The Sky is Falling

It rained again today for like 20 minutes. Wowzo!

You know what chafes my bunions? JB Weld & JB Kwik. I mean, they seem like they should be such useful products. And JB Weld has certainly been around enough, end even entered the lexicon as a verb, that if it was total snake-oil, you'd think it would have disappeared by now. But I just can't for the life of me get this stuff to actually work. I can get it to come real close to working, but not to actually work.

I did manage to get one JB Weld repair to last about six months after two tries of it, but I expect anything that dries as hard as steel ought to be able to hold a porch light fixture together for a lot longer than that.

And my JB Kwik experience yesterday told me that as long as I didn't not expect the bond to actually be able to take any kind of torque, maybe it would hold. But as soon as any torque was applied, it'll just pop apart as if held together white the really yummy white paste from lemelentary school.

See, I was trying to fix a table. I dunno why I bother fixing this table anymore. It's a cheapy table that came from some cheapy store. It is made of a ~2' diameter circle of particle board with three legs attached to it. It would be OK if it weren't for the existence of various childrens who like to climb on it and/or wakeboard on it.

First, one by one, the screws that held in the leg mounts tore out. It's just particle board, after all. I repositioned all of them threatened The Childrens with severe beatings if the surfed on the table anymore.

Then, of course, they all tore out again. It's still, after all, only particle board. I threatened to sell The Childrens to gypsies, but I didn't have to beat them as MaxieC managed to get hurt when the table collapsed underneath him, and I got to do a whole bunch of I-told-you-so's and See-that's-what-you-get's, which are the bread-and-butter of good parenting.

So I fixed that by cutting up some scrap plywood left over from the trampoline project, gluing these to the bottom of the table with Liquid Nails construction adhesive, and then using some proper, coarse threaded wood screws to affix the leg mounts to the plywood.

That held for quite a number of days. Alas, with the joint between leg mount and wood fixed, we exposed the next design weakness: the joint between the leg and the mount.

The leg mounts are little stamped pieces of steel that have a hole in the center into which screws a bolt that is embedded in the end of the leg. The little stamped piece of steel has a bit of a flange stamped in it around the screw hole, and this makes the sides of the hole tall enough to have a whole three thread turns on them. But this flange is just part of the stamping, so it is inherently under stress and a bit thin walled, and it turns out that doing belly flops onto the table is enough to separate the flange from the mount, thus leaving only one turn of threads behind which immediately strips out, cuz what kind of weight can a single thread turn in crap Chinese steel hold?

Now CherkyB is not one to give up quickly, so I devised a plan. I would go buy a nut at Ace Hardware that fit the threads of the leg bolt, and then I would JB Weld this guy onto the back of the mount where the flange used to be and thus end up with a much stronger solution that would still allow me to remove the legs. At Ace, I chose the $0.30 square nut over the $0.06 hex nut because it had a lot more surface are for the JB Weld.

Then, when I got home, I looked at how JB Weld takes 24 hours to cure, and you gotta clamp it for god knows how long, so I switched to the JB Kwik that I had purchased for a project I haven't gotten to yet and thus had never opened. JB Kwik dries in 4 minutes and requires no clamping.

The long and the short of it was that I let it cure for an hour, then I screwed the leg in, and it popped apart after the first half turn. Sheesh. So I got out the old standby Quick Steel epoxy clay, used a little of that (which requires no clamping but takes 15 minutes to cure), and it worked like a charm.

I only, however, fixed the broken leg. The other two will likely rip out shortly, and I will have to repeat the process. But not until I get in a couple let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you's.