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monkeybounce posted:^^^^ Except these.
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Jan 20, 2008 04:11
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Bad Angus! Bad!
NEVER use a screwdriver as a chisel or prying device.
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Can I use regular spray paint on plastic? I want to dress up a big plastic toolbox (they're so boring once you take the sticker off the front). Of course, I didn't think of this brilliant idea until I got home from WalMart, so I'd like to use the paint I already have. I also don't want to buy a whole can of Krylon Fusion for one tiny project. (Guess why I have the paint I have. Y'know, I don't think I even ever got around to the tiny project I bought this can for, though I've used a little here and there on other things.) The paint is Rustoleum flat protective enamel ("stops rust" product line), and the box has recycling code 05 PP, with a rough/matte surface (I'll sand it if needed).
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Jan 24, 2008 20:36
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poeticoddity posted:I've never used styrene before. Would it be feasable to cut the thinner sheets with an x-acto knife? Also, do you know if there are any propellants or other chemicals common in spray paints which would damage styrene? Oh, wait, I do! Rustoleum vs. polystyrene cup (the kind you use at a kegger, not foam): Yeah, it melts. Not immediately, though. You could probably get a one-shot stencil out of it, but it'll fall apart in a few minutes.
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Jan 24, 2008 22:00
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Cakefool posted:I have bought an Art. Carlton Banks Teller posted:I have a 20lb monitor I'd like to mount on a wall, ideally with plenty of stud support. The wall in question is from a home built in the 70s that appears to have studs spaced 50 inches apart.  Get a stud finder ($10 or so at Home Depot). They may be oddly spaced, but four loving feet seems just a tiny bit excessive.Edit: if you used a stud finder to find them 50" apart, I'd suggest trying a different stud finder. Or move out before the house falls in on you. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Feb 5, 2008 |
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Feb 5, 2008 09:45
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Cakefool posted:Do you have a picture of the sawtooth -looking things? Here's a random internet picture:  They usually come in a big ol' box of miscellaneous home fasteners for $5, along with hooks to put on the wall. How big/heavy is it?
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Feb 5, 2008 15:03
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Cakefool posted:So these nail to the back of the frame, sawtooth down? and the hook goes behind this and engages in the teeth to stop it slipping? quote:About 3 kg, maybe 120cm wide, 30cm high. I was thinking two of these saw-magijs?
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Feb 5, 2008 22:44
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RealKyleH posted:I am not sure what you mean cut to close to the stuff inside though. I will be cutting the excess edges off and cutting them into 4 rectangles.
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Apr 13, 2008 13:40
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What's the best way to strip paint off concrete? I've been contracted to repaint my grandmother's porch, and want to get as much of the old paint off as possible so the new sticks better. I've already used a scraper to get the really flaky bits off, but I want to tear it down to bare concrete. There's a Harbor Freight just up the street, and she says she'll pay for (cheap) tools. I'm thinking angle grinder + wire wheel. Any better ideas? Edit: and if the $20 Chicago Tool or whatever the current cheap Chinese import brand is survives the job, I'll have an angle grinder! Hmm, maybe I should accidentally cut some bars out of the porch rail so she'll buy me an arc welder . . . 
Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Aug 16, 2008 |
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Aug 16, 2008 03:18
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GWBBQ posted:Generally, when you see something like that, it's not so much that everyone agreed to a standard as everyone copied the first one that did it. Yeah, the first company had a massive head start/market share and if anybody else wanted to sell blades they'd have to be compatible. Then other companies wanted to get in with cheap knockoff saws but not bother with proprietary blades and so used the same blades as everybody else, leading to a de facto standard. It happens fairly often with things of that nature, not that I can remember any other examples at the moment (well, guns are one: consider your old standard pistol cartridges, 9mm and .45 -- each was originally developed for a specific model of gun, then the gun was adopted by the military, leading to a bunch of surplus ammo, so civilian gunsmiths built guns to use it, and then civilian ammunition makers made fancy loads for it, etc.).
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Oct 21, 2011 08:12
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Moving into a '99 Fleetwood 16'x80' mobile home this weekend, and have some questions about how much I can modify it. Specifically, knocking a doorway between the two lesser bedrooms to convert them to a suite, like so:  I doubt any interior walls of a trailer house are load-bearing, so it's probably safe enough to take a Sawzall to the closet wall, but do I need to pull a permit for that? In Texas if it matters, PM me for city if you care enough to actually look poo poo up. Resale value isn't a concern, I paid $7k and plan on living there for the foreseeable future. (Goth hobbit hole because the previous owner's teenage son painted it solid flat black with glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.) Also it has loving carpet in the master bath. WTF? What's the easiest/cheapest option for DIY bathroom flooring? Any ideas for a door for the oddly-sized opening between the bedroom and bathroom?  I don't like the cat watching me poop.
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Feb 20, 2015 01:05
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melon cat posted:Can I just break off epoxy in a bunch of bamboo skewers? "Fill it with wood glue and a bunch of toothpick" is indeed a time-honored tradition, in furniture repair at least. I'm not sure how it'd stand up for a wall-hangy thing.
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Feb 20, 2015 15:15
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slap me silly posted:Your fridge is broken and you should bug the landlord until they fix it. Yeah, that's the reason you're paying out the rear end for rent instead of a nice reasonable mortgage (well, and possibly bad credit and/or a host of other reasons). But one of the few perks of renting is that you can call up the landlord and get poo poo fixed at no additional charge. Sure, it might be a week before they actually get around to calling the repairman, but they will eventually. Conversely, one of the perks of being a homeowner is that while you do have to pay to fix whatever breaks, you can get it fixed on the day it breaks. (Sorry, I'm just bitter about my slumlord taking a week to send a guy to fix the A/C in the middle of Texas summer and two days to call a plumber when the water pipe froze and popped.) As for diagnosis, I have a working knowledge of refrigeration from going to work with my dad, sort of an apprenticeship without the actual learning of the craft. He did commercial/residential HVAC, but it's the same principle as a fridge, just on a different scale. Not cooling and water dripping down the walls means it's hosed. For your A/C, that means calling my dad to come out and put more Freon in it; for a fridge, it means having it replaced -- they're cheap enough that it's not worth finding/fixing the leak and refilling it, if they even have ports to add more refrigerant. Whatever the case, it's the landlord's problem.
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Feb 21, 2015 16:05
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The premixed fuel is a fairly recent invention for lazy people. People used chainsaws for thousands of years mixing it themselves. You're supposed to use special 2-stroke oil -- it's made to burn more cleanly and not gunk up the sparkplug -- but using regular motor oil, while sub-optimal (it'll foul your sparkplug and gunk up the exhaust port) won't kill it. Although I'd imagine even the grocery stores out in the sticks carry 2-stroke oil. Unless you're posting via satellite from the middle of the Amazon jungle or something.
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Jun 3, 2015 11:24
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kid sinister posted:Capacitors sort of work like batteries, but with opposite qualities: caps charge to full capacity extremely fast, but don't have near the capacity of a chemical battery. They also don't have near the shelf life of a battery: they discharge extremely quickly too. The bigger a cap, the longer it can hold a charge, while still giving up that charge in an instant. If you got a shock from a cap that big across your heart, it could screw up it's rhythm and, if you're having the worst luck of your life that day, kill you. Well, the resistor is there to slowly discharge the cap while the unit is turned off. So yeah, the resistor is there to prevent an extremely unlikely occurrence. Don't catch anything anybody throws at you in an HVAC shop. Fun prank: wrap one of those bigass starter caps loosely in a ball of foil and toss it at the new guy; he'll most likely instinctively catch it, crushing the foil onto the contacts. Makes a hell of a bang. quote:I got a contactor story. I once had a ant colony move into my condenser outside. Now a contactor is an electromechanical device, with moving parts. Well, those ants had built up so many of their dead bodies on the contacts of my contactor that the circuit couldn't complete. After an ant eviction and filing on the contacts a bit, it worked once more.
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Jun 13, 2015 23:00
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dwoloz posted:I have a new metal shop with studs spaced a very distant 5ft. Id like to mount shelves but struggling to find a suitable way that will support a good amount of weight. Thoughts? kid sinister posted:Thirding get free standing shelves. I really want to get gondola shelving (i.e., the shelving in grocery stores) for my shed. Holds a decent amount of weight, doesn't have the boxiness of freestanding solutions. Unfortunately for your shop it has to be bolted to the wall to hold a lot of weight on a one-sided application, and it' only comes in 2', 3', and 4' widths. On the other hand, "a lot of weight" in this application is a packed-full 60' run of canned veg or bottled water, it should be fine for shop storage as long as you're not using it to store a whole lot of steel stock. On the other other hand, you have a metal shop with metal studs. Weld in some stringers to mount your preferred shelving solution to. (I rearrange grocery stores for a living. I've seen one fall over. It was glorious. I've also been party to all-hands-on-deck holding up the glass aisle -- salad dressing, pickles, pasta sauce, etc. -- while two guys frantically threw shelves on the empty side and piled on cases of bottled water.) Edit: If you want to hold some real weight, Madix is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of the industry, they also do pallet racks and such. Probably pretty expensive to buy new if they'll even sell to a guy off the street, but keep an eye out for stores going out of business and selling the fixtures. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Oct 15, 2015 |
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Oct 15, 2015 03:04
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Get a painter's plastic dropcloth/package of trash bags (if the former, cut it into suitably-sized rectangles) and a roll of duct tape, replace as necessary?
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Jan 27, 2016 13:27
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Hashtag Banterzone posted:Is it exactly 17' of pipe? Could you do like 10' and an 8' piece with a coupling? Most black steel pipe that I've seen at the big box stores comes in 8', 10' and sometimes 12' lengths. If you can't piece it together with off the shelf lengths, some hardware stores will cut and thread steel pipe for you. Looks like it's multiples of 2' -- I just bought a couple of 4' pieces the other day for two sets of NIB Pony 52 clamps the previous owner left behind (her ex-husband bought them and never took them out of the box, I guess). I toddled on down to hometown hardware and got two pieces of 4' black pipe for :tenbux: (I wanted 6', but they were out.) But yeah, as has been said, it's thick-wall steel pipe, if it's not leaking just wire-brush off the rust and paint it.
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Feb 9, 2016 22:49
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Safety Dance posted:it looks like there are a bunch of flappers that connect with a chain instead of a metal rod Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:Urgency is relative. It is likely leaking a little bit, which could cause problems over the long term. But if it's moving, every movement could be the one that finally displaces a good chunk of wax ring, and it could suddenly turn into a big leak. By the time we moved out*, it was listing to the point that we shut the water to it off between uses -- turn it on, let it fill up enough to flush, turn it off, because the leave at the bottom of the tank was so bad and when it did fill up it leaked out the top as well. When using it, we could lean so that it rocked back upright (I guess there was a joist under one side of it), but as soon as you stood up, it'd fall back over against the wall. Oddly enough, it never got stinky -- the leak was from the tank bolts rusting away, and I guess the bit of floor with the wax ring stayed attached to the toilet and the drain pipe was flexible enough that it never leaked there. Or, knowing the landlord, they just replaced the wax ring with a couple tubes of silicone caulk to flexible drainpipe last time the wax ring wore out. *the landlord was extremely hands-off, and didn't fix anything unless we threatened to sue, like the time our A/C went out in the middle of summer in Texas, and they finally got around to fixing it after three weeks of calling every day, took a week for them to get a plumber to fix a burst pipe, and there was one problem -- rotten subfloor just inside the back door -- that we noticed when taking the tour that they promised to have fixed before we moved in and never did, so we didn't even bother trying to get the bathroom floor fixed because it didn't endanger our lives. Actually I think we did call once when it was at the "rocking a little bit" stage, and then just gave up on it.
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Apr 2, 2016 17:04
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Lol my mom's considering reroofing her house with metal, and asking me and my brother to do the work, and will pay us. Pretty sure it'd be cheaper to hire a company, no? I make $14/hour and lil' bro is a surveyor's assistant so probs $20/hr. Also I'm too fuckin' old to climb up on a roof, so I'd charge a premium for that (and maybe subcontract some kid).
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Jul 26, 2016 06:05
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opengl128 posted:We have some ugly 50's tile in our bathroom and as a stopgap until we can afford to completely renovate it, I want to put vinyl flooring over top of it. Nthing the "if it's not totally hosed in a way that doesn't show in the pictures, just live with it until it's time to gut it." Put the money you would've spent putting vinyl over it in a savings account, and have a little extra for the full renovation project. Seriously, it may not be stylish, but it's a drat bathroom, is it really so important that it look good that you need a stopgap measure? Unless, I guess, you or your spouse have OCD and can't bring yourselves to step on a crack or not count the tiles every time you go in, in which case I'd recommend spending the money on a shrink instead of recovering it. Hell, my bathroom has fuckin' carpet, and I'm in no hurry to refloor it.
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Aug 1, 2016 05:21
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Slugworth posted:Bought a house in July with a carpeted bathroom, and I was like, "well, that's obviously the first project". I have in fact done several other projects and keep pushing that one off. Look, I'm not an animal, I'm gonna replace it eventually, but.... it's kind of nice having a soft warm floor for your morning piss. Oddly enough, the linoleum-floored second bathroom has a hole in the floor big enough for the (indoor) cat to stick his head through. I've thrown a scrap of plywood over it for now, but what's the long-term fix? Tear it down to the joists and put in tile? lay concrete board over the lino and tile on top of that? It's a drat 20-year-old singlewide trailer, that's a bit more work than I'd like to do. Comedy option: install a hatch so I can throw grenades down into the crawlspace if the skunks living under the house that the PO had a problem with ever come back.
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Aug 16, 2016 05:00
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kid sinister posted:Why is there a hole in your bathroom floor big enough for a cat's head to fit through? Was the toilet moved or something? I don't know, it was a soft spot when we moved in, and got bigger. Something's probably leaking and rotting out the floor. Also the kitty is fairly small, the hole is smaller than a fist.
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Aug 16, 2016 06:46
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kid sinister posted:You had better figure out what's doing that like, immediately. That could put your whole family in danger, including your kitty. Last place we lived in, the toilet was listing 30 degrees to port like a dying battleship, somehow hadn't fallen through the floor yet, a lil' hole in the floor is a minor problem by my standards, but it jumped ahead of "tearing the carpet out of the master bath" on the to-do list. Also how exactly does this put the whole family (including cat) at risk? It's not like it's a gas leak. (Also the family consists of me, my partner, the cat, and two birds who mostly live in cages in the living room. There's no potential for a Baby Jessica scenario here.)
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Aug 20, 2016 02:43
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kid sinister posted:You apparently don't mind your entire home falling on your family while you all are sleeping. I'll put it this way: you are the previous owner that subsequent owners dread. I'm going to fix it eventually, just asking how long I have to save up for a proper fix. I've been there and done that on all counts, this one I'm going to fix because I own it. H110Hawk posted:Because your child is going to put their foot through a part of the floor that doesn't currently show signs of rot and crack their head open on one of the several hard surfaces bathrooms contain.
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Aug 21, 2016 07:43
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Get a compression rod, like for a shower curtain, and hang it off of that, maybe? Seconded. I have a shower curtain for a bathroom door, because my master bathroom is stupid and has no door (and the doorway is an odd size that doors don't fit in). Safety Dance posted:I think you're overthinking it. Drill baby, drill!
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Sep 20, 2016 06:34
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I have a cheap little tabletop drill press, and the drive belt broke. There's a phone number on the side to call the importer for replacement belts, but I don't exactly expect results or timely shipping even if they do still have 'em. The belt is 24cm circumference and 4mm diameter. Is that a standard o-ring size I can pick up at the local hardware store?
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Dec 3, 2016 13:29
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Safety Dance posted:24cm circumference seems awfully small for a drill press drive belt. Could you take a picture? It's a tiny little thing. Zippo for scale: 
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Dec 9, 2016 16:09
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My hot water is stinky. Smells like sewage. What causes this/is there an easy fix? Is there a port on the top of the water heater where I can pour a bottle of bleach in or something?
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Dec 17, 2017 18:37
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City, but the cold is fine, so it must be something in my water heater. And yeah it's probably the original 25-year-old unit. Edit: I guess now I have an excuse for not doing laundry/dishes, at least.
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Dec 17, 2017 18:52
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Mom's asking me and my brother to fix her porch: The front edge board is a bit rotten (but still mechanically sound), and there's some weirdness going on with what's holding it up, as you can see here:  Mom wants it fixed before planting new shrubs (the old ones died, apparentlythere's a blight going around on whatever they were, my brother removed the tree corpses last week with a chainsaw on a stick and a Hi-Lift jack.)Is this something the average person with a degree in half-assery from Jerry Rigg University can do? We have jacks that can take the weight to prop up that center post while we swap out the board under it, and I have a delightful Vaughn 28-oz framing hammer (oldschool, with a hatchet on the back instead of claws) that I'd love to have an excuse to use. Sorry for potato photos, but it was 8pm and it's not worth dragging out the big Nikon and tripod.
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May 26, 2018 02:39
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My mother is making things for her sister and niece of boards from her gandma's/my cousin's great-gandma's house (a serving tray and a lazy susan). I told her to wear my P100 respirator when sanding the paint off because it's probably lead-based, and she grew up in the '50s and has plenty lead poisoning already from leaded gas. "Surely they repainted it in the last 20 years." well, yes, the last 20 years before Mawmaw died in 1990, and did they remove the old paint first?
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Sep 7, 2018 23:02
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overboard posted:Has she considered a chemical stripper that would keep everything nice and goopy? A respirator is one thing but good luck cleaning lead dust from all your tools/clothes/your garage. I wouldn’t even try it outdoors. But it'll look so much better and antique if she just varnishes over what's left of the original paint after scraping off the flaky bits and sanding it. Apparently "not a dumbass", like the baldnass gene, skips a generstion. Edit: I did my part in scraping off the old paint with my axe-hammer, and told her to wear the gas mask when sanding it. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Sep 8, 2018 |
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Sep 8, 2018 01:18
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I have a fluorescent light over my desk, and the tube is on its last legs (the ballast is probably going too, but the tube is smoky inside at both ends). Thing is, there's so much variety of them I don't know what to get. It's 20 watts, 1.5" diameter, 23" from endcap to endcap, 24" to the ends of the pins, and the pins are half an inch on centers. I think it's this one. Is that right?
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Oct 16, 2020 02:27
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