Zed's Dead, Baby

This here is a Casio CZ-101. It's often mistaken for a cheesy home keyboard that you might give to the child of a friend you don't like for xmas, but while diminutive in size and in original MSRP, it's actually a genuine, professional music machine. You'll find no button that plays a corny samba rhythm, nor will you find any onboard speakers; instead you'll find some 1/4" output jacks, and a pair of full size MIDI ports on the back.

Along with some strap buttons so you can wear it on stage like a keytar.

Now this particular example has two problems. First, it doesn't make any noise (and not just due to the lack of onboard speakers). Second, it's absolutely filthy. It also has some condition issues that are common with a keyboard that people mistake for a kid's toy.

I tried to send the ghost of this astronaut back into orbit using a bit of rubbing alcohol, but that just ended up taking off some of the finish where the sticker's adhesive had long ago softened it. I suppose the spaceman has left his indelible mark on history, and this synthesizer will forever wear the scars of its past life.

Anyway, let's get down to business. Click through the link to follow along.

The Great Fluffening Part 9

Progress has naturally slowed a bit now that I'm back to twerk at my day job, but it hasn't come to a halt. I did a bit of insulating this week but held off on doing too much while I was waiting for another new tool to come in.

You see, cutting the foam with the larger utility knife was definitely a step up from the small one, but I had my eye on going one better.

Wherever there is a job, there is a power tool to make it faster (and more dangerous).

These blades are designed for soft materials like foam and cardboard, and have a wavy knife edge designed to slice through the material rather than serrated teeth that rip out chunks of annoying fluff.

They're also much longer than regular jigsaw blades.

Now that's a knoif.

I had actually tried cutting the foam with a regular blade, but the short length left it just barely unable to pierce the paper on the back side of the cut, and the foam crumbs it ejected everywhere were irritating to say the least. Let's see what kind of cuts this new blade can make.

And the verdict is...

Beautifully clean and basically dust-free. It's also very easy to control and follow a line, so this should be a big upgrade.

As for the insulation progress, I've filled two more highly irregular bays.

And I used some highly irregular scraps to make it work. Waste not, want not.

Brushie Brushie

So I got this paint brush back when I moved, in order to do some (ok, a lot) of touch up to the paint; particularly the trim. I didn't exactly treat it terribly well, often using it to mash paint into tight spaces or grind it into details on moldings, and it shows. I did keep it clean at least, but the fuzziness has become a bit of an impediment to its regular use.

I could have just thrown this out and got a new one, but I came across a tip that you can reshape brushes that have fluffed out like this by dipping them in boiling water and using a wire brush to comb them straight. I figured that was slightly less effort than throwing it in the trash, so here we go.

Now I should preface this next image by saying that paint brushes always look fantastic when they're wet, so this immediate result wasn't anything I was expecting to stick around after things dried out, but it was at least a good start.

So after letting the brush sit for a few weeks to get good and dry, what it actually looks like is this.

And I'd say that's a solid improvement. Maybe not quite fresh-and-new-out-of-the-box but definitely more usable than it was before I gave it a dip in the hot springs.

I even gave the brush a little bit of a shake to make sure the bristles weren't just stuck to each other or something, and it's still looking good. I think once I dip this in some paint again, it should stick together in a nice brush shape instead of the tip splitting and stray cow-licks poking out all over.

Now I also tried this technique on a natural bristle artist brush that had got a bit of a curl in the bristles, and it didn't do a damn thing to it, so I think this trick is strictly for synthetic brushes. Maybe there's another trick out there for dealing with unruly natural bristle brushes, I dunno. In the meantime, I'll enjoy my much more usable synthetic brushes.

Coping Strategies

So I have a project coming up sometime in the mid-future which will involve coping. This is basically where instead of making a pair of 45 degree miter cuts on an inside corner, you instead let one board run square into the corner, and then cut the other board to fit.

That second operation is known as coping, and you start by cutting the board at the normal 45 degree angle, and then come in with another wood removal technique to follow the intersection of that 45 degree cut and the profile of the board to form a relief-cut in order to make room for it to fit over top of the first square-cut board.

The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, it allows the square cut board (often the longer piece) to shift in length without having to worry about a miter opening up. Secondly, if a gap does open between the two pieces, the square cut board basically fills the space behind the coped board, so the gap is much less visible than it would be with a miter that's split open.

Now there's a number of techniques used for coping, and the important factor is that you need to be able to essentially make a compound angled cut. The actual angle isn't important, it just needs to be a continuous cut that clears the other piece by a reasonable margin in every relevant axis.

The most basic method is to use a fret saw to manually cut the cope relief. This works, but it's a bit of a pain in the ass, kind of slow, and fret saw blades are very prone to breaking.

Another common method is to use an angle grinder with a 40 grit flap disc. This supposedly works well despite sounding like it would make absolute mince out of the board you're working on. It also generates a lot of fine, airborne dust, which isn't always ideal.

The method I chose to pursue, however, is to use a jigsaw. Now normally a jigsaw can make only simple miter cuts by angling the foot plate. This would get you most of the way there, but you'd have difficulty making that cut connect on inside corners. To get a compound cut, we'll instead remove the original footplate and install this Collins coping foot #not-sponsored which is a conical/spherical/rounded foot that allows you to freehand the angle of the cut in two axes.

To actually use it, you flip the jigsaw upside-down and cut from the bottom. I found it surprisingly comfortable to cradle the jigsaw this way and operate the trigger with my thumb.

Now at first it might seem alarming to cut from the backside with the blade pointed towards your face, but it really works surprisingly well. About the only thing I needed to pay attention to was making sure I got the right blade speed to keep the board from vibrating (not too slow, not too fast), and then it was as simple as just following the line.

For a practice piece I just grabbed this hunk of scrap OSB and did an excessively angled back-cut on what had previously been some square cuts, aiming to follow the corner of those existing cuts on the face side.

And from the front side, it looks pretty... much like a hunk of scrap OSB.

The important thing is that it was very easy to follow the line quite precisely while maintaining the compound undercut angle, including going around the inside corner. I think I'll probably practice on a few scraps of the actual molding material when the time comes, but I feel quite confident that I'll be able to make the cuts without a problem.

I should also add here that installation of the foot plate was very simple. Jigsaws have been around long enough that they're pretty much all universal (except for Festool, of course) so this foot is basically a one-size-fits-all thing, only coming with a few shims to accommodate some models that need a bit more clearance (I needed to install the thin shim for my Milwaukee saw).

So yeah, good purchase, well worth the money.

The Great Fluffening Part 8

Since my vacation days are coming to a close I decided to clean up some more fiddly tasks today, starting with getting the soffit vent covers prepped for installation.

And the first step of preparing them is to remove the bar code sticker, which was expertly placed to block 90% of the vent area.

I wonder how many of these have been installed with this bar code sticker still in place, over the years? I'm guessing somewhere between "all of them" and "all of them".

The Prop 65 warning will, of course, be staying. We can't have anyone being unknowingly exposed to aluminum, after all.

While we're here, I also checked to make sure that the 2 inch hole saw I have would make the right sized hole for these to fit snugly into.

And that is, indeed, a delightfully snug fit into this piece of wood that will now double as an installation tool. It also reminded me that my 2 inch hole saw is just slightly not deep enough to cut all the way through a piece of universal wood from one side, which is awkward. But more on that later, we've got stickers to remove.

And remove and remove and remove.

Now we need to prime these, and it just so happens that I have some aluminum primer left over from the awning refreshening I did a while back.

And so on it goes.

And on and on and on.

Now my house isn't primer-coloured (well, it's a slightly different shade of primer, I guess) so now would be a good time to use up a bit more of that jar of sample paint I got a short while back.

Or maybe it was a long while back. Well, a little peeling and stirring later and it's looking good as... usable.

You know what? It spreads on fine, so let's paint.

And paint and paint and paint.

Well that was a bit of work, let's take a short bicycle break.

We don't have winter here, we have smog. People do love their wood burning fireplaces this time of year.

Anyway, back at it and it's mail time.

Using a knife that wasn't long enough to make it half way through the foam wasn't really cutting it, pun entirely intended, so I picked up an 18mm utility knife. I also ordered some non-snap blades so that the blade wouldn't snap while I had it extended like this, but they're arriving a bit late so I'll just try to be careful with the one (1) snap blade that was included with the knife.

I know that size isn't supposed to matter, but it's gotta be long enough to do the job!

Also in that delivery was a 1 inch hole saw to add to my hole saw kit. I don't need it for this project, but I do need it for "don't assume I have a 1 inch hole saw in this kit when there actually isn't one".

But more importantly, I got this hole poker.

This is a 2 inch self-feeding auger bit, which looks like it should rightly be a wrist-breaker-9000-deluxe.

Which just barely fits into the chuck on my drill.

But despite appearances to the contrary, it actually goes through this universal wood surprisingly smoothly; even moreso I dare say than the hole saw which has a tendency to bind and grab. This just chews up the wood and spits it out the back effortlessly. I like it.

And yes, it does drill the holes sufficiently on-size.

Now I was going to go around poking holes in my soffits today, but it occurred to me that some of the insulation panels I've installed are being held up mostly just by the seam tape and the wishes of small children. Like, most of them are in there pretty snug, but there's a few that are just lightly set in place. Given that, it seemed likely that a strong wind blowing in through the soffit vents might be enough to pop them out and send them crashing back down to the car hole floor, and so I decided that I should hold off on the soffit vents until I get the strapping nailed up.

So let's carry on with the insulation installation instead.

I'm happy to announce that I made it through the first roll of seam tape.

So that means I damn well better be at least 1/4 of the way done, because I only bought 4 rolls of it.

Speaking of doneness, I managed to fill these two rafter bays before running out of working hours.

There's just the one more teensy wedge-shaped bay on this side to go (which you can see in the upper left), which is nice, because it means I can move the insulation panels inside if there's any rain in the forecast, and they won't be too terribly in the way if I stack them under here. I don't think they'd get damaged by being rained on, but all the same I don't want to deal with wet insulation panels.

Oh, and I also furred out and insulated this little cheese wedge.

There's three more rafter bays on the other side that would have been nice to get done, as then I could move my band saw back into its home, so I'll probably tackle those next as I putter along to finish up this job. I also have the 4 full size rafter bays on that side to do, but I'm holding off on those for a bit as I'll need to move some car hole crap out of the way to access them properly.

On the subject of puttering along, I'm expecting progress to slow considerably from here on out, so this will be the last of the daily-ish updates. I'll make another post here and there as I run across things worth sharing or just to summarize the work that's been done, but other than that it's back to the usual schedule of occasionally shouting into the void for me.

For now, I'm calling this another project successfully part-done.

The Great Fluffening Part 7

Today we're going through the looking glass, which is to say doing basically the same thing as yesterday but in a mirror image.

The car hole door brackets got a shortening on this side and some blocking installed, the little triangle in the corner got some blocking and a cheese wedge of insulation, and after all of that I managed to have just enough time to fill two measly rafter bays with foam.

Two rotten, measly rafter bays. And let me tell you, you would have to search long and hard to find a bigger concentration of mease than these two rafter bays. The one on the left loses a good half inch in width from the bottom to the top, and if you think that's bad, the one on the right goes from about 16 inches at the bottom to barely 13 inches at the top.

Luckily these two rafter bays are the worst in the whole roof (well, except for maybe the one right next to them), so getting them out of the way should be a lot of work off my plate.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that I'm not going to get the whole insulation project done before my vacation is up, particularly since I'm trying to actually enjoy some R&R in between sessions of wrestling with framing and insulating. The good news is that the project is in a state now where I can just chip away at it whenever I find time, and there shouldn't be anything major to trip me up from here on out.

The Great Fluffening Part 6

I was hoping that today would just be tossing insulation up into the rafters non-stop, but one minor issue did end up stopping me for a little detour: the mounts for my car hole door tracks.

I don't really want to entomb these forever behind the insulation, strapping and drywall (just entombing them behind the drywall would be acceptable, though), so I'm going to put in a piece of blocking and lower them down below the level of the rafters.

Like this, basically.

Cutting through the slotted angle wasn't too bad to do with my snips, and I made sure to bevel the ends so as not to leave a pointy-sharp right angle.

Anyway, with that done I was ready to get rolling with stuffing the insulation, and now that I had yesterday's experience under my belt, I surely wouldn't be spending an hour on fitting the insulation panel into each stud bay.

Or at least that's what I told myself before spending an hour on fitting the insulation panels into each stud bay.

I did a little reset though and had a think about the pain points I was running into, and decided to switch things up a little bit by cutting the panels cross-ways into 4 foot panels rather than lengthwise into 8 foot ones. Wrestling the full 8 foot lengths up here was turning out to be quite a chore, and cutting them was equally awkward given that the straightedge I was using is only 4 feet long.

These 4 foot panels did indeed turn out to be much easier to deal with, and despite needing to do twice the layout and cutting, the process went much quicker than with the 8 foot ones, so I'll be continuing like this from here on I think.

Of course, there's only 6 more full-length rafter bays until I get into the weeds of the valley rafter bays, so I was going to run out of places to stick 8 foot panels soon anyway.