What did you do today?

[Mark Brown]

I always liked Zamma transitions, they are still my favorite.... but I can't get them anymore because our supplier found something cheaper... grrrr

It does hurt man, I was in the hot tub tonight and after I got all pruney you could see the layers of skin missing. If I hang on long enough ill have some mean calluses lol

 

[C.J.]

Zamma makes a match for many different flavors of flooring. Lifeproof, Home Decorators, Traffic Master… pretty much whatever HD sells will have a matching Zamma reducer to go with it and I’m sure Zamma isn’t just limited to HD. I think that’s all Zamma does is transitions so it makes sense that they can do them cheaper than other manufacturers can which I’m sure is why they are being used as opposed to the LVP manufacturers themselves.

I did a Coretec job couple weeks ago. Here’s a baby threshold that came with it. As @highup mentioned somewhere on this forum, when he talked with Coretec they said their baby threshold doesn’t come with a snap track yet there clearly is one in the wrapper. Clearly this is a Shaw threshold that matches a Coretec product but that doesn’t surprise me because Shaw owns Coretec. Then again maybe it is a Zamma threshold. Nobody will ever know

 

[C.J.]

My kids came and visited me this week. We had a blast. Went tubing, drove through the shitty parts of town, had a few great meals and lots of laughs. Got this text from my boy today and I guess I did something right for once. Hope all you guys have as great a day as I did today.

 

[Mark Brown]

I mean... that sounds good and all, but I dont think this world is ready for two of you buddy.

 

[C.J.]

Hopefully he wants to emulate current me and not old me

 

[Mark Brown]

current you is what I'm worried about

 

[zannej]

I managed to scrape my arm on the same spot on the microwave door that cut my thumb. Maybe it is sharper than I realized.

Mark, I hope your hand heals quickly.

CJ, I'll have to see if I can find Zamma's company site and figure out if they have anything that matches my flooring. I am going to order samples of the life-proof hickory to compare to my antique mahogany to see if the color is close enough. I'm not good at differentiating colors that well.

These are photos of the Lifeproof shadow hickory

This is the stock photo of the MSI antique mahogany

Obviously the latter has more dark spots-- I actually prefer the Lifeproof's look with less black-ish coloring.

This is the photo of the Zamma shadow hickory trim

I'm tempted to just order the transition instead of the samples and hope it matches well enough.
We don't expect perfection in this house.

Something I didn't think about with the room size was that the measurements are done with the existing walls that are very thin wall panels and some of the paneling will have to be removed and replaced-- because it's super thin/cheap crappy ugly wood stuff. I *might* end up using "waterboard" a sort of waterproof drywall that is purple (if the local hardware store still has it). It's thicker and I'd have to measure just how thick. It cracks easily though.

I really wish I'd ordered enough of the MSI stuff to do the kitchen, but I wasn't anticipating the floor deteriorating the way it did. I also wish they sold vinyl tile or planks that looks like parquet.

to get an idea of the wall panels (and ugly ceiling-although not as ugly as the ceiling in my room that looks like pegboard tiles)

It's thinner wood paneling over slightly thicker wood paneling. I don't like drywall so we will probably get more paneling of some sort. Maybe something similar to beadboard.

 

[highup]

My kids came and visited me this week. We had a blast. Went tubing, drove through the shitty parts of town, had a few great meals and lots of laughs. Got this text from my boy today and I guess I did something right for once. Hope all you guys have as great a day as I did today.

View attachment 12736

That is really cool. I think a lot of times you know that you're doing the right thing but for him to go to the point of actually sending you a message like that...... That's over the top cool.
I don't have any kids so that's not going to happen to me......
....well, not in the same way that you received an acknowledgment that you've done the right thing.
I got a surprise today. My brother has been helping me with a carpet job for a little over a week. We've been working at a home for a retired couple and their daughter and three children live with them.
The kids like to talk a lot, but overall, they've been pretty darn good the entire time. The oldest of the daughter and I think she's around 11? She's bright and has a good sense of humor and plays with her younger brothers and you hear laughter all the time.......... ear piercing at times. . You know, that I don't do production work so this is actually been kind of a fun job. They clear out one room each day and we complete one room each day.
Today we finished the master bedroom and we're outside for quite a while packing out tools and rerolling some of the carpet that was removed and putting it in my truck.
The kids came out side and they knew that we were leaving and both the two younger boys came over with there arms spread out wanting a hug. It felt really nice whatever it was that we did had some sort of impact on the kids.
........of course the only thing I noticed when we dumped the garbage out of the back of the truck into the warehouse dumpster, is I didn't have my main tool bag. I left it in the house.
I only live about 5 mi away from them. After realizing my error I called them up and told him I'd like to come back and pick up my tool bag. They said that's great, come on over. The little girl answered the door with her sweet little smile and I said:
"I had to come back because I miss you guys already"
Yes she knew I was just coming back for my tool bag but she thought that was quite funny.
I don't think you can leave a job much better than that.
I have tomorrow and the weekend off so I'm going to tinker with the gauges that I'm trying to install in my pickup. One of these days I'll gitter done.

 

[highup]

Zamma makes a match for many different flavors of flooring. Lifeproof, Home Decorators, Traffic Master… pretty much whatever HD sells will have a matching Zamma reducer to go with it and I’m sure Zamma isn’t just limited to HD. I think that’s all Zamma does is transitions so it makes sense that they can do them cheaper than other manufacturers can which I’m sure is why they are being used as opposed to the LVP manufacturers themselves.

I did a Coretec job couple weeks ago. Here’s a baby threshold that came with it. As @highup mentioned somewhere on this forum, when he talked with Coretec they said their baby threshold doesn’t come with a snap track yet there clearly is one in the wrapper. Clearly this is a Shaw threshold that matches a Coretec product but that doesn’t surprise me because Shaw owns Coretec. Then again maybe it is a Zamma threshold. Nobody will ever know View attachment 12735View attachment 12734

The customer had a tube with 49 ft of trim along with the loose pieces of track. They weren't sealed up like the one you have.
Maybe it's a carpet one/Cortec/Shaw thing. I don't know, I run into the situation probably three times. Most installers don't even use the transition moldings they just turn and tuck the carpet against the LVP edge because they hate the process of adhering these transitions...

 

[highup]

There is another company that makes custom trims for virtually any manufacturer. They color match wood trims for specific products and they also have vinyl trims. I think they even have baseboards cord around that literally everything.
They're called Artistic Finishes
https://www.artisticfinishes.com/Page/Moldings

 

[highup]

I took my monster Makita 5200 compressor to the job today. When I got home, just for the heck of it I unscrewed the fill cap thinking it would have a dipstick on it. Nope, it's got a site plug with a red dot in the center to show the fill level.
I bought this compressor around Christmas time, a little before. My 1993 Emglo was kicking the bucket, needing a start capacitor and a pressure switch. Who knows how much rust was on the inside of those twin tanks, so find the repair parts might not make that good of a deal. I needed a compressor, like it right now. It died while I was finishing up 200 ft of quarter round. Had to buy a compressor.
Got a really good deal on this compressor and it was only $160 bucks at a pawn shop. New ones at the time for costing $350 to $400. It's much more compressive than I need for work but I found that it now allows me to use some air tools and not just staplers.
Why would I not check the oil level in a new to me, used compressor? That should have been the first thing I did when I bought it.
On the outside, the compressor looks fantastic. At the pawn shop I plugged it in and both gauges slowly rose up to 140 lb in perfect synchronicity...... Is that a word?
This is a 3 horsepower compressor in the pawn shop it started easily with a 50 ft 16 3 cord outside the building. That right there sold me on it.
I had to also looked at ratings on this unit and it's like top of the list, top of the heap.
Anyway before unloading it out of the truck tonight, I unscrewed the fill cap and it didn't have a dipstick so I looked at the site plug and it was just totally black. I had no idea if it was empty or overfilled so I put a plastic container underneath it and pulled the drain plug. Thick goo, almost resembling gear oil, came out of there. It smelled like used motor oil.
Compressors don't have thick oil. They also don't have black oil. The compressor runs perfect so I hope nothing is worn inside of it.
I let the oil drain for 10 minutes and tipped it on its side to get every drop I could out of there. I had a quart of senco synthetic compressor oil so I filled that up to the sight line with that. I plugged in the compressor and allowed it to fill up then unplug it and flush the tank. I looked at the site plug again and now it looked like it was low so I added some more oil. I pumped up the tank again and flushed it and I did that two times. Then I checked the oil a second time and it seems foamy.
Looked online and show me oil seems to me from high humidity and temperature issues or overfilling of the oil in the crankcase. It's been sitting in the carport for 2 hours. It was obvious that I overfilled it. I have a friend designed for mixing fuel for two cycle engines and I use that to suck out the excess oil. It's now slightly below the red dot in a sight line, not slightly above it. I'm sure it will be fine, it was just kind of a surprise to see the synthetic oil turn foamy that fast. Maybe it's compatibility issue with the thick oil that I drained out. I still have enough Senco oil to refill the crank case a second time and use my first fill as a flush.
I got reading stuff online that semco and probably other manufacturers send a break-in oil which is supposed to be changed soon after you start using it.
If the oil was that thick, could this be the breaking oil from 2008?
Nobody is that stupid, right?

https://www.amazon.com/Makita-MAC52...=mac5200+air+compressor&qid=1629444681&sr=8-3

 

[highup]

On a different note:
This has got to be one of the coolest families ever. To have a dad so dedicated to these kids lives that he's made one of the neatest bands in my recollection.
His profession is as a musician.
Colvin brought his income and his world to a virtual stop. He had time to teach the kids and somehow he turned this into a fantastic family band.
Who would think that covid could create something this fantastic.

This an eary early video and it shows him instructing his kids as to their part in this one song. I'm biased because I think this is one of the coolest songs ever. These kids nailed it.
The little girl is the one that intrigues me the most because she looks like she's goofing around and dancing like an idiot, but when it comes time to shine, like hitting the cowbell or any other instrument or just anything, she is spot on and as good as it gets. She nails every note, every single tap of the cowbell or Maracas or whatever she's handed. She spins in circles like a dust devil but whenever she needs to hit a note, she nails it.

 

[highup]

Well I'm gaining on my gauge set. Got the aluminum and the formica piece cut out. The formica fits well enough the gauges will hold it in place so I'm not going to glue it.
Next is wiring and running the oil line and the water temperature line.
This might be harder than what I've done so far. I would have preferred gray Formica, but finding a match would be a bit unrealistic.
...besides, I have black.

 

[Floorist]

Just walking the pets.

 

[highup]

If it isn't one thing, it's another.
The one thing is I was going to check the wiring from the dimmer switch for my gauge lights so I can run a wire from there to where my new gauges will be.
The panel that holds my headlights and the dimmer only takes two screws to get loose but the bundle of wires is short which makes it hard getting the plugs unplugged.
Once I got the panel removed I noticed one of the wires had a bare spot in it. I grabbed a light to get a better look at the situation and realize that same wire has a bubbled appearance indicating it's been rather warm. It appears to be a ground wire but I can't find a description with the color codes.
It gets even more fun. To hold the dimmer knob and the headlight switches in place is a metal bracket with two screws at the top and two screws at the bottom. They of course screw into plastic. In the '80s and into the '90s GM used the crappiest plastic ever created. To add insult to injury they made it thin.
One of the bosses that holds the screws was still intact. The bottom runs were actually gone and one of the top ones was cracked.
I probably spent 2 hours getting a piece of plastic to replace the lower bosses and then cut reinforcements for the upper bosses to reinforce them. JB weld quick is your friend. Love that stuff.
While I had a torn apart I opened up the rheostat and polished up all the copper contacts and contact surfaces. I won't know if the dimmer works better than it used to or not at least not until tonight.
Basically all I got done today was worry about a ground wire that's gotten hot. I have no idea how to get in there and replace it because the wires are tucked too far into the dash to do a repair and the cavity is only about 2 in by 5 in. Not much room for wire strippers and fat hands.
Oh wait it gets better.
I replaced the gasket in the bottom of the throttle body a month and a half or two ago and while I had it off like I gave it a spit shine inside and out.
The engine has had a slight stumble for a couple of seconds whenever I start the truck. I decided to look into the throttle body again and see if there was any build up, which there shouldn't be because I just, ....I just cleaned the damn thing.
There is a vent from the rocker arm cover directly into an air cleaner spacer in the back of the throttle body. That hose was plugged up totally when I had the throttle body off and was cleaning it so I cleaned out the hose too and for the first time in a long time, my PVC system was functioning.
Okay, back to the stumble I was trying to get rid of. This is what the back side of the throttle body looks like. It was shiny metal a month and a half or so ago.
Okay, that's obviously from moisture. I searched around and discovered where it's coming from. The intake manifold gasket is apparently not in the best of shape. There's a water crossover passage on the back side of the intake manifold that feeds both heads. This is one time where moist is not good. I'm thinking it may be a slow drip into the lifter valley that's just enough to evaporate continuously and get sucked up through that vent tube. The oil is not milky at all it looks great.
I pulled the spark plugs on this side of the engine and if water was seeping into the intake then the plug should be white and clean because water in the heat pretty much steam clean the porcelain. The one closest to the leak had a reddish tinge to it. That's not from water so I don't think any water is getting sucked into the cylinder. I don't think a leak into the head could cause the moisture getting into the oil. And since I can now see some bubbling on the backside of the intake manifold I think it's just that gasket.
This is not going to be fun to fix. I'm hoping some stop leak, some of that Silver Seal aluminum stuff we'll make a temporary fix.
..................and how was your day?

 

[highup]

I'm sitting at the hospital in the parking lot waiting for my brother. He had a pain in his side and just told me he's been having it off and on for a week. Looks like somebody else isn't having a nice day because of a helicopter just landed at the end of the parking lot by the emergency room.
No they weren't landing in a parking space they have their own.

 

[Floorist]

I'm sitting at the hospital in the parking lot waiting for my brother. He had a pain in his side and just told me he's been having it off and on for a week. Looks like somebody else isn't having a nice day because of a helicopter just landed at the end of the parking lot by the emergency room.
No they weren't landing in a parking space they have their own.

I hope he gets seen soon. In the ERs around here you can have a 12 hour wait because of covid. Some people have actually waited 24 hours. Last time I went to one I left after 3 hours. A lady sitting there told me he had been there 8 hours and still had 8 people in front of her. In the 3 hours I had waited, they had taken in 1 patient.

 

[Mark Brown]

I hope he gets seen soon. In the ERs around here you can have a 12 hour wait because of covid. Some people have actually waited 24 hours. Last time I went to one I left after 3 hours. A lady sitting there told me he had been there 8 hours and still had 8 people in front of her. In the 3 hours I had waited, they had taken in 1 patient.

Last time I needed stitches, I did it myself because I knew there was no way I hell my little (non life threatening) cut would ever be seen as a priority.

I figure unless I'm closer to death than life I stay far away from that place.

 

[Floorist]

Last time I needed stitches, I did it myself because I knew there was no way I hell my little (non life threatening) cut would ever be seen as a priority.

I figure unless I'm closer to death than life I stay far away from that place.

I have used superglue for cuts.

 

[havasu]

Since today is my birthday, my son got me a bottle of wine, and 2500 rounds of 9mm bullets!