I suppose DIY is my middle name, or perhaps my whole name. It is an obsession, I s'pose.
For example, today in between feeding and talking with my almost 5 YO daughter, with whom I am happily stuck in the house by March's Winter weather, I am repairing a falling-apart 80 YO cardboard violin case.
I began the repair with epoxy-soaked fiber, using up the last of my 20 YO supply of scrapyard-salvaged liquid epoxy. I've laminated a lot of stuff with this before, patched fuel tanks, etc.
But for this job it has proved too brittle, and now I am using yellow wood glue as the laminating resin. A water-filled Ziploc bag as a conforming clamp.
This seemingly irrelevant story is to illustrate the huge gap between the , "Yeah, I can do that myself" confidence of an intelligent layman, and the ability to do a job durably and cost-effectively the first time.
I guess I can claim to know how to do some things well, to the "master" level, as I have been a mechanical engineer and operated my own machine/welding shop for thirty years. I can remove the bolts that the DIY mechanic twisted off, with confidence and without damage to his engine block....at $20 a pop. I can weld the broken lawnmower that he already welded six times, and after I am done with it it will never break in the same place for the same reason. Oh, yeah, it will cost him three times what it would have if he had not tried to fix it him self first. I can design a bridge over your creek that the oil truck can safely cross, and without, "gee, look.! It sagged last time maybe we'd better put some locust posts in the creek under it!"
My only point is, that I am as much of a how-to junkie as anyone. And I am as capable as anyone of biting off more than I can chew, of ruining a project, or a couple of Ben Franklins, with half-educated enthusiasm.
We who hope to survive come-what-may, should watch out for the illusion that a few carefully saved PDF's will let us deal expertly, or even adequately, with tasks with which we do not have years of education (not necessarily formal) and practice.
I remind myself as much as anyone else here, that cooperation, division of labor, human resources to trade with and rely on, as much as those thoughts make me bristle and as hard, o, hard beyond believing it is to get those resources and relationships in place., IS VITAL.
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Topic: Do-It-Yourself Links and Info (Read 97829 times)