A Tale of Vise

Now that my workshop electrical outlets are installed, the refinisher shipment has arrived, and the piano is delivered, I can get back to stripping the window trim on the first floor.

Yesterday I removed the varnish from the last two long pieces from the dining room windows. And last night I pried off all the trim (barring the stool) from the first of the dining room piano windows. I had visions of getting all those pieces stripped today, before I had to dress and go sing in a choir concert this evening.

Didn't work out like that.

In the first place, I had to spend an hour or so this morning packaging up my digital camera I dropped on the floor yesterday, and taking it to the post office to send to the FujiFilm factory service center in Joisey. Maybe it can be fixed and I won't have to buy a new camera.

Or maybe not. Got it posted, anyway.

Something after 11:00 AM I got down the basement and started stripping the paint from the window trim I took down last night.

Uh, no. Ever try holding a two-foot piece of wood, aiming a heat gun at it, and stripping off the old paint, all at once? Definitely a three-handed job.

Which means a vise to supply the third hand. In my case, the clamp-on vise my dad gave me years ago, with the 1/4" plywood on each face to keep from marring the workpiece.

But I couldn't use my heirloom vise with my present set up. My workbench has no lip to clamp it to and my collapsible steel sawhorses had no wood beams on them. I'd been intending to put some on ever since I bought them nine or ten years ago, but somehow I never . . .

Until today. There comes a time when the time has come. When a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. When the annoyance of not doing an annoying job is more annoying than doing it.

I had to get those beams on my sawhorses if I wanted to make any progress with the woodwork stripping.

And I was well-fixed to take care of it. Some previous owner had left me a couple of likely-looking 2x4s to choose between, and I have a whole hardware cabinet of miscellaneous fasteners.

But I couldn't take care of it, not right away. The brick foundation wall of my workshop is the happy home to a few dozen colonies of sidewalk ants. Harmless, the exterminator tells me, but they attract spiders which festoon the wall with their webs, which catch all the frass that the ants dump out of their nests. The 2x4s were covered with it, and so was a lot of everything else.

Naaaaassssty.

So before my work on the sawhorses could proceed, I had to take the shop vac and clear out all the spiderwebs and their loads of eggs and ant poop.

Not what I was planning to do today.

But I did it. And got the chosen 2x4 cut to the right lengths, five inches longer than the sawhorse tops.

And considered how I'd attach them to the steel sawhorses.

Now, you'll laugh at this. This is the biggest reason why I hadn't put the wood beams on the sawhorses years ago. I had the silly, over-wrought idea that I had to attach them with bolts and nuts, with the bolt heads countersunk into the top surface of the wood.

And I don't have any countersinking drill bits.

Well, I thought, I can improvise.

So I turned over the sawhorses, the better to see and feel how big a bolt I needed for the predrilled holes.

And it hit me: "You silly idiot! All you need is four washers and screws driven up from the underside of the sawhorses into the bottom surface of the 2x4s! That'll hold just fine!

So that's what I did. Though being me, I had to make heavy weather of using the portable drill to drive the screws in. I'm not too proficient at keeping the driver head straight on with the screw, and I end up with metal shavings all over.

Still, they went in well enough to hold.

And now I have a nice wooden overhang at each end of my sawhorses, and I can clamp on my vise!

And my vise can hold my short pieces of window trim while I heat-strip them!

I got three pieces done this afternoon. Probably won't be able to do any more with it till Friday-- tomorrow, I've got other things I have to do.

Electrified

Through snow and slop and slick conditions, the electrician, Harrison Coffey of Coffey Electric (I told him I'd give him a plug-- so to speak) appeared right on time this noon to install the new circuit and outlets in my basement and workshop.

First order of business, get rid of the culprit that'd left my workshop in the dark-- a faulty screw-in recepticle from the workshop pullchain light. It went into the recycling.

Then, install a new 20-amp circuit in the breaker box and run the wire.

Then comes a new recepticle in the workshop.

And two new ones in the main basement.

And a fourth one (on a different circuit) mounted on the furnace, so the condensation pump can be plugged directly into it, and no longer into yet another pullchain light.

Two and a half hours later, all done! I went down to experiment with the new outlets.

I started with my worklight, trying to plug it into the new recepticle on the south basement wall. But it wouldn't go! Maybe the prongs needed to be spread?

"Just give it a shove and push it in," Mr. Coffey said. "Those 20 amp recepticles have tighter slots."

But my fingers were still on the plug prongs as I pushed.

"Hey!" said the electrician.

"Oh! right!" I took them away, just before the plug went in. Whew!

"You make contact with that, you'd know it. It'd throw you across the room!"

Right. Not an experiment I care to make.

After Mr. Coffey went on his way, I did not run downstairs and start stripping woodwork. Took care of some other things this afternoon and evening-- of which more anon.

But I've got me some proper outlets in the basement! I can plug the heatgun in without shorting out the house! Electifying!

Making the Right Connections

When I retired to bed last night (ok, early this morning), I noticed that the lamp in my bedroom wouldn't turn on. Nor would the space heater. And the clock radio was dark. And the phone display was blank.

In short, all my bedroom outlets were kaput.

I could not figure this out. How could an electrical overload in my basement affect the outlets in my second floor bedroom?

Well, it was too late to work it out now. I'd see what the electrician would say on the morrow.

This morning, I was happy to find that the furnace had been working all night-- no frozen delight in the toilet bowl! But there was water ponding across the basement floor-- courtesy of the non-functioning condensation pump.

That was not unexpected. What I didn't understand is why the first floor phone, which is plugged into an outlet in my living room, was getting no power. And the lamp that shares that recepticle wasn't working, either.

Huh? Did last night's electrical fry extend that much influence over the house's whole system?

Or could it be that-- oh, no, not again! I thought I'd solved all that two or three years ago!

"All that" refers to the circus that was POs'-1 idea of upgrading the electrical system in this house. Yes, they used code-approved wiring and connectors, but they joined and over-joined outlets, switches, and appliances all over the house on single circuits. For instance, all the kitchen appliances and the back porch lights were on one circuit and my POs had to have someone out to untangle it: I've got the invoice in my house file as testimony. Shortly after I moved in, I discovered (thanks to an overload), that just one circuit was carrying the 3rd floor outlets, an outlet in the guest bedroom, the outlets, microwave, and dishwasher in the kitchen, and the outlet in the basement bath.

I got an electrician in to rectify that. But now are you telling me that the basement lights, my bedroom outlets, and the living room outlets are all on one circuit, too? Is anybody really sure where anything from my panel box really goes?

Well. When the electrican sent by the home warranty company made his appearance around 1:30 PM, that's exactly what he did tell me. Not only that, but he showed me that my workshop and main basement lights are on the same circuit, too!

No idea how I managed to trip the circuit last night, but that's all it was-- I simply hadn't shoved the circuit breaker far enough over to turn it all the way off, then back on again.

And as for the initial outage-- that was due to a loose connection in-- well, let's just say the only source of power in my workshop is a screw-in recepticle in the pull-chain ceiling fixture, with the bulb screwed into that. From thence, an extension cord or two snakes down to a power strip, into which I'd plugged my worklight, my radio, and a heatgun drawing maybe 2500 watts. The electrician tested the power draw, and it was about to the limit. He theorizes that the furnace condensation pump must have kicked in, and with the tenuous connection in the light fixture recepticle, it was too much.

So when it came down to it, nothing really was broken. That doesn't mean, though, that nothing needs fixed. That light-fixture recepticle arrangement gives me the willies, especially after last night.

So I asked the electrician how much he'd charge for a surface-mounted duplex outlet in the workshop and two in the main basement room. He suggested they all be on the same circuit, 20 amp rating. Should be enough for the power tools, work lights, and all.

He named what sounds like a reasonable price. But my regular electrician is coming by tomorrow night to look at things and give me a second bid.

Whomever I decide to use, if I'm to keep using the heat gun to tackle the woodwork stripping, I need a power source that can take it. I have a lot of items on my electrical improvements wish list, but the basement outlets have just moved up to No. 1.

Acute Overload

Tonight (meaning Sunday evening) I was down the basement making my weekly offering on the altar of woodwork stripping.

Used the Western Wood Doctor refinisher to take one piece of dining room-kitchen casing down to the bare wood. Dry-chipped the paint off the cornice of the lintel. Used the heat gun to take the paint off the top of the cornice of the long lintel on the dining room side of the casing between the dining room and living room.

Then after a break that lasted till after 11:00 PM, I went back down cellar to tackle the other piece of the casing going from the dining room to the kitchen. This piece was definitely a heat gun job, since it would not dry chip at all. Most of my woodwork has only three layers of paint: off-white, cream, and mushroom-beige; this piece adds a lichen green, among other colors, to the mix. Don't know what it was doing on the dining room side: Maybe it was originally in the kitchen and got moved when the POs-1 did their kitchen remodel.

So there I am at 1:30 AM or so, almost done stripping this thing with the heat gun, all but a few inches on the side edges. I'm on a roll. I could see me cleaning it off with the liquid refinisher before I was done tonight!

Then, suddenly, as I moved around to get a better angle on the remaining paint, the heat gun turned itself off. As did the work light, and the radio, and the pull-chain ceiling light in my workshop.

I should explain, perhaps, that I do my woodwork stripping in the main room of the basement of my foursquare. The workshop is under the former front porch, and it's too long and narrow to set up sawhorses. But there are no outlets in the main room, unless you count the one in one of the pullchain lights, into which is plugged a strange extension cord that leads to something on the furnace that does I know not what. Think it has something to do with the drain thingy that carries water through a long tube and ultimately drips it in my laundry room sink.

So if I want to plug anything in where I was working, I have to use the plug strip just inside the door of the workshop. But obviously, it wasn't just the plug strip that wasn't working, it was the circuit for all that room.

But I had lights where I was, and after shutting off the heat gun, I immediately checked the circuit panel.

Hmm. No circuit switches were tripped.

Tried the one marked "Basement." That turned off the lights in the main basement room.

Turned them back on, and tried a couple more switches that weren't marked.

No effect on the workshop lights.

Tried a couple more. Including, for some cockamamie reason, the one marked "Basement." It turned off the lights again, but when I pushed it back to On, they stayed Off. And that circuit switch is now limp.

Tried flipping the mains switch. No effect whatsoever, except that now I have to reset various electric clocks throughout the house.

There was nothing more I could do tonight, but sweep up the stripping mess by the light of the laundry room ceiling light. (Do not want the cats sampling the paint chips.)

And put in a call to my home warranty company. I may not be covered for this, but at least getting into the automated system will get an electrician out here to see.

(The really fun thing about this is the furnace. There's supposed to be a separate circuit for that; at least, that's what's marked in my panel. But what if that weird cord up to that pullchain light actually controls something essential, Without Which the Furnace Will Not Work?

I guess I'll find out if the toilet bowl water is frozen over in the morning . . . )