Against All Oddities: The Final Push

Many of you have been following along as I’ve shared details of my questionable quest to make a century-old foundry into a workable workshop. Meanwhile, my wife and I are expecting our first kid very shortly. Doctors are projecting an ETA at the end of August, but the way things are going, it feels like the big day could come at any time. Of all my projects, this is gonna be the most important. My wife, Dana, is famous for her tolerance of my idiotic automotive activities. But I have grown to know her limits. Projects that don’t involve raising a human and helping a mama recover will soon become distant priorities.

But fret not, Oddities obsessives: this space will not go dark. I’ll certainly still be here writing, albeit about other people’s activities and adventures. For a time, anyway.

That’s where the foundry crew comes in—the friends, renters, and fellow enthusiasts who are using the new storage space. Like an old three-shift mill, someone is here practically all the time. This group of young whippersnappers has a taste for ’80s and ’90s Nissans, BMWs, and Fords but any make and model are of potential interest.

As un-picky they are about taste in cars, they are even less so about working conditions. So if I’m not going to be around the foundry a lot and these guys are, I better not act like a slumlord and make the place livable.

Luckily, everyone is happy to lend a hand to help get us there. Using a whiteboard salvaged from beneath the treads of a skid steer, plus the Toyota-famous workflow organization method known as kanban, we divided up essential tasks and prioritized them as follows into columns:

• To-do
• Doing
• Done

We used magnets and everything!

First order of business: Get a proper lift in place, rather than a fleet of jack stands. I had one already, it was merely located 4 hours away, anchored in concrete, and at the end of a very narrow driveway lined with renters’ belongings and vegetation. The thought of dealing with all of that in Charleston, South Carolina summer heat seemed… unpleasant. I tossed around the idea of finding a more local bargain on Facebook Marketplace and saving myself the hassle. On second consideration, the devil I know is almost always better than the one I don’t. The icing on the cake: it would be a good excuse to grab lunch at my favorite haunt in my old neighborhood in Charleston. Fine, let’s do it.

On the promise of burgers and a midday beer, my buddy Nick agreed to the arduous day ahead. Long story short, after completely draining our energy reserves by relocating this 9000-pound capacity behemoth. with nothing but our arms, legs, and a pair of furniture dollies, those Moe’s Crosstown tavern beers tasted good and earned.

After a few weeks of collecting parts and considering where to place the lift, things got going with help from a borrowed hammer. My friends Thomas and Matt Andersen-with-an-E (I swear this person isn’t a figment of my imagination) worked to get the lift standing tall once again. Thomas procured some fresh hydraulic fluid from his place of work to replace the extremely skunky blend I had been sitting on for the last 15 years. The next time our friend TJ (an electrician) is here, he’ll run 220V to it and we’ll all be in business.

Now that the shop has a lift and a forklift, legal liability protection is of elevated importance. I installed one of my proudest auction finds: a heavy, green letterbox with a padlock. Next to it I screwed two clothespins to the wall and affixed a pile of waivers. Not just your generic run-of-the-mill release, mind you, but one that my lawyer-friend-neighbor, Martin, helped me write with a high degree of specificity. It neatly outlines all possible manners of disfigurement and informs the signer that they know full well what taking any of those keys might put into motion. (Working on old cars in an defunct foundry, of course, involves risk!) The take-up rate of this daunting waiver was impressive; within two days there were eight signed copies. Not bad.

The number one area that I felt particularly unhappy about was the back wall of the shop, where water was finding its way in. Second on the list of shortcomings was the absolutely filthy floor. Mix those two together and what you get is thick mud, which is why that problem claimed top step of the Uninhabitability Podium.

To correct this shameful state of affairs, my first move (in addition to shifting about ten cars out of the way) was to hire out the pressure washing job to a lovely family who cleans local school buildings. I think of the foundry as a place of education, so it seemed like a good fit. Ol’ Vernon and his son spent a couple of days getting our roughly 1200 square feet of floor pressure washed, then squeegied and shop vac’d all of the mud away.

When it was finally all dried out and ready for coating, the weather laughed at us. It rained. For days.

We placed fans around the wall to maximize evaporation, and when the timing was right, the “Deal with Floor” card was moved to the “Doing” column on our kanban board. At around 3 a.m. one morning, the guys finished the last of the application. Though the aggregate looked like a moon landing practice set, it squeaked under the foot. Everyone agreed it was glorious.

Finally, the most significant endeavor would be inbound water management. With 14,000 square feet of luckily new roof, water from the sky gets corralled over a broad area and forcefully deposited…somewhere. In the building’s original form, roof runoff would have gone directly into large cement troughs that were graded to drain to the street via a large channel. Nowadays, structural additions have broken up the flow path and what remains of it is heavily clogged with sediment. Fixing this permanently will take several excavation days involving our whole crew and maybe even a cistern. For now, I just need water not to go into my renters’ bays. Gutters it is!

There were two relatively large challenges with installing gutters:

1) There was no way to reach the area of concern and 2) there was nothing to attach the gutters to.

In order to rebuild the rafter tails and attach a fascia, we needed clear a large amount of jungle. Enter Thomas, our Marlboro-Red-smoking, machete- (and chainsaw) -wielding hero. Within about an hour, we had the whole hillside cleared and ready.

The irony of gutter work is that when gutters are most needed—i.e., during rain—they can’t be installed. It took quite a while to coordinate with the weather, but finally, about an hour before Hurricane Debby’s first sprinkles, the last bits of gutter and drainage tile were laid.

I’m not really sure what exactly my days will look like once fatherhood begins, but I know I’ll be focused on bigger things than muddy floors. That being said, the show must go on over at the foundry. I’m highly confident that the shift change will keep productivity high while I’m dealing with, at the very least, muddy diapers.

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