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How to fix our chairs

We have old dining chairs with a teak base and a bent plywood backrest and seat, originally from the UK supposedly but bought at McCarney’s in SF. They’re old and well-used, so the screw holes in the plywood seat are getting loose. When the holes blow out and the seat comes off, these are the steps to fix them:

  1. Pull away any badly blown out chips of the seat base plywood so that you can get it properly level later with filler.
  2. Drill out the stripped hole with a 15/64″ bit. Use masking tape to mark how deep you should go without blowing through the top.
  3. Put a drop of wood glue in the hole and use a toothpick or similar to spread it around.
  4. Hammer a 1/4″ fluted dowel in to the hole and let the glue dry as long as it needs.
  5. Saw the end of the dowel off as flush as you can, then sand down the dowel and any rough bits.
  6. Use wood filler to fill any dings or gaps, and allow it to set up before sanding.
  7. Align the base on the seat to the indentations that are already there, then lightly hammer the screws in to create divots for your pilot holes.
  8. Drill pilot holes in your dowels where the divots are. They should be pretty centered on the dowels, and about the same depth as when you drilled out the stripped hole in step #2.
  9. Screw the base on to the seat.

Quick tip: Buy wood filler in the little can, not a tube. The tube dries out very quickly and is impossible to un-jam. Also, if the stripped hole is a real mess and seems like it needs to be larger than about 1/4″, get the next size up fluted dowel. The bit you use should be 1/64″ smaller than the dowel ideally, or the same size if that’s not possible. If you can’t find dowels the size you want, you can go down the toothpick / matchstick route.

Two down, two to go.

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Tasks for a Sunday mood

Tasks* for a Sunday mood, restlessness, feeling like I need to Get Something Done. When I feel like that, I default to doing more work or work-adjacent hobbies on a laptop / tablet / phone. I need to stop that, I spend enough of my waking hours in the digital aether.

Prep some food

Maybe the most helpful thing for the week ahead, Wednesday-night-me will be thankful for Sunday-me’s foresight. Boil some eggs, roast vegetables, wash the veg you bought last week, bake cookies, parboil potatoes, make a bean salad, cook a big batch of chickpeas, collect some wild rocket or blackberries.

Fix / alter some clothes

Needle-felt holes in sweaters, dye the shirt you like but feel iffy about the colour, shorten trousers w/ thread or nifty iron-on hem tape, embroider over stains.

Sort through old / unused stuff

Donate or give away books that aren’t worth keeping, recycle tights w/ holes or trousers that can no longer feasibly be repaired (and get a discount while doing it!), cut up threadbare t-shirts for rags, sort through makeup and donate gently- and unused (unexpired) items to a local women’s shelter (UK, USA).

Give your plants some love

Dust off the leaves, do some repotting, pick the dried-up stipules off the pothos. Propogate the sage that grows in the park.

Cleaning / tidying

Do the weird, rarely-done cleaning tasks. Hoover the places behind bookshelves, clean your laptop, wipe off the tops of the kitchen cabinets, tidy up the chaos beneath the sinks, get the cobwebs out of the corners, take down the coats / bags that have accumulated on the hooks behind the doors and put them away properly.

Other stuff

Go for a swim. Finally finish those drawings.

 

* These are chores, really. But we need a better word than “chore” for these sorts of things, that word’s got baggage.

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#pianogoals

Songs I’ll learn when I get a piano:

  • Chopin, Nocturne en bi bémol majeur opus 9 no2: Ballade en Sol Mineur No.1
  • Tom Waits, I’m Still Here
  • Chilly Gonzales, Armellodie
  • Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou, The Song of the Sea

Some of these are almost certainly wishful thinking, it’s been a while. Reach for the moon… 💫

Tips for buying a secondhand piano (focus on uprights):

Want to moonlight as a piano tuner someday, but looks like it might be difficult to find any courses… Supposedly there’s only one left in the UK. Maybe it’s this one? Pretty formal though.

Time to turn to the #1 self-teaching resource, the WORLD WIDE WEB. Have quickly discovered some circa-2000 diamonds in the rough. Sometimes the writing is a little salty, and it always has a pointed perspective, but pretty useful and fun. Need more room for tools.

And a few books:

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Leather strap repair on straw bag repair

Brown leather strap repair on straw bag

Replaced the broken leather straps on my mom’s old straw bag with my new (new to me anyway!) favourite tool.

Speedy Stitcher Sewing Awl

Edit 2018.08.29 at 15:08
This bag has seen a lot of action this summer and the handles are holding up well. The straw (it’s more like thin rope…) is starting to fray at the top though. I’ve lashed it together with invisible fishing line for the time being. I’m expecting sections of it to give way eventually, at which point I’m considering doing some sort of makeshift crochet/embroidery thing to keep it patched up. That’s where that black line came from, it was a little band made of the same straw material that wrapped round the whole bag. It was totally eaten away in parts, so I unwound what was left and replaced it with black embroidery floss.

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On finding a suitable replacement for a Weinmann Type 730 sidepull bicycle brake

A small bike-related victory today. Converting my bike to a single speed went relatively smoothly, but as suspected, the front Weinmann Type 730 caliper brake is pure trouble with the new slimmer road wheel. Centring this brake is no small task. The whole mechanism spins freely around the bolt — seems ridiculous for a side pull — so the only way to centre it is to alter the spring tension. To do this, you need a specific female allen key to take apart the brake and adjust the spring against each arm, hopefully without harming the plastic bushing in the process. It’s all a bit much. I’m not bothered about it being an era-appropriate item, so I started looking for a replacement brake.

In the end I went with the Condor Strada XL deep drop (55-73mm) nutted front brake in silver for £17.99. It was purchased in-shop, can’t seem to find it on the Condor website at the moment. I’m pretty darn pleased with it, particularly since there aren’t that many traditional nut-style brakes to choose from. It’s a great brake at a great price, and it’s always a pleasure supporting that shop. Of course I forgot to grab a pack of cable end caps… It’s getting there.

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Regarding single speed bicycle assembly

I need a bike that I’m comfortable with for getting around London. My Claud Butler steel mixte frame is in good condition and I’ve always wanted to learn more about bikes, so I’ve started to replace the heaviest and most problematic bits myself. Over time, the project evolved in to a single speed conversion. The notes below are an overview of the work and research I’ve done thus far. Expect misused terminology ahead, bumps in the road, etc.

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