Old House Handyman: Working in the garage, just like old times

Among the most-used tools in my dad’s garage are classics close at hand on a pegboard above his workbench: two flat-blade screwdrivers, a box-cutter knife, a pair of pliers, a claw hammer, two ball-peen hammers, a hacksaw, a hand saw for wood, wire brushes of various sizes and a wide variety of glues and rolls of tape.

But the tool that he uses — and the rest of us working on the family farm use at least as often as all of those little hand tools — is the 51-year-old Speedaire compressor.

It’s green and about the size of a big push mower — if a push mower had a tank the size of a 100-pound summer sausage in place of its engine.

This air compressor, vintage 1973, has a special place in the garage — near the overhead door and the single 220-volt outlet in the garage. It’s near the opening for the overhead door because Dad uses it every time he mows the grass and insists, to his credit, that the rest of us mowers do the same: Pull up to the garage, lift the mower deck and use that big, old compressor with its tornado-like blast of air to blow off all the dust and grass clippings clinging to the mowers.

Conveniently, and not by any sort of coincidence, the grease guns hang on the wall next to the compressor. While in the shop for a blast of cleansing air, you might as well grease up all of the fittings.

Old House Handyman: Rot and rust make plumbing a least-favorite task

And that’s why the mower he bought in the late 1980s is still out there, every week, mowing the 5 acres of grass around his house, the barn and out buildings, and the nearby house where Daughter No. 3 lives.

Our goal is that the 4-year-old zero-turn mower with which she cuts grass will be out there four decades from now.

The Speedaire not only keeps the mowers clean, but it also does the usual air-compressor things, such as filling tires. Farms have a lot of tires. Four each on two mowers, two tractors, two pickup trucks, one car, three trailers, a generator, a few bicycles and two hand carts. That’s at least 60 tires that need constant attention and occasional filling.

We even use it to blow the dust and grass clippings off of ourselves after a day of mowing in the wind.

A few weeks ago, we thought the old Speedaire was sounding a little off. The compressor is two pistons, like those in a combustion engine, that move up and down via a belt-driven pulley attached to a 220-volt electric motor.

The hum and purr that we typically heard had been supplanted by a ca-chunk , ca-chunk , ca-chunk sound — the kind of sound that sets a mechanic’s teeth on edge because it’s clear that this little compressor is hurting. Finally, the belt flew off the pulley.

These were all bad signs.

My dad, who is often awake late at night contemplating the world’s problems and calculating whether an air compressor making a ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk sound can be saved, finally found at least one of the problems: The Speedaire had a blown head gasket.

Air that was supposed to be going into the air tank was being pushed out into the garage through a gap between the head and cylinders holding the two pistons. So he did what any 85-year-old guy would do. He asked his granddaughter to look up the parts online and find replacement gaskets.

And she did!

So last weekend, Dad and I spent an afternoon in the garage — like we had done so many times when I was a kid — working on a machine. Perhaps his favorite machine.

We spent a half hour taking apart the compressor and several hours doing the tedious work of gently scraping away the remnants of two gaskets.

The cylinders are steel. The two-piece head is aluminum.

Dad noted the importance of not scratching the surfaces with our putty knives — and how soft aluminum is compared to steel. So I suggested that he take the aluminum parts and that I would scrape off the gasket bits atop the cylinders — and clean up the rest of the compressor.

Old House Handyman: Painting gutters is needed for old houses

I also found that the compressor pulley had somehow moved about an inch off center from the drive motor’s pulley, so I tapped it back into place and tightened it down.

By 4 p.m. on Saturday, at the end of an afternoon filled with chatter about the intricacies of an old compressor and memories of the days when he spent hours honing and polishing an exhaust manifold to make his 1956 Chevy run faster at the drag strip, we had the compressor running again.

And we had been together in the garage for hours. Just like when I was a kid.

Dad smiled. The hum and purr of the old compressor were back.

“That was fun,” he said.

Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.

youroldhouse1@gmail.com

@youroldhouse

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Old House Handyman: Working in the garage, just like old times