Monday, March 21, 2011

Yike! Wind!

We had as luverly a windstorm as I've ever seen here today, fer shur. I knew we were in trouble when I woke at one and the wind was blowing. Wind before dawn always means the afternoon will be hell; hell before nine in the morning means the whole frickin' desert will blow away by the afternoon. And so it was.

At geiger counter central we went from bare trays to 160 units ready to solder, and no way to solder them. GC guy has been doing the soldering outdoors; that was clearly impossible. He set up a ventilated room in his house to do it, but a very little experimentation proved that trying to move the trays from the building where we assemble them to the house would allow the wind to sweep the boxes right off the trays into ... well, into Nebraska. He's got this thing about soldering indoors, like a little solder smoke is going to kill him. Why, when I was his age...

So now I'm not sure what we're gonna do tomorrow. We can't assemble more boxes because we're out of trays and places to put them, but if he's not willing to solder the damned things we're kinda stuck. One thing for sure is that I've got a full day ahead of me, because I've got to start shit-shoveling early so I can get everything in. Also, the weather forecast says our nice warm weather is going away for a while - back into the twenties. Shite.

Meanwhile, here in plumbing hell at Landlady's place, I got the freeze damage fixed at Landlady's house while the well pump filled the cistern. Hot and cold running water, yay! Yeah, except when I went back to the powershed, stuff was floating around in there. Plumbing guy's brilliant piping job had come apart in a truly spectacular fashion. I left him an irate voicemail, to which he has so far failed to reply. Landlady's due here at the end of the week and I was really looking forward to delighting her with her fully-functional house plumbing, and now the whole system's down again. If he doesn't respond in the next day or two I'll make up a list of stuff we need to just do it ourselves. Last week I got ten feet of pipe, but I'm pretty much out of fittings. If I just look the current installation over and get the parts I need, I can't possibly do a worse job than he did and then we can get it up and running this weekend. I say hopefully. This is truly...ridiculous. If you ever move to the boonies, bring your own contracting skills because the locals kinda suck.

3 comments:

KurtP said...

Just remember Blue glue and Purple primer.

Douglas2 said...

There is an "instructables" on temporarily re-purposing a over-the-stove extraction fan into an expedient lab fume cabinet.
"Building a small fume hood for stinky projects"

This would be about a 10-minute project in my house, as long as my wife wasn't home to ask questions about why I was borrowing kitchen fixtures, the dryer vent hose, plexi-glass from a poster frame, etc. ("I'll put it all back just as it was, later tonight. Honest!")

Anonymous said...

You could build a fume hood out of cardboard,and use any old fan. A friend of mine,who's a scale modeler, built one out of that foil covered foamboard insulation. I've soldered indoors with no problem...that I'm aware of.
The only thing I've had a problem soldering indoors is tin cans. I was building a Cantenna some years ago, and soldered 40 of them together inside a closed garage..trust me, don't do this.
Ain't it fun to fix what a perfeshnul supposedly fixed? I used to work rental maintenance,and so-called perfeshnuls screqwed things up plenty of times.