Month: November 2018

Okay so normally when I re-caulk a tub enclosure it’s a tiled enclosure, and 80% of the job is chipping out the old grout or caulk or whatever, but in this case it was a fiberglass tub enclosure.  And of course, the installer had taken the easy way out and had used cheap water based caulk, which, as sure as night follows day, allows water to get in and then mold to grow. The stains were horrific.  No amount of scrubbing would get them out, they were embedded.  ICK!

But, since it was fiberglass and not tile, thus cheap latex caulk and not old cracked grout, all I had to do was take a razor blade and cut out on the bottom and the side and the old caulk bead came right off.  Normally, with a tile/grout enclosure, that takes a couple of hours to do and is just nasty hard work.

So I taped it up and did a bead of Silicone II and shaped it with my finger, and now it looks glorious.  Well, as glorious as fiberglass can look.

 

 

Oh my goodness this has been a record breaking week here at Justin the Handyman.   I have been runnin’ and gunnin’ every day, but I came across something that I felt merited a blog post.   This is an electrical issue known as the Underwriter’s Knot.

So I had client present with a saggy baggy lamp socket:

Now I like to emphasize that I am NOT an electrician, but it is an oddity of life that most master electricians will not bother with re wiring lamps, so it comes to folks like me to fix them.  I am always amazed at lamp sockets– all that stands between your hand and a fully energized 110 volt bare wire is a little sleeve of cardboard about 1/16″ of an inch thick.   That’s IT.  Scary.

So anyway, this lady had had some lamp shop re-wire this thing, so you would THINK they would know how to do it.  But when I popped off the old socket, UH OH

There was no UNDERWRITER’S KNOT.

The idea here is, if someone trips on the lamp cord, that MIGHT pull the wire out of the socket and now you have bare energized wires touching the metal of the socket base, or maybe even falling out of the lamp altogether.  so when rewiring a lamp you ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS  tie a special “Underwriter’s Knot” in the wire, thus:

This makes it pretty much impossible that the wire will get yanked off the screws on the socket.

I had other problems with this thing, the previous re-wire being an amateurish job I had to triple check to see which wire was the “hot” as the hot wire MUST go to the gold screw, otherwise more risk of shock.  (Sorry no pic of done socket, this lady had a “list” a mile long and I was going and going.)

Rewiring lamps seems simple but it’s serious business.   VERY easy to screw it up and create a shock hazard.