I got another cold. I think I have been sick more in the last 2 months than not. I am sick of being stuffed up.
Anyways life still has to go on.
This weekend I got to see an old friend and get some stuff done around the house. The first is my VW. I have mentioned that I have a bluetooth amplifier in the car now, and that runs from my phone. But that means when I want to change something I have to reach for my phone that is sitting, usually, on the seat next to me. I wanted to see about mounting the phone so I could access it easily while driving. I know that there are lots of options for this out there, but not for a car that is 66 years old. I found a place that makes a really cool looking mount that works with the glovebox, but it was $65 plus shipping and I still have to buy a magnetic case for my phone. Then while looking online I came across a thread and someone had modified an ashtray to hold a RAM ball and then used one of those cell holders. I thought, I think I can do that. Well, the ashtray on my car has a 5mm threaded post and it is fixed to the ashtray. The RAM balls all are 1/4-20 thread. I didn’t want to drill out the ashtray to put in a different screw. So, I asked my dad if we could come up with a different method. He thought buying a 1/4-20 bolt then drilling and tapping it for 5mm that would thread onto the ashtray would work. So, I bought a bolt and took it out to my dad where he could use his lathe to drill and tap it.
And that leads to the next fun part of the weekend. I got there and an old friend, Jeff, and his wife were in town visiting my dad. Jeff owns a camera shop in Atlanta, Georgia. I met him going to PhotoKina with my dad in Germany for many years. I got to meet his wife and catch up. We haven’t seen each other in almost 12 years. We talked kids and life. It was nice. And while I talked with him my dad was wonderful and took my ashtray, bolt, and ball and got it all put together. The bolt didn’t work. It was too close to the 5mm size that once the tap was put down it to destroyed the bolt. But my dad just drilled the RAM ball out and put a larger insert in it, and then it all worked out. I have a great dad!
Then back home and I put all that together for the VW. And this is what it looks like:
I really like it. I haven’t been driving with it yet, but I think it will be a good addition. And it only cost $40 in parts.
Then yesterday I finally got around to replacing our kitchen sick faucet. Background here is that about 6 months ago it started leaking. I tried to fix it. But I found out that I couldn’t get it apart to replace the plastic washers. I tried and tried, but to no avail. Then when I put it back together it stopped leaking. Hooray! But then when you rotated it from one side to the other it would tighten and get hard to move in the clockwise direction and then loose in the counterclockwise direction (it clearly was turning in a thread somewhere and doing this). But we lived with it, until about 2 weeks ago when it started leaking again, but this time from the lower connection point and there was no fixing it and it was worse this time. So, I decided to just replace it. I did some looking online but decided to head over to Lowes and buy something so I could put it in right away. Well, we had 2 opening faucet. One for the water part and one for the handle. Guess what, that isn’t the norm anymore. In fact I had a hard time finding that style period, and I had already taken it all apart so I could make sure I would buy something that was similar in size to what we had. After some talking and texting of pictures with my wife we decided to go with a black single hole unit (single hole is the norm now for kitchens). And this is what I got:
It went in a lot easier then the old one came out, and that was a blessing. I do have 2 new and open holes in my countertop currently covered by soap and I will need to find black caps for those, but Amazon should have something that will work there. I like it. It isn’t perfect, but nothing ever is. It has the built in sprayer that pulls out, and apparently that is also the new norm. Or maybe it has been the norm for a while, and we are just now catching up to the current style. It was expensive in my opinion, but being at Lowes they were all expensive. I didn’t go with one of the really expensive ones more of a middle of the road ones. We’ll see. It had great reviews online. It was the Moen Georgene
Overall a good weekend, except having a cold, that sucked.