Smug As A Bug

[yogi]

I had some very limited exposure to Auto-Cad at Motorola. Our mechanical engineer used it and I was the IT guy at the time. I recall the license for what we had was horrendous; something like $10k and it needed a mechanical dongle just to boot up. I watched the engineer use it several times and was amazed at it's flexibility. I even got some time on the system to get familiar with it, but all that was soon forgotten when I moved on to another project. I believe you are correct to say the only way one can justify buying Auto-Cad is to have a business need for it. Same goes for the full blown version of Photoshop.

[Kellemora]

I know when I stopped in to visit my old drafting new boss that took over.
Their department now had nothing but computers and all kinds of fancy working pads to go with them.
And only one of the old drafting tables in the corner, for doing something with old drawings from the vault.

I did watch a guy work on a drawing for about ten minutes while the boss was on the phone with someone.
But mostly what he was doing was typing in coordinates on a keypad, and then the lines would appear on the screen.

Back when I was playing with AutoSketch, after seeing a sailing ship someone drew that gave me the idea.
I started with a layout of my garage, mainly because I was designing an office for in there, this office in fact.
I finished the drawing long before I had a chance to start because that side of the garage needed cleaned out, materials ordered, etc.
The other side of the garage where all the shelves were, I sorta got carried away with the drawing.
Added the shelves, then zoomed in to add where the screws and bolts were that held the shelves together, then zoomed in and added jars with labels, and zoomed in on the labels so you could read the fine print, hi hi.
I even zoomed in further and added couple of mouse droppings and dust on the shelves, a little lint, etc.

The best thing about using a CAD/CAM program to design a room, is you can get studs placed exactly so things will fit where you need them too. Provided you had all the starting measurements correct and took into consideration the walls may be out of plumb, hi hi.
I had a real challenge in the kitchen, because the thickness of the original wall on the left side of a certain kitchen wall used 2x4s that measured of full 2" x 4", while the studs on the right side of that same wall were the modern width 2x4s.
In other words, the wall was tapered from wide at the left to narrow at the right.
I sorta knew this when I was redoing the master bedroom. This caused the insides of the closets to be different depths too. But I made the face of the closet perfectly square so it would never be noticed.

You would not believe how much wasted space I was able to recover in this small house for storage!
I couldn't have done that without using a CAD/CAM program because of some really tight tolerances I had to deal with.

[yogi]

Your comment about tight tolerances is interesting. Most of the contractors I've watched work seem to have no concept of exactness. They eyeball just about everything and somehow it manages to come out right. In your case you were often dealing with crooked houses with rooms that had to fit into a predefined area. I can see a need for paying attention to tolerance when you are trying to level a floor, for example, but new construction seems to be built on experience and not blueprint specs so much. Any mistakes can be easily covered up when working from scratch, but renovating an existing structure might not be so simple. You also did all the work yourself, so it seems. Usually there is an architect involved and it's his job to pay attention to the details.

[Kellemora]

Most renovators take a house as is, that passes code, add a few minor repairs, and paint, then say they are done.

While the houses I bought often had to have a good portion of the insides gutted out completely, mainly because most of them had suffered fire damage.
I used Callies-Chisholm architect firm to redesign the front of the house for me, especially if all the houses on the street looked the same way, some were almost like row houses, hi hi.
They knew what they designed for me had to be able to be done CHEAP but with the biggest visual impact, and also blend perfectly with the neighborhood, nothing crazy, hi hi.
I rarely used them for the interior design, but sometimes they would take a look and toss something inside for me without great detail. Sometimes I would go ahead and order more detail for the inside when I couldn't visualize really what I wanted to do. That was always one of my problems, given an empty shell to work in, I never could come up with a floor plan on my own that I really liked, especially when you are doing it to appease unknown buyers.

Speaking of which, there is a subdivision off Clayton road in the county where all the houses were built using railroad ties, or made to look like it was built from RR ties.
There were a few original old farmhouses within this subdivision that stuck out like a sore thumb in comparison. I was asked if I could update a single story double farmhouse to make it look like it belonged there. An outside renovation.
Once again I called Callies-Chisholm to study the exterior and check out the other houses in the subdivision.
Not only did they come up with a super low cost design, they also sourced the materials for me, cut to the sizes and shapes I needed, for only a tad more than a song and dance. Where I envisioned at least 8 grand in materials that I would have to cut and size, they got everything for me, including the layout for each piece, and the ready to go materials only cost me like 2100 bucks. Plus their design was perfect too for the area too!
I'm in this pricing rut, almost everything I do I figured at a 15 grand bid, hi hi.
I was so worried the owner might not like it, even though he already saw the artists rendering from the architects, I actually underbid myself this time. We agreed on 12,500 for the job if he wasn't totally happy with it, and 17,500 if he was elated, or any amount in-between those figures. The guy was so happy with the completed project, he paid me 18 grand, but I also had to go back and do some other things for him inside the house, which were all simple things that took less than three days.

[yogi]

During my fifty years of home ownership up north I ran into only a few tradesmen who were worth calling back a second time. They were reasonably priced for the quality work they did, which means they didn't always come cheap. I don't recall a single one of them that based their price on their customers' satisfaction level. I can see why you were successful in your businesses, but I have yet to come across anybody like you down here in O'Fallon. It can be said that the prices are reasonable which is a good thing. In general the workmanship is good too, but I have yet to find one person or company who stands above the rest.

I love the idea of building a home out of railroad ties. My life's dream is to have outer walls 12" thick and capable of sustaining a direct hit from a hurricane. I've seen a few castles built to that standard but they were made of rock and located across the ocean. Well, tonight is the lotto drawing. Maybe I'll be lucky this time.

[Kellemora]

On the house I did, we took used railroad ties and had a slab cut off of each side, not the top or bottom, so there were no holes or splits. Then I had the center piece cut into two slabs to use for part of the interior decoration.
These were really OLD ties, so had no odor left in them, but after they were up and treated with linseed oil, they looked just like the rest of the houses.
On the interior pieces we used a stain and then a polyurethane sealant, which also looked great.

Had another job where this dude put down super thin T&G used for faux wainscoting on walls, in his hall and den. He tried to treat it the same as one would with a floating floor, and only put varnish over it, but it didn't work very well.
He had seen it done by a couple of other folks without realizing it was embedded in Targinol, a clear resin.
I did a lot of work with Targinol back in the day, but he said that is not what he wanted, he wanted the wood exposed.
He also wanted me to reuse all the pieces even though the T&G part was split off on almost all of the pieces.
He also didn't have a bunch of money to work with either, and didn't want the hardwood floor underneath ruined.
I told him I would think about it and get back to him in about 3 or 4 days. In the interim, I wanted him to take up the floor and stack all the pieces in the corner of his garage.
When I called him back, he said he went out and bought some more pieces to make sure he would have enough, because he and his brother took the floor and sawed the T&G part off of each piece so they are not as wide as they were before.
This presented a new problem for me, because I had planned on gluing them down to linoleum backing, which wouldn't work now. So I figured I would do it like we did Targinol floors and went out there and put down new Luan 4x8 sheets to cover the hallway and den floor first, then when I went to the store to get some Targinol to use like an adhesive, it was no longer made they said. I didn't want to mess with other types of adhesives I was not familiar with, so I ended up buying several bags of Thin-Set Mortar like I used to hold ceramic tiles down.
The owner and his brother did an excellent job trimming the thin slats and luckily none of them cupped or warped.
So I put down the floor over the Luan using the Thin-Set Mortar, and prayed the moisture would not cause them to warp before the mortar set-up properly. The gods of luck were behind me and not a single plank warped or curled.
The owner waited a few days to make sure everything was dry, then went and bought an oil based poly-stain product that was super thin, almost like water, and he loaded the floor up with it. I think he said he used a squeegee to spread it around so it would fill in the cracks. Naturally it dried as expected so the cracks were not filled but at least they were sealed. In any case, he got the look he was after, and something like 5 or 6 years later, it still looked like the day we put it down, except for the hallway at the transition to the kitchen flooring. He had to trim the ends of the wood there and install a tile edge piece. Apparently mopping the kitchen floor got into the end grain of the wood causing it to turn black and curl up slightly. But he fixed it OK where it would stay fixed.

In the early days of Targinol, I did a guys floor in torn up brown paper bags he saved for years from the grocery store. They had to be carefully glued down, because if any glue got on the surface of the torn up pieces of bag, it would leave a white mark. When I was done, it looked like a flagstone floor. Can't get much cheaper than Elmer's Glue All and Brown Paper Bags, Targinol itself was not all that expensive.
I guess I should mention what Targinol is. It was the thick clear flexible plastic used to make Pour Chip Floors.
The stuff lasted forever, even in high traffic areas like the check-out lanes of grocery stores, and ticket booths at the Arena. Also did a floor that we covered with 45 and 33 rpm records in a basement rec room for a teen. The thing about Targinal was it could be removed easily because it always went over a substrate like Luan, which was cheap back then.

[yogi]

I had to look this one up because I was considering doing something like it in my old house. Torginol is still available as chips that you would put into a resin for flooring. I was going to do my basement floor in the old house with this stuff, or something similar. The concern I had was the cracks in the concrete. None of them were substantial, but I wasn't sure a poured floor would come out level. Plus the people who finished the original concrete were pretty sloppy and didn't bother smoothing things out very well. There were some very grainy spots that again I didn't know how well they would fill in. Somebody told me I could use a leveler and then pour a floor on top of that. Possibly. I sold the house before I ever got around to doing the basement floor.

We had ceramic tile floors in that old house which were glued down with thin set. When we remodeled the kitchen it was a job and a half removing those tiles. We nearly had to replace the plywood in some spots. The carpenter who installed the oak flooring said it was unnecessary and he could work with it the way it was. It turned out solid and beautiful. When it came time to stain the new oak flooring, we had to vacate the house for the better part of the day. All the windows and doors had to remain shut to keep the dust off the floor until the stain dried. Even after that it took a couple days of fans blowing to get rid of most of the smell.

[Kellemora]

Hmm, wonder what I accidentally hit on my keyboard that knocked me out and changed the screen to black?

I was saying, we never put a Targinol floor down without first putting down Luan. Except for one guy who wanted his garage floor done right on the concrete.
Being an unheated garage, and old, there were tons of cracks, and even some scaling of the concrete in places.
I went over that entire floor with muriatic acid after we used grease remover to make sure the floor would stay stuck.
You don't really have to worry about the low areas or cracks if you put down a thin layer of Targinol first, then the chips, instead of using the lousy adhesive they suggest. Always comes out better looking that way with no hollow sounding spots. I don't know where the guy got the chips from, but they were not from the Targinol company, and had several with a glitter to them. I worried that they may float out, so instead of simply pouring the floor on I used a wand and large hole sprayer. Still had to do the right thickness, but I worked in sections and then went back over a section twice before moving to the next row of sections. Glad I did too, because a lot of those chips would have floated out. The way I did it, the ones that did float up were fairly well set in place before the next two layers went on. I still worried it might delaminate doing it that way, but it didn't.
One thing I never mastered was pouring an epoxy tabletop in a way to get the sides to remain thick too.

[yogi]

When I worked at Motorola one of the guys in my department had a dad in the flooring business. He told us that his dad would take old cable spools and coat them, apparently with resin and Targinol, to turn them into a workable end table. He only did the flat surfaces and painted the inner cylinder part to match whatever color chips he used. Of course I ordered one, which he made gratis, and that damned spool table outlived the house it was used in. We brought it to the new house and used it there for many years before we got tired of it and trashed it. That table is what gave me the idea to do my basement floors with the same stuff. It lasts forever.

I used Luan when I installed a floating laminated floor in my old command and control center. I had no idea that was SOP; it just seemed like the right thing to do and it worked well.

We only have two versions of the style for this board. Actually, it's the same version in a light and a dark theme. If you have been seeing the light version, that is what you have set in your profile because the default for the board is the dark theme. To be honest I don't know of any keyboard shortcuts to change the style color. You found something I never knew about. LOL Can you repeat it?

[Kellemora]

Every once in a while while replying to a message I hit a key combination that either knocks me out completely or changes some setting somewhere. If I don't get knocked out, I can usually get back to the message.

If you ever do a floating floor again, don't buy that expensive felt-backed plastic sheeting. The very best thing to use under floating floors (not vinyl) is the cheap 1/4" fanfold foam insulation board.
Makes the floor sound like real hardwood instead of the clickety-clack when it is over the plastic sheet.
Even on a car dealers showroom floor with cars being moved in and out all the time, it never crushed.
Well, except by the door, so you put a couple of strips of the flooring underneath the flooring at the door where the cars are driven in and out.

Had this one crazy bloke one time who ordered me to put down on his garage floor a paper backed el-cheapo linoleum sheeting, vinyl floor sheeting. I told him if he even so much as turned his steering wheel it would tear it right up.
He argued it wouldn't! And to prove it, he had me go over to his dad's house which had a linoleum floor in his garage.
I pointed out to him that the product used on his dad's floor was REAL linoleum, and the color probably goes all the way through, and that it was 3 to 4 times thicker than the paper backed, printed on color with a thin vinyl cover laminated over the whole thing.
To which he said again, he didn't care, and added, it comes with a ten-year warranty, as long as it is installed using their adhesive, which we used. He had the paper he filled out showing the serial numbers from the cans of glue, and the date of installation. I didn't mind signing it, mainly because nobody could read my signature anyhow, hi hi.
I never heard back from him after that.

Heck, I'm so old, I've even put down asbestos floor tiles using a blow torch and tar, just like the old days.
But it was only once, in an old house, and the guy still had cases of matching tile as he used in his screened in porch and enclosed patio. It was the patio we were redoing, it wasn't heated and I guess the cold and heat caused the tiles to start popping up. Getting those buggers that were still stuck solid up was a real challenge. A concrete floor dissipated the heat from the type of blow torches we used for tile installation.

In some of the old inner-city houses I've worked in, you wouldn't believe the number of different things folks would use to cover a floor, or what they used to glue it down with. Most of them were crazy, but a few were sorta unique!
One had a floor made of burlap sacks, then coated with I assume guesso, followed by clear varnish.
Another that looked really neat was actually a surprise to me how he did it. I'm surprised he didn't kill himself in the process inhaling all those fumes.
He used Spray Glue from aerosol cans and then tossed sawdust on top of it while wet. The sawdust was fairly fine, not coarse like from a sawmill, more like from cutting maple with a bandsaw at home, fairly fine. He used a little hand brush to brush the piles of sawdust over the fresh sprayed glue working his way toward the door. He waited a few days then swept as much up as he could so there was still plenty of loose over the glue that was not glued down. He didn't want to vacuum it up because he had a hunch, and his hunch was right.
Again using aerosol cans of spray lacquer, he sprayed a fairly thing coating over the entire floor first, waited a day and came back and sprayed a little thicker coat over that. The first light spray made some of the sawdust stand up but secured it in place, and the second heavier coat sealed the whole thing. He didn't do any sanding at all before applying the first layer of rolled on polyurethane floor finish. Then he only used a drywall sander lightly over that to knock down any points that remained, then two more coats of polyurethane floor finish over that.
When done, the floor looked like it was made of light tan velvet. Even eight years later when I saw it, it still looked like they day he did it.

My dad used to do all kinds of things using of all things Shellac. He was always adamant about making sure the shellac was what was called four pound cut. This was back in the 1950s to 60s era when he did a lot of that type of work.
He was also a master at making and mixing White Medusa, a paint cement mixture for basement walls.

[yogi]

Got to admit you find things that I've not heard of before, such as keyboard shortcuts to change board settings and fan fold insulation. LOL I guess I've seen that insulation used but never had occasion to install it myself. All the floors in this house, except the bedrooms, are hardwood and probably will not need replacing in my lifetime. They are hard as all hell to keep clean, however, which never seemed to be a problem with the laminate flooring. The laminate did not take well to water or moisture unfortunately, and the hardwood can absorb it and become stained. The wood we have is sealed and water doesn't seem to soak in. The cleaning solution the wife uses however is like any other floor cleaner I've seen. It makes the floor shine but builds up a film of dirt over time. That never happened to laminate because I never used more than water and vinegar with a few drops of dish soap to clean it. Of course I had to wipe it down after washing, but that was no big deal.

Oh wow, you brought back some ancient memories with that asbestos tile story. The house I grew up in had a room with a concrete floor that was used for laundry and stuff. Dad decided to tile it one year and asbestos was the way to go back then. I do recall him torching it. It was an ugly gray and dark green tile but looked better than bare cement. It's the same room we had the coal burning stove in to heat the house. I can't believe that stuff was dangerous. It was like granite. LOL

[Kellemora]

I had to tear out a beautiful hardwood floor from a clients house, because there was nothing we could do to fix the mess he made of it.
He bought a clear-cast resin like used to embed things in clear blocks like Lucite blocks, but clear-cast was a hobby-craft material. I've used it myself for a few things.
However, he did not use enough hardener in the resin for it to set properly. It looked OK at first, but was always a bit tacky, which meant everything stuck to it, and furniture legs sunk into it, and carpets stuck to it. It became a royal mess in a very short time.
I had a table top I did in clear-cast resin and although done properly, about five years later it began to alligator, like old varnish. This was a small area and I could sand it with wet sandpaper and then applied a coat of a harder plastic resin over it. That fixed my problem, but it sure would not work on his floors.
He rented a floor sander which made it even more of a mess, like trying to sand tar, hi hi.
Then he called me.

I experimented in a corner with some different products to see if I could dissolve it, but nothing worked.
I then tried using a large handled wide razor scraper to see if I could get it to peel away from the floor.
Right where it bonded to the wood it was solid as a rock and permanently affixed.
I actually thought that might be the key to getting it up, because it would crack like amber if whacked with a hammer, but the part over it was too resilient. I ended up with a few areas of shattered stars in the corner, but it still wouldn't come up. Heck, I even tried using a circular saw and cutting down to just above the wood making like 8 inch squares to see if I could get it up that way. I actually got a few pieces to pop out, but other pieces pulled the surface of the wood off. I finally told the guy, it looks like the cheapest way to go will be to pull up the entire floor and replace it.
He said let him think about it over the weekend.
This guy must have been the luckiest guy in the world! He managed to pick the right wall to start removing the floor himself, because the nails in hardwood floors are angled through the tongue so the next board will slide into it properly.
He said the floor almost rolled up like a carpet when he got started, and about every three to five feet it would snap the top in half so he could carry out the bundles easily. It had a thick sub-floor under it too that was in perfect shape.
He decided rather than putting down new hardwood flooring, he would just call a carpeting company to come out and put carpeting down.

Most old houses have asbestos siding, especially those old ones I bought to renovate. I actually a couple of houses that turned out to be tar paper that looks like bricks hiding under the vinyl siding, and under the tar paper on the oldest original part of the house was asbestos siding shingles.
In my younger years working at gas stations, they had me doing brake jobs, and I was always blowing out the brake drums with an air hose, dust was always in the air from brake dust back then too.
Yet none of us ever have got cancer from asbestos. Plus all the steam pipes in our greenhouses were covered with an asbestos wrap which we redid every few years. They way they talk about how bad that stuff is, we all should be dead by now, hi hi.

As an aside: I have bird feeders outside my window, and this morning I forgot to pull the lid back down on one suspended from a cable. The lid slides up and down the cable to refill the feeder, and I left it up.
Even the weight of a bird will tilt the bird feeder by almost 45 degrees.
It has been hilarious to watch them trying to maneuver on the perch when it tilts down like that. The opening at the top of the seed tube will lean over until it hits the cable. That was my enjoyment for this morning, hi hi.

[yogi]

I watched them install the oak floor in my old house. It was a pleasure watching the installers work. They did exactly what you described and angled the nails so that the next board fit in snugly. I wondered if those nails went into the subfloor because they were pretty long. Doing that would also make the flooring very solid, being held in place by millions of nails. LOL I also thought it would be a disaster if that floor had to be replaced. I'm sure that won't be an issue for a few decades to come. We had a sunken living room and the step down to it was perfect. They were highly skilled and the finished floor was a showpiece. In my opinion it was well worth the expense having somebody else do the work.

We all survived what they would call today a dangerous environment while growing up. Our water supply was from solid lead pipes until I was at least 7-8 years old. Then there was the smoke from the coal stove, not to mention the asbestos tile. I don't know if I'm lucky or if the dangers are over rated. I do know you had a lot more exposure to those toxic materials and are now experiencing lung trouble. The two might not be related, but that's the kind of thing they warn about.

About a week or two ago there was a mass migration of birds. I mean there were thousands of them that decided to make our side of O'Fallon a rest stop. It happened three times during the course of the week and reminded me of something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. The great migration is over and there is snow on the ground, but I notice those damned birds are nesting under my deck once again. They were mating on my deck too. Supposedly they know what they are doing, but it's VERY early in the season to see such things.

[Kellemora]

Most of the mainline pipes in St. Louis's older areas are still lead.
No biggie though, because calcium builds up on the insides of the pipes so no lead leaches from them anymore.
Heck, we had lead in the pencils, lead in the paint, lead in the gas, lead in our cars, and lead in our pants, hi hi
Yes I know pencils are actually graphite, and have been for a long time, but not in the early days of pencils. They were clay, lamp black, and a little lead to keep the material from cracking.

One of my uncles lived right in the path of migrating geese. Talk about a mess every year. We've had lots of birds in our yard at times, so many you almost couldn't see the grass, but that is usually only for a couple hours and then they are gone for the year.

Because I feed the birds right outside my office window, I always have tons of them year round.
Every so often I see a tropical bird that probably escaped from somebody's cage and learned to live in the wild.
For years there were a flocks of Budgies living up north of here, they escaped in a tractor trailer accident about the time I moved down here. There were so many, and breeding, they became a nuisance for a short time. Never heard much about them for several years now.

[yogi]

I've read about budgies being the cause of a lot of crop damage. They don't do too well in the winters around here which is why we don't hear more about them. When we first moved into the home we built in Cook County there was a lot of open prairie around the house. We fed the birds and squirrels and a host of other critters that raided the seeds we tossed out. It was a sight to see. The most interesting creatures were the pheasants that came to feed. I never saw one fly, but they can run pretty fast. They disappeared when people built around our house, probably because pheasants nest on the ground instead of up in trees like the other birds. Around here there are some big birds that circle around high in the sky. They must be hawks or possibly eagles but I've never seen one close enough to identify what they are. I suppose they are looking for food when they do that circular route, and I'm always amazed that they can find something on the ground that's maybe a thousand feet or more away. Birds must have some very keen vision.

[Kellemora]

Birds do have amazing vision, with both peripheral and zoom at the same time.
Although they don't, sometimes you might think they have X-ray vision, the way a Robin in a tree can spot a worm between blades of grass and thatch on the ground and swoop down and grab that worm.

I had trained my parrot to select a card from a hand of seven cards.
I started out with blank cards and a big quarter inch black dot.
Once he learned to select the card with the dot, I started using regular playing cards.
Kept making the dot smaller and smaller until it was only one tiny dot inside the circular pattern of the cards.
Unless you studied the cards very close yourself, you would never notice that tiny black dot filling in one of the circles.
But the parrot could see it with ease. Never missed selecting the right card.

Trained a horse once to count, but only got up to four before other things pulled me away from messing around, hi hi.
He did mess up quite often, mainly because if you hold up two fingers, he sees your thumb holding the other two fingers down and counts it too, hi hi. But if I cupped one hand over the other then he got it right every time.

We have several types of hawks here, a few eagles, and a whole lot of large birds I have no idea what they are.
I love to see an Owl hunt. They do something I've never seen another bird ever do.
They will close their wings and drop like a bomb until the are close to the ground, then spread those wings so they can travel at high speed at ground level to capture their prey. I guess they do that in order to obtain those high speed ground level runs. Seems they always do their hunting right after the sun drops below the horizon too, and often come in with the setting sun behind them.
We have a few small barn owls here too, and one of them almost got the little Smoky Shrew I've been feeding at night. But that little guy outsmarted the owl, hi hi.

[yogi]

Maybe there's something abnormal with my eyes. I used to go fishing a lot with my father-in-law. He was an avid fly fisherman and often made his own lures. The secret to his success was that he could see the fish in the water and target them accurately. Often times he would point out where the fish were and I would rarely see them. That was all pretty cool and probably a skill he developed all those years he spent fishing. As good as my' FIL was, the gulls that hung around the lake were even better. Quite often it was a fight between my father-in-law and the gulls who were swooping down out of nowhere to grab that fish. I was spooked a few times tossing a hooked minnow into the water and some goofy bird would snatch it before it landed. Plus, the birds knew the difference between live bait and the plastic stuff. The fish weren't quite that smart. LOL

I think that was a pretty clever bird what could pick out marked cards. The real brilliance, however, was in your knowing how to do the training. I could teach a parakeet to say a few words, but that was as far as I ever got teaching animals tricks. I barely could get my dogs to go fetch.

[Kellemora]

I never was good at behavioral training, but when it came to trick training, now that I was great at.

The whole trick to trick training is to do so in inches or quarter-inches if necessary.
Doesn't matter what type of animal, it works basically the same for all of them.
But it takes a human guinea pig first in order to teach you how to train properly.
If you can't instruct a human, an animal will be even more confused with what you want.

Let's say you want to teach your pooch or a bird to pick up a ball and drop it in a basket.
There you are, you, the animal, and the ball in a room. Might have the basket in there already or not.
This is going to sound crazy, but remember, the pet does not understand English, much less that you want to teach him a trick, through a series of steps.
The pet must be slightly hungry, not famished, and not overly hungry either.
You must have their favorite treat on hand too, in very tiny pieces. How to determine the favorite treat is yet another lesson to learn. Plus use the same clicker for your pet, don't swap around different brand clickers.
OK, we are ready to teach the animal to go get the ball, bring it across the room, and drop it into the basket.
I simply point at the ball, the pet will probably look at my finger, not at the ball. Do nothing.
Just sit there and wait, when the pet looks at the ball, click and reward. Then wait.
Point at the ball, and when the pet looks at the ball, click and reward. As soon as he realizes the click happened when he looked at the ball, and he got a treat for it. No more clicks for doing that step.
The next step is for the pet to move toward the ball, maybe not all the way to it, just begins to move that direction.
You point at the ball, and when he looks at it in anticipation of a treat, do nothing. Repeat the step of pointing at the ball, and if the pet makes a move toward the ball, even if only one step, click and reward.
In other words, trick training is done in a series of super small steps. Once each step is mastered, no more treats until they move onto the next step of the routine you want them to learn.
Once a routine is learned, repeat this routine often, and reward for doing it properly.
Then it is time to move on to some other trick or routine you want them to learn.

Also, every pet is different in what types of antics they do on their own.
Pay attention to these antics, because they are steps to something you can build on. Then later add dialogue to for a skit.
If you have the time, teaching a pet tricks can be fun and they really do enjoy the attention!

[yogi]

I have read about the positive reinforcement with the animal treats. That makes sense to me because finding food is about half the animal's life. Sleeping is the other half. I've also read where people say the animals love doing the tricks in order to please the alpha leader. That could be true but only up to a point. Old tricks get to be tiring pretty fast. At least that is the case for humans. Other animals have no sense of boredom apparently. LOL

Assistance dogs, or guide dogs, have the most boring jobs in the world. They are indeed invaluable for what they do, but it seems as if all their dogie instincts are striped away. I can't imagine how to go about training a dog to go against it's own instincts, but that's what the assistance dogs seem to be doing. It's all pretty amazing stuff.

[Kellemora]

I have a pooch laying here by my left foot who doesn't like treats at any time except his bedtime small treat.
I can put his favorite treats in a bowl and he never touches them all day.
The vet says he is overweight, but the little guy never eats even 1/4th of what he is supposed to be eating.
We did find one food that he will eat about 3 ounces of, but that's it, if we give him more than that, he leaves it.

Although not true for most animals, it seems dogs live to please their master.
This is even evident in wild dogs who follow the alpha dogs desires.

But as more and more animals are bred in captivity, after a certain number of generations, most of their natural instincts are bred out of them. But there are several where it is impossible to breed out their natural wild instincts. That is why some animals, like Chimps for example, can suddenly turn on you, no matter how docile they may seem. All it takes is one trigger and they can turn on you.
Then too, I've seen some of the strangest things, many since moving down here where we have very dangerous bears.
It seems some wild animals can remember a certain human who may have helped them, or possibly even saved their life somehow. Every once in a while we hear a story of a wild animal, like a bear, who is fending off other bears to save a human, only to find the human knew the bear and possible helped it out of a situation at some time. Apparently they never forget.

When I go out to fill the bird feeders in the morning, whatever birds are out there always fly away fast.
But there is one female Cardinal who may jump over to the fence, but she doesn't fly away, just waits patiently for me to fill the feeders.
About five years ago, there was a bird, I think a Towhee or something like that, who managed to get his foot caught on my window ledge, where the screen fits over the slot. I spent close to twenty minutes trying to get close to him without him hurting himself, but finally it got so tired it just sat there scared to death. I pushed in on the screen and slid his foot down to a wider area and got it freed. It was so scared it didn't even fly off my hand. I moved over to the bird feeder and physically picked it up and sat it down on the perch of the feeder, and backed away slowly. Once it got its energy back, it took off as I expected. What I didn't expect was for him to start coming to me when I brought out the cans of feed to fill the feeders. He would come and sit on the edge of the can, or on the feeder while I was filling it. Little by little he stayed further away from me each day, until he never came to me anymore.