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found exhaust hood
Tuesday, June 24 2008
Ray and Nancy had returned from their upstate adventures yesterday and spent another night in our guest room, and, after a cup of coffee, returned to the city. Gretchen also headed south today, driving down to Maryland. At some point I took the dogs on a walk to the old abandoned go cart track to look for pieces of metal suitable for use as a stove exhaust hood. In replacing the microwave oven, which included an integrated exhaust hood for the stove beneath it, I needed to build an exhaust hood from scratch. On the way to the go car track, I ate numerous blueberries, as a first wave of them had just ripened.
I found a perfect piece of metal in the old go car track's kitchen. I suspect that the piece I found had once been the bottom panel of an oven. Back when the go cart track was an ongoing business, people would buy hot dogs and hamburgers, which were prepared in the kitchen. The roof of the kitchen has been gone for many years and the kitchen itself is full of detritus and the sort of soil that forms after dozens of autumns' worth of leaf falls. Most of the metal at the go cart track is dented or shot through with bullets, but not the piece I found today. I also found a rusty old high chair that I can probably make into a functional step stool. Ever since I taught myself how to weld, scrap iron and derelict steel object have seemed a lot more valuable to me.
After I returned home with my found steel stove hood, I went on another materials gathering mission up the Stick Trail, this time to an old bluestone mine about a quarter mile from the house. There are some large sheets of bluestone at this mine, and I gathered a monster and loaded it onto my handtruck. But there were problems. For starters, the bluestone at this mine is all somewhat bent, meaning that a large sheet will always have a hump in the middle. And then I noticed that one of the tubeless tires on my handtruck had blown out. Repressurizing a small tubeless tire isn't difficult (when I was a kid I discovered that rubber cement was an effective tubeless tire sealant), but it meant I had to take the handtruck all the way back home again to fix it. When I'd finally repaired the handtruck, the sheet of bluestone quickly proved unwieldy and difficult to move without expending incredible effort, mostly in my arms. [I didn't know it at the time, but all I would have had to do was rotate the sheet 90 degrees along a horizontal axis on the handtruck and it would have been much easier to move.]
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