Planned obsolescence even in trash can lids... 

Plastic fabrication being troublesome? There's always other kinds of awesome - just leave it Zombie to engage in some woodcrafting!

That's a nice piece of work right there, what with all the shaping you had to do, particularly on those curved ends. Even weatherproofing was taken into account, because nothing should be left to chance - and averts the possibility of having to do all that once again before... a good long while. 

Door threshold: you took some freedoms with the variable height painting, especially on that right-hand side. In any case, approved!

16 hours ago, Thorondor said:

Planned obsolescence even in trash can lids... 

I doubt it. There's gotta be a reason behind it, maybe it's weight reduction or easier to manufacture/attach. It just seems odd to have that many air bubbles in the plastic.

16 hours ago, Thorondor said:

Plastic fabrication being troublesome? There's always other kinds of awesome - just leave it Zombie to engage in some woodcrafting!

That's a nice piece of work right there, what with all the shaping you had to do, particularly on those curved ends. Even weatherproofing was taken into account, because nothing should be left to chance - and averts the possibility of having to do all that once again before... a good long while. 

It wasn't much trouble to do the curved ends actually. I cut off as much as I could with the saw. To make the rounded top, I used a rasp to remove the excess and then rough sandpaper to remove the marks. For the inside of the rounded parts, I drilled as much as I could, then chipped the rest out with a flat blade screwdriver with sanding to follow.

So let's head on over to the garbage cans themselves. There were cracks on the sides which I forgot about until I started scraping. The epoxy I used the last time didn't stick too good so it all came off easily. For the first one I started scraping and the longer I went, the more cracks I found. I figured that was a good thing - try to reveal all the cracks so that they can be fixed. The first pic is upside down for some reason, but I think you can get an idea of what I was finding:

More cracks:

And cracks that combine and fork off:

And more cracks along the bottom:

I actually sanded the sides a bit to remove as much old paint and primer that I could. When all the scraping, sanding and dusting was complete, I plastic welded the cracks:

And more plastic welding on a different area:

And then the last area:

Have I mentioned this took a while? Yup, sure did. But it turned out pretty good. My only worry was the paint stuck in the cracks as that may cause the welded crack to be weak.I figure it's better than epoxy though. The other garbage can wasn't much better as I soon found out:

The big crack took a lot of work to get it to sit flat again with many passes with the plastic welder. Did a little excess scraping on the other side of the can as I wasn't sure how far the cracks went there:

It wasn't too bad, but needed help. After revealing most of the rim, I plastic welded the cracks, sanded the area and inspected the cans for spots I may have missed. After getting all that done I primed the areas I scraped down to bare plastic:

This project took about 2 days to complete, with maybe 4 hours of work going into it total. But I'm happy how it all turned out. The primer I used on it the last time really stuck good, so I'm also happy I'm using the same stuff this time around. Going to paint the outside with polyurethane instead of spraying as that will be more cost effective. However, I'm not going to do that quite yet as I think I need to address the inside of the can yet. Some of the longer cracks that run up the side do go through to the inside so those will need to be welded yet. The cracks that ran along the bottom rim didn't look like they went through, they were just superficial. Maybe? I need to look at that closer.

- Zombie

The more you dig the more unpleasantness you discover. I suppose you could say either those garbage cans aren't all they're cracked up to be *bada-bing*  or they've simply been really roughly handled, which is unsurprising.

That second can had a significant gap alright but you've put in the time and effort, and it shows given how smooth the end results are!

Something else did inadvertently catch my eye on that last pic too, by the way - things are perhaps getting a tad too green on the ground near the greenhouse. Life always finds a way...

On 9/15/2025 at 4:13 AM, Zombie said:

I have my doubts about that working SV, PS isn't the strongest plastic out there and it can be quite brittle. I will also mention that polystyrene isn't what the buckets are made of so that means it wouldn't stick.

Probably true, though it seemed easy enough to be worth trying.  

On 9/16/2025 at 11:31 AM, Space Voyager said:

Probably true, though it seemed easy enough to be worth trying.  

Maybe. I have a real issue with using gasoline to dissolve the styro. Gotta be really mindful when messing around with gas as the vapor is heavier than air. Suppose that could be done outside somewhere...

Ok, so now it's time to fool around with the screw collars. The one that was broken off and had half missing required a bit of filling to get it back into somewhat of a cylinder:

Just used black sacrificial bucket plastic for this. It's not the most beautiful looking piece, but hey, at least it's functional. So that fixes the broken one. But I'm missing another one completely. How to make it, that was the question running through my mind for quite a while. I could have just started to build up plastic from a blob but I actually used a strip of sacrificial bucket to build on that. I added plenty extra so the cylinder was wider:

The strip idea was great because it gave me something to hold on to when depositing the plastic. Now I needed to machine this down to a size that would fit the stub that was still present on the top. Drilled a hole in it and immediately cracked the thing down both sides. Well, darn. While inspecting it, I noticed that the crack happened where the strip was. So maybe the plastic I deposited on it didn't bond properly - melted everything back together again. Then carefully drilled the hole again. Had to cut part of the end off so that it wouldn't be so high.

In order to machine the piece into something that looked like a cylinder, I put a long, thin bolt through the hole, put a couple nuts on the end, tightened it up carefully and chucked it into the drill. Feathered the speed of the drill with my left hand and used a rasp in my right to remove some of the excess:

It actually worked surprisingly well. So now I had two loose screw collars. Really spent some time melting the collars into the top because I was worried that they would crack off. Spray painted the tops and put one top back together (also notice the blue cart has one coat of paint on it):

Looks pretty darn good if you ask me. The next day I worked on getting the other top completed. Here's the inside with my fabricated wood piece all painted up:

The flapper should be sitting below the opening but it was basically even. Here's what the two cans looked like (the left one is the unmodified top, the right one has the new screw collars and wood connector):

The gap is a little wider on the right one. Probably could have left it alone as it did work, but I took the whole assembly off and added some more plastic to the collars to make them taller:

And here they are, unmodified on the left and modified on the right:

I call that close enough! At least it works. The tops are going to need one more coat of spray paint and then they should be complete. Next time I'll discuss fixing the inside of the cans as well as the bottom.

- Zombie

Your resourcefulness never ceases to impress, Zombie. 

Creating a whole screw collar from scratch you were bound to run into some hitches, but you didn't let that first botched attempt derail you and you went on to refine the result by devising that ingenious off-the-cuff grinding process. Well done!

It was also satisfying to see your other piece of work - the one you've made from wood - slotted in place, with its fresh coat of "cammo" paint, and working as intended.

And look at that... Tweedledee and Tweedledum: joyously posing for another photo with their restored tops on. You know right there you've done something right!

On 9/20/2025 at 11:05 AM, Thorondor said:

Your resourcefulness never ceases to impress, Zombie. 

Creating a whole screw collar from scratch you were bound to run into some hitches, but you didn't let that first botched attempt derail you and you went on to refine the result by devising that ingenious off-the-cuff grinding process. Well done!

Thanks! Necessity is the mother of invention... or something like that, right? I should've really recruited the help of another person to operate the drill while I did the grinding, but it all worked out in the end.

Well, here's what the cart looked like with one coat of blue paint on it:

I made a little bit of a mistake and added some turpentine to aid in rolling, but all it did was create bubbles in the paint and caused it to take forever to cure. We're talking 3 days - and it was still a little tacky to the touch. To help that curing process I put the fan on it over the weekend and that did the trick. Had to sand the entire thing down to get rid of the bubbles and finally rolled on another coat this past Wednesday:

I used a light touch on the roller this time too so there were not too many bubbles. It dried fine this time but I did put the fan on it overnight. It probably needs another coat so I'll try to get that done this week. It certainly looks a lot better, that's for sure!

Back to the garbage cans themselves. They were really filthy inside so I bleached them out and took a pic of the inside when it was dry:

This is when I noticed that some of those cracks on the bottom actually went through to the inside. There's a crack on the bottom in the 3 - 4 o clock position and you can clearly see another crack to the left of the 6 o clock position on the side. Gotta fix this up! This is what it looked like after fixing the major cracks:

You can probably see there are a lot more cracks along the side near the bottom. I did fix these up, but it was pretty difficult because the cracks were at the bottom of a tall can and my arm is only so long. Had to actually stick most of my head down in there to see something and to reach the cracks. Not fun. I tried to match the areas I fixed outside to the inside to focus my efforts on those spots. After the insides were mostly complete, I also addressed the bottom too as there were a couple bigger cracks there too. I'm pretty happy with my efforts, but I need to take a closer look at them yet.

- Zombie

A spot of turpentine-induced "rocky road" coating? Just a speed bump, as the cart is well on its way to fully rejuvenated.

And getting to the bottom of things inside those garbage cans does strike me as challenging, as work conditions go. If you weren't as tall as you are that might well be a task ending up left at arm's length. 

You're reaching for perfection by now, but by all means, crack on!

I went through the bottom of both the garbage cans and welded that all up:

Some spots here and there, it wasn't too bad actually. Some of the cracks were in the corner between the side and the bottom and those were very difficult to get at. There really was no way to zipper weld the cracks so I concocted another method where I'd widen the crack with the soldering iron and then fill that back in. Seemed to work okay so I'm happy with that. Here's what the inside looks like:

Maybe could use some more smoothing, but it's all welded at least and that's the most important part. Since the weather has been cooperating recently, I painted the outside of the cans with polyurethane today:

This is one coat, it'll probably need another sometime. I put the fan on it overnight hoping the paint will set quicker (we had rather high humidity today and that hinders drying time). And since I had the brush in the polyurethane, I may as well do the threshold of the door:

I leaned a board (to the left of the door right now) against the wall and in front of the threshold to prevent people from trying to step in it, and to protect it from any dew or morning moisture, and also to keep leaves from the trees from getting stuck in the tacky paint. Hopefully it dries overnight decently. Still needs another coat, I may have some polyurethane from the back cooler floor that has sand in it for traction.

Recently one of our flower and supply wholesalers was running a special promotion: buy 2 gallons of concentrated liquid flower food and you could buy a hand-held proportioning unit for $35. We use a lot of flower food so a couple extra gallons is always a good idea. And for the unit cost, well, it's just a little bit more than a gallon of the food which is a small price to pay. Got that in and it's pretty impressive:

You hook it up to a garden hose via the brass fitting, add the food into the container, set the rate, pull the trigger and presto, a filled bucket with the correct concentration. Just to note, I looked up the price of this unit from our wholesaler... no promotion... it would cost $125-ish. With our discount and a little negotiating I could probably get it for ~$100 (or maybe just under). So for a $65 savings we get another proportioning unit. Not bad!

- Zombie

One might say that, once you're done with this pair of garbage cans, they're not garbage anymore. 

That polyurethane makes things look milky wet and I imagine, humidity aside, even you probably need to directly test it to see if it has actually dried properly. As for going for the sand treatment on the door threshold - just make sure you don't overdo it as unexpected grip can be dangerous too. 

Flower food special promotion with hand-held proportioning unit thrown in - can't go wrong with a deal like that. "Swiss made" to boot.

When using that stuff, remember to be mindful of the rate / resulting concentration though. You wouldn't want any... unforeseen outcomes. 

On 9/27/2025 at 9:48 AM, Thorondor said:

That polyurethane makes things look milky wet and I imagine, humidity aside, even you probably need to directly test it to see if it has actually dried properly.

I don't usually need to touch the polyurethane to determine how far along in the drying process it is. If I brushed it on, a good visual cue that the paint is dry is the lack of brush strokes and appearance of sags/runs. Another cue is the smell (stronger, more "chemically" when wet and a sweeter smell when dry). With that said, sometimes I do touch just to gauge how fast it's going.

Well, back to plastic welding again! The other week I turned on the soldering iron because I was planning on doing a little touch up. I was filling some buckets up for flowers in the meantime and noticed that one was leaking. Got a different bucket out and transferred the water over and that one leaked too. When it rains it pours it seems. One had a small crack along the side near the bottom. Fixed that up with no issues. The other one was cracked in approximately the same area. I wasn't really sure if I fixed it because there was a natural seam around the circumference. How far did it go? Better to be safe than sorry so I went along the entire seam just to make sure:

There was another bucket that was leaking along the bottom so I hopefully fixed that. Remember that bucket that I melted a hole straight through it because the plastic was so thin? Added some more plastic to close the hole and smoothed it out. Maybe usable, gotta test that one carefully. Finally, there was a bucket with a bottom that was almost falling off because of a long crack that was running along the rim on the bottom. Welded that up, added some plastic and smoothed it out. Here's what all 3 looked like (L-R):

You can see that at the bottom of the pic there is another garbage pail on the ground that looks like the flower cutting one in the backroom, only shorter. It was in rough shape with multiple cracks and most of the top rim missing. Plastic welded all that up:

I smoothed it all out recently and also softened the cracked edge so that there were no sharp areas. Better? Yes. I just stopped the bleeding though, it's still missing a lot of plastic and that would be very difficult to fix.

Speaking of the garbage can in the backroom for the flowers... remember the rim I created to fill the spot that was missing? Well, that cracked recently too. I think it was due to that sacrificial piece I grafted on there - it didn't bond decently. I melted the whole thing back together and also melted in a piece of screening on the top of the rim to prevent a crack from forming there again. I'm still planning on using another strip of screening and melting that into the side of the rim just to make sure it's all supported. Who knows, it may actually be a good idea to do that to all the corners. Sometime.

- Zombie

4 hours ago, Zombie said:

Well, that cracked recently too. I think it was due to that sacrificial piece I grafted on there - it didn't bond decently.

Plastic bonding really is a problem, any ammount of oil will prevent it (the temperatures are not high enough to burn it off). I guess that is why people use the wire armature across the seam. 

The bucket list grows. Soldiering on = soldering on. 

You're the one in the best position to judge, but that garbage pail at the bottom of the pic seems to me it might indeed be stretching what you'd want to chew if aiming for a full reconstruction.

It's probably usable as is in a makeshift sense after your latest touch-ups. There's feasible and then there's desireable / sensible - pretty much as you've hinted at.

10 hours ago, Thorondor said:

The bucket list grows. Soldiering on = soldering on. 

You're the one in the best position to judge, but that garbage pail at the bottom of the pic seems to me it might indeed be stretching what you'd want to chew if aiming for a full reconstruction.

It's probably usable as is in a makeshift sense after your latest touch-ups. There's feasible and then there's desireable / sensible - pretty much as you've hinted at.

Yup, that smaller square garbage can is almost a lost cause. But with the cracks fixed now, that gives it a new lease on life. I may plug the ends of the rim on the top with some plastic to hopefully prevent new cracks from forming, and I think it would benefit from screening on the corners that are left so it give you something to grab on to.

17 hours ago, Space Voyager said:

Plastic bonding really is a problem, any ammount of oil will prevent it (the temperatures are not high enough to burn it off). I guess that is why people use the wire armature across the seam. 

I don't think oils were the cause of the crack in this case. Everything was clean. I'm guessing it was just a matter of not heating the two plastics up to a high enough temperature in order to create a good bond between them. I also made the mistake of lifting the can by the "fixed" rim with a partially filled can and that probably was too much weight for the plastic to handle. Old habits die hard.

As for the round garbage cans, they dried perfectly. I put them out in the sun today to "bake" the finish and then put the fan on them again to hopefully draw out any volatiles. Sanded them down today so they are almost ready for the final coat. I did notice that I missed a crack on one of them, so I think I need to rescrape the area, weld it and prime it.

Well on to some painting. Back to the east wall of the building, this time right above the areas I did last year. There was some bricks where the paint was failing so I had to scrape, wire brush and dust off the bad areas:

Needs to be caulked and primed yet, but I want to get a bigger area ready so I can be more efficient. The one good thing I noticed so far is that nothing needs tuck pointing which means I can breeze right through. Hopefully.

- Zombie

Ah, the east wall - or, as one might say, The Great Wall.

No shortage of features and little wrinkles on that venerable old face. May the caulking incantations begin then! 

I had a little time the other day to mess around with those cracks in the round garbage cans. Yes, there were multiple cracks I found. Thanks to the polyurethane which made them visible. Got those areas sanded and welded up:

And of course, I had to put a coat of primer on those spots too:

There was some paint that chipped off the can on the left, so I scraped that down to the plastic and primed that too. The cans were already sanded so now I just have to out another coat of paint on them and then it should be done.

Worked a bit more on the east wall too. Did about 18 feet worth - scraped, wire brushed and dusted off:

Apologies, it was late in the day and the sun was reflecting off the neighbor's windows on to the wall. And the crack on the left was a real bear to get clean:

That was a good stopping point anyway. Now for the next section!

- Zombie

It's curious to see how different light refraction too can help reveal that which previously appeared to be but unremarkable aspects of a surface, Zombie. So, polyurethane modeling is a thing now. 

Regarding The Wall, conquer it you shall, one foot at a time. It knows full well you can not be bricked, every seam seen to; big or small, all things you're keen to realign on that bright road leading to a good prime!

The other day I was able to do some more scraping on the east wall. I estimate another 16 feet so it's at least some progress:

Yup, more reflections again. There's a section above the window where some of the mortar was crumbling so I got out the cold chisel and widened the joints:

I still have some really old mortar mix somewhere, but I was worried it wouldn't set so I purchased another bag on Saturday just to make sure. Suppose I could slowly start to prime some of the scraped areas now that there's a good area ready. And caulking, can't forget about that. As a plus, I have plenty of caulk available.

On Thursday I was using the leaf blower to blow some leaves from the sidewalk into the street for pickup and suddenly got a sharp pain in my shoulder. Didn't know what that was so I kept going. Then there was a sharp pain on my right leg. And another pain on my arm. I brushed the area with my hand and hit something. It was a hornet. And when I looked up I was getting swarmed so I took off running. Think I was stung about 6-8 times in total which wasn't fun. By the next day the pain was gone, but the areas were very itchy.

Turns out there's a hornet nest under the sidewalk by one of the trees. I tried flooding the area with soapy water which didn't seem to do much. Tried "Brakleen" (brake parts cleaner) but that didn't seem to do much either. Had just a spritz of hornet and wasp killer spray left and that did significantly reduce the activity. But there were still some hornets flying around there on Saturday so I picked up a couple more cans of the spray. When I left, I didn't see anything going in or coming out anymore so maybe I got all of them. Will check on Monday to make sure.

- Zombie

You're performing a good wall sweep, Zombie, undaunted, and going deeper whenever the need so arises. Do remain vigilant, as I can already spot hints of more potential trouble areas ahead.

And speaking of troublesome, hot damn! - messing with a hornet's nest is an activity that needs little cautioning, as cautioned you already were, stingingly, in swift fashion.

Well, you know what they say, if all else eventually fails, turn up the heat and... kill it with fire!! 

On 10/6/2025 at 5:30 AM, Thorondor said:

Well, you know what they say, if all else eventually fails, turn up the heat and... kill it with fire!! 

I hesitate to use fire in this case as the nest is underground and I may accidentally catch the roots of the tree on fire. Underground fires are a real bear to deal with if they get out of hand. Granted, this is under a sidewalk and it just rained so it would probably be fine. Nah, to be safe I'll probably use expanding foam to fill the void, then mortar the crack full. I didn't see any more hornets going in or coming out on Saturday and Monday so I think the nest is dead now.

Had some time yesterday to put another coat of blue paint on the rolling cart again:

Not a very good pic, I'll admit. When it dries I'll roll it out into the sun for the big reveal. This is the final coat, so I can finally cross this off the list.

I painted the threshold with another coat of polyurethane on Saturday morning. Didn't bother with using the stuff with the sand in it already - I just oped for sprinkling on some sand into the wet paint by hand. Seems like it's plenty rough now:

This should be good enough too, unless I feel like it needs another coat.

Was watching some more plastic welding videos this weekend and decided that the buckets that I plastic welded already would benefit from screening over the weld. So I did a bunch of them:

Still have some more bigger black buckets that need screening. Took a pic of one that I'll need to smooth out some more after melting in the screening:

I figured the screening would probably be necessary since the buckets take a real beating sometimes - and I don't feel like fixing a bunch of them when it's busy.

- Zombie

And here the cart is in all it's glory:

Smelled and felt dry, but I decided to roll it into the greenhouse to "outgas" overnight. It was nice and toasty in there which will hopefully "bake" the finish on there. I felt 3 coats of paint were plenty since there's also primer and touch-up paint on areas too. Mark this off the list, time to move to something else, like the greenhouse again. I have a few spots I need to touch up on the tables in there, then it's ready for winter.

- Zombie

Airspace cleared. No-fly zone enforcement confirmed, Sir! 

Heavenly too is how I find the cart delivery. Incomparably better now you've given it the regal three coatings treatment. 

You're always intent on going the extra mile, which is the case also with the "sandy" threshold. Finished with aplomb.

And, for peace of mind, nothing like a good bucket screening bonanza, affording extra resilience gains.

Just remember not to skimp on leak testing either - the welding process itself involves surface forces, and in physics you know every action begets a reaction...

I made some time on Wednesday to prime all the areas I scraped on the east wall:

And on Thursday it was another "caulkpocalypse":

Again, apologies for the reflections. Here's what that long crack looked like all filled up:

I actually caulked everything up to the window and used up a full tube plus a bit more. I'll brush the caulk/primed areas with one coat of base color so that the color doesn't show in the final coat. But, there's more scraping, priming and caulking necessary - including tuck pointing.

As a refresher, this is what the roof of the small garage looked like one year ago:

Finally got bossman to get the roof of the thing fixed. The crew started Saturday morning by tearing off the old crumbling roofing tar and tar paper. Didn't take them too long to do that, remove the nails, sweep the decking and start to install new 4x8 foot sheets of decking:

Apologies, forgot to open the door. But you can see they have just under half complete. After the new decking was installed, they swept it off again and used a leaf blower to get rid of anything the broom missed. With a clean roof, they hauled up the big roll of rubber membrane, unrolled it and adjusted it to have the correct overlap. Then it was just a matter of pulling back half the membrane and rolling on a coat of adhesive on both the rubber and the decking. Here it is drying:

After this set, they rolled the membrane back, pushed it down, and it was good to go. Obviously, they did the same steps for the other half except they had to contend with attaching it to the wall. I'll take some pics tomorrow of the final result. So happy I will not have to go up there and patch again!

- Zombie

This is the very definition of a marked progress, Zombie. 

It kind of makes one feel for those specialists that recover ancient monuments. They not only have to make the old new again, they must do so with painstaking attention to detail and respecting historical correctness.

You can at least get away with just being... thorough.

There's no questioning how satisfying it is to see things restored though. The wall shall be conquered - praise the caulk! 

And speaking of restoration, congrats on finally getting the roof of the small garage renewed through and through. You've already got more than enough on your plate, so I'm happy for you. 

Well, this is what the roof of the small garage looked like on Monday afternoon:

The guys had just finished up putting the rubber membrane on the wall so I was happy they did that. Just in time too as it rained a little bit. Here's what the rubber looked like on the wall area:

No leaks that I could see inside. The inside of the garage smelled like adhesive so I opened up the garage door and put on a fan. The smell wasn't overpowering, but noticeable - better be safe than sorry.

On 10/13/2025 at 4:55 AM, Thorondor said:

And speaking of restoration, congrats on finally getting the roof of the small garage renewed through and through. You've already got more than enough on your plate, so I'm happy for you. 

I'm happy too, no more crawling up on the roof every few months to patch suspect areas. With that said though, it's been a real headache getting the inside all cleaned up. Since Monday I've been out in the garage for a couple hours each day sweeping up the mess. When the crew was sweeping/blowing the roof off getting it ready for the fiberboard decking, all the dust, some roofing nails, small pieces of hardened tar and sawdust filtered through the cracks and landed on everything inside. I cleaned off part of a shelf today and did some consolidating and then swept the floor and got another good sized pile:

You may be able to see the pile just above the green watering can. Looks good, ready to put stuff away again, right? Oh no, up next is to take the stuff out from underneath the shelves and put that off to the side (after dusting it all off). Done now? Nope. After that it's a quick sweep to get the majority of the junk, then I'm going to take the leaf blower and blow the roof and the rafters to hopefully loosen any more of the stuff to fall down to the ground. After that is complete is when I'll start to put stuff away again. Kinda doing a bottom up approach instead of a top down because otherwise I'd be brushing tons of stuff off everything.

This is what the middle and back of the garage looks like:

The back section has been swept out already and I cleaned off the middle tables in order to stack stuff on there, out of the way. I'm going to concentrate on the front part of the garage first - getting that all blown off and swept up and things put away, for the simple fact that the spaces between the decking boards in that section were really close together which I'm hoping means less of a mess. As you get to the back of the garage, the spaces are wider which means more of a cleanup. Actually, this isn't such a bad thing as it gives me an excuse to clean house, make some hard decisions and toss stuff out that isn't being used, or will never be used etc. Wish me luck, this is going to be a real project!

- Zombie