Woodpecker Frustration

When you hear woodpeckers drilling at your house, you know you have at least one problem: woodpeckers. The ruin your morning coffee experience with loud chirping and staccato jack hammer noises that resonate in the walls of your precious craftsman style bungalow that you're signing away half your monthly salary just to live in. If woodpeckers are on your list of awful things in life beside Yugos, bears, LISP, burnt eggs, and children, they really should be. You will feel more complete knowing you have a full list of things to intensely dislike.

Another important point about woodpeckers is that they are usually just there because there is something else that is very wrong and annoying you that you just don't know about yet. It is highly likely that the thing that is drawing the woodpeckers is also a problem, and often is the root of your pecker frustrations.

For example: this was the root of my woodpecker frustrations: rotten trim.

Looks lovely, doesn't it? The wood peckers, arriving on springs coat tales, were having a blast boring in to it, plucking out great pieces of fibreglass, and chirping up a storm.

If anyone in town finds random bits of fibreglass around it wasn't us, I swear.

When we first bought the house, there were pronounced problems with trees touching and growing into it. A high priority was cutting them back, but the damage was still done, and much of the trim has large holes worn in it. Additionally, I found that the gutter on that part of the house wasn't flashed correctly, so water drained behind it, across the trim, instead of into it. Note: the drip edge terminates in the gutter!

Tired of constant pecking, I crowbarred off the offending bits, inspected the damange, then stapled heavy plastic over the problem while I contemplatd what to do.

Gutter removal. Aluminium gutters are quite light. The major problem is getting behind the nail head to pull them off.

A blownout picture: at least the ends of the rafters are not rotted,and the decking is in great shape.

You can seen where an old squirrel nest used to be on the left. Center are the supports I made for holding the new trimwork to the rafters. They held each piece of trim in place while I aligned and screwed them in.

New trim boards. These are made of PVC and should never rot. Because my car can only handle 8 foot boards, I had to use two pieces for everything, which complicated the project. That and the cellar door.

Replacement cleat. It's really tough doing a good job creating a new cleat. It's very tough to work out where to install it on the wall. The geometry is simple. The requisite measurements standing on a ladder are not. And the brick wall is bowed. Thus, I'm pretty sure that the horizontal parts are not quite planer. You won't notice, right?

Offsets installed to hold the horizontals

Another view of the offsets.

Horizontals installed. The bowed wall meant that the sides of the 1x12s had to be shaved and cut (as much as 2 inches in places) to fit. Any residual gaps got caulked.

Another view. The outside corner ended up being the summation of all the offsize cuts and rounding errors.There's an extension off the cleat for the inside trim at the end of the house (the darker wood). There's also a small panel where the combination of the 1x12s (which were 6' long) didn't quite reach. Did I say "thank goodness for caulk" yet? If not, I should.

Thank goodness for caulk.

All buttoned up and read for caulk and paint.

Painted and caulked.

See! I told you it would look great.

Gutter reinstalled.

If I had to do it again, I would have done a few things differently:

1. I would have spent the money for PVC all the way around. After I found out how easy it was to work with, and really got into the pain of fiddling with the ladders around the cellar hatch, I determined that never having to work there again would be great and high durability PVC would help.
2. Sand all boards before installation and use primer before painting, the fit and finish will be way better.
3. Consider full length pieces wherever possible. It means fewer measure/cut processes and it just looks better without seams. 
4. Next time, when in the hardware store holding the big crowbar, thinking "this will make getting that gutter/trim/board/nail/woodpecker out", i'm going to buy the godamn bar, put it in the car, drive home, and wreck things. I'm not going to poke around with a hammer, a small prybar, and a iron pike for 3 hours. 

Things I Find in the Woods

Looking back at my photography archive, another possible direction to take my online inscriptions could be a site like www.scarybridges.com. Except it would be like thingsifindinthewoods.com.

This weekends discovery would be this monstrosity, found by ever-loving dog on the shore of Beaverdam Reservoir near Bramblton VA. When I first saw it, I thought it was a steam shovel scoop, but the huge flywheels and concrete pad on a slope suggest it had a different use: I'm pretty sure it's a rock crusher. Basalt is mined through out the area for use as gravel, and there's the old Luck Stone Quarry to the north.
 

Bearings made from a different material. Soft iron or ceramic? Unclear.

Snakes molt in the strangest places. This one found a stub on the end of a twig at the top of the flywheel to get started.

This flywheel was attached to the shaft using a giant pin. In 2014, having a rusty metal shard spinning round and round looks like mutilation hazard.

Tension spring for the crusher.

Did I mention the snake was 3 feet long?

It looks like the flywheels were packed with concrete to give them more rotational mass.

Bearing plates where put together with gaskets.

Grease holes? It looks like they were cast in after the main pour.

Layering

These things can be quite beautiful.

It is so intriguing to have a big hole right in the middle.

Prior Tenants

Before we bought the house, it was a rental.

A rental with a bit of local history.

 That is to say, it had a reputation around town.

 It's taken over a year to really put a dent in the evidence of all that, but things keep cropping up.

 We moved that huge brush pile, and found a bunch of stuff at the bottom that wasn't brush.

Boomers

I put new speakers in our Cutlass Ciera.

The ChevOldsmoBuiac was down to one or two speakers that made any noise. A cars stereo is not really high on the livability scale of a vehicle, with things like working brakes and seat belts really taking priority. However, the tome of the ages says that when non-audiophile spouses start registering complaints, things have gotten pretty bad and something might be done.

The annoying things about the base model Ciera is that it only has a couple of small 3 1/2" speakers in front and a couple of 6x9's in the rear. There's no center console speaker and no door speakers. The haynes manual shows there's slots for front door speakers, but the trim doesn't have an obvious cut out. Given the age of the car (crumbling plastic) and the extant head unit (2012 vintage Wally-world wonder), sticking with the same size speakers seemed the best way to go.

3 1/2" speakers are not a common size in car audio and I couldn't find any locally. I opted to use amazon to isolate a short list of speakers and then choose the cheapest, a couple of Kicker DS 30s. You can see that they'd likely work better than the 24 year old OEM speakers.

After installing them, it became quite obvious that the new speakers had vastly better high and low response than the rear speakers, giving the car a strange, over-the-telephone quality of sound from the more voluminous rear speakers. I found some 6x9 speakers on clearance at worst-buy.

The 6x9 were clearly intended to be installed with screws and an included grill by cutting out all the OEM mounting hardware. Partially due to lazyiness and partially due to the lack of desire to have a car that looked like it might have anything valuable in it*, I modified the original speaker brackets to hold the new speakers. The new 6x9s have a much wider magnet and a deeper cone, so I cut the back of the bracket off and moved the support to the back of the cone.

As alluded to earlier, car audio isn't exactly a place where a lot of investment is warranted. Old cars tend to have a bit of natural noise from being driven, and isolating or drowning out the outside world is a recipe for an accident. That said, even with economics optimized replacements, the new speakers sound terrific... Lynard Skynard sounds three dimensional.

*Painful irony is when someone breaks a 200$ window to steal a $60 head unit.

Slow motion evening

Relaxing with the Girly.

Peppers II

Story Continued from Peppers I

The peppers didn't die from what will have to pass at my attempts to harden them by accidentally leaving them out overnight to freeze. In fact, they were starting to get pretty gnarly. I think they were permanently scared by their fears of abandonment.

So, I put them in the ground! It turns out a tray of 36 pepper plants will fill 1 and half garden beds. I'm going to have to find a way to build some more.

I'm surpised at how well plants work, honestly. While the Girly swears that I have a green thumb, my actual approach is pretty much plant, water, and then see what happens. Not "hope for the best", there definite resignation that things probably won't work. I don't take my plants seriously at all. I randomly decide to sprout seeds, randomly decide to plant seedlings, and keep random green things as house plants. Regard to soil? Little. Regard to timing: less. I'm pretty sure I started carrots in late august last year. That's why they only made it to a few inches long. And yet, usually things survive and often produce... as long as I can keep the animals away.