I had a half fin­ished a long ass unin­ter­est­ing post about the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of hav­ing to clean my deck today, but while check­ing my work email in another win­dow, Mozilla locked up and there was no way to save it. With my lame typ­ing skills I don’t have time nor incli­na­tion to try and recre­ate it. Suf­fice to say, the title explains my sta­tus on the project, so there is more pres­sure wash­ing in my week­end future…

Last Thurs­day after the Miata Club meet­ing we went over to John & Carol’s house to bor­row their pres­sure washer for my week­end deck clean­ing. John gave me a brief run down on their well used unit, he showed me how to twist the wand to go from pres­sure to light spray and told me that I could expect some leak­age around the hose inlet. He had used some teflon tape around the threads, but there was the split o-ring on the quick dis­con­nect part that sort of negated any progress made with the tape.

We already had a half day off from work on Fri­day, so we put in for a 1/2 day of vaca­tion to have the whole day off. We did some run­ning around in the morn­ing and it wasn’t until after lunch before the clean­ing began. I had pur­chased a bot­tle of deck wash with chlo­rine in it that was sup­posed to mixed with 5 gal­lons of water, but see­ing as my deck was FILTHY, I poured it into about half that amount of water. I placed the suc­tion tube in the bucket and started wash­ing. The pres­sure was doing a good job sep­a­rat­ing dirt from wood, but I wasn’t get­ting any soap. Being a pres­sure wash­ing vir­gin and John didn’t tell me that part, it wasn’t until I had an epiphany did I turn the noz­zle to spray and get soapy stuff. Sprayed soapy stuff on about half the deck and let it soak in while I went back to blast­ing gray and mildew off the boards in one inch wide strips. I was mak­ing unsteady progress.

There are two parts to the quick dis­con­nect thing, the male part on the hose inlet and the female part that screws on the hose and snaps on the male part. The male part was on the washer already and John rum­maged through a box until he found a female part that would snap on . I’m not so sure these matched exactly because the quick dis­con­nect was prone to ran­dom dis­con­nec­tions while in use. Because it was not good to have the pres­sure washer run­ning when there was no water com­ing in I would shut it off every time the the hose popped off. The only trou­ble with that was the on/off switch was not real reli­able, so the best thing to do was unplug it. So, every time the quick dis­con­nect would spon­ta­neously let go, a wild hose would snake around on the deck while I hus­tled the 25 feet back to where the washer was plugged in the wall. Then I would have to exit the screen porch and walk by where the hose was shoot­ing water out and down the stairs and the 25 feet to where the spigot was to shut off the water. Walk back to where the pres­sure washer was, hook up the dis­con­nect, walk back to the spigot turn the water back on, walk back & then past the washer into the screened porch to plug the plug back in and then back over to the washer to start spray­ing again.

Not only did this spec­ta­cle hap­pen ran­domly, but it could also be caused by me strug­gling to get the wand to swap from sudsy spray to power spray. There was a detent that you had to get around by simul­ta­ne­ously push­ing down and twist­ing and when­ever I did this it seemed I would tug just enough on the wand’s hose to move the washer which caused the dis­con­nect to let go, spray­ing water, etc, etc.

After about half dozen dis­con­nects I thought I could short­cut the recon­nec­tion process by not mak­ing the long walk back and forth to the faucet. I thought I could use that old fold-the-hose-in-half trick. Big mis­take. You can’t really get it totally squeezed off and that lit­tle pres­sure wouldn’t allow me to get the quick dis­con­nect on and locked, so it popped back off caus­ing the split o-ring to come off too. Nat­u­rally the sur­prise of this caused me to let go of the hose and the now gush­ing water stream pushed that lit­tle o-ring right between a deck board down into no man’s land. #$%&@!

I have some of those same types of dis­con­nects on my hose reels. I couldn’t use the back as that was the one I was using to “wash” the deck, but the one in front was ripe for pil­fer­ing. I snagged the o-ring off the front male fit­ting and pushed it on the one on the pres­sure washer. This worked great, the mas­sive leak­ing due to the old split o-ring stopped, but with one excep­tion, wait for it, the new o-ring must have been just a touch smaller because now the fre­quency of dis­con­nects increased.

After about 3 hours, Donna came out to check on me and as she watched me from the safety of behind the bed­room door she was treated to the sight of me strug­gling to rotate the wand to soap spray and in my strug­gle I acci­den­tally dis­con­nected the wand from the han­dle. My grip was on the wand, so the han­dle crashed to the deck caus­ing a twist and tug on the hose which of course made the hose come loose from the pres­sure washer and snake around on the deck soak­ing me more than I already was. I must have given her just the right look because she opened the door and asked, “Would you like your own new pres­sure washer.”

Sixty-nine dol­lars later — The Week­ender

Ever since I had to have a lug replaced I have had a ching­ing sound com­ing from that wheel. It is not a very loud sound and is high pitched. It occurs every time I hit a bump or rough spot of road and also when mak­ing 90 degree cor­ners. Sounds kinda like brake chirp­ing, but it does not seem brake related, i.e. it is present whether brak­ing or not.

I pulled off the wheel, caliper and caliper mount­ing bracket over the week­end to see if the new lug was hit­ting the back­ing plate and it looked like there was plenty of room.

Could it be in the wheel that was rotated there? Unlikely. A fam­ily of small bats has nested in my wheel well? Highly unlikely. Is it some­thing they did when replac­ing the lug? Likely.

I have bor­rowed a rub­ber mal­let and plan on jack­ing up the car this week­end and pound­ing away while sys­tem­at­i­cally remov­ing car bits until the noise stops. Hope­fully once the noise has stopped, the last item removed won’t be too important…

Bless my mother-in-law, she means well. She knows I’m a Star Wars fan, so she saved me the “spe­cial” two-page poster from this Sunday’s USA Week­end. I thanked her, but I’m gen­er­ally unin­ter­ested. About the poster and so too, to some extent, the movie. I am con­sid­er­ing not going to the the­ater to see it and just wait­ing for the DVD. I will still prob­a­bly get sucked in and see it on the big screen, but it will be more like late June once the crowds have died down. And I will prob­a­bly be underwhelmed.

I’ll leave you with the last cou­ple of lines from an Ed Hal­ter col­umn for the Vil­lage Voice, If you are inter­ested the rest can be read here: May the Force Be Over

But block­busters have since become an over­bred species, and Lucas’s work has like­wise degen­er­ated into unbal­anced over­pro­duc­tion. Post-Jar Jar, our expec­ta­tions have sunk so low that now fans will cel­e­brate a film just because it doesn’t com­pletely suck.