I've been spending some time this week, between Christmas and when I need to get back in the studio, doing projects.
Packing and shipping Christmas presents (and one continuing pottery order). Putting away the packing supplies and cleaning up the studio. Doing home repairs.
I don't know about you, but something I've noticed about every home repair job is, it's never just one repair. It's two.
At least.
Case in point: earlier this fall, I decided that, while raking the leaves on the lawn could wait, clearing them off the sidewalk could not. We had a heavy fall of wet oak leaves, and the footing was treacherous. So I got out my snow shovel (Of course I have a snow shovel. I'm from
Wisconsin.) and garden cart, and cleared the entire stretch from our mailbox, just north of the property line, to my southern neighbor's driveway. Filled up the cart completely, packed down, even. And when I tried to roll it back to the compost pile, one wheel went
wump-wump-wump. Not flat; bearings were shot.
My garden cart is a home-brew creature, bodged together from plywood, angle-iron (including some of my first at-home welding), lots of bolts, and a bunch of stuff salvaged from BRING Recycling, back in their old edge-of-swamp location off of Seavey Loop. Including two recycled bicycle wheels.
I know how to fix bike bearings; took a class at the Craft Center years ago. But to get at them, I'd have to take half the frame off the cart to get at the wheel, and besides, the v-shaped prop that held the other end up had collapsed and needed extra support, which involved drilling new holes in the sides, which happened to coincide with parts of the angle iron, which... It was an all-afternoon job, just getting it fixed enough to haul away a second load of leaves.
So I finally got to the bearings this Monday. Took things apart, and one side had eight bearings, the other side only five (One of which was a different size. Weird). It looked like the proper number, discarding the extra large one, was ten per side, so I supplemented the mostly full side from the other, and took a couple of cleaned-up bearing down to Nearby Bike Shop to see if they could redeem themselves from
my previous interaction. Sure enough, they dropped a bearing through a size gauge, filled up a bag with ten just like it, charged me a dollar. Success!
Until I got home, cleaned out the race, filled it with grease and bearings, and discovered that the retaining ring meant to hold them in place was bent all to snot, and didn't. Retain, that is. So I took the good one out of the other side and drove back to the bike shop.
Where they didn't have anything that size. And explained that cones and rings were idiosyncratically sized, and it would probably be easier to just replace the entire wheel. Maybe stop at Goodwill; they usually had old bikes on sale for twenty bucks.
Instead, I went home and, with mallet and narrow-jaw pliers, waled on the thing until it fit well enough to hold the bearings in while I threaded it back on the axle and tightened down the cone nut. Put it back together, tried it out today raking leaves off the lawn.
It worked fine.
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We don't actually use our front door, much. The screen door likes to jam, and, for Denise, the three steps down to ground level are a challenge, between her knees and the lack of a railing to hang on to. The studio door is a little further, through the kitchen and down a hall, but I've built a ramp there, for rolling in hand trucks full of clay. Besides which, it's closer to the driveway, car, van, pottery shed. I think the only reason I've opened the front door in the last few weeks was to accept packages, or to leave bags of pottery for contact-free pick-ups.