Thursday, July 10, 2008

This And...That?

§ 1. The astute observer will have noted I missed my late-afternoon/early-evening posting yesterday. Thereby hangs a tale, in much the same manner as a spider monkey hangs from one. My part of the Big Secret Project has involved a lot of Being An Electrician, which is sort of like havin' a nuke reactor tech fix your Jacuzzi. And it's not quite starting from scratch, the place was wired up once, then later unwired back to the walls; so about half of it is lookin' at what's there and figuring out how to get from that to what the project needs with a minimim of kludges, cheats and bends (especially bends other than 90° -- 3/4" EMT conduit and a gal-powered bender old enough to not have handy angle marks, that much exercise I do not need and want even less). And the other half is actually so doing, plus a little work inside a live panelboard. Projects and deadlines being what they are, yesterday was at least twelve full hours of it and no stop for lunch. I came home, made a quick run to the market with Tam (outta cat food and microwavable girl chow), ate dinner and sailed away to Dreamland, the Sandman tagging after, complaining, "Hey! Not so fast!"

§ 2. This guy has been linkin' to me for awhile now. If you like guns and music, I commend Redboy Blues to your attention.

§ 3. My congratulations to the well-chosen winners of Para Ordnance's weekend at Blackwater! (Including my roomie, who won't quite admit to dancing about, singing, "Made of Win! And Cake!" when the happy news arrived).

§ 4. And now, I'm off! Wish me luck, the bulk of The Project needs to be finished today.

6 comments:

Turk Turon said...

You're always workin' on such cool secret stuff!

Ian Argent said...

Chow for microwaveable girls?

KurtP said...

Here's a quick little cheat for conduit bending,
Get your angles and measurements and chalk them out on the ground. that way you have a template to bend to.
hopefully when you match the floor pattern, it'll match what you need.

Anonymous said...

See, this is why I hate manual benders - 3/4" gets old fast, especially when you have to do dozens of bends. Even racheting benders like Hossfeld are an improvement..

Roberta X said...

HTRN: amen! And I was bending box-to-wall offsets in the first phase; gave up after six and used minnies instead of P-clips. Then had to tear down and redo one wall's worth when the Locaton of An Obstruction was changed.

Kurtp: H'mm. It works, if I'd had the time.

Ian: I can't say we're not, though it is an experience we try to avoid.

Turk: yup. I may have pictures, eventually.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, bending stuff with those things is a world class pain in the ass, and you're limited to 3/4" unless you got arms like Atlas, and Pipe is right out. Racheting, or better yet, hydro benders are the way to go - you should bug 'em to buy one. :)