The Adventure of a Physicist and an Engineer

Well, here we have it again. I am a physicist and my neighbor is an engineer. It seems that whenever one of us asks the other a question of some sort it ends up being some day long project that prevents either of us from doing whatever chore our wives originally asked us to do. Last Saturday, the unimaginable project of the day was fixing the leaky spillcock on the front of my house. When I first thought of the title of this entry I thought about doing in the style of the "Walrus and the Carpenter" for those of you who remember Alice in Wonderland. Anyway, given that my newborn baby is still in the NICU and I am extremely tired I'll just relate what I can remember of it at this point.

So it all starts with the fact that for the past 4 years the spillcock on the front of my house has dripped. For the past four years I've provided water (the spillcock) and a litter box (my kids sandbox) for the stray cats of the neighborhood. Those days had to end. While I don't really know how to end the litter box issue (aside from letting my great dane roam the yard as much as possible) I knew I could fix the spillcock which would also save some money. I was a little reluctant to do this because I knew that the drippy exterior faucet was doing it's part to keep global warming in check, but darn it, scientists are just going to have to find another way!

So I started to disassemble the spillcock and when it didn't come apart as I expected (or at all for that matter) I began to wonder if there was something I didn't know about how they are put together and decided to ask my neighbor P, the engineer.

It turns out P was not having the best engineering day that day... Earlier in the morning at P's house he had been refilling his something like 30 gallon, industrial strength, hospital quality humidifier that somebody else thought was a good item for DI because it had a broken valve. Well, a broken valve is easy enough for any engineer to take care of I'm sure P would tell you. What P forgot to tell himself was that the huge tank he'd just filled up and left in his bathroom has a simple bouyant lever arm that opens or closes the valve depending on its orientation. So when P noticed water dripping down into his basement the last thing on his mind was the great jug of liquid he'd left so simply upstairs. It did however come to his mind after he'd ensured that the kids hadn't been forcing water through cracks in the foundation of his house. By that time, his kids had vowed to never touch a hose again under the pressure of the inquisition and inches of water had been retained in the bathroom. P had just finished taking care of that and was bringing his wet vac outside to empty when I approached him that morning. It was a simple problem he told me. Of course, it would be for an engineer I told myself.

Well, if I'd known how P had started out the morning I might have left it at that. But with P digging out all his toys that we like to play with (including walkie-talkies and head strap flashlights), I was too excited to worry about that. We decided that the spillcock should have dissasembled how I expected it too, and therefore probably was not a "freeze-proof" model like I thought it was. The idea now was to very carefully clamp onto the pipe inside the house while turning the spillcock outside the house so as to remove it without busting any joints that had been swetted or breaking any pipes that might be brittle. Well, the first quarter turn brought a loud "pop!" I said that can't be good into my walkie-talkie. "It's probably just an old crusty pipe thread starting to turn," said P. Yeah, we popped the swetted joint inside the wall, and it was by the way a freeze-proof spillcock.

No biggie. I'm a physicist and he's an engineer.

So this prompted a tour of P's basement and exterior wall where we examined what he had done when installing his own outdoor water access and then came up with a war plan to replace mine. The war plan was based around going to the "candy store". For people like P and myself the name of the "candy store" is Harbor Freight. We're waiting for them to start ice cream truck routes, but in the meantime they're only a 10 minute drive away. We actually didn't have to go to the candy store for this specific project, but we had to go to Lowe's for it anyway so we might as well have and our wives were too tired to point that out.

Our wives did however make us eat lunch first. While P was on his lunch break he went to clean up the bathroom from that morning and as he was pivoting his chest cavity on the edge of the tub he heard a very familiar loud "pop!", just like the one we heard from the pipe on my house. Except this time the pop came from P's rib. Thank goodness it was just his rib, another other bone and he would have had to go to a doctor to get it set. Since it was his rib there was nothing he could do but continue on to the candy store with me.... darn it, nothing he could do about it at all.

Well, by the time we got back and assembled and installed the spillcock it was past dinner time and the day was long gone. But hey, that's what happens when you cross a physicist with an engineer.