My Future Past

Kludge: how to repair paint scratches with nail polish

2014-09-07T17:02:00.002-04:00

This information wasn't on the Internet, so I'm putting it there. Our blue Samsung washer and dryer were badly scratched during the move, and the original color isn't available. So I blended three colors of nail polish together to match the bastards. Good thing I painted all those tiny orc figurines in my D&D-playing days!

The washer and dryer are a pretty odd color, a grayish metallic blue. My first thought was that it must be an automobile paint, but Samsung doesn't offer touch-up paint for it. Alice suggested we try nail polish. So I asked her to go to the store and get several colors that were close to her recollection of the appliances. Out of the six she came back with, I used these:

Here's the color names, just in case you're reading this post because you are actually trying to repair a scratched Samsung WF363BTBEUF washer or DV363EWBEUF dryer:

I mixed four parts metallic blue, one part metallic light purple, and one part nonmetallic dark purple. Where's a good place to mix nail polish? On the bottom of a glass jar from the recycling bin, that's where. I used a small craft paintbrush to mix and apply the polish. A smaller paintbrush would have allowed me to do a neater job.

Here's the results, with and without camera flash. The left end of this scratch has been repaired:

The mixed color is so close, it might be hard for you to see the repaired part. I was pretty pleased, considering that the scratches go all the way to the metal.

Take the matter into your own hands, folks. Fix your stuff!

DIY Pipe Shelves

2014-07-29T18:54:00.000-04:00

We've built a shelving unit in our kitchen out of plumbing pipes. As you might imagine, it's very strong, which is good because we have a lot of cookbooks. Alice had seen it done elsewhere, and we couldn't find a prefab bookcase for the space, so we decided to modify the design and give it a try.

We pretty much cleaned out our local Lowe's and Home Depot of 3/4" black pipe tees, flanges, and nipples. (Tell your inner 10-year-old that a nipple, in this context, is a short length of pipe with threads on both ends.) The pipe and fittings came to over $300, and the wood and stain came to another $100 or so. Not cheap, but it would probably survive a tornado.

Black pipe comes with a film of greasy grime all over it, so the project began with an hour or so of scrubbing with Goo Gone. After that we could handle the parts without looking like we'd robbed a bank. Here are the two uprights mostly assembled:

Standard practice with black pipe is to put Teflon tape on the threads before assembly to make a good seal. I did that here even though these pipes obviously don't need to hold pressure; I wanted it to be easy to disassemble and adjust.

I had to make a lot of things happen: the uprights couldn't look bent or crooked even though there are fourteen joints from top to bottom; the tees all had to point in the same direction; and the flanges (that's the flat round things) all had to touch the wall at the same time. And to make that more complicated, the walls of this 100-year-old house ain't flat. Yet here they are, mounted:

Yes, we plan to leave some empty space on that middle shelf so we can reach the light switch.

The left upright luckily was fastened directly to a stud, so it's not going anywhere. With the right one, I thought 28 drywall screws would hold it in place, but the matchy-matchy black-headed drywall screws I bought are too thick and tend to strip their holes, so they don't have much holding power. I used some plastic wall anchors and some Molly bolts to secure each flange and it's as strong as the other.

My pride was tempered with dismay when I noticed that the shelves were going to be way off level. Of course the floor isn't level (duh) but the weird thing is that the left upright is longer than the right one. I must not have tightened the left one's joints as many turns as the right one. Oh well: they go from leaning to the left at the bottom to perfectly level in the middle to leaning to the right at the top. I'll shim them. It could be worse.

Meanwhile Alice honed her staining skills on the shelves. I had bought two 10' 1"x8" boards of southern yellow pine, which I cut into eight 30" shelf lengths. Alice then sanded them and applied some kind of stinky hydrocarbon pretreatment the store had sold her to prep the surface for stain. The stain went on pretty evenly and it actually almost matches our cabinets. Here they are, stained and waiting for polyurethane:

I wasn't thrilled with the unevenness of the spray polyurethane, but it's not like the shelves are going to be outdoors. Here's the whole assembly:

And finally, below, with cookbooks. We used to have about twice this many but we edited the library down pretty severely before moving.

Ta-daa!

A day in the life: installing a garbage disposal

2014-06-22T12:28:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I installed a garbage disposal in our house. This is just one of the projects that have been filling my weekends, and which I somehow usually fail to document properly. This time I got pictures.

A proper "before" picture should have showed the sink with no electrical service under it. The first step in this process was to bring in an electrician to install the wires and switch. They're already here in this photo:

Step One of the instructions cheerfully said "disconnect the drain from the sink". I had no idea how to do that, so I grabbed my largest wrench and started twisting things. After a couple hours I had removed all the drain pipes that were in the way. I had also replaced the "Y" pipe that the dishwasher was connected to (upper right) with a straight pipe, since the plan was to connect the dishwasher to the disposal. Here's what it looked like after Step One:

The next major step was to connect the electrical. That gray arc of wire housing in the cabinet was very stiff. It was subtly incompatible with the hole in the disposal: the hole was threaded and so was the cable housing. Sounds good, right? No: if I turned the cable housing until it was tight and secure in the disposal, it'd be pointing the wrong way in the cabinet. I had to leave it a little loose, which meant it was also free to swivel. I secured it with the cable housing's nut on the inside of the disposal and moved on.

Physically mounting the disposal to the bottom of the sink was easier than I thought it would be. The final time-consuming phase was rebuilding the drain pipes. Again this was glossed over with a single step in the instructions. I reused the parts, cutting many of the pipes shorter using a hacksaw. I had to replace one seal/gasket that broke when I tried to clean the gunk off of it. Here's the final result:

Careful observers will note that the tee on the right, where the drain from the disposal joins that from the other sink, is lower in the final arrangement. I had to rebuild all that, twice, in order to get it to fit.

The result is the quietest garbage disposal I've ever used. It's in InSinkErator "evolution space saver". I happen to have a sound level meter here, so I measured how loud it is, with the meter at eye level, pointing upwards, one pace back from the sink.

Quiet house: 40dbA
Faucet on: 49dbA
Faucet and disposal on: 53dbA

The numbers changed quite a bit if I held the meter in different places, but the relative values were always about what I listed here. It's pretty damn quiet.

Elapsed time: six hours. Trips to hardware store: two, not counting the initial purchase. Costs: about $180 for the disposal, plus something like $100 or more for the electricians to put in the wiring, plus a few bucks for putty, drain pipes, and gaskets.