Mending

[yourfriendclaire]

I realize I'm turning into this board's de facto pioneer woman, but what's something you've fixed recently? I just did a janky sashiko mending job on the blasted-out butt of some old jeans, and I felt pretty good about it.

[RCH]

I pulled apart the visible plumbing under the sink in order to determine that No, we can't fix the slow drain ourselves. Made me feel like a real man.

[Abe]

I did a bathroom renovation.
before:

after:

I paid someone to do the tile, but I did everything else.
I also repaired a bunch of audio gear recently.

[Abe]

I pulled apart the visible plumbing under the sink in order to determine that No, we can't fix the slow drain ourselves. Made me feel like a real man.

Have you disassembled the drain part that is in the sink? Often the slow drain is caused by a build up of soap, hair, and dirt at the drain stopper, not in the pipe below it.

[yourfriendclaire]

I did a bathroom renovation.
before:

after:

I paid someone to do the tile, but I did everything else.
I also repaired a bunch of audio gear recently.

Damn that’s impressive! The most advanced home DIY I’ve done is some tile work on the fireplace, this is really inspiring

[Abe]

Thanks Claire! I did spend a few years working on construction sites as a low voltage electrician back in my 20s, so that does gives me confidence, even though I mostly just did AV hookups, wire pulls, and stuff like that.
I actually learned to do it all through youtube videos! When I started the project in February, the main issue was that the old sink had a crack in it. So I watched videos on plumbing. Then the project kept growing, from plumbing to carpentry to electrical and drywall. A lot of drywall. Huge thanks to the awesome South East Portland Tool Library - I couldn't have done it without being able to get access to those tools. That is huge!

[ritchey]

Gary is Mr. Fixit in our house and recently he did something really amazing. As many of you know, we recently got a very elaborate, expensive, violent roofing job done, and replaced our shitty illegal asphalt roof with a metal one. You can't have rain gutters with a metal roof (at least not here--because snow slides off the roof so powerfully it will tear them off and ruin your eaves) so they took our gutters down. Unfortunately we had only recently installed this badass rain catchment system where the gutters were directed down into the rain barrels. Now it seemed that was ruined, and we were sad! But the other day Gary went out there and hacked apart the old gutters and fitted them into the mouths of the rain barrels (so each barrel has two giant lengths of gutter sticking out the top of it in a V shape) AND IT WORKS. After a rain, the barrels are full! Furthermore, the new jury-rigged system caused a lot of splash back onto the side of the house, which is bad (our window frames are like 80 years old and don't need any additional stress) so then he went back out and hacked apart a bunch of metal flashing and affixed it to the house-facing side of each gutter length, as a rain shield. Again, IT WORKED.

I am very impressed by all this.

I don't really fix stuff--my pioneer woman tendencies come out in the kitchen. I'm gonna start a new thread, fuck it

[Abe]

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_1JN0ZhJAQ ... _copy_link

I fixed up my space echo. These are really cool delay units that use tape. There are five tape heads. The first erases what is on the tape already. The second records whatever is coming in. The third through fifth are all playback heads. You have control of the tape speed which in effect, changes the length of the delay. These are fun to work on! They do need a ton of maintenance though...