Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   paint survived the heat of soldering
Sunday, September 18 2005
Coming back from a housecall near Saugerties, I inevitably stopped at Lowes for more supplies, most of them for things needed to bring my laboratory in compliance with building codes, a huge week-long tangent from my solar project. Back when I was working on the boiler room plumbing phase of the project, after I'd built the deck but before I'd begun the panel or run the 150 feet of copper pipe, I remember thinking "this project has too many steps and I'm never going to finish it!" That was before the building inspector appeared on the scene to hand me my unexpected laboratory assignments. It's demoralizing unless I mentally divide it all up into a bunch of milestones, which gives me a sense of accomplishment as I pass each one. In the original project, the solar deck itself was supposed to be such a milestone, useful even if I didn't proceed with the solar stuff. But now that has been thrown into question, destroying the foundation of a whole month and a half of work.
When I returned home Gretchen told me that the electrical inspector she'd ordered up as part of the laboratory inspection had randomly dropped by, without warning, while I'd been out. He'd tested some plugs and then been puzzled by a place where I'd buried some electrical wires beneath the drywall. Those wires had actually disappeared into an electrical box, which I knew was a violation, but now they end in electrical plugs. I'm not sure what the code says about buried conventional wires that can be disconnected by the process of unplugging. But the happy news about his impromptu inspection was that he didn't expect a room full of empty boxes and he had no interest in opening any of the boxes that had switches or outlets in them.

I did a little work on the laboratory handrail subproject, something I've been doing in small increments for several days. From the start I knew the material I'd be using would be iron or steel, since wooden rails would have to be built too ponderously to achieve sufficiently firmness. My first choice would have been hand rails removed from the abandoned passenger train cars parked out on the Esopus Valley floor (near the Hurley State Police Barracks), but when I went there the other day I found I couldn't turn any of the bolts or nuts holding them fast; thirty years of rust can be very emphatic. So the material I'm using is black iron pipe with threaded fittings of various types. Evidently iron pipe is often used in structural applications, because there are fittings available that make no sense for use in plumbing, particularly flanges and crosses. I'm finding that black pipe makes for a very solid rail if you put your back into tightening each of the fittings as you go.
Later I climbed up on the solar deck, drained the water out of the panel, and then did more soldering in an attempt to better bond the galvanized steel of the absorber plate to the pipes. This time I had 32 ounces of tin-copper "solder"1 wire, and I burned through about 85 percent of it in about an hour of work. I'd spray painted much of the panel yesterday using that high-temperature Rustoleum stuff, the kind used for painting wood stoves. Interestingly, the paint often survived the heat of soldering, floating as scum on the surface of pools of molten metal to form a cracked black surface once the solder solidified. As resistant as it was to heat, the Rustoleum came off without resistance when I wiped it with paint thinner.


1Technically, this alloy is usually referred to as "bronze" and "solder" is reserved for alloys of tin and lead. But lead isn't used in plumbing or electronics these days and our children are supposedly smarter because of it. I, for one, welcome our new, more intelligent, child overlords.


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