Mortise Locks for the DIY Dummy

Mortise Lock

If they weren't so undeniably sad, we would probably find many of the posts we nominate for DotD to be hilarious – but then we remember that some moron assembled a bunch of meaningless (or worse, dangerous) words with the sole purpose of lining his or her pockets. And that makes us mad... so, without further ado, here's today's candidate: three-time dumbass Soren Bagley, spreading his incompetence ever wider with a post at HomeSteady.com titled "How to Install a Mortise Lock."¹ Duh...

Fracking for Dummies

The fracking process in a nutshell

Several months ago – actually more like two years ago, but we just ran across it again earlier this week – we mentioned the website EzineArticles.com in one of our exposés about plumbing: we made the crack that Ezine shouldn't exactly be considered "a paragon of quality"* when talking about plumbing. Oddly, we'd never followed up on that potential source of freelance dumbassery... until today. Let us present to you the first-ever DotD candidate from EzineArticles.com, Paul Mike John (think that's his real name? we doubt it...) and "Understanding The Process of Natural Gas Fracking."

Indoor Bike Trainers for the Dummy Cyclist

No, Elle, the "rods" do not go "in the cogs"!

Every English speaker (and, or at least we hear, speakers of other languages) has words they use when they don't know the correct word; like "doohickey" or "thingumabob." Obviously, when one's pretending expertise, we can't use those inexact terms, so what can we do? Well, if you're like Elle Di Jensen (aka L. D. Jensen) of the Leaf Group site TheNest.com, you simply make it up; just like Elle did when she posted "How to Hook Up Bike Tires to Exercise Indoors."

Flooded Carburetors for Dummies

Let us be perfectly frank about something: our staffers have learned (the hard way, perhaps) to pretty much assume that any freelance article dealing with internal combustion engines written by a J-school or English graduate is gonna be rubbish. That's for a couple of reasons, but mostly because they don't teach automotive mechanics in liberal arts courses. Sorry, folks: it is what it is. So when we saw "What are the Causes of Carburetor Flooding," posted by eHow's Angus Koolbreeze III, we figured it would be bushwa... and we were right.

Koolbreeze (yeah, sure, that's his name) opens by telling his readers what a carburetor is -- or what he thinks a carburetor is:

"The carburetor is one of the main parts of a vehicle. Its job is to regulate the speed of the engine. It does this by measuring the amount of air necessary for the speed at which you wish to travel: it pulls a small amount of air and fuel for low speeds, increasing that amount as you speed up."

Right away we knew Angus was in over his (her?) head: "main parts of a vehicle"??? then why are almost all cars today fuel-injected? and is the carb more "main" than the brakes? the transmission? the camshaft? Of course not: what "Koolbreeze" apparently didn't know is that carburetors are pretty much restricted to small engines these days, like lawnmowers and string trimmers. Let's move on, though, to see how "Angus" defines flooding: no, wait, he never does! so here goes: flooding occurs when the air-fuel mixture passing through the carburetor is too rich for the engine speed; meaning that there is more fuel than necessary to maintain combustion. Too bad "Angus" never said that...  By the way, here are some common reasons for flooding...

When it comes to the causes of flooding, Mr. or Ms Koolbreeze did little more than reword information found at a couple of websites. Even that is a little too much for Angus, however, as it is painfully obvious that he doesn't know what a carburetor float is -- which is probably why he tells his readers that the cause of a float problem is probably

"...the defective float problem develops when the tang (the metal adjustment on the float) is too long and catches on the webbing part that supports the stanchions on the float pin. To solve the problem, shorten the tang, then readjust the float drop..."

...which Koolbreeze reworded from a Porsche enthusiast website: in the real world, carburetor floats are fabricated just fine and are much more likely to develop a pinhole than to have a tang-stanchion mismatch. Dumbass.

By now it should be obvious that Angus (whatever his/her real name is) has no idea what flooding is and probably couldn't spell "carburetor" before claiming this title at eHow. We hope that realization means that it's also obvious why Koolbreeze is the Dumbass of the Day for today.

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DD - ENGINES

Finger Joints for the Dummy Woodworker (2-by-4 Week 7)

Box joint, sometimes called a finger joint

Well, the last day of 2-by-4 Week is here. We still had more than twenty DotD candidates to choose from, so we picked one at random, and boy! did we pick a winner! well, more of a loser: this particular idiot turned out to be stupid enough that she didn't need a content editor to mess up her post. She'd have qualified even if the lumber dimensions hadn't been hosed. Meet Alexis Rohlin and feast your eyes on her eHow.com post, "How to Make Finger Joints in Woodworking"¹ (now at OurPastimes.com). Thank the lord for that "in Woodworking," or Alexis might have tried to explain orthopedic surgery...

Moving a Shed for Dummies (2-by-4 Week 6)

As the Antisocial Network's 2-by-4 week, during which we take eHow.com freelancers to task for apparently thinking that 2-by-4 means "2 foot by 4 foot," winds down; we bring you the case of some freelancer who clearly had a lapse in common sense. This time it's returning DotD Ann Johnson, whose "How to Move a Storage Shed"¹ an HomeSteady.com brought tears of laughter to a staffer's eye.

A Pig Roasting Box for the Dummy Chef (2-by-4 Week 5)

Commercial caja china

Ever wanted to roast a whole pig? Well, apparently enough people asked about this one that eHow's title crew scraped it up – twice, once under "pig roasting box" and once under "caja china." Contributor Fred Decker, who published (by our unofficial count) about eleven thousand cooking posts for eHow.com, grabbed "How to Build a Pig Roasting Box" and went whole hog. Fred's problem? a content editor got hold of this post (now seen at the niche site Leaf.tv)...