Meaghann got the first (prototype) planter box seated down in the garden. It still lacks irrigation and benchtops, but it could take fill at this point. Despite a few retries and missteps, I'd call it a successful design and implementation. While she was working on that I did all the cutting for planter box #2. This process took about 1:45 project time including setup and cleanup, about 2:10 on the clock. I got a worthy system down for it from all of the work figuring out how to do the prototype. It goes like this:
- I had already sectioned the 16' wall boards into 3 sections of about 64" each when working on the prototype. This was done to make working with these very long and heavy boards possible with 1 person and without a lot of props. 24 pieces of this are needed for each planter box, 3 for each side, and you can get 2 of them from each of these 64" chunks.
- I cut 45 degree angles on each end of these 5' boards, good face short. I used the rotation from vertical and laid the boards flat on the saw table. No measuring needed for this step. I staged the boards for efficient processing.
- From the pile of 12 64" boards with beveled ends, each one was laid good face down on the saw table and 31" measurements taken from each end's long edge. Then with the saw set square I cut each chunk twice to obtain my 2 wall boards and set them aside.
- Next I shortened and cut points on the 8 corner stakes. In order to do what I could to help make them easier to drive into the ground, I made them a bit shorter overall, cut angles on all 4 sides of the point (instead of just 2), and used 50 degrees instead of 45 degrees. I used a pair of bricks on the work table to eliminate measuring: just set against brick and saw guide, cut, flip, cut, flip, cut, flip, cut... x 8.
- Next I used the extra wall board material to cut the 4 bench supports. All simple square cuts at 16.5 inches.
- I deferred cutting the bench tops because I only had material for 2 anyway, and I figured it still wouldn't hurt to see the prototype completed before committing to the bench design, although the prototypes design looks pretty good.
Last night I had stayed up studying electrical stuff, and I made a reference sheet of the key points I'd learned. I finally got clear on grounding, service vs sub panels, multi-switch circuits, and other details that I'd always had a slight haze about. That work inspired me to get back to some electrical improvements around dinner time especially after the boys went to bed. Meg helped me identify which circuit every single fixture in the house was associated with except 2: The dishwasher and garbage disposer. I was able to use this information to create a detailed drawing of the west end of the house which each switch, cep, and fixture properly labeled with its circuit.
The circuits are a bit zany in this house, as we'd expected, and I may be able to clarify some of that in time. However, my primary mission is to replace the 2-blade ceps with grounded style ceps in order to remove the need to use those clumsy converters all the while. Like getting the back door properly sealed when shut (something I only completed yesterday), this is a project I'd envisioned to be completed a long time ago, and I've had the replacement receptacles downstairs for months. But I'd always wondered about how safe it would be to make a simple swap of the receptacles, and so I wasn't so enthusiastic about diving in until I'd studied up. Now that I've studied, I realize that the three-prong ceps are no less safe than the 2, only mildly deceptive because they appear grounded but the ground is only the box and cep itself. But even better, I learned that in these situations with ungrounded wiring, a single GFCI cep can provide good similar protection for the entire circuit if it's properly placed. Thus, getting the circuit map figured out is important to being able to find the right place to put the GFCI ceps since they need to be first from the panel on the circuit. With this plan in mind, and with my map made, all that remained was to discover the actual circuit pathways, i.e. where each cep, switch, or fixture appeared in the order of wiring.
Accomplishing this can be done by tracing the wires, but this is not always practical due to wiring being completely hidden in many places, and it's somewhat inconvenient in that it requires running around in the crawl spaces or attic. So I figured that a lot of information can be deduced from testing the wires in the boxes when in the process of replacing the ceps. So I started with the ceps in west wall of the living room and found the following interesting result: One of the ceps is terminal (the end of the line), while the other's removal fails to disable the terminal one! This means that this circuit includes at least 1 branch point, and is not just a simple loop. Turns out the nonterminal cep seems to have split the circuit pretty nearly in half. So, with this information, I may be able to learn the rest by tracing wires in the west crawl space and have a complete map in a matter of 15 minutes or so.
Meanwhile, the two ceps in the living room have been replaced and are working fine. As expected, the wiring is 12-gauge and done old-school. This means my cheap little 15A ceps can't accept the push-in connections, and it means there's a lot of cloth and paper in those metal boxes, which I remove as much as I can when I'm in there. The nonterminal cep was bridged, not by using the screws on the cep, but by doing a soldered, shrink-taped Y-style splice. The ends of the load side meet a bared section of the feed side. My modern view is that this method is at least as tough and risky as wire nuts, and so I avoid both approaches and use the device itself to do the bridging I need whenever possible. And it's quite often possible, thanks to the extra connections modern ceps have.
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