Archive for June, 2010

Doofus Tradesmen Worse Than Typhoid

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Another Brush With Death

A while back, I wrote about a Bosch charger that blew up on me. I was cleaning up my workbench, and I had a Bosch charger and a Panasonic charger next to each other, and when I moved the Bosch, it touched the Panasonic. There was a noise and a flash, and the Bosch quit working. I opened it up and replaced the fuse, but the whole unit was garbage.

A reader suggested the outlet was bad, so I checked it, and the test doodad said I had an “open hot.” I checked to find out what that meant; tradesman jargon is generally meaningless at face value, and this was no exception. Far as I could determine, it just meant the wire that carried the power was not connected. Which was wrong, since the outlet had been working.

The circuit in question was installed by some lowballing chusma a long time ago. He used the cheesiest Chinese sockets imaginable, and I suspect that his son ran off with one of my fishing rods. I think he made the sockets in his garage in Hialeah, out of papier-mache. I bought a box of outlets a year or two ago and replaced the Chinese junk, but the “open hot” outlet was the lone holdout. I ran out of new outlets, so this one didn’t get changed.

Today I started working on it again. It turned out I had bought a replacement outlet, so I didn’t need parts. I shut down the power (I thought), and I started checking the wiring. When I took the front plate off the square box, half of the Chinese receptacle came with it. Very nice.

I poked around on some adjoining outlets, and suddenly, I felt a tingle. I got shocked. I could not believe it. Somehow, juice was getting through. I disconnected everything that was hooked up to the circuit, and I flipped the adjoining breakers. Still, the juice flowed. I found this out by causing a short that scarred my screwdriver.

Here’s what I eventually found. There were four wires, not three, going to this circuit. The genius who installed it ran a red hot wire to one breaker and a black hot wire to another breaker. Don’t ask me why. I cannot fathom this type of brilliance.

I went back to the breaker board and capped off the red hot. I rewired the circuit so everything ran off the same breaker. I tried the circuit tester. All was well.

Someone explain why an electrician would put two hot wires in one 120 circuit. No, I don’t want to know. I’m just glad all I lost was a battery charger.

Who Can Find a Man Who Makes Cheesecake?

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

His Price is Far Above Rubies

Went to church tonight to do some work on the kitchen and work security for the Tuesday service. While I was there, THREE women stopped me to tell me how amazing my cheesecake was!

I knew this would happen!

More

I got my press ready for 10mm today. Problem: since the gun isn’t here, I can’t check the ammo to see if it chambers and ejects. I made five rounds without powder or primers, and when I get the gun, I’ll see if the external dimensions are okay for the chamber. Once I have it working, I don’t think I’ll need to adjust anything but the seating die.

I have relatively cheap Laser-Cast bullets for practice. I plan to use a recipe that gives about 1060 fps in a 5″ barrel. Internet sources say I’ll only lose about 5% of optimal velocity with a 3″ Glock barrel. When my Speer Gold Dots arrive, I’ll be using a 1250-fps recipe, so I should come in at about 1200.

The modified primer feed on my press is working great. There is nothing like having your own machine shop.

Did I Ask God to Make me Useful?

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

RETRACTION

Lots of stuff to do today.

Tonight, I serve as an armorbearer at church. Before I go, I need to weld the church’s handtruck back together. Now that I’ve seen a few Chinese welds pop, I am a little nervous about trusting welded products.

I also need to make 10mm ammunition before my new pistol arrives. I have the makings, but I need to get the press set up and start cranking the handle. I looked around for 10mm practice ammo, but it’s hard to find here. Some people would recoil in horror at the thought of endangering a Glock warranty with reloads, but I think that’s stupid. For a single repair, which is all you’re likely to need over the life of the gun, the warranty has a maximum value of about $500. In reality, you probably won’t use a Glock warranty, and if you do, it will probably be a repair you could have gotten for $20. You save at least $12 per box with reloads. Over $200 per thousand rounds. Let’s see if we can figure out the right choice! DUH!

Good defensive rounds cost about $45 per box, delivered. I can save something like $30 per box. And I can run them through a Chrony and make sure they’re right.

They wouldn’t even be reloads. I found new Starline brass online. Probably a mistake. I think I should use it to make some defensive rounds and buy once-fired for everything else.

I don’t know why people get so spastic about gun warranties. You have to weigh what you’re getting against what you lose.

I also have to order some pots for the church. I have to take care of Father’s Day. And I should take my angle grinder to church and remove the 24″ piece of 5/16″ angle iron protruding from the kitchen floor. Maybe I should take my rotary hammer and try to remove the stub from the concrete.

It’s too much for my tiny brain to handle.

My cheesecake and brownies are selling really well at church. I’m thinking I should put an oven in a warehouse and see what I can sell to bakeries and restaurants. How hard can it be? I already have an empty warehouse.

Bye.

Augean Kitchen

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Mouse Poop Rearranged

Went to church today and helped the team REVOLUTIONIZE the kitchen. Stuff was moved. Crap was discarded. We only nearly set the place on fire once.

I have an entire room for pizza production now. Sort of. Part of it is dedicated to storage. But basically, it’s my own pizza empire.

Found out they sold one of my cheesecakes today. Every last slice. They have one left for tomorrow. And now we have a beautiful refrigerated display case for my desserts.

God is great. Food is pretty good. Using big tools to pulverize entropy in a disorganized church kitchen is the bomb.

And they sent a busted handtruck home for me to weld together. I love it.

God Loves Fat Women

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Cheesecake Assault

I had an incredible weekend.

First, I made three blueberry cheesecakes for church. I stuck two in the walk-in cooler, and we sold the third. People were oohing and ahhing. If I could only get the women to quit dieting…

It’s no wonder they want to diet. They refuse to drink diet soda. Must be an island thing. We don’t even have diet soda in the fountain. I guess all those Pepsis add up, and then you can’t have cheesecake.

Second thing: I got a key to the church kitchen. FINALLY. I was driving the guy who passes out keys crazy. I even went to his Facebook page and posted “Isaiah 22:22!” Now I can get in there and DO things. Today a bunch of us plan to tear through the kitchen and utterly abolish the disorder. I’m going to take some tools so I can hang a clock.

Third thing: I was feeling frustrated and sort of unappreciated because I could not get a key to the kitchen, and it seemed like the Armorbearers were in a rut. I couldn’t help them get them to communicate so we could organize to do things. But I got the key, and then the Armorbearers had a fantastic meeting after church. We managed to get a couple of things worked out. We’re planning to bring a guy in to give us krav maga lessons, and we’re gearing up for paintball. One of the younger guys suggested it. He said it builds unity. I don’t know about that, but it sure builds welts.

I had dinner with some Messianic Jews on Friday. They want to form an AB squad for their synagogue, and they want to go to the range with us and get CCW permits. Hopefully, we can work that out.

I talked with one of my chefs yesterday, and we made some tentative plans about equipment and food. I’m checking stuff out at Instawares. I plan to take some of my beautiful Chinese cookware with me today so people can check it out and see if we should order some, and I think I’m going to donate some of my useless, overpriced Japanese knives. They have gathered dust for three years, at least. I don’t like giving cast-off stuff to the church, but these are too good to throw out, and I refuse to use them here.

Life is sweet, thanks to God.

More

This is from a friend named Celeste. Found it on Facebook.

I cry out with my whole heart; hear me, O Lord! Psalm 119:145
Family, PLEASE I am asking for urgent prayers for my brother Jim who is in the hospital. They are running tests and we are praying for a miracle. Thank you. xo

DC Adventure, Part III

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Not by Sight

I should finish writing about my trip to Washington, DC, for the National Day of Prayer. I left you at the National Holocaust Memorial.

After our tour, Mike and I were stuck in the city. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews had a dinner scheduled, and we did not have enough time to go home and shower. We made our way to the Crowne Plaza on K Street and headed downstairs to the banquet room.

They had a table set up, with little gift bags for everyone. I got a package of Dead Sea girly stuff. Mud pack or something. We also received Rabbi Eckstein’s latest CD. He sings.

We met a number of donors and IFCJ staffers. One of the staffers is a food critic. She said she would like to see my cookbook. I didn’t know what to say about that. It’s not the kind of material Christians ordinarily read.

The Rabbi showed up, and each of us got to pose for a photo with him. Very nice guy. Not stand-offish at all. No entourage. No hovering assistants to keep donors away. He even posed with Mike, who, as I have noted before, isn’t even a donor!

We sat at our tables in the banquet room, and food started coming out, and speakers appeared. I was amazed that prayer in the name of Jesus was tolerated.

I shouldn’t even have to point out that almost all of the donors were Christians.

The Rabbi spoke. He said he did not want to talk politics, but he referred, in a general way, to the problems Israel was having with the current U.S. administration. Barack Obama is not a conservative Christian, and he does not have the pro-Israel attitude conservatives expect when they nominate a candidate. He sees Israel and the Jews as spoiled by previous administrations, and he is determined to bring about “even-handedness” in our dealings in the Middle East.

“Even-handedness.” There are about 15 million Jews on earth. They have one tiny country they can flee to when persecuted. They have 1.2 billion Muslim counterparts, many of whom are determined to destroy Israel, and many of whom hope to exterminate the Jewish people. But our President wants “even-handedness.”

I can’t tell you how good it felt, watching an Orthodox rabbi tell us he was frustrated by a liberal administration and pleased to have the support of conservative Christians.

He gave us a song or two, using a beautiful guitar a supporter made. And we heard from some other speakers, and then we had conversation.

My table was wonderful. We started talking about weapons and tools and so on. We had a Pentagon employee (Army, I think) and a retired military guy and his wife, and most of us were on exactly the same frequency. Linda (the IFCJ rep who invited me) told everyone about my cookbook and my guns and tools, and we started exchanging information and opinions.

I think Mike was a little weirded out. We were sitting with total strangers, yet there was an instant rapport. We were talking about prophecy and how America was declining, and one of the guys started quoting Perry Stone, whom I have mentioned to Mike many times. Everyone wanted to know about concealed carry and reloading and so on, and I told them what I knew.

There was one couple–Baptists, probably–who seemed almost taken aback by the passion and conviction we all displayed. But the rest of us were completely caught up, like no other group at the dinner. I told Mike that when you start walking by faith, this kind of thing happens all the time. I said, “It’s going to keep happening for the rest of your life.”

By the end, we were talking like old friends.

The next morning, Mike and I got up and headed for DC again, to hear the Israeli ambassador. His name is Michael Oren, and we were scheduled to hear him at the Ninth Annual Israel Solidarity Event, at the Israeli Embassy!

I spent four months on a kibbutz in 1984, and for a long time, I’ve longed to return to Israel. The embassy is considered part of Israel, so it was a pretty good substitute.

We met some of our new friends outside the security building, and we made our way through the metal detector. It was odd to hear the peculiar, brusque Israeli accent again as the guards and staffers worked to get us checked in.

Before we began, a pianist and singer performed Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel. Funny thing, it’s based on the same folk melody as Smetana’s Die Moldau, which was one of my mother’s favorite pieces of music. When Hatikvah was banned by the British Mandate, some radio stations played Die Moldau in order to get around the prohibition.

The Star-Spangled Banner followed.

Christian speakers including Gary Bauer preceded the ambassador. They talked about the worldwide increase in anti-Semitism and the need to stand by Israel’s side in these strange times. Once again, prayer in the name of Jesus was permitted. Amazing.

I believe the only Israeli speakers were Noam Katz (Minister for Public Diplomacy) and Michael Oren. If memory serves, Mr. Katz openly admitted that American conservative Christians were the best friends Israel had. It may have been Ambassador Oren, but I don’t remember it that way. In any case, it was stirring. What a change in the Jewish perspective.

Ambassador Oren was wonderful. He’s a historian (born in the US and schooled at Princeton and Columbia), and he told about American’s long association with Israel and the Jews. He told us that one of the Founding Fathers proposed putting Moses and the Hebrews on our national seal, as a metaphor for our crossing the Atlantic and leaving the British behind. The British were our Egyptians. Ambassador Oren also pointed out that a surprising number of early Americans were schooled in the Hebrew language, and many believed it to be the language of heaven.

When the Israelis spoke, a serious-looking young man stood to the side of the podium, staring out over the crowd. I took him to be a Mossad bodyguard. An armorbearer! Just like me, except he actually knew what he was doing.

I found myself seated next to a donor I hadn’t met before. We found ourselves talking a great deal. She and her husband had been at the dinner, and a group had prayed for him, and his ear had been healed. She complained that now he could hear her muttering about him!

She asked about my church, and I told her about Trinity, and that we belonged to the Assemblies of God. The woman I was talking to said she thought it was a sign that she should check out a local AG church she had wanted to visit. A lady in front of us turned around and said she was AG, too. I seem to have made a much better impression on people than I had any right to.

I told her what I could about charismatic Christianity. I believe prayer in the Spirit builds us up (as the Bible claims), and that it gives us faith and changes us from within.

Naturally, I also talked to her about food. I took her email address and told her she could have any recipe she wanted. Since then, we have corresponded. Her husband’s ear, which had been screwed up for years, is still fine.

I was glad I had managed to be of some use. When you walk by faith, God chooses the people you meet.

I touched the stones of the courtyard on the way out, saying goodbye to Israel once again.

I can’t tell you everything that happened on Saturday; it’s fairly private. We went to the air and space museum at the Smithsonian. I felt like God was showing me the wonders he had done for this country before it turned away from him. I wondered what was in store, as our rebellion continued.

On Sunday, Mike and I went to church. His wife wanted to take their son fishing, so they didn’t go. But Mike was very gung-ho. I got him to go to Trinity Assembly of God in Lanham, Maryland. I found it on the web a while back, and it looked promising. And how about that name? Same as my church in Miami Gardens.

We got to the church, and I told Mike to pick seats for us. I was confident that God would do something weird with his choice. We ended up near the back on the right.

The music was very good, and I even knew some of the songs. I guess charismatics tend to gravitate toward the same hymns.

Mike has been having some difficulties with his family. I don’t want to say more than that. Guess what day God picked to get us in church together? Mother’s Day. The whole service was about wives and mothers. Very appropriate.

Before things really got going, we heard some testimony from a lady whose prayer for a baby had been answered. When I heard her voice, it was another great surprise. Many of the people in the church were black, but until she spoke, I didn’t know they were island people. Just like Trinity in Miami Gardens! How did that happen? We were in Maryland, not Florida. They had Hispanics, too. The pastor’s name is Tino. The only other Tino I know goes to Trinity.

The pastor had us pray sort of randomly early on. This is not unusual at a charismatic church. Mike and I went at it, and as we did, each of us felt a big hand land on his shoulder. An older man in the row behind us was praying for us, asking God to take us in hand and change us and make us his instruments. It was wonderful. I turned and thanked him.

When the prayer was done, the pastor sent a Mother’s Day bouquet to his own mother, who was attending. The person with the flowers walked right toward us and then past us. To a lady in the row behind us. Standing next to the man who prayed. Evidently, Mike chose seats directly in front of the pastor’s dad.

The pastor’s wife gave the sermon. She talked about great female figures in the Bible. Ruth, Esther, Deborah, and so on. But toward the end, she became agitated and kept saying she felt like she had to talk about restoring marriages and families. She started talking about all the things the church had to offer. Counseling and prayer and so on. And she kept repeating, “You have to do the work. You have to do the work!” This is exactly what I tell Mike all the time. You can’t wait to get your life in order before you turn to God, because he’s the one who fixes your life. You have to make time and go.

She became so agitated, she began speaking in tongues, which Mike found a little alarming. But that’s part of the package.

He has gone back to the church since our visit, and I’m hoping he’ll join. How many “coincidences” do you need to witness before you give up and get on board?

I accidentally left my IFCJ gift bag in Mike’s car. Now he’ll have everything he needs, if he decides to do a Dead Sea mud pack.

There wasn’t much more to the trip than that. We went to Five Guys again, and then I got on a plane.

If you read all three installments of the story, it should be obvious to you that I was guided on this trip, and so were the people around me. This is what my life is like these days. I am not perfect in obedience or faith, but I am on the path, and I am seeing God’s power in my life. The Bible says he lifts us out of the miry clay and sets our feet upon a rock and establishes our goings. It is absolutely true.

I wish I had time to write up all the things I’ve seen. I can understand why the Gospels say the world could not contain enough books to hold the complete story of Jesus’s ministry. I’m a nobody, and I can’t even cover what happens to me.

Green Logic

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Oxymoron of Oxymorons

Greenie: a person who throws a spastic fit over discarding a plastic bag that weighs four grams, without worrying about the fifteen pounds of garbage inside it.

Favor is Better Than Brains

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Jubilee Continues

I keep saying I think this is my “year of God’s favor.” Today I got news that seems to confirm it.

I got sued twice this year over real estate I owned in common with some relatives. We sold land we should have held onto, and we ended up with two frivolous lawsuits because the deals weren’t handled well. A few weeks ago, I found out one of the suits had been dismissed. The court issued an order requiring us to pay a tiny amount to another party. It’s going to cost me about a hundred and thirty bucks. The court didn’t even tell our lawyer. My aunt found out after visiting the courthouse to try to find out what was happening.

The other deal is more interesting. A businessman bought part of a big commercial plot from us, and he tried to get an option on the rest of the property. He failed to pay the entire option fee, so he had nothing when he tried to exercise the option. He had a lawyer send us some BS about suing, and on advice from me and my father, everyone ignored it.

Today we found out he sold part of the land we sold him, and he has been parking cars on our land, next door. I don’t know exactly what he does, but apparently, he has to park a lot of vehicles in order to do business. He sold the land he should be parking stuff on, and he seems to have decided it was okay to park on our land instead. I am assuming the story told to me is correct.

My aunt’s husband taped off the property and notified the sheriff. The businessman’s wife flipped out. I guess this is going to kill their business. Their lawyer now admits they have no option on the rest of the land, so they are completely out of luck. That’s unfortunate for them, but we are under no legal or moral obligation to do anything to help squatters fix a problem they created.

Now, instead of pushing us around with his lawyer, he’s looking at a trespassing suit, and he has no way to do business on the land he bought. We can’t figure out what he was thinking when he sold land that was vital to his business. He may have to quit. If he does, we should be able to buy the land back for less than he paid us.

That’s great for us, because we regret selling the land, and we would like to develop it. We own the parcel next door, and together, they form a large and unique commercial property, in an area where flat land is hard to find.

On top of that, the state condemned another piece of the property a while back, and they have to start moving dirt off of it. We need fill to make our land level; it will increase the value dramatically. It will make the difference between being able to put a convenience store on it and being able to put a Wal-Mart on it. The state’s guy says they’ll be happy to give us 7,000 yards of fill. And when they’re done, the area will get a lot more traffic, and we’ll be at a major intersection, complete with a newly created island of property just perfect for a gas station.

If we can’t get the businessman to sell, we can charge him a lot of money to park his cars until we develop the land.

Crazy. We did our best to screw this up, and God pulled our bacon out of the fire.

My dad asked me if I had any idea what this guy was thinking when he did all these crazy things. I always say that when people do things that are utterly inexplicable, there is probably a supernatural cause. I think God worked it out so the dumb things we did would not harm us as badly as they should have.

Two lawsuits are completely destroyed. We stand a good chance of getting our property back. The state is going to fill our lot. The guy who was trying to turn us into victims is going to have to pay through the nose. That’s how it looks.

Isn’t this the kind of thing that happened to Jacob?

I don’t deserve it, but I’ll take it. This sure beats living under a curse.

Because They Don’t Go to Eleven

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Escalation

I’m making the jump to 10mm. I decided it was worth it to spend the money and tolerate a slightly larger carry piece.

After reading all the BS, I have come to the tentative conclusion that you need speed to make a handgun bullet expand, and you need a big bullet with lots of penetration if expansion doesn’t occur, and that adds up to “not 9mm.”

The argument never ends, and it is impossible to draw a firm conclusion. Six months from now, I may think I made a big mistake. But you have to make the most of the information you have.

At the gun shop, I talked to a guy who has fired the AK-47 pistol. He says it will do exactly what I want, i.e. provide excellent accuracy and stopping power at short distances. With a laser, it should be the ultimate non-registration vehicle weapon. I may be wrong; I need to take my Vz 58 outside, fold it, and see how it behaves in the truck. If it handles okay, it would be considerably better than the AK, because of the option of using the buttstock.

I would need to be able to secure the rifle when I’m not in the truck. I think a bicycle lock might be the simplest way. I can carry it legally in a nylon bag, but that won’t keep thieves from grabbing it. When I park in an iffy area, the bike lock would add enough security to defeat most of the goofs who are likely to try to steal the gun. There is no way to keep it away from skilled people who really want it.

It’s legal to carry a long gun in a vehicle in Florida, but you have to have it “securely encased,” which means almost nothing. Same rule for pistols. If you put a pistol in the center console of your car, it’s securely encased under my reading of the law. It should be legal to have an AK pistol in a box or zippered bag.

Our gun laws are pretty stupid. Ted Nugent says the Second Amendment is his carry permit, and he’s right. It says we can “keep and bear” arms, and “keep” means “own,” and “bear” means “carry on your person.” The Constitution says we have the right to “own arms and carry them with us.” Unfortunately, the courts and some state legislatures have screwed it up. Imagine living in a state where you can’t have a gun rack in the window of your pickup. It’s un-American.

I can carry the nastiest pistol made just about anywhere I go, as long as I conceal it, but if I let people see it (so they have a chance to react appropriately), I can be charged with a crime. I can’t leave it out on my car seat, even though that’s better concealment than a long shirt. I can’t carry it onto school property, so if I see a young coed being gang-raped, all I can do is wave and say, “How’s it going, guys?” None of it makes any sense. Anyway, I can put an AK pistol in my truck, and I may very well do it. Ordinary pistols just don’t cut it; they’re desperation weapons, for times when you can’t get to a long gun.

One nice thing about 10mm is that it appears I can make handloads which will work beautifully for self-defense. The Speer Gold Dot hollow point has great performance, and they are readily available as components. The .45 HPs I got from Hornady are said to be lame because they don’t expand; I just use them for practice. I found good recipes for 10mm, so I shouldn’t have to do anything but load and shoot. I got a Chrony a long time ago; maybe I could set it up and test the ammo.

Guess I’ll sell the 9mm. Or keep it in case the new gun pops a spring or something.

Pig Gets First Taste of Lipstick

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Shopmade Primer Feed Cap

I made a cap for the primer feed on my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Pretty exciting. By my standards.

I took a piece of aluminum bar stock and turned it down to 0.875″, within a thousandth or two. I used the lathe to drill a 0.316″ hole down the length of the stock. I parted 2″ off and put it in my rotab. I used a 1/4″ mill to bore it out to 0.625″ inside, to a depth of about 3/8″. Then I stuck it back on the lathe, faced it down to size, and put a nice bevelly surface on the top. After that I stuck it on the drill press and used the slide table to put two holes in it for set screws. Now I have to tap the holes and get two screws.

Problem: my tap handle won’t deal with taps as small as the one I need to use, so I have to go to the hardware store and see if they have a cheapo I can get.

This should be pretty sweet. The set screws are a little bit of a risk, since one of them could deform the primer tube, but I think that’s incredibly unlikely. It’s pretty sturdy, and the screws don’t have to be very tight.

If this works, it should solve a lot of the problems caused by Hornady’s cheap plastic primer feed cap and the lack of any meaningful attachment at the lower end of the tube.

Photos eventually.

More

Here’s a photo of the part I made. The blue thing is a coat hanger segment I put in there to keep track of the number of primers in the tube (and to supply the force to push primers into the slide–another thing Hornady didn’t provide for).

If you make one of these for yourself, make the outer diameter about 0.850″. This one is 0.875″, and it almost touches the powder measure on the way up.

The hex screws are not a problem, and they never will be. The amount of force needed to hold this part in place is tiny, so it will never be necessary to tighten the screws to the point where they damage anything.

This thing is infinitely superior to the one that came with the press. It even has more area up top so you can easily feed primers by hand when you need to.

Rehab

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Half of Success is Being Willing to Do Other People’s Jobs

I think I’m going to go out in the garage and start fixing the problems with my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Stabilizing the primer feed tube should be pretty easy; Hornady supplied a very flimsy piece of plastic–about as sturdy as those tiny tables that hold pizza boxes off the cheese–to do the job, but I should be able to produce a more realistic part on the lathe or my rotab. I may open up the slot the primer slide rides in. It’s so tight, a few tiny grains of No. 7 can shut it down, causing even more powder to spill.

The press comes with one primer-feed assembly with two interchangeable feed tubes in different sizes. I think it would have been smarter to make two separate assemblies. They would have been more rigid, and there would be no flimsy plastic involved.

It’s too bad there is no easy way to determine whether a case is primed before sending it to be filled with powder. You can stop the press, lift the case, examine it, and put it back, but that takes a long time, and if you’re making 200 rounds, it takes 200 times a long time.

I am wondering if I should remove the wood I used to shore up the bench under the press and replace it with 5/16″ angle iron. Anything that reduces flex will help. And it would be great to have a lever handle that works, so I can take the existing plastic ball to the gun range and punish it for making me suffer. Some guy makes an ergonomic handle, but I think I can manage to make one for myself.

I don’t know why the dies spin in their sockets. I’m going to look the press over. I hope I didn’t misplace an O-ring or some other part that stabilizes the dies. The set screws are tight, so they’re not the problem. It’s not that the dies turn on their threads. The whole mess turns in the press.

It’s strange that .38 Super causes so many problems, while .45 ACP works pretty well. One problem is that the powder is much finer. I use Unique for .45, and the grains are so big, they take longer to get into the works and cause jams. And the shape of the cases and the level of the powder are such that powder is harder to spill. I use fine-grained No. 7 for .38 Super, and the cases are tall, and the powder fills them pretty far, so spills are much more likely.

Maybe I should start using case lube. It’s supposed to be unnecessary with carbide dies, but “supposed to be” isn’t “is.” I wanted to be able to dye my .38 Super brass, and case lube will make that hard to do, but I should be using a brass catcher instead of relying on paint.

It would be nice to have a steel hub in the press to replace the existing hub, which appears to be pot metal. I’m not positive it’s pot metal, but whatever it is, it’s weak. My first hub broke like cheese, the same way pot metal does. I think the hub will be okay, though. The loss of the first one appears to have been a fluke. I don’t remember what caused it. Maybe a round caught on the old ejection wire and stopped the plate.

The way the plates attach to the press is very primitive. There is a screw which goes down through the plate into the hub, and the plate rests directly on the press table. The amount of pressure between the table and plate depends solely on the torque you put on the screw, and users are advised not to tighten the screw too much, because when the pressure is high, the plate and bed will act like a disk brake. If the screw isn’t tight enough, it can back out. There is nothing to prevent it. There are better ways to do this. In fact, the way Hornady did it is the crudest way possible, apart from relying on gravity and happy thoughts to hold the plate down. It would be nice to have a bearing under the plate and some sort of attachment which can’t be tightened or loosened by the action of the press.

I don’t know if the retainer spring is as good as it should be. They tend to snap after a few hundred rounds, unless you get lucky and get a press that doesn’t pinch the spring too much. I’m wondering why a nitrile O-ring wasn’t used. Maybe they break even more easily. But the existing spring is maybe five thousandths of an inch in diameter (across the wire, not the coil), so there isn’t much metal there to resist wear.

I’m going to look at the press as a fixer-upper, not a failed purchase. I don’t think the problems are fatal. It’s like buying a Harbor Freight lathe; you don’t expect it to work right out of the box. You take it apart, replace the bad stuff, put it back together, adjust it, and THEN it works.

You know what? Grizzly needs to start making ammo presses. Shiraz Balolia is a match shooter, and he developed their gunsmith lathes. I’ll bet they could come up with a superior product for a lot less than what the US makers charge. I’ll bet he already considered it and decided there was no money in it.

I know of no way to fix the wear under the primer-insertion piston. It’s in a location a drill won’t reach, without some sort of exotic 90° adapter. Maybe I can mount the press sideways in my mill and use a Woodruff cutter to gouge out a hole so I can put a sacrificial shim in there. I have to wonder what Hornady’s plan was. I guess you just throw out the press once the hole gets too deep. It’s not a problem yet, but someday it will be.