Epoxy Variations: III (Finale: Allegro Amabile)

With the cracks in the siding all epoxied up, I had two more epoxy-related tasks to perform before I could start rehabilitating the dormer in earnest: the consolidating of the heavily damaged sill wood, and the sealing of the end grain on the siding. The former task I wanted to do before sanding because I wanted to prevent the many crannies worn in the sill wood from becoming choked with sanding dust, and the latter was simply convenient to do at the same time.

The sill on the dormer is damaged in the same way as those on the south side windows: extreme lignin damage and oxidation from sun exposure. Here's a picture I took a while back, showing the condition of the sill:

Check out the mountain of debris that had built up in the weight pocket!

In any event, the damage is not as deep on the dormer sill, but it is just as severe. Thus, the treatment required here was the same: straight LiquidWood, applied liberally; the only difference is that the wood would require less of it.

So this last variation is essentially a reprise of the Theme, played more quickly and lightly, and sweetly as well, because we don't have to choke on thinner.

Here is the completed treatment:

The top part of the sill didn't need treatment, because it has been protected under the sash. As I mentioned, I've sealed the ends of the siding as well. Aside from the preventing of any absorption of moisture there, I'm hoping it will help discourage further cracking simply by binding the grain more firmly together.

Now, I am ready to sand.

* * *

Ganahl Lumber, Pasadena. They really make a guy feel at home.

Serious Putty

When Wifey heard about my difficulty finding the fallen screws in among the pine needles, she remarked, "You could have used a magnet to find them." That reminded me that I have a magnet specifically designed for such a task that I had forgotten about. I hate to sound clichéd, but: d'oh!

Since the closing of Furnace Gap, I've been puttying my way along the rest of the belt course. It's slow work, which is why I haven't posted for a few days; puttying in progress seems like rather a boring subject, so I usually leave it out of the narrative, showing only the end product if anything.

Then it occurred to me that this whole blog could be considered rather boring unless one is specifically interested in its subject matter. One of my reasons for writing this blog is to illustrate procedures that are not generally covered in the instructional literature readily available in the usual places, and what I call "putty sculpting" certainly qualifies for that distinction. And so, all aboard the Boredom Express!

Because I must work along the long, narrow strip of the belt course at the top of an extension ladder, the work naturally breaks itself up into sections, the width of which is my safe reach to each side of the ladder: about four feet for close work, and up to six for simple tasks. Some of the patching I can do in one pass, but the more complex patches can take up to three passes. Thus, at any given time during this work I will have areas in different degrees of completeness which decrease as one moves to the left.

Here is the area I pictured in the last post, after two passes with the putty (sanded down after each pass):

It looks a lot better now, but it's not quite done; areas like this take several passes because there are many areas that need patching from several different angles that tend to interfere with each other. If I try to do too much at once, I end up dislodging putty I've already placed.

My main patching tools are flexible putty knives in one-inch and two-inch widths, but they are of limited usefulness on contoured surfaces. In the search for tools more applicable to detailed work, I've had great success looking in artists' catalogues. In the task at hand, one tool in particular is very useful, which I believe is intended for sculpting clay. Here, I'm using it to make a difficult concave patch:

Otherwise, I'd have to slide a putty knife down the divot, trying to stay close to the proper curvature: a much trickier proposition, and one that invariably leaves a big blob of putty to sand off. In contoured areas, the less putty there is to sand off, the smaller the chance of distorting the profile of the trim.

Here is this area after I completed the final patching:

This will be very easy to sand back to profile once it hardens. I'm really on my game now, such as it is. It always takes me several days to get my putty-sculpting chops back up after a layoff; it's just one of those skill sets that does not stay resident in my active mind. I really need more RAM.

From here, I moved on down to the next station, where lies the area I discussed in great detail back in April. 

Here it is before any puttying. This was the area that bore the brunt of the foundation's settling below and to the left of this picture.  This forced the left lower trim piece down; butted tightly against the right lower trim piece, the friction splintered the piece severely at its right end. In fact, the stress was so great upon this piece that cracks like the ones you see above opened up along its entire length.

At the same time, the top left trim piece was forced inwards, and the top right one outwards; this displacement is not apparent in the photo, although the resulting damage clearly is. 

Here is a close-up of the area after the second patching pass:

Now you can see clearly the significant front-back displacement of the two top pieces, but what you can't see is that the bottom half of the bottom left piece is sticking out a bit as well. I didn't see it myself until this point. Because of these displacements, the patching at this spot is going to take several more passes.

The difficulty here lies in the fact that I obviously can't completely eradicate the discrepancies here, as I was able to do for the most part with the gap in the middle trim pieces further up the belt course. I thus have to contrive to handle the discrepancies as gracefully as possible, and just how much gracefulness I can get away with will take some trial and error. More to the point, I know I can eliminate the front-back discrepancy in the lower trim pieces, but I'm not at all sure what I can get away with concerning the top trim pieces.

Tune in again for the next exciting installment of "The Trim-Jog Incident!"

* * *

Furnace Gap, 1943–2011

As William F. Buckley might have said, he gone!

Yes, the Furnace Gap Elimination Project is complete. The task I most dreaded when I began working on the south side really wasn't so hard after all.

I've in fact finished the patching of the belt course all the way from the right end to a foot or so to the left of the Gap. Most of what remains is pretty easy except for a few rough patches, notably this one:

Looks like someone had a rough day with the hammer. I can empathize, because I had a pretty rough day myself. Nothing in particular was wrong; it was simply that I was not on my game today. Oh boy, was I not on my game today. It was one of those days when I really had no business being up on a ladder, especially not an extension ladder.

For the most part, I'm pretty comfortable on any sort of stepladder, as long as it is sturdy and on solid ground. This is because most of the time with a stepladder you can position it so that your center of gravity is firmly within the ladder's legs, tending towards the ladder, so that if you get wobbly you'll tend to wobble against the ladder.

With an extension ladder, on the other hand, your center of gravity is at best just slightly in front of the plane of your feet, and most often off to one side of the ladder. In other words, you are in constant danger of falling off if you forget where you are for a split-second. Thus, you are compelled to concentrate on two things at all times: what you are doing, and keeping your balance. 

This is why I hate working on extension ladders. Well, it's a big part of why I hate it. I also hate having to carry up all my tools and materials in a bucket and an apron, having to rummage through said bucket (hanging off the side of the ladder) and apron for what I need with one hand while holding on to the ladder with the other, and then having to carry everything back down the ladder and move it (it's heavy!) every few feet. This is unpleasant enough on a good day.

On a day like I had today, the whole affair becomes high adventure.

Not only were my eyes simply not working right, and for no good reason, but my sense of balance never really reported for work. Not that I was at all dizzy; it was just that I could never find stable equilibrium. As a result, I had to concentrate so much upon just staying up there that there weren't many resources left for what I was trying to get done. Oh, the sanding went well enough, but everything else was quite a challenge. 

At one point, I was driving a few screws up through the bottom trim piece to pull it back in line with the top; this was particularly thrilling, because I had to stay up without holding on. At that point, I had the box of screws open in the bucket so I could reach in and get them as needed; while I was driving one of the screws, somehow the bucket upended, and all the screws disappeared into the thick blanket of pine needles below. I have no idea how that happened. But hey, at least I was still on the ladder! And so I spent the next half-hour looking for pine-needle-colored screws in the pine needles, mostly by feel.

I ended up getting a reasonable amount of work done through sheer stubbornness, but along the way a few other items jumped ship. I still haven't found my pine-needle-colored nail set.

"Your nail set's stuck in your hair."

I Get The Blues When It Rains

I had been on a pretty good roll there for a while, but Friday's rain really threw me for a loop. I had no idea it was coming until noon the day before, so I didn't really have time to plan for it. I just had enough time to prime the east casing, as I have mentioned.

I had enough tasks to do in the garage to keep me busy on Friday, and if that had been the end of the rain, I could have picked up right where I left off the next day. But even though it didn't rain on Saturday, I couldn't do anything I had planned, because it's quite likely to rain again on Sunday. So I had to come up with a new plan if I wanted to keep moving the ball forward.

There remains one major cosmetic reconstruction to do on the south side, and so I turned my attention to it: the divot cut in the belt course when the old floor heater was installed.

I like to call it Furnace Gap, because it makes me laugh, and when I'm laughing, my head's not in the oven. You know, when I first started painting the house, I looked up at Furnace Gap and thought it was huge, much too huge to fill in with WoodEpox alone. I envisioned either splicing in some wood and puttying it in, or making a mold from another part of the belt course and casting it in. But I didn't give any truly serious thought about the problem until today, when I was forced to do so.

So I gave it a good look from the ground for the first time in months, and after all I've been through in the rehabilitation of this side of the house, suddenly it looked rather small.

I climbed up the ladder to give it a close look.

Yep, it's really not so big, after all. I realized that there was really no problem in just patching it up with WoodEpox, if I sunk a few screws in the sides and pushed the putty into that gap between the trim pieces so there was a physical connection between the epoxy mass and the surrounding wood. Still, it would be rather a slow job doing it completely freehand.

I started to think of how I might apply the idea I used with the sills of clamping a guide to aid my puttying. There was no good place to clamp on the belt course, but I could hold the guide in place with screws on each side. Then the old idea of casting came to mind, and suddenly I had a minor inspiration. I took some measurements of Furnace Gap and its environs, rummaged around in my scrap wood pile, and soon I had this:

Now all I have to do is coat these guides with mold release agent, screw them in place, then press the epoxy in this ad hoc mold from underneath, and half the work will be done. Doing the bottom part freehand will be simple enough. I'd already be well on my way by now, if it weren't for the coming rain.

So here I sit, still stymied despite my best efforts. But at least I moved the ball forward a little today.

* * *

I Am Curious (Stupid)

Yesterday, I caulked the gap between the top of the west casing and the siding.

Not at all pretty, but the joint will be covered by the cap pieces, so who cares? I am phenomenally inept at wielding a caulking gun; under absolutely ideal conditions, I can lay down a pretty good bead, but most of the time it ends up glopping out, and I just smear it into place with my fingers, wasting about 60% of it in the process. For my purposes, it might as well just come in a tub like spackle. And as if caulking itself were not enough of a challenge, I'm using a super-duper 90-year guarantee urethane caulk that starts to cure immediately, making it difficult to clean up all the caulk that gets where I don't want it to be.

Once this task was done, I returned to the thorny matter of fitting the cap pieces. I'd taken the needed angles from the restored right cap piece of the east casing, but that didn't get me a lot closer to understanding the geometry of the situation, and I wanted to understand it. Whenever I am confronted by a distinct lack of ability in some area, my first impulse is to try to develop this ability, as one would exercise a weak muscle in order to strengthen it. 

I realize this flies in the face of common wisdom, which instructs us to play to our strengths, so perhaps I'm just a dope. Still, if I weren't this way, I wouldn't be doing any of the work that I am writing about in these pages, because not too terribly long ago I couldn't do anything more complicated, home improvement-wise, than to change a light bulb. Whether this is an argument for or against my way of doing things is a conclusion I leave to you.

So, I measured every pertinent angle on the restored east casing, wrote them down, and stared at them as I tried to retrieve my high-school geometry and trigonometry lessons from under the huge piles of baseball stats, movie trivia, and BMW chassis codes in my disordered brain. I was able to figure out the theory behind the side-to-side angles, and I used that understanding to verify the accuracy of the angles I had measured for that direction.

But the front-to-back angles continued to baffle me. I couldn't understand why there was a need for an angle in this direction of the end profile, and what geometrical rule dictated the size of this angle in relation to the other angles involved. I could have simply cut these angles and hoped they were correct, but I really wanted to understand the whys and wherefores first, so I could verify the accuracy of these angles as I had the side-to-side angles. I felt that verifying the angles was important, because I was not at all confident of the accuracy of my measurements, given that they were taken from a 126-year-old house that had seen a lot of living. At length, I decided to sleep on the matter.

Sure enough, I woke up with a start in the middle of the night with the answer I was seeking. I'll spare you the details, because I imagine it's obvious enough to you already, but let's just say that I had cleared my mental clog, so that my thoughts could now flow freely down—okay, let's not say that. Let's just say that I figured it out.

And so, I strode out to the garage the next morning confident that a few minutes' time would see this perversely difficult task at last behind me.

Forty-five minutes later, I was standing in front of the miter saw holding one of the cap pieces, completely baffled. I knew what angles to cut, sure enough. Now, the big question was this: what combination of saw movements and stock orientation would yield said angles?

The reason this was difficult for me to comprehend was that while the miter saw can be adjusted both to the left and to the right horizontally, vertically it can only be pivoted counter-clockwise. I really needed it to move clockwise. Everything would have been so easy if it could only pivot clockwise.

I rotated the piece one way and the other, and I just couldn't make the angles come out right. At last, I decided to make a test cut on a spare piece of stock and check it out. It was wrong, but at least it led me to figure out that I had to orient the piece with the long dimension vertical, so I got the proper cut on the next try.

The next problem was how to cut the other piece to match. By then I realized that the fastest way to figure it out was simply to try every possible way until I hit upon the right one, so I found two identical scrap pieces of wood, cut one the way I had cut the first piece, then tried cutting the other piece turned 180 degrees from the other and on the other side of the blade. This time, I got it on the first try!

I then duplicated this cuts in the actual cap pieces, and put them in position on the casing to check the fit.

WIN

It's not quite evident in this picture, because it was impossible to hold both pieces while taking the picture without some movement of the pieces, but the fit is, as a practical matter, perfect. At least, it will look perfect after some judicious patching and sanding. Reconciling the measurements I made to the geometry involved really paid off.

This excruciating lesson in geometry may not lead to an increased ability to visualize in three dimensions, but at least next time a problem involving compound angles arises, I'll know how to handle it.

* * *

. . .to seek out new life and new civilizations. . .

The One Stooge

Today was one of those no-paint days; between the extreme sunniness and the breeziness, it would have been hard to lay down a good coat. So instead I returned to the west casing.

I stopped work on this casing earlier and went on to the east casing because I realized that fitting the new cap pieces would be trickier than I first envisioned. You see, I'm not one of those lucky people who came from the factory hard-wired to think abstractly in three dimensions. I've developed a serviceable level of ability in that regard through hard work and experience, but conceptualizing the end profiles of the cap pieces proved too much for me. It didn't help to look at the pieces I was replacing, because their original end profiles were lost to history:

I thought the matter through thoroughly, looking at the pieces and the place where they are to go. I took careful measurements of the angles involved. I measured twice, cut once. And here is the result of my best efforts:

FAIL

For all my cogitating, I hadn't understood that the downward slope facing forward would affect the junction of the cap pieces. It wasn't even apparent to me when I held these pieces in position with the ends still cut square. It wasn't until this point, when I had cut them to the proper up-down angle, that I understood that I had to cut to a front-back angle as well.

It's humbling to find oneself confronted so inescapably by his own mental failings, but it's also instructive; you can be sure I won't make this mistake again. Just getting just the front edge to line up required precise positioning, so I realized that I needed to re-think the entire process thoroughly in order to ensure that I affix the pieces in the proper position.

That's why I moved on to the east casing: I hoped that the exercise of removing and replacing one of those cap pieces would give me a better understanding of the process. Happily, it did, and so now I think I can do a reasonably good job installing the cap pieces on the west casing.

But there is other work to do first. I want to caulk the joint between the casing and the siding along the top. In places the gap is quite wide, so before I caulk I need to insert some foam backing rod.

You can see in the illustration on the package how this works. Caulk can't properly fill a gap more than about 3/16 of an inch wide, and so one must insert this foam rod to provide a flexible, weather-resistant bed for it to sit upon.

Inserting the rod is pretty easy; all one does is stuff it in the cracks. Where it doesn't fit, it isn't needed.

At this point I ran out of day, so I'll caulk tomorrow.

* * *

. . .Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds. . .

Regaining Focus

The next day, I took stock of the progress on the rebuilding of the east casing sash. 

Uh, did I say "progress"? Man, did I make a mess of things! I guess I was just in too much of a hurry. I had tried to use the forms before I had built the sash up enough to provide the proper support for them. I realized that I couldn't determine how to fix this until I had smoothed things out a bit. I filled in the remaining large voids in the top. sanded out the wood remnants and the rough spots, and took some measurements and levels.

As it turned out, the situation actually wasn't bad; the only problem was that I had built the top front edge out too far in places, which was throwing off all the other angles. So I rehabilitated my wood forms by flipping them over and scraping off the remaining epoxy, made sure they had a good coating of mold release agent, and carefully re-clamped them, matching the dimensions of the completed west sash. Once I had sanded off all the putty that projected beyond the forms, it became quite evident where I needed to apply more putty.

Right at that point, I was just about out of putty. Truth be told, my mind has not been on my work these past several weeks; I've pretty much just been putting one foot in front of the other and slogging through, so to speak. I've been mechanically scooping equal amounts of Part A and Part B from their tubs without taking note of how much was left. Honestly, it never occurred to me that I would go through an entire quart of putty on this one casing and still not be done, but that's what happened. 

I did have one other issue to deal with during that time: my new contact lenses. After the initial thrill, my eyes and my brain rebelled against the drastic change. These new lenses are huge in diameter, with an abrupt change in profile at the junction between the two corrections; the resulting irritation caused the lenses to cloud up frequently. The odd configuration of the corrections, with close vision coming from the middle of one lens and the mid-range coming from the periphery of the other, baffled my brain for several weeks, and there were many times when neither region was in focus. Thus, for a few weeks my working vision was actually worse than before. 

I finally had to start consciously prompting myself where to get focus from for a particular situation, actively training my brain to work with these lenses. Just this week, my brain finally caught on, and now everything in my field of vision is in seamless focus, if still a bit cloudy at times.

I had actually noted my dwindling supply of putty last Friday and had put an order in late that afternoon, but I didn't expect it to arrive until next week, because Abatron is in Wisconsin and I didn't imagine the order would go out until after the weekend. But they really came through for me; they somehow managed to ship the same day, and I got it on Thursday, just when I needed it. Yay, Abatron!

Thus reprovisioned, I puttied the front plane of the sash flush with the forms, and when I took the forms off and sanded back to profile, I found that I finally had all the lines established properly.

Now, it's a simple matter of filling in the remaining divots and leveling out the top slope. After what has seemed like an eternity, I'm just a few days away from being ready to prime this casing. That is, I am as long as the patching of the cap piece does not present any unforeseen difficulties.

* * *

Space: the final frontier.

Inch by Inch, Step by Step

Well, I haven't got much done since the last post. We had a pretty busy weekend, and since then it's been brain-damagingly hot. But I have gotten some work done.

I got the first pass of widespread patching done: the big divots, the more obvious smaller holes, and the ends of the sill. I'm going to get the top and bottom profiles on the ends of the sill struck accurately so that I can clamp the guides as I did last time and then establish the front plane and the top and bottom edges in one or two passes. You can already see at the top how the apron pieces are looking a lot more solid, but there's still a lot of work to do there. Remember, I still have to attach the patch piece and do extra work to hide the grain up there. First, however, I want to sand and prime beneath it. 

Because of the extensive epoxying I had to do, I have already reached the point where I'm going to have to put down a coat of primer just to get everything the same color so I can see where I need to do further patching. With my weak eyes and all those colors and textures going on, I need as much help as possible to see all the divots.

And by the way, I've vetoed the idea of brushing the wood with diluted epoxy to firm it up. The main reason for this is a basic work precept I've learned from experience: when you come up with a scathingly brilliant idea that you've never heard having been done before, be absolutely convinced that you're really on to something new before you try it. That's because the chances are very great that it's a bad idea. Don't ask me how I know.

Because I hate having only one picture in a post, I thought I'd give you a little background on the difficulties of working on a house that is essentially situated in the middle of a forest, and the specific difficulties of working on this particular casing.

This particular casing is especially difficult to work on because there is a massive pine tree standing less than five feet away, and an air-conditioning compressor sitting right next to it. Because of this, there are parts of the casing I simply can't get to easily, so I have no choice but to lean way off one ladder or the other at times. 

In general, working on this house is difficult because there is a constant barrage of debris falling on every square inch of the property. A case in point: I moved the extension ladder over against the house to get at the top left part of the casing, and as I began to climb it I saw this:

Gobs of the stickiest-imaginable pine sap were splattered all over the ladder. So before I even started to work, I had to go up the ladder with a bottle of paint thinner and a rag, cleaning off all this sap before I started to work. Otherwise, the sap would have gotten all over my clothes, my hands, and ultimately my work. I tell you, there are times on especially hot, messy days that by the time I have prepared everything for working, I'm already tired.

Thank goodness I don't do this for a living!

* * *

"Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnn!!!"

Back on Track

Now that I've at last solved the problem of the missing trim, it's time to get back to rehabilitating the east window casing.

With the exception of the cap pieces, the east casing is in worse shape than the west one. It has taken a thorough physical thrashing. This is most likely the work of pine boughs from the adjacent tree, long since trimmed, that did considerable damage in this area of the house. Parts of the casing, notably the vertical pieces, were heavily split, splintered and shredded. The aprons under the cap pieces, as we saw in the last two posts, are cracked extensively; while some of the loose pieces have been nailed in place, several others were hanging precariously.

You can see here, where the cap piece I removed goes, why it was so loose despite the dozen nails driven through it; decades of movement in the wind and weather had enlarged the nail holes into craters.

Overall, the wood is generally soft, seemingly more from oxidation than sun damage; a light exploratory first sanding removed an alarming amount of wood before I could take notice.

This was just from one pass with a quarter-sheet sander using a medium-grit paper; it tore right through the paint and the top layer of wood. Notice how chewed-up the wood in the upper-right portion of the photograph appears, and how flattened the triple-bead pattern is. There's no real evidence of sun damage here; it appears that the last coat of paint was put down over a layer of heavily oxidized wood, which you can see clearly in the darkened area in the lower right corner (where I eased up when I finally took note of what was occurring).

So I stopped sanding for the time being in order to do some preparatory work first.  I applied LiquidWood liberally into the cracks and onto all the areas of severely damaged wood. One area was so thoroughly shredded, however, that I couldn't get enough glue in where I needed with my normal techniques, so I pulled out a new tool that I recently ordered from Abatron: a large (60 cc/2 oz.) syringe.

I've tried medical syringes before with LiquidWood, but the needles were too small to pass the thick liquid. This one, however, worked like a charm, allowing me to inject the epoxy deep into the cracks.

After clamping and curing, the piece was quite solid.

One particularly odd circumstance of this casing is that the right vertical piece is distinctly out of place:

As you can see by comparing it to the sill and the apron below it, the right vertical piece is a half-inch off-line to the right, and the same is true at its other end. As we've learned, when a piece is noticeably off-line like this, there is a story behind it. The house did offer a clue as to this story, but in the pictures I've shown you so far it's already been removed. So let me reach back a bit in the archive to show it to you:

In this detail of a picture taken just before I began work on this casing, you can see an extra board nailed in at the top of the window opening. This window lights the room Anne Wilson occupied for at least the last few decades of her life, and it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that this board was put up to shield her eyes from the direct intrusion of the sun at midday. Apparently whoever installed this board didn't have a saw handy to shorten it a half-inch, so he instead removed the right vertical piece and moved it over to make room. Now, that's a bit too ad hoc, even for me! I'm leaving the board right where it is; it's far too fragile to move.

The one part of the casing that is in relatively good shape is the left cap piece:

It's more or less sound and in its proper place; it's only chewed up where extra nails were driven through it and at the top where it was most vulnerable.  Once I patch it out to its extents, it will look just fine, and match up with the other cap piece neatly.

I'm not quite sure exactly how I will proceed from here; it will all depend upon what I find after a very careful, gentle sanding of all surfaces, If I find that the softness I've found in part of the casing is extensive, I will have to do something to harden the wood before I restore the surface; possibly I may paint it with a coat of LiquidWood diluted with an equal volume of its natural solvent, a proprietary mixture called Abosolv. I'm thinking that this will harden the top layer of the wood sufficiently without interfering with the establishment of a reasonably flat, uniform surface. To use undiluted epoxy all over would add considerably to my work.

* * *

Woodworking for The Inept, Part Two

The next day, I took my creation out to see how well it fit:

Okay, I could work with this! I knew I'd have to adjust the inside curve, of course, and I knew the piece would be too thick. My only real error in fitting was that I cut wide to the right, although not nearly as wide as it appears here. I made some marks on the piece and took it back in for adjustments.

I enlarged the inner curve with a drum sander on a Dremel, and smoothed the outer curve with a sanding block. I cut what amounted to a small wedge off the right side, and then took the piece out to re-check it. It looked okay, but it was hard to be sure because it was still too thick. So I took it back in and sanded the piece down a bit from the back, being careful to keep the front and back sides parallel.

Sadly, I was so busy keeping the front and back parallel that I allowed them to get just a bit too close. I really should have stopped halfway through and checked my progress against the existing piece, but I was so eager to get it done that I ended up letting myself in for more work. I'd overdone it by less than one-sixteenth of an inch, not much, but enough so that I had to shim it out to the proper level. I didn't have any 1/16" stock handy, but I did have some nice stout paperboard.

This is archival backer board, designed to keep things like pictures and comic books stiff in a plastic bag. It's rigid and fine-grained. Plus, it's just under one-sixteenth of an inch thick. Ad hoc!

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will no doubt be shocked at my proposing to use a paper product as part of a long-term repair. You may be asking: Is he really under that much pressure to get this done? Has he lost interest in the project? Where's the danged lolcat already?

The truth is, I'm not proposing to use a paper product. I'm proposing to use an epoxy-impregnated paper product. I've learned from experience that when you impregnate a material with liquid epoxy, the material becomes nothing more than a vehicle for the epoxy. It wouldn't be a good idea to put it where it would be exposed on its face, because it would still look like paper, and would be subject to abrasion over time. Laminated to the back of a piece of wood, however, and with only its edge exposed, it would as a practical matter serve as well as an equivalent volume of WoodEpox.

Plus, I had to mix up some LiquidWood anyway. You will recall that last time I mentioned that the plywood I'm using for the new piece is not weatherproof. It's interior plywood, so the glue holding the plies together is not waterproof; the wood is thus subject to delamination over time. To forestall this as long as possible, I was planning to give the piece a good epoxy bath, so it was a simple matter to slip the paperboard in there at the same time, getting the impregnation and lamination done all at once.

After all the hoops I had been jumping through unsuccessfully to get the epoxy to cure thoroughly overnight without needing further heat-curing, this time I just followed the basic procedure, letting it induce for ten minutes, letting the piece soak for about a half hour, then taking it out, wiping off the excess, and letting it sit at room temperature overnight. I figured since there would be very little penetration, and thus very little epoxy mass, the need for further curing would be inevitable.

The next morning, the piece was fully cured, with absolutely no hint of stickiness. Ah, irony.

I couldn't help noticing the effect the epoxy had on the wood: it looked varnished. I filed the observation for future experimentation. Now that the varnish I used on the kitchen cabinets has been outlawed here in California, I'm going to have to find some reliable substitute. The junk that's available now certainly won't do.

Cutting the impregnated paperboard to shape convinced me of its resilience; I couldn't cut it with an X-Acto knife. I had to bear down on it hard with a bare single-edged razor blade to get it to cut cleanly. That indicates that it's harder than birch or poplar.

Once it's painted and part of the casing, the impregnated paper will be indistinguishable.

It was time for one final check for fit:

As the kids say, woo-hoo! The profile and height are now perfect. It still looks wide on the right, but that's due to the perspective. With all that's going on with this piece already, once I've puttied up the gaps, it'll blend right in. . .uh, except for one little detail.

The grain on the new piece is going the wrong danged way! It would have been simple enough to orient the piece so that the grain lined up, but it never occurred to me. Well, as I said, I've never done any real woodworking before, and this proves it. You can be sure that I won't make this mistake next time this kind of thing comes up.

Not that this is a truly harmful error, not with all the other things going on with the casing. Still, I will have to take extra steps to ensure the grain difference is not readily apparent.

I'll do the actual attaching of the new piece a bit later. First, I want to do a little work on the area underneath it. In the meantime, remember: there's no problem that a little epoxy and sandpaper can't fix.

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"Our minds are one: I feel what you feel; I know what you know."

A Posse Ad Esse

Well, it's been an uneventful month, blog-wise, because I've mostly been busy with tasks other than the painting. As I showed you last time, the garage was a disaster area; it had been so long since I'd taken time to put things back that nothing was where it was supposed to be. I had to take a few days to give it a thorough straightening up just so I could find what I needed. At the same time, I put up several more lights so that I could see what I was looking for. The older I get, the more lights I need.

Speaking of lights, I put up a swell new light in the gazebo, a high-pressure sodium light. FarmTek has some very reasonably-priced fixtures, so I decided to give one a try. It works magnificently! Just 150 watts, but it lights up that gazebo at night like the Angel Stadium infield.

Fiat lux.

Speaking of the yard, I had to take some time to tend to that, too. Debris is falling there 24/7, weeds are always springing up, and we have a lot of plants in pots that were beginning to feel neglected.

To sum it all up. I've been pretty busy this past month tending to all the things I've let slip as I worked on the house, but I'm back at it now, finishing the patching of the west window casing. I've been having a terribly difficult time getting the sill to look right, especially since I ran out of the new putty and had to start using the old stuff. I thought I could do it freehand, but as I mentioned before, it's very difficult to establish a straight edge out of putty in midair. No matter how much I worked, I just couldn't get the edge straight. It looked awful.

Sic semper WoodEpox.

I realized I had to make some sort of superstructure to guide me. Fortunately, the profile at each end was correct, so I could use the ends as a guide.

Digging around in my nice neat garage, I found some nice rectangular window stop that the contractor milled for me. I cut two pieces slightly longer than the sill, coated them with mold release agent, then clamped them so they were flush with each end. They thus described a straight, level and perpendicular plane along the front of the sill.

Veni, vidi, putty.

I then puttied slightly proud of this plane, and when it hardened I sanded it carefully back even with the edges of the window stop. It worked! The edge is now straight and level, and the front plane nice and flat. I was stunned to see the difference it made. Before I did this, I was very unhappy with the whole appearance of the casing. I thought it looked bad despite all the work I had done. Now, even though there remain many divots to fill in the sill and the top trim is still off, simply having the sill lines established properly suddenly makes the whole casing look great, at least to my eyes.

Ars gratia artis.

And with that, I've moved on to the east window casing while I await a new shipment of WoodEpox.

* * *

Absit invidia.