So I've been running a small cutter suction dredge on a pond job near Denton for about six months now. I always thought the pump needed to be primed just once at startup and then you're good. Last Tuesday I heard this weird grinding noise and the discharge rate dropped way off. I shut everything down and checked the suction line and there was this massive air pocket. Turns out I had been losing prime slowly the whole time because I never cracked the vent valve after the first few minutes. My foreman walked over and asked if I even bothered reading the manual page on re-priming. Felt pretty dumb standing there with mud all over my boots. Has anyone else had a similar brain fart with pump suction maintenance?
I had this one PS4 where the HDMI port was loose but not totally busted, and my usual trick of just applying more solder wasn't cutting it. After about 3 tries, I tried using a tiny dab of epoxy (the kind that sets in 5 minutes) around the back of the port pins before soldering. It held everything in place perfectly on a repair I did for a guy in Toledo. Has anyone else tried this kind of reinforcement trick for HDMI ports?
I kept getting jagged edges on my planks until a guy at a supply house in Phoenix told me to score the bottom side first with a hook knife before snapping. Has anyone else tried this or got a better way to avoid those chips?
I had this living room in Phoenix where the customer wanted a tight stretch on some 80 ounce carpet. I usually use my old Roberts with the metal head but I grabbed my buddy's Crain with the rubber grip to compare. The Roberts felt like it was bouncing off the pad and I kept having to readjust every two feet. The Crain just grabbed the carpet smooth and I did the whole 12x15 room in maybe 20 minutes without going back to fix anything. I think the extra weight and the way the Crain's teeth bite makes a huge difference on thicker carpets. Has anyone else noticed a big gap between brands on the dense stuff or is it just in my head?
Spent all Sunday night tracking down why my forum's sidebar was shoved to the bottom. Turned out I forgot one closing div tag in a nested block of CSS. 4 hours of staring at code for one stupid character. Has anyone else wasted a whole evening on a typo like this?
I had to choose between spending my budget on a good moisture meter or sending samples for carbon dating on a site near Tucson. I picked the moisture meter because the soil was weird and I thought it would save time. Ended up finding a layer of clay that was hiding a storage pit with broken pottery from around 900 AD. The carbon dating would have told me the age but the moisture test showed me where to dig. Got the dates later from a university lab for cheap but the pottery was already out of context. Anyone else skip the fancy tests and just go with ground truth on a site?
I been doing 37.5 degrees on my bevels for years like I was taught. Last month I had a job out in Bakersfield on a water storage tank and decided to try 30 degrees just to see what would happen. The fit-up was actually way tighter and I didn't have to run as many passes to fill it in. But then the inspector flagged it because the included angle was too narrow per the spec. So I had to grind it back out and redo it. Learned that sometimes what you think is a shortcut is really just a different way of doing things, but you gotta check the print first. Any of you guys try different angles and get away with it?
Everyone at the shop keeps telling me to swap it for something newer, but I just don't see the point. That 4.6 liter V8 still runs smooth as glass and I've only done basic maintenance since day one. Has anyone else kept a truck running way past what people call its life?
I was hemming a display dress behind my booth when the bobbin thread started looping up top, making a mess of the fabric. I had to apologize to three customers while I took the machine apart right there and found a tiny knot of thread wrapped around the tension disk. Has anyone else had this happen and found a quick fix to avoid stopping mid-event?
I used to only post my finished digital pieces with clean white backgrounds, thinking that's how you get noticed. But this artist I met at a coffee shop downtown said she always shows her process shots because people connect more with the messy middle. She had like 3 layers of sketches and color tests before the final piece. Now I'm wondering if I've been hiding the wrong parts of my art on Instagram.