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Rudy Canoza[_5_]

On 9/12/2016 5:30 PM, wrote:
On Monday, September 12, 2016 at 5:18:08 PM UTC-4, Rudy Canoza wrote:

What kind of fishing? My son and I are thinking of getting into fly
fishing. I'd like to look into building my own fly rod. Ever done that?

I bought a book on making fishing rods by Dale Clemens and gave it to my grandson last Christmas. But he is not much of a DIY kid. Fortunately the book was from Abe and cost less than $5. I recommend the book. I learned about Dale from a guy that was the production manager for Fenwick at the time.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm not terribly much a DIY guy, but
I've learned to do a few things, and I don't mind a little bit of
failure if I can learn from it and eventually get what I want. One of
my last projects was really an exercise in frustration that ultimately
ended with a big partial success but a particularly ass-chapping bit of
failure. I wanted to make a pull-up bar for my son and me. I had been
looking for something to bolt to either a wall or an exposed beam I have
on the back patio, or possibly to attach to a couple of redwood 4x4 set
into the yard, but I didn't see anything that I liked or that I thought
would work. All of a sudden, after looking at a couple of DIY pages for
pull-up bars, I had a flash of inspiration. I bought two 3/4" floor
flanges, two 12" nipples, two elbows, and one 3' length, all in black
pipe. I assembled them into a wide flat "U" shape, with the flanges on
the ends of the nipples, had my son help me hold it up to the bottom of
a 4"x8" wood beam so I could mark where to drill the holes, and then I
drilled pilot holes for the screws into the bottom of the beam. With
four screw holes on each flange, I bought eight #14 screws, 2-1/2"
length. This is where things began to go wrong. I bought the screws at
Home Depot, and of course they're from China.

With a combination of tools, I managed to drive four screws to hold one
of the flanges to the beam. On the second flange, I successfully drove
three of the screws. On the fourth screw on the second flange, the
screw broke about one inch from the head just as the screw head was
about to make contact with the flange. I bought a screw extractor and
attempted to get the broken screw out, but I couldn't drill into the
piece of the screw embedded in the beam - the shaft was over an inch
into the beam.

I rotated the flange 45 degrees and started over. Same thing: three
screws successfully driven to hold the flange tight to the beam, fourth
screw broke...at exactly the same depth (about 1".) I bought a couple
of plastic tubular spacers to try to drill into the screw shaft so I
could get a screw extractor into the shaft, but it ultimately failed. I
now have four screws holding one flange, and three holding the other.
I'm not very heavy - a little over 150 lb. - and my son is lighter, and
I don't hear any noise from the three-screw flange like the screws are
pulling free, so it appears to be okay, but it still chaps my ass that
Home Depot sells ****ty stuff. How hard can it be for a screw and bolt
manufacturer to make *steel* screws that will screw into wood - *with*
properly sized pilot holes, for christall****ingmighty - without the
screw shaft breaking?

The lesson