Thursday, May 31, 2018

Still in Portland

I was shopping at Ikea and assembling a King bed frame and other stuff yesterday. My son just moved back with his family from overseas to Portland, Oregon so I'm up visiting and helping them get settled. If you buy stuff that needs assembling from Ikea I recommend also buying a Makita drill with battery packs with extra ends like star ends and phillips and other ends for the makita battery operated drill for assembly of what you buy from Ikea. Otherwise your wrist are going to get pretty tired twisting screwdrivers and such during assembly. I was given a Makita battery pack drill set in the 1990s by my father in law. I find it useful because you no longer have to use nails for anything you make. Instead what I will buy now if I'm assembling something that is wooden is screw nails of 8 penny or even 16 penny size that have Phillips screw heads. This way I can build something (like an organic planter) or even a:



Trebuchet - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trebuchet

A trebuchet (French trébuchet) is a type of catapult, a common type of siege engine which uses a swinging arm to throw a projectile. The traction trebuchet, also referred to as a mangonel at times, first appeared in Ancient China during the 4th century BC as a siege weapon ... The projectile is thrown when the beam is quickly rotated by applying force to ...

For my daughter's private school. Then when you are finished with whatever you built you just unscrew all the screw nails with your reversible drill and reuse the wood for something else when you are done. This way it is very efficient to re-use 2 by 4s for multiple uses and other things over the years. I even reuse the wood screws, metal screws or screw nails with phillips heads for re-use if the heads aren't stripped already from the drill.

For example, I disassembled a dog running wheel I built for my daughter's school project and re-used the material when the Heat Ducting people left a gaping hole in the floor of a closet to keep critters from finding a way under the house and up into where we live since we live in a forest where there are deer, mice wood rats, etc. And sometimes Mountain lions all over the place in the wilds around us near the ocean.

A year or two ago our neighbor down the street woke up to a mountain lion hunting deer from her front yard a few houses from us.

Note: The other advantage of not using nails is you don't have to tear everything apart to dissemble it. When you have to use a claw hammer or nail puller often your wood gets destroyed too. Also, it is very easy to get injured pulling nails as well because often the torque you need is either too little or too much and injuries then easily happen.

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