That is a city crew using a very large saw to cut open the road to access the sewer connection to my house.

This report comes to you after taking a slash against a pine tree in the back yard.

To explain what is happening we must first answer the the question "What are were you doing New Years Eve?"
A: I was frantically calling plumbers after sewage started bubbling out of the furnace room floor drain.

A check of the backflow valve showed it shut tight; suggesting that nothing was escaping the main sewer line.

This was both confusing and deja-vu all over again since our main drain was replaced in 2016 after our circa 1959 clay pipe collapsed and was the first traumatically expensive home repair we ever undertook. The gas line runs right alongside the sewer they had to dig it out with shovels and it cost a fortune.

The local plumber who heroically showed up at 9:30am on new years eve confirmed the block was 54' out; well into the city portion.

So I called the city while he was able to snake it partially free and give us working sewage so long as we were careful.

The first city employee arrived Jan 2nd, confirmed it was still not right and called for locates but somehow failed to put in a work order for the team with the big snake to clear it.

The next day another city inspection crew arrived, realized there had been a cock-up and finally put in a work order.

Last night it absolutely pissed down rain for hours and my daughter had a slightly too long shower which lead to another basement puddle.

I hoped it was just too much at once and would clear but the backflow valve never went down, then my son helpfully confirmed the blockage by flushing on instinct and doing it again.

So I put on gloves and called the city again on speakerphone with a code red brown and they helpfully escalated it.

This morning before we were all fully awake the big snake crew arrived, I came down just in time to find they'd lost their rotor head and it was still blocked solid.

So they marked the spot and put in a ticket for an excavation crew while my wife, kids and dog decamped for the grandparent's house.

No step on snek!

The backhoe showed up mid afternoon followed by a small army of other trucks.

I spent a fun half hour running round all the neighbors trying to figure out whose car was parked right in the path of destruction across the street and would need to be moved. Finally figured out it was one of the framers working on a new house down the way so at least we avoided the wait for a tow-truck.

Then there was a wait for the locates guy, then more waiting for the big saw which brings us to the photo above.

Once they got the asphalt up the backhoe could start.

They just encountered what might be the water main so switched to the hydro-vac.

Which brings the total so far:

• 1 plumber
• 2 city inspector vans
• 1 Enbridge gas locate team
• 1 city snake team
• 2 city work trucks
• 1 backhoe
• 2 dump trucks, one towing a trailer with a set of trench supporting plates
• 1 site locates guy in an SUV
• 1 cube van with the big saw
• 1 hydrovac truck
  and probably a partridge in a pear tree but I can't hear it over the engines.

With any luck we'll be able to flush again by tomorrow morning - or they'll have escalated to calling in a battleship - but for now I'm going to pack stuff to sleepover at the in-laws.

Footnote: I received my Secret Senna yesterday; thanks @The-Crazy-Kanuck it is amazing and demands a full write up but that will have to wait until I have indoor plumbing again....

Nah, I definitely fucked up

Between minimising exposure to people before the vacation, the trip itself and the family getting covid after we got back I haven't been into the office for about 3 weeks now.

We are on 3 day hybrid schedule so our section is pretty sparsely populated. Also we specced out the number of cubicals for our dept before covid layoffs etc so there are a bunch of empty seats.

This made me think of some old Dilbert strips where they create an imaginary employee.

Hence one lonely lunchtime I cloned the cubicle name tag template and printed a label for "Gene Erik" the generic employee...

I found that MS office has a bunch of stock photos of the same people doing different activities so was thinking of giving him a Shutterstock family and maybe a dollar store plastic cactus.

But then I went on vacation and forgot all about it.... until today.

It turns out my boss saw the label last week and thought some other dept was moving people into our space. So he tasked our admin to find out what was going on; this sent her on an epic wild goose chase involving all the office managers and escalating up several levels of HR....

Only one of my colleagues who was there with me knew about it, I guess they finally crossed paths today and told me the whole story on the dept chat channel.

Thankfully our admin thinks it's hilarious and there was talk of adding more guest stars to our dept.

However there's no way this doesn't get back to me at some point.

Got any tips to owning up to really childish pranks as a grown ass adult Oppo?

I guess at least I kept it clean and didn't go with one of the classics like "Hugh G. Rection"

UPDATE: I live to do more inadvisable things another day.
Admin brought it up over lunch, I came clean about it and was generally laughed off. My boss's main irritation had been that random people were moving into our space and so wasn't against the idea of making the place look more occupied.
For now Gene stays and provided a glowing reference for his Quebecois cousin Jean Erique....

Secret senna arrived a while back and apparently I was very good this year because holy crap this is amazing.

I have to profoundly apologize to @The-Crazy-Kanuck for how long this post took to write, I wanted to do it justice and started right after new year but then the sewer backed up, followed by my son's birthday, my 40th birthday, traveling for work then a scout camp (that's enough excuses: Ed)

Safety shoebox wrapped with duct tape; always good sign...

Cryptic message and dick-butt who has a fine motorsport pedigree
(Credit: @Stef-Schrader)

Ladies: he's a 12... (shoe size) but draws dick-butts on all the Christmas gifts - would you?

Item 1: a Pilot;s checklist for a Canadair Silver Star

Now I know that should I have a single side landing gear failure, to fly until the wingtip tanks are empty (advisable to avoid fiery death), then land on the side of the runway where your gear is down and try to keep it straight with the brakes (dubious)

This is relevant to my interests as I downloaded the declassified U2 Flight Manual with the intent of printing it out as a coffee table book (still haven't done that either)

Item 2: an original new old stock titanium blade for a Pratt and Whitney jet engine!

Fun fact I did an internship the summer before I graduated mechanical engineering at a factory which machined jet engine blades for Rolls Royce. Sadly a it's a tractor dealership now

And finally Item 3: complete with drumroll and additional dick-butt.

This an original engineering department circular/memo from 1957 detailing the daily happenings on the fricking Avro Arrow program!

Apparently the Arrow 2 loungers beat the Stress comets 6-4 in a friendly at Woodbridge and the visit by USAF Chief of staff tomorrow has been postponed.

For those unfamiliar the AVRO Arrow is the great white whale (elephant?) of Canadian aviation.

It's actually my profile photo at the moment.

Back in the '50s the fear was the Ruskies would fly nuclear armed bombers over the pole to strike the US and Canada before they had a chance to launch back.

NATO built the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line -as sung about by Rush- to detect incoming aircraft but they needed planes to shoot them down.

The Arrow was designed to be an interceptor; capable of massive straight line speed and equipped with air to air missiles (potentially nuclear tipped) for blasting bombers out of the sky before they could reach their targets.

It was a stunning design, capable of being one of the fastest and highest flying jets ever built - the beaver's balls, the pride of a nation...️

And right as they reached the second prototype it was rendered obsolete by the advent of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles! (ICBMs) Can't chase one of those suckers down with a jet.

It was actually unveiled to the public the same days as Sputnik was launched.

The incoming government of the day cancelled the program and ordered all the prototypes and designs related to the project destroyed; ostensibly to prevent them falling into Soviet hands but also to ensure the next administration couldn't restart it.

This decision was highly contentious at the time and continues to be debated today but 60+ years of hindsight have proven it to be correct.

I suspect it was too big to dogfight and couldn't carry enough ordinance to be a bomber - it was suddenly pointless (despite being very pointy).

The western world started to pivot away from the WW2 era of a different plane for every job towards the multi-role fighter jets we know today which could still act as interceptors.

The Soviets who didn't have to worry about silly little things like public opinion did build a bunch of MIG-25 Foxbats but they mostly got used for reconnaissance.
They did manage to sell a bunch to middle Eastern dictators; I guess the top trumps dick measuring stat of "the fastest plane <Clarkson Voice> in the world" went over pretty well with the gold plated gun set even if they weren't actually much use.

As an engineer it definitely galls me to see that much work wasted and I thought surely they could have at least used the engines for something else. But then I looked into them and realized what else would you put an engine the size of a short bus designed to cruise at Mach2 into?

Most of the contemporaries of the Orenda Iroquois got cancelled too.

Sadly the Arrow's cancellation was effectively the end of Avro; without a project all the engineers were laid off and many wound up on the Apollo program.

That said I'm not sure Canada had the economy to support a full time military aviation company post war. The population in 1959 was only 17.5 million, the baby boom and waves of immigration that grew the country into what it is today were still ongoing (and we're still relatively small at 38.8M).
That's the population of NYC in 2001, I'm pretty sure even post 911 Giuliani couldn't justify the city having its own aircraft company (although recent events suggest he might actually be that crackers).

With the way defence costs have escalated the calculation would only have got worse over the following half century. The F35 program is estimated to cost the USA 1.7 trillion over it's lifespan; that's Canada's entire 2019 GDP...

I'm a huge fan of these mad, dead end, cold war technologies but I've now seen enough to realize that there was usually a reason they didn't go anywhere.

Despite the order to trash everything some resourceful Avro employees managed to squirrel away an entire cockpit, enough information exists to build a static replica and clearly department circulars weren't subject to that either cos now I own one!

Thanks @The-Crazy-Kanuck I'm now figuring out how to frame/display it so it stays this pristine for the next 70+ years without getting faded.

We salute you

Eeh by gum

As foreshadowed in my gate construction post, two weeks ago we brought home this handsome boy!

My wife always had dogs growing up and now the kids are older we'd been talking about getting one for a while. After applying to several postings on petfinder this one called us back.

He was an owner surrender to a local rescue; we actually met the family who had him and it was clear they really loved him but had no experience with dogs and were not prepared for the expense of a 76lb eating machine.

We are actually his third family, apparently his original owners "moved to Europe" ¯_( ͠° ͟ʖ °͠ )_/¯ and offered him to family friends who are the people we met.

He's a great fit for us because he was already living with a little girl and as a pampered lab showed no prey drive towards our cats. Many rescue dogs come with stipulations; quiet home, no kids, no other animals etc.
Case in point, my SIL's dog is wonderful but grew up in northern Quebec surviving on squirrels. As such small fluffy creatures are snacks to her.

At two years old he still hasnt been neutered; they were on the list for the city animal services free clinic but due to the wave of pandemic puppies it's backed up past a year.

As such he was displaying attempts at dominant behaviour like jumping up on new people and is generally a bit much when excited.

He got fixed on Tuesday so is currently wearing the cone of shame.

Since he wasn't fixed we don't think he's ever been to obedience training, he does know how to sit but pulls like crazy on the leash so I was the only one who could walk him until the combo of pulling dog and icy sidewalk took me down on Monday and I cracked a rib.

We had a session with a local trainer that evening who gave us a bunch of tools to get him to walk on leash and start off encouraging good habits.

He's still mouths like a puppy and they played tug of war with him so he wouldn't let go of anything but we're making good progress on that; you gotta drop it to eat the treat...

We were told he's a lab mix with some rottweiler in there too - but neither the trainer nor our vets see it, he just looks like a (very pretty) pure-bred Labrador. Also based on the reaction of a couple of parents in the pickup line when we mentioned what we were getting he's gonna "pass" for straight labrador. Everything I've read about rottweilers says they're great but I guess there's an unfair stigma.

Honestly I prefer a mix as they're usually healthier, that said he does have some quirks:

At one point he'd scratched the fur off around his eyes and their vet suspected a food allergy to chicken/beef, so he came with a bunch of bags of Kangaroo 🦘meat based kibble!
Our vet isn't convinced since he didn't have fur missing elsewhere and because the 'roo food seemed to be giving him the trots we're currently trying some eye cream and a higher fibre regular kibble.

He also has a patch of missing fur on one leg and a bit of a limp sometimes because he was hit by a car over the summer! The former owners went away for a weekend and hired a dog walker through some app (maybe Rover? Dont do this). Not surprisingly given how strong he is he got away from the walker and ran into traffic.
The app's insurance paid for his care but the cast was left on too long because they were waiting for the cheque to come through.
Seems to have healed up well and hopefully he just needs to rebuild muscle, didn't give him any fear of cars so we're working on sitting every time we cross the road.

So he's a bit of a #projectdog but overall is super sweet and a great addition to the family. He's very people orientated, wants to be wherever we are and gets super excited when we come home.
He's also smart and food motivated which bodes well for training him, I'm going everywhere with a pocket full of kibble now.

Hydrogen is not the future, it will never be the future and here's why.

Every week or so someone writes about how they're "waiting for Hydrogen cars" or how we only need battery cars until hydrogen is "ready for primetime"

It makes me want to spit and write 10,000 words in the comments, so to save time and phlegm here's my definitive takedown so I can link to it in future.

EFFICIENCY

Lets start with the basics: Hydrogen is not a "Fuel" like gasoline but rather a method of electricity transmission.

Once we get away from oil/gas which is essentially "free" energy gushing out of the ground then we have to generate it. Whether that's through solar/hydro/wind or "burning" nuclear isotopes in a reactor it all starts as electricity.

We're all familiar with the classic hydrogen cycle: split Hydrogen (H2) from water (H2O)with electricity, transport the hydrogen to the gas station, pump it into your car, power the car using a hydrogen fuel cell and electric motor and the car's only emission is nice clean water.
It makes for a lovely elementary school science fair diorama but in reality is a complete crock of shit because of the process losses are ridiculous.

You can skip the next 4 paragraphs if you read this diagram - its from Ulf Bossel's excellent analysis from 2006 and nothing has really changed except batteries got waaaay cheaper

First job is to split hydrogen from water molecules using electrolysis, this is requires converting AC power to DC (-5%) and then electrolysis is not very efficient: about 20% of the energy is lost in conversion.
So say we start with 100 units of electricity only 75 remain after we make the hydrogen.

Fun sidebar its way cheaper to strip hydrogen off methane with steam than using electrolysis so that's how 95% of it is produced at the moment. Guess what the byproduct of that reaction is? - yup CO2. Just burn the damn natural gas already.

Next you need to pack down the least dense element in the universe small enough to make it transportable without using a Zeppelin. You can either compress it real hard or liquify it by chilling to –253 ºC (–423 ºF). This uses a boatload of energy but doesn't add any value to your fuel; cool, coolcoolcoolcool.
Liquified hydrogen also boils off and has to be vented as it warms up in the tanks, the longer you store it the more you lose.
Then you drive it to a gas station in a tanker truck which uses energy to move and more to transfer the hydrogen in and out. The net effect is by the time it reaches your car only 40-50% of the generated energy remains.

Now we get to the easy part; run it through a Hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricity, this is about 50% efficient so now 20-25 units of energy remain
Then we have the electrical drive system and motors which are about 90% efficient - not too bad.
So the end result: only 19-23 units out of 100 that you paid to generate actually provide any motion to the wheels.

This is -in short- godawful, it's pissing ~80% of the energy you paid for up the wall in system losses.

Let compare with an existing battery electric car. Grid transmission is about 90% efficient, AC/DC conversion plus battery charging 85% and the same 90% for the electric drivetrain.
End result about 69 units out of 100 make it to the wheels.

But but but but people may say: these processes will improve with future technology like fluidized bed catalysts, nanotube electrodes, flux capacitors and midichlorians…. but let's be real, it's polishing a turd.

Most of the losses come from established "Cannae change the laws of physics" stuff like trying to compress a stupidly light gas molecule and move it cross country. The diagram above is from 2006 paper and the math isn't appreciably different in 2022.

Wasting more than twice as much energy as an established technology is not a position you can stage a comeback from.

INFRASTRUCTURE

But we haven't even got to the really big road block yet: the infrastructure.

So the hydrogen fuel tanks in the Honda clarity run at 70 MPa or 10,000psi that is ludicrously, terrifyingly fricking high pressure and requires some serious engineering to handle.

For context most car tires run around 30-35psi and the tank for your BBQ is 100-200psi (propane is actually liquid when compressed to that pressure because it's a bigger hydrocarbon molecule).
The general public who smoke around gas pumps and drive off with the hose still attached have no business being near 10,000psi of stored energy.

But lets ignore the issues with spontaneous pyrotechnics for a moment.

There is no way to refuel Hydrogen cars except at a dedicated filling station; assuming range and refuel time is similar to gasoline we need to replace every single gas station that currently exists: there were 115 thousand of the them and climbing in the US in 2017 (the year I could get data). Hydrogen stations are running between $1-2M just for the equipment.
Charitably assuming $1M per station cos it makes the math easier that's 115 Billion dollars just at the retail end. That might not be too much in defence procurement circles but ask your local dingy, minimum wage employing filling station if they've got a spare mil lying around.

Or y'know I could just:

As of January 2021, there were 45 publicly accessible hydrogen refueling stations in the USA, 43 of which were located in California and nobody is rushing out to build hundreds of thousands more.

One more time: 115,000+ vs 45

Honestly the filling stations are the cheap bit; we'd need a fleet of special tankers to supply them, massive refrigeration/compression plants to chill/compress the hydrogen and industrial electrolysis plants to generate it - nationwide. None of this exists, none of it is easy and all of it is incomprehensively expensive. Plants are going to be in the hundreds of millions and we are going to need a lot of them: think replacing every oil refinery in the country.

Plus the electricity grid is going to need to the scaled up; my napkin math suggests 20-40% more electricity generation will be needed for EVs eventually but given the wastage with hydrogen you'd have to at least double the current national generation capacity.

WATER

Electrolysis to produce hydrogen will need to use drinking quality or maybe cleaner water, since any impurities are going to foul the electrodes.
How are we doing for fresh water worldwide at the moment? Got lots of it to spare? No didn't think so

A fuel cell car produces about 0.15kg of water per mile so using our 3.2 trillion miles a year number (3.2x0.15=0.48) that's nearly half a trillion, or 480 billion litres of drinking quality water. Which is in a similar ballpark to the 559 billion litres of gasoline America used in 2020.
The average person drinks 1-2L of water per day, take the average and multiply by the population of the USA ~334 million.
334x1.5x365=182,865 million or 182.8 billion litres.

That means our cars will drink more than two and a half times what we currently do.
This has danger and future roller skating dystopia written all over it - especially when some cities already have difficulty not poisoning their population.
(I appreciate other household, farming and industrial uses of water dwarf drinking water but let's focus on staying alive here)

Remember when we tried burning food in cars (E10/E85 ethanol) it drove the prices of corn and other staples up. Let's not do that with water.

DUDE WHY?

Why are we doing all this again? Oh right to save half an hour or so in refuelling time over batteries.
Its worth noting carmakers are talking about 1,000km range EVs now and as that battery gets bigger the inrushing charge gets spread out amongst more cells. This means you can push a more energy in faster without overheating and get a useful amount of distance loaded up quicker.
Mercedes state their new EV will be able to recharge 300 km (174-186 miles) of range in 15 minutes

EVs still have some challenges for sure but they seem surmountable (that's a whole other article). The problems with Hydrogen make it straight up impossible.

Sure there may be a few niche applications but I'm still skeptical the economics will work out for cost sensitive industries like trucking, rail, shipping or aviation either.

This gigantic pile of stoopid is why I get angry every time someone even mentions hydrogen cars.
There is no.frickin.way. economically, practically or environmentally.

Maybe 30 years ago there was a debate about what the future held but now it's quite clear batteries work ok but Hydrogen never will. They are competing technologies too, nobody is going to build trillions in hydrogen infrastructure just to get their ass kicked.

So next time you see someone who is pushing hydrogen look for their agenda, they're either:
• Trying to con investors (Nikola)
• Divert time and money that could be better spent elsewhere (any oil co.)
• Have lingering misguided funding/tax credits left to milk (some universities/govts)
• Have sunk so much money into it they can't admit they're wrong (Toyota - until shockingly recently)
• Lazy auto journalists who haven't kept up (also won't have bothered to read this far)

The oil companies like hydrogen because it looks like their current business model: pushing chemical energy around in pipes and tankers. Cynically I think they like it even more because they're fully aware it's infeasible; if you could pick the competitor to eventually drive you out of business wouldn't you pick the lame dead duck?

TLDR

So in short the Hydrogen future requires us to:
• Double our generation capacity but make electricity so cheap we can afford to waste over three quarters of it in process losses.
• Have so much available fresh drinking water we're ok burning it like gasoline.
• Build more untried infrastructure at once than anyone ever has in history that will never make any money.
• Do it all quickly enough to stop the planet from warming irreversibly and killing us all.

If you think there's something wrong with this assessment I'd love to hear why, but bear in mind "In god we trust, all others bring data"

Here is part 2 of and I hope to god the conclusion to the events of a couple weeks ago (Apologies I'm really behind on my Oppo posts atm)

Catch up here

When we left our heroes they were hydrovac-ing the final section of the hole having struck brown gold insulation foam indicating something was buried directly beneath.

Next time I came out they had literally and figuratively gotten to the bottom of it.

The houses across the street are new builds: a couple of years back the elderly owners passed away and a contractor bought the double lot to split back into its two original sized plots.

To run water mains to the new houses the city used a technique called "impact moling" where a compressed air powered mole (or torpedo as the dig super called it) is shot between two small pits creating a passage for pipe to be pulled behind it.

Apparently its a very affordable method for running small pipes but "Impact moling has some disadvantages such as inaccuracy in line and grade since the system is unguided. This can cause damage to existing utility lines that have not been detected before the start of the project."

Yup, they bullseyed my sewer pipe! You can see the shiny copper line running right through the middle and the hopelessly stuck snake tool sticking out the opening where it collapsed.

I ran a quarter of a bathtub out to check there weren't any other problems upstream, that created a brief heart stopping moment when I arrived at the pipe exit before the water did but it started flowing a moment later and all was good.

So on to the fix, they didn't have a long enough length of replacement pipe on the truck so there was a wait while that arrived.

Gravel from the two dump trucks to fill the bottom of the hole then a concrete truck completed the ensemble of heavy machinery with some kind of lean gravel mix to top it off.

The backhoe and first crew arrived at 2:30pm, by 11pm they were are gone and hallelujah we could flush again, so didn't have to overnight on air mattresses at the in-laws.

I was genuinely impressed with how quick they moved and bought a bunch of Tim Hortons gift cards for all the guys on the crew while I was there for dinner and a dump.

Here's hoping this is the last sewer problem for a couple of decades and something new and exciting will break next...

Ominous post credits scene: while checking my backflow valve during the rain storm I noticed that the gravel all around it was covered with clear water.

I dont know if this itsrelated to the sewer backup or actually the ground-water level under the foundation since my backflow valve is a retrofit cut through the basement floor.

We have a sump pump (with battery backup) on the new basement addition that's tied into the existing weeping tile and it works overtime on rainy days so I think that's keeping the levels in check.

However I am worried with "once in a lifetime" weather events now happening on the regular we are vulnerable especially since we have a basement garage with a sloping driveway down into it.

I jerry rigged a water level alarm onto the basement floor drain during this saga, think it's time to add a permanent level here.

I heard stories this week that the Volga Dnipro owned Antonov that's been stuck at Toronto's Pearson airport for over a year would be handed over to Ukraine shortly.
Since my son was at a birthday party nearby this evening we stopped by to see it on the way home.

Amusingly it's directly across from the airport parking impound lot. I took a lot of iterations of this photo

Was kind of tricky to get decent photos through the chain link fence, I'm going to do the traditional bad workman's thing of blaming the Leica lenses on my Huawei phone for throwing a fit of nationalist sentiment (or being too spread apart to crop it out)



It's a chonky boi

I feel you could host a reasonable dinner party on those elevators.

I expect it will still be here for a while, even if the diplomatic paperwork gets ironed out there's going to be a ton of maintenance needed on a plane that's been parked unattended for that long, through a Canadian winter.
I'm actually surprised the airport storage fees are only ~$1,000/day, I was sure they'd have owed more that it was worth and written it off by now.
If anyone wants to check it out, it's viewable from 5675 Silver Dart Drive here

Was just browsing some random listicle about filming miniatures when I came across this photo.

That is a large scale model DeLorean, being pushed along by a rideable size model train and filmed with an El-camino (Ranchero? I dunno my utes that well)

We are hopefully adopting a dog this week so I needed to put a gate on the backyard asap.

My wife knowing my tendency to procrastinate bought a generic gate kit and latch off Amazon which gave me a good starting point.

Given the deadline and being my first time doing this I figured go simple as possible: rectangular 2x4 frame with 1x6 fence boards across the front and some diagonal braces at the back.

Then I went to double check my measurements and started thinking it would last better if the boards were capped as our old fence ended up pretty snaggle-toothed. Also if I lapped the boards it would match the new fence really nicely and I wouldn't have to rip all the boards to a weird width to fit the gap.

Ah well on to the MK2 version. Didn't need the braces anyway as the kit comes with metal corners.

Made a cut list and $110.30 CAD (ouch!) of pressure treated lumber later was ready to start Saturday afternoon.

Not many progress photos as I was focused on the task at hand.

My favorite detail was using the radial arm saw to buzz down the cap to fit over the top of the hinge and hide it. This thing has proved its value today and I'm going to give it some upgrades (I'll do another post on that)

I started after lunch and got the last hinge hung by the light of the impact driver. (I maintain I'm not stubborn at all - my wife says otherwise). No pics cos it was dark.

Next morning there was rain in the forecast at 10am so I skipped breakfast and jumped straight into cutting and mounting the 4x4 post onto the foundation.

The concrete anchors available were nowhere near long enough to pass through a 4x4 and I thought L- brackets would be hideous so I counterbored more than half way through the piece and tightened the nuts up with an extension.

Mistakes were made; the first cut I did was exactly 1/4" too short when I fixated on getting the saw lined up exactly and forgot the number. Past me was smart enough to foresee such dumbassery however and had plenty of spare material.
I also didn't clean enough concrete dust out of the first hole in the wall and hammered over the thread on the anchor trying to get it in.
Sawzall to the rescue: I zipped the tip off and was back in business.

Got it all finished just in time to take the kids swimming and before the rain started.


Still not 100% happy with it, but I never am. The gate swings open when released and the latch bounces if not closed gently. I figure both can be fixed by adding a spring later and for now its nice and solid.

Just as well since the rescue emailed while I was writing and we pickup the dog tomorrow night!

Yikes, if that isn't satire (since real old ad copy is often hard to distinguish, see below) I feel a lot less bad for the beating Ralph Nader gave them.

I've always kinda wanted to take a ruined 80s merc and give it the full Miami vice DIY Gemballa treatment: either full black or maybe metallic purple.

Although coketastic white has its merits too.
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/modified/what-mercedes-tuners-were-doing-80s
There were some other fun ones too love the grill on this.

Oh dear, when people already think you're a joke a uniform that gormless really isn't going to help.

Seriously, when Steve Carell looks more professional while lampooning you something has gone very very wrong. The costume dept would have rejected that uniform design on the grounds that no one would believe it.

I can just see all the exchanges at future D.C. military functions going something like "oh, have you met Allen, no he's not with catering he's with <snorts> Space Force...."

I think they just need to commit to camo of all black with sparkles at this point.

@Urambo-Tauro ooooh I bet there's a good business to be had making macho "tactical" step stools with angry eyebrows

@Roadkilled well then you'd still want to be off center to avoid riding the grease line..

@Fish-McSticks well

may i reccomend adding some studio Ghibli movies to your wheel. I'm (very) late to the party but every one becomes new favourite.
I'm watching Porco Rosso at present and realizing just how much of a giant aviation nerd the director & one of the studio's founders Hayao Miyazaki is.

@farscythe just post your wifi password on your front door, I'm sure some local yoofs with cheapo phone plans will appreciate the charity.

@bison78 yeah times have changed, my '06 Ford Focus had shockingly bad ABS, particularly in snow. If felt like the brakes had gone away and nearly caused me to hit a minivan doing an ill advised U-turn in a storm once.
I had to learn to consciously lift off and threshold brake the ABS if I wanted to stop. I looked into pulling the fuse in bad weather but it was under the hood so not ideal in a snow storm.

Definitely all different sizes and shaft lengths too, I chewed a frame with the 1st gear teeth making that mistake.
Square taper just means the shaft shape and they're all the same on the mountain bikes.
If it's creaky might be the crank being loose and that needs tightening asap or it'll eat the softer crank metal and never tighten back up.
Crunchy sounds like the bearings, if it wasn't sealed you might have them loose or full of crap and be able to take it apart and clean them. Probably just need a new assembly though so remove the old one and either pull the part number or take the assembly to a shop to match the size.
You'll need a crank puller tool to remove those and a spline tool to turn unscrew the bottom bracket. As others have said one side of the BB unscrews the wrong way.