Handyman Can

Posted onOctober 20, 2019April 19, 2020

Thanks for visiting… I hope you’ll stay a bit… I’ve had this domain name for almost 20 years now… but only recently transitioning from a blog for fun to a honey do list specialist site. I grew up at my dad’s side helping build everything from a cabin on Lake Greenwood to reviving an old Cushman motor scooter that I used to deliver newspapers on long ago.

I retired in 2014 after many years as a maintenance tech primarily in an industrial setting. Trained in the US Air Force as an electronics tech. A wide variety of of skills including computer networking to industrial robots. Lately I’ve been fooling with the IOT using Raspberry Pi and ESP 32 talking via MQTT to control various things around the house.

My focus as a handyman is on smaller one man type jobs… plumbing repairs and installation…. doors and storm doors… custom closet shelves… electrical repairs and installation… ceiling fans… sheetrock repairs and installation… backsplash tiles.

If you need some help with your Honey Do List…. then give me a shout.
I look forward to an opportunity to be your handyman.

1930 Ford Model A Pickup

Posted onJanuary 23, 2019January 23, 2019

My friend Clarence recently acquired this very cool truck… which I actually found on facebook ads. It was ready to roll right from the gitgo 😉 has a few minor issues but has taken us around Little Mountain a few times now. Working on the ahooogah horn…amazing that you can get new brushes for that right online. Didn’t need brushes though… it has an ungrounded motor inside and requires two leads to make it work… it was missing one but still had the original connectors inside… quite amazing.

Cottonwood Trail

Posted onApril 12, 2018April 12, 2018

I’ve been doing handyman work as a sideline for a little over a year now and it has been both enjoyable and profitable. I would like to thank all of you that have allowed me to be your handyman. One of my more interesting encounters led to my discovery of the Cottonwood Trail on Lawsons Fork Creek. It seems I’m becoming more connected to this creek.. It seems to be everywhere I’m fond of frequenting. I enjoy riding a motorcycle and often ride on Hanging Rock road which borders the creek there at Valley Falls. It also borders the property at USC Upstate… its not so obvious there but I recently discovered that there are some nice trails alongside the creek there. Most recently I discovered the Cottonwood Trail by accident… I have a customer whose property is very close to the creek in the Fernwood area. After finishing a job there I saw a sign for the trail and decided to check it out. It is a 115 acres preserve complete with a boardwalk and nice trails in the heart of Spartanburg… if you’ve never been there you should check it out.

This is the view from my friends window… Lawsons Fork Creek is just across the road… they had this killer piece of glass art… A 12 inch cube of fused glass with an incredible amount of detail in the colored cube in the center.

Swamp Man

Posted onApril 9, 2017February 6, 2020

On the way back from Daytona I saw the signs for Branchville near where 95 and 26 intersect. Branchville was the home of the Swamp Man whom I learned to blow glass from at his place there in the swamp on the banks of the Edisto River. Branchville I think is the location of the first train crossing in the state… from which its name came. The Edisto River is the longest black water river in the world… probably in part because its meanders and doubles back on itself so much there in the flatlands.

It was about 2000 when I found him online while looking for information about torch working glass. Thats where you make pieces using pyrex glass by heating it in a special torch. The Swamp Man had a furnace with a crucible inside full of molten glass… you dip a stainless steel blowpipe into it to “gather” molten glass on the end of it… then you add color… more glass.. and more heat… in the “glory hole” before blowing it into something cool.

A few years ago I was going to go back to visit and googled the swamp man only to find he had died a few years before that. All that to say this… I decided to stop by and see what if anything was left of his place in the swamp. Although it had been 17 years since my last visit and about 6 years since he had passed… I was able to find it.
There was a German lady there that owned it now and she let me look around the glass studio…. although they had stored some furniture and other stuff in there… it was pretty much as he had left it…. blowpipes in their holder… a bag of Spruce Pine Batch ready to go in the furnace… jars of color on the shelf. The annealing ovens ready for new pieces… spare burner parts… you have to burn a lot of propane to blow glass.