A Shipwright in Training

I really do like owning a house, and I particularly like the renters I’ve had in my house for the past couple of years. No kidding, they’re the bomb. So, when they mentioned over the summer that the house was pretty cold last winter, I wanted to help them out. At the same time I wanted to make sure that whatever I did kept the house looking nice.

My first instinct was to replace the old crummy double track aluminum storm windows. However, when I looked at the cost (around $5k), how hard it would be to access the upstairs windows, and the questionable gains for the investment, I started to re-think that particular plan. The excellent folks over at Fine Homebuilding (the Breaktime bulliten board) gave me the idea of building some interior storm windows and leaving the old ones where they are. Hmmm, I don’t have to work outside and it’s cheaper… Yes yes.

The challenge was to come up with something that would seal the windows from the inside without looking ugly and require doing a lot of work each season. For instance, lots of people put up plastic over their windows in the winter, or use removable caulking to seal up around the windows. Too much work and time each season. Looking online, I found a place that sold storm windows with a strip of magnetic tape around the edge. The problem was that you had to put a steel rim around your windows for the magnets to stick to and I didn’t like how that looked.

I use rare earth magnets a lot for holding things in the shop, and after a little thinking, I came up with a way to use them to hold storm windows in place. They have the added advantage of being easily hidden in the window frame so you never see them. You can paint right over them without affecting them at all. Here’s what I came up with.
I used:

• 1/8″ Acrylic and Polycarbonate (Lexan) sheets. The Lexan is clearer and won’t yellow, so I used it for the downstairs windows. The Acrylic was used for the upstairs bedrooms.
• 3/16″ x 1 1/4″ clear pine strips that I milled
• Outdoor carpet tape to hold the pine strips on the Acrylic
• 1/4″ x 1/2″ rare earth magnets (via Ebay)
• 1/4″ x 1″ bolts & nuts. Grind the top surface of the heads dead flat.
• 1/2″ x 3/4″ stick-on foam insulation
• A little super glue gel to anchor the magnets in the window frame.

It really is simplicity itself.

• Cut your plastic sheet to overlap the interior window opening by 1 1/2″ on each side and along the top.
• Attach the wood strips to the margin of the plastic with carpet tape. I couldn’t find thin carpet tape, so I had to cut mine in half lengthwise.

Here you’re looking from the window side of the plastic at the wood attached with carpet tape.

• Drill some evenly spaced 1/4″ holes for the bolts 3/4″ from the outside edge of the plastic. I put 2 holes along the top and 4 along each side for the larger windows. If you have many windows of the same size, you can drill them all at once.

• Place the assembly up against window frame and center it. When you’re happy with the fit, use the holes you drilled as a guide to drill holes into your window trim. Yikes! Use a bit of tape on your drill bit to get your depth right. You want to drill just deep enough so that you can sink your magnets flush to the frame surface.
• Attach the foam insulation. See, that’s why we drilled the holes 3/4″ in. Along the bottom, have the insulation sit about 1/8′ proud of the bottom of the window. You need a nice soft strip there to seal the bottom edge against the window sill.
• Thread a nut on the bolt, and then put them both through the hole with the bolt head just at or below the level of the insulation. Attach another nut to the wood side of the window to hold the bolt in place.

• Sink your magnets into the holes you drilled. Use a drop of superglue gel to make sure they stay. I had to tap many of my magnets in with a hammer. Use a rag between the hammer and magnet to protect the magnet… they can shatter. I sunk mine to just proud of the window frame.

• Now place the new storm window up against the frame. Adjust the nuts in or out so that they just grab the magnet and hold the insulation tightly against the frame.
• You can paint the wood to match your existing frames if you like. I left mine bare because I was short on time. Still, I think they looked pretty decent.

Oh, here’s a hint. When you pull the protective plastic off of the acrylic (this was less a problem with the Lexan), you’ll get huge amounts of static electricity. All the wood chips from drilling, or dust bunnies, or your cat will cling to the window. To lessen this effect, wipe down the window with a wet rag as you peel off the plastic.

I found it took about an hour / window to go from materials to installed window. I did 17 windows in 4 days and still had time to eat thanksgiving dinner with friends!

Professional Plastics will cut your plastic to size for you, saving you a step. They were also able to sell me pre-cut Lexan for cheaper than I could get at Home Depot, even with shipping.

The renters said that they could tell the difference the first night. Of course, this is a 1930’s house and the windows were pretty leaky to begin with.

This design requires that you have flat trim around your windows. It won’t work if your trim is textured, particularly uneven, or sculpted in any way. The Magnetite folks have the advantage of a system that works no matter what kind of trim you have. Unfortunately the metal trim is just ugly as far as I can see.

Next up: something about boats I think.

Blogged with Flock

It’s been raining most of the time since I arrived. I think I used up all the glorious weather on the way out here. Perhaps I was blessed by the magic bakery truck as I left Madison.

Um, no comment.

Unfortunately I took very few photos of people in Buffalo. Well, very few that I would ever share with anyone. Sorry Cynthia. Sorry Dick. I did, however, get re-amazed at the variety and quality of Buffalo architecture. You’d walk down the street and there would be some cool little detail like this one on a building:

This is just under some window. How great is that??!

After leaving Buffalo I made my way across the lower part of the state to the finger lakes region to visit my old bud Judi.
That’s her on the right. On the left is a friend of hers from the University that joined us on a walk one bright morning. Judi has great wall signs around her house.

We ate very well too. For instance, here’s some raspberry sorbet with mango on the side. See, eating well is something that’s fun and easy to do at home!!

After Alfred, it was back on the big roads and on up to way Upstate NY to visit Lyons and Laura & family at a YMCA camp in Lake George.

That was one fast bike. It stayed with me the whole trip.

Lyons & Co. were staying at the Silver Bay YMCA, an amazing turn of the century place. Laura’s parents actually met at this camp and had their very first kiss on the dock. How many first kisses happened at this place? Too many to count, but looking at the leadership groups filled with teens running around and it makes me happy to think that they’re still happening. One night we were walking back to the cabin and we decided to look at the chapel. Someone was playing a duet with violin and piano up on the altar… no audience, just the two of them focused on the music. It’s that kind of place.

The cabins are the old time Adirondack style that you see throughout new england. Spartan, uneven, cobbled together, charming in every way. The group buildings are large, magnificant structures from the CCC era.

We sailed,

That’s David in the foreground and Laura and Eliot in the other boat. David is a great kid that Lyons and Laura had fostered along with his sister Kat a few years back.

We jumped off of rocks just to prove that the youngsters got nothing on us old fogies. And we didn’t break anything at all.

Laura organized us into a tennis tournament (I didn’t win is all you really need to know), and we spent a good amount of time at the archery range. It’s summer camp!!!

It was hard to leave, but there’s places to go, so off I went. After a night in Northfield with my folks (sorry no photos there either) I finally drove in through the light rain to Newport.

And it’s been raining off and on since then, with a good break for the wooden boat show.

I’ve been building (as usual), but my workshop is in the side yard behind the cool old trailer. With the rain, I’ve had to rig up a tarp and it’s worked quite well.

It’s been interesting using all hand tools, and I particularly like the contrast of using nice planes and Japanese chisels in this primitive location. I don’t have any of my power tools here other than a few cordless drills, so it’s all sawing, planing, chiseling by hand. [Ok, I confess I tried to use Kurt's 18v cordless saws... word to the wise, Ryobi cordless saws are only good for the lightest duty work. They have no guts at all. Bottom line, I did it all by hand.]

I re-did the ladder to my loft first. The old ladder was very much like a normal ladder but with square rungs with the edges pointing up. They hurt my tender little footsies, so I wanted something with wide, horizontal treads. I used some old boards from out back to make this whole thing, which meant dimensioning all the lumber myself. Have you ever tried to rip a 9′ long 2″ thick board using a japanese saw? Well, it’s slow going matey, and you have to do some serious planing when you’re done to straighten up that edge. 8 hours later, though, I had myself a good ladder to the loft and my feet sing a song of thanks to me every night before bed. No glue, just tight joints and screws.

Today I actually sprung for new pine and made some much needed bookshelves. Same deal, no glue. And not being able to leave well enough alone, I put a few little details in like having the shelves slightly proud of the side members and beveling their edges. As long as you’re making it by hand, might as well make it nice.

That’s it for now. 2 good days in the “shop” and I am SO READY for power tools.

The plan was to leave on Tuesday the 15th. We took some time the Sunday afternoon and rented a bunch of boats out at Lake Wingra.  A dozen or so folks showed up to paddle and sail about before the big party.

Tom and Tammy kayaked.

I sailed a boat with the most awful sails I’ve ever seen.

And Lori’s friend Luda (sp?) from Lithuania got to take a turn in the sailboat!

And Deb, who had car trouble and wasn’t supposed to be able to make it from Milwaukee showed up unexpectedly.  Yay!!
For the Big Party I rented the shelter at the park near our house, and Jan and piles of other people made it into a party.  Really, I did next to nothing, other than talk with Jan about what kinds of food it would be good to have.  Lori and Jan brought all manner of pirate garb and I think I looked quite dangerous and villianous, if I may be so bold as to brag.