Vise resident

My brother was kind enough to give me a woodworking vise for my birthday. In related news, my dad gave me a beefy old vise from his basement the next day (which was Christmas). As a result, there are now two heavy-duty vises residing in our basement.

The vise from my brother arrived first, so I mounted it up first. My dad brought the other vise over a few days later; with the arrival of some bolts from McMaster-Carr, I now have enough clamping force for three men.

Thanks, family!

Counterbores to keep the bolt heads below the table surface

One vise mounted

Enough vises to conquer Afghanistan

The bench with both vises (and a pile of pallets turned into firewood)

Measuring insulation with an IR camera

I got my hands on a thermal imaging camera for a few hours recently and took a look around the house to see what I could learn. The camera detects infrared radiation, which is proportional to surface temperature. When you're inside a house in the winter, the poorly insulated bits look blue, because they're colder. From the outside, the poorly insulated parts look red, because they're hotter than the surroundings. (This is assuming you have the camera set to adjust the spectrum to cover the temperatures in the field of view. The camera I was using, a Flir i60, could either adjust automatically or stay fixed so you could compare temperatures across multiple pictures.)

I learned some interesting stuff. The gables of our attic appear to be completely uninsulated. There is one stud bay missing insulation next to our front stairs. I hadn't noticed it, but once I knew to check, I could feel the temperature change with my hand.

Our windows are generally our most poorly insulating surface, but in the picture below, you can see the panels in the front door are a close second. (The large box of fire is a radiator.)

I was thinking I should insulate the garage roof, but the thermal camera revealed that the door was leaking more heat.

I had noticed that our cats preferred lounging in certains parts of our kitchen floor, but I hadn't noticed the large cold stripe down the middle.

Here, you can see that there are two rooms we aren't heating-- their windows are blue.

Hard Times athletics

(See my previous post for the background to this post.)

There aren't many activities in our modern society where it makes economic sense for me to engage in the kind of physical labor that will keep me healthy, but there are a few. From what I can tell, they tend to cluster at the margins of fossil fuel consumption. I'll explain what I mean by that shortly.

The first good example I've come up with involves the woodstove we had installed recently. (Barry John Chimney did a great job, by the way.) We can buy a cord of wood for around $250, but I can collect pallets from around Somerville pretty easily as well. We get some pallets at work, but I can also pick up pallets around Davis Square; I guess they're a waste stream diffuse and intermittent enough that the only collectors are amateurs such as myself.

Before I can burn the pallets, I have to cut them up. I'm not strong enough to break them into 13" lengths without the help of steel, at least stone, tools. Cutting them up with only a handsaw is possible, but grueling. A better combination for casualties of the modern workplace like me is to use a circular saw with the blade set to cut just shy of the full depth of the cross planks. If you cut all the way through, the planks sag and bind the blade. Once the planks are 95% cut, you can stomp on them, and then cut up the remaining stringers wih a handsaw. Between the two types of sawing, the stomping, and the lugging of pallets, it's a fair bit of work.

The pattern I've noticed is that I can substitute labor for fossil fuels at margins of our consumption. Heating our house entirely with wood would take a lot of effort; I've spent enough time with a splitting maul (10 hours, maybe) to know that I don't want to do it all winter. But, dragging home some pallets and cutting them up piecemeal in the basement is pretty satisfying.

One of the other large fossil fuel sinks in our lives is commuting. When I worked out in Lexington, I commuted 22 miles a day on a bike, rain or shine, all winter long. But, as we've moved and I've changed jobs, I switched to biking 16 miles per day, then 5 miles on foot. (Last year, we moved just a few blocks from my office, so I had to take up running, but you won't hear me complaining about that.)

I've been casting about for a name for these activities, and Hard Times Athletics is the best I can do.

(If you called it Fake Athletics for the Hard Times, or FAHT, you could say, "Have you been FAHTing in the basement again? It smells terrible down there." In Boston, that's funny.)

Below are some snapshots of my Hard Times gymnasium. Further suggestions of new Hard Times Athletics events are welcome in the comments.

The input

The tools of transformation

The output

Efficiency, exercise, and the modern condition

Shortly after we bought our house, with its 500 ft² lawn, one of my colleagues was kind enough to give me a vintage reel mower. It weighs 48 pounds. It was manufactured shortly after 1918, as dated by the patent on the cast handle, which I believe refers to this patent. It's very similar, but not quite identical, to this mower.

A modern reel mower of similar dimensions, like the Brill Razorcut, weighs around half as much. While I haven't actually used one, I imagine that it is substantially easier to push than my lovely behemoth. This brings us to the question of what I'm really trying to accomplish by mowing the lawn. Would it be better or worse if mowing the lawn were easier?

Here are my lawn-mowing goals: I want the grass to be uniformly short across the extents of the lawn. I want to avoid loud machinery, burning petrochemicals, and smelling like gas. I definitely want to avoid cutting my feet or otherwise hurting myself. If it's an unpleasant task, I'd like it to be quick.

At the same time that I'm looking for the best solution to that problem, I'm also trying to solve a larger problem, one endemic to the modern condition. As an educated American engineer, I spend most of my waking hours sitting at a desk, either manipulating a computer, talking to other engineers, or using a pencil. Perhaps 20% of my working time is spent on light physical work-- fabricating, assembling, or adjusting equipment. A very small fraction of my time-- less than 1%-- involves heavy work, like moving equipment or using hand tools. I see no reason that these divisions would change in future, unless I were to do still less manual labor.

Unfortunately, as a human, I die early if I don't live vigorously enough. We don't know the exact trade-off yet, but the data from the Framingham Heart Study, a longitudinal study of exercise and heart disease started in 1948, suggests that spending around 1 year of your life exercising (split into 30-minute daily stints) will extend your life by around 3.5 years, particularly if you're a good demographic match for Framingham, MA. Given that I grew up in a suburban Massachusetts town near route 495 much like Framingham, and I now live outside Boston, it's likely a great predictor for me.

My estimate of 1 year of exercise for 4 years more life is based on an analysis by Jonker, et al of the Framingham data in the journal Diabetes Care, put out by the American Diabetes Association. 2.25 hours of exercise per week, or 117 hours per year, puts you in their "high activity" group. That's about 8775 hours over a 75 year lifetime; there are 8760 hours in a year.

Since I don't have a time machine yet, I'm faced with the task of figuring out how to invest 2.25 hours per week in exercise, knowing that I'm likely to get a 4x return on the investment. (Maybe it's only a 3x return if I count the time I spend before or after exercise, like putting on sneakers or taking a shower. Still that's a huge return, especially given that it's paid in life, rather than in American dollars, which cannot be redeemed for life.)

So then the question is what goals I can accomplish using the 2.5 hours of vigorous activity I'd like to insert into my week. There are a few obvious candidates: shoveling snow in the winter and mowing the lawn in the summer. Strangely, due to the twisted incentives of the modern condition, I'd rather (or might as well) mow the lawn with a gargantuan, cast iron lawn mower than a light, nimble piece of German engineering. Our neighbors have been snowblowing our sidewalk as a friendly gesture, and I've found myself thinking, "But . . . you're taking away the only 30 minutes I've got in the winter where engaging myself in physical labor actually makes sense, and you're doing it with a two-stroke gas engine."

I am, however, not without recourse. I'm not lunkheaded enough to ask my neighbors not to snowblow our sidewalk, but this idea comes close. It's late, so the details will be saved for the next post.