HEADLINERS AND ALSO-RANS

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As devoted readers of my precious blog will surely recall, I purchased myself a pickem-up truck some 9 months ago. I've come to call her Dutch, though she might not actually be a woman. Honestly I have no idea, and I don't care to find out the truth of the matter. Regardless, this is what "she" looks like:

Though Dutch is really in pretty great aesthetic shape considering her vintage (1992), the headliner in the cab was starting to sag as a result of occasional intrusions of water from the roof and a constant barrage of gravity from the cosmos, so I decided to call up my go-to automotive repair buddy Danger Dan to help me replace it.

This, as they say in the industry, is Danger Dan. He's a crusty old east coaster. Hails from Allegheny, PA to be exact. Known him a great many years, I have. And one time, he done wrastled himself a whole family of wolverines with just his bear hands, which he'd ripped off a mother grizzly no more than 20 minutes earlier. And that was just with his human hands. Truly a man of great intrigue and consequence, and perhaps consequently a man with great and random stuff. Why, a leisurely stroll around his workspace reveals a whole world of treasures...

Like an engine lift!

And a pile of Mitsubishi rims and fashionable/utterly impractical cast-iron steampunk accessories!

Meticulously organized batteries!

And also one time, he took a drum from an old washing machine and turned it into a backyard grill pit thing.

See???

Anyway, Danger Dan has been an exceptionally good friend to me over the years, but has also served as an invaluable informational resource for me in more recent years, as he knows an obscene amount about automobiles, and I apparently know almost nothing about buying vehicles that don't break down all the goddamn time (though to her credit, outside of a battery replacement and a couple failed hoses, Dutch has been rock solid in terms of reliability). He's taught me how to change my oil, he's taught me how to install a car stereo, he's taught me how to change the tension on a Saab 900's clutch cable, and he's taught me how to safely move and securely reattach my truck's horrendously placed center-console-armrest-storage-unit-thingy (this last project was far more complicated than it sounds and would have made a great Rubbish post, but unfortunately my camera was nowhere to be found that day).

Dan also serves as a great counterbalance to me from a project creation standpoint, as he likes to think out everything that he's going to do on a project before he actually does it, which tends to minimize mistakes and maximize results. This of course stands in direct contrast to my typical building methodology which involves putting whatever I'm working on together via a sequence of whims and notions, then finding creative ways to fix the problems that arise after I inevitably and invariably fuck everything up on it.

Different strokes for different folks, but there's no doubting that for a detail-oriented, meticulous project like replacing a truck's headliner, Dan's creative method is just downright superior to my own.

This...

...is my truck's old headliner. It shouldn't be too tough for you to see the sagging fabric and water stains around the outside of the piece, but this next picture should articulate the problems better still:

I know, gross, right?

Before we go any further, you must first know this: Your standard headliner is made up of two components - the fiberglass molding that gives your headliner its shape and the headliner fabric that gives your car's roof its kissably soft look and feel. But that's really only 66% of the story, as the headliner fabric is actually made up of two components as well - the foam that attaches to the fiberglass molding and the fabric that covers up the foam. This means that there are two adhesive joints in this construct that can fail - the one between the foam and the fabric and the one between the foam and the fiberglass. In my case, the adhesion between the fabric and the foam was failing, which meant that as I peeled away the fabric most of the foam was left behind, still clinging to the fiberglass molding.

Any application of a new headliner would have looked absolutely horrible if I didn't get that foam off of the fiberglass molding first (and apart from that, it probably would have stayed in place for about 12 minutes before peeling off from my car's ceiling, letting off the faint sound of a distant foghorn as it draped down over my truck's interior), so Dan lent me a small metal wire brush (yep, that's the brush alright) and I set myself to scraping off all of this 20 year old (and almost certainly carcinogenic) foam, inch by inch.

This is what it looked like when I'd only scraped off a couple teeny tiny areas of the foam.

And this is what it looked like when I'd scraped off a little more of the foam. And also I'd leaned the whole thing against a hot tub. And I turned it on its side for some reason or another. That's what happened.

And this is what it looked like with all of the foam gone except for a smiley face.

And this is what it looked like with all of the foam gone except for a banana.

And then after that, there was no banana at all.

So it goes.

I bought new headliner fabric at a very cool and somewhat obscure shop in Denver called B-D Company on Broadway, and they recommended that I use 3M brand's "General Trim Adhesive" so I picked up a can of that as well (though in the end it very frustratingly required 1 full can of the stuff plus about 1/64th of a second can to get the job done properly). The trim adhesive shot out like a mixture of silly string, cotton candy, and Spiderman web goo, though somehow I was able to restrain myself from eating it despite the fact that two of these things rank highly on my list of favorite foods.

Here's Dan laying down a liberal but not overwhelming coat of the stuff on the fiberglass side of things.

We put some on the underside of the headliner fabric as well, to really make sure we got a strong bond between the two. We then softly pressed the headliner down to get it firmly into place... if you're trying this at home, imagine that you're kneading a ball of pizza dough that you're utterly terrified of. That's the level of pressure you want to be creating.

Once the middle was secured and somewhat dried, we glued and affixed the corners and other assorted tricky areas, until we were left with something like this:

There were a few wrinkles and dimples left after the fact that we couldn't get rid of for whatever reason (this bothered Dan far more than it bothered me), but things were generally as we wanted them to be so we cut the extra fabric around the sides and wrapped the front end of the fabric (the only end that wouldn't be covered by plastic trim inside the cab) around the fiberglass molding to complete the job. After that it was just a matter of reinstalling the bastard inside the cab, which was FAR more of a pain in the ass than you'd imagine, as it involved removing/reattaching all of the seat belts and plastic trim, and getting the stupid little dome light thing into a position where it would work properly and not fall onto the center console every time I went over a pothole.

But ultimately, and predictably, we claimed victory.

An improvement? Absolutely. A somewhat underwhelming photograph to end a catastrophically long blog post? You bet your sweet ass it is. Tah!!!

FLOODMAGEDDON!!!!

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If you know anything about my history of living in the McHanslaw Manor, it's that it's one chock full of floody goodness and general water-logged-ee-ness. As a matter of fact, in the three or so years that I've lived in this marvelous basement, my earthy possessions have weathered the ravages of three separate floods (the first chronicled here, if you really care to look). That's a fair amount.

The latest of these floods has without a doubt proven to be the most catastrophic of the bunch from a stuff-ruining/life upheaval-ing perspective, but it also had a wonderful cleaning effect on my world. Not only in the sense that it literally washed the holy hell out of all sorts of things that I never have the time or wherewithal to properly wash on my own (my arsenal of sneakers has never looked so bright and shiny), but also in the sense that it forcibly instilled within me some serious "getting rid of shit" momentum, so I decided to ride that wave of righteousness and give the fine folks at some charitable organization a ton of my stuff. We'll call it a floodletting, just to be cute.

While none of my donations could ever be exchanged for earnest American currency, some of the pieces I parted with were half-assed duds from the annals of Rubbishdom, so let's play a little game, shall we? See if you can find the following objects in the picture below!

Framed Racism is Not Funky poster, Vladimir Lenin-themed laptop carrying case, Colorado Buffaloes Starting Lineup action figure, hideous but virtually brand new 30-year-old car-shaped photo frame, Soviet flag, autographed photograph of Heisman Trophy winner Rashaan Salaam, creepy headless tea kettle, pill splitter (from my heavily medicated days... quite the collector's item!), reproduced Richard Nixon campaign poster, pink and white elephant made out of paper mache and sea shells, miniature Denver Broncos football helmet,

'Takin Dumps repurposed Hobby Lobby bric-a-brac, protest signage written in French... and crayon.

Guys from the Healing Minds donation truck, you can thank me next time I see you!

If you've got an especially keen eye, you might have noticed in that shot that I also parted ways with the frame from my Norman Rockwell-esque "Afternoon in Saint Petersburg" piece that I did quite some time ago. It was never my intention to give away with that one, but a large portion of the print was damaged in the flood, so I chopped out a little chunk of it and framed it in a far tinier house than it'd grown accustomed to. Still, I think it looks kinda neat.

In an effort to be as abrupt as possible, I feel it's my duty to express to you that it's currently 12:22am in my world and I'm about 3% of the way through the process of moving all my shit into a new apartment, so I apologize for the lack of humor, life, and interesting anythings in this post. I'll do better next time. Promise.

EBAY SUCCESS REDEFINED.

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The following information has only been shared with a precious few of my most trusted associates and allies, but my basement dwelling within the McHanslaw manor has fallen victim to a flood for the third time in as many years, and as a result I've decided it's finally time to extricate myself from this rent-free near-windowless laminate forest and trade it in for some sort of lease-based "apartment" type dwelling that I (hopefully) won't share with two 60some year old roommates.

Of course, they'll probably go down as the best roommates I ever had, but that's sort of beside the point.

This impending move has warped my spend-thrifty ways into downright miserliness, so when I needed a new jigsaw for the purpose of creating an ornate headboard for a bed frame I'll be building sometime soon (more on that later... like, probably months from now later), I didn't go to Home Despot. Nay, I didn't even go to Amazon. I went to eBay.

Normally I don't take the cheap route on tools - be they electronic or not - as a tool is something I plan to have for a LONG time when I buy it, but I really didn't have the coin available to buy a Bosch machine, or my dream jigsaw from Milwaukee, so instead of getting some middle of the road "adequate but generally unspectacular" machine, I opted to get a bargain basement "wholly unspectacular but generally reliable" unit. In this price range, Black and Decker and Skil are the only brands I found worth looking into, so I tracked a few auctions and put in ridiculously lowball bids on them in the hopes that one of them might pan out.

Then one did. A Black and Decker. A brand new one. For a whopping $1.29 winning bid ($11.18 after shipping).

This was well below the normal closing price for identical saws, so I was somewhat befuddled as to what had gone on here, especially since the auction closed on a Sunday afternoon (word to the wise: If you want top dollar for crap you're selling on eBay, list it to close on Saturday or Sunday, the prices almost always get pumped up on the weekends). But then I took a second listing at the auction, and it all became clear to me. Well... the "why I got it for 11 bucks" part of it, anyway:

Let's go in for a closer look at that little guy, shall we?

"Oh, no wonder," I thought. "I won a jizsaw. That's not what I needed at all."

Oh well, I paid for the item anyway. Hopefully the item I eventually receive will turn out to be a normal jigsaw that just fell victim to a typo (albeit a typo that the auction author exercised TWICE in his listing), and failing that hopefully the item won't give me nightmares or VD.

Then again, there's a lot of guys out there that've paid a hell of a lot more for VD than $11 after shipping, so I guess I'll be coming out ahead either way.

There's no way to write that last sentence without loading it full of unintentional innuendo. You have my apologies.

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR THE WORLD, 5 MONTHS IN THE MAKING

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On September 6th, 1972, my brother, the venerable and oft-referenced Angwart Schmidt Borlovsky, successfully broke free of the treacherous reign of his mother's womb. By an amazing coincidence, exactly 38 years later he, his family, and scores of unseen but undoubtedly present and famished mountain lions assembled themselves at a mountaintop villa to commemorate this most sacred of occasions.

That villa, of course, was the McHanslaw family cabin.

And those mountain lions, of course, are the ones that will eventually eat all of us, including but not limited to former journeyman NFL quarterback Steve DeBerg. We will all be sorely missed.

In my culture, the 38th birthday for a man is perhaps the most important of them all, as it signals the death of the final few shreds of a man's youthful dreams and ambitions, and the birth of a new era of reluctant yet all-encompassing acceptance of his current circumstances. Naturally, I would not allow this rite of passage to go by without bestowing a grand gift upon one of my dearest familial cohorts.

I found this Star Wars cooking apron online several months before his birthday, and ordered it almost immediately. After all, what better gift could a person give to a person who regularly grills and serves hamburgers to people at his house whilst all of them partake in a spirited game of some kind of wizard/dwarf-based fantasy shit?

There is no answer to that question.

Unfortunately, I failed to recognize that this was a new product being offered by the official Star Wars shop, and as such would by default fall under the heading of "things George Lucas has created after 1983," and as such would also fall under the heading of "being a massive, steaming pile of crap that isn't worth any of your money, even if the theater comps you a free popcorn and sensual Swedish massage, and you happen to be in a wealthy neighborhood at the time so you could reasonably expect that the massage would actually be really nice and not just disturbing." Obviously, the warning signs were there. I should have known better.

This is the absurd quasi-garment that showed up at my house some 3 weeks later (great shipping speed, Mr. Lucas!). Note the overwhelming lack of attention to detail. Marvel at the totally unadjustable neckline, and woefully inadequate tying cords around the waistline - hardly big enough to house an average Deep Space Nine aficionado, let alone your standard hardcore Star Wars fanboy. And finally, allow your mind to imagine the saccharine sweetness of running your fingers across the fully-synthetic "fabric" (see: "recycled garbage bags") they chose to make this thing out of. Because hey, nothing says good 'ol American barbecuing like an apron that melts to fit the grillmaster's skin!

My initial impulse was to return the product, but Lucas' return policy would have been laughable if it weren't so infuriating. It's been a while so I don't remember all the details, but I do recall that I was responsible for paying return shipping on the product, and that it was going to take somewhere around a month and a half for me to actually get my money back. There may have been talk of a paper check being involved as well - as in, they weren't going to just transfer the money back onto the card I used to pay for it, but rather issue me a check for the cost of the product, minus the overpriced shipping charge they'd gouged me with when I initially bought this thing, and then physically mail that check to me - but once again, my memory's a bit fuzzy on all this.

George Lucas reigns over an empire that completely sucks, that's all I'm getting at here.

Anyway, considering that my refund after required expenditures would have been about 84 American cents, I decided to just keep the thing (after swearing off ever buying anything from the Star Wars Shop ever again... boy, that sure was painful!) and modify it into something that was at least somewhat useful, so I headed down to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and picked up this legitimate, 100% cotton, devastatingly useful apron for about half the price of the piece of shit Dr. Jar Jar Binks slung at me:

Please take note of the adjustable neckline, and waist cords designed to wrap around a person who weighs more than 140lbs. Such a marvel of fabric engineering I'd never before seen!

I used some fabric glue and Mother McHanslaw's trusty sewing machine (my own machine had yet to manifest itself at this time) and affixed the crappy Lucas creation to the well-designed but unspectacular BB&B apron, and came out with this as my end product:

Improvement? Absolutely. Perfect? Far from it. In fact, this was one of my first sewing projects, so it is the very definition of "good from far, far from good" (uneven glue application, obtuse stitch lines galore, etc) but I busted my butt on making it (the useful apron required a few alterations to fit the size of the Star Wars one), so I had no reservations about giving it to him on that day.

The very next day, he turned 38 years and 1 day old. I gave him nothing.

Now, let us bear in mind that this project was finished a full 5 months ago, and I'm just getting around to writing about it now. Considering this fact, might it be reasonable to assume that I've finished several other projects over this time, but have just been too goddamn lazy to blather on about them for about 12 paragraphs more than is necessary? Why yes, yes it would be reasonable to assume that.

And hopefully my friends, I will soon get to the weighty job of tying a bow around all of these old projects by submitting them to the world of Rubbish, but I make no guarantees on that front. I've just been accepted to some sort of learning-school for humans, and I'm feverishly working towards a goal that seemed totally untouchable a mere 3 months ago (more on that later), so Rubbish time might further dwindle.

Only Time will tell. She's a filthy gossip.

UNPRECEDENTED!

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As long-time readers of this blog will surely be aware, I've had a Good Rubbish shop (www.zazzle.com/goodrubbish) established on zazzle.com for a couple of years now, featuring a medley of t-shirts and other assorted crap that I designed several years ago (it's rumored that a new Ronald Reagan hoodie is in the works, but I can neither confirm nor deny these reports at this time).

Anyway, as you might expect, the Good Rubbish shop has not been drowning in sales over the course of its under-hyped, neglected existence, totaling 16 sales over its first 24 months of business. And, if I'm being totally fair, only 14 of those were legitimate sales, as two of them were accounted for by my own Mother McHanslaw as well as the venerable Artimus Mangilord.

Anyway...

Suddenly, and without provocation or explanation, my quasi-derelict Zazzle shop has started blowing up over the past month, garnering 10 sales over the past 30 days alone. That's one sale every 3 days, which any math major can tell you is a massive increase over my previous average of one sale every 46 days. Yahtzee!

As might be expected, almost all of my sales over time have come from my most morbid shirt design of all, this homage to Leon Trotsky:

But as of late there's been a run on what's probably my favorite design of the bunch, this reusable grocery/tote bag design I crafted several years ago:

Take THAT, Westboro Baptist Church!

For the record, I own a few of the "budget" totes on that God Hates Bags design. And let me tell you, I could not think of a finer Christmas gift for your friends, family, or significant others than that affordable, adorable piece.

Now, I have absolutely no idea WHY my shop is suddenly getting all of these sales, or WHEN this hot streak of mine is going to come to a screeching halt, but I certainly am enjoying it. Of course, I shall keep you all up to date if I ever figure out why in God's name people have suddenly decided to start buying all this crap, but I honestly doubt that a question like that will ever present the world with a legitimate answer.

So yeah, that's it. Shameless plug post over, normal Rubbish post pending. Tah!

ADVENTURES IN PROCUREMENT

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As a frequent reader of this blog, you've probably noticed that a disturbing trend is emerging in the world of Rubbish, as two of my previous two posts have developed under the inspiration of "look at this great crap I bought!" sentiments.

First off, allow me to assuage your concerns by informing you that this blog has never, and will never become a blog focussed exclusively - or even primarily - upon the act of buying things that are neat, interesting, and/or catastrophically spectacular. The purpose of Good Rubbish has been and will always be to showcase the stuff that I've turned into crap, or vice-versa. The previous two posts were merely an aberration.

Secondly, what follows will be my third of three consecutive posts centered around neat stuff that I bought. Without further ado...

The holiday season is upon us once again, and the world of Rubbish is not immune to its excess, my friends. Oh no, it most certainly is not.

This is what Sears looks like at 9am on Black Friday. How would I know? Because I was there.

Take note of the complete and utter lack of shoppers, and then take note of the fact that, once again, this was taken at roughly 9am on Black Friday, the single busiest shopping day of the year. Hey Sears! Get it through your thick fucking skull, no one buys clothes from you anymore! Furthermore, NO ONE is going to buy an engagement band from your jewelry department!!! QUIT BEING SO FUCKING STUPID! JUST CLOSE THE TOP 3 FLOORS OF YOUR STUPID DEPARTMENT STORE AND SELL TOOLS, APPLIANCES, AND HOUSEWARES EXCLUSIVELY!!! IT'S YOUR ONLY REMAINING CHANCE TO RETURN TO A STATE OF SOLVENCY!!!

Sorry, that may have been a bit out of hand, but Sears frustrates me. Best tools money can buy in the worst run corporation money can't fix. Ridiculous.

That said, they did have some smokin' deals (and lots of elbowroom, but there's probably no further need to beat that already beaten dead horse) on Black Friday, so I picked up a few goodies for my war chest.

This 200 piece socket set was marked down 50% and comes with the Craftsman lifetime warranty (which I'm really hoping some other company chooses to honor after Sears inevitably goes belly up within the next 10 years). Took a pretty big chunk out of my checking account, but I think it's worth it. Barring theft, this should be the last socket set I'll ever buy.

I also got this big rolling tool chest, which is something I've always wanted to have, for 50% off as well. I would have loved to put my new socket set inside one of the drawers, but unfortunately I lack the necessary living space to actually use this tool chest for its intended purpose right now, so I'll be using it as a dresser/bureau until the time arrives where I actually have some sort of tool-holding workspace.

See? Tube socks. Pajamas. Bureau.

I had another absolutely epic thrifting run about a week ago, which netted me a number of wonderful treasures, but without a doubt the treasure-ey-est treasure of the bunch was this 1950's or 60's era Health-O-Meter bathroom scale, which only set me back 15 bucks and (somewhat surprisingly) TOTALLY works and is TOTALLY accurate:

How did this marvelous and ludicrously heavy thing end up in a crummy thrift store? I have absolutely no idea, but I'm thankful it did. Similar to the socket set, I don't picture myself buying another bathroom scale any time soon.

Goodness... so much personality.

Also, and in conclusion, my months long search for a sewing machine to call my own has finally (or at least hopefully) come to an end. This was quite the epic journey, as I'd settled on the sewing machine that I wanted to get some time ago (a Janome TB12 Threadbanger edition unit), but the machine was discontinued by the time I'd saved up enough money to actually purchase it. As a result, I had to go digging around for another machine that had as many of the TB12's qualities as possible:

- Metal casing

- Simple, straight-forward design and functionality

- Doesn't look like a bulbous, uninteresting pile of dogshit

Those don't sound like the makings of a very tall order, but let me tell you friends, they really are.

First off, since everything nowadays is made to fall apart about 3 and 1/2 weeks after its already meager warranty expires, no one makes much of anything out of metal anymore. Janome up until fairly recently had several sewing machines with metal casings, but as far as I was able to find ALL of them have been discontinued and replaced with plastic-surrounded models. Blugh.

Also, and this isn't the case with all manufacturers, but most companies seem to want as many selling points as possible for their plastic-lined crap, so they don't come out with sewing machines that sell under the heading of "it only does 3 things, but it does those 3 things really well and will continue to do them until the end of time if you maintain it properly" anymore. Double blugh.

And finally, almost all consumer-marketed sewing machines look like this, this, or this. Or, to put it more bluntly, almost all consumer-marketed sewing machines look like bulbous, uninteresting piles of dogshit. Blugh city.

After doing some very frustrating research on the new model sewing machines available on the market, I ultimately decided to buy an older sewing machine - one from an era of time when important stuff wasn't made out of crappy shit.

Following several failed auction attempts on eBay, I ultimately won an auction for a Husqvarna Viking Classica 105. It was a bit of a leap at $120 after shipping, but it's a very high quality machine and it DOES work (though we'll see how marvelous of condition it's in for certain once I get it in to someone to have it tuned up). She's sort of pretty though, ain't she? At least in a utilitarian, Swedish sort of way...

And hey, it came in its original box, so that's a good thing, right?

And it came with this sparkley sticker commemorating Husqvarna's 300 year anniversary as a company (1689-1989... yeah, this machine's a little old). That's what we in the biz call a "Major Enron Selling Point."

Anyway, had I stumbled across it beforehand I might have given some through to this new Singer sewing machine, which to its credit isn't excruciatingly ugly and isn't made out of plastic exclusively (though there's apparently still a lot of plastic on it), but considering the $200 difference in price I feel pretty good about my purchase. Hopefully I'll feel REALLY good about it once I get it in to a sewing machine mechanic person who actually knows what the fuck they're talking about.

I shall surely keep you posted. Adios!