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ugly welds and successful solder blobs
Tuesday, August 25 2026
When I took Charlotte for her walk this morning, I also brought a plastic bag and went straight to the chanterelle patch along the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. I didn't put on any insect repellant first for two reasons: the mosquitoes aren't as bad as they'd been, and I didn't want to put any weird chemicals on things I was gathering with my hands to eat. There were plenty of chanterelles still there in the patch, though some were a little old and had either begun to decompose or dry out. Still, I was able to gather a good many of them. It came to over a pound. Charlotte disappeared before I even got to the chanterelle patch, so once I'd collected all that seemed good, I returned home. I found Charlotte snuggling with Neville in his corral.
Later I drove into town to run some errands. First I picked up of Gretchen's most controlled prescriptions (ambien and xanax) from the Uptown CVS, where they made me show my driver's license. Then I drove out to Lowes via Sawkill Road to get supplies both for finishing the spiral stair project at the cabin and for getting started installing that wind generator there. Lowes does not have 1.5 inch galvanized pipe, but they do have 1.5 inch black iron pipe. I would've preferred 12 feet of it for the pole to support the wind generator, but all they had was 10 foot pieces. I bought one of those, plus a compatible flange and a coupling. I then looked at the sheet metal in stock to see if I could use a piece of that to replace the oak landing at the top of the spiral stairs (since that wouldn't survive well out in the rain). But the material in stock was both flimsy and expensive. The last two things I selected was an eight four treated four by four (for another deck post I need) and an eight foot cedar four by four (to interface and buffer the steel at the top of the spiral staircase where it connects to the deck it is attaching to). While a treated four by four is maybe eleven dollars, a cedar one is $50. That's a huge price disparity, though it might be the result of tariffs on Canadian goods.
Back at the house, while Gretchen was in seemingly endless Zoom meetings, I consulted with ChatGPT on the best way to weld to a galvanized fitting. It suggested sensibly that I first sand away the zinc coating, so that was what I did. I then used my welding equipment to weld a baseplate sent with the wind generator to that coupling fitting, thereby giving it screws to attach to the top of that black iron pipe. I'm a terrible welder, and today I realized why: I can never see what I am welding when the welding mask goes dark, and so I end up feeling my way with the welding stick. This results in ugly lumps and voids, though my welds end up being solid. There is a ring I welded to a bolt something like fifteen years ago that gets yanked on as the tree that the bolt runs through tosses in the wind, and it's held all this time.
Then I turned my attention to one of my most procrastinated summer projects: fixing the leaks in our neighbor A's upstairs bathroom radiator. My first attempts had failed, but now that I had a reliable way to pressure test it, I could relax and try different things. The first thing I did was peel off the little copper patch I'd put over the most obvious leak. When I did that, I saw that there had been no solder at all under the patch, which accounted for why it hadn't stopped the leaking. I used steel wool to clean around that leak and the other leak I'd discovered and then just flowed solder over each. When I pressure tested it, it didn't leak at all! Because I wasn't confident that solder alone would form a lasting patch, I flattened some 12 gauge electrical copper (leftover from a household wiring project) to give it more of a rectangular cross-section, cut it and bent it into a C-shapes, and pushed them into the heated blobs of solder, where it could provide some additional structural support.
Since I was on something of a manly-man roll, I then used the chainsaw to begin cutting out a block of wood in my big red-oak chainsawed stool to separate its top (seat) from a shelf lower down. The stool is big and my chain blade is dull, so I was fighting to get things to be orthogonal. In the end, I cut a little further than I would've preferred into that shelf, but I think the stool will ultimately be a success.
When my brother Don called tonight, he immediately wanted to tell me about bees and some hormone in their bodies containing zinc that degrades as they age. I couldn't really follow what he was saying, and I had to have him repeat the word "zinc" several times before I figured out what he was saying. He had not yet heard about Dolly Parton's death, which happened earlier today.
I spent my second night in a row sleeping with Neville in his corral, since Gretchen would soon be sleeping with him for multiple days. As always, it took awhile for him to settle down and actually sleep. His pattern is to keep coming up with things to whimper about, such as a desire to go check the cat litter boxes for morsels to eat (there's no stopping that!) while I am trying to fall asleep.
A cardinal in the front yard today. Click to enlarge.
What I mean by ugly welds. Click to enlarge.
The patches in the radiator. Note the bits of flattened copper wire in the solder blobs. Click to enlarge.
One view of the stool after today's cuts. Click to enlarge.
Another view. Click to enlarge.
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