- Warped Boards!
As you well know, there’s an adage that says it never rains in Southern California. There’s another one that says an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. There still one more that says stupid is as stupid does.
Well, you probably know we Californians are dying for rain…after all these years of drought, we’re down to putting on galoshes and pulling out the bumbershoots when we see a cloud! So we were delighted to welcome this most recent deluge last week! Even though it wreaked havoc on the house…it’s been a long, dry year…it was wonderful to have water fall from teh sky so early in the fall!
The roof leaked over my son’s room, and he’ll soon be the happy recipient of new drywall and flooring when I discover where the water got in. It also leaked here in my office…ol’ Bessie the computer almost got drenched. Almost.
Things weren’t so happy outside. Oh, the track held up – brass rails on plastic ties don’t care much about water. The Forces of Valor Farmhouse held up just fine. The Pola railroad station building got wet but is now dry. That’s the good news.
It’s that deck – my beautiful hand-laid coffee-stir-stick masterpiece that took the damage. Makes me, a grown man, father of three, want to cry.
- It's Ruined!
What is particularly distressing about this tragedy is that I took the precaution of bathing, and I do mean bathing, the deck in waterproofing juice before I stained it. As you’ll recall, I actually was concerned that the waterproofing would repel the stain! That was my ounce of prevention.
But, in thinking about it, I seem to recall my wife watching me splash on the skim-milky looking waterproofing stuff…Thompson’s Water Seal, I think. She watched for a while as I slathered it on.
“Don’t you think that’s rather thin?” she asked with arched eyebrow.
Now, it’s a guy thing, I know it, but I was three quarters of the way through with the project. You’re a guy…you would have said the same thing:
“Nope, it’s fine.”
“I think you’re supposed to mix it up, like paint,” she said before she left. She has her Master’s Degree in Russian literature…she knows BS when she sees it.
“Nope, it’s fine,” I replied.
The can of water seal was stored outside, see, for, like, a long time. The lid had rusted onto the can. I had to use a pair of vise-grips to get it open, and you can just imagine what those vise-grips did to the thin steel cap of the water seal can. Mangle city! Now, this is one of those gallon sized rectangular steel cans with the easy-pour spout and a handle and everything. Because the pour spout is only two inches wide, you can’t get a stir stick down in there to shake things up. Because I’d screwed up the screw top to the can, it won’t go back on, making shaking the can itself a very messy proposition.
I knew the stuff wasn’t right, but I’m an optimist in addition to being a somewhat dim bulb. I figured there was probably some degree of water protection in the milky effluvia in which I bathed the platform. And then I stained it with something that said it had a varnish in it. That should have worked, shouldn’t it?
Well, it didn’t.
It seems to me it took just about forever to cut down all those coffee-stir sticks and glue ‘em down and sand the crackers out of ‘em. Looking in my account of free time to rework something on which I’ve already spent a gajillion hours, I find there are precious few minutes there. Hmph.
- Oh, sure...the bad roof's just fine!
To add insult to injury, take a look at the roof on the Forces of Valor Farmhouse. Do you see how the rows of shingles form columns, too? Now go take a look at any shingle roof…hey, those rows are offset from one another! When I was done shticking those shingles down I nailed the roof with a quick coat of Rust-Oleum brown. That’s when I spotted the mistake.
I’d be willing to redo that roof because of the error, but of course that roof held the water out just fine!
So my pride and joy, the one piece of woodworking I’ve ever done in my life that actually looks half decent is wiped out.
My favorite battle in World War II is Midway. I’ve always been fascinated by the intricate timing and the seemingly unbelievable coincidences that led to the American victory. I often think about what happened over in the planning room of the Japanese high command when they found out that four of their six carriers, the very backbone of their strategy for the entire war, were now gone. I’ve often wondered what it’s like to find your resources suddenly swept off the board. Now, there’s no way to equate the damage done to my little platform with the incredible sacrifices of both fleets at Midway, and this is an improper reflection. Please disregard.
So, it’s back to the drawing board. What do you think of this? Scrape off the stir sticks and replace ‘em with unwarpy ones, and then spray the crackers out of ‘em with Rust-Oleum brown, and then sand away the tops to accept a stain and a coat of varnish? In theory the paint would provide a nice water seal all the way around the boards, and the varnish over the stain would protect the tops and make ‘em look purty. The seams would looked caulked between the boards, too!
So what lesson did we learn? Well, it doesn’t rain on your HO layout in the basement, does it? You can make roofs out of toilet paper and they’ll last a decade!
But out here in the yard we must never, never forget: Garden railroading is REAL railroading!
