Sunday - December 13, 2009

On the threshold of madness

"Find yourself a Drew over there” cracks Rich. Yeah, right.

Let me tell you, it ain’t easy being me. I never get the easy jobs, just the crap.

Today it was “Can you fix the door? It won’t close properly when it’s cold.” Oy. It’s an anodized aluminum hollow section exterior office door, in a hollow section aluminum frame, with an aluminum threshold mounted on slab concrete. The door “hangs” from two “security pin” hinges, each one a single knuckle 1.25” diameter with a 5/8” screwed in pin, riding against a single knuckle that is integral to the door frame. The top pin screws in from the underside, and the bottom pin screws in from the top. Which means the entire weight of the door is carried by the lower pin, because the upper pin is there just for alignment. In theory a single stamped lock nut keeps the lower pin from backing out, although in reality both upper and lower pins have a little set screw in the sides for “security”. Which means you can take the door off from the outside in about 5 minutes with a screwdriver and a C clamp. Such security. It’s hardly worth installing a lock on the damn thing.

And that’s exactly how I adjusted it. Blast both hinges with WD-40, loosen the set screws, then lift up the entire door by tightening a 4” C clamp around the upper hinge. The damn door came up 1/4” with hardly an effort at all. Then it was just a matter of screwing down the bottom pin until it contacted the boss (a ground contact plate under the lower hinge pin). Which I hope is steel. Best fix would be to use a great honking thrust washer between the knuckles of the lower hinge. It’s a cheap design, and it’s a cheap door. But I got it fixed.

Then I had to adjust the sweep on the inside. That’s when I found out that it was mounted with plain steel screws. Ages ago. Totally corroded of course. Rusted in place and rusted almost through. Nothing more fun than being down on my hands and knees, face almost on the ground, making my own impact hammer out of a screwdriver and a 10” adjustable wrench.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s official duck hunting weather here today? Freezing rain falling from the sky with passion. I passed half a dozen accidents on the way down, cops out everywhere, ambulances creeping along. Black ice on everything, and I guess the highway department has the weekend off. Not a handful of sand or salt on any of the roads anywhere. And out in that mess is me, down on my knees on the cold wet concrete. Damn. But I got it done, and brought the sweep down enough to keep the stronger breezes out.

So of course the threshold is now all out of whack. And it’s been messed with before. The 3 main screws that hold it down are rusted to bits, and OF COURSE the screw slots are just chewed to shit. And some bright boy has tried to help things in the past by screwing 3 or 4 drywall screws into each end of the threshold, were OF COURSE the door rubs on them, so those screw heads are both chewed up and worn down. Nothing to get a bite on with any kind of tool.

“Lucky” for me that there’s a Home Depot just down the street. So I go there and buy a few #14 2 1/2” screws to replace the beat ones. What I want is Grade 8 or better. No such luck. So I buy the store brand instead. Bring them back, screw one down into the hole where the old #14 screw came out ... feel it start to bite ... one turn, two turns ... and it shears. Shit. Try the next hole. One turn, two turns, starting to grab, snap. That one sheared as well. Son. Of. A. Beach. #*(!ing dog &*^# camel ~+%^ shit steel from China. WTFF! DAMN YOU HOME DEPOT. DAMN YOU TO HELL.

This is one of my worst pet peeves. All the hardware stores only carry nuts bolts and screws imported from China these days. And China - as usual - turns out a garbage product. It’s not that a #14 screw is a dinky little thing. Hell no. You OUGHT to be able to anchor a car with one or two. They’re pretty hefty. You don’t use a #2 Phillips screwdriver with these, you need the special, hard to find, bloody gigantic #3 Phillips. A screwdriver that can double as a tire iron. The screw shaft is nearly 1/4” across. And they sheared off with hand pressure. Deep in the holes too, naturally. Because Chinese steel is even worse than French plastic. And the froggies make some sorry ass plastic. It’s nearly powder, since they save a few euros by not heating it up properly during manufacture.

You need screws? Go to McFeelys if you can’t find American made ones locally. Even screws from Taiwan are far better than the junk from China. Ooh, but they cost less! Sure, because they’re absolute crap. I thought I’d learned my lesson with a huge drywall project some years ago ... but you hold out hope, and pray you’ll get lucky, because the chicom screws are almost all that’s available. And halfway through a job you don’t have the luxury of mail ordering stuff.

So that was a couple hours of cold wet aggravating non-fun. Now it’s time to prop up the ADA sink I wrote about the other day. Let’s see, how to do that? Ah, I know, let’s tighten the mounting bracket. OK ... crawl under the sink (very glad I just washed the bathroom floor!) ... and there is no mounting bracket. No lag bolts holding it onto the wall either. WTH? This sink has some kind of hidden mount, and a couple of holes on the underside of the hollow porcelain with some sort of bolt on a strap dohicky thingamabob. Is that the mount? Some kind of lever operated turnbuckle? Beats me. So I tighten them up until I start hearing those scary crunchy pottery sounds. Is it tight? No. Does it still sag? Yes. And look, when you push down on the lip of the sink, the WALL bows outward!! Huh? this ain’t right. So I find a nice hefty steel shelf bracket, made in America, all white powder coated and gusseted for strength. I figure I can mount that to the sidewall and support the sink, right? Ought to work. Use the stud finder, locate stud in the right area, jack up the sink, mark the holes, then mount the bracket with 3 5/16” diameter lag bolts. That ought to hold a cranky pony, at least. So supporting a 60lb sink should be nothing. Funny thing though - the pilot holes drilled awfully easy. Through the drywall, then a bit of pressure, then POP! and the drill bit sank in all the way. Huh. So I do all the work, let the jack down, and watch the bracket torque off to the side under the weight of the sink. Son of a bitch, the damn wall is made with metal studs.

Metal studs suck ass. Sure, they’re just fine for holding the drywall in place. And they cost less, weigh less, and are faster to install than wood studs. But they’re made out of tinfoil. You can’t hang anything from them. And they don’t support screws and bolts for shit. No wonder the sink is sagging off the wall. There’s no wall in the wall. Darn sink is supposed to be held in place by a 2x8 brace between 2x4 studs.

Another cheap ass implementation. Office buildings are just shells. The walls are just for show. The ceiling is just a fiberglass panel that hides some wires. I am just so sick and tired of this. Everything is made like crap, installed like crap, and built like crap. Which makes repairing things nearly impossible.

As far as I can tell, to have this ADA sink held properly in place, I’ll have to tear out the wallboard and install actual studs, long ones that I can screw into the concrete slab on the bottom and clamp on to the rebar truss roofing network ten feet above. I can’t see any other way to have a strong enough wall. But what else can I do? It’s a customer bathroom, therefore the sink has to be ADA compliant. Which means no legs or pedestals under the sink. This sucks.

I am slowly. Going. Crazy.

UPDATE: As the text message junkies say, “FML”. I’m as tenacious as a terrier, so I couldn’t just walk away from that sink situation. No, Google is my bitch, and the entire world is on the internet, therefore my solution is out there. Somewhere. I tried and I tried, and entered all sorts of searches. Finally I tried something like “hidden mount ADA sink” and in the results saw the words “concealed arm carrier”. I knew they weren’t talking about guns, so I followed the link to Zurn, which showed me what these things are. Then I had to download and install a free copy of SolidWorks’ eViewer, so I could read the .dxf file. I’d never even heard of a .dxf file; turns out that’s an AutoCad rendering. So I put that in, read the file, and saw my nemesis, that two armed bastard. Now properly enlightened, another quick Google sent me to MiFab, where an even better picture showed me what was going on.

A “concealed arm carrier” is a sink support that is mounted inside the wall, and two iron bars stick out of the wall like arms. The hollow sink slides onto them, and a couple of screws adjust the tilt of the sink up and down. Son of a gun. Duh. No wonder that sink wasn’t lag screwed into the wall - it wasn’t supposed to be. And the screws I was turning just tightened the sink to the mounting bars. They didn’t do a darn thing to adjust the saggy angle. Sha-grin. 

So tomorrow morning I’ll go back down there with a knife, a caulk gun, and a screw driver. Loosen the locking screws, pare off the caulk seam I put in, and turn the adjusting screws. That should raise the lip up and get the back edge snugged up to the wall. Re-tighten, re-caulk. And it should be good to go. Duh, I’d better take my adjustable wrench too, to remove the utterly useless and unnecessary bracket that I put in today. And if this doesn’t work, at least I can explain why the wall needs to come out - to replace the carrier.

Parts drawings on the overleaf:

Posted by Drew458     on 12/13/2009 at 04:41 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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