More Things to Never Do

Just a word to the wise. If you have a RAID 1 array for your C: drive in Windows, and you replace one of the hard disks that RAID reports as failed, DO NOT attach the failed disk to the same machine to find out what is wrong with it. I now know more about the Windows boot manager, the Windows Recovery Environment, disk partitions under Windows 7 and the use of the Diskpart, Bootrec, and BCDEdit tools, as well as remote editing of registry hives, than I ever wanted. It took nearly three days of searching, fiddling, booting from install disks, and trying out various tools (some of which did bad things I then had to figure out how to undo - I'm looking at you, EasyBCD) to get back to where I started from.

Pulling Your Weight

Today the youngster and I stopped in at the Harbor Freight store. Not for anything in particular, unless I saw a good deal on a bench vise, perhaps, but mainly because I'd never been before. It's an impressive collection of tools they have there, at equally impressive prices. Too bad the quality is not equally impressive. Still, I'd shop there again for things where price was the most important factor. And it's not like it's all horrible crap, most of the stuff is fairly good, and a fairly good deal at the price.

While there, I saw a winch. A hand-cranked winch. A hand-cranked winch with cable for less than twenty bucks. A hand-cranked winch with cable for less than twenty bucks that would be just dandy for a certain Secret Clubhouse application - the retractable ladder. Sold!

Let's see how it looks:





It does the job. I think I need to work on a housing, or it'll be rusted in no time.

The Secret Clubhouse

First, a disclaimer. The clubhouse is not a secret. Its name is "The Secret Clubhouse."

The youngest member of the family has been clamoring for a clubhouse for a couple of years, at least. The play fort atop the big play structure just wasn't cutting it. I suspect it started with a Berenstain Bears book, No Girls Allowed. The book describes a clubhouse built by the boys with a door and windows and intriguingly, a drawbridge to keep out the girls. Many drawings of clubhouses were made, all with drawbridges and windows. I'd regularly get asked if we could build a clubhouse "right now" and I was always putting the kid off. We had sufficient play areas, after all, but they weren't what he wanted.

Last month, I'm not entirely sure why, I agreed to build a clubhouse. Some of the reason, of course, is the recapitulation of my own childhood in what I see of my child's activities and interests. I wanted to have a clubhouse again, too.

When I was small, my dad built a succession of sandboxes for me and my siblings, but the first ones were mainly for me. There was a tractor tire to start with, and when we moved to Cody, Wyoming, Dad built the first wooden sandbox. We moved back to Boise, and Dad built a bigger sandbox, then later enlarged it. It had several sizes over the years, larger and then smaller again, but at its largest it was easily the biggest sandbox I've ever seen in a private yard, and I've only ever seen one park with a bigger sandbox. Maybe sixteen by twenty feet or thereabouts, big enough for a swingset with lots of room left over. He had the sand delivered by dump truck, taking down a fence so it could back into the back yard and drop several yards of sand in directly. There was a LOT of sand in there. On a couple of the iterations, Dad put up some 4x4 posts, with the intention of building some kind of elevated play space like a clubhouse on top. Our neighborhood was built on former farmland, and there were no mature trees that would make for a good tree house in our yard or for several blocks for that matter, so the posts were actually a pretty reasonable idea. Unfortunately, posts were as for as we got for several years. Those posts were there with nothing atop them, until they rotted at the bottom and got pulled out. Dad finally built us an entirely different sort of playhouse on a telephone pole he had installed in the back yard, which was pretty cool. That's a story for another time.

Remembering the posts, and having some spare ones when I was building the play space in my own back yard, I put up four of them in the corner, spaced about eight feet apart. I thought that corner would make a good sandbox, and I'd put up some sort of roof to keep the sun and the rain at bay. I still think it would make a good sandbox, but I decided to put the posts to another use - a Secret Clubhouse.

The first thing to do was to make a deck. Some might say I should have made a plan before I made a deck, but I figured I'd need a deck regardless, so I started with that. I've got very little experience building decks, but I helped on a couple, and it didn't seem that hard. I cut the corner poles to the same height, about five feet above the level of the wood chips in the play space, hoping to minimize the potential fractures and lawsuits. I put some boards around the outside, put joist hangers on them every 16" and hung the joists, then screwed down a bunch of cedar deck boards on top. Voila, instant deck, pretty close to 8' square.



Next, I needed a design for a clubhouse. Searching online was not especially helpful. Unlike most info on the internet that wants to be free, practically all the interesting playhouse/fort/clubhouse plans were ones that they wanted money for - all you get is a mediocre photo. So I doodled up one of my own. It was really simple, roughly a six-foot square with one corner lopped off where the door would go. Big enough for a father and son campout, basically, with a couple extra feet of deck on two sides for play. I decided on a shed roof, and a sloping height from five feet to about six and a half, so I could stand up in there without whacking my head in part of it, at least. I would frame it with 2x3 studs and use some sheet siding for the exterior. I did a little bit of calculating for the angles, and came up with a framing plan.

Next came some trips to Home Depot. I had a fair number of things on hand, but I needed the siding and the studs. I started by cutting all the siding into the shapes I needed, then cut and screwed the stud framing together for each wall, and then screwed the siding onto the framing. The walls weren't too big, and I figured I could lift each wall onto the deck by myself in a pinch. After getting them put together, I hefted them onto the deck and screwed them down and to each other. It took a few evenings to get them all put together and then installed, probably a couple of days per wall all told. While working on the walls, I got the idea to install a trap door in one corner. I didn't want to cut into the deck, and the joists were fairly close together, so it was in a wall instead of the floor. Thus the Secret Escape Hatch was born.



After getting all the walls up, I worked on the roof next, putting together a frame of 1x3s and using some corrugated plastic, thinking it would be lighter, and possibly let some light inside. That last plan didn't work out; the stuff is surprisingly opaque. On the other hand, it was a lot easier to complete on the ground and lift up on top than a roof of shingles on plywood would have been. Getting it done took a few more days. Look at that, a play house that keeps the weather out. Unless it's really windy.

Next I put up a railing, so it would be safe enough to have kids over. The youngster had taken to jumping off the edge of the deck, so I figured it was time. I put together a rope ladder, but didn't anticipate a problem that it presented. Mr. Secret Clubhouse was very concerned that he be able to keep robbers out, thus he wanted a rope ladder that he could pull up, so the robbers wouldn't be able to get in. Unfortunately, a rope ladder wants to hang toward the center of gravity of whatever it's holding up when the bottom isn't anchored. That meant that as soon as he started climbing it, his feet would swing under the deck until he was mostly hanging from the ladder, and it was almost impossible to actually transition onto the deck. We stuck with using the regular ladder for a while while I considered the problem. I put together the bottom half of a dutch door and installed it next.

At this stage of completion we decided that the Secret Clubhouse was done enough and safe enough to have some friends over for an open house. The eager boy had been enthusiastically describing his new clubhouse and its progress to his classmates for three weeks or so, and now he could show it off. Some had been understandably skeptical. We emailed some invitations for the weekend, and prepared cookies and lemonade. I think we'd invited people to come between 11 and 4, and this turned out to be a bit too long - no one came until around 1:00 in the afternoon, so we were twiddling our thumbs for a while. I used the time to work on the top half of the door and get it installed. More and more kids came with time, and by the time the last one left, I think we'd had ten or more over. It was a big hit.

After the open house, I had an idea for a "drawbridge ladder" to get up to the secret escape hatch. This would satisfy the drawbridge urge and the need to keep baddies at bay in one swell foop. I put together a ladder with some thick hardwood dowels and some spare studs, and was thinking about how to make it liftable by a first-grader when the Exceptionally Competent Mrs. suggested swapping it for the rope ladder instead. This seemed like an excellent idea, so I shortened the ladder by one rung to fit on the deck on the other side. I made up some hinges out of lag bolts with nylon bushings and swapped out the rope ladder for the drawbridge ladder. The rope ladder had another rung added and went around to the secret escape hatch. I still haven't figured out a good way for the kid to lift it, but that will come.




The final addition has been windows. There are sliding windows inside in the back walls, and fixed windows in front by the door. They're all made of acrylic. The sliding ones have finger holes on either side and fit in slots cut in frames above and below the window openings. Having the windows in has cut down the draft a little bit, though there's still an airspace around the roofline. I got the last windows installed yesterday, so the Secret Clubhouse as planned is now complete. It could probably use some paint, but hey, it's a clubhouse.


Some say that kids should build their own clubhouses, treehouses, forts, etcetera, and I don't disagree. That usually comes a bit later, though, when they've mastered swinging a hammer. That time will come. For now, the Secret Clubhouse rules our back yard. Next up, some more garden boxes, like this one I've already finished.

LEGO My List of LEGO

No, I don't know why there's a big gap here, scroll down a bit...

Number	Theme	Set Name
5613	City	Firefighter
5969	Space Police	Squidman Escape
5971	Space Police	Gold Heist
5972	Space Police	Container Heist
5974	Space Police	Galactic Enforcer
7239	City	Fire Truck
7281	City	T-Junction & Curved Road Plates
7669	Star Wars	Anakin's Jedi Starfighter
7670	Star Wars	Hailfire Droid & Spider Droid
7671	Star Wars	AT-AP Walker
7673	Star Wars	MagnaGuard Starfighter
7674	Star Wars	V-19 Torrent
7675	Star Wars	AT-TE Walker
7676	Star Wars	Republic Attack Gunship
7679	Star Wars	Republic Fighter Tank
7680	Star Wars	The Twilight
7681	Star Wars	Separatist Spider Droid
7723	City	Police Pontoon Plane
7734	City	Cargo Plane
7741	City	Police Helicopter
7743	City	Police Command Centre
7744	City	Police Headquarters
7748	Star Wars	Corporate Alliance Tank Droid
7773	Aqua Raiders	Tiger Shark Attack
8014	Star Wars	Clone Walker Battle Pack
8015	Star Wars	Assassin Droids Battle Pack
8016	Star Wars	Hyena Droid Bomber
8018	Star Wars	Armored Assault Tank (AAT)
8019	Star Wars	Republic Attack Shuttle
8031	Star Wars	V-19 Torrent
8036	Star Wars	Separatists Shuttle
8083	Star Wars	Rebel Trooper Battle Pack
8086	Star Wars	Droid Tri-Fighter
8188	Power Miners	Fire Blaster
8189	Power Miners	Magma Mech
8398	City	BBQ Stand
8708	Power Miners	Cave Crusher
8956	Power Miners	Stone Chopper
8957	Power Miners	Mine Mech
8958	Power Miners	Granite Grinder
8960	Power Miners	Thunder Driller
8961	Power Miners	Crystal Sweeper
8964	Power Miners	Titanium Command Rig

We sure have a lot of LEGO at our house, and we acquire more on a regular basis. Just as a public service to those who might want to get us even more LEGO, I thought I'd post a current list of the LEGO sets that the younger member of the family has.

This list of course does not include the generic buckets of bricks or any of the Duplo sets he has, or any of my own sets still mostly stuck in boxes in storage. They'll come out some day to play, I'm sure.

Family Resemblance

Just something I noticed while looking at my photos recently. Maybe it's more of an expression resemblance.

Just a Minor Detail

On his second day sick at home, the younger member of the family remembered his crystal radio set and wanted to listen to it again. I got it down from the shelf in the office and we took it to the dining room and connected it to the ground and antenna wires that were still in place, and he gave it a good listen for a while on his headphones, then said he'd like to hook it up to speakers. I allowed as how the crystal radio set probably didn't have enough power to drive a speaker, so we'd need an amplifier of some kind for that. He asked if we could build an amplifier, and I thought that we could. I went downstairs and got out the old 300-in-one Advanced Electronics set I got in a nostalgic moment at a Radio Shack at least a decade ago, and started thumbing through the index for a suitable amplifier circuit.

Considering that my poor eyes could barely distinguish some of the resistor color code stripes, it took longer to build than the impatient one thought necessary. He also thought I was hogging all the cool assembly parts and he didn't get to help with enough of it either, but then it was finally done and we hooked it up to the outputs of the crystal set and switched it on.

Nothing.

Not that any longtime engineer would expect any different. Of course, one of the wires in the breadboard was in the wrong spot and that took another minute or two to find, but once found, the circuit worked just fine, and we were dancing along to KIXI AM 880 from our amplified speaker.
I think the discrimination in the crystal set is virtually non-existant; we're probably listening to a smear of the AM band about 200KHz wide, so tuning the variable capacitor (the soda can with the paper bit around it) we can often hear two or even three stations at once. Once the amplifier was working, naturally the boy had more requests.

"Can we pause it?"

Hmm. How to explain this to somebody who was born after the advent of the DVR? That's a little beyond the capabilities of the 300-in-one set, I'm afraid, though it would be cool for sure. "We'd need more parts. Lots more." Like a computer, I'm thinking, with a hard-drive recording system, just like in the DVR. For a boy who thinks his dad can build anything, that's just a minor detail.

"We can spend the weekend on it!"

Yep.

Lazy Days and Breakers

Welcome to sunny Oceanside, California, somewhere midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. We're right at the beach, after a fashion - there's only really any beach below the rocks of the seawall at low tide.

 

Here's kids playing in the sand and rocks; there's the buglet, his cousins Bryce and Juliet, and a friend who's staying with them for the weekend.


And here's the more sedate adult crowd, enjoying some Adirondack time. You can see our little blue cottage doesn't quite compare to the million-dollar manse next door, but it's more than nice enough for our needs.


We're expecting the folks and more cousins soon, and of course, Legoland and Disneyland. We wandered the Midway aircraft carrier museum yesterday, which was impressive in several ways besides mere size. I think we got through about a third of the audio tour in the nearly three hours we spent there. The Highly Capable Mrs. was found guilty at the Captain's Mast and had to spend some time in the Brig:

Don't worry, the sentence was only long enough for a photo.