It isn’t a good deal until the blue wrapper is off.

This Mother’s Day the time had come for a decent barbecue. Mom had always resisted the things because my dad didn’t like charred food, and taking the unit apart and storing it inside each night was too much work. I determined to put one in place which would connect to the house propane line and be durable enough to survive outside for several seasons without protection from the elements.

I wasted a half-day negotiating for a used Weber in Ottawa, “a steal at $750.” Then Bet suggested for the tenth time: “You should be able to find a new one in town for less than that.” On Friday evening I set out to gain an education in gas barbecues and find an acceptable deal.

On my first stop I ran into a young man who obviously knows his gas grills. I looked at the gleaming Weber at the front of the store, but he seemed to think it was a bit rich for my blood. He directed me halfway back to a row of plain, Ontario-built models. He told me he owns one of these and finds it great for all of his outdoor cooking needs.

I looked to the gleaming monster beside it. He dismissed it as a cheap knockoff and wouldn’t tell me any more about it. He then moved down to the lesser grills and explained how they will cook, but won’t last nearly as long as the one he had chosen for me.  I thanked him. It was closing time in his store, and I had a lot to learn yet. This guy knew his stuff; I’ll give him that.

Next stop was a large department store. I briefly looked at a myriad of huge grills with laughably low prices and lurid product names.

At the farmer’s store I encountered only two models. Ah, limited choices. Good. A shiny one had many bells and whistles. The other one, an Ontario-made model, seemed very plain but had the same price. I couldn’t find anyone in the store, so I headed on.

The Tire place displayed a bewildering variety of grills under a generic name. Two models in my range were priced identically, had similar features, yet looked as though they had been built on different continents. I managed to corner a clerk, who promptly radioed for help. After this process repeated two more times, I got to talk to a manager who obviously knew nothing about the grills. Maybe Friday evening is not the time to shop.

My next department store stop had the predictable array of Asian knockoffs, though one smaller model looked pretty nice. Three clerks into the depth chart and I found one who actually owns one of the grills. All she could tell me about it was that it works well, and she has had it for four years. I added this model to my short list and dashed home to watch a hockey game.

Saturday morning dawned with the realization that I still didn’t have a grill for Mother’s Day dinner, and was more confused than ever. So I asked Google, which promptly turned me over to an assortment of discussion groups devoted to gas grills.

The first thing I learned was that everyone dismissed the imports as cheap throw-aways. The same five brand names kept coming up as quality products. The choices were narrowing down, but time was running out.

This time I found an alert clerk at the farm store, so I peppered her with questions. The brand-name grill turned out to be an orphan which had been around since the store opened. I tossed a low-ball offer. She countered. I offered a more reasonable number which she took to her manager. After a delay she came back, acting a bit frazzled from the battle, but told me the deal had gone through. I wheeled it out to the parking lot, missing drip tray and all.

Once Bet caught and prevented me from firing up the grill with the parts bag still inside, things went well until she tried to remove that blue film which covered the stainless steel parts. She came back into the house looking for a chisel and I figured we had a problem. The blue film simply wouldn’t let go of the metal underneath.

WD40 and varsol didn’t work. Google located a lady in Texas who had faced the same problem. Turns out household ammonia releases the adhesive in the film. I put on my charcoal fume mask and spent an hour scrubbing. Next time I’ll buy a new grill from the guy who knows his job.

Then I accidentally located another little item on the Net. Consumer’s Reports has failed only one barbecue in the last five years. Guess which one melted during its test, dripping molten metal down onto the tank below? Mine, the orphan grill at the farm store. So much for my vaunted research skills. At least the company website makes it easy to order replacement parts online to get the unit up to spec.

Even though the steaks were fine at dinner, it isn’t a good deal if the grill melts when you light it.

The Floor Sander

The biggest renovation task when we moved to an older house involved tearing up old carpet to get to the good hardwood floors underneath. The rusted staples through the underlay made my blood boil, but we managed to bleach most of the stains out. Some rooms were so heavily coated with oily varnish that it proved quicker and much cheaper to scratch the finish off with a brace of hand scrapers than to gum up the sander’s belts in seconds of use.

Over a couple of weeks the floors and stairway succumbed. Most of the varnish went on very well, but I had read that the open grain of oak required filler before the varnish, so in the living room I slathered on a generous dose of the goop and waited for it to set. It didn’t. More research revealed that Japan dryer mixed into varnish makes it dry much more quickly. I resolved to put a coat of modified varnish onto the floor in the hope that it would mix with the filler and cause the whole thing to harden. This left a living-room pool of smelly liquid. Not good. Maybe if I used more dryer. To apply the second coat I had to wade, so I settled upon woolen socks covered by clear plastic bags as the footwear of choice. In I went with the foam applicator on a broom handle, and on went the third coat with a fervent prayer to whatever deity controls the drying of varnish.

It worked. The whole thing set up beautifully. Two more coats of gloss and we had a magnificent living room floor.

Thus emboldened, I set my sights on my son’s bedroom. He needed a desk and shelf-unit, so I picked up 300 bd. feet of red oak from a mill north of #7, ran it through the planer and built a complex work unit. This left a great deal of surface to sand, so I resolved to rent a floor sander for his bedroom floor and then press it into service for the new wood, as well.

The old-style Clarke drum sander hurts my back. The angle is just wrong. At that time I was at the stage of life where I tended to adjust things to suit. It turned out that the handles don’t adjust that high. This discovery came to me as I held dumbly to the handle while the rest of the unit took off down a flight of stairs, under full power until the cord pulled out.

Yikes! Fortunately the oak baseboards were pretty tough and I hadn’t hit any balusters, so I got by with one dent in the pine flooring on the landing.

The day was wearing on and I still had that pile of oak to sand, so I moved the unit to the back deck and smoothed the two desk tops without incident. But the deck was the wrong shape for shelves. Ideally a long, flat area would be best for the narrower pieces. The street! Church Street at that time was a series of long, concrete slabs: a smooth, uninterrupted sanding surface.

Fueled by coffee and determined to complete the job before the sander was due back at the rental agency, I arranged the shelves one after the other along the quiet street. The heavy red cord wouldn’t reach the outlet in the garage. In haste I grabbed an extension, one of those yellow things on a reel which were popular in the 80’s. It reached. I plugged in and started the first shelf. Pop! The sander quit. The breaker on the cord reel had let go.

In frustration I walked over and punched the reset button.

Nothing on this earth accelerates as quickly as a Clarke floor sander on concrete. By the time I could get my finger off the breaker the thing was down the street and out of sight behind a Pontiac. What’s worse, I heard a loud “crump” when it hit the curb.  Silence.

I looked around.  Everyone in the neighbourhood had vanished, even the owner of the car.

The sander did not enjoy its encounter with the curb. It cracked the cast aluminum casing. Of course I tried to puzzle out how such an accident could have happened – or more likely I tried to find an explanation which made me seem a little less of an idiot. It came down to the clearly-labeled electronic switch on the unit. Electronic switches don’t normally start up after a power interruption. This one obviously did. Turns out the rental guy had replaced the worn-out switch with a regular light switch, but hadn’t changed the label.

Still, returning the sander was easily my most embarrassing moment to that point in our life in Smiths Falls. Later on I bought my own unit, but I’ve never tried to raise the handle. I just sand until my back hurts, and then quit for the day. It works fine that way. Oh, yes, I also threw that yellow, wind-up cord away and bought a heavier one.