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Tried shimming a door jamb with playing cards on a bet, and the lesson cost me a lunch
Back in 2019 I was hanging doors in a flip house outside Scranton and my buddy Dave kept razzing me about how slow I was setting jambs. So I bet him lunch I could shim a whole jamb with nothing but a deck of cards and have it swinging true in under 20 minutes. First two hinges actually went fine and I was feeling pretty smug, but by the strike side the cards had crushed down to mush and the door was dragging so bad it wouldn't latch. I pulled the cards out, and there was a wad of paper pulp jammed in the gap that took me an extra half hour to dig out with a putty knife. Dave just stood there eating his sandwich watching me scrape. What I learned is that shims need to take a load without squishing, which is why we use cedar or plastic in the first place, not because some old timer just liked the smell of it. I bought Dave his lunch and I still hear about it every time we trim out a house together. Curious if anybody else has tried some shortcut like this and had it blow up on them?
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