Renewing faith in West African repairs

"Oh god! Oh no! No! Help!!!" Fearing some near-collapse of the roof or some other disaster that would be the end of her life, I came running in to the bathroom to see #1 Fan standing in the shower over some washing she was taking care of. Behind her, where the faucet had been for the shower, there was just a jet of water shooting in to the opposite wall.

I told her to go outside and ask the guard to find the main water and shut it off. That was easily done and once finished, I was able to assess the damage. Yes, the faucet had indeed broken off. After a perfunctory two years of service, this cheap, possibly-not-metal-from-this-planet, Chinese faucet had just sheered off at the pipe. That was it. No threads to re-thread. No duct tape to re-apply. Our shower was dead and due to there being no redundant line cutoffs, the water of the house was off too.

This was a Sunday, in the evening. Looking in to the hole of the pipe, I assumed that the wall was going to have to be knocked out to replace the pipe. Basically, given the general perception of how long repairs can take in Cote d'Ivoire, I thought we'd be without water and showers for the next week. Still, we had to do something to start the wheels in motion towards a repair.

#1 Fan went out and found the block superintendent, who was, as usual, napping under a tree around the corner. He came in, looked at the problem and gave his standard-issue chuckle, which we were rather pissed at given that he wasn't the one who was going to be going bucket-shower for a week. He did call a plumber to come over and check out the problem. The plumber said he would come over right away on this Sunday evening.

Needless to say, we were in no end of shock when the plumber actually did show up 20 minutes later. With him, he carried an old rice sack which he had repurposed in to his tool box. He plopped everything down in the bathroom, eyed the broken faucet threads in the wall, pulled out a screwdriver and a wrench and went to work breaking out the threads. Naturally, the wrench was being used as a hammer as any tool can be a hammer, yet a hammer cannot be any tool.

In no time, he had cracked out the old threads. From the "tool sack" he then produced a new faucet. It was obvious the man knew this repair well. In a matter of 10 minutes, he had the new faucet on, readjusted, and re-pressured. And that was that. My mind was blown and stereotypes were needing to be re-thought, or at least tweaked slightly. In less than an hour, life was back to normal and it went to show that if living five degrees above the equator, once the sun sets, anything is possible.

23 02 2010      0 comments

Tags: in to africa, praving

A toilet without a proper seat is no toilet at all

Word had come down prior to arrival in Côte d'Ivoire that the seat on the toilet in the house that #1 Fan had rented was less than optimal. Replacement was not going to be easy as the only seats you can get in the smallish town of Abengourou are all the same thin, cheap, plastic seats that stick to you when you're hot and don't support you when you're sitting. This was not going to do for my half a year stay.

So, given that I had 46kgs of space that I wasn't really sure what to do with, I decided to pick up a $15 toilet seat at Home Depot and actually bring it with me. Preposterous sounding, perhaps, but if you've never dealt with one of these skinny pieces of junk, then you don't know just how bad it could be. Oh yeah, on top of the construction of the seat, it was an oval seat for a round toilet. I think in the US, there would have been a lawsuit over this.

On my first night of arrival, out of the suitcase I produced a proper round seat. In removing the old seat and thoroughly cleaning everything, I saw that yes, this was going to be a perfect fit. Ah, but there is just one thing as it appears in the US, 14cm bolt centers on the seat are used whereas here, it's 16cm. Now, I could have just tried to smash it in to place and hope for the best. Well, actually I did try that initially, but it was pretty bad. Ultimately, I ended up unscrewing the hinges and moving them 1cm out on each side. The result of which you see below and while it isn't pretty, it makes for a proper seat, as well as 2kg of extra space in my bag for the trip back at the end of June.

01 02 2010      1 comment

Tags: in to africa, praving, toilets

A little prav, a little fix

I'm always slowly adding to my praving gallery when I get the chance. It's well known by anyone who reads my blog regularly and doesn't make up the 90% of my traffic that are just stealing images, I love the prav. Things like this recent sunshade are a precious testament to half-assed fixes of mankind.

Naturally, once #1 Fan pointed me to There, I Fixed It, I nearly pissed myself. My collection seems paltry when matched to the brilliance of that site. If nothing else, it's there to remind us that pravs took us to the moon and help with roasting hotdogs.

14 07 2009      0 comments

Tags: praving

A touch of the prav, First Class to Mali

I'm sending a small flash drive to Mali (it's a country in West Africa, if you're not aware) and having sent items through the Croatian postal system, I am always wary of mail handlers in general. So, I came up with the incredibly brilliant method of cutting some card stock to fit around the drive and to then slip it in to a small privacy envelope. On the one hand, I'm quite pleased with my stealthy spy mailing prav. On the other hand, I'm starting to wonder if there was some truth to my family getting out of the Balkans on forged documents. We're obviously a very crafty lot who are not to be trifled with.

05 06 2009      0 comments

Tags: praving

How to Lock (Prav) the Back of your Humanscale Freedom Chair

I've really enjoyed my Freedom Chair ever since buying it. Yeah, they're freakin' expensive, but what is the cost of your back worth to you? My back happens to be worth about $850 in a good chair to me.

The only really big catch with these chairs is that you can't lock the back to prevent reclining and in turn, slouching. This has all kinds of side effects that aren't good. The shoulders get messed up and if you already have bad posture like I do, things only get worse. I tried and tried to find a solution out there, but none seemed to exist, which is strange given that other models from Humanscale do allow the back to be locked.

So entered the prav. At first I came up with the crazy idea of drilling a hole on each side of the support and sticking a pin in these holes to allow the reclining back to be both locked and unlocked as they should have done in the original design. Quickly, I realized that this solution was too elegant (ie time consuming). Instead, I discovered that there are two plates on either side of the bar under the seat that are just above the recline pivot point. If you take a strand of two of bailing wire and wrap it through one of these holes on each side and then loop it around the bottom, it effectively stops the chair from reclining.

Keeping true to my praving roots, I made sure just to twist the wire ends together and leave some nice sharp edges that I'll undoubtedly curse myself for creating whenever I go to move this chair some day. Because these are just three strange of 1.6mm wire under there, they'll undoubtedly break eventually, thus requiring more wire to be added. Thankfully, the wire is cheap and of course if I ever want the recline back, I can just cut the wire. Overall, a prav well done. Oh, in case you're wondering why I didn't use proxy bailing wire--a coat hanger, it's because there was no way that I get the coat hanger to bend enough to pull it through. That and bailing wire is too soft. If one is out praving, there is a careful balance to be maintained which is to fix the thing just well enough to make sure that you won't have to fix it again for a long time, although it will indeed need fixing again down the road because hey, you praved it.

27 02 2009      0 comments

Tags: praving

Praving Rears its Mottled Head in San Francisco

Sometime back, I talked about the paramount importance of bailing wire to your modern pravs. The same holds true with it now as it did then. It's a crucial element without which nothing can be slapped together. I mean really, why on earth would you weld or solder something, when bailing wire is so incredible simple, yet so fantastically powerful?

While there are many other elements that are key to your general praving arsenal (hammers immediately come to mind), there is the often overlooked tarpaulin or 'tarp'. It's a workhorse within the praving world community. It's at once roofing, flooring, insulation, a sail, and every so often, actually just a tarp which you toss over some goods to keep them dry. In thinking about the tarp, I again turn to fond memories of my proud, praving father. On our small farm, we had many an item tarped. There would be small mounds around the property with something or other important being kept under a tarp. In theory, there should have been sheds and garages for these items, but why go to all that trouble when a tarp that costs $2 can cover in a matter of five minutes. Naturally, the big downside to the tarp is that they really do a crap job, they start to smell, leak and also deteriorate insanely fast through prolonged exposure to the sun. All of this was simply solved by adding another tarp. To this day, I am still digging up old shed foundations blue tarps from the ground whenever I try to organize things for my mom.

So, naturally, I could relate when I saw what you see below (direct link) which is a restaurant in Lower Pacific Heights that obviously got a leaky roof to which they decided to fix with... yup, a tarp. Let me add that this is not new. A Google Street Map from who knows when documented this prav-tarped roof long before I saw it last Saturday. Of course, it doesn't help in the least that it's a place called Pride of the Mediterranean, which is only fitting for the repair job that they did and goes a long way to explain how in the hell this place has a miserable 2.5 star rating on Yelp. I didn't even know there was anything rated that low on the heavily skewed and practically useless Yelp, but I guess they didn't want to pay Yelp's blood money to get the reviews removed. Still, they undoubtedly get business from moronic friends from my hometown who go for the kitsch factor of grubby hookahs to smoke, but I digress.

I suppose the only really problem with the tarp and praving is that in developing nations where conflict has recently occurred, the tarp is actually a truly useful item. You'll often see people living under them as they're quick and cheap shelter that aid agencies can provide. So, there is no way I can completely scorn and ridicule the tarp as it has reached some form of hallowed ground for those in bad situations. However in the case of Pride of the Mediterranean and my father's "inventions", I have to curse the damned tarp in how easy a crappy fix it provides far and wide.

09 02 2009      3 comments

Tags: praving, san francisco

My Praving has Reached Fatherly Levels

I haven't talked about the praving because there really hasn't been any of note lately. I didn't encounter anything terribly interesting so I it has kinda stayed put. But then the issue of Spanish mops came in to the picture.

You see, Spanish mops are a good deal better at mopping than your standard American mop, especially the sponge mop, which is derided and ridiculed to no end by Spaniards touting the Iberian Mop Agenda. The only issue is that while it's easy to toss a mop head or two in the suitcase when returning from a Spanish trip, it isn't so easy to get them mounted on a stick in the US for use and sticks are too big to bring back from Spain. The threads are all out of whack because of this thing we keep refusing to use called the Metric System. So, giving up rather easy, the mops sat, sad and unused for endless months.

On the most recent Spanish trip for the holidays, I learned that the threads on the mop heads were somewhat ignored when it came to getting a particular head on a particular stick. Naturally, folks turned to the almighty prav, or as it is known in Spain, the chapuza. In this case, my mother in law showed me that it's just a matter of keeping the hard plastic in a pot of boiling water long enough to get the plastic pliable and then force it on the stick.

This seemed simple enough and was one of the more elegant pravs I've seen, but in getting back home, I quickly found that it didn't work. The stick was really too big to fit the head no matter how much time the head spent in a pot of boiling water. This required more desperate measures.

Digging deep in to the praving that courses through my veins and summoning up all pravosity, I came up with the idea that the plastic just needed to stretch more, which meant fire. Seeing as how I had recycled the stick from the previous sponge mop, I took advantage of the fact it was made out of metal and decided to heat it up in the flame from the gas burners on the stove. This only met with mild success as the mop head didn't melt fast enough to allow the stick to attach before cooling to the point where it wouldn't melt anymore. To get around this issue, I tool the bread knife and sliced down the horizontal axis of the plastic on the mop head. Then I heated up the stick again and shoved it in. It stuck. All was well, the prav seemed to work.

And work it did for about two minutes until the plastic that had melted cracked around the stick. I was back to square one until I decided that heavier artillery was needed and I got out my drill and a wood chisel. I took the chisel and fully split the shaft on the mop head. Then I took the drill and made a hole through the mop head that matched up with holes on the metal stick. When I put it together, it all lined up and I tried to use the pin that was left over from my sponge mop salvage. That worked for a minute, but the pin kept falling out. In typical praving fashion, I would have turned to bailing wire at this point, but I didn't have any around. I used the second best thing in this case, which was to cut up an old clothes hanger, thread it through the hole on the stick and then give it a good twist to secure it. Did it work? Oh yeah, you betcha!

From this, I have learned two things. One is that the leaps and bounds in to which I'm becoming my father are terrifying. Secondly, I think I should probably start giving my "emergency contacts" a head's up anytime I work on new pravs.

30 01 2009      2 comments

Tags: praving, spain

The Pravs of Prague

Naturally, when one starts heading in to the Slavic countries, the praving starts to rise. Again, I don't know why the Slavs love to prav. Maybe it's the communist period that brought it about, or maybe it's just a hot-tempered people who find that the best fix to a problem always involves breaking something, which is oddly very similar to the Bush administration's foreign policy.

There must be something of a Germanic, cool-headed approach to fixing things in the Czech Republic though as most of the fixes are quite good. I don't see wires punched through windows or holes dug in surreptitious places to allow pipes to pass. But then again, the Slavic mentality does rise here and there and you see things like the shot below. I have no idea what that is doing, but I have a good idea how it came about:

"Honza, we need this red pipe here, now. No, don't ask why, we just need it."

"Okay, Miro, that's going to require a 2 kilo smashing hammer, a 300 gram pounding hammer, as well as my shaping knife/screwdriver/belt buckle, and to finish it up, we'll need the 5 kilo chisel hammer, and... bailing wire. Lots of bailing wire."

Thusly, you end up with a corner of an old building that ends up looking like a drunk plumber went berserk one night.

02 07 2008      0 comments

Tags: czech republic, prague, praving, the europe

A Touch of the African Praving

Prior to heading to DR Congo, I kept thinking in the back of my mind, "Sweet pounding hammers and smashing saws, this country must have the mothers of all pravs. Years of corruption, neglect of basic public works, and cars that were the living dead must have created the ultimate hotbed of pravs for the entire world." Upon arrival, the praving part of my brain was overloaded and just sorta fried. The whole damned country is one continuous prav, but it continues in such a way that I could never really figure out a way to capture these things in photos. I mean, how do you capture something that's infinite? It hurts the mind when you follow some wiring for an air conditioning unit that has been punched through a glass window, to then be draped over the outside balcony and fastened to the building with the wiring for something on the floor below, that then loops back up to have a cellphone antenna powered off of it, only to then come back in to the apartment through a crack in the ceiling and be surface-wired in to an "electrical box" above the couch. Or what about the photocopier guys out in the street who hardwired their machines in to the wiring for the street lamps?

I just couldn't do it. I couldn't document all of this. Sure, I got one of two shots off of self-contained pravs as you can see below, but there was no way I was going to shoot everything I saw, especially since photos were problematic. But then it dawned on me that this really wasn't praving. The Congolese did the pravs that they did because that's all they had to work with. To pick at the work they did would be like making fun of someone eating a bowl of rice because they only have rice to eat. In a word, it's arrogant.

I now understand that praving is praving because a person fixes something in such a way that is completely half-assed and in blatant disregard to the proper way to fix it that is indeed available. For instance, why did my father repair the water main to his house with a radiator hose when he had undue access to proper pipe? Simple. The man was a Croatian praver. But, why does a Congolese cut holes in the side of his van for windows? Simple. He needs to be able to have people breathe so that he can drive the car around as a taxi and make some sort of a living. If this work was done in Europe or the US (and we actually did have a van that was like this when I was growing up) it would be and is a prav. When done in a place like DR Congo, it's just survival and to a large degree, I actually respect what people do there despite the fact that they have access to so little.

17 05 2008      0 comments

Tags: dr congo, in to africa, praving

Praving meets the 21st Century

My main man, Dinko is as Balkan as they come. That being the case, he loves his čevapčići and his pravs. It's in the blood. My father was a super praver whose work still stands at my parents' house despite years of nearly falling apart. Being a second generation Croat didn't stop my father considering bailing wire to be one of the most important tools in his toolbox.

Maybe it's because Dinko is Bosnian or maybe it's because of years living in the west have changed him, but the fact is that Dinko's praving is actually pretty damned good work. One could go so far as to say it's quality and that the only praving lies in the initial approach, which for pravers is somewhere along the lines of, "Hmm, this is going to require my big smashing hammer, the smaller pounding hammer, and a lot of bailing wire." For instance, in his recent job of mounting a flat screen TV, Dinko started out with, "Since I don’t have a laser level, I attached a regular presentation laser pointer to my level using cable ties." Genius. Cable ties, while not my favorite (I stand by bailing wire) are the choice attaching system for a 21st century praver.

From there, you'd think things would start to go downhill and his project would turn out looking a good deal like any Homer Simpson project, but no, the end result was quite nice. You can read all about it, here and see what happens when one strays beyond the principal that, "Any tool can be a hammer".

27 03 2008      4 comments

Tags: praving, slavic fixes, the balkans