I did something today.

January 16

I smashed and bagged up my RC airplanes that I’ve had since the mid eighties. They were obsolete, they’d never fly again but they were something I felt I needed to hold on to. Anyway they be gone, what’s next!

January 16

You could always throw away those scrap pieces of wood that you hold on to

I know I've got several five gallon buckets with various pieces that "I just know" will come in handy some day,.........some day,.....hate to throw away good wood ya know

January 16

It’s happened to me more than once, I’ll have one of those minimalistic moments and toss something, two weeks later I’m like DAMN! :88:

January 16

6 minutes ago, TEWKS said:

It’s happened to me more than once, I’ll have one of those minimalistic moments and toss something, two weeks later I’m like DAMN!

And then you have to cut a larger piece of good wood into a smaller piece to use,........and save what's left for that future moment

January 16

11 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

You could always throw away those scrap pieces of wood that you hold on to

I see a perfectly good set of squirrel steps right there!

January 16

39 minutes ago, TEWKS said:

I see a perfectly good set of squirrel steps right there!

54 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

You could always throw away those scrap pieces of wood that you hold on to

I know I've got several five gallon buckets with various pieces that "I just know" will come in handy some day,.........some day,.....hate to throw away good wood ya know

Dang, that's me RIGHT there.

I finished building my house in late 2016 (actually, have been working on "finishing" kinds of things for the past 5 years), and ended up with some decent scrap wood. I had eight and ten foot planks, 12" to 14" wide that were pretty well used, but that I just couldn't bear to throw away, along with all kinds of 2x4, 1x2, finishing moulding, and, even some cement board. I made a 4'x8' pile in back of the house and threw a tarp over it, pledging to eventually take it all to the dump. However, every spring through fall, I'm back digging into that wood pile. EVERYTHING seems to get reused, and sure enough, if I throw even small pieces of wood like this away, it'll come back to bite me. "If only I had just a small, maybe 8" or 10" piece of 2x4, this little job would be easy", and so forth.

My garage is relatively small (maybe 1.5 car), and is chalked full of stuff. Yet, I made room for my wife's car (or my new F150 pickup), my BMW RT, a snow blower (best $400 I've spent in 30 years, it's old and used, but boy-oh-boy, has it bailed me out this year), a gun safe, a stand up freezer, two 8' storage racks, a 6' tall by 6' wide rolling tool box, and lot, lot more. For the past two winters, I've been cursing myself because I left a few pieces of wood in the garage, e.g. a half a dozen 8', 2x4's, plywood scraps, etc., just in case I needed them, and ended up pushing them all over the garage because they were in the way. This year, I just didn't have any extra room, and put it ALL the scrap wood in the back stack, where it's now under a foot or so of snow. Sure enough, I was reinstalling an undermount bathroom sink last week, and needed just a short 2x4" to use to support the sink (using an "L" clamp through the drain hole) while the silicone dried. I must have searched the garage for a danged hour, HOPING that I had left just one 2x4 in the garage. Nope. I ended up improvising and got it done using something else, but it's just another example of why I never throw scrape wood away.

January 16

I’m constantly in the doghouse for trashing some thingamajig that means more to my spouse than anything else. But if you need a 6-1/2” piece of pressure treated 2x4 I’m your man.

January 16

They have that Spidey Sense. Fifteen years worth of dust down in the basement (it’s gone) Hey did you see my bla bla bla?

Talk about wood keeping. I can’t even do the math but we’ve been in the house since 1993 and I still have this final piece of trim in all its unpainted and uninstalled glory!

January 16

14 minutes ago, TEWKS said:

They have that Spidey Sense. Fifteen years worth of dust down in the basement (it’s gone) Hey did you see my bla bla bla?

Talk about wood keeping. I can’t even do the math but we’ve been in the house since 1993 and I still have this final piece of trim in all its unpainted and uninstalled glory!

Hmmm, not so impressed that you have that trim piece, as I am that you could actually FIND it. 🤣

January 16

I keep it in plain sight, I just choose not to see it, Everyday… It’s a character flaw I do realize.

January 16

3 hours ago, TEWKS said:

I smashed and bagged up my RC airplanes that I’ve had since the mid eighties. They were obsolete, they’d never fly again but they were something I felt I needed to hold on to. Anyway they be gone, what’s next!

Couldn't have been easy! "Somebody could use this."

A phrase almost as dangerous as "watch this."

January 16

25 minutes ago, Hosstage said:

Couldn't have been easy! "Somebody could use this."

A phrase almost as dangerous as "watch this."

Well, umm.. matter of fact, I have my OLD bathroom sink and faucet sitting out on the front porch, hoping that the freeze will make it just go away. 🙄😖

January 16

I restored old Porsche's for 40 years, you don't throw anything away.

January 16

6 hours ago, Hosstage said:

Couldn't have been easy! "Somebody could use this."

We have an RC flying club in town, I almost loaded them in the truck and was going to bring them to the field and leave them like an abandoned baby on a doorstep.

January 16

6 hours ago, Scott9999 said:

Well, umm.. matter of fact, I have my OLD bathroom sink and faucet sitting out on the front porch, hoping that the freeze will make it just go away. 🙄😖

I have an old toilet that we've been "planning" to install in the pool shed since 2015. Problem is, we've actually gotta run water and septic line to that shed and I've been prolonging that endeavour due to it having to be hand dug and its location. Thought about rednecking a septic with two 55 gallon drums and some corrugated piping, but it's still a crappy location to dig all that in.

As for wood, I may take a picture of the stashes that I have. In the barn, I've got the wood from the stables we tore out (white oak), some of the old siding we took out, there's "extra" hardiplank from us completing the siding on the house. There's the wood slat wainscotting we took outta the house and much much more. In the crawlspace in my basement garage, much much trim pieces/crown molding from us gutting the house in 2015/16. In the overhead to the basement garage, plenty more trim pieces/molding. Behind some shelving units, sheets of drywall and miscellaneous pieces of drywall. Still have some cement board from one of the bathrooms we did. Also have HVAC duct parts.

The greenhouse was built with scrap wood, windows and the door. (we did craigslist find the big sheets of glass used). Most of the projects are built with scrap stuff I have laying around,.......dunno what I'm going to do when I run out.

January 16

1 hour ago, TEWKS said:

We have an RC flying club in town, I almost loaded them in the truck and was going to bring them to the field and leave them like an abandoned baby on a doorstep.

I did that with a bunch of old Playboys at the high school parking lot. A little eye opener for those hormone driven hoodlums.

January 16

I've still got some that have never been opened, still in their mailing plastic.

January 16

11 hours ago, TEWKS said:

I smashed and bagged up my RC airplanes that I’ve had since the mid eighties. They were obsolete, they’d never fly again but they were something I felt I needed to hold on to. Anyway they be gone, what’s next!

You're giving me ideas.

Back in grad school, I made a couple of gliders. First one was a 2-meter, balsa-rib wing construction:

Had a flat-bottomed airfoil, not great performance. I think I once had a flight that lasted for 20 minutes, but that was some kind of freaky wave lift going on, not because it was a great plane.

The next year I built a 3-meter plane (me on the left):

Fiberglass fuselage, foam-core wing with balsa skin, a curved-bottom airfoil with pretty good glide performance. Launched with a big high-start, basically 100 feet (unstretched) of surgical rubber tubing and several hundred feet of string. Anchor the tubing in the ground, hook the string to the bottom of the plane, walk back to stretch the tubing, and release:

Once it's at altitude, you overfly the tubing's anchor point, the string slips off of the hook on the bottom of the plane, and you're free. On an evening like that last picture, it would glide down to ground in the space of a few minutes. On good sunny afternoons with a lot of thermal activity, I often had flights lasting 30-60 minutes.

The last time I flew them was maybe 1998. They've moved with me five times since then, and have been gathering dust in our current basement for almost 18 years now. May be time to smash them...

January 16

28 minutes ago, Joe Frickin' Friday said:

You're giving me ideas.

Back in grad school, I made a couple of gliders. First one was a 2-meter, balsa-rib wing construction:

Had a flat-bottomed airfoil, not great performance. I think I once had a flight that lasted for 20 minutes, but that was some kind of freaky wave lift going on, not because it was a great plane.

The next year I built a 3-meter plane (me on the left):

Fiberglass fuselage, foam-core wing with balsa skin, a curved-bottom airfoil with pretty good glide performance. Launched with a big high-start, basically 100 feet (unstretched) of surgical rubber tubing and several hundred feet of string. Anchor the tubing in the ground, hook the string to the bottom of the plane, walk back to stretch the tubing, and release:

Once it's at altitude, you overfly the tubing's anchor point, the string slips off of the hook on the bottom of the plane, and you're free. On an evening like that last picture, it would glide down to ground in the space of a few minutes. On good sunny afternoons with a lot of thermal activity, I often had flights lasting 30-60 minutes.

The last time I flew them was maybe 1998. They've moved with me five times since then, and have been gathering dust in our current basement for almost 18 years now. May be time to smash them...

Donate them to a local club.... newbies can learn to fly at minimal expense.

January 16

I should have waited till tomorrow, trash day is on Thursday. I’ll have to walk by my bagged up P-51 a dozen times till then. No actually I’m alright, it was time to say.

January 16

Man, that Balsa could be used for spacers or shims,....dat's some good wood there.

January 16

1 hour ago, Rougarou said:

Man, that Balsa could be used for spacers or shims,....dat's some good wood there.

My dad had a pretty big collection of salvaged scrap material and nuts/bolts. From one of his jobs, he came into possession of a box of maybe a few thousand used IBM punch cards:

He often used these as shims in his home remodeling projects. They were about 0.007" thick, so you could stack as few/many as you needed to get whatever shim height you wanted, and they were good firm cardstock, so they could bear plenty of weight.

January 16

You guys, are making me feel pretty good about myself!

January 16

A friend's dad was a "collector" (Depression era hoarder!). When he died, his kids found it was cheaper to get rid of all the tires in the house (167 of them just in the house), the garage, the shed, and the 6 cars stored on a city lot, by the ton rather than by the pickup truckload. 2 tons of tires. Extra charge for the ones still on rims. He started breaking them down to save money. After 26 he said F it, pay the man.

It took almost a year for him and 3 brothers to clear the house.

"Somebody can use that" was not really an option, as most of it had melted into whatever was below it. Whatever was on the bottom had melted into the floor. Think of the Terminator ll melting into the liquid nitrogen.

January 16

Not trying to be shocking but we’ve got our fair share of hoarder houses in town. We went to this one where there were almost tunnels of garbage to navigate from one area of the house to the next.

They had an electric heater fan buried in the trash that ran up the side of the kitchen wall. It was on too! Anyway, the only place the resident could lay down and die was under the kitchen table. That’s where he was.

January 16

1 hour ago, Joe Frickin' Friday said:

My dad had a pretty big collection of salvaged scrap material and nuts/bolts. From one of his jobs, he came into possession of a box of maybe a few thousand used IBM punch cards:

He often used these as shims in his home remodeling projects. They were about 0.007" thick, so you could stack as few/many as you needed to get whatever shim height you wanted, and they were good firm cardstock, so they could bear plenty of weight.

Cobol programming cards

January 16

1 hour ago, Joe Frickin' Friday said:

My dad had a pretty big collection of salvaged scrap material and nuts/bolts. From one of his jobs, he came into possession of a box of maybe a few thousand used IBM punch cards:

He often used these as shims in his home remodeling projects. They were about 0.007" thick, so you could stack as few/many as you needed to get whatever shim height you wanted, and they were good firm cardstock, so they could bear plenty of weight.

I remember utility company bills would come with such a card that customers remitted their payments.

January 16

First computer class was Fortran.... I grew to hate punch cards. The professor would give us an assignment on Monday, we would schedule time to go to the punch room after we wrote our program, punch out a few hundred cards, submit them for batch processing, wait 24 hours to get your program as the assignment was due the next day. Low and behold if you made one keying error.....which I did a lot....your program would abend and you would go to class empty handed. The professor would give you one last chance over the weekend to make it right. Be cause it didn't run the first time the best grade you could get was a C. If it didn't run the second time...big fat F.

I wrote a program for my end of the year assignment that was a payroll program...unheard of in those days. The school used it for the next 2 years I was there to pay there employees.

January 16

8 hours ago, Rougarou said:

I have an old toilet that we've been "planning" to install in the pool shed since 2015. Problem is, we've actually gotta run water and septic line to that shed and I've been prolonging that endeavour due to it having to be hand dug and its location. Thought about rednecking a septic with two 55 gallon drums and some corrugated piping, but it's still a crappy location to dig all that in.

As for wood, I may take a picture of the stashes that I have. In the barn, I've got the wood from the stables we tore out (white oak), some of the old siding we took out, there's "extra" hardiplank from us completing the siding on the house. There's the wood slat wainscotting we took outta the house and much much more. In the crawlspace in my basement garage, much much trim pieces/crown molding from us gutting the house in 2015/16. In the overhead to the basement garage, plenty more trim pieces/molding. Behind some shelving units, sheets of drywall and miscellaneous pieces of drywall. Still have some cement board from one of the bathrooms we did. Also have HVAC duct parts.

The greenhouse was built with scrap wood, windows and the door. (we did craigslist find the big sheets of glass used). Most of the projects are built with scrap stuff I have laying around,.......dunno what I'm going to do when I run out.

"old toilet that we've been "planning" to install in the pool shed since 2015. Problem is, we've actually gotta run water"

- I just finally dug and plumbed an irrigation system on the house I built in 2016, last summer. All hand dug, as the rocky soil it would ruin a ditch witch. Relatively steep hillside. My wife wouldn't quit planting stuff, and I was responsible for keeping it watered. It was like a retirement-life-sentence, so getting that done was a huge priority. Implementing that in a 4-season, sometimes -10F environment, was all the more challenging. Just as I was digging the last trench with pick and shovel, my neighbor came up to me to chat, and said something to the effect of "Ya know, I've been watching you out here for weeks, and just wanted to tell you, they make carbide chain saws that we use at the electric company, that you could rent, that would cut right thru that rock and have this done in now time." I said, "Bob, I've been out here six weeks and you only just decided to tell me that NOW? Thanks buddy."

Anyhow, short of it is, when you get tired of going into the house to pee, and the pool shed becomes your priority, you'll find a way to get 'er done. (And, further note, after I got the irrigation in, I installed 32 half wine barrel planters, covered the hillside with weed barrior fabric, and hauled about 12 tons of top soil and rock up the hillside, but that's another story .... but it's my "good excuse" for "no riding in 2023".)

"Most of the projects are built with scrap stuff I have laying around,.......dunno what I'm going to do when I run out."

Uhh, that's called static analysis. Completing all your projects will mysteriously generate twice as much scrape wood and material than the stuff you use up. It's like a train engine with self-laying tracks. It'll go on forever, until you pass, and one of your incredulous off-spring says "WTF?!!", and hauls it all off to a dump somewhere (or maybe HIS own pile of crap, which is where half my stuff from my 2015 move from California after living in the same house for 25 years, ended up. I can find anything I used to have a my son's house, and his wife ain't particularly happy with that. 🙃😁

Lol, don't get me started, Richard. Just don't go there .... 🤣🤣🤣

January 16

7 hours ago, Hosstage said:

I did that with a bunch of old Playboys at the high school parking lot. A little eye opener for those hormone driven hoodlums.

Ya mean, that haven't ever seen such cute little old grandma's from back when they were "babe's", in the 60's and 70's?! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Hos! 🤣🤣

(Unfortuantely, what they were probably exposed to in primary school on the internet, would probably make both you and I blush. Your stuff is tame.)

January 16

2 hours ago, Scott9999 said:

Ya mean, that haven't ever seen such cute little old grandma's from back when they were "babe's", in the 60's and 70's?! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Hos! 🤣🤣

(Unfortuantely, what they were probably exposed to in primary school on the internet, would probably make both you and I blush. Your stuff is tame.)

Meh, saw my first porn at about five'ish,.....in the back room of a bar. Back in the day little kids could tag along with dad to the bars. In the back room, going in to get a roll of quarters for pinball and pool, the "men" would have a projector showing porn, so, I's introduced to adult education entertainment at an early age.

A few years later, my brothers worked at a drive in. The regular feature would be shown early, then porn would be the late feature. Sometimes, I'd help them do clean up after the show.

Never really knew what I was watching but figured it out younger than most.

January 16

30 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

A few years later, my brothers worked at a drive in. The regular feature would be shown early, then porn would be the late feature. Sometimes, I'd help them do clean up after the show.

Never really knew what I was watching but figured it out younger than most.

Not so sure I would want to help clean up after the show if the late film of the night was porn. This coming from a guy who did trauma/crime scene cleaning for years.

January 17

5 minutes ago, 81delorean said:

Not so sure I would want to help clean up after the show if the late film of the night was porn. This coming from a guy who did trauma/crime scene cleaning for years.

Well, I do recall that while picking up trash, I asked my brothers "what's this",...they immediately said "throw it back down".

In other news, at some of the bars with my dad, I'd ask what that "machine" was in the bathroom. He'd tell me a balloon dispenser. So, being a little kid, I wanted a balloon. He'd drop the quarter in, get the little square package and tell me to put it in my pocket until I got home. Well, once he dropped me off at home, I'd reach in my pocket and pull out my balloon. Sometimes I'd blow them up, sometimes I'd fill it with water, but everytime, my mom would ask me "where'd you get that",....."daddy" was the response and she'd just shake her head.

Took me forever to put the balloon together with the thing I found at the drive in, and that they were playing with balloons at the drive in,.....didn't understand why anyone would play with balloons at a drive in.

January 17

57 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

Well, I do recall that while picking up trash, I asked my brothers "what's this",...they immediately said "throw it back down".

Did you put some GermX on after you typed that? Made me want to just reading it.

January 17

58 minutes ago, Rougarou said:

Took me forever to put the balloon together with the thing I found at the drive in, and that they were playing with balloons at the drive in,.....didn't understand why anyone would play with balloons at a drive in.

Just one of the great mysteries of youth.....

January 17

1 hour ago, Rougarou said:

Took me forever to put the balloon together with the thing I found at the drive in, and that they were playing with balloons at the drive in,.....didn't understand why anyone would play with balloons at a drive in.

Hey, at least you matured enough by then where blowing up the found balloons wasn’t a thought.

January 17

18 minutes ago, 81delorean said:

Did you put some GermX on after you typed that? Made me want to just reading it.

Haha, nope, don't think that existed in the early 70's.

There's a reason I don't get sick,......I keep them white blood cells in training at all times by touching or ingesting stuff that other people think is yuck.

At work, I have two cups, my coffee cup and an everything else cup, neither have been washed since I brought them to work in 2009.

January 17

The next thing you will be telling folks is that you used to drink from the garden hose, too.

January 17

That’s actually no joke.

The kid is healthy all summer, two days back to school and she’s sick for a week. Not use to them germs.

January 17

4 minutes ago, wbw6cos said:

The next thing you will be telling folks is that you used to drink from the garden hose, too.

What,.....you quit doing that? and it's a hose pipe!

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