Tim vs the Slow Drain
by Tim Faircloth on Jun 22, 2009, 1:43 pm
Sorry, folks. I forgot to take before and after shots and I’m not about to crawl under there again just to take pictures. Anyway, here’s my report.
For this project I used:
Tools:
- 1 “general metal” hacksaw blade
- 1 14” pipe wrench (can’t believe I didn’t have one)
- 1 wood rasp
Expendables:
- 1 can of “all-purpose cement”
- 1 5-foot length of 1.5” PVC
- 1 2-foot length of 2” PVC
- 1 1.5” PVC T-joint
- 1 1.5” PVC cleanout plug
- 1 1.5” PVC slip joint
- 1 1.5” PVC male thread adapter (unused)
- 1 1.5” to 2” rubber junction
- 1 2” to 3” rubber junction
Tools cost: about $20
Expendables cost: about $30
Total cost: about $50
Time cost: about 5 hours
Much better than paying a plumber about $100/hour to do it for me.
I thought I’d be able to join the pvc to the cast iron with male thread adapter, but when I tried, the adapter got stripped out in the iron threads and leaked like a sieve. Instead I joined two rubber adapters with about 3 inches of 2” PVC and slipped the 3” side over the cast iron junction, which was a pain in the ass because cast iron pipes have a bulges where they join with other pipes. I had to do some fenagling with my flathead screwdriver to get it over that bulge.
The rest of the job went well, and I even put a cleanout plug where there used to be just a 90 degree bend so if the damned thing gets clogged up again I can just snake it or hose it out. Yes, a Y-connector may have been better (so I don’t have to worry about getting horribly wet when I hose it out), but I can always replace the cleanout plug with a threaded Y-connector later if I need to.
Things I’ve learned:
- All-purpose cement sets up fast — within seconds — except when the surfaces are wet and/or dirty, but will set even then in a few minutes.
- The bond that the cement creates is very strong. If you took a pipe wrench to it, you’d probably break the PVC before the cement gave way.
- If you can deal with spiders, dirt, and enclosed spaces, a house’s crawlspace can actually be a decent place to work in the summer because it’s cool and quiet. Also, no one can hear the stream of foul language that explodes from your mouth when you realize you have to forgot a tool.
- PVC is a lot easier to work with than copper, galvanized steel, or cast iron. At one point I tried to cut the iron pipe with my hacksaw; after about twenty minutes of cutting I looked at my progress and realized I had barely cut through a millimeter of rust.
All in all, not that difficult a task as far as home improvement goes. My next trick will be to replace the 3” cast iron pipe with PVC.
Tim vs. The Slow Drain
by Tim Faircloth on Jun 20, 2009, 9:46 pm
In recent days, my kitchen sink has become incredibly slow… sometimes taking several hours to drain properly. In truth, it’s never been the fastest drain in the east, but usually I could cure it with some Liquid Plumber or Draino.
However, no amount of chemicals would fix this issue (trust me, I tried them all), so I decided to do a little home plumbing.
After checking the pipes directly under the sink (which I deemed to be perfectly clean except for a bit of sediment in the trap), I decided the trouble was deeper. I went to Lowes and got a drain snake. After a frustrating hour of snaking, I decided it was time to go under the house and try my hand at some real plumbing. Here’s what my drain structure looks like (or at least used to look like) under the house:
Obviously, that picture wasn’t taken from under my house, but I’ll explain. The concrete slab represents “under my house” and the area with the dead grass represents “just visible above the floor under my sink”. The copper pipe, as you can see, pokes up to the plumbing under my sink, extends down to a 90 degree bend (I had to hacksaw the pipe to get it out). The end of the copper pipe was pushed into the big end of the steel (yes, steel) pipe and duck taped so it supposedly wouldn’t leak (seriously, I found the cardboard center of a duc tape roll under there). The small end of the pipe was threaded into a large cast iron pipe (not pictured).
The duck tape “seal” was permeated with all kinds of rust (from both the copper and the obviously-not-stainless steel), and I figured that had to be the problem… oxides mixed and mashed inside the pipe and had congealed to one major clog.
To make a long story short (too late!) I cut it all out and found the problem. Here’s the end of the copper pipe that was duct taped to the steel pipe:
eeeeewwwww.
You can see where my snake punched a hole through the gunk at the bottom of the pipe. Here’s the big end of the steel pipe that was duct taped to the copper pipe:
EEEEEwwwww!
That picture was taken after my attempts to dig out some of the gunk. This picture of the other end of the pipe (which connected to the cast iron) is closer to what I saw before all that effort:
EEEEEWWWWW!!!
The clog actually continues on down the iron pipe a few inches, but I know it’s fairly clear past the clothes washer drain junction, so it can’t be too far, so I should be able to clear it out with the snake.
Tomorrow I plan to make some friends in the plumbing department at Lowes and replace all this myself with PVC drainpipe. If all goes well you may get to see it when it’s put in place and working.
To Be Continued
I am convinced...
by Tim Faircloth on Jun 17, 2009, 9:54 am
…that pool (the game with the pocketed table and balls and sticks) was invented by men who wanted to see drunk girls in low-cut tops and tight jeans (or short skirts) bend over a waist-high table.
That is all.
Superman Flies (part 2)
by Tim Faircloth on Jun 8, 2009, 4:56 pm
This weekend Joel and I traveled to St. Mary’s, GA to start our career of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. In spite of rain and cloud cover most of the time, I managed to get in three jumps, leaving four jumps until I can go solo (right now I jump out with an instructor).
I only landed incorrectly once (had to roll a few times), but I’ve got more bruises from the rig than I do from rolling across the ground. Those leg straps are rough.
I’ll post pictures soon.
The Kember Identity
by Tim Faircloth on May 6, 2009, 2:24 pm
Today in my travels, I ran across a page concerning The Kember Identity. In short, this guy (Elliot Kember) is looking for a 32-character hexadecimal string that that is the same as that string’s MD5 sum (he does a better job of explaining it).
The issue he’s running across is that there are 16^32 possible MD5 sums. That’s 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or roughly 340*10^36.
To store every possible sum, you’d need 17,592,186,044,416 YottaBytes of space. That’s 17.5 trillion times HP’s estimated data storage capacity for humans by 2013.
If one computer runs through 40,000 strings every second (approximately how fast my my machine goes, utilizing 100% of one CPU), it’ll take 269,757,076,770,150,354,724,263,228 years to get through them all.
If everyone in the world (6,790,062,216 people, according to CIA records) each used one computer to calculate 100,000 strings per second, it would still take 1,591,720,484,991,568 years — 1.5 quadrillion (1.5 million billion) years — to run through them all.
Kember’s idea is to have as many people as possible run the code, hoping somebody will get lucky and find a reversible MD5 sum in his lifetime.
Fat chance, but that doesn’t stop me from running a script on my machine that runs the task (currently I’ve gone through almost 600 million unique strings). I say help him out! Even if you don’t join his pool, it’ll be interesting to see how many people we can get in on this.