Sometimes you need a deadline to get motivated.
I want this done no later than close-of-business (COB) tomorrow.
No particular reason for COB, it’s just helpful to have a deadline. Continue reading Post 1857: Building an indirect solar food dryer. Part 1.
Stories in real life rarely have a fairy-tale ending. This one is an exception. Continue reading Post #1856: Can this furniture be saved? Happy ending.
My recent foray into furniture repair has turned into a lesson on why you should do you own Swedish death cleaning as you age.
To recap, this is what is left of a pair of chairs that got tossed to the curb, across the street from me, here in the middle-class suburbs of DC. They were in great shape when I picked them off the curb, but years of use by my kids took their toll on the half-century-old fabric and foam.
These were discarded, in excellent condition, alongside heaps of other household goods, by the children of an elderly, recently-widowed woman. Her kids were clearing out her house, as they prepared to move their mother down to Texas to be near them.
At that time, I couldn’t find any images of these on the internet. I assumed they were 1970s Sears knockoffs of a mid-century-modern design. Or similar. Middle-class couple, middle-class house. Surely these were nothing special.
Yesterday I started putting these back together, as shown in the just-prior post. At that time, I didn’t even know what to call them. But they’re pretty nice, and it would be a shame to see them end up in the dumpster. So why not.
On a whim — now two decades after my first attempt to ID them — I did another Google search.
I have now gotten a certification, from the son of the designer, that this is (or was) what’s left of a pair of Adrian Pearsall Craft Associates chairs.
Adrian Pearsall is now something of a legend in U.S. mid-century-modern furniture design. Properly restored, this pair of chairs would be worth thousands of dollars.
Worse, improperly restoring them is something of a sacrilege. Not for the money lost, but for taking a valued piece of Americana and destroying it.
This is suddenly a different and more complex task. All my woodworking plans go out the window. And now I have to figure out how to proceed, now that I know what they are. I don’t collect antique furniture, so it’s not clear these have any business staying with me.
I guess the real take-away is that these never should have ended up in the trash. But they did so, because the prior owner left it up to her kids. I only discovered the chairs’ secret identity because they became part of my own Swedish death cleaning. I still have no idea what to do with them, but at least I’m making the decision, with an understanding of what they are.
Today I started restoring the two chairs pictured above. I glued up one frame, and started a Tom-Johnson-style repair (below) of the other.
The sad circumstances under which I acquired these are given in Post #1697.
I’ll be writing up the progress, a bit at a time. The idea is both to make notes, and to present an un-edited version of how this restoration actually played out. Cuts and all.
Edit: I may have goofed, big-time. I picked these off the curb years ago, as described in Post #1697. Last time I looked into it, I could not figure out who made them. I assumed they were run-of-the-mill furniture, likely Sears Best or similar. But now, the internet shows me that these are identical to Adrian Pearsall Craft Associates 932-C Sling Lounge Chairs. Like these, on Ebay. If so, these are (or were) valuable antiques. Unless I can show that these are knockoffs, there will be no followup to this post on repairs.
Today I sliced the side of my thumb with a wood chisel.
‘Tsall good.
I’m now more mindful of where the sharp edge of the chisel may go if it slips. And I take pains to hold the work and tool accordingly.
Let’s do Q and A about this incident.
Q: Was I being a dumbass? A: Yes
Q: Did it hurt like hell? A: Yes, eventually.
Q: Deep cut? Did I bleed on stuff? A: Yes and yes.
Q: Gonna try not to do that again? A: You got it.
There are two walnut frames, and two cloth-covered rigid foam seats, that must be restored.
One of the walnut frames is now glued back together. That frame needs to have a corner block made and glued into place. At that point, it will be complete except for cleaning, and having a finished seat installed.
This part was mostly boring and/or complicated by my lack of tools. In particular, the nylon-rope-as-clamp was a bit of a clown show. It took a couple of tries, but I think I got it adequately tight.
Above, left, is the wooden internal support for the rigid-foam seat. When done, that will fit within the frame, with most of the occupant’s weight resting on two curved cleats screwed to the frame, as shown below. Just four non-weight-bearing wood screws (two in the top bar, two in the bottom bar) hold the seat to the frame.
I don’t even know what to call this thing. TV chair? Lounger? Even though it’s seems 1970s vintage (owing to the burnt orange fabric), the frame just says mid-century modern to me. Whatever it is.
On the other frame, I have started a repair patterned after those of Tom Johnson, of Gorham, Maine. He’s a fine furniture restorer on YouTube. In a situation like the one I’m facing, where the end of one leg is broken, he typically cuts the wood back to what’s sound.
Then he glues in an oversized block of matching wood. Then he carves it to shape by hand. That last part makes this fairly risky, for an amateur. But after looking at my options, this seemed at least potentially feasible for me.
I think I can get that into shape. For a no-talent like me, some combination of rasps and sandpaper (and lots of time) should allow me to get close. We’ll see tomorrow.
For the walnut piece that I glued in, I went to my local thrift shop and bought an ugly little piece of walnut bric-a-brac, from which I cut the block of walnut I used. It was cheaper than buying a walnut board, and I could see how the wood would look when finished.
At this point, the only difficult task was drilling out the broken dowels. FWIW, I drill a little pilot hole, hoping that it’s centered and square. The drill a hole just smaller than the diameter of the dowel, hoping the drill bit stays entirely within the dowel, and doesn’t drill out into the walnut. Then I scrape out any remaining wood that I can reach. Then I clean out the hole using a drill bit that’s the full diameter of the dowel.
The whole game plan is to avoid wallowing out the hole, while cleaning out all the wood and glue in the hole. I came close. Mostly.
Dealing with loose but intact joints. I’ll probably spend time in Purgatory for doing this, but I did not knock all the loose joints apart and re-glue them. Two joints in the side frames were loose, but I feared taking the sides of the chairs apart entirely. So instead of knocking the sides apart, I used clamps to spread those joints, exposing the loose (un-glued) dowels. I liberally applied glue to those dowels before clamping the joints back together.
Arguably, the other sin I committed was gluing the dowled joints using Titebond (yellow aliphatic) glue. I think the experts say to use hide glue on the joints, so that the furniture can be knocked apart as needed at a later date. But having saved these from the trash once, I think that if I can get them back together at all, even once, that’s good enough. So regular Titebond it is. Plus, I already own it and know how to use it.
Next post will outline the overall plan.
Bottom line: Per mile, risk of death on a bicycle is about thirteen times higher than risk of death in a car/SUV/van. Calculation shown below.
I read a story in the Washington Post today, about a woman who was killed while bicycling, in the bike lane, alongside River Road in Bethesda. Crushed by a careless commercial truck driver making a right turn. Leaving behind a husband and two young kids.
The truck driver was given the maximum sentence allowed by law, which in this case was a $2000 fine. And a brief moment of shame in court. He’s still on the road, driving a truck.
I looked up the accident scene on Google, and it was the worst kind of grudging, cheap, zero-effort retrofit urban bike lane that the very least of your tax dollars can produce. Based on historical images, they took a narrow, disused shoulder of a 35-MPH urban arterial highway, and painted little arrows and bike icons in it.
Well, there’s your bike lane, right there. Problem solved. The result of that zero-effort accommodation of bicyclists is every bit as safe as you might reasonably expect.
Above, the middle red circle is the site of death. It’s just one of many driveways opening into the busy commercial establishments that line the road. It’s located just 500 feet from the Capital Crescent Trail, a dedicated bike path whose road-crossing bridge can be seen circled in the background. Which is almost certainly why they bothered to re-paint the road shoulder.
In the foreground is a sign. Based on Google street view, that sign was only placed there a few months ago. If you don’t routinely bike in an urban area, you’d think that sign was there to remind motorists to use caution, and look before they turn. But for that purpose, in this context, a sign like that is useless. Motorists don’t even perceive signs like that, in the crowded visual field of an urban motorway, at 35 MPH and up. The actual, practical purpose of the sign is to warn bicyclists and pedestrians that they are in the middle of a war zone, and that they should act accordingly if and as possible.
But in this situation, there’s not much a bicyclist can do. The bike lane appears to be just under 3′ wide. The curb is about a foot to your right, so there’s no escape in that direction. Your life depends on the caution and good sense of the drivers passing a couple of feet to your left.
A slender reed, for sure.
Yes it is.
And, for some reason, this appears to be an answer that absolutely infuriates bicycle advocates. Not because they don’t want to make roadways safer for bikes. But simply because they don’t want to believe that there are significant downsides to bicycle transport in America. This, even if everybody grasps what a drag it is to (e.g.) bike in bad weather.
(And, to be clear, I’m a lifetime bicycling enthusiast. But I’m also a realist.)
Years ago, I did the homework to answer this question, to my own satisfaction. I came up with an estimate that bicycling is about ten times as dangerous as driving, per mile traveled. That’s in terms of risk of death. It’s even higher in terms of risk of injury requiring medical attention. Those specific calculations are lost in the mists of time. So I thought I might update and document that here.
Any estimate of bicycling safety ends up combining data from two separate sources. That’s always a risk for accuracy, but it is what it is.
Information on traffic-related deaths comes from a motor vehicle crash reporting system maintained by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. Whatever its limitations, that’s the U.S. gold standard for counting traffic-related fatalities in the U.S.
(Secondarily, if you have an interest, you can use nationally-available hospital statistics from the U.S. Public Health Service’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project to find the number of hospitalizations and outpatient visits related to bicycle accidents. But non-fatal injuries actually show an even grimmer picture for bicycling versus driving, so it’s probably sufficient to settle on an estimate of risk-of-death while bicycling versus driving, per mile.)
So, bicyclists accounted for about 2.4% of all U.S. traffic deaths in 2020. That figure is roughly constant over time.
Information on bicycle-miles traveled comes from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). This is based on a log-diary survey of thousands of U.S. households, capturing how and why they traveled over the course of a week. Near as I can tell, it’s the only nationally-representative information on actual use of bicycles versus other modes of transportation.
Source: 2017 National Household Travel Survey
Based on that large, nationally-representative log-diary survey, bicycle transport accounted for 0.2% of all U.S. household transportation, or about 8.5 billion bicycle-miles per year in 2017. (Sounds like a lot until you realize there are about 330 million U.S. residents, so that works out to about 25 bike-miles per person per year.)
We have to re-calculate the percentages above, to restrict this to cars versus bikes. After that, it’s just simple math.
Yes, bicycle transportation really is as dangerous as it looks, as you drive along the road.
Using two gold-standard U.S. databases, bicycling appears vastly riskier than driving a car. In this most recent calculation, I estimate about 13 times higher risk of death, per mile, on a bike, versus in a car. That’s reasonably consistent with the estimate I got years ago.
And, as I recall, if you expand to non-fatal injuries requiring medical attention, the relative risk is actually much higher. More like 50 or 60 times the risk, per mile. That’s for the obvious reason that a collision that produces only minor bumps and scrapes to car occupants can produce severe wounds to an unprotected bicyclist.
Four things are worth noting.
First, the absolute risk is low. If you bicycle 1000 miles a year — which is a lot — your risk of death-via-bike is about 0.01% per year.
Second, for older adults, the exercise benefit vastly outweighs the crash risk. This is another one that I did the homework years ago, then lost the analysis somewhere. For the average 65-year-old man, all-causes risk of death is about 2% per year. Best available research suggests that frequent vigorous exercise roughly cuts that in half. The health benefits of frequent bicycling likely outweigh the risk-of-traffic-death by an order of magnitude or two.
Third, on paper at least, walking around traffic is more hazardous than bicycling. I’m not sure to the extent this is driven solely by work-related pedestrian accidents in big cities. But whatever the cause, this too seems plausible. In effect, we let amateurs drive 3-ton pieces of machinery, at high speed, around crowds, with virtually no enforcement of rules or penalties for engaging in risky behavior. It’s a wonder that so few pedestrian deaths result.
Finally, if you do a deep dive in the FARS database, you’ll find that dead pedestrians and dead bicyclists have something in common with dead drivers. An astounding fraction of them are dead drunk at the time. Roughly half, in each case. The moral of the story is that BUI and WUI are maybe not as deadly to others as DUI, but they clearly up your risk of death on the roadways.
But in this case, that’s irrelevant. It was broad daylight, and the victim was returning from a school function for her kids. The death was just the result of a toxic combination of thoughtless, zero-effort bike lane design, and bad luck. Ten seconds sooner, or ten seconds later, and she’d have been fine. It’s just an unavoidable risk of bicycling in most urban areas of the U.S.
No less an authority than the USDA is now on the bandwagon for #leavetheleaves. That is, the idea that gathering and disposing of fallen autumn leaves is foolish from an environmental standpoint.
The conspiracy-minded among you may view this as just another facet of the Deep State, an evil cabal within the U.S. Civil Service determined to disrupt every facet of the American Way. Yes, stooping so low as to attack that most harmless of small-town fall rituals …
… requesting that citizens rake/blow leaves to the curb, so the Town can repeatedly drive its high-decibel fleet of dedicated leaf-vacuuming equipment through town, and so spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to suck up those leaves, then trucking hundreds of tons of leaves down the interstate so that they can be sterilized via hot composting at some remote location, ensuring that no offspring of this year’s crop of butterflies and similar insects survive.
Well, at least, that’s the tradition in my small town. It’s an industrial-scale process that’s a far cry from Normal Rockwell, if you get my drift.
Source: Pinterest.
The USDA is just the most recent in a long line of organizations that have gotten behind the idea that leaf collection and disposal of this type is a relic of the past. Historically, in this area, it’s the immediate successor to the era in which suburbanites routinely raked up and burned fall leaves. Before that was banned owing to the resulting air pollution.
Locally, even the surrounding county (Fairfax County, VA) has proposed to stop doing vacuum leaf collection (see Post #1821). In part, because that turned out to be a real hassle for county staff this past year. But also for all the good reasons outlined on the USDA web page.
But in Vienna, VA, traditions die hard, unless there’s some profit to be made in killing them. And new learning percolates excruciatingly slowly. Town-wide, this is mostly about doing our bit to slow the insect apocalypse (reference National Academies of Science). Not sure that matters to most residents, even though it should, from a survival-of-our-species standpoint. All said and done, it’s still an open question as to whether we can break ourselves of this 40-year-old tradition. Just to benefit a bunch of butterflies and such.
My prior screeds on this subject include:
This, in addition to several posts on the economics of the Town of Vienna’s centralized leaf collection and disposal process.
Pictures in this post are mainly from Gencraft.com and Freepik AI
Tonight and tomorrow, it’s going to rain like crazy around here. In the DC area, we’re expecting to get about three inches, with some significant probability of tropic storm force winds (sustained winds in excess of 39 MPH). My brother lives in the Tidewater area, and he’s right on the edge of the region where four to six inches of rain are expected. Along with maybe a four foot tidal surge. All from tropical storm Ophelia.
What I find odd about is that the very first mention of this disturbance was late yesterday morning. That’s based on a check of the archives at the the National Hurricane Center. The very first mention of Ophelia — the point at which it became a named tropical storm — was the forecast update as of late afternoon today.
Source: National Hurricane Center.
In short, the interval between this thing becoming a name tropical storm, and the start of the deluge, here in NoVA, is maybe eight hours. Plus or minus. Even worse, my brother in the Tidewater area got about 6 hours’ warning between the time Ophelia became a named storm, and the time that tropical-storm-force winds are expected to hit his area.
I don’t think the weather used to work this way. Either that, or my memory has become so clouded that I don’t recall the times this has occurred in the past.
I used to have a sailboat, down in Tidewater Virginia, a couple of hours’ drive from where I live. I spent many autumns tuned into the hurricane forecast for this area, because a major storm meant that I had to move the boat off its dock and moor it in the middle of the river. (Because, if you don’t, the storm surge floats your boat up and over the dock, at which point wave action destroys both the boat and the dock to which it is tied. So it’s not optional. It was written into the contract allowing me to use the dock.) This, along with everybody else who kept a boat at the same dock. It was quite a fire drill every time.
My recollection is that major tropical cyclones were well-anticipated events, and that you’re read about them for days before they made landfall. I’d have plenty of time to gear up, arrange time off work, and get the boat prepped for the oncoming storm.
I further recall that when a few such storms “popped up” in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago, without crossing the Atlantic first, that was news, meteorologically-speaking.
But maybe the short-cycling of tropical storms is now the new normal. Plausibly, this is brought about by elevated Atlantic Coast sea surface temperatures. Warm ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico got all the headlines with the most recent hurricane. But in fact, ocean water temperatures are a few degrees above historical averages all up and down the U.S. East Coast. And, apparently, a few degrees is all it takes to whirl up a tropical storm in a couple of days, flat.
And so, this went from literally nothing on the weather map, to landfall of a tropical storm, in just about exactly two days.
And, unlike those pop-up tropical depressions of a couple of years back, that doesn’t even seem to be triggering comment this time around.
It’s just the way the world works now. Having days of warning for a tropical storm landfall? That’s so last-century.
Get used to it.
All pictures here are from Gencraft.com AI. We never really did have a meeting of the minds over what I meant by “hurricane”.
Just another AI test. I gave Gencraft.com the names of some famous people. I took the better of the two pictures generated for each name. Then I matched them to actual pictures. I tried to avoid iconic real images, where possible. Continue reading Post #1850: Which pic is real?
There is no new big surge of COVID-19 cases in Virginia. We don’t have to guess about that because Virginia continues to gather the same benchmark PCR test data that it did all throughout the pandemic.
At present, Virginia is showing 10 new cases (new positive COVID-19 PCR tests) per 100K population per day. That’s up from our normal summertime minimum of around 2 / 100K day. And is a level we saw off and on throughout the pandemic.
But the point is, it’s normal. In so far as anything about the post-pandemic U.S. can be considered normal. Continue reading Post #1849: Virginia still collects COVID-19 case data? Yep, sure does.
It’s funny how catastrophes linger in our collective memory, but near-catastrophes fade.
Fifteen years ago, the “housing bubble” that developed during the Bush administration finally collapsed, and almost took down the U.S. banking system with it. To the point where the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ran a negative fund balance, due to the wave of bank failures (below).
Source: FDIC, , courtesy of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), s
By now, most have forgotten how crazy housing prices were in some parts of the country. And what extraordinary measures the Federal Reserve took to avoid a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 near-catastrophe. In particular, that led to more than a decade during which the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. Lower than the underlying rate of inflation, in fact. As I see it, the Fed recapitalized a bankrupt U.S. banking industry on the backs of U.S. savers.
But that era of below-zero real interest began to end a couple of years ago.
And nothing much has happened. Yet.
Yesterday, a friend pointed out that some economic analysts see the U.S. housing market as once again ripe for a collapse in prices. Given that I own a house, I thought it was well worth taking the time to look at current U.S. housing market data. And while I was originally skeptical, I’d now have to say, he has a point. There’s not a lot of sunshine in the current housing market data.
