Last weekend was spent prepping for taxes, and we met with the accountant on Friday. Unfortunately, her internet was out due to the most recent Nor'easter that dropped a foot of wet, heavy snow on New England. So I won't know what the damage will be for another couple of days.
Speaking of the storm and damage, we lost a medium sized pine in the woods next to our house. I'm shocked we didn't hear this one come down as it is on the same side of the house as our bedroom. Once the snow melts, I'll chop it up and will also probably put some cable bracing on the remaining pines to keep them from falling toward the house.
Here are a few more shots around the property of all the snow and subsequent clearing operations last Thursday.
Today, I went out to the garage intent on putting up the outside trim around the garage doors, but it was just too darn cold. So, I decided to work in the other heated garage. First, I scrapped a Craftsman radial arm saw that I bought at an estate sale a few weeks ago. I got it for $50, and there's a $100 recall on them from the manufacturer. I felt a little bad about doing so, as this saw had been used for little over its lifetime. But, scrapping it will pay for
everything else I got that day.
I saved whatever I could off of it, and other than a few items EOCJason asked for, I'll put everything else up on Ebay for other users who don't scrap their saws.
The next thing I did was finish routing the 4" PVC utility pipe into the old garage. I used a variety of tools (12"-long drill bit, variable hole saw, utility knife and Sawzall) to make the opening through the cedar siding, the plywood and the drywall. Fortunately, I missed the stud in the wall by a few hair-widths and the hole was much tighter than the one in the new garage. I still need to caulk it, but it is pretty air tight.
I realize now that I took zero pictures of the pipe installation. I'll take some tomorrow when I go back and caulk it.
Last thing today was routing the compressed air line through the utility pipe. Months ago I bought a Rapidair Maxline kit that comes with 100' of flexible 3/4" vinyl-coated aluminum tubing, thinking it would be easy to snake it through my utility pipe. However, I had my doubts when I started to unroll the coiled tubing--it was very stiff! After second guessing myself and pricing jackhammer-sized 3/4" rubber lines on Amazon (twice as much as my kit for a hundred feet!), I decided to give the Rapidair tubing the ol' college try.
One thing I knew for certain I would need was some kind of nose piece for the leading end of the tubing. I expected the pipe to catch on some elbow lip halfway down the pipe and get stuck. I mulled it over a bit and decided to make what I needed on my lathe.
I scrounged through my collection of estate sale scraps and found 4-inch length of plastic rod of the right diameter. I rounded off one end into a bullet shape, and then drilled a 5/8" hole down the middle for the rope to come out. I then swapped the leader around in the chuck and drilled a larger hole in the bottom, the same size as the outside diameter of the tubing. This allowed the leader to sit down over the end of the tube and because the rope would be pulling from the middle of the bullet shape, there would be no sharp edges to catch. The last step was to drill radially through the leader and the tubing so that I could poke the rope out and tie it to the tubing below the leader, locking both firmly together.
Here are a few shots of the lathe work.
And here's the leader sticking out of the far end of the tubing.
Speaking of the ol' college try, I had to call on my son and his college friend (both home for Spring Break) to pull on the rope at the distant end and uncoil the tubing behind me as I pushed it into the near end. We only got stuck twice, but both times we were able to back up and hit it again, pushing past whatever had stopped us. I pulled all but 25 feet through the pipe and will hook up the near end tubing to my existing distro system tomorrow. I have a few other goodies to install in the air compressor system that I'll detail then.
Thanks for reading!
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Sooo glad all that white **** isn't in my yard!