It's Not Trash!

Our property alternates between ridges and valleys, three of the former flanking two of the latter, and our barns sit down in the east valley.

Though the wind might be, and often is, pretty feisty at the top of the east ridge, a high point in the county, down by the barns is usually much calmer.

Usually but not always.

Sometimes the wind will come east down off the middle ridge, across the pond, up the slope, and hit

the west side of the main barn pretty hard. Which happens to be where, for the past 14 or so years, I have had an awning more or less permanently set up with a chair and table (and Mom & Dad's walking sticks hanging under it) so I can sit and watch the dawn light up the slope across the pond regardless of the weather.

A few times those rogue winds have "interfered" with my awning.

Usually just blowing out an admittedly time&weather compromised cover. But this last time not only did it blow an aged cover

into many individual pieces that I had to run around and gather up, but also snapped a UV weakened guy-line, pulled the leg-stakes out of the ground, picked up the frame, rolled it over, and seriously abused it.

Here I've already righted and un-crumpled the frame

and with brute force and some leverage, mostly straightened out a seriously kinked leg.

The frame might actually even still fold up since the kink damage is above where the mechanism slides down,

but the bigger issue was the two sets of cross-members that had snapped clean in two.

At this point we're going to take a short side-trip.

Get away from the regimented urban environments or the suburban HOA'ed-to-the-millimeter landscape and get out into the real world, the rural, sometimes arboreal, sometimes arid, places where actual foundational life happens, and you're likely to see pockets of what snooty, upturned proboscie might clasify as trashy.

What those pampered - store around every corner, I got a guy for that - people don't understand is that that's not trash. That's spare parts.

It might take decades, or even generations, to reveal how, but that's usefull stuff disguised as junk.

And we're no different. Tucked out of sight on the far side of the tractor barn, next to the brush-hog that gets used once or twice a year, we have a wagon, pretty much scrap itself with sun-rotted tires, full of "scrap" metal.

OK, we're back.

And one of the things tucked away down there is an old awning frame we were no longer using.

This was one of those cheap, light-weight, easy-up type awnings that was never what you might call robust. For that reason, when its cover blew out from a combination of too much sun and cats using it as a hammock, I didn't bother replacing the cover but rather bought a commercial-grade awning instead. (And moved it farther away from the greenhouse trailer so cats couldn't quite jump so easily from one to the other.) The kind professional craft-fair and farmer's market people rely on.

Because the old frame was lighter and made with smaller components I had an idea, and a few checks with the calipers and a test fit confirmed it.

With a little persuasion, the components of the old frame would slide inside the cross-members of the heavier frame.

So I harvested a couple bits of the old frame,

and slid them inside the severed bits of the heavier frame to splice the two broken cross-members back together,

making sure the splices stay put with a few self-taping screws.

Then I drug the spare cover off the shelf in the barn (even without rogue winds, with constant exposure the covers will only last about three years before they get brittle and start to split so I keep a spare handy because I know I'm going to need it at some point and I use this awning pretty much every day.) and the only thing left to do

was move the whole thing back into position and throw a fresh set of guy-lines on it.

Now, where was I before being so rudely interupted?