Gross Motor Skills

I’m still not able to use my new belt grinder. Not really.

For a long time, I wanted a 2″x72″ belt grinder, because it’s a powerful tool for removing metal and other materials from stuff. If you want to change the shape of something fast, a 2×72 grinder (I am reverting to the typical lazy expression without quotation/inch marks) is your best friend.

As people who actually read this blog know, I bought a pretty yellow grinder, and I rigged it up with an old motor and VFD I had lying around. So far, so good. But there are some issues.

First of all, do not ever buy Dupli-color water-based pickup bed paint (“Bed Armor”). It’s horrible. They make a poisonous (probably) solvent-based bed paint which is magnificent, but I bought the water-based type because my local Advance Auto Parts didn’t have the version that works. The results were not good.

I intended to use it on the wooden platform I made for the grinder. I guess I should point that out. The solventy stuff makes a rock-hard finish you could probably pressure-clean, and it dries fast. It’s useful for lots of projects. I hoped the water-based version would work just as well.

I made the platform and started spraying it. The paint came out in globs and big droplets. It didn’t want to adhere to the wood, so I had to use a lot. There were big globby areas when I was done. It self-leveled to some extent, but when it was over, it looked bad. Also, it takes over a day to cure.

When it was cured, the surface was like fresh concrete, only without the durability. It was gritty. It attracted and held onto grease and dirt. Worst part: I could scrape it off with a fingernail.

Avoid.

That being said, I decided to use the platform until I got the grinder set up, with the intention of stripping and fixing it later.

The motor I intended to use had some problems. Mainly, it was caked with black grease which was not far from wax in consistency. The grease was inside the motor as well as outside. How did that happen? Don’t ask me. It appeared as though someone had operated the motor near a mysterious, implausible source of flying grease, and the motor’s fan had sucked it in through one end of the case.

Also, the case was rusty and peeling. It was like that when I got it, but I made it worse by storing capped muriatic acid near it. You can’t have muriatic acid in a room with iron. Even if you cap it, the acid will get out into the air and make things rust.

The motor was free, sort of. I bought my first lathe (used) from an outfit called Plaza Machinery, and in addition to promising me one model of lathe and sending a different one, the owner sent me the wrong motor. He made some truly pathetic, grudging efforts to make up for what he did, and sending me the crusty motor was among those efforts.

I offered to send it back to him at one point, but he had my money, and he was no longer willing to talk to me, so I kept it.

He also sold me micrometers that didn’t work. Then people got mad at me when I criticized him on a machinist forum. Amazing. Obviously, if you’re part of a hobby, your loyalty should be to your fellow hobbyists, not to characters who promise you one thing, insist on cashier’s checks so you can’t fight them through your credit card company, and then send you something else.

Forum people tend to suck up to vendors, and that’s sad. They’re like church people who try to rip out the throats of honest individuals who criticize crooked pastors. It’s a mindset I can’t comprehend.

The lathe guy was obnoxious, and his business methods were suspect, to put it kindly (more like euphemistically). I forgive him and all, but that doesn’t change what he was. I don’t care if every Internet machinist on earth gets mad at me.

I guess they’ll all stop sending me big weekly checks to pay my bills.

I felt bad putting my crusty motor beside my beautiful grinder, so I decided to paint it. I took the end shields off (that’s what the ends of motors are called). I sprayed chemical stripper on the case (outside of the motor) and used a plastic spatula to remove the crud. That stuff is amazing. It takes about ten minutes to work, and if you’re not inept, you can spray it very accurately.

I cleaned the excess stripper off in the kitchen sink. It’s good to be single.

I finished up with an angle grinder and wire knot wheel. I would guess that the whole depainting process took 45 minutes, including wiping it down with DNA (denatured alcohol). I gouged one of the motor’s wires, but I was able to perform microsurgery on it and fix it. About half of the strands were cut. I cut the rubber back on each side of the gouge. I wrapped thin wire around the remaining strands to build them up. Then I buried the joint in solder and covered it with shrink tubing. It’s really nice. I was shocked that I was able to do it at all.

Having panned a brand of paint and a machinery dealer, I will now offer some praise.

Hammer-finish paint is great for tool restorations. It has little dents and dimples in it when it dries, so it masks scratches and dings in a machine’s surface. It looks snazzy. I decided to try it. I got me a couple of cans of Rust-Oleum Forged Hammer Finish paint. This stuff includes primer, and it’s about a dollar more than the regular Rust-Oleum hammer finish paint. It has a neat spray nozzle that works in all positions.

I taped the motor off (the way people who actually care about their work do), and I blasted it with paint. Over the next day, I would say I ended up with three coats. It looked wonderful. It’s hard. It’s shiny. It makes the motor look smooth. Excellent. Buy it. It does take a long time to cure, though.

The end shields on the motor are aluminum, and I was not able to make them look good by buffing and sanding. They were too beaten up. I cleaned them using electrolysis (and by boiling them in cleaning-strength vinegar), and then I hit them with black hammer finish paint. The results are beautiful.

The grease was a real problem. I cleaned the motor on the outside using DNA and turpentine, but I couldn’t do much to the inside. The stator (the wiry bits that don’t move) was bonded to the case, so I couldn’t remove it to clean. I wiped off whatever I could and let it go.

Turpentine takes grease off in a hurry. It dissolves it instantly. Then it evaporates. Highly recommended.

The motor had a broken wave spring (washer that functions as a spring and holds the rotor in place in the shield), so I ordered one from Ebay. I also put a clamp fitting in the hole where the wires come out, to provide strain relief and keep the wires off the sharp threads in the hole.

This motor has no junction box. A junction box is a little sheet metal box the wires go into when they leave the motor. Another nice present from Plaza? I don’t know. I can’t believe the motor was made that way. Because it has no junction box, there is no place to connect a ground screw. I’m thinking I may buy a galvanized box from Home Depot and attach it.

So anyway, now I have a beautiful motor that runs like new. That’s a problem. The motor isn’t really suited to grinder use. It’s not sealed against dust, so abrasive and/or conductive stuff from the grinder will get sucked into it. Initially, I didn’t care about this. Free motor. And it was old and beaten up. If it blew up, so what? But now that the motor looks like a rock star, I don’t want to ruin it.

Now I have some wonderful facts about motors, for your enjoyment.

Far as I know, there are two types of motor that work well in dusty environments. One is TEFC, and the other is TENV. TEFC means “totally enclosed fan-cooled,” or something close to that. TENV means “totally enclosed non-ventilated,” or something similar. Look it up. What am I? Your nanny?

The motor I have is more like TOTC, or “totally open to crap.”

If you decide to put a grinder or sanding machine together, think about grit and try to keep it out of your motor. I already have a little belt grinder with a TOTC motor, but I at least arranged the fan so it sucks air from the clean side.

I couldn’t stand the thought of my painted motor eating grit, so I went on Ebay, and I found a TEFC motor for the low, low price of $65, with an ad that practically said, “We will take almost anything for this.”

The motor is a Mitsubishi. I kept looking at the photos, trying to figure out whether it was bulletproof, better-than-American, Japanese Mitsubishi or crappy, depressing licensed Mitsubishi from China or Nigeria or something. I sent the seller a question, and he said he didn’t know, and he offered to take fifty bucks. SOLD!

So now I have that on the way. I have to wait for it before I can do the final setup on the grinder.

The motor has a 145T frame, and the old motor is a 184-something, so I’ll have to put different holes in the platform.

More motor information: motors can be described by frame designations. These are numbers like 145T, 184, 156, and so on. An organization called NEMA created specifications for various frame numbers. If you know a motor’s frame number, you can look it up, and no matter who made the motor, you will be able to determine the motor’s shaft diameter, feet pattern, and so on. This is very helpful when you’re trying to install a motor in a machine you already have. If NEMA says it fits, it fits.

My new motor and my old motor have the same horsepower rating and speed, but the 145T is smaller (nice), and the base is different, so the 184 holes won’t work. With luck, one of them will be okay, but I’ll have to make three more, which is more aggravation than you would think. When you’re Carlos the carefree Cuban self-taught handyman from Hialeah, you just grab your Harbor Freight drill and one of your three rusty drill bits, and you make crappy holes surrounded by tearout. Then you demand payment in cash and run away before your work explodes. When you’re trying to do a good job, you have to use at least two bits per hole, and you have to clamp stuff under the work to prevent tearout. So I have that to look forward to.

When all this is done, I have to make some kind of housing for the VFD, to keep crud out of it.

In about 8 days, I should have a grinder that works. Exciting.

I realize no one read this, but I write what makes me happy, so I suppose that’s okay. If you made it this far, your prize is the photo I post below. In the photo, the motor is only mocked up, but you get the idea.

Enjoy. You lucky, lucky few.

It’s Available, Cheaper Than You Think

As much as I try to avoid saying anything useful, occasionally I have to break the rules and tell you something that could help you. This is one of those times.

For years, I’ve been trying to defeat nighttime congestion. It’s a horrible problem. When your nose clogs up during the night, you may dream you’re suffocating. Nighttime congestion puts you in the habit of feeling stifled and frustrated, so you don’t fully escape the aggravation during the daytime.

I’ve used nasal sprays. They work, but you have to use them every day, because once you’ve used something like Afrin two days in a row, you will start to get rebound congestion. Every time the spray wears off, your nose will close up, even if there is nothing around to provoke an allergic response. Also, sprays will irritate your nose to the point where you’ll blow out blood and little scabs.

Cleaning up helps, because it gets rid of dust and mites, but I don’t think anyone who lives in a normal house with fabrics and paper and so forth can ever get it clean enough to completely get rid of congestion. Maybe you could do it if you had a bare closet containing only a cot.

A few years back, I got a Honeywell air purifier. This thing is a big box the size of a hamper. It has three filters in it. A noisy fan blows air through it, and supposedly, it takes allergens out of the air.

Here is a summary of my conclusions regarding Honeywell air purifiers. They do remove dust from the air. They also blow dust into the air, because they keep air moving. They don’t have much of an effect on allergies. They make a nice white noise, however, and that’s very helpful when you’re trying to sleep, especially if you have Hispanic neighbors. The noise costs $200 plus electricity, so it’s not a great deal. The filters are expensive, too.

Last year, somehow or another, I decided to try adding things to the air in the house. There are certain substances that naturally open your airways up. Camphor, pine oil, tea tree oil, menthol, and so on. One of the chemicals that do the work is alpha-pinene.

Alpha-pinene is expensive in its pure form. Guess how you can get it cheap? By buying turpentine. Alpha-pinene is one of the main ingredients in turpentine. Why does a quart of turpentine cost six bucks, while an ounce of alpha-pinene or pine oil costs seven bucks? I do not know.

Anyway, I found that splashing a little turpentine in a dish and leaving it in my bedroom was very helpful with congestion. If you don’t like the smell of turpentine, you can buy tea tree oil and put a few drops in a dish. Somehow the aromatic chemicals overcome the funk and must and whatever that make nostrils clench up.

You can also buy tea tree oil and put it on your upper lip. Or you can buy Vick’s Vaporub, which contains camphor, eucalyptus oil, and menthol.

Vick’s sells little waterless vaporizers that plug into electric sockets. The problem is that they use little pads that will cost you about $400 per year, and you also have to find a free socket.

Whatever you use will evaporate during the night, but you can always start over.

You can’t just buy a jug of turpentine and take the cap off every night. The good parts of the turpentine evaporate and leave the useless parts behind. If you leave the jug open, the good stuff will disappear early, and then you’ll have nothing. You have to dispense and use a small amount every night.

It also works to deodorize your house. I add it to mop water, and sometimes I pour it on the floor under the air conditioner air handler. It blows throughout the house.

Miami’s natural smell is like the smell of a pile of warm sweaty underwear. That’s just the way it is. It’s nice to have something clean and crisp to counteract it.

I tried these things in 2015, and they worked. Somehow I got distracted and quit. Big mistake. I went back to it this week, and it’s wonderful. I don’t have to worry about lying on one side so the nostril on the other side will open up. I don’t have to lie on my back so both nostrils will open. I just sleep.

Now, what do I do with the machine? My neighbors are still noisy and thoughtless. I need sounds to shut them out.

I’ve decided to try a dedicated white noise machine. I already have a Homedics Sound Spa clock radio, which is very nice. It plays relaxing sounds. The problem with it is that the digital audio clips it uses are short, and once you’ve heard one a few times, you know exactly where it stops and starts. You start listening for the repetitions, and then you lie awake. A true white noise machine doesn’t use digital files.

A company called Marpac makes a machine called the Dohm Sound Conditioner. It comes in a model with one speed and a model with two speeds. It’s completely analog. It has been around since 1962. You can adjust the pitch and volume of the sound. I ordered one, and if it works, the Honeywell is going on Craigslist.

If your nose keeps you awake and you’re tired of the terrible medications used to treat it, give this a try. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Cops Hate the Cop Cops

I keep watching videos of people who claim they’ve visited hell. It has been interesting.

Some folks like to say it’s not possible to visit hell. They say the Bible says man dies once and then goes to judgment, so that rules out returns from the dead. That’s wrong, however, because a number of Biblical figures died and were resurrected.

That’s the end of that argument.

It’s generally true that people only die once. Generally. Not universally.

It’s possible to visit hell, and it’s also possible for people to stay right here and make up lies. If you claim you went to hell, you can get a lot of attention, and you can make money off of it. For some people, attention is all it takes. Somehow I like them less than the greedy. At least the greedy get something tangible in exchange for their honor.

Yesterday I tried to watch a girl named Sarah Binayamo Boyanga. I assume she’s African. She has a Youtube video. In the video, she’s a well-dressed young lady who seems to have a nice personality.

I found her claims implausible.

For one thing, her video is boring. When God talks to spiritually aware people through other people, it’s not dull. The Holy Spirit wakes you up and makes you listen. I can’t believe Jesus would take someone on a tour of the spiritual realm and then allow her to give a talk that causes people to drift off.

Another issue: she said God is happy if you pray two minutes per day. I mean, seriously…is that credible? The devil works around the clock. Rotten people work around the clock. You can’t ask God to counteract that in two minutes, and aside from that, you can’t have a relationship with another person, based on 120 seconds of perfunctory interaction. God wants children, and children love their parents and include them in their lives.

Did Paul say to pray two minutes per day? No, he said he thanked God he prayed in tongues more than all of the Corinthians. Did Jesus say to love God a little bit here and there? No, he said to love him with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. Can’t do it in two minutes.

She said Jesus told her that if a person is serving the Lord, that person can’t die of disease. She said that if anyone had a loved one who was ill, and that person was serving God, that person would be healed. Problem: Elishah died from disease. If Elishah didn’t serve God, who does?

Lazarus also died from disease. We don’t know much about him, but his sisters served God, and Jesus was his close friend (not just his rabbi), so how can it be true that he didn’t serve God?

I kept getting bored and wandering off, so I didn’t see the whole video. I don’t think I need to. If you prove you’re wrong in the first ten minutes of a speech, the rest of the speech can’t help you.

It’s easy to be fooled. I can’t tell when people are lying, and you can’t, either. People think they can. It’s just pride. If you don’t have the help of the Holy Spirit, lies will look just wonderful to you. It has happened to me, many times.

I often wonder how many times people have lied to me. My natural inclination is to assume people are telling the truth, because even liars tell the truth maybe 90% of the time.

When I was a kid, my best friend was a thief and a liar. I remember losing a pocket knife in my front yard and asking him to help me look for it. We looked all over a small patch of grass, and I never found it. Oddly, he turned out to have a knife just like mine. I also lost my dad’s hunting knife when he was around. I’m old, and it only occurred to me recently to put two and two together. I didn’t lie to my friend or steal from him, so I assumed he treated me more or less the same way.

Preachers lie constantly. My grandfather was a tort lawyer, and he also served as a prosecutor and circuit judge. He said, “Whenever you see a preacher on the stand, get ready to hear a bunch of lies.” He was too kind. He should have said, “Whenever you see a preacher anywhere.”

I turned back to God because I had genuine supernatural experiences, and I wanted to know people who were in the same boat. I heard preachers on TV and in pulpits telling them Jesus appeared and said this and that. I figured they had to be telling the truth. After what I had been through, surely other people had experienced similar events.

Preachers still love to say, “God just told me there are __ people in this room who need to give a thousand dollars each.” God never said any such thing. If I tell you God told me something, you can be sure one of two things is true: God told me something or I just think he told me something. I’m not going to make things up, and I am eager to expose those who do. I have no mercy, and I take pleasure in informing on them. When the wolf charges in, you don’t hand him a water bottle and take his coat. You blow his brains out and make a nice rug out of his skin.

There are so many liars, the truthful are hard to find, and once you find them, the habit of rejecting liars makes it hard for us to believe them. Liars are like the chaff airplanes drop to fool missiles. If you can get people to follow liars, they won’t be available to listen to the truthful. They waste their energy chasing garbage trucks instead of armored cars full of riches.

I don’t know if Sarah Binayamo is a liar. I just know I don’t believe her.

She’s a great choice for a decoy. She looks and sounds sweet and innocent. Anyone who criticized her would be likely to be accused of picking on a nice kid who just wants to help God. That makes sense. A smart jihadi doesn’t hide a bomb in a carry-on belonging to a hairy guy who looks crazy. He hides in in the wheelchair of an old lady with blue eyes and a big smile.

I don’t care what people think about me criticizing folks who mislead in God’s name. I was thinking about it last night. I’ve belonged to three churches. I left one because the prosperity gospel turned me off. I left the other for the same reason, and the preachers told lies about me behind my back and held secret meetings to find out what I was up to. I left a third because the preachers were proud, selfish, immature, and, of course, caught up in the prosperity gospel. The head pastor was so mad at me, he chased a friend of mine down in the parking lot and started screaming at him about me.

You know what I am? God showed me last night. I’m internal affairs.

Cops stick together. If one cop blows a kid’s brains out for no reason, the first instinct other cops will have will be to obstruct justice and help him avoid arrest. That’s just human nature. Cops help other cops. But they don’t help all cops. They hate the cops who investigate other cops. They hate the people from internal affairs, because those people expose their crimes and bring justice down on them.

If all you do is sit in a pew and confirm your pastor’s delusions of godhood, you are part of the thin blue line. You’re covering corruption so it can fester. If you stand up and tell the truth, you’re internal affairs. People will condemn you. They will say much worse things about you than you say about your pastor, without worrying about whether those things are true. They will think they serve God when they attack you.

Carnal principles apply to carnal people, both inside and outside of the church.

Prophets are internal affairs. Prophets are lonely, or at least they’re aloof. A man who sits in the front row at church and lets the pastor take him on trips paid for out of the building fund…that man has a conflict of interest. He’s like a teacher who takes bribes in exchange for good grades. The people who tell the truth sit in the back, rejected, or they don’t go to church at all. They have to keep their feet dry.

The Jews killed prophets, both before and after the crucifixion. Christians do the same thing. The Jews killed Isaiah. A Jew killed John the Baptist. They put Jeremiah in a cistern. Ahab, a Jew, was guilty of the murder of the prophets his pagan wife murdered. He consented to the effort to murder Elijah. Ahab hated Micaiah because he told the truth. The Jews had Jesus killed, and they killed Stephen. At their command, Paul murdered people who were full of the Holy Spirit.

Nothing changes. Religious insiders want to destroy anyone who tells the truth. It’s not easy for a preacher to get away with killing someone who corrects him, but they do what they can. They ostracize them and lie about them.

I am not saying I’m a prophet, but I am a somewhat truthful person who says things that make crooked preachers uncomfortable. In that sense, I am similar to a prophet.

The closer you get to God, the more you will recognize and repeat the truth, and the more people will hate you. They have sold out to the devil. They love getting along and going with the flow. If you contradict them, they’ll try to destroy you instead of receiving healthy correction.

I have realized I need to be more honest. I think of myself as an honest person, and I have always had a reputation for honesty, but it’s an illusion. I’ve lied more times than I can remember. You don’t have to be very honest to set yourself apart in this world. I have lied enough to make it hard for me to perceive the truth.

God showed me that dishonest people lose the ability to perceive truth. When they start lying at an early age, they know they’re lying. At fifty or sixty, an unrepentant liar is actually mentally ill. He is unable to tell the difference between lies and reality, so he doesn’t have much potential to change. If you can’t receive criticism, which is truth, you are spitting out medicine.

Hell is full of liars. They stand in hell, burning…and still lying. “God didn’t give me a chance.” “I was a preacher; I don’t belong here.” “If you sent me back to earth, I’d be different.” “God is vicious and unfair.” They’re in hell because they made themselves immune to truth. Once that happened, there was no point in trying to save them. Salvation requires cooperation and honesty.

People say my sister would sooner climb a tree and lie than tell the truth and stand on the ground. She was a terrible liar when she was young, and now she doesn’t know what truth is. Harsh things to say, but true. It’s why God doesn’t ask me to pray for her or work with her now. There is no return on the investment.

She doesn’t say things with conviction. She just says things she thinks may bring about a desired result, and then she watches to see if they stick. It’s like watching someone spin a wheel at a fair. You can tell when you watch her that she’s just throwing dice. It’s reflected in her expression.

I’m not in that shape, but I have definitely let pride and bias damage my honesty. It’s one of the things I need God to help me fix.

Faith is perception of the truth. Peace is perception of the truth. Worry and fear are belief in lies. No wonder liars are so miserable.

If I want to tell other people the truth, I need to maximize my own ability to discern it. Things could be worse, but they can definitely use improvement.

We swim in a sea of lies, every day. Only the Holy Spirit can lift you up on top of it.

Things are getting weirder and more chaotic in the US. Christians need protection and help, more than ever, and our need is increasing, fast. Satan is almost completely in charge now. The filth we tolerate and love is like nothing we have seen before. If you don’t start looking for correction and redemption, you’re going to be unprepared when it really gets bad, and God is not going to listen to your cries for help, because you turned him down so often in the past.

God is full of help. Get in touch and start receiving it. You’re already receiving from his enemy; you might as well have both channels open.

Grinder Takes Shape

I have my 2×72 belt grinder set up, more or less.

It has been an interesting project. To make it work, I had to choose between getting a new base for the grinder or making it work with my old abrasive cart, which is a Northern Tool cart that held my 1×42 belt grinder and bench grinder. In the end, I decided the smart thing was to try to jam both belt grinders on the cart. It’s easier to put the bench grinder on a new base than to start from scratch on a belt grinder base.

The motor I’m using is gigantic. It’s the old 2-HP Reuland motor I got for nothing (sort of). When I bought my first lathe, the unscrupulous dealer sold me the wrong machine, and he included a 1-phase motor instead of the 3-phase job he had advertised. He made a little effort to make things right, and that included shipping me the ancient Reuland. The shaft was banged up, so I took to Ebay and bought a beautiful new 2-HP Baldor, cheap.

I guess I can’t call it free, since the dealer still cheated me, but I didn’t pay for the motor.

When I first tried to use the Reuland, I had a hard time getting the lathe’s pulley mounted. Then it ran funny. When I took the pulley off and looked at the shaft, it appeared that someone had banged it pretty hard with a giant hammer or something. It had burrs and a big flat spot. I can’t even guess what kind of idiot does a thing like that to a top-of-the-line 3-phase motor, but I can tell you this much: it was an employee, not the owner of a company. People who pay for things don’t beat them with hammers.

When you bang on a piece of metal and make a depression, you also raise metal. The metal you displace from the depression has to go somewhere, so it usually rises up around the depression, forming a rim. I heard a master machinist describe this as “disturbed metal.” My motor’s shaft had disturbed metal around a big ding, so the pulley had a hard time sliding past it.

I got rid of that lathe a long time ago, and of course, the buyer cheated me out of a hundred dollars. I had it rigged up with a VFD, which I kept. The fact that I had a motor and VFD lying idle figured prominently in the rationalizations that enabled me to buy the new belt grinder.

When I tried to put the new drive wheel on the motor (to pull the grinding belts), it didn’t want to go over the damaged shaft, and the keyway in the shaft looked enormous. I assumed it was larger than the usual keyway for a 7/8″ shaft. It looked bigger than the corresponding keyway in the wheel. I figured I would have to broach a bigger keyway into the wheel.

I got the motor running, and I used the spinning motion to help me file the bumps off the shaft. I then sanded it. After that, the wheel went right on, and surprisingly, the key fit. Apparently, the monkey who banged up the shaft also did something or other to cause the keyway to wear, and it made it look like it was a size larger than it is. Whatever; as long as it works.

That’s the exciting story of the motor.

It turned out I actually had two VFD’s to choose from. A long time ago, I bought a VFD for my milling machine, thinking I was buying a pulley machine. A machine with multiple drive pulleys allows you to change speeds by moving a belt from one pulley to another. The seller, who tended to screw up a lot, informed me he was sending a variable speed mill instead. Nice, because that’s a pricier tool, and I wasn’t paying extra. But I had already spent maybe $250 for the VFD.

The purpose of the VFD was twofold: 1) to turn 250V 1-phase power into 3-phase power, and 2) to allow me to vary the frequency (changing the motor’s speed) without handling belts. I no longer needed the frequency feature, but I still needed 3-phase, so I hooked the VFD up.

Later on, I bought a big phase converter (machine which turns 1-phase into 3-phase), so I didn’t really need a VFD for the mill. I left the VFD connected anyway, because I was lazy. Yesterday I removed it, and I’ll be connecting the mill to the phase converter soon.

Now I have two VFD’s ready for use. One is small and easy to mount. The other has a nice detachable control pad, so I can mount it out of the way of dust and run an ethernet cable to the control pad. I can connect a remote speed-control pot to the smaller VFD; it won’t be as elegant, but it will work.

I wired the motor up to the VFD. I cut a piece of thick plywood to use as a platform. I put the motor and grinder on the wood, and I clamped them down. I ran the motor with a belt on the grinder and moved things around until I was happy.

After that, I used a stubby pencil and transfer punches to mark drilling locations on the wood, and I made holes for 3/8″ bolts.

The bolts go through the grinder and motor bases and then through the plywood. I didn’t want anything to protrude under the plywood and scrape up my cart, so I used T-nuts. These are nuts that sink into wood. I used a Forstner bit to cut shallow cavities on the underside of the wood (for the T-nut bases to fit into), and then I installed the T-nuts. Perfect.

Drilling wood is a real pain. It always blows out and tears up on the lower side. I made a lot of effort to avoid this. For one thing, I clamped scrap to the underside of the wood so the scrap would support the fibers where the bits came out. For another, I drilled tiny starter holes all the way through the wood, and I used them to guide a spade bit which I applied from the underside. This created shallow 3/8″ holes on the underside. When I drilled down from above, I met these holes, and there was less wood in the way to blow out.

Here’s a photo of what I have now:

Some people insist on metal plates and so on to anchor belt grinders. I guess that’s nice if you work in a factory and you put hundred-pound loads on your grinder rest. The setup I created is as solid as a rock, and it doesn’t have to handle heavy loads. I used 3/4″ plywood, but 1/2″ would have worked fine.

I’m going to sand the rough edges off the platform. Then I think I’ll hit it with truck bed paint. It goes on without primer, it dries fast, it looks good, and it wears like iron. After that, I’ll try to situate rubber feet on the underside of the platform, so they’ll butt up against the inner walls of the cart and hold the platform in place. The platform won’t sit in the cart. It will rest on the outer edges. That lets me use platforms that are larger than the top tray, and it leaves space in the tray for belts and belt grease.

I can retract the tool arm(s) when I’m not using the grinder. That will keep it out of the way, to some extent.

I haven’t figured out what to do about dust. One easy solution is to hang the VFD under the tray, away from dust, and run wires to a pot mounted on the platform. I hate to cut holes in my nice cart, though, and I wonder if it will protect the VFD. Generally, people put them in boxes with air filters. Mine would be exposed, but it would be in an area which sees little dust.

I think that will work. I’ve seen where the dust from grinders falls, and it doesn’t fly around corners or in loops. It falls under the platform and belt. It won’t make it to a VFD under the tray.

I can already tell the grinder is going to be a fantastic tool. While I was setting it up, I used it to remove some of the milling marks from a knife I made. The grinder has a flat platen behind the belt, and you can press flat objects against it, so it creates a flat surface. From the results I got, I believe it will work well enough (accurately enough) to allow me to put flat, scale-free sides on knives.

This will sound crazy, but I held the knife against the platen with my bare fingers, turned the motor on, and let the belt grind it while I held it there. It was no problem at all. In the future, I think I’ll put something between me and the blade, so my fingers won’t hit the belt if I slip, but at low speeds, it’s not likely to hurt me because I can move my hand way in plenty of time.

I’ll need a big contact wheel. That’s is a giant pulley (maybe 10″ in diameter) that replaces the platen. It allows you to grind the sides of knives so they’re slightly hollow. That makes sharpening easier, and it makes for a less clunky knife. Contact wheels cost a lot of money. Not sure why.

I’m going to have two nice grinders, side by side, with speed controls. That will be excellent. If you haven’t used grinders, you don’t understand how useful they are. They sharpen. They deburr. They clean. They shape. They polish. Wonderful machines.

Now I suppose I need to learn about belt grinder safety so I don’t sand myself to death.

Good tools turn frustration into pleasure. I look forward to using this thing.

Take That However You Want

I finished Ovid yesterday. The last thing I read was the letter from…now I’ve forgotten…Medea to Jason. No, it was Sappho to Phaon, whoever that is. I had to check. You can see how much it impacted me.

It’s essentially a remake of the other letters, which are remakes of each other. Sappho said a couple of things that were relatively clever, but they weren’t clever enough to raise her above the level of the other jilted stalkers.

My main reaction to finishing Ovid: relief. Of course. Now I get to read Augustine. I don’t like calling him “St. Augustine” because he’s not a saint. By that I mean he’s not better than other human beings. He’s not someone people should pray to. Great guy, maybe. Not a saint. The saints were created to replace the Greek pantheon. God had nothing to do with it.

If you had told me a year ago that I was going to have to read Augustine, I would have looked for a way out of it, as I did, successfully, back at Columbia University. After my ordeal with the Greeks and Romans, Augustine sounds like a trip to Disney World. Bring him on. I can’t wait.

The Sappho letter lends credence to the idea that Sappho was a truck-driving, Anne Murray-listening, overall-wearing ladies’ lady. She complains that Mr. Phaon has ruined her for women. After her Phaon fornication binge, women just don’t do it for her. Does this mean she was really a lesbian? I don’t think so. Ovid lived a long time after Sappho, so he probably didn’t know much more about her than we do. Once you get a reputation, justified or not, it tends to stick. Maybe Sappho had already been lumped in with the field hockey players and non-shavers of legs before he was born.

Maybe there is a document out there which proves Sappho liked women. I will never know, because I am done with the classics. I wouldn’t read another classic author even if his book was a collection of winning lottery numbers in Roman numeral form. But the document must not exist, because people who actually like the classics do not agree on her orientation.

I don’t know why I’m discussing this. Maybe it’s because it’s the only thing about Sappho that is even remotely interesting.

It’s hard to think of anything exciting enough to follow up speculation about whether Sappho was a flannel-wearer, but I will try: today my belt grinder is going to arrive. If Fedex gets it right. I ordered it a week ago, and the shipper decided to fix it so it required a signature, so I’m stuck at home.

I think I made a good buy. I’m spending maybe $200 more than the cost of building my own grinder, but I will save a pile of work and time, and it looks like the grinder I chose–the Oregon Blade Maker–is a tremendous deal and a good product.

I say that before trying it.

If Sappho were alive, I bet she’d have a belt grinder.

Is it okay to make jokes like that? I don’t actually care, but I guess these days it’s likely to bring out the pierced and tattooed villagers with thrift store torches and Ikea pitchforks.

The coming increase in the persecution of Christians is a frequent topic here, but there are some aspects I haven’t thought about yet. Here’s one that just occurred to me: we will probably be beaten and imprisoned by hipsters. That’s terrible. It’s embarrassing. I’m not sticking up for the Nazis, of course, but I feel like it’s less of a blow to your self-respect when the man who shoots you in the head is wearing a smart military uniform with shiny death’s head pins. We’re going to be murdered by “men” who look like Snuggles the Fabric Softener Bear with glasses. It will be like getting punched out by Truman Capote.

Suddenly the Romans don’t look too bad. Having your brains clubbed out by a 6’8″ barbarian centurion…that’s a man’s death. Centurions didn’t have to say, “Hold my latte,” before they killed people. We’re going to be slaughtered by the snowflake patrol.

I never thought musing about persecution would look like this. You have to wonder what people will make of it when I’m gone.

I would not be the first Christian to have a sense of humor about it. They say that when Lawrence was roasted on a grill (by the church), he looked up and said, “I’m well done. Turn me over!”

If I have to take sides, I think I’ll side with John, not Lawrence. Lawrence was grilled, and grilling is about health, not flavor. John was deep-fried. It didn’t take, but it was certainly a superior method of preparation. Now that we know KFC’s secret recipe, I can request to be breaded.

I look forward to trying the grinder, but it won’t solve my scale problem. I will still have to find a way to clean mill scale off of steel, without ruining the shape of the metal. A surface grinder would be great to have. Another possibility: buy steel a little oversize and put screw holes at the ends. Screw it to a big piece of metal, put the metal in the mill vise, and mill the scale off. The large piece of metal and the screws would hold it flat, better than a vise could.

While I wait for the grinder, I’m working on my next food project. I keep making large batches of food so I can reheat during the week instead of cooking from scratch over and over. Yesterday I gave up and bought collards, hocks, neck bones, corn meal, tomatoes, and Vidalias. I’m going to make collard greens and hoe cakes. I just hope I don’t overeat. This food will be off-the-charts good.

I look forward to making the hoe cakes, because I have a Griswold griddle I’ve never used. I Ebayed it and used electrolysis to get the crud off. It looked brand new when I was done. Then I seasoned it with bacon fat. It should be wonderful to use. A griddle is great for things like pancakes and crepes, because it provides easy access for a spatula.

I don’t think I’d want to be griddled. I keep hoping I’ll be hit by a meteor. I can’t come up with anything that beats that plan. Makes a mess, but that’s not my problem.

Maybe I’ll post a photo if I get the grinder running. Or maybe I’ll just lie on my back eating hoe cakes.

Ovid Knew When to Shut it

I am going to knock Ovid off today. I’m very grateful to have a short reading assignment to kill the taste of The Aeneid and help me heal from the boredom.

I’m done with Dido’s letter to Aeneas, and I just started someone else’s letter to someone else. It doesn’t matter who wrote whom; they’re fungible. One letter is almost exactly like another. Same voice. Same whiny, neurotic, meandering style. Does Tiger Beat still exist? They probably get letters like this all the time, scarred by clove-cigarette burns, with instructions to forward them to Justin Timberlake.

“My parents don’t understand our secret love. I know you were moved by the triquetra and unicorn I drew in the dust on the side of your tour bus. I totally understand why you had your security people restrain me while you drove away. They’re not worthy to witness what we’re becoming.”

Medea. That’s who it is. Medea wrote Jason. I don’t know anything about these two, except that Jason was in one of my favorite Saturday afternoon movies when I was a kid: Jason and the Argonauts. Jason roamed around in a boat, fighting cool Ray Harryhausen monsters. I loved that stuff. We didn’t have fancy CGI back then; some crazy old coot had to build statues and move them a degree or a millimeter at a time for the cameras. I thought it was wonderful.

To be clear, it’s Medea, not Madea. If you don’t know who Madea is, good for you. It’s a Tyler Perry character. If you don’t know who Tyler Perry is, see previous.

Tyler Perry created very bad TV shows, and somehow he became extremely successful. Now he creates very bad movies. I can’t understand his popularity. He uses BET-grade actors, and the scripts are like something I would have written in the sixth grade.

Back when I was at Trinity Church, they showed a Tyler Perry movie, which I’m sure they did not pay for. It featured a big family of miserable black people having a holiday meal and discussing infidelity and VD (each other’s). The message of the film: we should all admire good-looking guys who date extremely overweight women.

My feeling on the subject is this: people like what they like. If you prefer women under 300 pounds, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. If you like them big, it doesn’t make you a good person. Maybe you’re just an Arab.

Yes, they talked about VD and adultery in church, and not in a constructive way. The decision to show the movie was typical of the Wilkerson attitude. The obvious blew right by them. Any normal preacher would have thought, “Maybe this isn’t a great thing to show kids at 9 a.m.”

Trinity was maybe 80% black, and the Wilkersons knew the movie would please the crowd. The crowd’s happiness was always job one, and it still is. Feed the beast. If you don’t feed it, you can’t milk it.

Madea is Tyler Perry in a big flowered dress. I don’t know too much about “her,” but I believe she’s an angry and somewhat carnal church lady, sort of like Lamont Sanford’s Aunt Esther. As a Christian, I’m not a big fan of drag. The Wilkersons love drag. Their son and another pastor did a video in drag.

Madea does not figure heavily in Greek mythology. I guess that’s my point.

I still don’t understand why people admire Ovid. The letters he wrote are like something Bradley Manning might write to Justin Bieber. Stalkerish. “I hope you die. Well, no I don’t. Because I want you to live long enough to suffer for abandoning me. I’m not mad at you. Please come and kill me. If you have a minute.”

Our notions of romance have changed since the 19th century. Before that, it was perfectly okay to be a stalker. We admired stalkers. You could probably get away with that lifestyle up through 1920 or so. Now, we don’t think it’s romantic to mail someone your ear or jump on a bonfire because someone left you. We think it’s sick and crazy.

It’s a little unfair. We encourage young people to read stalker literature, and then we get mad when they grow up and hack the online accounts of people who dumped them, or when they cut themselves. We don’t expect them to take the things we teach them seriously. We expect them to have the good sense to be hypocrites, like the rest of us.

I don’t recall the Greeks getting excited about stalking. Maybe it started with the Romans. The impression I have is that in the Greek stuff, people who couldn’t let go were considered pathetic.

That would make sense. The Greeks admired moderation. Even in their rape, murder, pillage, arson, and theft.

A friend told me I was the least codependent person he knew, because I was so fast to cut people off and so serious about not taking them back. It was a nice compliment, but I clung to counterproductive people in the past, and that’s how I learned that it was better to cut out the dead wood and move on. I had to make a fool of myself many times before God helped me see what I was doing wrong. However I got here, you don’t have to worry about me stalking anyone now. I wish people the best, and I hope I manage to help a few get to know God, but I think my epitaph will be “Buh-BYE.”

I seem to be immune to loneliness these days. Years ago, it was a real problem for me. When I was living in Texas, undergoing the torture of toxic ADD drugs and consistent failure at my chosen profession, I had almost no one, and I was like one of those zoo animals that develop tics and repetitive movements because of isolation. Now I’m kind of glad I don’t deal with people too much. I guess some people go the St. John route, and others go Kaczynski.

When you’re around people too much, they pressure you to be what you don’t want to be. That’s fine if you’re three. You need the guidance. It’s not so good when you’ve gotten a glimpse of God and you’re surrounded by people who think carnality is the bomb.

After today, I am done with Greeks and Romans. I move on to Augustine’s Confessions, which could be a pretty good read. Surely it will not be full of two-paragraph similes, the way Homer and Virgil were.

The next assignment is actually a combination of Luke and John, but I’ve read those three million times, so I don’t plan to go back over them.

I will continue to regale you with tales of my scholarly exploits. I’m sure someone will want to publish my sophisticated insights. I think I’ll hold my breath until I get an offer.

In any case, I’ll get a little closure and redemption. And I will know where Phrygia is.