Worn out things

So I have this issue with things that wear out unevenly. Things that are otherwise in good shape but are rendered unusable because a crucial feature is worn. Take this snow shovel; light weight, sturdy, and the working edge gone.
Sort through the stock room and find some pieces of stainless steel. The new working edge is .060" and the back plate is .090.





You can see some of the old edge here. The cutouts were made on the bandsaw and are what's left of the original stiffening ribs.
It works pretty well but wants to bite deeper than it did. Gets under ice really well!

Next up was this ice scraper my son gave me. I like it because it will extend out so I can clean the truck windshield without over reaching. I've seen brass ice scrapers and had heard that they work well and won't scratch the glass, so...










Put an edge on it to come close to the original angle.  The plastic was thick enough that I didn't feel the need to have a back up plate.

It goes through ice on the windshield so easily that I almost feel guilty when I hear my neighbors scraping, and scraping. Almost.

The Worlds Most Expensive Shelves-assembly and finish!

So, the very first thing was to clean the years of
accumulated crud plus smoke residue off of the
shelves. They were REALLY dirty!

Then we set up the workmates, boxes of hardware, tools and uprights. I put the feet on the uprights as soon as the paint was dry. I had a square handy, but there was surprisingly little tendency to become a parallelogram. Eight screws, nuts, and lock washers on each shelf. I had flat washers, but there wasn't room to put them on.

The finished product! I have three 5 shelf units and one 2 shelf unit. Very sturdy!
Total cost; maybe $100 in materials and five years agonizing over the process.

Walking on the Moon!

I've been suffering with plantar fasciitis for a little over a year now and finally decided to see the doctor. I'd been avoiding this because I know that there is very little that can be done beyond what I am already doing, icing and stretching. No surprises from the doctor except the recommendation to try custom insoles. He gave me the name of the guy he went to, heck of a recommendation IMHO! Anyway, the end result is I can walk again without pain! A couple of weeks later I'm at the cardiologist for my one year surgical follow up; I'm fine, moo, and I'm telling the nurse about how much walking I've been doing. So she gives me a pedometer.  This is not a high end unit, but a cheap chinese piece they have been giving away as part of their 10,000 steps a day campaign. Cool. First day I notice that it keeps resetting to zero, not useful  for counting steps. Instructions say that it holds the data when it powers down after two minutes. WTF! Further testing reveals that I'm hitting the reset button inadvertently, probably when I sit. The reset button is very tall for the size of the unit, so I decided that some kind of guard might be the ticket. I started sketching up a full cover but decided that that was a bit over the top. Looking at the thing and visualizing what it was I was trying to accomplish I started looking for a washer of an appropriate size. After a little belt sanding and a drop of super glue, we have what I think will work. Testing is in progress. Results are favorable.

Although it worked for awhile, it would still reset at random. Then I broke the clip off and decided that I had devoted entirely too much energy to this.

One a side note; the reason it's been so long since the last post is that I've not been able to get this picture from my phone to here. It's my lie, and I'm sticking with it.  Solved the problem by plugging the phone into the computer.