Bonehead Ideas

[Wood Butcher]

Seeing the "Forehead Slappers" and "Beeswax as grease" threads revived a couple of dormant gray cells.

Several years back I had the brilliant idea of using beeswax to lube & rustproof the threads on some of my horrible freight adjustable clamps. I warmed the threads and the clamp head with a torch just enough so that the beeswax would melt and get sucked into the threads. Perfect! Until I tried to use them and watched in horror as the handles slowly unscrewed themselves. Arrggghhh!

Anyone else care to share their bonehead idea?

Art

[Charlie Self]

Not woodworking, but a similar intent: we have windows that slide up on aluminum tracks set in the sides. Given years and dirt and whatnot, they were a bitch to raise and tended to slam when lowered, so I sprayed some Teflon dry lube on them all. Made them wonderfully easy to raise, of course, and they no longer slammed, but there was no longer enough friction to keep them open, either. I cut a lot of short sticks at that time.

Charlie Self "One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected." George W. Bush

[Andy Dingley]

There's a website out there for a famous supplier of very high-end titanium bikes. Their workshop bod has a bit of a bee in his bassinet about the many uses of beeswax, and their website is full of technical hints for what to do with it; from lubricating to threadlocking to stopping the ends of brake cables unravelling. Now beeswax might keep the ends of one's handlebar mustache in order, but it does nothing for steel cables. The rest of the tips are similarly useless.

[George]

Are you trying to say that sometimes things can be too well-lubricated?

Actually "unscrewed themselves" sounds a bit like morning-after pills....

[loutent]

One that comes to my mind is when a friend of mine was having a house built. He was/is very meticulous and was watching every step of the construction.

After the insulation was installed, he was not satisfied with the gaps he noticed around the windows, so after working hours, he sprayed foam insulation around all the windows.

Sure enough, none of the windows would budge after the foam expanded. Had to remove it all.

He was probably not the first (or last) to do this.

And no, the 'friend' was not me!

Lou

[Robatoy]

Sorry those mistakes were all made by friends of mine.. I'll ask around...LOL

r

[Mike]

That's why nearly all window manufactures have a warning label on the window that tells the installer NOT to use expanding foam. In some cases it's use will void the window's warranty. A lot of installers still use it however.

Mike O.

[Jim Warman]

I did that once with with a prehung exterior door (back in the early 80s). The freind WAS me and I gained a new respect for expanding foam...

Jim Warman [e-mail]

[Andy Dingley]

[Silvan]

Boy, that brought back a memory. What was I trying to accomplish? Hrm...

I had some hole I was trying to fill with foam outside a rented house. Mice were getting in, maybe. The nozzle thing was broken, so I got the brilliant idea that I could shoot a hole in the can and then direct the stream of goo shooting out its side at the target area and do a close enough job for this application.

So I grabbed my BB gun, stepped way back, took aim at the can, and KA-FLOOM! An entire can of Great Stuff evacuated straight up into the air in about

1/50th of a second. After which it rained foam all over EVERYTHING. The roof, the siding, the oil tank, the grass, me, my infant son standing on the far side of the house.

Yeah buddy, that definitely qualifies as a contender for the prize of most boneheaded thing I've ever done. Especially if you rule out electricity or fire. Or sharp edges.

[Mark & Juanita]

Silvan, You realize your monitor cleaning bill is racking up quite a tab, don't you?

[grumble, grumble @#$% windex! Swallow @#$% before reading!]

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Now we'll just use some glue to hold things in place until the brads dry +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[d.kessell]

I have a buddy drove his Taurus wagon left front tire off the edge of a steep track in the woods in Arkansas couple a years ago. Couldn't back it out, so we (4 of us on a camping trip) decided to use a come-along to hoist it back onto the road. We blocked the rear, jacked the left front, attached the cable to a tree and to a piece of metal under the right front, and started cranking.

That was the bonehead bit--the piece of metal: turns out it was only sheet metal. Just as we get the car back on the track it rips out, and the Taurus careens down hill. (I don't know why the brake wasn't set, or why it took all four of us outside the vehicle. It just did, OK!?)

Fortunately, it struck a small tree where the track made a hairpin turn, before it could plunge down the hollar. Tree roots jammed against the trany and it stuck.

We ended up jacking the car, blocking it with rocks, and cutting the tree out with a chainsaw. It started right up, and he drove it home to Colorado. Next year he showed up with an Explorer 4x4. He still doesn't like to talk about it.

Dan

[Groggy]

Dan, as an ex-owner of a Taurus wagon I think you missed the true bonehead bit - you should have cut the tree roots free then given it another shove - all four of you.

The Taurus rivals the Edsel IMO.

Greg (who had a very bad experience with his Taurus, so bad that Ford rebuilt the engine - for free)

[Larry Jaques]

On Sun, 09 Jan 2005 02:22:56 +0000, Andy Dingley calmly ranted:

the Nth degree, wot?

--- - Sarcasm is just one more service we offer. -

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[Larry Jaques]

On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 20:53:40 -0700, Mark & Juanita calmly ranted:

Shameful, Marky. You have been around for years and really -should- know by now that you shouldn't Drink and Browse the Wreck.

--- - Sarcasm is just one more service we offer. -

Web Applications

[Mike Patterson]

A couple of weeks ago my gas-heated clothes dryer wouldn't heat, so being a DIY kind of guy I decided to diagnose it myself.

Did you know that the temperature sensor on a gas dryer exhaust is wired at 110VAC? I didn't until then....

At least I was following the "one hand" rule.

Mike Patterson Please remove the spamtrap to email me. "I always wanted to be somebody...I should have been more specific..." - Lily Tomlin

[mark]

Not quite the same thing, but I figured you'd get a good laugh out of it. I am building a sailboat, and had to cut the hole in the back for the rudder control to go through. It was a rectangle about 3x5. I grabbed a spade bit, and popped a hole right in the center of the rectangle, planning on using my jigsaw to finish it. I blasted through, and I knew that the spade bits made a mess of the other side, so I stuck my finger in (all the way to the last knuckle, of course) to see how bad it was, and could instantly feel huge spinters on the other side of the plywood..."Dammit! I thought. Now we'll have to repaint." Well, when I went to pull my finger out, all the spinters closed around my finger. I was stuck fast and it hurt like hell. It was like one of those chinese finger traps. The more I tried to get out, the more the sharp splinters dug into my finger. About ten minutes later my dad came home from getting sandwiches for dinner, and almost pissed himself when he realized I couldn't move and I was stuck to the back of the boat. He had to crawl inside, lay on his back and pull the splinters away from my finger.....ah, stupidity....

[Old Nick]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 18:21:44 -0800, "Wood Butcher" vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!:

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

Another friend one, I am afraid.

To remove a boat from a trailer, back rapidly towards the ramp, until the trailer is in the water up to the usual axle depth. Stop suddenly. Boat slides off. But what if it's a _keel_ boat?

[Knothead]

In another life I was an auto mechanic and spent a few years working in a car dealership. Well in those days most accessories were installed at the dealer like roof racks, mudflaps etc. Well on small foreign jobs you may notice the first accessory most folks needed was a roof rack. I had installed about a million of these things before the idea hit me to make a drilling jig. I spent a Saturday in the shop made a really nice drilling jig and was in such a hurry to see how it worked that instead of reworking my drill stop I removed it and proceeded to drill 8 perfectly even, perfectly lined up holes in the roof, headliner, interior roof lights on a brand new Subaru Wagon..... The car went down the road with lenses from a wreck and 8 color matching interior body plugs that no other car on the planet had. No one ever caught it.

Knothead

[Charlie Self]

Knothead notes:

Sounds like a buddy of mine. I was putting seats from a wrecked BMW into my Valiant (why the HELL not?). We marked the first location for checking above and below, I lifted the seat out and discovered ol' Miles had drilled the first two holes already. There was this funny smell...ahhhhh, brake fluid!

We did get the seats in, capped the line to the rear wheels, and I drove home with front wheel brakes until I could get to the dealer's next day.

Charlie Self "One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected." George W. Bush