/diy/ - Do It Yourself

So we talking about beat to shit houses here?

I've been a renter for the last 12 years of my life. Did a ton of home repairs and upgrades when I was growing up, because my parents bought an unfinished house when I was 6.

Now I'm 30 and buying my own place because rent is fucking expensive. I'm picking up a no-frills short-sale that's mostly intact but is in a general state of disrepair - the deal is closing in about a month and a half. Most of the stuff it needs I can do with my eyes closed, but some of this stuff? I'm worried I may have bit off more than I can chew.

Image related - it's a stud on the outer wall of the detached garage. The siding has completely fallen off of the wall and shit piles up between it and the garage next-door. I have no idea how to start replacing studs.

University dropout here.

Do uni. Better to be a poor student for five years than a poor wage-slave for a decade. Even with the global economy in the crapper, you'll have a much better chance of getting into the industry you want once you have that piece of paper - you can't even hardly get a job as a secretary in America without a bachelor's degree.

Everybody's been down on college lately, but labor department statistics still show the unemployment rate for college grads is a fraction of that for non-grads. Grads are just used to being on easy street - now they're having to deal with the kind of unemployment that non-grads have always dealt with, and non-grads are now having to deal with the kind of unemployment that high school dropouts used to deal with.

Even if they "don't teach you anything" at college, use your time there to socially network with other people interested in your field - you'll definitely not find that many intelligent people just walking the street or flipping burgers. With a little luck, by your senior year you might have enough connections to plan a new startup company and get funding.

>>311374
Qwiksteel and JB Stik come immediately to mind.

>>311452
Hang on, you just need a new outlet in a bedroom that already has one or more? You don't necessarily need to run all the way back to the box, then. You can just run wire from an existing electrical box in the room (behind an outlet or light switch, for example) and don't have to find a path all the way back to the breaker box.

But if you've got too much load and are popping the breaker, or if the existing wiring is boxless knob-and-tube, then just run a completely new circuit as planned and excellently described by >>311454

There's supposed to be a little rubber, foam, or magnetic insert inside your spark plug socket, to grab the plug and keep it in the socket. Unfortunately the rubber and foam inserts have a tendency to pull out of the socket and get lost. Yours is probably missing.

Use a magnet on a stick. You can buy them at any autoparts store for $2-5, or simply make your own out of a magnet, and a stick.

Should not be technically difficult for any mid-range modern laptop. 48khz/24bit is not that bad, that's just basic DVD quality audio.
I assume you have just analog audio source, though, and you're not going to find a laptop with that many inputs. However those are low-bandwidth streams so you can just stick 7 USB sound cards on some USB 2 hubs. Just read the specs on the USB cards before you buy them; some of the cheaper ones are meant for telephone/VOIP use and have substandard microphone inputs (12khz mono telephone quality). So long as you shop carefully you should be able to avoid those ultra-budget cards.

The biggest limitation will be that monster of a mixing program you are using. Encoding audio in real-time isn't all that demanding itself, but the system requirements on Sonar are startling - core 2 duo and 2 gigs of ram -minimum-. Still, you should be able to use a (high end) off-the-shelf consumer laptop if you shop properly. Many of Dell's high-end Insiprons come with quad-core i7s and 8 GB of ram, that'd should run it effortlessly. Just get your favorite machine from any manufacturer configured that way - quad core i7, 8 GB of RAM. (I'd tell you to get a quad core i5, but those don't seem to exist in the laptop world, so you'll have to pay the i7 tax) It will likely weigh a ton and eat through the battery faster than you can blink, but it'll do the job. Whatever you buy, get the car charger for it.

>>308261
It's the markup. That's not just the shack, though, that's standard retail practice. Also the packaging costs more than the product for a lot of stuff at retail stores that you can just bulk-order from china on your own.

>first real car project
>window regulators

oh shit dude, I've rebuilt engines and I will not touch that shit. Any time I try to do work inside the doorframe my hands cramp up and I can't get anything useful done.

it's not just a shit design; every car with power windows will eventually have all of them fail. This is why people buy trucks with hand-crank windows.

And I don't really have any good suggestions other than slap fiberglass over the cracked bits (which you have done) and epoxy/goop everything to the doorframe.

>>311027
All the decent i5s are either dual cores with 4MB of cache or quad cores with 6MB of cache.

Buy a 6MB quad core and you will not be disappointed, even if you buy the cheapest one. It's pretty hard to go wrong in that entire family. You can (commonly) find them in stock speeds from 2.5 ghz to 3.4 ghz. I think that around 3.0 ghz is a good price/performance sweet spot, but the price spread is not really that big so you should buy the fastest one that fits your budget.

It's generally not price-effective to go dual-GPU, except at the extreme high-end (i.e. 2 $400 cards instead of an $1000 card). For average gamers, one current-gen midrange card is going to be the best option. I would recommend a hd7850 as a good $170 entry-level card. Cut'n'pasted from a /v/ thread:
>Top tier: gtx 690, $1050
>2nd tier: hd 7970 Ghz edition, $400
>3rd tier: gtx 670, $380
>4th tier: hd 7870, $245
>5th tier: hd 7850, $165

It's worth mentioning that I play Skyrim and TF2 just fine on max settings on a much cheaper GPU than any of those.

But then again, you could do it your way. You should still use a remote-starter to avoid draining the battery. There's several Cadillac and Buick models sold in cold regions of the US that have heated windshields from the factory and the work very nicely.

I'd recommend using a fan to blow hot air on the windshield, rather than using convection and a heating coil. You can spread the heat out and distribute it better that way. If you can find an automotive space heater over there, buy one - they sell them here as little fan-blown heaters that plug into your cigarette lighter (image related), and use the guts from it.

Using a cigarette lighter for power, you'll be generally limited to 15 amps (which is what most of the pre-made heaters pull). You can wire straight to the battery or alternator to pull more than that, though, and trying to pull more than that without having the engine running is a recipe for a dead battery.

Whatever you rig together, it has to be able to tolerate voltage variances from 8v-15v.

I work at an (american) auto parts store and have been doing car shit for my entire life.

The short answer is that you are not taking either of the easy ways out. The easiest way out is to use a good, strong de-icing windshield washer fluid. There are also concentrated de-icing agents ("washer fluid booster") you can add to your wiper fluid to improve its de-icing abilities. Then just run the windshield washer when you get in the car and let the wipers scrub the slush away.

The second easiest way out for you is to simply install a remote-starter kit. When you park the car for the night, simply set the defrost on full-hot before locking up. In the morning push the starter button, any ice should melt off very fast - thick ice should take no more than 5 minutes after the engine gets up to normal operating temperature. A car that meets American emissions standards usually has to hit full operating temperature within 5 minutes or so of starting on a cold morning, but I know your auto emissions standards are a bit laxer so it might take longer for one of your cars. It would be easier to rig one of these remote starters on a timer than to rig a 12v electric heater on one, and you'd get the added benefit of a complete warm car.

If you wanted to proceed with the electric heater idea, you should be very sure of the condition of your battery first. A high wattage heater could very well drain your car's battery before melting the ice; most electric car heaters that are sold are only intended to be used with the engine running.

If you are going to heat water with it, get a separate passive solar system set up for that, rather than going through the efficiency loss of using active solar to power an electric heater.

Many pharmacies offer a pill-treatment called "FlavoRX" (to get kids to take their medicine). It can't be hard to reproduce.

My former roommate was a radio shack employee when he was saving up cash for college.

Radio Shack cannot maintain their business model selling components. Even if they were charging 3$ a capacitor, the volume isn't there, because the market is too small. When he was running the counter at *the closest Radio Shack to the main Microsoft campus*, where you would expect a large tech-savvy clientele, he sold components once or twice a week - it was always less than $20 of components a week.

Radio Shack has been floundering and trying to find a way to reorient their business towards something that'll be more profitable. Cell phones, Monster Cables, and Satellite TV subscriptions have been a big part of that, along with selling larger, bigger ticket consumer electronics. So far, though, they haven't found a niche that's working for them. (see >>308215 )

A Radio Shack counter worker works for minimum wage, but gets a $50 bonus for every cell phone contract they originate (per line!), something like $100 for every satellite subscription they start, and so on (you can extrapolate for yourself how much money Radio Shack must get for setting up an account) . Individual employees are reviewed primarily on those metrics, as well as ticket average (the average subtotal of transactions processed by that employee). How well a counter worker does on those metrics determines their chances of getting/keeping a full-time schedule and benefits, as well as potential promotions.

Product training, like in all retail, is completely nonexistent. A new employee is hired on the basis of their friendliness and customer service credentials - they have to figure out what the fuck they're selling by, over time, reading the packaging of every product in the store.

>>308532
not 926kb. 926b. Slightly less than 1kb.

And the system is likely not expecting anything executable on the card, nor will you likely be able to execute anything off of it.

>>308101
>>308690

If you want to keep the machine in-house and use it (media PC or otherwise), you could potentially do that, there is room for upgrades there. Your big limitation on that model is going to be the 4gb RAM limitation on the motherboard; so first step would be buy a pair of 2gb sticks and max it out. From the factory that thing was probably ordered with only 512MB - the minimum requirement for Vista Basic, and a spec in-line with the bottom-end Celeron it was also ordered with. The combination of Vista and a tiny amount of RAM is probably the biggest hurdle standing in the way of satisfactory performance. It should be able to use any DDR2 sticks from 667mhz-1067mhz, so you should be able to fix that with $50 of new RAM.

Once the ram problem is solved, throw out that Celeron chip and replace it. That's an LGA775 cpu socket on the board, so there's a ton of cheap used CPU's you can upgrade to. Avoid Pentium/PentiumD, and the Xeons, as they're all based on the old obsolete P4, and avoid the Celerons as they are crippled. You can get a basic low-end used Core 2 Duo on ebay for around $30 and that would be a huge bump.

So for $80 you could make it respectable desktop/office box with decent performance. Throw on another $50 for a few generations old hand-me-down graphics card on eBay to replace the integrated Intel junk, and you're playing Team Fortress or Skyrim.

>>308101
That computer is basically junk as parts. It's a slightly obsolete budget box. You'd be better off reassembling it and finding a way to wipe the drive, perhaps with Knoppix or another linux liveCD. Then reinstall the factory copy of Vista (I expect there's a vista license# on the case somewhere), install a basic free productivity suite (Openoffice or similar), and sell it on Craigslist that way for $100 or so. Now. Before it becomes any more obsolete.

I suspect that is a legitimate 530s, because the product specs you are seeing are for the /current version/ of the 530s being produced and sold. The processor lineup for that model has changed a few times over the years; they can be found with anything from a Celeron to a Core 2 Quad (and the motherboard can accept a ton of Core 2 family CPUs).
(cont.)

>>307582
>I plan to experiment some with fresnel lenses.
That sounds like an intriguing setup to me. Since you only need it during the hot/sunny times, passive solar heating of the liquid could totally work, assuming you can direct enough sunlight down those shafts. Passive solar water heaters were common during the 70's in the US, there must be a ton of info out there about them.

What is that original Munters unit? Just a traditional refrigerative dehumidifier, with a big resistive heater to get rid of the condensate? If so, I'd try solar heating of the condensate before completely removing the unit (assuming you can keep it running that long with only occasional use and no spare parts). If it doesn't work, rigging up a new electric heater is basically zero effort. Once you've got your evap figured out, install the dessicant waterfall.

Make sure you run the old system periodically, even when not needed, to keep oil circulated through the refrigeration system. Anything that old will lock up on you if you give it a chance to sit dormant for any extended period of time.

On the Munters dehumidifier, if it's refrigerative, where did they put the hot side - does the waste heat go to the condensate shaft (helping with the evap) or is it used to heat the facility?

>>308549
Because most land that far out is subdivided into giant logging company parcels or similar. There's lawyer labor and legal paperwork involved in subdividing it, which makes it not worth it for the landowner just to make a $1000 sale.

In addition, in many areas without government infrastructure built, you'll run up against county zoning problems if you try to make a smaller parcel. The county will set a minimum livable lot size of multiple acres in remote areas, to avoid the potential problem of having to suddenly start providing services out to a new remote shantytown.

For example: I live in the City of Seattle, but we are on the far west edge of a county that extends all the way east to the summit of the Cascade mountain range. In Seattle, without getting into the complicated zoning of dense neighborhoods, you can subdivide down to 5000 sqft and still live on the lot. Go out to the far-flung suburbs/exurbs in the foothills of the mountains, and that rises to a 1 acre minimum. Leave the exurbs, go out to the undeveloped edge of the national forest up in the Cascades, and the minimum size goes up to 10 acres.

So you have to buy the whole $20,000 parcel (even if you'll never see the other side of it). Don't think of it as bad, all that extra land can provide you a bunch of free resources. A sustainable source of firewood, for example. Maybe some wild fruiting trees (or plant your own small orchard). Perhaps a practical location for a well. Maybe a hill from the top of which you can mount some antennas and pick up TV/Cell/whatever signals from a nearby town. Or maybe you learn to hunt.

>>201552
And just for fun, it would take about 5 seconds for a spray gun to burn HF's pancake compressor down to 40 PSI from max.

Fuck the haters, you can get a lot of use out of a cheap Chinese compressor.

Oilless compressors wear out, don't buy them used.

Forget how many HP, it doesn't matter. What matters is the volume of air it can move. New compressors should be rated in CFM at 2 pressures, one low and one high. For instance, the HF 1/3 hp pancake compressor is rated for 1 CFM at 40 PSI, and 0.6 CFM at 90 PSI. The 2hp compressor is 4.5/5.5 at the same pressures.

All the air tools you're looking at should have ratings as well. For example, a roofing nail gun on HF is estimated to use 1.0 CFM at 90 PSI. A paint gun on the other hand uses 13 CFM at 45 PSI.

That doesn't mean that you can't use those tools with a smaller compressor. That's what the tank is for - you burn the tank pressure as you use the tools, and it refills when you switch tasks.

So you are spraying a boat. That will be the most air-intensive task, and you should size your compressor to it. If you want to be able to spray indefinitely, get a compressor that can out-pump your spray gun, and ignore the tank size - most 5HP compressors should be up to the task (HF's definitely are, 16.4 CFM @ 40 PSI).

If, on the other hand, you're going to have frequent downtime while you're spraying, you can get an undersized compressor with a big tank - HF's 2hp model would need (roughly) 1.5 minutes of rest for every minute of spraying, and with it's 21 gallon tank, would take about 1 minute for a spray gun to bleed it down to 40 PSI from max pressure. A bigger tank would allow you longer periods of continuous spray, followed by longer periods of rest.

>>201508
>The bike has horizontal drop outs

Ok, then you can.

I'd still use the stock derailleur to keep things lined up, especially on the rear.

>>201394
>So if I tension the chain just right, it should have no problems, right?

It is most likely not /possible/ to tension the chain "just right". You can only make adjustments of exactly one link (or one half-link, if you want to be a dick about it) in size.

Purpose built single-speed bicycles have the chain length, sprocket size, and crank-to-axle distance all coordinated to make sure the chain tension CAN be adjusted "just right". In addition, they have sprockets designed to resist skipping, that can be used with lower chain tension than the sprockets on a multi-speed bike.

You need to reinstall the rear derailleur. It also serves as a chain tensioner.
That is why it has the spring-loaded swingarm & extra sprocket.