Stucco?

Got a lot done these past few days. I now have CATV wiring, phone wiring (house and studio lines), my business phone system is mounted in a rack in the basement, and the studio has two extensions wired. Soon I'll flip the rest of the house over so each phone in the house is a different extension, and program it so the studio line rings in the two studio extensions, and the house line rings everywhere. Insulation is almost done, I have (4) batts to go, I have one 2x4 thats cut and fitted for a messy corner spot that has to be screwed down, and finally, finish up the plywooding of the walls and ceilings. Major progress. On the truck front, it passed inspection at the DMV yesterday morning, (in NJ) with all the emissions junk, air pumps, charcoal canisters, catalytic converters et all, removed. Well, the cat is there, I just hammered a straight pipe through it and welded it in so it looks like a cat :) Amazing what a little bit of code modification in the truck's ECM can do :) Anyway, back to work. The goal is to start layer two of the walls/ceilings after this weekend. I've decided to use sheetrock instead of plywood for the second layer, as per your suggestions. The question is, should I screw it down to the plywood, should I glue it down to the plywood, or should I slap on furring strips and screw it to the strips? What do you think? I'd *prefer* to attach it direction to the plywood, only because I don't want to lose another inch in ceiling height on the slanted side, but other than that I'm cool with it. Maybe I could get away with direct fitment to the slant, and furr strip everything else? Sorry for the stupid questions, I should know the answer by now.

If I'm right in thinking that the plywood is directly screwed onto the joists without Resilient channel under it, and that there's another center of mass outside the insulation that is pretty well sealed, then that's it for your air spaces. You would want to fasten the drywall directly to the plywood, but try to find some Laminating screws, they are designed to fasten one layer to another without fastening to the studs. If you can find the right screws, you should put a stripe of construction adhesive parallel to, and about 2" away from, each joist. This line is where your laminating screws should go also. What you want is for each layer to be somewhat free to resonate on its own, so that you have two DIFFERENT resonant frequencies therefore no ONE freq. can get through due to sympathetic vibes. You also do NOT want any fasteners to go thru both layers AND into the joists, that lets sound flank your air space by going thru the fasteners and joists. That's why the offset fasteners, in line with the glue but NOT with the joists. Even though sound will follow the fasteners, it gets dispersed in the insulation instead of traveling through the joists. Yeah, cars can be fun to play with - there's quite a bit of new stuff that wasn't available when I was heavier into it, like the "high piston pin, long rod" thing that's got a lot of guys building new engines - who-da thunk a minor change in geometry could do all that? Glad to hear you're making some progress in several areas - not sure I even remember how to spell the word... Steve

If I'm right in thinking that the plywood is directly screwed onto the joists without Resilient channel under it, and that there's another center of mass outside the insulation that is pretty well sealed, then that's it for your air spaces. You would want to fasten the drywall directly to the plywood, but try to find some Laminating screws, they are designed to fasten one layer to another without fastening to the studs.

I think I have found the right fasteners, 1" long sheet rock screws. They would screw into the plywood through the sheetrock, and not hit the joists. I shall follow your advice.

Yeah, cars can be fun to play with - there's quite a bit of new stuff that wasn't available when I was heavier into it, like the "high piston pin, long rod" thing that's got a lot of guys building new engines - who-da thunk a minor change in geometry could do all that?

Actually, the longer the rod, the longer the piston stays at TDC thus providing more torque for a longer duration. Combine this with a short stroke crank and you can generally rev the snot out of it. Lighten and balance everything of course. There are a lot of tricks that can be had. For example, my FWD continental (3.8L V6) likes to spit out head gaskets, so through careful and clever machining, using copper o-rings, I run no head gaskets at all. None, zero, zilch, et all. 129K miles later I'm still getting awesome power and breezing through emissions without cats, canisters, air pumps and what not. And light to light, I can spank 'stangs and vettes and such light to light. I lose at the higher speeds, but light to light it wins most every time. Not bad for a FWD 4-door leather-clad pillow. :-D

Glad to hear you're making some progress in several areas - not sure I even remember how to spell the word... Steve

LOL. I had a temporary delay in getting motivated, but the bug hit me this past sunday so I'm making progress left and right. What really sucks is as I work around the perimeter of the room, I have a huge amount of junk that has to rotate to the opposite side of the room, so I can setup ladders and such. To quote my wife... "you have too much shit". While I promptly disagree, I do see her point. Humping the gear left in the room around and a around, then putting a sheet over it is a pain in the butt. Once I finish the sheet rock, tape and spackle, I'll be doing something fun. I'm going to build the console table out of rectangular steel tubing, weld to fit in the room. Then I'll shuffle it to the back of the room, and start laying down the pergo. I don't want to weld over the new fancy imitation wood if I can help it. I've outgrown the need for fire :-D

Well. Isn't this special. Three walls are insulated, chaulked, and plywooded. I didn't intend to rip down the back wall or the cove area where the sofa is going, simply because they didn't fall off like all the other rotted, termite eaten cedar panelled walls. I'm thinking hey, great, right? Anyway, moved all the boxes out of the sofa cove, so I can put a stool there and staple insulation up in between the joists. Brrrr, I feel a draft coming from the floor. So, I gently pry a few cedar panels off, and viola! The whole wall fell down. No insulation. Duh. Its not even badly insulated, its simply NOT insulated at all. Found three mice skeletons, about 20 rabid spiders, and what looks like a dead bird. Yes, in a wall. Dead stuff. So, I ripped down the entire wall, insulated it, and now I'm putting up 3/4" plywood. Here I thought i was done except for the ceiling. Imagine that. What I'd like to know is, why does my house have to have dead stuff in the walls? Why cant it be Knightfly's house? Someone tell me that. BTW, what I think is a dead bird, is going on ebay, in case anyone is interested :lol: Even though I widened the entrance to the room by sawzalling out the old nasty doorframe that was falling apart (and held in with two finishing nails, it was wedged in there good!), I cut out the doorframe a little larger, but aparently not large enough for a 23" wide door, the next size of interior doors at home depot. I went to three home depots and a lowes, and none of them had anything wider than an 18" door, and narrower than a 22" door, which is all the space thats there considering the studs on both sides are support studs i really don't want to cut. So, I felt a little defeated loading a prehung 18" wide door into my truck, but hey, I dealt with it for two years, and its just to the bathroom/passageway anyway. I'll hate it for the next 20 years, but it won't kill me. I just can't record people who like Klondikes. Well, I can record them, they just can't use the bathroom :-D As coincidence will have it, the original door is actually a 18.5" door, so I planed both sides of it so now its a 18" door, and I'm going to hinge it on the other side of the doorframe, going in. So I'll have two doors helping control noise leaving the studio. Whats absolutely amazing is the prehung door is taller than the original door, so I had to lop it down a bit off the bottom, as I did the frame. This lowers the doorknob 4". Which means (pure luck) the original door will have its doorknob 4" higher than the new door, so i can use normal doorknobs and not have them bang each other. I did a test fit, using the doorknobs I bought, and amazingly enough I can close both doors fully without the doorknobs making contact with the other door. For me, that makes up for having to chuck a dead bird-like thing out the window. *sigh*

"why does my house have to have dead stuff in the walls? Why cant it be Knightfly's house?" - What makes you think it ISN'T Knightfly's house? I live in the house your builder's retarded illegitimate son rode his unicycle west just to build, in hopes I'd be stupid enough to buy it... Not only can I call your dead bird, I can raise you some mice, maybe half a dozen dead rats, and several families of birds raised in places that birds should never be able to access. I've got to excercise EXTREME self-control every time I climb on my Case Backhoe so that I don't just "drive around inside the house for a while", then say "oops - accident; better call the insurance" - so, instead, I keep windows open to let all the "blue air" out while I invent new strings of cuss-words and slowly replace the entire F-ing house from the inside out. All this because my wife and I were in possession of more horses than senses when we moved here in 1978, and this place had 9-1/2 acres and a barn - you'd think that in 25 years even one idiot working alone could have run out of things to undo, but I'm a VERY accomplished procrastinator. I'm getting better though, really I am... Man, I LOVE steel tubing - I've gotten so I actually STOCK several sizes of square, the smaller sizes the .095" wall nests into each other pretty good, great for sockets with pins, jackstand style, or different attachments, etc - I'm hoping to get a wire machine eventually, it's kinda iffy using stick on light weight stuff. The good news is your doorknobs miss each other - the bad news is, doorknobs leak sound... Gotta run, wifey's home with "honey-do" stuff... Steve

Steel tubing... I should start stocking it here considering how much stuff I end up welding together. I went up to Newark NJ today to my steel suplier this morning in fact, to buy 1/4" plate so I can make a larger, flat bumper for my F350, with a built in storage lid for tools and junk. Kinda like what you see on towtrucks. I'd rather make it because they are typically $1500+ new for what is about $100 worth of steel. I hear ya on the cuss-words, I've come up with some interesting combinational cusses myself, but its just a random anger-management thing for me. Especially when I hit my thumb with a hammer :) Sorry about all the dead critters in your place.. I guess I'll stop complaining about my studio, now that they've all been removed. *sigh*. I actually have part of the ceiling up, finally. THough I went to bring in more plywood (its leaning on the front of the house, under the eave to keep it dry) but I've stacked a ton of junk on it so when it stops raining I'll have to clean that up so I can get at the plywood. This past saturday was "dollar day" at a junkyard 2 hours away, so for a $20 cover and $1 every part (a part, being an engine, for example) lets just say I filled my pickup bed higher than the roofline, plus many boxes of stuff in the crewcab. I was smart and took out the rear seat ahead of time to make room. Ebay here I come. Its weird paying for studio gear with car parts sold on e-bay, but heck, it works. I have no less than 125 ECM's sitting under a tarp right now LOL. Bought a Chevy 350 4-bolt truck motor for a mere $1, and dropped that off at an aquantance's place 20 miles away for $700. Made up for the 9 mpg I got heading out there, and the 7 mpg I got coming back fully loaded. The nice thing about F350's is fully loaded (I had probably 4000lbs of junk in the bed plus whatever was inside) it road nice and smooth, and zero sagging. Gotta love HD springs. Oh well, enough car stuff :-D

I'm coming into this thread late, so I might have missed some things, but how about covering your slot absorbers with the fake bricks? Make the slats the same as the height of a brick, account for the difference in thickness, then glue the bricks to the slats....? Thomas

barefoot wrote:

I'm coming into this thread late, so I might have missed some things, but how about covering your slot absorbers with the fake bricks? Make the slats the same as the height of a brick, account for the difference in thickness, then glue the bricks to the slats....? Thomas

Thats okay, jump right in. BTW, howdy :) I could do something like that, assuming the slats are strong enough. The fake bricks I have are real bricks, just 5/8" thick instead of the full 4 inches. I'm going to need a good glue :) The thickness of the slats is important, how about the material? Because instead of wood slats, I could use thinner, steel slats maybe?