Can you recommend, or even lend out, any good DIY-related books?

29 responses total.

We have Grainger catalog, USG Gypsum Construction Handbook, Wiremold Buyer's
Guide, the 1981 National Electrical Code (got rid of 1979,I think 1981 was
still valid when we started building), Use Wrenches the Safe Way (US Dept of
Labor 1951), a 25C pocket book How to Work With Tools and Wood (1955),
a forties book on refrigeration (to match our refrigerator collection),
Household Encyclopedia (1966, including ideas for novelty wrappings, make your
own kitchen gadgets, furniture styles, washing dishes, The Lawn, How to Use
a Roller, 70 pages of home repair, 30 on painting, basic mending stitches,
How to Buy More for Your Money, Edible Weeds, Party Games for Adults, Typical
Family Budget, Dates on Which Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday Fall, and
Language of Flowers, among many other topics.  First ed was 1953).  Complete
Book of Home Repair and Improvements, For Don from Aunt Helen, March 1952.
By the editors of Popular Mechanics.    Novel Igloo Incinerator of Troweled
Concrete Combines Both Utility and Atractiveness (drawing of son in shorts
and wife in dress feeding it bags of garbage).  

What kind of concrete do they use for the incinerator that will withstand
the heat?
 
One of my favorite magazines for house stuff is Fine Homebuilding.  They
also publish very good books on various home building / repair subjects.
If ever you come across such a book by Taunton Books & Videos, you can 
bet that it's a good book on the subject.  We showed one on roofing to
the guy who did our roof and he said he had never seen such a good book
on the subject of roofing and wanted to know where we got it.
 
Another book that we really like is A Pattern Language.  This is not a
specific how-to book but more of a why-to book.  It is a timeless piece
and would be of interest to most anyone interested in architecture, people
behavior and other such observations.

Who is the author?  Maybe the library will order it, if in print.
'Cement is troweled over metal lath to a 4-in thicness. THe wooden forms may
be burned away later.'  No special type of concrete is mentioned, sorry.
The Fine Homebuilding videos are stocked by the library, along with the books,
and we learned a lot about tiling.

        I don't know about incinirators but friends built an oven in their yard
out of cob which is clay and straw primarily. I t uses additives like blood,
urine and dung for strength. there is no flue, the heat goes directly into
the mass and the smoke roils out the door. when the fire burns out they put
their bread dough in. They can bake a few loafs bufore having to fire up
again.

I don't recall who the author is and the book is on seemingly indefinite
loan to some friends who can't be without it for even a week.  It is
already stocked by the library.
 
Gee, if we made concrete the old-fashioned way, there would be little
need for sewage treatment plants ;-)

Yes, but who could you convince to live near a concrete plant?

Make your own kitchen gadgets.  Sterilizer-homemade.  Use a can in which meat
packers ship livers to your butcher.  Boil with soap powder and laundry bleach
for 30 minutes.  Lace rubber jar covers together to form a shock absorber at
bottom.  (What do you use this for, by the way?)

Polarity tester for electric current.  A simple polarity tester can be made
from two small copper rods and a glass jar.....Select a cork...slot opposite
sides to take the rods. Disslve salt in water and pour into the jar. (exact
amounts omitted by typist).  Adjust the rods to just touch liquid, hold the
bared ends fo the wires in teh circuit against hte ends of the rods.  The rod
that sparks is positive side of circuit.  (For those who don't own meters.)

Furs commonly used for clothing.  Ocelot.  Sportswear.  Pale peltries more
desirable.

Mental health.  Don't brood over the past.  Think about the rosy future.

For homes without electricity, there are washers operated by gasoline.
Automatic washers are chiefly of three types:  wringer type, spinner type
(with a separate spinning compartment), and cylinder type (top loader).  THere
is also a type with vacuum cups.

Re polarity tester. That is only for DC, of course, and surely works only
above some minimum voltage. Do you know what it is? (I am pretty skeptical
of the proposal, and would have to see it to believe it - the rods really
are *touching* the solution, and the spark appears *in the liquid*?) What
if you don't have copper rods? When is this useful? All batteries are
marked or one can tell by shape. But just as a challenge...touch the
two wires to your tongue - the one that tastes sour is negative (the
other will taste bitter). Say..how did you do this, anyway? You said you
don't have salt. There must be a simpler way than any of the above..may
I use a compass?

Eureka! I invented another way to determine polarity! Dissolve a little
salt in a small amount of household ammonia, soak a small strip of white
paper in this, and then lay it across two copper wires attached to
the electrical terminals. A blue color will form at the positive (+)
electrode. 

I never said we built this gadget, Jim found it in a book and thought you
would enjoy disbelieving it.  We don't have ammonia either.  But we do have
several meters that do the job faster.  How long do you have to wait for the
copper to turn blue?  Jim wonders whether you would get hydrogen and oxygen
forming at the different electrodes, and the hydrogen would burn?
We have vinegar and baking soda and citric acid, washing soda, lye, epsom
salts (the last two left over from making soap and tofu, baking soda as a
deodorant, washing soda as a water softener, citric acid for canning and for
dissolving calcium out of eggshells to add to oatmeal as calcium citrate,
vinegar for washing our stucco walls to get off the inflorescence and for
removing stray mortar from bricks instead of HCl).  ANy other good uses for
our chemical arsenal?  Also we have tartaric acid which I boiled with
tarnished silver and a piece of aluminum foil.  And lime which we used to boil
with dried corn to get off the husk and convert the niacin, to make tortillas.

Another useful gadget.  Lawn-sprinkler shutoff, can be regulated to open and
close a valve alternately and repeat a slow cycle continuously, or turn on
a sprinkler at night.....the shutoff operates by action of water dripping from
pet cocks into pails hanging from the ends of a crossarm attached to a
quick-acting-type steam cock.  To set the device so that it turns a sprinkler
on and off at intervals, open each pet cock to drip at the desired rate.  With
the steam cock closed and the sill faucet open, water will drip from the
right-hand pet cock and into the pail.  Weight of the water will cause the
pail to lower and in turn to open the ssteam cock.  This starts the sprinkler
and at the same time starts water dripping from the other pet cock. 
Simulaneously water in the lowered pail escapes through a valve in the bottom
and the cycle repeats.  .....
(But what if the pet cat drinks out of the bucket?
The drawing shows a closet-tank ball blcking the hole in the bucket, which
has been flared out into a tube, at the bottom of this is a broomstick and
a rubber crutch tip, resting on a wet brick.

I could tell blue had developed on the paper in a few seconds with a 9-volt
battery and a copper wire spacing of ca. 1/2 inch. The rate of formation
depends on the current, which increases with voltage and decreases with
distance. This works by copper dissolving at the (+) electrode and reacting
with the ammonia to make an intense blue complex. Hydrogen is formed at
the (-) electrode, but not enough to be flammable in the time it takes to
do the experiment (give it an hour, though, and you might be able to
accumulate enough hydrogen to burn).

I look for what will solve a problem, and not what one might do with one's
chemical inventory. 

Don't use that aluminum trick on your silver if you value it. It etches
the silver and will, with repeated use, turn it matte.

Is it removing a layer of silver oxide?  I though it was deoxidizing it.

We know a faster way to tell the + and - ends of a battery apart.

The silver looks a lot less black after boiling with aluminum.  Silver polish
removes a layer mechanically.  What would you recommend?

Well, I thought it would be interesting to find a method that did not
involve a meter or reading the labels. I like puzzles, which are always
posed with constraints on information. You seemed to like the spark
method, since you cited it, so I undertook to devise a method that
would be more likely to work with less difficulty. I succeeded, and
demonstrated it. 

The aluminum acts as an anode to cathodically reduce the silver oxide and
silver sulfide tarnishes back to silver. This does two things: it makes
pits where the tarnish crystals were, and raises roughness where it grows
new silver crystals nearby. This process does not remove silver but rather
moves it around to create a less shiny surface. Only an abrasive, which
does remove silver, will polish it. 

Once you have moved the silver around to form pits and bumps, could you
smoothe it out again by rubbing with a clean cloth?  The silver plate is so
thin I would not want to abrade it.
        Yes, your method was clever.  Ammonium cuprate?  Have you tested to
see if you have polarity?

Polishing does move some of the silver around but primarily abrades off
the irregularities. You do *not* want to use the aluminum method on
silver plate, since it is pitting the silver. 

The blue color formed is the cupric-ammonium ion Cu(NH3)4(2+). It is
a deep intense blue, and thus can be seen at very low concentrations.

I don't have polarity. It would be shocking if I did. I get my charge
other ways.

What is the blue color in toilet bowl bars?

It seems I have a choice between abrading my grandfather's collection of old
spoons with hotel names on them by polishing, pitting it by reducing the silvr
oxide, or using black silver.  Why would it not work to pit it and then
smoothe it out with a clean cloth?  The boil-with-foil method is fun, we can
watch it turn colors and impress kids.  This is not valuable silver.

Well, once around with aluminum will improve the appearance for a while.
You could store it in anti-tarnish cloth, which helps a little (it absorbs
H2S). But silver polish would really accomplish the same. I do not know
for sure which method will go through the plate faster. You could polish
half of it, and "aluminum" the rest - and report back when you get through
the plate on either.

The surest way to wear through the plate is to use the silver, and the bowl
bottoms wear through quickly.  What is the metal underneath, and is it harmful
to the health?  WOnder if we should not be using the worn-out stuff.  What
is nickel silver?  Nickel is not supposed to be good for you.
I don't think the experiment you suggest would work unless we had two
identical spoons, identically worn.

I agree that the test would have to be done on a large scale with many
participants, to average out the differences in spoons and uses.

NIckel silver is an alloy of nickel, copper and zinc. Tableware is
made from it. Hardened brass is also used. There is no toxicity problem
with metallic nickel alloys - they do not corrode readily.

Our spoons are turning blue where the silver is worn off.  We also have one
spoon somehwere made of some other shiny metal that is not silver or
stainless.  What is German silver?

We have some silverplate which show signs of rust where the plating has been
nicked etc.

German silver is an earlier name for nickel silver (why blame it on the
Germans?). Tableware is made from an alloy of about 50% copper, 25% zinc
and 25% nickel. It has a blue-white color - does that fit the "blue"
you see? Small changes in the composition make big changes in hardness,
brittleness, color, fusibility. 

Looked like copper blue to me, not blue-white.  Maybe my spoon was especially
high in copper content.  What is written on the back of the silverplate which
shows rust?  

        "DO NOT GET WET"

Cooper is red(ish) - some of its compounds are blue or green. Has this
stuff been sitting around for a long time unused? Copper alloys will
corrode to produce a blue-green coat of "verdigris".

Most of our silverware has been sitting in the drainer between uses (ever
since the table got turned around during a kitchen cleaning and I can't reach
the drawer any more).  Jim wants to know what pot metal is made of.
The silverware stays pretty wet in the drainer, that is where it turns blue.
Will the copper content in the spoons hurt us?
Is pot metal casting metal, non-ferrous?

Copper is an essential mineral; too much copper will kill you. The usual.
I doubt you would get too much from utensils. Pot metal is mostly zinc -
non-ferrous. Copper may be added to make it harder.

re 21 & 23:
The pieces that have rusty edges are the knives, from an old set that
my grandfather gave us.  On most of them is a faint marking of 
"Wm Rogers & Son / Warranted 12 DWT" but one seems to say 
"Rockford S. P. Co. / 1876 / Warranted 12 DWT".
We don't have any matching spoons; the forks (which are not rusting,
that I can see, and which we have used much more) mostly say
"Wm Rogers & Son  12." but one says only "Panama Silver."

Just found a great book on Shirtmaking, by David Coffin, published by Taunton
Press, which puts out wonderful books on furniture making, with videos.  There
are chapters on materials (with drawings of how different sorts of cloth are
constructed), tools, and how to sew various details.  Fascinating reading even
if you only contact with shirts is wearing them.  I had never noticed how my
plackets differed in different shirts, or that some collars were attached via
a 'stand' and others were not.  It gives a history of shirts - apparently they
were made with a rectangular body and various other attached rectangles until
late 19th century, when cloth got cheap enough that cutting it was not a
sacrilege (you can't reuse shaped cloth for much, rectangles you can), and
that shape is now being revived in 'big shirts'.  David is a self-taught
shirtmaker and when he started 15 years ago could not find any books on the
subject so had to write his own.  Very clearly and concisely written, with
lots of his own illustrations (former painter).
        I look forward to a similar book on pantsmaking, as the only one I
found (Finally it Fits) did not produce a product that fit.  This book tells
you how to make your own patterns based on adapting either a commercial
pattern by draping it over a read body, or copying something that does fit.

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