Of Gingenuity and the renewal of the Brown Dustcoat

You might have to forgive the smugness that overflows here ;-)

I've been doing a bit of furniture 'restoration', see. The old bar
stools in the pub were getting a bit past their sell-by date and had
started to wobble, quite alarmingly at times. The only times they
seemed firm was some way into a session when the sitter would weave
around more than the sat-upon. The crunch (literally) came when one of
the stools had a couple of seat-back spindles snapped, at seat height,
by an alcohol-fuelled clumsy fat bastard who flung his lardy-arsed self
into it from an unsafe height.

"No problem", I said, "I'll take it home and spin a couple of spindles
up on the lathe". This is where the problems started, of course. To
make a new spindle, one needs an old spindle as a pattern. Measuring it
in situ is one thing, having the thing in the hand is another completely
different thing. It shouldn't be a problem, for I had in my hand, so to
speak, a collection of whole spindles and a couple of busted ones ...
all attached to the chair.

Dismantling, that's the thing. It would have to come apart to allow
fitting of the new spindles in any case, and the glue was dried out and
pretty dead too, which should help my cause. The thing is, these bar
stools are mass-produced on the cheap. The machining isn't too bad, but
they're banged together - and, it turns out, they have sneaky little
steel pins, like nails with the heads cut off, hammered through the
joints and driven /below the surface of the wood/.

So - how do you dig out a parallel-sided steel pin, that's buried in
wood that you really don't want to damage? That, my friend, is the
question.


I acknowledged that a) I'd have to do /some/ damage - but b) it wouldn't
really matter so much because a) the thing was effectively buggered
anyway, and b) I'd have to secure the spindle on reassembly and drilling
a hole for a screw or a dowel would eliminate any holes I'd have to dig.
Probably.

So - how to dig the pins out? What I wanted, I reckoned, was a hollow
drill bit. Hah. Nobody makes them, right? I thought about a nail
punch, but the recess in the end is far too shallow. A tiny holesaw
would be just the ticket, but 5mm diameter holesaws don't exist either.
I have a set of leather punches ... somewhere ....

I thought about drilling holes around the pin, with 1mm drill bits - but
worried about wandering off or getting tied up with the pin and snapping
the bit and nailing my leg, or producing a massive scratch in the
varnished seat back. I considered Dremelling my way around the pin, but
rejected that on the likelihood of Dremelling the bloody pin off - and
the pin, I betcha, would go right through the spindle and into the front
of the seat back and then I'd never get it out.

I considered grabbing the spindle in Stillsons and twisting until the
pin just ripped around - but the accurate machining and twenty-year-old
crusty glue defeated that one, as I ended up with a spindle in many
small pieces, some of which were in my hair. I smoked a lot of rollies
and wore a small trench across the patio, considering this knotty
problem.

It occurred to me, thinking the process through, that I'd need to pull
the pins once I'd excavated a trench around them, in the manner of a
Japanese gardener preparing to move a cherry tree - so what to pull the
pins with? Needlenose pliers seemed to be the answer, if I could grip
the pin hard enough so as not to slip off - and manage to pull hard
enough to extract the pin which had had prolly twenty years to set in
place.

In the end, I took my needlenose pliers, sat down on the step to my
shed, placed the seat back on my knees and worried away at the wood
around the pin. Holding the pliers jaws apart enough to just clear the
pin, I rotated the ends of the jaws around the pin site, which produced
tiny amounts of sawdust and wood fibres and e v e n t u a l l y produced
a trench around the pin. It didn't look pretty and it was only a couple
of mm deep, but I'd got a start - and a couple of blisters.

Some time later, I had the end of the pin in sight - about 2mm of it, in
a 5mm deep hole of 8mm diameter. I was also elbow-deep in blisters, of
course. Following a celebratory smoke, I grabbed the end of the pin
with my faithful needlenoses and pulled. SNICK! Slipped straight off.
I took hold of the pliers handles as firmly as I could, got the best
grip I could, and pulled ... HARD. SNIKK!! Slipped off again and I
punched myself in the forehead - with the pliers handles.


Once my eyes had stopped watering, I started digging with the pliers
again. I'd given up caring about damage by this point and now the blood
and plasma were flowing freely the pliers whizzed around carelessly. I
rapidly and rather messily achieved a tapered hole all around the pin,
with about 5mm of the pin protruding upwards from the base of the hole.
Grabbing the pin once I again, I squeezed like a mofo, twisting and -
vitally - levering against the side of the hole. The pin yielded and
slid 3mm outwards. Big grin time. Discarding the needlenoses, I got my
waterpump (slip joint) pliers around the pin and, levering against the
chair back, curled the pin all the way out. 20mm long, the bloody thing
was. It didn't half look silly, though - all bent and chewed at the
end, lying deceased on the wood it had so successfully secured for all
those years. I told it that.

The next several pins were disposed of in a like manner, until all the
joints that I need to dismantle were free - and it had only taken three
days. I was going to need a better method - a further three bar stools
were in need of attention. Turning up new spindles, fitting, glueing
and screwing and clamping presented no few problems, but all very much
in a minor key relative to the pin extraction problem.


Anyway - today, I solved it.

I have made, with my own bleeding hands, a hollow drill bit.

Inspiration struck, when faced with the next stool which needed 14 pins
removed and the blisters from the last one have only partly healed - and
I still have two matched lumps on my forehead, which correspond to the
handles of my needlenose pliers. I reasoned that I needed a bit of
steel tube, see. Small diameter, soft enough to work, hard enough to
cut through wood.

A search of the usual places - workshop, garage, toolboxes - revealed
nothing suitable: all too big or made of copper. Then, in the middle of
a desperately inspiration-searching fag, came the answer. A robust
rummaging in my old cantilever 'toolbox', which is more concerned with
holding old exhaust clamps and random bolts than shiny spanners these
days, turned up just what I had in mind - a slightly used roll pin.

You all know what a roll pin is, right? They're used freely on cars and
bikes to hold all manner of spigots in sockets, brake levers in pivots,
that sort of thing. Made of a hard and brittle spring steel, looking
like a slotted tube, you have to drive them out to separate your shaft,
then squeeze and drive a new one in to reassemble.


Pin digging out tool, Mark One. Take a roll pin of 5mm diameter and
25mm length and holding one end, rotate the other end against the
spinning wheel of the bench grinder, to produce a gently tapered end
with a sharp leading edge. next, take a Dremel fitted with a diamond-
coated steel cutting disc and chop a couple of narrow slots in the
sharpened end, then a couple of angled slots adjoining ... teeth!
Juggle the significantly hot little steel tube across to the cordless
drill and insert in the chuck. Bingo.

Take a comfy seat in the sunny garden, with the as-yet undismantled seat
back on your lap, line up the hole in the centre of the PDOT#1 with the
end of the barely-visible pin, locate and squeeze the drill trigger
gently. Watch with wonder as it cuts a perfectly concentric hole all
around the pin - and remember in the nick of time that you don't want to
go all the way through the thing. Withdraw the cutter and leer
suggestively at the pin, now exposed and protruding 5mm from the base of
a wonderfully cleanly-cut, parallel-sided hole.

Take a pair of needlenose pliers in the left hand and let the sides of
the cylindrical hole guide the jaws closed on the pin, whilst with the
slip-joint pliers in the right hand, gripping the needlenose pliers and
squeezing them tightly shut on the shaft of the pin. The left hand is
now free to steady the seat back while the right rotates the big pliers
against it, efficiently levering the pin from its lodgement in one
smooth squeeze.


So, that's it. I am Man, I have made a Tool.


Not only has this ginger tool made a stool tool, it works and it works
so well that it has reduced the time taken to remove a pesky pin from an
hour or more (including the self-infliction of concomitant injuries) to
no more than five minutes with zero injuries and no unnecessary damage
to the surround wood. The cylindrical hole produced by the PDOT#1 will
neatly accommodate a 5mm fixing dowel or the shank of a woodscrew during
reassembly. Sorted.

I'm off to rip a couple more pins out, then I might brush off my
dustcoat and sit and have a fag on the patio, I think.

 

*applause*

 

Deserved.

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Pip

<doffs hat>

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - "He's hopeless, but he's honest"

I have already made the greatest contribution to the fight against climate
change that I can make: I have decided not to breed. Now quit bugging me and
go and talk to the Catholics.

 

<affects mock accent as per bad 70's Kung fu film>

Ah Master, teach me your secret, can you solve mystery of siezed in
disc bolts on F650GS

Boxerboy san

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, boxerboy

Ahh... No mystely. It is what it is. And it is a BMW. Mystely solved.

--
Wicked Uncle Nigel - "He's hopeless, but he's honest"

I have already made the greatest contribution to the fight against climate
change that I can make: I have decided not to breed. Now quit bugging me and
go and talk to the Catholics.

 

Pip wrote:

My boggle is boggled! Was it really not possible to use a nail punch to
push it through just enough to get a pair of mole grips on it?

 

<Tips cap in a general home counties direction, and lights a
celebratory marlboro light>

Hope the back is better fella, I hear the clan are happy with the 360,
glad to see it go to a good home - I'm missing it now !

 

The back's doing what it does - and I'm doing my best to ignore it, as
usual. The little fella's currently punishing Mass Effect, even as I
type. The bigger fella is getting into Forza in a big way ;-)

Job's a good 'un.

 

No, had to pull it out. To push a 25mm x 1mm pin through 5mm of wood on
the backrest and more like 20mm on the legs would have been nigh
impossible, I reckon. Not only that, but the tapered nature of even a
small punch would have had to push a lot of wood out of the way. Bear
in mind that a nail punch is only meant to push the head of a nail just
below the surface - the pins have no head and there's a relatively long
way to go to the other side.

Believe me, if it had been feasible to do it without trying very hard -
I'd have done it.

 

Well, determination above and beyond the call of duty I'd say. Award
yourself the Victoria Toolmaster with Bar!

 

No forgiveness necessary, a damn good read!

Deservedly so, nice one that man ..

 

<tips toupee>

 

Prolly due to the subject line, IRTA "wore a small trench coat
across the patio" AIMNSAA.

Well done, dude, another 12 and you can make your own TV series
about them, like the Beery Hikers.

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
GSX600F, RG250WD "You Porsche. Me pass!" DoD #484 JKLO#003, 005
WP7# 3000 LC Unit #2368 (tinlc) UKMC#00009 BOTAFOT#16 UKRMMA#7 (Hon)
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

 

))

Xmas is coming.

 

Right! I've got this pump here which pumps diesel to my heater in the
workshop. It's not working though. What do I do?

It would appear you're *are* the man in GAMI.


--
Beav

VN 750
Zed 1000
OMF# 19

 

Pip wibbled...

Brilliant! Pixie Engineering at its very best.

i can't help wondering if it would have been a lot quicker to go down to
your local Oxfam shop and buy another load of chairs.

But I know you're not the type of person to let a 25mmx1mm piece of
metal beat you

 

Well done, that chap.

 

Oh I don't know old bean, well justified.>

Well done.


Flipping message tripped my it's too long filter so I ad to go back
and find it.

 

<SNIP>

In the unlikely event that I ever find myself on a manned space mission,
remind me to check if you are part of the crew or back up team.

Truly an Apollo 13 tale of furniture restoration.

--
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