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drilling wood with a masonry bit
Saturday, October 9 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
The morning wasn't too cool considering we were in the Adirondacks in October. In the full light of day, I was struck by how much the leaves had changed color in the past week. A lot of leaves had also begun falling, helping to cover the cabin's barren building site. Eric and I built a fire in the fire pit using some wood he'd brought from Massachussetts (possibly in violation of firewood transportation rules; such wood is a vector for harmful parasites like the emerald ash borer). The fire dispelled the chill and heated water for a french press of coffee, the first hot coffee I'd ever made at this cabin.
At some point I needed to poop, so I walked a short distance down the nascent Lake Edward trail and then headed north into a part of the forest I hadn't yet explored. I was astounded and delighted to find a line of granite cliffs maybe 15 feet high and hundreds of feet long, all within a short walk of the cabin. I should make a little loop trail just so I can walk past these cliffs whenever I need the inexplicable joy they give me.
Back on the subject of pooping: the port-a-potty has been removed from the cabin site, so anyone who needs to poop now must do it in the forest. There will be a toilet soon in the cabin, but the septic field and toilet have yet to be installed. Eric said that many dumptrucks of sand were delivered in recent days and spread out where the septic field will bem (producing a noticeable hump), but the pipes of the leach field have yet to be installed and connected.
Eventually Eric and I went back to work, with me concentrating on tiling the rest of the first floor bathroom and Eric continuing the application of polyurethane. He was wearing a mask to help with the fumes, though I couldn't see how that would help much, since the problem was vapors, not particles, and his mask didn't contain charcoal.
The tiling went slowly, as it had before, and by the end, as I ran out of hexagons, I was setting them individually, that is, not as part of a meshed unit. I'd managed to tile all of the bathroom outside the closet, which was the goal Gretchen had set for me. At the very end, I was using tiny cut pieces of hexagon in the shapes of triangles and trapezoids to square up the edges of my tiling so it would be compatible with rectangular tile. I was able to use all but two of the individual hexagons, though at the end I also had a pile of tiny hexagon pieces.
After that, I transitioned to tiling with large square (8 inch by 8 inch) green tiles leftover from the when I retiled the entryway in the house back in Hurley. They went in quickly, but I ran out before I could finish the job. I then checked to see if I had enough of some yellow rectangular tiles leftover from last summer's tub installation project to finish the job, and when I didn't, I decided to leave the rest of the bathroom closet untiled, at least for now.
I'd brought my big MP3 player so I could listen to podcasts. But for some reason it kept resetting, and I was unable to listen to a whole podcasts without having to undertake heroic interventions. Since my hands were covered with thinset, that was impossible. So I decided to listen to the radio instead. I found an oddball local Gloversville station called WFNY (which might've been an AM station). Their tagline is "Glove City's favorite radio station." Their music was a confounding mix of pre-rock golden oldies from the 1950s, psychedelia from the late 1960s, and classic rock from the 1980s. Some of this music was terrible, but many of the songs were refreshing to hear because I'd either never heard them before or I hadn't heard them since I was a child.
Once the floor was tiled, I could move on to some other tasks. I drove with the dogs to the communal dock to offload some concrete blocks, dock hardware, and old automotive brake drums, all for possible use when building the dock. I made mistake of trying to turn the Bolt around, and in so doing ventured off the gravel parking area near the communal dock. I soon realized I was stuck in the mud, with nobody nearby to help. So I used a flat piece of metal as a shovel to clear the humps of sticky black mud from behind my tires and then put a few chunks of rock in against the tires' tread. This didn't work very well at first, but eventually I was able to drive forward up out of the pits my tires had excavated. And that gave me enough potential energy to then back down quickly through those pits and up the other side. As I was doing all this, the dogs wandered up the steep communal dock driveway to Woodworth Lake Road. I backed up there and, most of the way to the top, quickly loaded them in the car, worried the whole time the Bolt would somehow slip out of park and go racing back down the driveway without me at the wheel.
I drove us directly from there to the Noble Ace hardware store in Johnstown, where I bought a $30 one-inch-wide DeWalt masonry bit, some romex clamps (something I have lots of, but never where I need them), and a few other bits and pieces to help me finish up the installation of the 240 volt car-charging outlet. On the way back to the cabin, I stopped again at the Price Chopper to buy veggie dogs, hot dog rolls, and another 12 pack of Hazy Little Thing. I'd bought portobello caps and a bag of charcoal yesterday, and I thought maybe tonight it would be fun to break in the fancy charcoal barbecue.
Back at the cabin, I brought in the beer in case Eric needed some ("Do you think that'll be enough?" he asked) and then walked with the dogs down to the dock. I beat them to the lake, and so set out in the canoe without them. But they managed to reach the communal dock by walking along the shoreline by the time I was done loading the cargo. Ramona was happy to board the canoe from the communal dock itself (the water level was as high as I've ever seen it, making that dock more useful). But Neville was reluctant and had to be dragged aboard.
Back at the cabin, I used the big new masonry bit to ream out the hole I'd bored yesterday. This didn't take long at all. But even with a hole an inch in diameter, the 3/4 inch conduit didn't quite fit. But with some additional reaming with that same bit, I made the hole just big enough. It was still far too narrow for a PVC fitting of the sort one would put on the back of an electrical box. So instead of using one of those, I simply sanded down the walls on the end of a piece of 3/4 inch PVC until it just barely fit into the threaded hole on the back of the box. After that, I could twist the pipe into the hole, where the threads bound tightly into the pipe almost like self-dieing (as opposed to self-tapping) threads.
Down in the basement when I went to run the fat 8-gauge cable, I found that all the existing holes were too narrow, meaning I needed to cut new holes. Unfortunately, I didn't have any spade bits with me. But I eventually found a solution: it turns out that a masonry bit will cut through wood in a pinch. It's a bit a slower, but it goes much faster than drilling into concrete.
Meanwhile I'd been "seasoning" the new charcoal grill for hours using charcoal, leaves, and peanuts. (The instructions called for doing this with vegetable oil, which I didn't have. I thought peanuts might work as a substitute given how oily they are.)
It was well after dark by the time Eric and I had our barbecue. Eric is a nice guy, and he hasn't been too much of a bother. But, as with almost any socializing (except, for some reason, with Gretchen), he has been placing a slight cognitive load on me that I would otherwise be blissfully free of. He sometimes asks questions that I'd rather not spend the energy necessary for formulating an answer. And there are many things that I feel should be common knowledge that he doesn't, for whatever reason, know, which I then have to explain. But tonight after we were mostly done with our day's work, we had a good time together eating Tofurky hotdogs and drinking gin by the fire (we were running both the barbecue and the fire pit). There was a ceiling of thin clouds blocking our view of the stars, but the sky had Eric thinking of the things he's seen in it. Eric asked if I'd ever seen the Northern Lights, and I said that I had, just once. Eric asked where I'd been. "Ray and Nancy's wedding," I said. "I was at Ray and Nancy's wedding," Eric said, "and I don't remember that." "It was at the bowling alley," I explained. "Oh, I didn't go to that," said Eric. He had seen the Northern Lights in Wisconsin, though.
Ramona and Neville riding with me and the dock hardware across the lake. Click to enlarge.
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