house should fit in this area, I may even put in some shelving.

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.