Any "I was doing it the hard way" stories?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You might have seen the Laural & Hardy film “The Music Box” where they were movers trying to haul a piano up a long flight of stairs to a house at the top of a hill. The kicker near the end was that there was a driveway up to the house on the other side of the hill that they didn’t know about.

Recently I purchased some empty plastic squeeze tubes and was faced with how to fill them with something more viscous than I had counted on. Seemingly the only way to do it would be with a syringe with a long needle, which I didn’t have. After much effort and a lot of mess, I finally discovered that the tubes unscrewed at the top so you don’t have to try to fill them through the narrow spout. {d’oh!}

Any comparable moments you’d like to relate?

2

Mine is actually pretty similar to “The Music Box” now that I think about it.

Back in 1999 I was working as a bagger at a grocery store. Besides bagging groceries one of our duties was to clean the bathrooms. This store had two sets of bathrooms: a pair of public restrooms at the back of the store, and employee bathrooms that were located at the top of a flight of stairs near the front of the store up where the manager’s office was. The first time I was assigned to clean the bathrooms I went and filled a bucket with soapy water, grabbed a mop and other cleaning supplies, and cleaned the public restrooms like I’d been trained. Then I wheeled the bucket to the front of the store, and hauled the heavy bucket up the stairs to do the employee bathrooms (No, there wasn’t an elevator).

After I was done my supervisor was like “Wait, did you carry that bucket up the stairs? Most people just leave the bucket at the bottom of the stairs, wet the mop, and take just the mop upstairs.” D’oh!

3

Back in the early 90’s, when I first moved to Seattle, I knew nothing of the geography, the street layout, what neighborhoods were what, just a total blank slate. I somewhat at random ended up with a great apartment in a perfect location, but right in one of those areas where two differently oriented street grids clash.

In my first week or two, I found a great cafe open late that I liked to stop in for dinner. Because of the confusing street layout, I had to take a roundabout path to get to this place. Several blocks of walking as I recall. Maybe my third week there, I got seated on the opposite side of the dining room from what I was used to. I thought that the back of the building across the street looked familiar. That was because it was my apartment building.

I had been walking a long way out of the way to go to a place across the street.

4

Probably too many to remember. There were also a lot of those for young troops just learning the trades. I watched one electrician apprentice carefully measuring some wire, then cutting it off and feeding it into a piece of conduit (10’ is the standard length). When he had pushed it all the way in, it still hadn’t appeared at the other end. Rinse and repeat. I finally pointed out to him that he might try feeding the wire through the pipe first, leaving enough on each end for his connections, and then cutting it. You can almost see the light bulb come on in those moments.

5

I’ve done a little bit of teaching – not “professionally” just part of my job – and I freaking love those moments.

6

Me too. I did teach basic interior wiring for awhile, but most of my work was in the field. One of my favorites was watching a new troop go up and down a ladder a half-dozen times to get another tool. At that point, I’d walk up, ask him if he was tired of going up and down that ladder, and hand him a tool pouch (which was issued with the tools). A real “duh” moment.

7

The very first physics test I ever took in college, when I sat down with the paper, my mind went blank. I couldn’t remember any formulas beyond F = ma. And so I frantically re-derived every one of them, on the spot, as I needed them. Finally, I turn to the last page of the test…

and it was a formula sheet

@carrps , I am a teacher, and I always tell folks that the “lightbulb moments” are the reason why I do it.

8

LOL. The only formula I remember from my Physics for Boneheads class (I was an English Lit major) was F-ma.

9

I once met a guy who thought that, to top up the oil in his car, he had to pull out the dipstick and then use a tiny funnel, like the kind used to fill up a hip flask, to fill the crankcase through the dipstick tube. Apparently he had been doing this for years, not knowing that his engine had an oil filler cap.

10

If you’re only going to remember one, that’s definitely the one to remember.

11

Moved into a new house, the kitchen sink had built-in soap dispenser. Soap ran out after a month or three. I cleared everything out from under the sink and wrestled with the soap dispenser bottle for almost thirty minutes to get it out. After that, I was in no hurry to re-install it, it was a real pain in the a**. A couple of months later finally re-installed it after almost an hour of contorting myself under the sink and fighting with this plastic container. But I did it!

Another couple of months later, surfing the Youtubes, I see a video, “fill your soap dispenser with no mess”. Turns out the pump assembly on top of the sink is free moving, not attached to the sink or counter. You just pull it out, stick a funnel in there and pour away. GRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr!

12

Well, I had to rebuild a broken leaf spring (luckily, the top spring was intact. All the others snapped in half) on the Jeep instead of just swapping out for the new one. The bolt at the forward end snapped trying to get it loose. I could have removed it, but if I did, there was no way to repair it further. The broken part was behind the bracket and inaccessible, without major cut/weld/bullshit.

So, disassemble the spring, reassemble on the Jeep, get the lift components re-installed, bolt it all back up. Used the leaf keepers where I could, make some new ones with really heavy hose clamps where I couldn’t.

Was a pain, but it came out remarkable well. That broken bolt don’t worry me none! But if that one original leaf fails, this Jeep is pretty much done.

13

I’ve learned that any time I’m doing something that seems tedious or hard, I should stop and check youtube. For instance, that’s how I learned that a (clean) garlic press is the perfect tool for juicing key limes.

14

Last month I was replacing the rear control arms on our 2002 Jeep Liberty.

When I tried to remove one of the bolts, I couldn’t. Because the muffler was in the way. I then spent a few hours trying to remove the entire exhaust system (it was all rusted together). I couldn’t do it because the cross-member was in the way. I then tried to remove the cross-member, and every bolt sheared, causing the transmission to flop down. It then dawned on me: “Just cut the head off the bolt with a reciprocating saw, and remove it in the other direction. Then use a new bolt.” Took me five minutes to do it. (I then spent two days drilling new holes for the cross member, reinstalling the exhaust, etc.)

15

This one changed the relationship between me and my older brother. Until that event, he had always considered me a pest and and idiot and a weakling and…

But one afternoon he was in the garage messing around underneath the old Mercury Capri he had bought. We had all done our early driving in Mom’s car, but the Capri was the first car he had owned and it became his obsession to make it sporty and cool – which was good because it took his time and energy away from picking on me.

My brother had the front of his car propped up on stands kept working with a couple of spring-compressors that he was using underneath the front wheels. He would crank the nuts on the bolts and the hooks would come together and compress the coils on the springs and then he would roll under the car on his back and try to attach something under there and then cuss and swear and roll back out and stand up and stamp his feet and repeat the process. I asked what he was trying to do and he said he was trying to mount a stiffer torsion bar. I had no idea what he was talking about.

But, for some reason, his antics made me think of a scene in a TV show that I had watched less than a week earlier. Two detectives were talking about a tale of a yacht getting stuck while trying to go under a bridge that crossed a canal. City engineers were brought in to take measurements and make recommendations about how best to cut the underside of the cement bridge so it wouldn’t weaken the structure so much that it couldn’t be repaired to a usable condition afterward. A kid in the crowd of spectators laughed and said, “Don’t raise the bridge, lower the water!” And then other engineers were brought in to figure out how to slightly divert the canal stream around the boat so it wouldn’t float so high and the top of the yacht broke free of the underside of the bridge. After they pulled the yacht away, the water diverters were removed and the canal flowed normally, no bridge modifications were required.

So I asked my brother, “How much does your car weigh?”

I could hear his exasperated sigh – the same one he would use when he was frustrated by my inability to think the way he did or play sports at his level (He’s five years older than me and, until the 20’s a five-year gap can mean a lot of difference in brain and body development) – but he guesstimated, “About 2500 pounds, a little over a ton. Why?”

“Well,” I answered timidly (because that exhasperated sigh typically meant trouble was coming for me soon, “it just seems like you’re fighting those springs to pull the wheels up and you could be asking gravity to help you pull the car down.”

My brother was silent for a while and that was creepy. Normally he would have chewed me out for saying something stupid and I knew as I said it that I had foolishly given ‘gravity’ a persona so I was expecting at least that much of a corrective lecture. But then he rolled out from under the car and started running around the vehicle and looking at things as if he had lost a thousand dollar bill.

Eventually, he jacked the car up, pulled the stands out of the way, lowered the car and rolled it out of the garage, then he put some steel ramps in front of the wheels and rolled the car up to their stopping position. Then he rolled himself back under the car again. After a few more fumbly attempts, he asked me to push on the front of the car.

[That was an odd moment, as I thought, "If I push a little sideways, this 2500-pound mass of metal will…]

So I pushed and nothing seemed to happen, but my brother said, “Well, that’s closer than it’s been before. Try again, harder.”

After a few attempts I ended up balancing on the hood of the car and “reverse-jumping” by standing tall and suddenly squatting so that my 130-pound weight had just a little more than gravity shoving me downward on the 2500-pound car.

And suddenly the end of that funny bar popped into the hole it needed to fit in. I heard the pop and my brother shouted and I originally thought one of those coil-springs had broken and injured him – except he was shouting happily about finally getting the part to fit.

Then he told me to climb down and I stood around while he bolted everything firmly in place. After that, he cleaned up and, for the first time ever, let me ride in his car. Since I had never ridden in his car before, I didn’t know if the stiffer torsion bar made things better or worse. Nevertheless, he seemed pleased with the results and after that he seemed to respect my knack for NOT thinking the way he did.

–G!

16

Heh. I did it your (hard) way once myself. But just once. I don’t remember how I learned the easy way, I think I stumbled upon it one day. But yeah, I always check YouTube first these days.

I might have posted this before, but my “I’m a dumbass” story was when I was replacing an exhaust manifold on my Ford Ranger. It was a V6, and of course it was the right side manifold that was harder to reach the bolts. Luckily disassembly wasn’t as bad as I anticipated. I was able to remove the manifold bolts and even the three bolts that attach the exhaust pipe to the manifold were not a huge problem to get loose. So I installed the new manifold, tightened the bolts to the head, and then went under the truck to attach the exhaust pipe to the manifold. And the three bolts just would not align. They were close. So close. But despite yanking, prying, just about everything I could think of, it would not work. It was hot, I was sweating, and bits of dirt and rust were falling in my face and eyes. I was cursing quite loudly. There must have been a cloud of blue words rising from my driveway and drifting over the neighborhood. This went on for about an hour.

If only, I thought, if only I could get the end of the manifold to shift a few millimeters, then the bolt holes would align and I could get the bolts in.

Finally a light went on in my head. I got out from under the truck, went back to the engine bay, and loosened the bolts holding the manifold to the head a few turns. Voila, that provided the play I needed to get the three exhaust pipe bolts in. Once those were in, it was a simple matter to tighten the bolts I had loosened. I simultaneously felt mad at myself for being so stupid and pleased with myself for figuring it out.

17

Yep. Never tighten anything up till you got everything started.

18

Sure, now you tell me.

19

I can’t take credit. Learned that from my old man.

Exhaust fixtures are the worst, in my opinion. They heat-cycle and who the hell knows how they want to be when cool. I fought with a BMW header for too long before waiting till the heat of day to try again. BOOM! Lined up perfect. I sweated a bit, but I can shower.

20

My old man taught me a lot of things, but when I became a snotty teen who thought I knew everything, he must have deliberately left out a few lessons so I could learn things the hard way.