a minor household repair - very creative!

A text only post as I didn't think to take pictures while working. 

 My mother has a brass bed frame and some of the bolts that hold it together are loose. I will write a little about my repairs if I think I can make them clear and interesting - enough to explain my thesis, anyway. That thesis being, unskilled repair people have to be very creative indeed to solve problems they didn't understand when they arrived at the problem. 

 One part of the challenge in describing the event is also the problem with being unskilled. When I discuss 'fasteners' it is because I have no idea what the name of the actual part is. I also don't know if this name is common knowledge and to save time I will just say 'fastener' rather than describe in detail - which would also be painstaking and awkward as I lack that vocabulary as well. 

 Here is what happened. My mom's brass bed frame was coming apart at the junctures where pipe met pipe. I found the whole thing was kept together by 'headless-threaded bolts' perhaps fifteen cm long. At one end, a decorative brass globe screwed on. But inside the pipe was a fastener that had been pushed back quite deep into the pipe, far beyond what the bolt could reach. My first thought, having lived in Asia for many years, was chopsticks. Some disposable chopsticks we had at hand had a lump at one end so I pushed the stick past the fastener and pushed up on the fastened while pulling back. I think I had some success but mostly I pushed the fastener as high as it could go and it stuck in place. Then I got needle nose pliers and they were now long enough so I could pull the fastener out, learn how it worked and replace it. I threaded it on the bolt and tried it in the hole.

 But now I couldn't remove it. These fasteners went in easily but were hard to pull out. 

Alright, let me try to describe them; they were basically domes with a hole in the centre. Huh; that was easier than I had thought. You put the dome in the pipe so it was concave to the opening and it went in fairly well but was hard to pull out.  

So now I have to push the bolt, already connected via the dome-fastener to a pipe, to the main bed frame. But of course the frame post was slightly twisted so I could not just push it through. I needed to twist the main post, slide the bolt through without knocking it deeper into the pipe and fit the decorative end on. Three hands were clearly needed. 

On my third try, holding the pipe in my hand and my fingers on the bolt, I used my other hand to twist the frame post and slide it on... and succeeded! I quickly put the decorative end on and was done!

 Nope.

 Time to look over the rest of the bed. It seems the bed frame was three inches longer than the mattress. and the angle-iron mattress-holding part of the frame was loose where it contacted the brass.

 I cut a two-by-four into three inch lengths, then cut gaps about an inch deep into them for the bolts holding the iron to brass fit. I tried to tighten the iron frame to the brass with my fingers.

 Nope. 

I couldn't find a wrench head the right size. So I opened a ratchet set my father had given me nearly forty years ago and used it for the first time! Thanks, Dad. 

So I was able to tighten the parts of the frame together, tighten the brass piping, and even clean under this bed for what appeared to be the first time in months. 

 Someone who knew what they were doing would have taken ten minutes, I think. They might even had pushed the dome fasteners deeper and used fresh ones as that would probably have been better time/money efficient than salvaging the original ones. 

 My creative exploration and journey took over an hour and included, among other things, balancing a flashlight on my shoulder so that the light was a eye level to look down the pipe while also holding that pipe and probing it with a chopstick. 

 And I think this is the big lesson; naïve creative work can complete a job as well as experienced-step following work but it will take a lot longer.

TWIC: Settling in

I have just moved to Canada and am busy setting up, well, a life here. I have a phone and pick up a car tomorrow... You might not care. Among other things, few private homes have unlimited internet use and I have held back on my surfing habits a little.

The means I want to share a lot of Quora today.
Is technology damaging our creative skills?
Creativity and youth
Creativity: nature or nurture?
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Unusual homes.

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Paul F Tompkins on paying podcast guests.
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Using Storyboard for language practice.
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A nine year old girl's suggestions for New Yorker captions.

Old V New Lego

When I was my son's age, we built rectilinear houses and rectilinear  cars with square blocks and we liked it!  Now, my son wants specialty sets based on marketable themes and with unusually shaped pieces that build preplanned shapes: castles, helicopters, dinosaurs, dune buggies and steam-punk vehicles.
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This seems life a good place for an addition two weeks later:  The Ethical Adman misses the old Lego sets too.  He shows some 1970's Lego ads, including one of an interesting ambulance, then says,

 This was around the time when I started playing with the iconic blocks, almost 40 years ago. Note that the craptacular ambulance built by 5-year-old "Maria" could have just as easily been built by "Mario".

And then it hit me what the real problem is.

Lego stopped being a "blank slate" imagination toy sometime in the '80s. While you can still buy plain blocks if you look hard enough, Lego is now much more about getting kids to act out branded and scripted narratives than asking them to start from scratch.

End updated section
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I haven't decided if this is an improvement.  Maybe the creative aspect has simply moved one step.  Where I built an owl, carefully choosing the right pieces to form a large diamond -shaped body and a  smaller diamond-shaped head with protruding beak, then admired it as it sat on my dresser, the little guy builds castles, populates them with good and bad guys, then spends hours acting out a story with them.  My creative output was in making; His is in using.

I have two concerns with the specialty shapes in the Monster Fighter themed sets, though.  First, it will be hard or impossible to use some of them in new ways later.  The spooky, gothic castle roof piece looks like it would only be appropriate as a spooky gothic roof piece - maybe the castle part is the variable.  The castle is made from perhaps twenty tall blocks that now have the included atmospheric stickers on them.  It is difficult imagining them as being repurposed as aircraft wings, for example.

All that said, I do love the flourishes and details in the vampire's castle.  There is a library, a cauldron with magical ingredients stewing and a piano in the attic of a high tower.  The little guy has already put the vampire in there to work the keyboard.

A related point is that the castle perfectly fits my conception of a vampire's castle but I am old.  I would be upset with a Twilight-style castle (they don't have castles? That woman is ruining the genre!) but I also don't want my son to be pushed into playing out traditional vampire stories.

My second concern with the Monster Fighter's themed sets is the number of guns.  Now, I played with guns a lot as a child and have turned out mostly fine.  In the set, it is not merely a few characters who have guns, but the cars have guns as exhaust pipes or hood ornaments.  They look bad-ass but not in a way I want to son to experience.  Am I old and cranky?

I want this office.

Wade Davis, the 'explorer-in-residence' for National Geographic has a beautiful office.  I'm sure that if I had it, once I tired of climbing the ladder to view my books, I could be very productive.
Photo from Travis Price Architects.

Another from Washington Life:

unusual homes and how to make them

I read National Geographic World ( magazine for pre-teens) as a child and I clearly remember a home built of tires and pounded earth.  The finished home didn't look like tires as it had some coating and inside cladding but it did look great -the walls were very organic and nothing was straight.

The Ekinoid Project homes look very different but also are similar in that they look quite different from normal homes as well.

Other homes:
Rammed Earth and tires/ cans, Hexayurt, and my favorite, the plastic bottle floating island.

When well-done, they look great and are certainly eye-catching.  I don't think they can live up to their hype though.  The Ekinoid home is built as a sphere for better insulation by volume, but I don't buy it because so much space is wasted in a sphere. Few people want to walk on the sloping sides of even the bottom eighth, nor can they use, except as a crawl-space attic, the edges on top.  The project calls for the home to be 'off the grid' but again, I don't know how easy that is to do.  I do like them, though.

To my mind, environmentally friendly housing needs to be multi-family housing.  Perhaps a standard box with four families each using a corner and two outside walls but having an open space interior.  The unconventional aspect would be the uses the open space would be for.  Each family would have privacy in their nearly dorm-style apartment, but share a common cooking and recreation area.  The savings would come from shared appliances,  a one big fridge rather than four medium sized ones.

Oh, how to make an Ekinoid home?  I don't know.  If you have ideas, visit their site (link is above) and read the criteria they have.