With great power...

...comes great responsibility:



It's awesome, but it's also just a little scary. And yes - that really is the very best picture of it I could take with the old camera. Seriously. I took twelve shots of it...

Anyway, I'm not really up to making a full accounting of all the changes over the past few days, but I did want to tell a little story about ducts, and furnaces, and the way renovations get done at Don and Amy's house.

We decided on Sunday that it was time to move the duct that ran from the main trunk of the furnace, across the ceiling of the bathroom, down and then along the laundry -room-side of the support beam, and back up into the floor joists, where it then split into two lines: one heading into the kitchen (which was working okay) and one heading to two (count 'em, TWO) dead ends.

Having spent most of the day Saturday (and a goodly portion of Thursday night, to be honest) chasing down the tools and materials we needed to do the job, we got cracking on Sunday. The first step was to remove the old ducting, and this proved to be remarkably easy, once we realized that there was very little securing the damn things in place anyways.

Once all the ductwork was out of the way (and had been stamped flat by the War Department so it would lie properly on the rest of the recycling pile), we attached a couple of lengths of duct to the existing kitchen run so that it would lead right back to the furnace. This was also pretty straightforward.

Once we had the duct close enough to the furnace, it was time to cut into the trunk and attach the take-off. This... well, this is where things started to get a little squirrelly. See, we'd been all over town looking for a proper sheet metal cutting tool, with absolutely no success. The only thing we had to cut the duct with were a couple of pairs of aviation snips. Now, the aviation snips are perfectly capable of doing the job, but they don't do quite as nice of a cut as these. Still, you go to work with the tools you have, right?

So we carefully drew up a template that matched the size of the take-off, marked it out all nice and proper on the furnace, and drilled pilot holes in each of the corners. I then got up on the little step ladder with the aviation snips and.. couldn't get the tip of the snips into the hole without munging the metal of the trunk.

Well, not to be thwarted by some dumb tin can, we hauled out Amy's jigsaw (which had been put away with the blade sticking out and trapped between the two halves of the case - BAD DON!) and got it fired up and ready to go. I put the blade in the hole, lined up the little laser guide, pulled the trigger, and started cutting.

About three-quarters of an inch into my cut, just as I was thinking "Jeez, this is pretty smooth... it might actually work-"

Ping!

"Huh."

"What? What was that noise?"

"Hmmm..."

"Was that the blade?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Did it fall into the furnace?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Shit."

"Oh yeah."

Well, we couldn't really see into the furnace very well, so we soldiered on. The good part was that the jigsaw cut had expanded the hole enough for the aviation snips to fit in, so I managed to make a reasonable facsimile of the required hole. The take-off fit snugly (but not too tight), and after a few hours of sweating, cursing, yelling, and crying, we got the angles and ducts all cut, screwed together, and taped up.

But... (oh, you knew this was coming, don't tell me you didn't) it was about this time that Amy brought up the missing jigsaw blade. She reckoned that it might be possible that the blade had fallen into the furnace fan. If we turned the furnace on, with the jigsaw blade trapped in the fan blades, it might just destroy our furnace.

This, as they say, would not be good.

Well, we had already taped up and finished the hole we had already cut in the side, so we took off the furnace "access" panels to have a look. We saw a lot of wires and gas pipes and other stuff we knew better than to mess with, but there seemed to be no access into the "fire box". Then we noticed an old patch on the side of the fire box, covered up with duct tape. Now, as any handyman knows, you never, ever, ever use duct tape when sealing ducts (no, I'm really not kidding), so we were going to have to replace that tape anyway.

With the aid of my hand mirror (I use it to see the back of my head, shut up), we managed to get a look inside the firebox and sure enough, there was the jigsaw blade, sitting on a small ledge immediately beside the exposed blades of the fan. It was pretty evident that if we turned on the furnace, the fan might very well dislodge the jigsaw blade and lead to a very messed up furnace.

This next part is a little hard to describe, so bear with me...

The fan is the lowest part of the furnace, sitting pretty much right at the bottom. Immediately above the fan are the heating "coils". They're not really shaped like coils, but more like upside down T's. There are three of them.. oh, screw it. Here:



(Tremble in awe at my mad MS Paint skillz! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!)

Ahem.

Anyway, you can see how the shape of the furnace coils and the location of the jigsaw blade would make for a difficult extraction, particularly when you also consider that it's dark inside the fire box, the distance between the hole in the side and the bottom of the coils is a good four feet, and the opening in the side is only about six or eight inches square... yeah. Not easy.

We started with the simplest of tools: a kitchen magnet suspended on a string from a piece of wooden dowel. In case you were wondering what the heating coils are made from, I can assure you that it's ferrous metal. In terms of a magnet on a string, that's not good.

The next approach was to tape the kitchen magnet to a yard stick. This worked about as well as can be expected, which is to say, not at all. Our friend Rick dropped by about this point with a magnet on the end of a telescoping rod, but this ran into the same problems as the magnet-on-a-string and magnet-on-a-stick: we simply couldn't get the magnet down between the heating coils and past the tight spot between the "T's" at the bottom. Not only that, but we risked damaging the heating coils with repeated bashings of the magnet(s). It was time to try another tack.

Salvation came in the form of a squat, black, rotund piece of equipment that we had almost begun to take for granted. The shop vac! (You can see it lurking ominously in the background in previous blog posts, namely here and here, and quite conspicuously in the foreground here.)

So, I pulled the beast over and fed the nozzle carefully into the hole in the side of the firebox. It was a little long and rigid to fit around the corner, so I detached it from the hose, slid it in gently, and then reattached the hose. (See FOOTNOTE.) After several attempts, I managed to get the nozzle positioned where I wanted it, but Amy had to hold the shop vac up off the ground so there would be enough play in the hose. We turned on the shop vac, and almost immediately there was a tinkling sound as the jigsaw blade was sucked up into the nozzle.

Of course, now we had another problem. You see, I had to take the nozzle apart to get it through the hole in the side of the firebox. But the shop vac didn't have enough power, or the blade was too light, to suck the damn thing all the way into the bag: it was twirling around inside the nozzle. If I took the nozzle apart or turned off the shop vac, the blade was going to fall right back into the furnace - possibly into the fan itself.

So here's the situation: Amy's holding up a 40-pound, fully operating shop vac while I have one arm inside the firebox up to the shoulder while I try and finagle the nozzle of the shop vac up high enough so I can put my hand over the end. I felt like an outcast from a James Herriot novel - you know, if he ever wrote about enormous metal cows or cyborgs. (Those would have been good books, actually. I would have read them.)

Anyway, to make a long story not quite as painfully long, I managed to get my fingers over the end of the nozzle, and when Amy turned the shop vac off, the blade fell out into my hand. We extracted the shop vac, inspected the coils as best we could to make sure we hadn't damaged anything, and patched up the hole in the side of the furnace with a new piece of sheet metal and proper foil tape.

And to commemorate this momentous occasion, I present the first ever picture on Don & Amy's Basement Reno taken with my new camera:



And yes, I drew on it! The black arrow is the new line we put in to heat the kitchen, the red arrow is the new patch on the side of the fire box through which I was trying to extract the jigsaw blade, the yellow lines are a really crappy attempt at showing the position of the heating coils, and the green arrow is a very rough approximation of where the jigsaw blade landed inside the furnace.

Phew!

Anyway, we picked up some more two-by-fours, so I should be doing some more framing on Hallowe'en while Amy tends to the candy-sucking trolls at the door. Depending on how all of that goes, I may or may not have some decent pictures to post tonight.

Happy Hallowe'en, all!




FOOTNOTE: Quite possibly the most boring sentence ever written that contains the words "long and rigid" and "slid it in gently", but this is a family blog.