Paradise ponders: wooden stirrup, leaky pipes, and stair rails edition...

Paradise ponders: wooden stirrup, leaky pipes, and stair rails edition...  This morning my brother Scott came by, looking for a bit of help in building some wooden stirrups.  Wooden stirrups?  Why would one want those?  Well, it turns out that people from the town of Newton (where Scott lives) volunteered to build a display for the town, to be shown at this month's Cache County fair.  Scott was one of the volunteers, and he got the job of making wooden stirrups (along with some other stuff).  As I understand it (and I'm not entirely sure I do!), other volunteers are going to combine the wooden stirrups with potatoes, other vegetables, and who knows what else to make ... little potato-head stirrup people.  Exactly why they're doing this remains unexplained.  :)  But making the wooden stirrups (photos below) was fun, mainly because it involved boiling wood for 45 minutes or so to make it bendable.  There was also a bit of a challenge cutting a precise angle on the dowels that make up the hanger on them. They came out rather nicely!

Yesterday morning I tried very hard to fix the leaks in the 2 1/2" galvanized pipe fittings on my irrigation pump.  I tried a total of four different thread treatments (thin Teflon tape, thick Teflon tape, Teflon paste, and old fashioned pipe dope).  None of them worked – I had a drippy leak after using them all.  So I got online and looked up methods to stop leaks in large threaded joints, and found hundreds upon hundreds of posts about it.  Obviously I'm not the first one to face this challenge!  There seemed to be consistent advice that a product called Loctite 565 thread sealant would do the trick.  So I ordered some, and it will be here tomorrow afternoon.  If that doesn't work, then I'm not sure what to do!

After my abject failure at fixing that leak, I went to work installing the stair rails we had made for our sun room stairs (the ones I made earlier this year).  The first step was to drill the holes for the mounting bolts – a little scary, that, as if any of the hole were incorrectly located it would permanently mar those stairs.  The photo at right shows the after-drilling view.  Debbie (who was helping me) was mighty worried about the location of the holes! :)  I thought that after that, all I'd have to do would be to drop the bolts in, tighten the nuts, and I'd be done.  Oh, no, no, no...

First, the powder-coating operation on the rail filled in the holes in the steel plates on the bottom sufficiently that I couldn't insert the bolts at all.  So I had to drill all those out.  Worse, the threads on the bolts weren't long enough to allow the nuts to be tightened.  The bolts were beautifully powder-coated to match the rail, so I couldn't just run out and buy new bolts.  I had to cut an additional 1.5" of thread on each of 12 bolts.  I have a tap & die set, so I'm equipped to do that.  But – cutting that much thread (18" in total) on high quality (so very hard) 3/8" steel bolts was quite a bit of work.  My arms were tired when I got done!  But the end result (at left) was worth it: a beautiful and sturdy rail to go with those stairs.  The finish matches the finish on the basement window well covers.  If you look closely in the photo, you can see Konani poking his head through the cat-hole, checking to see if it's safe for him to come up...