iburkard.worklog
Saturday, October 14, 2006
I went nuts today, trying to do too many things at once. I managed to patch an old 1930's army blanket, has a cool insignia on it. I also repaired an old ROME electric heater while doing laundry and cleaning up. Obviously, cleaning up didn't happen, since there isn't a machine that cleans while I make a mess of a project.
There's an aquarium in my kitchen set up to do electrolysis (to clean metal), old cloth wiring ripped to shreds in my living room, and my supposed work room... can't even really walk in there... like hoping from patch of floor to patch of floor, which works for me since I'm tall. I also have boxes and crap strewn all over the place, going through old stuff that my brother sent me from our old house.
Here are several before and after pictures of the heater. (The heating element turned out blue in the photographs, but it's actually red.) The before picture doesn't do justice to how grungy this thing was. I completely disassembled the heater so that I could:
-Knock out dents
-Strip off the clear coat
(took two hours with rubbing compound)
-Polish the metal
-Clean up the porcelain element socket and contacts
-Fix the heating element
-Remove three broken rivets
(support for the heating element base)
-Replace rivets with brass screws
-Rewire/replace the old power chord
Someone had disassembled the heater before me (back in the day), and put it back together incorrectly. Ugh! It was nice to put the heater back together correctly, so that it regained its round shape, instead of being a wonky cylinder with a triangular profile, but you don't care about this. Images!
There's an aquarium in my kitchen set up to do electrolysis (to clean metal), old cloth wiring ripped to shreds in my living room, and my supposed work room... can't even really walk in there... like hoping from patch of floor to patch of floor, which works for me since I'm tall. I also have boxes and crap strewn all over the place, going through old stuff that my brother sent me from our old house.
Here are several before and after pictures of the heater. (The heating element turned out blue in the photographs, but it's actually red.) The before picture doesn't do justice to how grungy this thing was. I completely disassembled the heater so that I could:
-Knock out dents
-Strip off the clear coat
(took two hours with rubbing compound)
-Polish the metal
-Clean up the porcelain element socket and contacts
-Fix the heating element
-Remove three broken rivets
(support for the heating element base)
-Replace rivets with brass screws
-Rewire/replace the old power chord
Someone had disassembled the heater before me (back in the day), and put it back together incorrectly. Ugh! It was nice to put the heater back together correctly, so that it regained its round shape, instead of being a wonky cylinder with a triangular profile, but you don't care about this. Images!
