I worked in the yard again. One of the bigger projects was that I cut down an old Juniper which was half-dead. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been because the wood was really difficult to cut, especially when getting the stump out. I used a few different hand saws, an axe (actually 2, I broke the first on it!), and even a drill, but it took a couple of weeks in all to get rid of it. That’s documented in my Flickr gallery. I had cut down the other Juniper we had about 10 years ago, and it wasn’t so difficult, maybe because it was still alive.

After that was done, I worked on my model train layout. I had never really wired it properly, so I decided to finally do that and give the trains adequate power. I used 14 gauge stranded copper for that. It seems like overkill, but the run gets pretty long and I calculated that 14 gauge wire would be needed to prevent power sag. These then connect to smaller feeders to the rails with terminal blocks. Lots of cutting, stripping, and crimping had to be done, but this also allows me to separate the tables if necessary. After I got rid of many empty boxes that I kept there, it made accessing the underside of the tables much easier.

I replaced some of the lights in the kitchen. The old under-cabinet halogen lights were not working too well. When I removed them, it became pretty obvious as to why that was, they were not wired very well by the installer, which probably ended up damaging them in the end. It was almost surprising that they even worked at all. I replaced them with new LED lights, which were more expensive, but they are almost as bright as the halogen lights were, just not as warm in color… and they don’t get hot while lit, unlike the halogens.

I’ve also been thinking about replacing the  fluorescent light fixtures in the basement with some new ones. The new ones have a built-in door that opens up to change the tubes, as opposed to the old style — a sheet of clear plastic crammed between the ceiling tile rails — which always seemed to crack the plastic before it was in place. Also, with a digital ballast, they save more energy than the old ones… about 40% from what I read. So I could have more light for the same cost; 4 tubes instead of 2 for example.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 12:04 PM and is filed under Lair. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.