Adventures in being me.
Sep. 26th, 2021 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brooksmosesYesterday afternoon I moved the last of the stuff out of my small storage unit into a large storage unit, so that I won't have to pay rent on both next month.
This turned out to be more work than I expected, in a rather amusing way: One of the shelf-racks-on-wheels that I had bought at an auction yesterday morning had a bent wheel, and of course I noticed this after loading it. It turned out, rather to my amusement, that because of the particular stage of the moving process that I was at, I had all of the tools readily available to fix it properly.
I retrieved my spare car jack from the small storage unit to lift up the relevant end of the shelf, and then took the circa-1890s adjustable wrench of serious size (it's 18" long, and has a capacity of about 4 inches) out of my car where I had it because I couldn't find my normal pipe wrench a couple of weeks ago when I was obtaining a sink from a different auction, and used the wrench to unscrew the caster from the bottom of the shelf. As I expected, the screw-thread part of the caster was quite bent. Also, the threads on it were rather chewed up.
The next step was to go back up to the small storage unit, and retrieve the various heavy antique bench vises (circa 1930s-1950s, I think) that would already have been the next load to bring out. I clamped the caster in the heaviest vise, and used the adjustable wrench to bend the screw-thread part back straight.
Then, I considered the damaged screw threads -- and the fact that, in the load of stuff before I'd discovered this problem, I had brought down a box of thread-cutting dies and handles. And, indeed, it had several dies of the right size, including one helpfully in a plastic bag labeled "lefthand thread" as a caution not to accidentally try to use it for normal threads. Unfortunately, most of the handles had allen-wrench set screws to hold the dies in, and allen wrenches (being more common tools) were not a thing I had handy. I did, however, find a rather cheap and beat-up die handle that had lost its set screw and had it replaced with a normal screw with a flathead-drive head. I didn't have a screwdriver either, but the box next to the thread-die box had hammers in it, and one of them had had the nail-pulling end sharpened to a tip that was about the right sharpness to be a functional screwdriver substitute.
That left the problem that this beat-up die handle was also just enough out of round that the die wouldn't fit into it. Conveniently, I had a small arbor press on the cart with the bench vises, and that made short work of squishing it back round enough for the die to fit into. And so I cleaned up and recut the screw threads to fix the damaged bits.
After that, it was a simple matter of screwing the caster back into the shelf (which was quite easy since the screw threads were all properly cleaned up) and setting the shelf back down with the jack, and it was nearly as good as new.
Other than that, the move went pretty much as expected, and I got the last load moved to the larger storage unit at 8:45, well in advance of the "gate close" time of 9pm.
This turned out to be more work than I expected, in a rather amusing way: One of the shelf-racks-on-wheels that I had bought at an auction yesterday morning had a bent wheel, and of course I noticed this after loading it. It turned out, rather to my amusement, that because of the particular stage of the moving process that I was at, I had all of the tools readily available to fix it properly.
I retrieved my spare car jack from the small storage unit to lift up the relevant end of the shelf, and then took the circa-1890s adjustable wrench of serious size (it's 18" long, and has a capacity of about 4 inches) out of my car where I had it because I couldn't find my normal pipe wrench a couple of weeks ago when I was obtaining a sink from a different auction, and used the wrench to unscrew the caster from the bottom of the shelf. As I expected, the screw-thread part of the caster was quite bent. Also, the threads on it were rather chewed up.
The next step was to go back up to the small storage unit, and retrieve the various heavy antique bench vises (circa 1930s-1950s, I think) that would already have been the next load to bring out. I clamped the caster in the heaviest vise, and used the adjustable wrench to bend the screw-thread part back straight.
Then, I considered the damaged screw threads -- and the fact that, in the load of stuff before I'd discovered this problem, I had brought down a box of thread-cutting dies and handles. And, indeed, it had several dies of the right size, including one helpfully in a plastic bag labeled "lefthand thread" as a caution not to accidentally try to use it for normal threads. Unfortunately, most of the handles had allen-wrench set screws to hold the dies in, and allen wrenches (being more common tools) were not a thing I had handy. I did, however, find a rather cheap and beat-up die handle that had lost its set screw and had it replaced with a normal screw with a flathead-drive head. I didn't have a screwdriver either, but the box next to the thread-die box had hammers in it, and one of them had had the nail-pulling end sharpened to a tip that was about the right sharpness to be a functional screwdriver substitute.
That left the problem that this beat-up die handle was also just enough out of round that the die wouldn't fit into it. Conveniently, I had a small arbor press on the cart with the bench vises, and that made short work of squishing it back round enough for the die to fit into. And so I cleaned up and recut the screw threads to fix the damaged bits.
After that, it was a simple matter of screwing the caster back into the shelf (which was quite easy since the screw threads were all properly cleaned up) and setting the shelf back down with the jack, and it was nearly as good as new.
Other than that, the move went pretty much as expected, and I got the last load moved to the larger storage unit at 8:45, well in advance of the "gate close" time of 9pm.
