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asymptotic approach of omnipotence
Saturday, April 26 2008
It was another beautiful day, meaning I would spend the majority of it stripping parts from the increasingly-gutted Honda Civic hatchback. While Gretchen lay in the yard grading papers, solving crossword puzzles, and reading murder mysteries, I was focused mostly on the surprisingly difficult job of removing all the glass from the hatchback. I've replaced a windshield on a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle and found it a relatively easy operation, since it is held in by a simple rubber gasket. But Honda uses glue with their gaskets, which allows them to suspend panes of glass in improbable ways, held in place exclusively by adhesion from behind. Removing glass supported this way is a bitch. It was a good thing that I was removing it without the goal of replacing it, or I would have sunk into despair. My first target was the windshield, which was already smashed and useless after the explosion of the passenger-side airbag. I sliced its rubber gasket in multiple places, digging deeper and deeper and then loosening what I could of the windshield, which buckled as cracks developed tributaries, capillaries, and twiglets, resulting in a constant rain of tiny glass shards. Shattering automotive glass doesn't result in the large, dangerous shards characteristic of the shattering of other sorts of glass, but it wasn't wise for me to be doing all of this work barefoot and gloveless. I kept plucking tiny pyramids of glass from the soles of my feet. And my hand were soon cut up and bleeding, though none of the cuts were deep and none of the bleeding was profuse (as it would have been had I been handling any other kind of broken glass).
In the end I managed to get the windshield out. I then folded most of it into an old leaky five gallon bucket, striking it with a hammer to force it in. Finally I vacuumed up the car so it would be safe once more for the cats, whose interest remained undiminished. Later (and with similar, though scaled-down struggles) I removed the other two fixed panes of glass from either side of the back of the car. These came out intact, meaning they are available for some future project.
At some point Gretchen and I went up to Andrea's house and brought back two wheelbarrows of mushroom dirt (Andrea, who is a gardening jedi, orders it by the truckload and has told us to help ourselves). Then Gretchen launched into something of a weeding jihad in our humble little garden. When I saw her in the process of ripping out one of the two tomatoes I'd planted, I screamed for her to stop. She'd already ripped out the other, but I managed to find it and replant it. (She felt horrible of course).
Those two tomato plants had been volunteer seedlings that had appeared in a pot back in November. I'd brought them in after they'd survived a light frost, and they'd grown to big glorious vines, bursting into a riot of yellow flowers back in February. I'd planted them out in the garden in early April when it seemed there were no more frosty mornings in the ten day forecast. Frost eventually had come, but I'd been careful to cover the tomatoes beneath plastic every night. Still, they'd done badly even on nights when it hadn't quite frozen, wilting down to almost nothing. Recently, though, they'd seemed to be rallying again. Hopefully the events of this afternoon (and those of 9Eleven) won't set them back too much.
Looking at the Honda Civic this afternoon, I realized that it would be a lot easier to remove the window if I just cut away the remains of metal chassis from the front of the car and pull the engine out horizontally, supporting it from below with a heavy duty cart I happen to have. So I broke out the reciprocating saw and went nuts. I was amazed at how easily that saw cut through the car's steel. Even the massive structural square tubes that run on either side of the engine (the ones that run the length of the car from bumper to bumper) were no match to the fast-whipping blade, which at times really did seem to be sawing as if through butter. Within about fifteen minutes, I had a clear horizontal path for removing the engine and transmission. All I needed to do now was a few wires and cables and disconnect the axles connecting the wheels to the transmission. But that would have to wait for another day.
I've been trying different bulbs in the refrigerator, trying to find the best for that unusual location. It had shipped with two forty watt incandescent bulbs, which meant that every time the refrigerator door was opened, eighty watts of heat would be released into the otherwise-cold interior for the duration of the door's being opened. I'd tried low wattage LED bulbs, but they were far too dim. So then I'd tried a small 15 watt compact fluorescent bulbs (which, when in full brightness, gave the light of a 60 watt incandescent bulb). But CF bulbs don't work well in situations where they are only on for a few seconds. I also think that CF bulbs prefer conditions generally warmer than those present inside a refrigerator. The bulb had begun flickering and eventually became unreliable. So the other day I took delivery of a brighter LED-based bulb, one consuming about 1.6 watts of power. It was a bit dim and the light was too blue, but it was the best low-energy option I could find for this application. Unfortunately, its Edison-style threading was slightly-incompatible with the refrigerator's cheap charlie sockets, which were mostly plastic except for a brass clip for the hot wire and another for the neutral. The neutral clip's profile was too low beneath the threads and needed to be bent outward. And I also needed to solder a big glob of solder onto the tip of the bulb's base to make it slightly longer.
To bend out that clip, I devised a tool out of a surplus flat screwdriver. I wanted the screwdriver to become a flattened hook attached to an insulated handle, but I found that bending the screwdriver's shaft was impossible. So I heated it up with a blow torch until it glowed dull orange. At that point it bent like copper. I experienced the sort of empowerment that once got blacksmiths out of their beds every morning.
While I was playing around with heat in the shop, I decided to try something I'd once seen done on Mythbusters: the melting and fusing of conventional glass. I'd long thought of glass as an inflexible material for DIY projects: either it was in the form I wanted or in one I could easily cut into the desired form, and that was it. But on Mythbusters, that dude Grant held two shards of glass in a blow torch flame, where they promptly melted and fused, whereupon he drew them apart and created a long thin strand of glass. So I did the same thing and, sure enough, a glass fiber was easily created. Hmm, perhaps glass is a lot more plastic than I'd always assumed. If I can learn to make shapes out of scrap glass, a whole new avenue of creativity will open up, further paralyzing me with the asymptotic approach of omnipotence. Mu-hu-hu-what's-on-teevee?
The hatchback with the structural metal removed from in front of the engine. The exhaust manifold is also gone. Note the square ends of the structural tubes I severed to remove the remains of the front of the car.
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