The Taming Of The Screw Read online

  The Taming Of The Screw

  Dave Barry

  Dave Barry.

  The Taming Of The Screw

  Several million homeowners’ problems sidestepped

  Introduction

  Sincere statement of thanks from the author

  I sincerely thank you for purchasing this do-it-yourself book, instead of one of the thousands of other, much better ones. I want to assure you that there is not a single project in this book that I would not have considered doing myself if I hadn’t been so busy writing a do-it-yourself book.

  Why You Need This Book

  If you’re like most homeowners, you’re afraid that many repairs around your home are too difficult to tackle. So when your furnace explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it. The “professional” arrives in a truck with lettering on the sides and deposits two assistants whose combined IQ’s would still be a two-digit number, and they spend the better part of a week in your basement whacking objects at random with heavy wrenches, after which the “professional” returns and gives you a bill for slightly more money than it would cost you to run a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

  And that’s why you’ve decided to start doing things yourself. You figure, “If those bozos can fix my furnace, then so can I. How difficult can it be?”

  Very difficult. In fact, most home projects are impossible, which is why you should do them yourself. There is no point in paying other people to screw things up when you can easily screw them up yourself for far less money. This book can help you.

  How To Use This Book

  The best way to use this book is to place it on a coffee table so that your guests can place their drinks on it. Or, if you’d like to attempt a home repair project, you can look up the appropriate chapter. For example, if you want to fix a plumbing problem, you’d look up Chapter 4, “Plumbing.” Or Chapter 8, “Masonry.” It won’t make much difference.

  Chapter 1. Tools: Why They Want To Injure You, And How To Thwart Them

  Basically, a tool is an object that enables you to take advantage of the laws of physics and mechanics in such a way that you can seriously injure yourself. Today, people tend to take tools for granted. If you’re ever walking down the street and you notice some people who look particularly smug, the odds are that they are taking tools for granted. If I were you, I’d walk right up and smack them in the face.

  We ought to be very grateful that we have tools. Millions of years ago people did not have them, and home projects were extremely difficult. For example, when a primitive person wanted to put up paneling, he had to drive the little paneling nails into the cave wall with his bare fist, so generally the paneling wound up getting spattered with primitive blood, which isn’t really all that bad when you consider how ugly paneling is to begin with.

  Special Cautionary Procedure for Those of You Who Choose to Disregard My Advice and Use a Power Saw, You Fools

  1. With the saw off and all the power in the house off and the power lines completely detached from the house, place the piece of wood you want to cut near the saw.

  2. Leave the room and have the power turned back on. (WARNING: Never attempt to turn on the power yourself! Have one of your children do it.)

  3. Have the power turned back off and peek into the room, wearing industrial goggles. If you see any signs of movement from the saw, fire a few rounds at it from a small-caliber revolver, such as you might use to unclog a toilet (see Chapter 4, “Plumbing”). If you see no signs of movement, have one of your remaining children retrieve the piece of wood.

  The three major kinds of tools

  Tools for hitting things to make them loose or to tighten up or jar their many complex, sophisticated electrical parts in such a manner that theyfunction perfectly. These are your hammers, maces, bludgeons, and truncheons. Tools that, if dropped properly, can penetrate yourfoot. Awls. Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far greater than the value of any project that could possibly result. Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tool that uses any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.

  How to get a complete home tool set for under four dollars

  Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of Raisinets and malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon administration. In either the Hardware or Housewares department, you’ll find an item imported from an obscure oriental country and described as “Nine Tools in One,” consisting of a little handle with interchangeable ends representing inscrutable oriental notions of tools that Americans might use around the home. Buy it. This is the kind of tool set professionals use; not only is it inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the so-called quality tool sets: The handle will actually break right off if you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to direct sunlight.

  WARNING: Do not be misled by advertisements for so-called tool sets allegedly containing large numbers of tools. These are frauds! Oh, sure, you get a lot of tools, but most of them are the same kind! For example, you’ll get 127 wrenches, and the only difference is that one will be maybe an eighth of an inch bigger than another. Big deal.

  Chapter 2.Wood: If God Had Wanted Us To Use It, He Wouldn’t Have Made Plastic

  Wood has been the preferred building material for thousands of years, because it is one of the few materials that will rot as well as burn. Basically, there are two kinds of wood: hardwoods such as oak and walnut, which are used by skilled craftsmen to make furniture that you cannot afford; and softwoods such as fir, spruce, and tripe, which are actually members of the crabgrass family and are more suitable to the kinds of projects that an incompetent such as yourself will be doing.

  Dealing With Lumberyards

  Lumberyards are dangerous and hostile places, inhabited by suspicious men who wear bib overalls and spit a lot and duck behind piles of boards as soon as they see a homeowner coming. These men have lived in the lumberyard since childhood. It is the only home they know. At night, they just pull sheets of plywood over themselves and go to sleep. They don’t like intruders, especially homeowners such as yourself who are buying wood for some idiot home project, and they will try any crafty ruse to drive you away. For example, all their wood measurements are lies. A so-called two-by-four is not two anythings by four anythings, and so on. There is no way you can possibly know what size of wood you’re getting.

  Another common trick among the lumbermen is to call things by silly names, such as “soffit.” They dream these names up at night while they’re lying under their sheets of plywood, and they use them to make you feel stupid when you try to order your wood.

  YOU: Hi. I’d like two eight-foot two-by-fours, please.

  LUMBERMAN: What are they for?

  YOU: What?

  LUMBERMAN: Are they for joists? Headers? Beams? Rafters? Footers? Sills? Framing? Tenons? Partitions? Templates? Easements? Debentures? Just what is it you want, mister?

  YOU: Uh, well, ah, maybe I better go home and recheck my measurements.

  The Home Center: An Alternative To The Lumberyard? NO.

  Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with it, let’s build a home center. And before long home centers were springing up, like herpes, all over the United States.

  Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who’s willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location. Notice I say “shop for,” as o
pposed to “obtain.” This is the major drawback of home centers: They are always out of everything except artificial Christmas trees. The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise, because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every object—every board, washer, nail, and screw—in the entire store. Once they’ve applied a round of stickers, they immediately set out to apply a new set, with slightly higher prices, to the same merchandise. This leaves them no time to learn about the products they sell, so it is utterly futile to ask them for help.

  Let’s say a piece of your toilet breaks, so you remove the broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if they carry replacements. The employee, who has never in his life even seen the inside of a toilet, will peer at the broken part in very much the same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at an electronic calculator, then say, “We’re expecting a shipment of these sometime around the middle of next week.”

  So the bottom line is that home centers are even worse than lumberyards as a source for lumber. The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put into boxes.

  Chapter 3. Electricity: You Can Safely Do Your Own Wiring, Most Likely

  Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking. Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American homes is 110 volts per hour. This is very fast. In the time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows why it would want to.

  The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current, lightning, static, and European. Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while, then goes the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires.

  Your Home Electrical System

  Your home electrical system is basically a bunch of wires that bring electricity into your home and take it back out before it has a chance to kill you. This is called a “circuit.” The most common home electrical problem is when the circuit is broken by a “circuit breaker”; this causes the electricity to back up in one of the wires until it bursts out of an outlet in the form of sparks, which can damage your carpet. The best way to avoid broken circuits is to change your fuses regularly.

  Another common problem is that the lights flicker. This sometimes means that your electrical system is inadequate, but more often it means that your home is possessed by demons, in which case you’ll need to get a caulking gun and some caulking (see Chapter 6, “Heating and Cooling,” for more on getting rid of demons with caulking.) If you’re not sure whether your house is possessed, see The Amityville Horror, a fine documentary film based on an actual book. Or call in a licensed electrician, who is trained to spot the signs of demonic possession, such as blood coming down the stairs, enormous cats on the dinette table, etc.

  How To Change A Fuse

  You should change your fuses every six months or 200,000 amperes, whichever comes first. Here’s how:

  1. Go down to the basement, which should be located beneath the first floor, and find the gray box with all kinds of wires leading to it and little stickers on it saying things like “CAUTION: 80 SKILLION WATTS.”

  2. Standing about 15 feet away, toss a small domestic animal toward the box and note whether it (a) falls to the floor unscathed or (b) is reduced to

  a lump of carbon by a gigantic bolt of electricity.

  3. In the event of (b), call an experienced electrician without dependents and have him replace your fuses. In the event of (a), open the box and remove the old fuses by unscrewing them or whacking at them with a

  1/8-inch steel chisel, and replace them with new fuses, which can be obtained wherever new fuses are sold. Then simply close the box and continue to lead a normal life.

  How to repair a broken electrical appliance

  1. The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing the warranty expiration date with a 3’/16-inch felt-tipped marker.

  2. If this fails, take the appliance to the basement and leave it there for several months, on the theory that (a) it will get lonely and want to work again so it can be up in the kitchen with all the other appliances, or (b) we’ll have a nuclear war, and you won’t have any uses for appliances any more because you’ll be too busy defending your beef jerky and water from your neighbors, or (c) you’ll develop a horrible, lingering disease, and people will feel sorry for you and give you new appliances.

  3. If, after several months, the appliance still doesn’t work, locate the motor or some other electronic part and whap it briskly with a 58-ounce tire iron. This technique is particularly effective with your modern personal home electronic computers, which are smart enough to not want to be struck by blunt instruments. Toasters are much, much stupider—some of them cannot perform even simple addition—and often must be whapped for hours before coming around.

  Harness the power of nature to generate electricity for only pennies a day, not counting parts and labor

  If you’re tired of paying high electricity bills, and you live in an area that has a great deal of nature, you should definitely consider generating your own electricity via one of the extremely ecological methods described below. Then you should go back to whatever you were doing.

  WIND POWER

  Wind, which is imported into the United States from Canada in the form of cold air masses, can be used to turn the blades of a windmill, which in turn can generate electric power. At least that’s what Popular Mechanics is always claiming. The big problem is that, because of labor problems, Canada is an unreliable source of wind. So what you need is a wind collection device, such as the Goodyear blimp, to store the wind for use during times of Canadian labor unrest.

  SEA POWER

  The sea is potentially a source of vast amounts of electrical energy, as well as haddock. Scientists predict that some day, possibly as early as next week, whole cities will be powered by the sea. The key will be gigantic undersea electric turbines, whose blades will be turned by the relentless, powerful motion of lobsters walking along the sea bed. If you live near the sea and own a gigantic electric turbine, you can harness this power today. The trick is to make sure your turbine is parallel with the prevailing lobster motion.

  ATOMIC POWER

  At one time atomic power was considered difficult to handle, but these days just about every dirtball little country has it, and I see no reason why you shouldn’t, too. You’ll need an atomic reactor. This is a good time to buy one: Most of your electric companies are trying to unload their reactors because they might have this defect wherein they heat up and go all the way through the earth and destroy Communist China, so you can probably pick one up for a song. Don’t worry about the Communist Chinese. They’re not losing any sleep over you, believe me.

  Chapter 4. Plumbing: Troubleshooting Your Plumbing With A Loaded Sidearm

  You should worry incessantly about your plumbing. No doubt you have heard the tragic story of the family who went away on vacation, unaware that one of their pipes had sprung a small leak. By the time they returned, the leak had destroyed the home and all their possessions, forcing them to collect $175,000 from the insurance company and use the money to go to Hawaii and buy a small, chic restaurant that became fabulously successful, so now all they do is lie around on the beach sipping tropical rum drinks.

  This needless tragedy would never have occurred if this family had taken more of an interest in its plumbing. Plumbing is one of the easiest of do-it-yourself activities, requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm into a clogged toilet after a diseased houseguest has used it. In fact, you can solve many home plumbing problems, such as
an annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the radio. But before we get into any specific plumbing techniques, let’s look at how plumbing works.

  A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system, except that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires, it has pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets and toilets. So the truth is that your plumbing system is nothing at all like your electrical system, which is good, because electricity can kill you.

  The major problem with plumbing systems is that they leak. To understand why, imagine that you’re on a cross-country bus trip and you have drunk three six-packs of beer single-handedly and you really, really have to go to the bathroom, only the bus doesn’t have a bathroom and the driver refuses to stop until he gets to Elkhart, Indiana, which is 280 miles away. That is how your home plumbing system feels all the time. It sits there filled with water, day in and day out, until after a while all it can think about is leaking.

  The key to preventing leaks is proper maintenance. At least once a year (and more often if you have a small brain) you should go around and poke at the various elements of your plumbing system with the end of a cane. If you see anything the least bit suspicious, make a note of it in a spiral notebook. This routine maintenance program will prevent many plumbing headaches. And if anything does go wrong, don’t be afraid to tackle it yourself. Remember: The only difference between you and an experienced master plumber is that he is an experienced master plumber, whereas you are not.