Saturday, May 14, 2011

Another Dimensional Anomaly

The previous two posts were posted a day late because of the Blogger outage, so this post will serve to catch us up with the present.

Sanding the sill, then checking with a straightedge along the top plane, revealed that I have nailed the profile at the right end.


This gives you an idea just how much wood has been lost to weather damage.

Alas, the junction line starts to go south gradually about four inches along, until at the left end it is low by about a quarter-inch, as I suspected, so I've got some more building up to do.

Up at the top, after sanding I put a longer straightedge along the top piece, and discovered another, shall we say, dimensional anomaly:


The bottom edge follows a straight line from the left end to where the red line begins; the red line continues that straight line all the way to the right. As you can see, the actual piece goes a bit north at the start of the break, and stays up there until it is about 1/8" off at the right end. I haven't yet figured out how this happened, but it seems likely that the cause is related to the sag in the foundation that occurred nearby, and that may be also be the origin of the break in the wood that eventually caused a chunk to fall out. But for the life of me, I can't conceive of a plausible sequence of events to fit the evidence.

At this point it would only cause more problems to attempt to re-establish this straight line, so I am going to attempt to feather off this repair on the right end in a way that hides the problem.

Last time, I mentioned that I was going to use cyanoacrylate glue to attach the remaining piece to the apron, but as happens too often with this kind of glue, it failed me. As anyone who has worked with Super Glue knows, that stuff goes stale very quickly, and when it does it simply does not work. I'm now officially fed up with cyanoacrylate glue.

So I scrubbed the residue off with acetone and an old toothbrush, and used a bit of quick-setting epoxy instead. 


Sometimes this work is quite vexing, but I do it all so my loved ones may abide within in elegant comfort.


1 comment:

  1. Blinded by putty. Where will it all end. Squirrel!

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