When it comes to home improvement, you need information you can trust. Inside each issue of The Family Handyman, you’ll find see-and-solve expert repair techniques, a variety of projects for every room and step-by-step, do-it-yourself photos.
Along with his daughters, a son and a son-in-law, George B. built a windmill, a real working one that pumps well water for his horses. It was a complete family project that stretched across long days. They seemed to smile through all the work, and George sent photos to prove it. In our July/August issue, we posed a simple question on a corner of p. 8: Did you start a new project because you have more time at home? George did; he started and finished his windmill in 2020. He wasn’t alone. Dozens of you started and completed DIY projects. Thanks for sharing your stories. Like George, these readers and so many more of you used their newfound time to improve their home and build projects together: LORI M. built…
facebook.com/thefamilyhandyman pinterest.com/family_handyman youtube.com/thefamilyhandyman instagram.com/familyhandyman tiktok.com/@familyhandyman “I think this is the most important work I’ve ever done,” said Sandy Thistle, a Wisconsin carpenter who is building a future of opportunities for young women. In 2019, Thistle and Eliza Zimmerman launched CampBUILD, a summer camp where girls ages 6 through 18 learn skills such as tool safety, carpentry, electrical and welding. In CampBUILD’s first year, 116 Girl Scouts attended and built 49 toolboxes, 30 birdhouses and a picnic table while gaining skills with hammers, drills, squares, sanders and circular saws. The camp, held at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wis., did not meet for in-person learning in 2020 but did conduct classes in July 2021. “The girls take their projects home,” said Zimmerman, “and their parents are amazed at the work…
“I recently unpacked these; what are they?” asked Mark Braun of Norridge, Ill. “My grandfather came here at the turn of the 20th century as an ornamental ironworker. Could they be his? Anything you know could answer a lifetime of wondering. Thanks.” Associate editor Jay Cork says “These are drills for boring holes in rock or masonry. One man would hold the bit while another would strike it with a sledge. After every strike, the bit would turn slightly, giving the teeth (you see them on the leading edge) another bite into the stone. They were often used in quarries to bore holes for the dynamite. You have a little bit of history there, my friend.”…
Splitting firewood by hand is satisfying and fun. But if you’re heating your house or garage with wood (or stockpiling it for a fire pit), splitting by hand can become a part-time job. If you have access to cuttable trees on your lot, a gas-powered log splitter is the way to go. A smaller machine may suffice for splitting dry logs. But freshly cut hardwoods up to 16 in. in diameter, like the oaks we felled on our Getaway site, require a 16-ton machine or larger. The tonnage is the amount of force the wedge applies to the log. This 30-ton NorthStar splitter ($1,900) from Northern Tool made easy work of green red-oak logs up to about 18 in. in diameter. It has a smooth-running 200-cc Honda motor and a…
Use a permanent marker to write the exact oil blend needed for your twocycle engine on any clean surface of the tool. It’ll save you from running to the file cabinet to find your manual or grabbing the wrong mix. MYRON PORTER QUICKER FIXTURE MOUNTING Surface-mounted fixtures come with a layer of foilfaced insulation, which can make it difficult to line up the mounting keyholes with the screws on the electrical box. But using a screwdriver as a guide saves a lot of time and frustration. Slip the screwdriver shaft through the keyhole and stick the tip in the screw head. Slide the fixture over the shaft, rotate the fixture until the second screw comes into view, and then twist the fixture on the screw heads and snug them up.…
Nothing beats a pressure washer for removing a weekend’s worth of dirt from your ATV, cleaning your deck or erasing years of moss from your patio pavers. I couldn’t get by without mine. But I don’t love the bulk: the power cables, the hoses and the weight. When I power washed my patio pavers this summer, I needed a machine strong enough to blast through the moss yet easy to maneuver. The hybrid-powered Greenworks Pro 1,800-psi pressure washer eliminates the need for a power cord–at least for a while. Powered by either an AC wall plug or a pair of 60V batteries, the hybrid tool is far easier to move around than a pressure washer that’s always tethered to a wall outlet or one with a heavy gas engine. Most…
