Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 03/25/18> Sunday is the day of “rest”… I’...

alt Normally I write my daily dose column in the evenings before I go to bed and then publish on steemit around midnight Eastern Time here in the USA, so I can be sort of consistent and people can find it easier. Well that didn’t happen Saturday night, so I am trying to catch up with it now on Sunday morning.

The failure to get it written on Saturday night is because of total exhaustion. I got so wrapped up on Saturday working on a little project for a friend of mine that I didn’t even stop to eat anything all day. It isn’t a big project but it is time consuming and pretty dirty work. I enjoy refinishing things, taking old worn out items and bringing that back to life or at least making them presentable in appearance again. This particular project involves a fire hydrant, my good friend Gregg picked up on old fire hydrant at a sale and he wants to get it cleaned up and repainted so that he can use it in a display that he has for showing his antique cars.

I’ve done quite a bit of metal refinishing for Gregg over the years and I don’t ever turn any of his requests down. I enjoy doing his stuff because he is a perfectionist when it comes to things. His cars consistently win at these car shows he enters because of the attention to detail that he pays to even the slightest things. When his cars and his displays are entered at a car show it is more than just shiny paint and chrome trim. Judges of these car shows go way beyond that and Gregg knows that even the littlest things can make a big difference with the judges, I won’t share all of his secrets here in this post but one is that every screw, that is visible is indexed so that they all are in the same position. So if you are looking at the dashboard of his car and it has the old flat single slot screws, the slot will be facing the 12 and 6 position if you compare it to a clock face.

Well this old fire hydrant has about no less than 15 coats of paint on it, aside from the original industrial red paint coating that it left the foundry with. It started out red; it has since been changed over the years to blue, green and finally a silver finish. The silver paint is extremely thick on this hydrant. My little sandblaster and compressor is no match for this beast so I had to come up with another way to get this thing back down to bare metal. Zip Strip is my favorite paint stripper and it worked fine at cutting through the silver paint but it wasn’t as effective the deeper I got into the other layers.

I finally figured out the best way is to heat the paint with a hand held torch and then use a wire wheel on my air tool to brush the paint off. This made for a long day, what I thought would be a couple hour project with the sand blasting is eight hours and still not finished. Wrestling that heavy hydrant and being bent over with torch in one hand and air tool in the other, burning and stripping just flat wore me out. I only stopped for some drinks of water and to get a clean mask and to clean my safety glasses.

My girls were gone all day working cookie booths, so at the end of my day they weren’t home yet, I can tell you that the hot shower felt really good and was very much needed. I decided that I would wait on the girls to get home and cook me some grub, the couch was just to inviting and stretching out on it was beyond resisting. So I hit the couch at around 8:30 PM , I’m told that the girls got home about 9:00 PM , I never heard them come in.

They debated about waking me and felt it was best just to let the bear sleep, sleep I did. I ended up on the couch all night. I didn’t even wake up this morning until around 8:00 AM when the wife thought she had better make sure I was still breathing. She said I wasn’t snoring, and that scared her, because I snore like a freight train.

I opted out of church for today; the preacher isn’t going to tell me anything I haven’t heard in my 62 years of church going. He might say it in a different way but it all will boil down in the end to be something I heard before he even came along. Being that it is Palm Sunday and Easter is next week we’ll hear about the events leading up to Good Friday and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. I would prefer to hear that Sunday is the day of rest, so that is what I’m going with today.

I might catch one of those televangelist on the TV after I catch me some breakfast, it is now 10:35 and I am ready to start my day. So forgive me for not keeping with my normal schedule, and now I leave you in search of bacon and eggs.

Until next time,
Hive account@sultnpapper