Dock repair, still life with cat, garden blooms [rowing, photos, gardening]
We finally have a tool in place that allows us to log our volunteer hours for the rowing club. It will be interesting and helpful to know what this looks like.
On Saturday I spent a good 4.5 hours moving around and assessing dock sections, and then attempting some repairs to a couple pieces. The dock was originally purchased via a series of grants obtained up through 2013. Every year it experiences more wear and tear from sitting out in the Hudson River, and because it's HDPE plastic, it gradually cracks and fails. Many of the cracks form at structural weak points. But in one set of the floats, there's a second failure point at the plastic mold injection points on the underside of the float:

Here's the worst failure on this particular float:

I didn't remember to take any other "before" photos, unfortunately, but here's a photo of a couple more of these cracks after an initial prep step:

From watching a YouBoob video about repairing HDPE plastic kayaks, I learned that you can't just apply more material to HDPE like a glue and expect it to stick. Instead you need to melt the parent material so it mixes together with the patch material you're trying to add.
This is easier said than done, of course. So the above prep photo is after cleaning with acetone and then introducing some initial melts with the tip of a variable-temperature wood-burning tool.
Here's where I applied some #2 HDPE filler material taken from the lid of a Home Despot bucket:

A slow and tedious task.
I eventually got tired, hot, and hungry, because I'd packed breakfast but not lunch, so I wound up giving up on plastic welding and switched over to the other method recommended by a previous dockmaster, which was to simply glue over the cracks with hot glue.
...now if you know anything about working with plastic, I am sure that the second you read "hot glue" you suddenly twitched and had about 50 other ideas and opinions. Me too. In this case I just had to work with what was on hand. I share your skepticism.
I tried to do more of a patch for that one really bad crack:

But I don't fully trust my plastic welding abilities, so I also finished that one off with a round of hot glue.
Will it all hold? Will any of it hold? Time will tell. There are enough sections in need of repair that there's plenty of opportunity to continue experimenting. I just hope I'm not the only person who winds up working on them. We shall see.
-
By the time I got home, I was exhausted, and Emma missed me, so I curled up with the computer to edit the week's lab video. Emma soon joined me and did this super-cute thing where she put her chin down:

It took a lot of finagling to get that photo. At the slightest movement she'll pick her head back up again, like this:

-
I did a lot of vacuuming on Sunday. I am not going to post the photo I took of the crumbs on the dining room table. They are completely gone now.
Towards the end of the day, as I was getting ready to head to the grocery store, I stepped out on the back porch and noticed a patch of yellow that hadn't been there previously:

The mini daffodils bloomed!

I am so pleased. The mini daffodils that I bought 2 years ago got eaten by squirrels. I stowed this set in the basement over the summer, and planted them in the fall. You can also see the tulips that are about to bloom just behind the daffodils.
The Chorchid (Sharry Baby chocolate orchid) is also starting to bloom:

No fragrance just yet. Well, either no fragrance, or as S joked, oh no, we have IT!
And now, back to grading.
This entry was originally posted at https://rebeccmeister.dreamwidth.org/1454873.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
On Saturday I spent a good 4.5 hours moving around and assessing dock sections, and then attempting some repairs to a couple pieces. The dock was originally purchased via a series of grants obtained up through 2013. Every year it experiences more wear and tear from sitting out in the Hudson River, and because it's HDPE plastic, it gradually cracks and fails. Many of the cracks form at structural weak points. But in one set of the floats, there's a second failure point at the plastic mold injection points on the underside of the float:

Here's the worst failure on this particular float:

I didn't remember to take any other "before" photos, unfortunately, but here's a photo of a couple more of these cracks after an initial prep step:

From watching a YouBoob video about repairing HDPE plastic kayaks, I learned that you can't just apply more material to HDPE like a glue and expect it to stick. Instead you need to melt the parent material so it mixes together with the patch material you're trying to add.
This is easier said than done, of course. So the above prep photo is after cleaning with acetone and then introducing some initial melts with the tip of a variable-temperature wood-burning tool.
Here's where I applied some #2 HDPE filler material taken from the lid of a Home Despot bucket:

A slow and tedious task.
I eventually got tired, hot, and hungry, because I'd packed breakfast but not lunch, so I wound up giving up on plastic welding and switched over to the other method recommended by a previous dockmaster, which was to simply glue over the cracks with hot glue.
...now if you know anything about working with plastic, I am sure that the second you read "hot glue" you suddenly twitched and had about 50 other ideas and opinions. Me too. In this case I just had to work with what was on hand. I share your skepticism.
I tried to do more of a patch for that one really bad crack:

But I don't fully trust my plastic welding abilities, so I also finished that one off with a round of hot glue.
Will it all hold? Will any of it hold? Time will tell. There are enough sections in need of repair that there's plenty of opportunity to continue experimenting. I just hope I'm not the only person who winds up working on them. We shall see.
-
By the time I got home, I was exhausted, and Emma missed me, so I curled up with the computer to edit the week's lab video. Emma soon joined me and did this super-cute thing where she put her chin down:

It took a lot of finagling to get that photo. At the slightest movement she'll pick her head back up again, like this:

-
I did a lot of vacuuming on Sunday. I am not going to post the photo I took of the crumbs on the dining room table. They are completely gone now.
Towards the end of the day, as I was getting ready to head to the grocery store, I stepped out on the back porch and noticed a patch of yellow that hadn't been there previously:

The mini daffodils bloomed!

I am so pleased. The mini daffodils that I bought 2 years ago got eaten by squirrels. I stowed this set in the basement over the summer, and planted them in the fall. You can also see the tulips that are about to bloom just behind the daffodils.
The Chorchid (Sharry Baby chocolate orchid) is also starting to bloom:

No fragrance just yet. Well, either no fragrance, or as S joked, oh no, we have IT!
And now, back to grading.
This entry was originally posted at https://rebeccmeister.dreamwidth.org/1454873.html. Please comment there using OpenID.