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CJDave
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To FIX, or not to FIX.
07/18/08 10:47 AM
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 I am by nature a "fixer". I'll drill out the holes and tap them to a larger size and find screws that fit and that will hold the case together instead of tossing a drill in the trash. And even THEN when I do toss a drill I salvage the final drive arbor and the chuck to use as an extension. So that's kind of my approach to stuff; tossing it is a last resort. HOWEVER, there are limits to everything, and sooner or later I have to be "hard" or I would need a much bigger place to park all this stuff. It is getting so hard to find "good" stuff; stuff that isn't made in China to the lowest standards of quality; that auction sales and even antique stores have become my prime sources for good tools. There ARE some things that you can rebuild endlessly, so unless getting a new clothes dryer is key to enhancing your r'lationship, don't buy a new one. The washer, on the other hand is way more pesky to fix, and unless it's something simple, you're probably going to have to get it repaired by others, or replace it.  MOST power tools have either bad brushes, or a bearing has gone dry. Both of those problems can be fixed fairly easily as long as the tool wasn't otherwise damaged. I find that when I bring a drill or a saw home from an auction sale, that it is best to take it apart, clean it up, and repack the bearings. I also make any repairs to the cord or outright replace it before the cord can give trouble. Usually people wind the cord too tightly around the tool and wreck the strain relief section. Older table saws with cast iron tables are usually worth fixing, HOWEVER, on some models the motors are special-to-that-tool and replacements are hard to come by. Just about any air compressor is worth fixing as long as the tank isn't rusted to where it will "pinhole" soon. You can buy a two-cylinder compressor, with flywheel, for anywhere from a hundred to three hundred depending on how big it is, and how many stages it has.  I know it's a greasy mess, but nothing can restore the power of a conventional in-line or Vee configuration car or truck engine like replacing the timing chain and sprockets. That is one "fix" that will convince you to keep the vehicle for another hundred thousand miles. If you have a water pump seal go out, and you have to "go in" anyway, consider replacing the timing chain. Home air conditioners will run for ages and ages if you get out there and wash out the coils real good and clean up the interior of the condensing unit so it can handle the air better. A condenser fan motor is less than a hundred bucks, and you can pay for a set of refrigeration service gauges and the freon pretty easily by adding gas yourself when you give the unit it's the annual pre-season physical exam. Some kitchen stuff is worth working on and some isn't. I have a Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster that I just used this morning. This toaster was bought new by my parents in 1956, and I have overhauled it twice. I overhauled my Bunn coffee pot twice before it was too beat to go any farther. Mainly I had to remove deposits and touch up the electrical. Vacuum cleaners are easy to get parts for so if the unit is a good one, it's worth fixing. Also, when you see one sitting by the curb for the junk man; stop and cut the cord off of it. THEN go get a nice caged trouble light and put the newly-acquired vacuum cleaner cord on THAT.
CJDave
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JazzDad
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: CJDave]
07/21/08 08:55 AM
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Yesh, that's some of what I'm talking about! (See the thread I tried to hijack.)
I used to pick up lawn mowers people would put out for the trash collection. Once, I got one that didn't have a full season on it. Looking that new, I knew exactly where to go first. I pulled the flywheel off, and sure enough, it was a sheared key. A 50 cent part, reassembled, and it started up on the first pull. And even if you got one that was really abused, you usually get parts for your stockpile.
I collected lots of bicycle parts over the years, and cobbled together quite a few usable bikes. They weren't too bad looking after they were repainted.
All kids are gifted; some just open their packages earlier than others.-Michael Carr
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eccentricfarmer
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: JazzDad]
07/21/08 01:24 PM
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Brand new Craftsman 16" chain saw at auction. No start, got it for $10. Broken wire in side casing. Have used it ever since. There are always some people out there that would rather not waste their time fixing stuff and just raplace it with new when it breaks down....and then there is the rest of us!!
No fun, change the rules!!!
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: JazzDad]
07/21/08 01:31 PM
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With three bike-age kids and not much money, the 80's were all about bike mix-n-match. We made lots and lots of good bikes out of free ones. I welded up various kinds of frames, we respoked wheels to put three speed center sections into 20" bikes, swapped crankshafts to get longer pedal stroke; you name it.  One of my sons is a meter reader for a metropolitan water district and walks 120-miles each month. You would not BELIEVE the dozens and dozens of sockets he finds, along with other tools. Many of them are oriental junk, but some are good ones like New Britain and SK. He also keeps an eye out for cast-off mowers and appliances that are fixable. he has really scored on some of the stuff; just like that mower that had a broken key and the chainsaw with a broken wire. I got a free Kitchen Aid dishwasher that had a broken wire in it. 
CJDave
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egon
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: JazzDad]
07/21/08 03:08 PM
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There are differences between bikes and bicycles! 
Huge differences!
Egon
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: egon]
07/21/08 03:57 PM
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 They is? Er.... ah, ... I thought the word: "bike" was just shorthand for "bicycle" a term denoting a two-wheeled, operator-propelled, land vehicle? The dictionary just says "bike" is "bicycle" no other explanation is given.
CJDave
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egon
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: CJDave]
07/21/08 05:55 PM
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Oh it may be a two wheeled pedal powered land vehicle but it takes on many different forms.
The Tour De France is on at present and I'd be willing to say that the riders have at least three or four different bicycles to ride depending on what the conditions of the days stage are. These simple little machines may cost as much as a car. and be usefully for riding in only one type of situation.
It's just like saying a car is a four wheeled apparatus for transporting people.
Look forward to seeing more of them on the road as fuel prices increase! 
Egon
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: egon]
07/22/08 06:21 AM
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OH, yeah, I getcha. Way back in the Plehistocene Epoch when I attended college we all rode bikes because the campus was so spread out. I met a guy who was on kind of a high-end ride and he mentioned that it cost 600 bucks; ....this was in the early sixties, mind you. I was astonished at the price, and then he said: "Here, pick up the bike." I lifted his bike and there was like NO WEIGHT. "That's why it cost 600 bucks." he said." The frame members of that bike were actually thin in the midle and thicker at the joints. Tubular material that was drawn in such a way to achieve that weight-saving configuration..... YOW!
CJDave
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egon
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: CJDave]
07/22/08 07:10 AM
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The more you pay the less you get!
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Bird
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: egon]
07/22/08 09:12 AM
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In reply to:
The more you pay the less you get!
Maybe that's the reason my bike was so heavy.  I only had one bicycle when I was a kid; got it for Christmas when I was 8 years old I think. I rode it until I got a drivers license, then my younger brothers, 5 and 6 years younger than I, rode it until they got drivers licenses. I didn't know until I was grown that my Dad got that bike, used, from his boss, cleaned it up and painted it, and I thought I had a new bike. But it had no name on it, had the upper bars (or whatever you call them on a boy's bike) side by side instead of one over the other (made it more comfortable for a second person to ride between the seat and handle bars). Even by 1940s standards, it was much heavier than the bikes all my friends had. And we discovered that the chain was longer than any bicycle chains made at the time; had to have 2 master links to splice an extra few inches.
But the upside to that weight was an almost indestructible bicycle. One crash destroyed the front wheel and another crash destroyed the handle bars, but I think the frame, sprockets, etc. stayed original.
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egon
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/22/08 10:09 AM
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Was it a balloon tire bicycle Bird?
Egon
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Bird
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: egon]
07/22/08 10:42 AM
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In reply to:
Was it a balloon tire bicycle Bird?
Of course. In the days when I used a bicycle I had never even heard of one having gears or hand brakes, so I didn't know anyone who had such. And those little skinny tires a lot of them use now wouldn't be worth a hoot in sand, mud, or even grass. And in the summer of 1956, in Marietta, OK, the mechanic who owned the shop in the back of my dad's service station had one of the antique high wheeled bicycles. I was 16 at the time and had just gotten my drivers license and first car (1946 Chevy), but riding that high wheeled bike was a blast. I never really got the hang of getting on it properly, but I could get on the soda box and hop on it.
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/22/08 01:36 PM
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Here is my best "bike story": In the summer of 1983, while on vacation in the Pacific Northwest, we visited with some folks who lived on an island in Puget Sound. While I was enjoying a cuppa coffee on the deck of their home, one of my kids ran up and blurted out: "Look, Dad; they're throwing some bikes away. Can we get them?" Sure enough, the next door neighbor had just brought out three bicycles and set them out for trash pickup. The bikes were good quality stuff but had flat tires and had been left outdoors a time or two in the moist Seattle weather; chains were rusty, but not much else was ruined. Sooo... we asked the guy and he gave us the bikes which were eventually made like new and so forth, but that isn't the real story. I asked our host what his neighbor did for a living since he drove a Jag and a Mercedes Benz, could afford to toss perfectly good bikes, and never seemed to leave home. "Oh." he said, ""He is a MOLD DESIGNER." "Hmmm....?" I asked, "Can he stay busy doing that?" Well." said our host, "He has income from molds that he designed years ago; sort of a royalties type of thing. A company called him some years back and said that they had a product that was sure to be a big seller, but they had NO IDEA how to mold it. He told them to send a drawing and he would see what he could do. So a few weeks later he called the company and told them the mold was ready and they said that was great; how much was it? He said that the mold was free, just give him seven cents for every part that they made. The company was fine with that so the deal was inked and the mold went to work. That company was the WHAMO Corporation, and the mold was for the FRISBEE. Thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands of frisbees. And that was just ONE mold; he had many more out there cranking out money for him.
CJDave
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egon
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/22/08 03:08 PM
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Was it by any chance an American Flyer?
Weighted about 40 pounds. Had a gas tank like looking top bar.
Egon
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Bird
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: egon]
07/22/08 05:33 PM
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Egon, it's hard for me to describe without a picture and I don't have any pictures of it. But you know how boy's bikes have either one bar or two bars or pipes running from just below the handle bars back to just under the seat. If they have 2 bars, one is above the over. However, on my bike, the 2 bars were welded to the frame, just below the handle bars, at the same height. They angled outward for a couple of inches, then turned (actually cut and welded), so they ran back to just under the seat, but the bars were side by side, gradually getting closer together as they neared the seat, then started spreading apart as they went down on either side of the rear wheel. I have never seen another bicycle, or even a picture of one, like it. I don't know what it weighed, but no one I knew back then had one that was as heavy as it was. For all I know, it may have been homemade, but I doubt it. My dad was working for a multi-millionaire auto parts store (several stores) owner who was not too popular with most of his emplyees, but for some reason he took a liking to my Dad and to me. He had a couple of boys older than me and he was always giving dad something for me that he'd say his boys had outgrown or didn't want anymore.
Part of it may have been because he knew about my polio and frequent visits to the Crippled Children's Hospital in Oklahoma City, and part of it may have been because dad was one of the few people who were simply not scared of him. Someone he could talk to and whom he knew would actually tell him what he was thinking.
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/22/08 09:33 PM
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Bird, I remember those frames. Schwinn called their version a "cantilevered frame" but I never actually knew why they called it that, since nothing was overhung as the term implies. They were first made in the early fifties I think. I had a heavyweight Schwinn that had the conventional frame, a springer front end, and a "fuel tank" bolted inbetween the upper and lower frame tubes.
CJDave
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Bird
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: CJDave]
07/23/08 03:05 AM
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Dave, you could certainly be right, since I have no idea who made it. But as for first being made in the early '50s . . . well, like I said, it was used, have no idea how old it was when I got it, but I got it for Christmas of 1947 or 1948. I suppose the oddest thing, to me, is just the fact that I've neve seen another one, or even a picture of another one, like it.
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/23/08 10:28 AM
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The Schwinn models came out in the early fifties, but yours could have been a different make, like a Columbia for example. Hmmm... you could ride a full-size bike in '48? Let's see..... that was about a year or two before I attempted any such thing. I started skool in '49. My first grade teacher had two sons who were part of the occuption forces in Japan, and my best friend in the second grade in 1950 was a kid named Ronnie Yamamura who had, of course been born behind the fences of Manzanar internment camp. Little kids are so racially blind that I didn't realize that Ronnie was "the enemy" until some older kid told me a year or two later.
CJDave
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Bird
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: CJDave]
07/29/08 06:13 PM
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Dave, I didn't know you were such an old fellow. Apparently you're only about 3 years younger than me. I started in the first grade (no such thing as kindergarten in those days) in 1946. My first grade teacher at Plainview School (all 12 grades in one building) was Mrs. Croom. It's an odd thing that she, who taught first grade in Plainview at Ardmore, OK, and Mrs. Skaggs, who taught junior and senior English in Plano, Texas, are the only two teachers whose names I can remember.
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/29/08 10:08 PM
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I can remember all of the teacher's names up until we began switching rooms and even then I can remember most of them. High Skool is about the same, some stand out more than others. We had 287 kids in my H.S. senior class and I made it a point to know every one of them by name before we graduated. It took a little cramming in the final weeks of school, but I actually made it; I knew every graduate's name. I've done some substitute teaching and when you have five or six periods of twenty-something kids per period it is a real struggle to put the names with the faces. I find that if I hand out the corrected papers myself it helps me learn the names, The most consecutive days I have taught in one spot was about ten; two complete school weeks. After that amount of time I was getting to know who was who pretty well. Yeah, I'm kind of an "older" dog; I hesitate to say "old" dog.
CJDave
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Bird
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: CJDave]
07/30/08 06:38 AM
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Yep, Dave, I knew everyone in my graduating class, too. And it's easy to remember how many of us there were since 58 of us graduated in '58.
And times do change, don't they? I have a photo of my dad and his graduating class; total of 4 boys, no girls.
And our daughters didn't even know all their classmates because there was something over 700 in the older daughter's graduating class and over 1,100 in the younger daughter's graduating class. 
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CJDave
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Re: To FIX, or not to FIX.
[re: Bird]
07/30/08 07:55 AM
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I entered high school in the Fall of 1957, fully intending to spend the next four years leaning against a car in the parking lot discuusing the relative merits of having THREE Stromberg 97 carbs as opposed to two four-barrels. In October those inconsiderate Ruskies launched the Sputnik, caling into question just WHO was first in the world; and spoiling the plans I had for how to spend my time in high school. All of a sudden, Stromberg 97 carbs were OUT, chemistry and physics were IN. It became important to be SMART, and the teacher wrote notes in the margins of our papers like: "You can do better than this and your country needs it!" YIKES! All of a sudden it was all up to us to beat the Russians to the moon! The Class of '58 was an exceptionally good crop. You know how it sometimes seems to work that way? The class right behind them the '59 bunch was a bunch of useless drunks; (they almost got the foreign exchange student kicked out of school for boozing).:p
CJDave
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