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I've done major drivetrain repairs and junkyard transmission pulls in 3 feet of snow lying on a piece of cardboard after shoveling the snow out from underneath with a sun visor, pnw winters on the other hand are basically what New England calls fall and spring. I'm not too afraid of that. Hell, I lived in a house in New England with no furnace from 2011 through 2017. The blackberries might kill my rear end though. Holy poo poo I thought I was gonna die today a few times when a vine caught my foot and tripped me as I thrashed my way slowly through 8 foot deep thickets. I would have bled out before anyone could extract me. E: I think I just found the last leak in the roof too. It wasn't so much abandoned as my wife's grandparents just got too old to drive it safely and it needed a lot of work. kastein fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 07:07
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When does the house go on the market? Is it almost time to finally close the longest running saga on the forums? Sidenote goldmine this thread
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Oct 23, 2021 11:55
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Nevermind, was thinking this was the old house thread.
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Oct 23, 2021 19:05
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immoral_ posted:Nevermind, was thinking this was the old house thread. In a way, yeah.
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Oct 23, 2021 20:37
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UCS Hellmaker posted:When does the house go on the market? Is it almost time to finally close the longest running saga on the forums? This thread will need to be goldmined so you're not wrong.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:59
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Don't make assumptions like that, no one knows what the future holds. I hope it'll go well, but it might not. Today it rained its dick off for many hours more than it was supposed to. I did get a couple hours of dry weather though so I finished painting the roof around the refer+furnace chimney, put the cap back on it, scraped the old AC unit gasket off, put the new one on and got the unit situated and clamped down and hooked back up, etc. It then started raining again so I put the smashed up cap back on it and covered the hole with a garbage bag for now. Tomorrow we hopefully get the water heater, furnace, aux heater, and refrigerator working, once I've got the heat cranked I'll use that to test the AC and see if it works at all. If it doesn't I'm just going to plan on buying a new one in the spring, this one's definitely old enough to not be worth using and the install is literally 1 gasket and 3 wires.
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Oct 24, 2021 07:37
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Welcome to trying to build during 6 months of rain, or the "long dark" as we like to call it. Good luck! (I'm still stranded in a hellhole 5knmi away, eventually I'll be there to help)
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Oct 24, 2021 09:06
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kastein posted:Don't make assumptions like that, no one knows what the future holds. I hope it'll go well, but it might not. Either way, sounds like goldmine material.
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Oct 24, 2021 13:40
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EVERYWHERE 
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Elviscat posted:Welcome to trying to build during 6 months of rain, or the "long dark" as we like to call it. I'm not too worried about building in it since it'll all be easy after getting it dried in, but maintaining vehicles in it sucks. And thanks - let me know anytime you're in the area and need a hand. I'm always down to break things on someone else's house instead of my own.
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Oct 24, 2021 21:29
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Today: - verified we are roof leak free! Still need a new cap for the AC unit but the garbage bag over it is doing the trick for now. - got the water heater working - verified the furnace works - verified the catalytic heater works - verified the AC works! - got the fridge pilot light to light. Haven't determined if it actually works yet, will check it in the morning - pulled the really UV blasted window frame from the door without breaking the glass or frame at all so I could measure the rough opening - leveled the RV so the fridge would work... - without remembering I leaned the glass on the side - now we need a new window for the door, whoops At this point I think the fridge, auto AC, and some other things I'm forgetting are the only really important systems that are either non functional or not verified functional yet.
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Oct 25, 2021 02:57
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And the window 
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Oct 25, 2021 14:43
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UCS Hellmaker posted:And the window I still have that it's just uhhhh Some assembly required (I ordered a new one on Amazon. Turns out they're semi standardized)
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Oct 25, 2021 17:09
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You don't want to make it into a stained glass window with some jb weld and paint?
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Oct 25, 2021 17:14
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Galler posted:You don't want to make it into a stained glass window with some jb weld and paint? fast forward 5 years, there's a new cathedral on the NW coast of the USA
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Oct 25, 2021 23:26
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tangy yet delightful posted:fast forward 5 years, there's a new cathedral on the NW coast of the USA I will bring my broken rover and subaru offereings there to worship.
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Oct 25, 2021 23:32
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Motronic posted:I will bring my broken rover and subaru offereings there to worship. I stg if you fuckin leak on my unpolluted soil  (Shockingly the Honcho is the least leaky vehicle in the fleet right now. I should have fixed the leaks on the Buick and Comanche while I had their transmissions out...)
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Oct 26, 2021 00:53
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I cleared a bunch of blackberry and scotch broom yesterday before the rain came back, but forgot to take any pics. Was unsuccessful at finding the corner marker, it's still missing. At some point I'm going to get tired of looking for it and start stringing flagging tape through the woods till I get it straight, then run a surveyors tape. But I don't really feel like doing that through 660 feet of thorny hell so that's the last resort. The temporary gate posts are pounded in and we have a yellow steel chain gate for now. Hopefully no one steals it, I need to put a motion light and camera up. Today I put the new window in the RVs door and replaced the water heater anode during breaks in the rain. Hopefully the forecast isn't lying and I can get some stuff done without being rained on the next few days.  gently caress, who knows how long that's been in there and how much of the tank has dissolved. Hopefully not much.  This window is much less broken and the frame is much less UVed to death than the one that came with it. Also the glass isn't just flapping around now, I used dicor around the entire perimeter of the glass and frame on the outside. Not many repairs left before we can take this thing down to the property. Hopefully we can clear enough blackberries to do that in the next couple days.
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Oct 29, 2021 00:30
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Hey I keep getting recommended by ads this public/private land marker app - maybe give it a shot? I would if I was in same spot had a tree dispute but this was a few years ago and got a surveyor to fine the pins - now they are a year booked literally don’t know if it’s free or has a trial or what
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Oct 29, 2021 01:47
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The last few days have been absolutely beautiful and almost made up for the 2 weeks of rain in a row. I rented a Vermeer sc30tx stump grinder for twice the price I wanted to pay (Lowes here is useless, the website was playing coy about whether they had any rental tools and what the prices were, turns out they don't have any) but got it for 2 days for the price of one since the rental agency isn't open Sundays. So I killed like 9 or 10 of our stumps and then did 3 for the neighbor who stored the RV for us. This thing is way more heavy duty than the one I wanted to rent, but honestly not as big as I should have gotten. A few of our stumps were 2+ feet tall and right on the diameter limit for this thing. There isn't really an actual hard diameter limit but there is a practical one, above a certain diameter you have to take so many passes you will go nuts. The height limit is a hard limit, unless you pile dirt next to the stump to reach the top and reduce the pile by a foot or two once in a while.  ... BTW, in that last pic that's not a cloud on the horizon. It's a mountain. A mountain that's 50 or 60 miles away. I'm not sure I'll ever get used to seeing that out the living room window.  It looks like we're going back into the rainy season tomorrow but I hope to get the last corner post located before it starts back up around 11am. This one has been eluding me.
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Nov 1, 2021 06:11
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I hope you don't get used to the view, because that's awesome.
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Nov 1, 2021 17:26
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I believe that may be a volcano, sir.
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Nov 1, 2021 21:33
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Still have not found the loving corner post what the gently caress We got the RV registered in Washington finally (after 4 trips to the DoL and multiple rounds of emails with the DoR... What a pain) and can drive it anywhere anytime now. Also got a bunch of used chain link fence from my in-laws (they had just had a few fence put in and wanted it gone at the same time as we were looking for cheap or free fencing... Win win!) and brought it down, and found another 2 of the barn corner stakes elviscat and I put in a year ago. Still short one corner marker on the barn even though I looked for it today. I think I'm just gonna measure the last few things to narrow corner locations down more at this point. It's getting ridiculous. Well company says we need a larger generator for the pump so we'll probably run the harbor freight generator for that and refill the RV with it or something so it's not running at night.
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Nov 6, 2021 07:15
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Well. It rained a bunch again (fucks sake... ENOUGH) and so I ended up working on small projects instead of out in the woods. One, we need a chicken coop. One that I can build at the in-laws close to Lowes and move to the property easily after it's done. Did you know harbor freight sells road legal chicken coop frames?  I tossed some corrugated plastic roofing on it before it started raining again last night. Today was beautiful, so we headed out to the property to clear more invasive species and I worked on finding the last corner stake. First I fiddlefucked around with the metal detector and found nothing, again. So I gave up and finally decided to just use the huge tape measure... Here's the parcel again:  I'd already found the SW corner a week or two ago, and our neighbor had surveyors in to stake his parcels so the NE and SE corners are now known. I had measured the 330' from the NE corner to near where I thought the NW corner was a few weeks ago but couldn't find it. So I dragged my 300' tape measure through 660' of blackberries. It took a couple hours of wading, cutting, dragging the tape measure, clearing enough vines for it to run straight-ish in the approximate direction I thought it needed to go, staking and flagging, etc etc but I got all the way up to the NW corner in the afternoon and... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1blcXU20Qo It turns out I couldn't find the corner marker because my assumption about where it was? I searched everywhere from 30 feet in one direction from the road to 50 feet in the other direction.  I never looked literally in the drat road. The white X is where my tape measure said to look, and given what I thrashed through and around I'm not surprised I was 6.5 feet off, that's only about 1% error. I finally just gave up and said you know what? The tape measure says it's in the road. I'm gonna get the metal detector out and dig everywhere it says there's something. Eventually found it, 6 inches down. So now I know where the easement stops on that side (30 feet from that pipe in the ground) and have all 4 corners found. I can start drawing an ever-straighter line between the two Western corners now, I got it pretty close today but the middle section isn't great yet. Once it's perfectly straight I can figure out how big the barn can be and start drafting plans. kastein fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 06:59
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kastein posted:
I have bad news about the next 6 months.
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Nov 9, 2021 07:17
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Hexaoct posted:I have bad news about the next 6 months. Yeah I know. I HAVE BEEN INFORMED that the amount of rain last month and so far this month has already far exceeded normal total through end of this month. And that it's normally not this crazy. And that this is normally the rainiest month and then it just goes back down to a steady workable drizzle until... Like... 6 months from now. I'm not sure I believe it but we'll see. I also don't really plan to give a crap if it's raining or not once these buildings are dried in, if it is going to rain excessively I will just work on projects inside, no big deal. I've got probably 30 or 40 years worth of project ideas stacked up and I still have to like, work and make money 40 hours a week instead of having fun for a while yet. The rain is just being a severe pain in my rear end exactly when I have to be outside prepping for construction and making all the things waterproof so the rest can be worked on without being rained on.
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Nov 9, 2021 07:38
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kastein posted:The rain is just being a severe pain in my rear end exactly when I have to be outside prepping for construction and making all the things waterproof so the rest can be worked on without being rained on. Yep, that's exactly where I am too. I wanted to get things weatherproof before October but failed, and now everything takes 10x as long. So what's the deal with the road running through your property? Is that what the easement is for? Also did you consider using a laser measure instead of tape? You'd still have to use interim markers but at least you'd only need line of sight.
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Nov 9, 2021 09:14
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Yeah, there's a 30ft easement off the top of my parcel and another off the bottom of the adjoining parcel and the road goes nearly exactly down the middle of the two, only about 4-5ft off center. I did consider a laser measure but I don't have any bright enough to throw a beam that far in full sunlight and I don't really like going out there in the pouring rain, which has happened every single night. I might just get a super powerful illegal import laser pointer and a crappy tripod or something, but I've been trying to avoid spending too much money on this problem until now as I didn't even know where to point it yet. Even so, there's some fair slope to the ground on the last few hundred feet so I'll have to do it in sections either way. And there are likely to be trees stubbornly in the beam.
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Nov 9, 2021 10:57
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Yeah it's not ideal, gotta choose between "gently caress the tape is snagged again" and "gently caress where's the loving dot".
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Nov 9, 2021 14:14
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You never mentioned the loving tiger mural on the back of the camper.
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Nov 9, 2021 18:46
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rdb posted:You never mentioned the loving tiger mural on the back of the camper. I have the same comment.
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Nov 9, 2021 20:17
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You're right. I thought I had, but I checked all the threads it would have gone in and I didn't post it anywhere. Probably because my phone was on its last legs at the time and actually broke completely about a day after we got to Washington in the RV, so I was occasionally borrowing Britt's phone to check messages and Facebook but she doesn't have the awful app or imgur installed so I didn't post it here at the time, and I forgot to come back and upload pics after I recovered them from my broken phone. Whoops. The Trek Safari series got airbrushed murals on the back in some option packages. Ours is even signed by the artist, from the factory. I kind of wish they'd spent that money on building it out of things other than 1/8" "structural" plywood, gobs of glue, and drywall screws...
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Nov 9, 2021 20:30
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kastein posted:Yeah, there's a 30ft easement off the top of my parcel and another off the bottom of the adjoining parcel and the road goes nearly exactly down the middle of the two, only about 4-5ft off center. Perhaps you could try bodging together a plane table? Basically all you need is a flat(ish) surface, a large copy of your lot plan (or even just plots of the corner angles) and something to sight down. Not terrifically accurate but good enough to push a line at least some of the way down.
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Nov 9, 2021 22:02
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I looked at that link and I still can't figure out how the hell I'm supposed to use it. What am I missing? I absolutely have no idea what I'm doing as a surveyor. In any case, I think that project step is officially unimportant at this point. I erred on the side of caution with my first round of measurements and the "line" bows into our parcel as a result. And I still meet all minimum setback codes, even if I build this barn 90 feet long which is absurd. So finding the actual property line is on hold until I sell the Mass house and hire a real surveyor to do a full parcel survey and layout. Today we cleared blackberries and scotch broom, and I cleared out a section of logging slash pile that was going to be directly in the way of backing the RV into its spot and moved a bunch of slippery half rotten branches out of the driveway that were probably going to get the RV stuck. I think we're going to need a few yards of roadbase to make the driveway RV-passable but it's getting close.
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Nov 11, 2021 08:17
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kastein posted:And there are likely to be trees stubbornly in the beam. Only if your laser is underpowered.
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Nov 11, 2021 12:49
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Unfortunately I didn't get to take any class 4s with me when I left IPG Photonics. would come in pretty handy right now
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Nov 11, 2021 18:34
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You're american, buy a gun. Who needs a stream of particles when a really big one will do.
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Nov 11, 2021 19:20
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We have already shot our  guns on the property but have a firm "no shooting our trees" policy. Hug our trees if you wish, but do not shoot them.
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Nov 11, 2021 21:51
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kastein posted:I looked at that link and I still can't figure out how the hell I'm supposed to use it. What am I missing? I absolutely have no idea what I'm doing as a surveyor. no big deal, I was wavering on if I should share it, but thought I'd throw it out there just in case it might save some labour. The actual principle, if you're still curious, is dead simple. If you have a scale plan of the lot, the angles between legs of the boundary don't change no matter how large you project it. So you lie the plan over the marker you found, look back towards the other front marker and rotate the plan so that the boundary line on the paper points toward the second marker. The plan is now oriented to match the real world. You can then look down the long leg to see which way the line you've cut is drifting and by how far. Refinements such as having something to rest it on*, sighting along the lines with a straight ruler or small plank, or plotting out the angles on a larger sheet of paper will increase the accuracy. *Resting a clipboard on the top of a fence post has worked well for me in the past when I've been looking for pegs without any equipment on hand. Most recently it got me from 20m accuracy to 1m accuracy, allowing me to walk onto a missing peg.
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Nov 12, 2021 07:47
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That makes sense, thanks. Unfortunately I don't have a good plan (aside from the half rear end one I can pull from the county GIS maps) but it's a lovely jpeg and doesn't have any angle measurement, just length of 4 sides. I guess I could use the angle measure tool but I'm not confident I can get a solid angle on that. And... Since I'm an amateur and working in a thicket of blackberries I don't even have a straight line of sight to the other line I'd need to measure angle from  Basically I don't have poo poo for info. I am glad I now understand what you suggested, but... No can do.
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Nov 12, 2021 08:28
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I put a better (i.e. working... At all) rear view camera on the house. Pretty happy with it so far, works nicely, we'll see how long it lives. The tiger is not very amused that I've put zipsystem tape over the crushed factory camera "wart" until the rainy season is over. I'll fiberglass it correctly once it's dry out.   The best part? This camera is so much smaller that even with the giant bundles of extra cable, it will fit inside the wall... Even once I remove the factory "wart".  Which means reclaimed bathroom cabinet space! Always a good thing. There are 3 little wire loops you can clip to change the camera configuration. The only one I have clipped so far is the one for the horizontal/vertical mounting options, it rotates the image 180°. There is another to turn off the guideline overlay image which I'll probably clip since the lines are intended for a much lower mounting position and smaller vehicle, but we want to try it this way before clipping the wire. And another that flips the image left-right so it gives you the "over the shoulder" view instead of the rear view mirror view. We haven't clipped that one as we both feel it will be more intuitive. The image quality degraded quite a bit when I put the 35ft of coax installed by the factory in the circuit, but we are living with that for now as we likely will be replacing it when rebuilding the roof structure. It works "well enough" for now, so not worth tearing into the ceiling to fish the new cable in unless it's truly easy to do. Another feature I expect to add is a switching diode to automatically feed 12V to the camera from the reverse light circuit, so the camera will come on without hitting the switch (but can be turned on manually if desired as well) but I haven't done that yet, mostly because I haven't decided where the best cable routing for it is.
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Nov 16, 2021 01:36
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