Sunny Day Hardware

Heading for lunch and there's some lunkhead holding up traffic just this side of Dead Man's Curve. Oh, it's Mr. Weedeater.

We stop at the hardware store after lunch and they have a bargain bin full of tools. I am enthralled. I don't need anything, but they have this handle for chisels. Save your knuckles.

Somewhere to get rid of your fluorescent bulbs. Like I'm gonna drive clear across town to pay these guys 80 cents.

There is a pressurized sewer line running along Multnomah Boulevard. The current one was installed ten years ago but it wasn't up to snuff. The incessant hammering from the pumps dislodged it from it's moorings and it started leaking, so now it's being replaced. These guys were hard at it today, steam shovels steaming, skip loaders skipping, flaggers flagging. Another couple hundred yards and it will be complete.

Jack's replacing the sink in his kitchen, and due to the innate animosity of inanimate objects, he needs longer hold down screws. So he pulls out his handy-dandy pitch gauge to measure them and notices that this gauge has all kinds of pitches that he has never seen before. The first number is the number of threads per inch, the second number is the (approximate) length of one thread. I have seen threads with 13, 14, 16, 18, 20 and 24 threads per inch, but I've never seen any of the others. The gauge was made by Starrett. I wonder how old it is.

At the hardware store we are looking for some long #12 machine screws. As long as I have been fooling with hardware, screws sizes smaller than a quarter inch in diameter were given numbers. The smallest common size was #4 and the largest was #12, mostly even numbers, but occassionally you would run into some odd numbered wood screws. Anything a quarter inch or bigger was denoted by the diameter given as a fraction of an inch: 1/4, 5/16, 3/8, etc. I had never seen any screws denoted by a fraction smaller than a quarter. Until today, when I discovered that the unrepentent hoodlums at A-Boy were labeling screws as being 1/8 and 3/16 of an inch! Heresey!

Jack's putting down some tile, so he wanted a tile saw. Buy or rent? This one was only $77, so he bought it.

Cool picture of the day. This is the business end of the screw thread gauge with all the leaves lined up.

Jack got a new toy: a 500 year old drill press. Made of steel. And cast iron. The way god intended machine tools to be made. Note the OHSA approved safety guards around the drive belt and pulleys.