Riverbend Journal

  Note: I am halfway across the country from my home and may not have internet access on a regular basis for a few days so if your comments aren't published right away, that is why and I apologize in advance. I will try to get them published and answered as soon as time allows. I have been dreading this step ever since the Good Samaritan got in his vehicle to go back home after helping me lower the base to floor level. I needed to create attachment points to allow for the top to be bolted onto the base after it was moved inside the church since the doors of the church aren't wide enough to allow the entire thing to be carried in as one piece. I was able to attach brackets to the base but I needed to get the top centered onto the base and mark the holes for the brackets onto the bottom side of the top. To do that, I either needed to lift everything high enough in the air to crawl underneath OR I needed to turn everything upside down. I thought with some planning, I might, just m...

  Not long ago, I mentioned our gardening woes this spring and my discovery that rabbits aren't immune to electrical shocks, but that my solar powered fencer wasn't up for the job. I discovered that by running an very unrecommended extension cord all the way from the house to the solar charger and used their battery charger connection to essentially continuously charge the battery, also not recommended. I thus ordered a proper weatherproof fence charger that will plug into my outside outlet on the house. Above is the business end which you can see is coming out of the PVC pipe I used to insulate the metal fence posts from the electrified fencing. Using a sidewalk scraping tool that I mainly use to chip ice off the sidewalk on rare occasions, I repurposed it to dig a six inch deep trench in our lawn and buried the cable from where it exits out of the bottom of the PVC insulating pipe above to our patio underneath the deck. I then fastened it up a post and on the bottom side of t...

  After getting the plywood top laminated together, I got one last stick of oak lumber from my big box store and milled it down to make my own shop veneer, much thicker than what you can buy, to cover up the exposed plywood edges. It is 1/4 of an inch thick and when I apply a 1/4 inch radius later to soften up the edges, it should all but disappear making the entire top look like it was cut from a giant slab of wood.  Unfortunately though, I discovered that despite maybe a couple hundred clamps, I did not have a single clamp that would work to hold the veneer in place while the glue dries. Not wanting to but a bunch of expensive clamps that I'll likely never use again, I had to get creative. Above you can see what I ended up doing after digging through my storage box of ropes, bungees and ratchet straps. Perhaps 15 years ago, while living in another town, the local Ace Hardware store was going out of business and I stopped in while all inventory was 75% off to see if there was...

  With the best piece of plywood turned with the good face pointing down onto a moving blanket to protect it from damage, I applied epoxy to the back side. Like the side panel assemblies, the size prevents me from clamping it adequately and in a short enough period of time before the adhesive starts setting up. Epoxy gives me enough time to use alternative clamping in the form of lots of screws placed every six inches or so. The epoxy comes in tubes that I squirt on and it thick enough it doesn't run which meant I needed to spread it out in an even layer.  Previously I used small glue rollers but they cost around $10 and the epoxy pretty much renders them junk afterward. I had two old ones that I used and both had to be thrown away. This time, I wanted to try something different so bought some plastic putty knives for 99 cents each. They turned out to work quite well and I didn't feel bad about tossing them after I was done. It is hard to see but above is what it looked like a...

  After kicking around various ideas on how to entice people to lend me their backs, I came to an obvious solution. I would call up the parishioner who designed the altar and ask them to find some people to help lower it. He responded back saying that although he knows of one person who could possibly help, he thought that just the two of us would be able to do it. I was a bit skeptical but acquiesced.  While waiting for him to arrive, I decided to up the odds a bit and built a sort of midway platform between the height of my workbench and floor level. I overturned four 5-gallon buckets and placed a short 2x4 piece of lumber between them. This would give us a place to set the altar on about 18 inches or so above floor level and prevent us from having to lower it all the way down in one go and possibly injure our backs.  After checking things out, my good Samaritan and I just went for it and honestly, it wasn't bad at all. Both of us got it set down onto my makeshift platf...