08/30/2009 - 1 COMMENTS
Corn Harvest part II. So, it looks like it's going pretty good eh? Well, this is the shiny side of the nickle. It takes a lot of tossing over the shoulder in the garden to get the good ones in the basket to get it to the counter.
6.5 kilos in ziplock bags... and they go from here into the freezer which is a trick we learned from congressman Jefferson. Always store your ziplocks of Kilo's and your cash in the freezer. Label the cash "Fish" which stands for Money in some African country I think. Or, that's 14.3 pounds of garden corn for the winter would be another way to put it.
It's the very end of August and we're just starting to see tomatos we can use. Not sure what went wrong in the giddyup on this, I guess it's the Al Gore resistant cool/cold summer we had, the tomatos and corn just didn't get the 'heat units' that they'd like.
We have a bit of a crack in the basement wall. On a heavy rain, it just weeps a little, so it's no big deal other than we should fix it.
$370 to have the commercial guy come out and do a 'Low pressure foam injection' repair. I've seen some basement walls where it's been done and they look like what you'll see at the end of the picture show here. If the foam is good in both cases, then I think I've successfully cut out the labor side of this job. The kit was about $160 to the door. The other upside, is that I have enough kit left to do another 5 to 7 feet of crack if I need to do it. If the commercial guy came out, he'd be gone with my money and I'd have no more repair kit to use.
This part of the crack is above the grade outside. In fact, if you were standing in the window well, it's in the window well. The reason to plug this is because in a hard driven rain, it would get enough moisture in the crack to put some down the side of the metal frame of the window and over about 20 years rust it out.
You mix the epoxy and stick these 'ports' to the wall over the crack. Our wall is 8" thick so put the ports 8" apart.
You have to use a wire / steel brush to get the crack prep'd for the wall sealer. All the wall sealer does is hold the ports to the wall + keep the foam in long enough to let the foam set up. After that you can peel it all off or just leave it. The peel off adhesive does nothing for keeping the water out over the long haul.
This grey stuff is a mixture of some white and black parts of a resin of some kind that hardens really fast. You gotta keep moving once you expose that stuff and start applying.
Let this set up until fingernail hard, at least an hour, but not over night. I imagine it's still too soft at 1 hour. I also imagine it gets so hard overnight it may seperate from the wall. I mowed the grass and then it was ready.
The concept of low pressure injection in a DIY home kit sounds so good and even looks pretty promising on their video. However, imagine holding substantial pressure on the trigger end of your cheap home depot glue gun for most of 40 minutes. Anyone here have that kind of arm power? I'm not sure what the real answer to that problem is. Maybe a $15 gear reduced gun to come with the kit. Jack the cost up by $10 and when you're done, you have your crack repaired plus a nice glue gun to keep. I used a wood clamp to keep the pressure on it. The bottom ports where the crack is it's absolute hairline needed about 10 minutes each port at a substantial pressure.
You start on the lowest port and squeeze the foam into the crack. At some point you'll see it start to come out the port above so you stop the injection and cap off that port and move up one and repeat.
My only escape port/hole was at the very bottom. I'm not sure if it's coming out under the resin or if the crack at some very very hairline way extended down there. In any case, this does not impact the success of the repair.
When I got it filled on the top port it eventually squeezed out the crack by the side of the window. This should be a win.
Up top, it was known to come out the top of foundation and ooze over the edge. This also should be good. I love the concept, just can't imagine the product cost is very high. I guess it's from low demand or they just put the price point at half of the cost of the commercial guy. Not sure, but for us I'm confident we have the problem solved at half the commercial rate.
The meat is a turkey sausage that is very well spiced up. The onions and tomato are from the garden and there is some sweet red peppers from a jar we had in the fridge. They turned out 'good', but not kabob great and I think that has a lot to do with not getting much grease out of the sausage to soak flavor into the veggies. That too is a win, just not the flavor win you might like to see on a grilled kabob.
