This week on Fix It Radio, we tackle the springtime ritual that’s got everyone wrongly advised—firing up your sprinkler systems. Host John and guest Alan Stack from Stack Optical discuss the reality behind Denver Water’s misleading recommendations and share their professional landscaping insights. They bring clarity to whether you should prepare your irrigation, while encouraging lush lawns and vibrant shrubbery without falling into common traps. In parallel, we unravel the advances in eyewear technology that might just surprise you. With a focus on eye protection, we highlight the often-overlooked risks of DIY projects and the necessary precautions for keeping
SPEAKER 01 :
Walter? Upstairs! Are you alright?
SPEAKER 05 :
In the floor behind the chair.
SPEAKER 06 :
This is America.
SPEAKER 01 :
Does everybody know what time it is? Fix It Radio.
SPEAKER 04 :
All right, it is Fix It Radio, KLZ 560. Happy Saturday, everybody. Appreciate y’all joining us. If you’re listening to a replay show on Sunday or Tuesday, thank you for that as well. Today, on this particular Saturday, the 11th of April, beautiful day today. If you’re No, today’s the 12th. I’m sorry, Charlie. You are correct. The 12th. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. Today is the 12th. Thank you for the correction there. I don’t know why I had the 11th written down in my notes. I don’t know why. It was a day off. Anyways, it’s kind of been that way all week. I’ve been a day off most of the week. I thought Thursday was Friday, and then yesterday, I don’t know. Anyways, today is the 12th. Larry Unger, of course, answering phones for us today. That was, of course, Charlie talking in my ear. And Alan Stack joining us today as well. Stack Optical. Good morning, Alan. Good morning, John. And it is a beautiful day. It is gorgeous. So if you guys have not been out and about, I encourage you to get out and about. We’ll talk a little bit today. I’ll give you some tips, and every time Alan’s on, we give some tips on different things regarding eyewear, do-it-yourself stuff, and what you should or shouldn’t do along those lines. We’ll get into some of that. I also will walk you through today, as I said last week, because I figured a lot of people would be doing this today, if you haven’t already. Now, some of you may have already fired up your sprinkler system. and started watering and doing things along those lines, although some may have not. Larry Unger was telling me this morning that, and he was telling Alan and I both, that Denver Water is telling people, don’t fire up your system yet because you want to wait until the last freeze. Well… I will tell you, as somebody that is in that industry and we do commercial landscaping and all of that, I will tell you straight up, that is false. You can turn it on. You do whatever you feel like. They’re telling you that because they don’t want you using water for irrigation and so on. But the reality is, yeah, our chances of having anything freeze hard enough from this point on, it’s not going to happen, Alan. Yeah, you look at those golf courses. They are green. Went right out the door from us here, or out the window, I should say, to the west of us. Obviously, they’re watering. Yeah, obviously, they’re doing what Denver Water said not to do. What’s interesting about that, that’s a Denver course. So go figure. I’m right on that, Charlie, right? This golf course to the west, that’s a Denver course, right? Thank you. So that’s a Denver course. But Denver water is going to tell you not to water. But that golf course down here, and you can look at it right now, it’s as green as it gets. That’s right. It’s beautiful. So anyways, yeah, you guys do whatever you think you need to do around your home. I will tell you this, that some of your trees, shrubs, things like that, they’re all – uh by now they are probably leafed out not just bloomed out but leafed out some plants may be a little late but point there is they need some water and moisture as well so i will disagree with denver water you’ve got plants and shrubs and things that are going to need water not only that but your grass does as well and i hate to argue with denver water but they’re wrong do you really hate to argue no because they’re wrong It’s a municipality. They’re just wrong. Al, I mean, you know my feelings on government anyways, but they’re wrong. And bottom line, do what you need to do around your house. Okay, before we get going, and I should mention, too, if you’ve got a question for Alan, a lot of times we’ll get you guys that have certain questions on different things. You know, eyewear, eye care, all the different things. And Alan dovetails really well into not only here but Drive Radio just because, A, we have to see. I mean, drive. I guess you don’t have to, but I enjoy seeing Alan. Absolutely. For me, I do. And eye protection is a big deal. And I will tell you, working in the field that I was in the majority of my life and career and so on, especially when I was younger, did you do the things you should have to protect? And I will be the first to say that, no, I wasn’t always the best at wearing eye protection and those things. And I was lucky. Fortunately, nothing bad ever happened. I don’t have any ill effects from that or anything along those lines. But I look at that today and think, oh, man, I was dumb.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, no, I agree. Back then, we weren’t really worried about the UV and that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, we didn’t know in a lot of cases, right?
SPEAKER 05 :
So a lot of that we just don’t know until later in life.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s true.
SPEAKER 05 :
What that’s affecting.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s true.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s why you need to get those yearly eye exams.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. Get those done and wear eye protection when you’re – especially, guys, when you’re out. I just mentioned doing some things outside and even – Honestly, whether you’re weed eating or doing things along those lines, yes, wear eye protection. The last thing you want is to have any kind of eye problems for something flying up into it. If you’re out in the shop and you’re working, you’re welding, you’re grinding, you’re doing whatever, please make sure you’re using eye protection in all those particular situations. And I don’t care if it’s just for a half a second. Don’t be dumb. That’s right. And I have. I’ll be the first to admit it. I’ve been that guy in the past.
SPEAKER 05 :
No, I’ll just close my eyes while I do this little groin.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. The problem is, and Alan can attest to this, is even though you’re closing your eyes, that stuff is still getting around your eyelashes and other things. So even though you’ve closed your eyes, you open them. Right. And this is a voice of experience talking, as you can tell. You can still have something fall in them even from doing that. Am I right?
SPEAKER 05 :
Especially your contact lens wear.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. Am I right? Yep, absolutely. Because that stuff is still in your face and around you and so on, and that’s why you should, in some cases, by the way, I’m a big one on, for a lot of you listening, depending upon what you’re doing, I’m a big face shield guy, not just goggles. If you’re really working and there’s a lot of stuff spraying at you, again, because of that reason of things even getting around your cheeks and your forehead and so on, just eliminate all that stuff from getting on you in the first place and just wear a hood.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, and that face shield, then you can put them over your regular eyewear and that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, that’s absolutely. And, you know, that’s the other thing, too, that has changed since I was younger being in the industry is the wide array of those devices and how much better they’ve gotten, how much more comfortable they are to wear now and all of that, Alan. The optical clarity is so much better. So much better. When I was a kid, you’d put one of those on and you were like half the time you didn’t wear it because you couldn’t see wearing it. Right. So you took it off because you couldn’t see. Well, we have really, even the cheaper versions of those things.
SPEAKER 05 :
The ones that are stamped out are so much better.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, they’re so much better than what we ever had, you know, in my younger career. So those of you listening, if you do anything around the house, in the shop, whatever, my advice is, I don’t care whether you’re a handy person or not, having a good set of either safety glasses and or a hood that you can just put on at any given time. I don’t care if you’re going to run in the house and do a little bit of plumbing. Absolutely. Part of your tool bag. Put your goggles on. And in my case, I’m glad you said that, Alan. I’ve got a couple of different tool bags, and I’ve got glasses stuffed in each one of those just because they’re there. They’re handy. You grab them, and they’re cheap enough now where you can have multiple sets.
SPEAKER 05 :
Even though I wear eyewear, I still have face shields in my tool bags.
SPEAKER 04 :
You just never know when something’s going to crop up. And, again, we want you all to be safe. We want you to have good eyesight. There’s nothing worse than that. And this is one thing I don’t know we’ve ever talked about. I’m guessing that there are certain things that we can do, welding and so on, that if we’re really not careful, there can be some damage to, permanent damage done to our eyes if we’re not careful, right? Absolutely.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, so, no, you’ve… Proper eyewear, proper eye protection, depending on what you’re doing, especially with that welding. No, you need the welding helmet or… I don’t weld, so…
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, and I will tell you, for a lot of you listening, some of you that weld will know what I’m saying. There’s even different shades depending upon whether you’re working inside or outside because when you’re outside, you need much darker than inside because you’ve got the sunlight now that you’re contending with as well as the weld itself, the arc itself. You’re dealing with two things then, meaning if you, and you guys that are welders know this, but if you’re not a regular welder and you do a lot of welding inside, but now all of a sudden you’re going to hop outside and, you know, weld a fence post or do something along those lines, that indoor helmet is not the same as outside.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, wow. Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
Because you, yeah, again, this is the voice of experience. talking over all these years and doing things where you just go grab the old regular helmet, you go outside, fix whatever it is you’re going to fix, and then realize later in the day that, geez, why do my eyes hurt so bad? Well, because you burned them. Because you didn’t wear the proper equipment is why. Yeah, been there, done that. I’ve been that guy. So again, some of this, guys, is me, voice of experience, being in that industry for so long. And again, in our defense, some of that, when I was young, we didn’t have the same equipment that we have today. I look at technicians even today, Alan, and plumbers and so on, and electricians, and what they have to use today versus what… We had, when I was a kid, 40 years ago, and oh, my word, have we made advancements on that.
SPEAKER 05 :
You’re already splitting pipes, but now they’ve got these new connections.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, yeah, way different than it used to be.
SPEAKER 05 :
Which is really nice in a tight area to be able to use that instead of trying to get in there with your gun.
SPEAKER 04 :
In the eyewear, and this is in your world, it’s changed a lot in 40 years.
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, absolutely, yeah. And the materials that we have to work with and the different types of progressives and the single vision. lenses have changed so much now they have digital single vision lens basically what that means is the optics go from one edge of the lens to the other you don’t have all those distortions like really yeah they’ve improved a lot okay our transition lens is something people still get absolutely there’s definitely a place for them as a matter of fact one of my favorite lenses called the drive wear It’s made by transition. Instead of just being activated by ultraviolet light, there’s a chemical in there that’s actually activated just by light.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, okay. That’s something new.
SPEAKER 05 :
Regular transitions won’t do that. Right. But this drive wear will actually take the light from the windshield. and help darken it up. Okay. That’s new. I did not know that. Well, it’s not new. It’s been around for a long time. But it is a much better driving lens than just a regular transition.
SPEAKER 03 :
I had no idea.
SPEAKER 05 :
A regular transition will not darken behind the windshield because it needs the ultraviolet light.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, got it.
SPEAKER 05 :
But the drive wear actually activates by light, not just UV light.
SPEAKER 04 :
So they went one step further. Yes, they did. Now, how do they work in just regular sunlight? Same way? Beautiful. No problem?
SPEAKER 05 :
Beautiful. It’s my favorite. I golf.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
And I love that lens for golfing.
SPEAKER 04 :
Do they make those in different colors? No. Okay. No. It’s a one-shot brown. Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
And it kind of goes from brown, green. It’s got a lot of different colors to it, depending on the light conditions. It’s really a cool lens.
SPEAKER 04 :
And is it totally clear when it’s not activated? Absolutely not. Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
This is a sunglass lens.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
But it just gets darker. I see. Depending on the light conditions. Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
So it starts lighter and gets darker accordingly.
SPEAKER 05 :
I mean, I’ve been able to wear them running into the supermarket, be able to pick up something. I can still see through it.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
But it’s not in a comfortable lens indoors.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. Where the old ones back in the day, they were almost clear, right? Or not quite clear. No, no, no.
SPEAKER 05 :
But you’re talking about two different lenses.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
The regular transition is still clear. Okay. And then it darkens.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
They actually have one out there that’s polarizing. The polarizing always has a little color to it, and it doesn’t really get full polarizing until it gets to 40% or 50%. So that lens I don’t use a lot of, but that drive wear I use quite a bit.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. Hopefully you all listening learned something along those lines. I did. I didn’t realize that, and I haven’t seen – I wore transition lenses at one time. It had been a long, long time ago, long before I wore – started wearing contacts. But I wore a transition lens back in the day, and –
SPEAKER 05 :
uh let’s just say that you know in the shop environment and all of that there were some advantages and some disadvantages right and one of the the the old transition took forever yes to lighten up yes that was the one downside it had yeah but they’ve gone through quite a few different generations and they just came out with a new generation that really does lighten a lot faster.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. So it’s getting much better. I mean, I’ve always wondered how does that work?
SPEAKER 05 :
It’s an organic chemical that they have. That’s why old transitions don’t work quite as well because it is a chemical that over time gets worse. Degrades? Yeah, degrades. Exactly.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. I always wondered how those actually work. So it’s an actual chemical they embed into the lens. Absolutely. Okay. I did not know that.
SPEAKER 05 :
I think they’re doing the same thing, but they attach electricity to windows.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’ve seen those.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, I have seen them. And that is really slick. Yeah. Flip a switch and you can darken the window or change the shade or whatever. Yeah, very cool. All right. Any of you have questions, please give us a call. 303-477-5600. 303-477-5600. Text line also. Text us a question. 307-200-8222. 307-200-8222. Okay, Alan, before we go to break, always do this when you’re here. Give everybody a little bit of a tip because it never fails. Your glasses never break when you’re around. That’s right. They always break evenings, weekends, whatever the case. So how do we get through to a point of then being able to go see you?
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay, something to keep in mind, stay away from those little kits that have screws in them. If a screw falls out of your glasses… Don’t go down and buy a little kit with a bunch of screws because there’s different sizes, and if you put the wrong size screw into that barrel, you can strip it out.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
So you’ve actually done more damage than good when you do that, right? The best, quickest fix is jamming a wooden toothpick in there. Okay. The wooden toothpick is not going to mess up those barrels, and at least it’ll hold until you can get in. Another one you can take, I don’t know, I’m not sure what the gauge of the wire, but you can take out some of those copper… The copper leads inside an electrical wire. Take one of those real thin ones and you can twist it around that hole. Put it through the hole and then twist it and that’ll hold it. Okay. Another one is like if you have one of those fishing line glasses where the fishing line broke.
SPEAKER 03 :
Good idea.
SPEAKER 05 :
Best thing to do is just use a piece of tape, scotch tape, just to hold that until you can get in to see.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. But no, so the different kits and stuff that you see.
SPEAKER 05 :
The last thing you ever want to do is put any super glue near those glasses.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, yeah, that one is one of the first things I learned from you, which makes total sense. Because it embeds into the plastic, right?
SPEAKER 05 :
So many folks come in there and they’ve glued them and say, can you fix this? The problem is you’ve got to use such hard chemicals to get the glue off the glass or the lens. that you ruin it, especially with some of these new lenses that they have out.
SPEAKER 04 :
Got a text message a moment ago from somebody who said, here’s the best tip for broken glasses, have an extra pair. Well, that’s from your show yesterday. Go ahead. Excuse me. I get to laughing and coughing. So, yeah, on that line, go see Alan. Get a second pair. That’s right. Get yourself all dialed in. Which, by the way, that’s actually, I’m laughing, but I’m laughing because it’s just kind of a common sense thing. It’s like, okay, yeah, have an extra set around and utilize it if something were to break. And that way you’re always good to go. And even if it means you’re hanging on to that old pair for a little bit longer than you normally would, I’d do that, right? Don’t give away your old glasses. Absolutely. Who’s going to wear them anyways?
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, no. People donate them to us, and we give to Lions Club.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
But, ah, man. Even I keep a few pairs on.
SPEAKER 04 :
A few pairs on? Yes. Yeah, I mean, as you know, I wear contacts I have for years now, and I still have some of the old glasses that if I had to put them on and wear them, I absolutely could.
SPEAKER 03 :
You could still get by.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, if something happened and I ran out of a contact or whatever, or, you know, you’re you get a irritation or something and I don’t want to wear them on a particular day, I can actually, you know, go that route if I have to, and off I go, piece of cake.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, that’s so important to have.
SPEAKER 04 :
All right, let’s take a break. Real quick, Joe, hang tight. We’ll come back, and he’s got a question on sunglasses for pilots as well. We’ll come back. Don’t go anywhere. This is Fix It Radio, KLZ 560.
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
All right, we are back. Fix It Radio, KLZ 560, thanks for joining us today, by the way. We appreciate it very much. The website fixitradio.com, all of our partners and sponsors and everybody that makes this show happen are all listed there as well. Joe, what’s going on this morning?
SPEAKER 12 :
John, not a question, but just a suggestion if you have any pilots in the audience. If you’re a pilot and you’re flying a plane with what they call a glass panel, modern airplanes, instead of having round needle gauges, have polarized screens. And if you’re wearing polarized sunglasses, when you tilt your head over to look at that, it’ll block out. So you want to make sure you’re not wearing polarized sunglasses if you’re flying a glass panel airplane because you hate to spend $150 for a good pair of sunglasses and you find out you can’t use them in your airplane.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, that’s interesting you say that. I had a gentleman back in the 90s who sent me all kinds of articles. on what to recommend for pilots on their sunglasses. And the number one thing was no polarized. Yep. Because you can’t see the ice buildup on your wings. That’s the other thing.
SPEAKER 12 :
You won’t be able to see the ice, so you don’t. Very good point. Now, the other thing, and I don’t want to take business away from Alan, but 15 years ago, I had from an optician, you know, I paid a lot of money for a good pair of Ray-Bans, and they were professionally fit, and a lot of people don’t realize that you get you know, different, uh, bridge, you know, you know, distance between the center.
SPEAKER 04 :
Absolutely.
SPEAKER 12 :
Right. And, uh, so after 15 years, you know, I had chips and cracks and scratches and the frame was bent. So I needed a new pair and I knew exactly what I wanted, but, um, on a really good pair of sunglasses, if you look on the inside of one of the temples, you’ll see some numbers in a little square box. Um, and so if you know those numbers, when you go on and say you want to order another pair of $150 Ray-Ban sunglasses, If you look on the inside of that temple piece, you’ll see those numbers, and that will tell you exactly what the temple spread is and what the lens size is. And, again, I don’t want to take business away from that. Don’t worry about it. Okay. But, again, if you’re just going to order a replacement for something that you had, and they’re really, really good, and they were fit right the first time, you look on the inside of that temple, you’ll see all the numbers you need to reorder, which, by the way, I just did. About three weeks ago, I ordered the identical pair of Ray-Ban G-15s that I used to fly with because I had all that information.
SPEAKER 04 :
And they’re still around.
SPEAKER 12 :
Ray-Bans, absolutely. And that G-15 came out during World War II.
SPEAKER 04 :
You’re kidding me. And they’re still making it. You’re kidding me.
SPEAKER 12 :
By the way, it looks green. G, I guess, stands for gray. It looks green. But G stands for gray 15, and it’s just the ideal lens for flying aircraft.
SPEAKER 03 :
I didn’t know that.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yep. And so Ray-Ban G. Alan, do other manufacturers sell G15 lenses? That’s not unique to Ray-Ban, is it?
SPEAKER 05 :
No. The G15’s been around for so long. No. As a matter of fact, I make glasses with prescription with G15.
SPEAKER 12 :
Yep. And so that’s just my tips. Good to know. If you’re a pilot, don’t spend a lot of money on polarized glasses. because you won’t be able to use them where you shouldn’t use them.
SPEAKER 04 :
Interesting. All right. I learn something every day. Thank you, Joe.
SPEAKER 12 :
Take care, guys.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, I appreciate it. Okay, dumb question on my part, Alan. Back to Joe and older glasses and so on. I mean, I’ve got to believe that’s a rare exception. I’ve got to believe a lot of these manufacturers come out with a glass frame or whatever, and then several years later that’s superseded and this, that, and the other, or is it pretty standard and they keep that same thing rolling forever?
SPEAKER 05 :
It depends. You know, it’s like the blue blockers. That was really popular.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right.
SPEAKER 05 :
This kind of stuff. It’s basically a brown lens. Okay. And they’ll just remarket it. Okay. You know, but we have the brown. We have the gray. We have the G15, which is a gray-green. That’s with that G15. And that came out in World War II for the pilots so they could tell the difference in clouds and that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER 04 :
Non-polarized.
SPEAKER 05 :
Amazing stuff. Yes, non-polarized.
SPEAKER 04 :
So that’s one of the few exceptions to where you don’t want polarization.
SPEAKER 05 :
Absolutely.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. Because in a lot of cases where you’re, you know, fishing and hunting and doing all sorts of other things and so on, you want the polarization. You want to take the glare off things. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
But sometimes you need that glare to go, oh, I got ice building up on my wings.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, because otherwise you wouldn’t see that. Right. That’s a great point. I’ve always wondered because, okay, here’s another dumb question on my part. How many actual glass factories are there? Because I read something the other day that there’s a lot of branding that goes on. It’s sort of like shock absorbers in the automotive world. Really, on a worldwide basis, there may be a few small boutique shock makers, so I’m not sure somebody will correct me on this. But really, Alan, there’s about five major shock absorber factories worldwide. around the world, and, of course, Gabriel and Tenneco being the two largest, which Tenneco makes, like Gazillion Monroe and all that kind of stuff. But there’s a lot of other shocks on the market, but they’re all made by them.
SPEAKER 05 :
But it’s surprising how many independents there are still. On the glasses end, I think. On the glasses end, yes. Even though the place out of Italy, L’Exotica, has bought up a lot of them, they’re always buying them up. But there are still quite a few independents.
SPEAKER 04 :
So little guys that are making their own frames and doing their own thing and so on. Interesting. Yeah, that isn’t the case when it comes to the, probably because of the sheer cost of what it takes to make, you know, no offense, a shock absorber versus a pair of glasses. There’s a huge difference there in cost and factory and so on.
SPEAKER 05 :
Depending on the materials.
SPEAKER 04 :
True, true.
SPEAKER 05 :
And we’ll see how all this Terra stuff works out.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I was going to ask another question for you. When it comes to a lot of these that you just said, that’s an Italy company that owns a lot of those. So how will that or will that have an effect on those things? I’m assuming it will, right? I think so. So far it hasn’t.
SPEAKER 05 :
But I think we’re still working on inventories.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and here’s what I’m telling people even on the automotive side. If you’re thinking about doing something at all along these lines, do it now. Yes. Because I can tell you what the price will be today, but Alan can’t tell you what the price will be in 30 days. That’s right.
SPEAKER 05 :
Because one of my favorite frames is called a silhouette frame, which is a brimless frame. It’s made out of titanium. It’s made in Austria. Yep, familiar with it. And I’ve been carrying them for 22 years. There may be increases on that. That’s right. That’s right.
SPEAKER 04 :
so i’ve stocked up point being get in and get those done sooner than later because yeah i’m telling for example all of you listening i’m telling all of my auto shops that i coach you need to make sure you tell your customers you’ve got about a 48 hour window of guaranteeing that estimate because on car parts that could change literally alan in the next two or three days so you cannot guarantee an appointment much or not a point but an estimate right much longer than about 48 hours because you don’t know what the prices are going to do in the next couple of days absolutely so for all of you listening i my my number one you know uh suggestion would be if you’re thinking about doing anything especially in this world with alan go do it now not later because you don’t know what prices are going to be down the road and a lot of these things don’t come out of the united states of america i know and that’s the problem well you know it’s just like frames you know we used to make a lot of frames here in the 70s but then they oh we can get them cheaper else well what happens we lose the technology that’s right to make that’s right go somewhere else you’re 100 correct it’s part of what is uh trying to be fixed right now that’s a whole other conversation for the daytime show but bill and lakewood go ahead okay i got a trick question yeah
SPEAKER 11 :
You want to bet if you can answer it or not? Well, you never know. I won’t waste your time. I got a riding lawnmower. Okay. It’s a couple of years. It’s a Sears is what it is. Okay. And you cannot start it unless you’re sitting on the seat. Right. So now, and it never fails, every spring I got to buy a new battery because the battery’s dead. Okay. So you can’t jump it because the battery is underneath the seat.
SPEAKER 03 :
Right.
SPEAKER 11 :
And so you can’t sit. You can’t jump. The only way to do it is buy another battery and put another battery in. They don’t even got a string on it to pull to start the thing.
SPEAKER 04 :
No, the only other thing you can do is there is a paperclip trick that you jump across the sensor that’s on the bottom of the seat that allow it to start even when you’re not sitting on it.
SPEAKER 11 :
Oh, that’s what I was looking for.
SPEAKER 04 :
Just a paperclip. All you’re doing is making a connection through that switch that normally would be depressed when you’re sitting on it. You wouldn’t want to leave that there, of course, but that’s the trick.
SPEAKER 11 :
I haven’t looked yet because… Because it’s a long story.
SPEAKER 04 :
But anyway. For a lot of you listening, that’s a great topic, by the way, Bill. A lot of you will be getting push mowers, riding mowers, those sorts of things out. I’m going to service mine later today or first thing in the morning. So similar situation. So, yeah, that’s one of the secrets where if it’s not firing up and the battery, you know, you need to do a little work on it or whatever, but you still want to try to jump it and get it running or whatever. Yes, that’s how you bypass the seat switch.
SPEAKER 11 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
Just a paperclip. I wonder if that would be on YouTube. It’s really easy. You just look at the switch. It’ll be two wires coming into it, and all you do is take a paperclip and make a U out of it and shove it in the two terminals, and you’re good to go.
SPEAKER 11 :
Okay. Hey, thanks a lot.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s all you need to do, Bill, and you can get that thing jumped and fired up and running. And that’s sort of like Alan’s tip on what to do with your glasses. Just don’t leave the paperclip in there. And the reason for that is when I was a kid and Alan was a kid, you got on a riding lawnmower, there were no safety switches. If you fell off, it kept rolling. And people had some, I even knew some folk back then. I actually had a good friend of mine where one of their kids had unfortunately fell off, and the mower ran over him, and it was a bad deal, almost lost her leg, and it was not a good situation. A friend of mine lost. his arm because yeah so we you know we now have some safety devices along those lines to what bill was talking about to where if you fall off it shuts everything down and that’s why so but in this case where you’re working on it and you’re trying to get some things done and you want to get it started and so on that’s the trick but yes please disclaimer take the paper clip out once you’re done and you’re ready to work on it and don’t don’t activate the blades or anything along those lines but that’s just to get things running once you get it running pull that pull that paper clip out and by the way having a few paper clips in your toolbox for these types of things occasionally not a bad idea to have around and i was just wondering if you had some of the some of your glass glasses though the holes are probably too small to put a paper click in some of them some of them yeah
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s what I was thinking of stripping the wire, and you take that little cup.
SPEAKER 04 :
That works perfect. Yeah, and for some of you that maybe didn’t follow along with that, what Alan really was talking about was there are some solid core wire, or you just take even regular automotive wire and cut it, take your sheath off, strip it, and the reality is you’ll end up with, oh, I don’t know, depending upon the wire, you could have 10, 15 strands of wire there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, he needs one.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yep. and if you if you want to if you think that it’s not strong enough you want to put two in okay be my guest put a couple of them in there that’s right knock your socks off but you’re not going to damage anything by doing that automotive wire that’s the best job yeah and here’s and the reason for that and i’m glad alan said that is the reason why the automotive wire actually works better than some of the other wires that are out there even some of the computer wire and so on is in the automotive world we build wire where it can be flexible Because it’s vibrating. It’s why you never use house wire on a car. You never use Romex or anything like that on a car. I’ve seen so many guys over the years wire in trailer brakes or trailer wiring or whatever, and they’ll use house wire to do that. And it’s, I guess, because it’s around, it’s convenient, whatever the case may be. But the reason why… solid core wire is not ever used on a car is because multiple strand wire has a lot more flexibility in the ability to handle vibration that solid core wire won’t. A lot of people think, well, I want solid core because it’s stronger. Actually, the old saying of like a rope, Alan, where many strands… You know, wrapped into one is much stronger than one strand. The same is true with the wire. And that’s why you have found that automotive wire to be so much better for fixing glasses than anything else because it’s a lot more flexible. They make it differently than you would anything else because if they didn’t, it wouldn’t last. It would break in half and you’d have all kinds of problems in the car. which back in the day, for a lot of you that are old enough to remember this, back when they made a lot of the wiring with just cotton sheathing and so on, that wire would do what we’re talking about because it wasn’t as good a quality as what you have today. That’s why in a lot of cases you go acquire an older vehicle, and one of the first things that has to be done, if it’s all original, is in some cases a complete rewire of the car because a lot of what – I’m talking about does happen, and the only way to eliminate that is to put all new modern wiring in the car because what we have today is so much better than what we had back then.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I think about my bug that I had back in the 60s. And that was from the 50s.
SPEAKER 04 :
And they did not have the best of wiring like you have today.
SPEAKER 05 :
I had nice little fires going underneath where my radio was, and I got a gas tank sitting right there.
SPEAKER 04 :
And lots of things have changed since then because of that, just like your industry has changed on. I mean, I look today at even the glasses Alan’s wearing right now. I mean, you look at those and think, when I was a kid in high school and such, those things didn’t exist. There’s no way those would have existed back then.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, we couldn’t work with titanium.
SPEAKER 04 :
Didn’t have the technology, did we?
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 04 :
Which, not to get off on a rabbit trail, but that’s where a lot of what we’ve done in the military, space, end of things and so on, gave us the ability to do some of those things that we wouldn’t have had without all of that. That’s literally where a lot of that came from. That’s right. All right. We’ll take a quick break, guys. Questions, again, I should look at the text line, 307-200-8222. 307-200-8222. Fix It Radio, KLZ 560.
SPEAKER 09 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
All right, we are back. Fix-It Radio, KLZ 560. Josh Goff joining us now from Ridgeline Auto Brokers and Legacy Automotive. We’ll talk to Josh through Drive Radio as well. By the way, Alan Stack with us, also Stack Optical. Before I switch over to sprinklers really quick, Alan, I did get a message in, and this kind of reminded me of something. Let’s say you’re working outside and the wind’s blowing hard, your glasses get sandblasted. Is there any fix for that? No.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. The stuff that you see on the internet for taking scratches out of glasses is furniture wax.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay.
SPEAKER 05 :
So as soon as you clean it with hot water, it’s gone. Okay. So no, there is not a way to do that. Okay. But if they get dusty, don’t just wipe them off. Rinse them. Because you’re going to scratch them. That’s right. So if they get dusty, go back inside, rinse them off, and then clean them. Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
What about blowing them off? If you can blow the dust off, does that work too or no? No. You’re not going to get it off.
SPEAKER 05 :
It still scratches it. Yeah. Dust is the most abrasive thing on your glasses.
SPEAKER 04 :
Just keep that in mind. Yeah, it’s like a fine little sandpaper on it.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 04 :
So if you can’t rinse them, leave them. Just put up with it. If you’ve got a sink nearby, go wash them off.
SPEAKER 05 :
And if you do have a little bottle of cleaner… Spray it and let it drip off. Okay.
SPEAKER 03 :
That helps.
SPEAKER 05 :
Don’t wipe it off. Right. Okay. Gotcha. Let it really drip off. Okay. The big thing is you’re wiping that dust around. That’s what scratches your glass.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yep, yep. Makes total sense. No different than, you know, I won’t roll a window down in the wintertime on my car because I don’t want the side window to scratch. It’s the same philosophy. Same theory. It’s no different. All right. Somebody asked if I get the sprinklers, and yes, I am. So really quick, let me go through that before we finish out Fix It Radio today. So I’ll do this. I’ve done this in the past. We’ve got previous shows on this where I’ve spent literally the entire show going through the process of not only shutting down but firing up. Now, I will say this. Shutting down takes a lot longer than firing up. Firing up is usually pretty easy. The biggest thing that you’re going to do on firing one up is, A, everything goes in reverse from shutting it down. B, the biggest time consumer on firing it back up is getting everything readjusted because over the winter, you know, stuff happens. You know, the ground will move a little bit. You know, you may have run over a sprinkler head or something, you know. through the course of time or whatever. Anyways, getting them adjusted is what takes the longest. Actually, firing it up is pretty simple. First thing you’re going to do is, before you do anything, is go in your home, and hopefully you’re the one that did the shutdown, but if not and somebody else did it or you’re new to the home, go out to your vacuum breaker. that’s on the outside of the house it’s going to run the sprinkler system and don’t do anything with it yet just leave it alone but trace the line in the house so you can get the water turned on to the vacuum breaker to the backflow valve because that has been shut off if it was winterized properly that water has been shut off so we want to get the water turned on to the vacuum breaker first before we do anything else and i’ll tell you why and Go find where that is. In some cases, there may be a little drain, even on the ball valve or the gate valve where that gets shut off. Make sure that that’s closed. Go ahead and turn your water on. That’s going to run water all the way to the outside to the vacuum breaker. We call it a vacuum breaker, but it’s a backflow valve. All right, so that water is now on. You’ve traced that out. You’ve got that turned on. In some cases, that could be in the basement. In some of the newer homes, they’re putting that in what I call the furnace slash water closet where your hot water heater or your water heater will be. It just depends on your house, how they built it, how they plumbed it, and so on. But somewhere, there will be a shutoff to that particular outside line. So get that turned on. Once that’s on, and again, we’ve not done anything on the vacuum breaker, so everything there should be in a closed position so you shouldn’t have any issues. So what you want to do on that next is before you open the line that goes out to the yard, and you’ll know which line is which, because one’s coming out of the house, the other’s going down into the ground, which is then going to your valve box and so on. So what you’re gonna do is leave the valve that goes to the outside, that goes down into the valve box, leave it closed for now, One thing you’re going to have to do before you turn the water on on the other ball valve, though, because there’s two ball valves, one coming in, one going out. So before you turn the inlet valve on, and if, again, if it was winterized properly, there’ll be two flathead, they’re a valve, but they look like a screw. and they’re typically brass, and they’ll be in the, I call them the vents, basically the vent lines. You’ll see them, and you want that screw to go up and down, not back and forth, not sideways. In other words, we want it to go 90 degrees to the pipe. That means it’s closed. We don’t want it to flow with the pipe. So as you turn your screwdriver, you’re typically going to turn it, you know, 45 degrees. You’re going to rotate it up so that it’s now at a 90 degree angle and you want those to be closed. Now, once those are closed, go ahead and open up quickly. Don’t, don’t. don’t dink around but open up quickly the ball valve that goes into the vacuum breaker and here’s why you want to do it quickly if you do it too slow sometimes it won’t allow the spring and the seat and everything to set correctly and you might get a little bit of a leak coming out of the top if you do just shut it off let it drain for a second open it back up quickly again and let that pop together and you should be good now if you do that a couple of times and it’s still leaking you’re going to shut that back off Take that top cap all apart and see if you’ve had anything in there that sometimes they can have a little bit of water that gets left behind. There’s a safety device in there. They’re not very expensive, $12, $15 at your local big box stores. You’ll see if they get cracked or broken or whatever. That’s a safety device of the copper or the brass. in in that whole apparatus doesn’t break it’ll break that instead uh you know pressure you know the the water will freeze inward in this case and it’ll break that plastic that’s how it’s designed so you don’t end up breaking the entire you know backflow because if you do that it’s really expensive and you got to have a plumber come out unless you can sweat pipe yourself and so on and you don’t want to do that so as long as everything was shut off correctly you should be in good shape anyways once we get this all done You’ve got the ball valve on the end. You’ve got the breaker itself. The vacuum breaker is all set. There’s nothing leaking. Now go ahead and open it up to the sprinkler system itself and listen to see if it stops running water. Because if you open that and there’s water continually flowing, this is why we’re doing this in stages, if you’re continually hearing water flowing, we’ve got a leak someplace. that you’re going to have to repair because you don’t want to just leave that on because water’s flowing. Because you should open that second valve going to the valve boxes, the first valve box. And some sprinkler systems, depending on who put it in, sometimes there can be what they call a master valve that it has to turn on before any of the zones actually turn on. Some installations don’t have a master valve. It depends on your system and how the original installer did it. But my point is we should not hear anything running when you open that second valve. So first valve open, the breaker is now set. Everything’s good to go. You open up the second valve, that water’s flowing down into the breaker box. And some of you are going to say, what do you mean? You can hear the water running? You really can. And if not, that screwdriver that I told you about earlier that you’re going to use to turn those little pet cocks, put that on the pipe and put your ear to the screwdriver and you’ll know if water’s running or not. It’s a little trick from back in the day on even technicians listening for belt noise and things like that, alternator bearings, whatever. If you didn’t have a stethoscope handy, you just got a long screwdriver, you put your ear to it, you put that down on it, and you could hear right through it. It’s just like a megaphone coming back up into your ear. And Josh is over here agreeing with me. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER 13 :
You’ve done it. All day long.
SPEAKER 04 :
So if you ever want to know if there’s water running through a pipe, literally all you need is your ear and a screwdriver. And you put the screwdriver on the pipe and listen. It’ll tell you if water’s flowing through there or not. So we don’t want any water flowing. If all of that’s good to go, nothing’s flowing, we’re all set. Now you’re going to go back into where your clock is. And on all clocks, well… I say all clocks. Some of you might have some from World War II that aren’t like this anymore or that are not as modern. But all the modern clocks that are out there, you’ll have a setting on the clock where it’ll say test zones or manually start or something along those lines. They’re all labeled a little bit differently. But what we’re going to do is you want about a five-minute window per zone. to run through your zones. Some of you might have four or five zones. Some of you could have an entire clock, which could be 18 zones. Depends on the size of your property, what you’re watering and so on. But what you want to do is cycle through each one of those. And before doing this, I should have backed up. Before doing this, hopefully you know what your heads are and what tool you need to adjust your heads. And again, this comes back to who installed it. There’s multiple head manufacturers out there and know the tools aren’t universal. Rain Bird uses something different than Hunter, uses something different than Eritrol, uses something different than Toro, and you get the drift.
SPEAKER 05 :
That’s why we have to have this big kit because I’ve got a whole bunch of them. That’s right.
SPEAKER 04 :
And if you know what your house has and what tool you need, you’re in good shape. Some of them use little Allen wrenches. Some of them use little straight-headed screwdrivers. Some of them use a special wrench that’s made for that particular head. I mean, it just depends on… For example, a Hunter, it’s got this wing-shaped device that actually uses to adjust the head sweep on the rotor head. So it just depends on what you’ve got and how you need to adjust those. But hopefully you’ve got that tool kicking around from last year, and you’re all good to go. But you want to run through each zone. About five minutes each is about all it takes. And by the way, since it’s going to be really nice outside today, put your shorts and flip-flops on because you’re going to get a little wet. Otherwise, wear some boots or something along those lines, but you’re going to get wet. So do this later this afternoon when it’s nice and warm and you can have your shorts and flip-flops on. Go through, adjust all of your heads. We don’t want to water concrete. We don’t want to water rock. We want to water the grass and the shrubs and the things that we need to take care of, and you can adjust those. And again, they’re going to change from last year, guaranteed. It’s rare to fire up a system after sitting all winter long and not make any adjustments. I mean, you might find one head that’s great and the next head is all out of whack. And they can get dirt in them and all sorts of other things. That’s the other thing to look for is, are all of them popping up? Are they all flowing correctly? Do you have a dribble coming out of one? If that’s the case and it’s not flowing well, that means it’s got a rock in it. You may have to take that head apart. These are all things, by the way, that you guys can do on your own. You don’t need a professional service to come out and do this. It’s really very… uh cut and dried as far as how this works every one of these heads i just mentioned even the heads themselves come apart internally in other words you can take the entire head off all the way down in the ground where it fits into the fitting that’s down below or you can just take the top off and and you know look at things that way they all have the ability to come apart what i’m trying to say because that’s how they’re manufactured there’s a cup if you would and then you know the pop-up part goes into the cup and that screws onto the top and there’s a spring and so on anyways point being make sure they all fire up if they all come up some of you will have what we call pop-up heads where it just pops up and there’s a fan that comes out and spreads those are adjustable as well now when you look at those some of those are adjustable as far as on the neck itself towards the top of the head there’s a little uh knurled piece that you can actually spin and it will change the fan from you know 45 to 90 or 180 or even 360 in some cases and some of them are adjustable that way some are preset It’s a 45 degree head. It’s a 90 degree head. It’s a 180 degree head. And in that case, it’s a matter of just twisting it to where the pattern is just right. They all will have a little flathead screw in the middle of that head where you can actually change the fan. How should I say this? The length of spray. Think about it as a little pintle type pin, if you would, that’s going down into the water that’s disturbing the water flow that the farther in it goes, the less the pattern throws. The farther out the screw is, the farther the pattern throws. And again, you can adjust all these things depending upon what’s going on. The other thing that happens, by the way, with a lot of landscaping things and why you need to adjust these every year is things change even as far as how they’ve grown. You may have a bush now that is maybe in the way of a head, and you may look and say, wow, I’ve got to trim that back a little bit because that head’s not sweeping all the way onto the grass, and I’m going to have a big dead spot if I don’t take care of that, and, and, and. Things change from year to year, and you’ll get some growth in different things. The other thing that can happen a lot of times in sprinkler systems as well is trees like water. OK, tree roots, I should say, like water and it seeks water. So if you get a sprinkler line that has a little bit of seepage to it because they’re not 100 percent, it’s just like all of our water system. I talked about Denver water at the beginning of the hour. If you think that every single pipe Denver water has doesn’t leak, you’re crazy. They all do. Every single water pipe that’s running through this city is leaking a certain amount of water. It’s the way they’re made. They can’t get them completely sealed. Maybe a brand-new line doesn’t have any seepage, but if it’s been there for any length of time at all, I don’t even know what the figures are. Denver Water probably publishes it. There’s X amount of water loss in every system due to the fact that that water is seeping out of those lines because they can’t be completely tight. Your sprinkler system is the same way, meaning those tree roots like to find the sprinkler system. And it will wrap around, in some cases, a head or the urethane, you know, the poly line or whatever, depending upon how the system was built. So you may notice that, hey, all the rest of these heads are flowing really well and I’ve got one that’s not. Well, depending upon where that’s at in the zone or half of this zone is really spraying well and the other half isn’t. Well, you may actually have a situation where a tree root has wrapped around and clamped down on that particular line, and now half the system works well and half the system doesn’t. So just go through and analyze what things are doing. Hopefully you don’t have any of these major issues, which, by the way, none of these are major, even a tree root. Typically, the line is going to be down about a foot underground. It’s really not that big of a deal to kind of figure out where things are at. You dig down, you dig out the tree root, you put in a new line, and off you go.
SPEAKER 05 :
Been there, done that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Guys, I’ve got pictures literally where you can literally see a tree root. It’s the most amazing thing, but they will clamp down on it just like it’s a vice. And I’m not exaggerating. It literally will close around that pipe just like a vice because that tree is looking for water, nutrients, of course. And if there’s a slight leak there, it’ll find it. And how in the world it knows how to find it? That’s above my pay grade. I don’t know how it knows, but it does and it finds it. So again, if you notice that you’ve got a particular part of your system that seems to be struggling for whatever reason, double check that. Now, all that being said, I did all of that the easy way by going to the clock and so on. For a lot of you, there may be even a little more handy. every one of your valves in the valve box can be turned on manually as well so if you’ve got a system where you want to spend a little bit more time messing with that particular zone and you don’t want to dink around with going back and forth to the clock well look on youtube look at what your actual valve is what the manufacturer is figure out how to manually turn it on and you can manually turn that on if you would like. Most of the time it’s a matter of just turning the solenoid that’s on top, but every one of them is a little bit different. See exactly how to turn that on. You could turn that zone on manually if you wanted to, get everything adjusted, go back, turn it off, go to the next one, and so on. It just depends on you and how you want things to work and how fast you are at running through the system. Now, all that being said, For those of you that still have old, they’ll still be like a digital type clock, but they’re still very manual. I will tell you, and we talked about this last year, the new automated Wi-Fi capable clocks are, Nothing better.
SPEAKER 13 :
Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER 04 :
Nothing better. On my phone right here in front of me, I can literally go to my system, pull up any one of my controllers that I have, tell what zone I want to run, and I can do all of that sitting here while on air with you, and my system will run that zone.
SPEAKER 13 :
And when I’m adjusting it every summer. You can do the same thing.
SPEAKER 04 :
I just stand in the zone and tell my phone to turn it on. That’s right. You can go to each zone and just turn it on that way where you’re not even dinking around with turning them on manually or whatever the case may be. I’ve got to switch mine out. Oh, it’s so much better.
SPEAKER 13 :
Guys, I cannot stress that enough. And they follow the weather. So when it’s raining, they shut it off. Or temperature. Yeah, temperature, or they’ll tell you you need to water more this week. That’s right, because the temperature’s going to be hot. You set your own schedule, but then it’ll be like, okay, this week you need to water more.
SPEAKER 04 :
We need 120% instead of 90%.
SPEAKER 13 :
Yeah, and it just asks, do you want to do it?
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right.
SPEAKER 13 :
And it’s done.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. Oh, wow. Yeah, and like mine, and they’re all this way, but mine I’ve got set that if it’s below, I can’t remember on mine, I think I’ve got mine set that if it’s below 60 degrees, I don’t need water. And it knows, to Josh’s point, it knows the weather, the patterns, what’s going on in your particular area, by the way. It’s gotten so sophisticated, it’s not even going off a zip code. It knows where you live and what’s going on from other weather reports around you that get fed into the system. And it knows in your little area, you don’t even need rain sensors anymore. It knows from the weather what to do with your clock. They’re magnificent. So I’ll leave you guys with that. If there’s any specific questions, please let me know. Alan Stack, Stack Optimal, has been with us this hour. His number, by the way, 303-321-1578. You can find him on our website, fixitradio.com as well. Drive Radio will be up here in just a minute. If you’re listening to Replay, though, thank you very much. And we’ll be back. This is Fix It Radio, KLZ 560.
SPEAKER 08 :
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.
