It was sunny today, though cold still. Started by making a nice big pot of coffee (fresh ground hazelnut decaf), but then realized that we don’t have a Thermos bottle. Went to town to get one and to try and find a place that still sells kerosene. After a bit of running around I found both. Back at the house I washed the thermos and dumped the pot of coffee with a bit of maple syrup into it, grabbed my old neglected Kerosun Moonlighter kerosene heater out of the garage and my glues, and headed out to Mecca.
I had called ahead; Karl was in the shop with the woodstove going (building some new wall mounted material racks) and he went up and started the little electric heater for me.
The turd had run out of fuel at the end of my last visit, so this was a good time to swap out the newer holey mantles with some of the older ones.
They were much easier to install (maybe that was me) and they burn great without any holes, but they did smoke quite a bit when I singed them off.
Here’s the Moonlighter as retrieved from under the bench in my garage where it has sat for many years without being used. A big brown turd?
And here it is after dismantling, wiping everything down, cleaning the burner, reassembling, fueling and lit.
When I got to the loft the temp was 32 deg F (my spritz bottle and glue brush pot were both frozen solid). A few hours later, with the sun streaming in, both heaters and the lantern running, the loft temp had gotten up to 48F.
Decided to do a test glue up using one of my small blocks, the backside of the foam from the GG pocket test I had done previously and TB2 to see if I wanted to use the TB2 going forward with the wall blocking. I didn’t bother hogging out a pocket, just glued it flat and weighed it down.
Next I experimented with some more of the real deal blocks in the street side galley wall. One got spritzed with water and wiped just on the block, but I did it in advance and left it to sit damp side up while I spread the glue so that it would dry a little before installing. On the next one I used a lot less water (barely getting it damp at all) because that was all that would come out of my frozen squirt bottle. Still did this first, wiped it by hand and let sit while I spread the glue. A third block was done with no water at all; the hygrometer read 49/ct humidity.
At Karl’s suggestion, we used some of the blocks as spacers between the freezer paper and boxes of welding wire so that all of the weight would be concentrated on the block being glued underneath. There was a possibility that the cardboard box was flexing into the hub of the wire spools inside of the boxes, so by adding the extra spacer block we were insuring that all of the weight was bearing down evenly on the block being glued.
The box in the foreground is standing on edge due to proximity to the adjacent box (in the shadow on the right).
Here’s a longer shot using the new weight technique.
After about 40 min’s we pulled a couple of the weights off to take a look and there was minimal glue/foam expansion, not enough to fill the small voids around some parts of the blocks, and the little bit of glue that had squeezed out was still very tacky. So we put the weights back on and left it to fully cure.
Doesn’t seem like I got much done, but between running around and servicing the lantern and heater, I guess I kept busy.
When I got home again I found that the additional lights and switches from superbrightleds.com had arrived, shown here with my new Stanley thermos (Stanley used to be made in CT; this was made in China
).
Well, that was my day. Progress is progress.
by KCStudly » Sun Jan 20, 2013 2:18 pm 
; 21 F indicated on Google at the moment 
; warming trend ( 
) ...with snow approaching for the start of the weekend 
.