Repurposing (the patience thread)

CarlinsDarlin · Moderator Joined: Jul 02, 2004 Posts: 1401

Patience,
Since you're a metal worker, I can see that most of your make-do projects involve metal. Carlin, OTOH, worked for years in building furniture and custom cabinets, so most of our scrounging involves wood and wood-related stuff Smile

Interesting. I can always find a use for a decent sized piece of wood, as I am sure you can for a scrap piece of metal. Smile

Kathy

patience · Expert Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 1532

Yeah Kathy, I'm a metal head. We need specialists of every sort, right? Actually, I grew up around my grandfather who made furniture all his life, and have a real appreciation for that work, too! I just don't have room for it now on a big scale, but still love the smell of different woods. Truly, with the soaring cost of metal and plastics, I think wood is going to come back to it's rightful place as time goes by.

Love your posts on farm life, a subject near and dear to me. Just doing what I can on one acre. Scratching my head about how to get come chickens going here, sustainably, more or less. Just recycled some steel fence posts for that purpose. Now scrounging for wire fence, and coop materials.
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Local fix-it guy..

CarlinsDarlin · Moderator Joined: Jul 02, 2004 Posts: 1401

patience · Expert Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 1532

On the list for me to do is a solar water heater, to be built of a used electric water heater tank. All the exterior stuff will be stripped off and the tank painted black. It is to be placed horizontally in a plywood framework skinned with reflective aluminum sheets that form a parbolic reflector. The wood affair is insulated, then covered with a used glass patio door. A used wood door, covered with aluminum all over, is hinged to the box, and will either lie down to form additional reflector, of close over the glass for storm protection.

The Mother Earth News published this design a long time ago, and it still works great as a series batch heater. There is no heat exchanger, and nothing but water in the tank, so it must be drained if the weather is too cold. But, used in conjuction with a wood stove coil heater, you get hot water all year. An "H" valve setup switches it back and forth between the 2 sources, like a water softener is hooked up. Did it once before, and loved it.

Now, if I can get my wife to give up her lilac bush, I'll have a spot to put it! Maybe I can move the lilac. It's only 8 feet high....
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RedStateGreen

Someone fell in the dumpster??

Laughing

One other thing I do is get bricks off Craigslist and use them for edging my raised beds. As long as I don't raise them too high I don't have to use mortar or anything.

The last time I got some this couple that remodels homes charged me ten cents a brick. Way better than Home Depot! Very Happy

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Conservation is conservative

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. -- Charles Darwin

Laurasia · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jul 10, 2004 Posts: 533

I took an old umbrella, removed the cover and hang it, upside down by the handle, from my clothesline. I peg socks on it to dry - 3 or 4 per spoke. It works, and if it starts to rain I just yank the whole thing off the line and run inside with it!

Regards,

L.

wisconsin_cur · Moderator Joined: May 10, 2007 Posts: 3005

A question for the metal head Smile

:

If I decided to go to my local metal worker and ask him to build me something like this:

except a heavy one with thick steel so that i could hit a root or rock and not have it break (weight isn't too big of a factor since i am a 200 # male who would use it), would he/she be able to construct something like that at a reasonable expense? It would need to be able to receive a standard shovel handle, other than that I don't think I would be too picky.
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Nature is complete because it does not serve itself.

The sage places himself after and finds himself before,
Ignores his desire and finds himself content.

He is complete because he does not serve himself. -Lao Tze

patience · Expert Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 1532

WC, I have lots of questions. Is it to be a spading fork, or similiar? If so, the prying forces in it's use would require that the tines be hard, springy, material, not the soft, tough mild steel commonly stocked for welding and repairs. Hardening steel requires that you start with a material of greater carbon content than mild steel, and the process is beyond most repair shops, except for possibly small, single pieces, such as a pin or bolt, and still iffy. This hardness problem is the most knotty problem to consider.

If that be the case, then, how about just welding a couple spading forks together to get the greater width? That would solve the problem of creating a handle-socket, which isn't easy to make by shop methods. WHERE on the article the welding is done makes a difference, since welding will soften a heat-treated, hard part, and make it bendable.

My job is part investigator, part designer, and part mind-reader, which takes time, and shop's charge for time and material's. You save the most by having the job carefully planned to save time. Material cost is comparatively small. Tell me more about how you plan to use it, and we can come up with a way to make it work for a reasonable cost, most likely using some scrounged parts with suitable material properties.
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wisconsin_cur · Moderator Joined: May 10, 2007 Posts: 3005

I have heard the tool called a couple of things, most often a broadfork. I am wanting to use it to loosen the soil of the garden in preparation for planting. When in action it looks like this:

My primary concern is to make sure the metal itself will last longer, with proper care, than I or for that matter my children will. I have a hard time finding tools that meet my specification, only recently have I found a brand of garden tools that will last as long as I would like (Fiskers' shovels have thicker metal than I have seen in any tool except at auction).

Some give would be ok... only I've got a collection of broken tools that "had some give" but then broke with less than a year of heavy use, so I guess I have a bias.

Any advice you could give would be greatly appreciated.

patience · Expert Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 1532

WC, How about one of the old stable forks, the size of a scoop shovel with about 15 tines? If you want to dig with it, cut all the tines off to half length, to make them stiffer? If it is too hard to push into the ground, remove every other tine.

Hand tools are the most difficult of all to make, because of the need for great strength, combined with light weight, and in some design that fits the human body for use. That's why I'm working to adapt something here.
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wisconsin_cur · Moderator Joined: May 10, 2007 Posts: 3005

Do you mean something like this:

I'll pick one up and play with it the next time I run into one at an auction.

Thanks
Cur
_________________
Nature is complete because it does not serve itself.

The sage places himself after and finds himself before,
Ignores his desire and finds himself content.

He is complete because he does not serve himself. -Lao Tze

patience · Expert Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 1532

Okay, just saw your pictures. Back to the heat treat problem. If the tines are not heat treated for hardness, they will bend close to where they exit the cross bar. Unless you can scrounge the tine material, the cost of hardenable steel for them would be prohibitive, and welding it is tricky to avoid making them brittle at the weld, then, there is the added problem/cost of heat-treating itself (1 1/2 hours in a crefully controlled gas furnace). If the commercial ones are NOT hardened, they will bend instead of break when overloaded. If you make the tines of thicker diameter soft steel to get around this problem, it wiil be very hard to stab it in the ground.

The best process to make hand tools of any kind is forging, then hardening, which nowadays is only affordable by mass-production.

I tell my customers that if they can buy a good article for what they want, do so, because the mass-production processes have made them affordable, and shop methods cannot compete because of the greater time involved, and bulk material purchase savings. Done by processes available to a small shop, and hardened, that fork would cost several times what the commercial one does. That's why I have to be resourceful at adapting existing stuff to solve problems.
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wisconsin_cur · Moderator Joined: May 10, 2007 Posts: 3005

patience · Expert Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 1532

Yep, that's it. The tines at the original length aren't strong enought to stand the leverage of digging and prying. But cut to about 7 or 8 inches long, I think they stand a good chance of working. I suggested removing every other tine, because too many tines have too much friction to stab in the ground reasonably. Count carefully, a mark them before you cut! Impossible to put 'em back on, because of the hardnesss, etc.

I'd try a 4" grinder to cut the tines, and at an angle to avoid damaging the remainder where it would hurt. A short stub remaining of a cut tine would do no harm and is much better than nicking a needed one, which would weaken it badly.

Good luck!
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gonfishn

Patience,Do you think he could get away with using old hay rake tines passed through holes drilled in a piece of thick wall square tubing and then just weld the top of tine a little above flush with the tubing ? possibly wrap each tine with a damp rag as you weld it to dissipate heat .