I Now Own a Framing Nailer. woo-hoo.

While I do not make my living working with wood, I enjoy working with the medium, and have gotten pretty good at both making a variety of cabinets, and carpentry in general.

Many rooms, over the years, have been trimmed out by my hand-driven nails & back-saw cuts in a miter box before I purchased my first chop-saw, and subsequent finish nailer. A brad nailer was finally purchased after I felt I had mastered nailing backboards to cabinets by hand.

Between admiring skilled carpenters of days gone by, especially the Amish in Harrison Ford's "Witness", and the relative small size of most of my framing projects, I have always driven 16d nails by hand with a 16 ounce framing hammer. There's nothing quite like the pride from an honest day's sweat after admiring the barn now sitting where there used to be grass.

I shared this sentiment with Steve, my best-friend-from-childhood, and to paraphrase, he said, "You're kidding!" But he knows my propensity for doing things the hard way, and apparently knew I would eventually succumb to the pneumatic way of handling big nails as he had years ago.

That day has arrived. The front porch's soffit has bothered me since about two years after the "skilled" craftsmen hired to construct the structure, shortly after we bought the house, were paid. Rainwater went where it was not supposed to primarily because of a not-easily-correctable shingling job.

The house has now been re-roofed by a more conscientious team. Unfortunately, all their hammering (the main roof was re-decked) shook apart the previous team's porch's soffit construction. But the soffit suffered because neither the fascia board nor plywood was well-connected to the house.



The right fix requires the overhead nailing of many 2X4s between 42 year-old rafters. Between the wood's hardness, and the fact that I'm not getting any younger, I now own a Porter-Cable framing nailer.


I'm waiting to tell Steve - He'll just cackle, and ask what took so long.


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I Beat The Varmints To It.. for now

The varmints eating the string beans bothered me so much the other day that I only gave the sugar snap peas a casual glance. Since then, we’ve had a couple of days of rain, and I took a bit more time this afternoon to look closer at the sugar snap peas – The plants, to my surprise, are producing good-looking pods.


There’s not that many of them, but they do not look like the splotches I worried about on the leaves are affecting them.

In a pre-emptive strike, I picked the two biggest pods and ate them right there in the garden.

Take that, varmints!


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Varmints Are Keeping Me From Green Acres

This year’s Victory Garden is faring poorly at this point. While Kim & I are used to feeding the masses at Sunday School & Alabama games, there have never been any plans to feed God’s creatures in the middle of the night. But squirrels/rabbits/birds are not known for coordinating meals with us. At least the fence keeps out deer.

Replanting the squash, cucumbers & corn once, and the watermelon twice is one thing, but the string beans were crawling up the hemp ropes laid out (front of trellis) quite well until some animal I would like to make tomorrow night’s dinner has repeatedly stopped by to chew stalks off at ground level. I figure there will be no string bean plants left in a week or so.


The sugar snap peas (back of trellis), for some reason, are not a target. Perhaps my potential stew meat is waiting for them to crawl further up the trellis. The plants may have a blight, though, and the varmints are simply avoiding an upset tummy.

The tomato plants are, amazingly, looking pretty good. The bell pepper plants are doing okay, but I would have preferred them be a bit taller by this point. I would share more pictures, but I’d rather not consequentially share how badly the garden needs weeding at this point.

I guess my gardening guide from the ‘60s was cancelled before Oliver Douglas had a chance to address varmint control .



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Daniel and a Catfish, Sittin’ in a Tree

The Mighty Suburban took us and the Airstream down to Blue Springs AL State Park over the Memorial Day weekend where Daniel reeled in his first fish – a four-pound, one ounce catfish. Unbeknownst to us, the Alabama Fish & Wildlife folks had scheduled a fishing rodeo in the park’s pond targeted for kids our Boyz’ age for our first day there, and a lot of people showed up to participate. One of the game wardens found out it was Daniel’s first fish, and told him that it is tradition to kiss the first catch. Daniel gamely played along.


Most of the dads there were casting the line, and then handing the rod over to their kid. Daniel wanted to do everything himself. So after a brief checkout on how to operate the reel, he proceeded to get really good at casting chicken livers pretty far out in the pond. He caught a total of three fish that morning.


His brother’s luck was not as good. But as they say, a bad day fishing is better than a good day at work.


Another unexpected bonus was a genuine, cement pond.


When the park was built, a natural spring’s perimeter had been widened, and concrete poured to make a great swimming hole. The runoff flows into a nearby creek which the Boyz had fun exploring. With a year-round water temperature of 58 degrees, everyone was glad the afternoons were warm.

As expected on a holiday weekend, the campground was fairly full. What caught me off guard, though, was the number of tent campers. Fortunately for them, there was no rain, and the nights cooled considerably from daytime temperatures.

Kim was able to reserve us a full-hookup site which, with its seclusion, might have been the best spot on the campground.


Everything about our visit was great until night number two’s dinner of grilled hamburgers. The Airstream’s grilling spatula was nowhere to be found. But after duct taping the kitchen spatula to the grill tongs, I was able to keep the hair on my arm.


Between fishing, swimming, bicycling, and playing on the merry-go-round, no one got bored. But it was also nice just to sit and enjoy being outside.


Blue Springs State Park was a fun place to visit – We could go there again.



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…And the Mole Police Actually Sleeps

I think I have given short shrift to my dog Cookie because, although she is both a good dog & good company, in the past she has not done much more than be a good dog & good company. But she does give me a fair amount of exercise with the amount of ball she likes to play.

A guard dog she is not. But she was chosen from the shelter by everyone because of her small-child-tolerant disposition, and nothing else. As a result of her kind nature, Cookie’s place in our home has been secured since day one. This past weekend, though, Cookie earned her keep.

The weather was cold & gloomy, and I was not able to work in the yard as much as previously planned. Since I was just plain in the mood to be outside, Cookie & I got some serious ball-playing in between me getting done what little could be accomplished. In what I gather was her thanks for playing so much ball, over the course of the day she brought me five freshly killed moles – something she has never done before. I was ecstatic because moles have been a problem in the yard for the last couple of years.

Moles would not bother me except that the ones in my yard prefer to dig holes close to the house. With the under-house rainwater drainage issues addressed in the past few years the last thing I need is to have a mole hole allowing more rainwater in.

I have found “Great Stuff” polyurethane expanding foam to work great for sealing mole holes.


I usually fill the hole one afternoon, then cut off any cured squeeze-out the next afternoon, and rub some dirt over it to make everything blend. Not as much fun as what Bill Murray did in Caddyshack, but a lot less destructive.


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Tom’s PopcornWerks

Earlier this week, Kim called me at work to make sure I was okay with her volunteering me to repair Weatherly Elementary’s popcorn machine. Apparently, the machine had been out of commission for the past year, and the school had been using a local church’s popper until the church finally asked for theirs back. Since Friday popcorn sales add noticeably to the PTA’s coffers, everyone was interested in getting the school’s machine back in action.

Oddly, everyone appeared to have a different description of this commercial-grade popper’s symptoms. Some indicated it would not get hot enough to pop, while others claimed it continually tripped the circuit breaker. One individual queried claimed it did all of the above, and burned the popcorn to boot.

While Star Manufacturing Inc. is still in business, they do not support their now discontinued Model 89 popcorn popper anymore, and surprisingly the Internet did not offer a manual or wiring diagram. Since the popper is obviously old, I decided it was a good idea to disassemble & inspect the innards for old age issues. With luck, a bad part might be identified which could be responsible for every symptom identified. If nothing else, ever since the first time I saw Marshall Theater’s corn popper when I was a kid on a bicycle, I have always wanted to know what one looked like on the inside.

In comparing this machine to manually popping corn in a pan on a stove-top eye, there are really only two differences: A production-style unit has an agitator to stir the kernels, and the heat is thermostatically controlled. After finding the machine’s switches, wiring and agitator in good order, the kettle was disassembled to find two thermostats controlling the heat coming from two different heating elements.

Heating elements usually work or don’t work, and both of these elements checked out good with an ohmmeter. Thermostats are much the same way but will occasionally have an intermittent fault.


My initial impulse was to replace the thermostats since they are the weakest link, and Mr. Google told me replacements are still available. But at $60 apiece, it seemed prudent to verify there was in fact something wrong with the machine since no obvious “smoking gun” had been found.

The popper’s ID tag indicated it needs 2190 watts of power to pop as advertised. A typical home circuit can only provide 1800 watts before the breaker pops. Fortunately, a typical circuit in Tom’s PopcornWerks (formerly known as my shop) will provide 2400 big watts of corn poppin’ power. It was time to step to the other side of the Marshall Theater concession stand, and pop for the masses.


After tying my ammeter into the circuit, and doing nothing more than following the directions printed on a laminated card taped to the machine, a batch of genuine theater-style popcorn was done in minutes. I was disappointed – I was hoping the fun would last longer. Fortunately, Kim remembered one person indicating trouble did not begin until after a few batches. So, after 45 seconds of training, Kim popped four more batches while I watched the ammeter.


The popcorn popper never blinked an eye, and the ammeter confirmed an appropriate current draw for every batch.

Afterwards, everyone got involved to scoop & box the resulting 80 bags of popcorn - some to help, and some to “observe”.


In the relatively short time it took to pop all that corn, I asked Kim about where, in the school, the popper was plugged in. Apparently, the preferred spot had been in the Teacher’s Lounge until the constantly tripping breaker forced a move to Ms. So-and-so’s room. After that room’s breaker had tripped enough, everyone decided the machine was broken.

Come to find out, the teacher’s lounge had a Coke machine & refrigerator on the same circuit as the popper, and Ms. So-and-so’s room had a laminator along with other power-hungry devices also on the same circuit. My suspicion is the 48 year-old elementary school needs to have its electrical service updated.

Kim decided to take the popper back to the school this past Friday, and operate it with an eye towards problems. Deciding the complaint of burnt popcorn was operator error and not the machine’s fault, I told her to unplug anything short of a dialysis machine on the same breaker, and go from there. She popped her goal of 10 batches without incident.

The Weatherly Elementary PTA now appears to be in good fund-raising shape now that everyone will probably be more careful about what is plugged in during corn popping time. But I’m not putting my ammeter away just yet – Word is now that the church’s popcorn cooker didn’t work when they got it back. Tom’s PopcornWerks may just be getting started.



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The Garden Is Planted

A few weeks ago, the bell pepper & tomato plants started from seed in a Jiffy Greenhouse were moved into a bed of enriched potting soil. Between having room to grow, and sun from the south-facing window, the plants perked up considerably.


The original plan was to have this year’s Victory Garden planted in the backyard almost three weeks ago. But the incredible amount of rain we have had this year has kept the yard’s water table too high to till part of the garden.

Last Sunday, with the threat of more rain on the way, I went ahead and tilled the garden spot. Afterwards, the pepper & tomato plants were transplanted, and seeds sewn for everything else.


In spite of some 39 degree mornings lately, the Jiffy Greenhouse plants are surviving. I just checked, and some of the newly sewn seeds have germinated.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, we get out of this year’s garden.


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