Welders: more useful than you'd think

I like having a welder in the garage. When stupid stuff like this happens:

I can just zap my caulking gun back together!

Squeak-squeak-squeak... AC belt tensioner bearing is shot!

I’ve been chasing this squeaking noise at the front of the Subaru for a while now. Well, not exactly chasing - more like ignoring in the hope that it would go away. Really, I was afraid that it was the timing belt tensioner (something you really shouldn’t ignore) which is a fairly big and (more importantly) expensive job. It turned out to be an easy fix.

As exciting as watching paint dry

I didn’t realize how many damn things I had that needed paint until I started prepping them for a coat of primer. What you’re looking at is mostly my disassembled tire changer and a bunch of other random junk.

I’m trying a couple of new things this time. One is the primer - normally I just go straight to Tremclad, but a few projects of late  have been losing their paint prematurely. The other new thing is spraying - I recently bought a paint sprayer in order to paint my fence (it was a huge time-saver for that job) and decided to give it a whirl on some metal bits. There’s a pretty big time investment for stringing up the bits (and for cleaning the gun afterwards), and there’s some skill involved in avoiding drips, but it works fast and evenly. I think I like it more than my usual brushing method of painting.

Do you know how fast you were going back there, young man?

Thankfully I was never asked that question while riding my motorcycle. If I had been, I could legitimately respond with: “not a freaking clue.” You see, my motorcycle hasn’t had a functioning speedometer for as long as I have owned it. I was finally spurred to fix it when my tachometer needle decided to fall off inside the gauge. One broken gauge I could ignore - but not two!

This tire is tired - now what?

Speaking of things giving up on thing-ing, my recent valve stem breakage apparently wrought more damage than I first thought.

Vise upgrade!

Recently, my vise of many years finally gave up vise-ing.