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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Fix It...Don't Nix It! Mend It...Don't End It! Repair...Don't Despair! Plus Review of a Great New Product.

We live in opulent times.  Certainly there is poverty and desperate want in our countries and in the world at large.  For decades the growth in world population has elicited dire warnings of starvation and scarcity, but the population of the world has never been better off in the history of the world.

Writing in his recent book Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History, Angus Madison, Professor of Economic Growth, makes these observations:
From the year 1000 to 1820, growth was predominately extensive. Most of the GDP increase went to accommodate a four-fold increase in population. The advance in per capita income was a slow crawl – the world average increased by half over a period of eight centuries.  In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the firs year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere.  After 1820, world development became much more dynamic. By 2003, income per head had risen nearly ten-fold, population six-fold. Per capita income rose 1.2 per cent a year: 24 times as fast as in 1000-8120. Population grew about 1 per cent a year: six times as fast as in 1000-1820. Life expectation increased to 76 years in the west and 63 in the rest of the world. 
While increasing prosperity is great news, one of the downsides of all this opulence is that in many places we have become a wasteful society where most everything from dishes to diapers, from cups to cars, and from money to marriages has become disposable.  God gave us this remarkable world and its abundance as a stewardship.  From my study of the scriptures I'm convinced that God is happy when we use the means He's provided us but dismayed when we squander that abundance.  

Our grandparents had a saying "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without".  It's a wise concept because not only does it allow us to live more abundantly for less money, but it makes us better stewards of God's grand gift--this earth.  There are a number of simple things you can do to avoid wasting resources:
  • Buy used cars.  As you drive a new car off the lot it depreciates by nearly 10% (building a small fire with that $2,500 or so that you just threw away would at least warm your hands).  If you really want a "new car" buy one that has less than 20,000 miles on it and is less than a year old. Most of those miles will be highway miles, which create minimal wear and tear, and you will save 20% or more (around $5,000) off the price of the same car new.  My personal preference is to buy cars with around 100,000 miles on them.  I save over 60% on the car but it still has more than half its life left.
  • Buy used clothes.   If you are selective, you get better clothes for way less money.  For instance when a pair of pants still looks good on the rack at a thrift store you can tell it will wear well because it already has.  This may require some simple tailoring skills.  For instance after stopping by the thrift-store a few times without finding what I wanted I found a very nice wool tailored suit that looked new.  The jacket fit great but the pants were too big around the waist and too short.  It was only $20 so I bought it and tailored it myself.   Now it fits me nicely and I've worn it comfortably to high-powered business meetings with my clients' senior executives.  Even if you won't learn to tailor something yourself you can buy good clothing cheaply and have it altered by a local tailor and still save money.
  • Do your own basic home repairs.  I confess that the nastiest place in my house is the inside of my drain pipes, and that plumbing is my least favorite household chore.  However, we have a lot of girls in our family which means a fairly constant supply of long hair going down the bathroom sink drain and, consequently, frequent clogged drains.  Hiring someone to unclog a drain usually costs $200 or more so I have gotten comfortable with doing the unclogging myself (you can buy a cheap drain cleaner that attaches to your drill).  You can also easily learn to replace a faulty light switch, put in a new garbage disposal, repair a railing, or patch a hole in the wall.  When I don't know how to do something I just ask the people at my local hardware store and they are quite helpful.
  • Repair tools and equipment.  We humans are unique creatures when it comes to the complexity and usefulness of our tools.  They help us leverage our personal resources (e.g. strength, time, reach, speed etc.).   However, they are also aggravating when they break which, in my case, happens fairly regularly.  You can do simple equipment repairs yourself.  For instance, we had a recent grease fire under the stovetop cover of our electric stove.  The result was that the electrical coupling that the element plugs into was damaged which also caused the switch for that burner (the part behind the panel that your knob attaches to) to short out.  We lived with only three burners for a while but the big front one is the most used at our house so I talked to a local appliance repair guy who sold me the parts and told me how to install them.  Not hard at all.
I recently discovered a new tool repair product (no this is not an advertisement or a paid endorsement) called FiberFix that saved me a lot of time and money.  I have an old Troy Bilt Rear-Tine Rototiller for my large vegetable garden (it's about 40'X80' so it needs a powerful tiller to prepare the soil for planting and to keep it cultivated).  The old models are the best ones because they are built for durability.  However, they are expensive even when you buy them used.  The point on these tillers that gets the most stress is the tubing right at the base of the handle because it endures a lot of vibration and torque when the tiller bucks or jumps (e.g. from hitting a large rock), or when you grab the handles and turn the machine back around at the end of every row.  There's a particularly vulnerable place where a cross-piece is welded in between the two handles.  On my tiller the tubing of the left handle split at that spot and broke meaning that only the right handle was attached to the tiller's body.  I tried welding it with my cheap flux wire welder but I'm not very good at it and I mostly made a mess.  My weld kept breaking when I'd start using the tiller again.  I was beginning to think I'd have to buy a whole new handle assembly from Troy Bilt (over $200), but I went to the hardware store one last time to see if they had any ideas or suggestions.  The attendant in the tools department told me about FiberFix.  It's a resin-based repair tape that is flexible while you wrap it, but then hardens to be like steel.  It's even sandable and paintable.  It is from a small company started by a college student who was inspired by the medical wraps doctors use to make casts.  Because of its flexibility it has many applications.

In the collage below you can see the rusty tentative weld on my tiller's handle on the lower left.  Going clockwise you can see how I dipped the roll of resin-covered fiber in water, squeezed out the excess, wrapped it around and around the broken handle, smoothed it to spread the resin, temporarily wrapped it with a vinyl strip (included along with the black gloves), and within half an hour I was tilling again!  This stuff is truly remarkable.  I can think of hundreds of applications--you can use it to repair leaky pipes or garden hoses, you can mend tool handles, you can seal up leaky radiator hoses in your car etc. I expect to be buying this over and over to save money and extend the life of my tools and equipment.


FiberFix got me back to work quickly so I could take advantage of the unseasonably early spring weather and prepare our garden for this year's planting.

A Man Out-standing In His Field!

2 comments:

  1. FiberFix reminds me of some other products I've seen on infomercials... there is this steel putty that my mother-in-law purchased one time (cannot remember the name). You basically smash the contents of the tube together like putty to activate it and then wrap it, mold it, form it and let it set to become hard as steel.

    Another product you may have heard of or used before is Sugru (www.sugru.com). This stuff is best for forming a firm yet flexible fix for things like cables/wires but you can also add grip to tools like a wrench or a hand saw. It's great stuff.

    I love how big your garden is!

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  2. Yes Curtis, I love the epoxy putty. The best one I've used is called JB Weld. Paul Harvey used to talk about a farmer he knew who fixed a cracked engine block on a tractor with this stuff and kept using it for years. I haven't heard of Sugru. I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip.

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