BEL #716
Today I resolved to repair the broken
"take wood from here" sign we have at
Basecamp. We stuff this into one of the wood racks along the exterior walls of the
Library, so that we can make sure that the wood being pulled for fire-building is adequately dried (and so that we don't have all our wood racks at various levels of fullness, which looks weirder and more dilapidated as time passes).
I figured that this could easily be sorted by drilling holes in either half of the sign, stuffing dowel rod pins in the holes, and then fusing the two sides together. What I hadn't realized at the outset was that, were one to use a drill by hand, there's a high likelihood that things won't line up correctly.
So of course, that's what I did.
As you might expect, the sign parts didn't line up. One of the dowel rods sat in there okay, but since the other was crooked by just a tiny, tiny bit, the two halves were - even at their best-behaved - still about an inch apart.
Aha! I remembered.
There's a drill press down in the Woodshop. So I went there, clamped the two halves of the sign together, and did my best to have two lined-up holes for dowel rods to fit properly.
I think I actually impressed myself with the fit job that I ended up with in there. You can barely notice that somethings not quite right with the sign. The only thing I didn't do that I ought to have at the time was use a bit of wood glue to better-fuse the two halves together. So, for now, only the dowel rods are holding them together.
...But it looks kind of like a nice, intact, single piece of wood!
I torched the front of the sign, etched-out the letters with a Dremel tool, and then re-attached the sign to its post. It looks pretty good out there. We'll see how long it lasts, and whether a full-replacement was a better choice.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!
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