On Oct 28, 9:23*pm, "Lew Hodgett" wrote:
For all you folks getting ready to crawl into a "huricane hole" and
wait Sandy out,
my thoughts are with you.

Best of luck.

Lew

We live in NY City, in the Borough of Queens. Queens is part of Long
Island, which is 10-15 miles wide. We're a good 5-6 miles from the
water, so the storm surge won't affect us. But we do get what they
refer to as "localized" flooding, as our house is at the bottom of a
hill in pretty much every direction. Compared with real disasters, we
have had flooding that is more of an annoyance; maybe an inch at the
deepest inside the house in the two times it's happened.

So I spent most of Saturday battening down the hatches against such a
rain buildup. [it is positively howling outside as I type this, by the
way - glad I live in a brick house] I made some plywood barriers for
the doors and garage door, so that even if the water did reach the
house, it shouldn't be able to get in (very much). We have no
basement; the house is built on a slab. I've never seen the water get
higher than 8" outside , so I made the barriers comfortably higher.

Here's the Wreck angle:

It's funny the things you learn in a lifetime, and how they can be
applied in varying circumstances. I wanted the barriers to make a good
fit against the concrete at the bottom and the door frames at the
sides. Yes, especially on the sides I used furring strips to mount the
barriers and made liberal use of closed-cell weatherstripping, but I
still wanted a close fit. The barriers might need to "hold" for twenty
minutes or more until the local sewers can carry away the water.

Until quite recently I'm sure I'd have puzzled long and hard about how
to accomplish that, and still ended up with a clumsy method and a poor
job. But partially due to my occasional visits here, I have made the
acquaintance of hand planes in the last year or two. A small block
plane made short work of it, taking off just enough, just where I
needed it, and with none of the errors that I would undoubtedly made
with a saw; the kind of errors that require a "wood-stretcher" to
fix.

Planing the edge of 3/4" ply (an old beat-up piece that I've been
using as an auxiliary work surface on sawhorses) was no picnic at
first, but I tweaked the plane a little in my usual blundering way. I
made the mouth wider and the cut a little deeper; too wide and too
deep at first, of course. But eventually it felt about right.

At the bottom of the garage barrier, I could see daylight under a part
of it. I decided to graft on a piece of 1x3 on the back side, a little
lower down than the main piece. At first I figured to let the rubber
strip conform to the slight dip in the concrete, but the plane was
still on the bench. A few strokes later I had planed the board into a
slight curve, which fit the floor nicely.

I learned a year or two ago that planes could be useful, but in a
(trying-to-be) "fine woodworking" setting. This incident reminded me
that carpenters probably used planes for all manner of less "fine"
tasks as well; I can too apparently.

I used some more of my overstock of Kreg screws to put things
together, where I would certainly have used drywall screws before. I
may yet run through what seemed like a large excess when I first
ordered them. They don't "start" quite as easily, I find, but they
feel nice and secure, and they don't split the wood.

It's 10 pm here now. So far we have had absolutely no threat of
flooding, which is half the reason I put in 10 hours of work preparing
- in a sort of reverse Murphy effect, the universe conspires to make
any such work pointless. It simply hasn't rained all that much. But
the wind sounds absolutely vicious outside. I'm sure there will be
trees down and sundry other problems, with any luck not too bad.