Archive for December, 2016

Today’s Minor Miracle: Welding Cast Iron to Stainless Steel

Saturday, December 10th, 2016

Explain This if You Can

I welded something successfully today, and I can’t figure out why it worked.

I bought a motor on Ebay. It had a cast iron base. The seller packed it badly, and the possibly resentful USPS people who handled it broke a foot off of it. I got a full refund, but I didn’t have to surrender the motor, and I haven’t found anyone who wants to buy it.

I looked into ways to put the broken bit back on. Ordinarily, people braze cast iron. It’s considered very difficult to weld (adding steel filler to it with high heat), because cast iron expands and contracts differently than welding wire, and the welds tend to pop as the work cools. To braze, you have to heat the part to something like 400 degrees. Then you melt bronze (I think) into it with a torch, and you cover the whole mess with welding blankets while it cools.

No way could I braze this thing, because if you heat a motor to 400 degrees, the windings melt.

You can also TIG weld it, but I don’t have a TIG welder.

I found some guy on the web claiming you can MIG weld cast iron with only a slight preheat–about 100 degrees–using non-magnetic stainless wire. You then “peen” the welds with a hammer or needle scaler to somehow or other counteract the problem with the welds opening. Maybe it expands the weld material horizontally.

It sounded nuts, but I asked around and couldn’t find a better idea, so I decided to try it.

Today I cut shallow v-grooves in the places where the parts met (standard when welding thick parts), and I cleaned them with alcohol to make sure there was no loose graphite on them. Cast iron is full of graphite, and supposedly it contaminates weld filler and causes problems.

I clamped the parts together with a Bessey clamp knockoff and started welding. Naturally I forgot to turn on the gas. The first two tacks were giant blobs that looked like sponges. I ground them down to start over, but I didn’t get all the crap out. Oddly, the welds held, and I was able to remove the clamp.

Someone on the web suggested using high wire feed. That was bad advice. Even after I turned the gas on, the wire spewed into the welds and made more blobs. I turned the feed down, but I never got it low enough to be controllable.

I also had trouble with my mask. I don’t think it darkened at all on the first two welds. I had to adjust it to the darkest level in order to see anything.

I continued making very small welds, peening, and waiting. That’s part of the technique.

When cast iron welds fail, they make a sound like “tink.” I never heard that sound. That surprised me, because what I was doing was sort of a Hail Mary job. I didn’t think it would work.

I got it welded up, and then I spent about ten years cleaning it up with the angle grinder and a rotary tool. A bolt has to go through the motor base, and that means a washer has to sit flat on top of it. The base will sit on a platform, so it has to be flat on the bottom.

Everything went fine, apart from welding very clumsily and making a mess. When it was done, I beat the part with the hammer’s handle, and I tried to pull it loose with my hands. I couldn’t budge it. I think it’s actually welded. It’s probably a D on a scale of A to F, but it’s not going to be under much stress. Maybe it’s not good enough, but I can tell you this: there is no way in hell I’m going to redo it until it fails again.

Because the weld didn’t fail, I’m not sure if I learned anything about welding cast iron. If it had failed, I would have known the method didn’t work. Because it doesn’t appear to have failed, I’m not sure what’s happening. Sometimes really bad welds seem acceptable at first.

Here’s something weird that appears to be true: it seems like it’s possible to weld stainless directly to cast iron, and that would mean it’s possible to build up stainless weld on a cast part. If that’s true, you should be able to coat one side of a part with stainless weld, make a stainless replacement for the other piece, and weld it to the congealed filler. If my weld fails, I plan to try that. Can’t hurt. Hey, it’s a free motor.

I don’t know what to do with the motor. I now have three pretty good motors sitting around doing nothing. The one I fixed is really nice. Maybe I could try to build a 6×48 belt sander. I don’t really need one, but they’re great tools to have. It would be nice to build one and have a disk sander on the side.

I wish I had some cast iron scrap. I’d practice welding it to see if my results could be trusted.

Also, it would be nice to improve the appearance of my welds. When I weld, all I see is arc glare and red metal. It’s blind luck if I hit the joint.

Here’s a photo. It may not look like it, but the welded-on part is aligned perfectly.

New Tool Knowledge

Saturday, December 10th, 2016

Try to Contain Your Excitement

I keep learning things about tools. It’s astonishing how much there is to learn about using the few simple items I have in my garage. People who really know tools must have stores of knowledge comparable to engineers.

A week or two back I created a new handle for my blow gun. Then something happened that required me to switch a tool from one air compressor to the other, and I realized I had a male fitting on the end of one hose and a female fitting on the end of the other. I could not switch tools without switching the fittings on tools.

This one left me scratching my head. Surely there was a right way to do this. Everyone else uses male or female fittings, but not both.

I kept thinking about the pluses and minuses, and I realized female was the way to go. If you put a male fitting on the end of a hose, the compressor will discharge every time you remove a tool. A female fitting will have a valve in it that shuts the air off.

Here’s the question: why did I have a male fitting on one hose? I must have asked about the correct fitting a long time ago, when I got my first compressor. I must have had the right information. My best guess is that I installed a new hose, ran out of fittings, and used what I had. Then I forgot to get a new fitting.

Anyway, whatever the explanation is, here is the answer: put a female fitting with a swivel on the end of your air hose.

In researching this, I also got into the subject of different types of air fittings. I know of three types, offhand: automotive, industrial (I think it’s also called “mechanical”), and universal.

In the past, I never thought about the type of air fitting I was buying. I just assumed they were the same. Then I found out about the different types, and I had a new research project on my hands.

Which is the best kind? NO ONE KNOWS. People do whatever they want. Believe it or not, there are regional preferences. In some areas, you want automotive, because that’s what everyone else has. In other areas, you want industrial.

To make things worse, there are rarer types. Some are supposed to provide superior flow.

A guy on a forum provided a great solution to my problem: universal female coupler and industrial male couplers. A universal female coupler will work with all male couplers. I went to Home Depot last night and got me a universal female coupler.

The replacement hose I bought is a Flexzilla. I agonized about which brand to get, and finally I decided to give Flexzilla a try. It’s bright green, so if you step on it, it will be a choice and not a mistake. It has no memory (I can relate). It’s light. I like it. If I hadn’t gotten a Flexzilla, I would have gone with rubber. Poly is too stiff.

I found out that machining coolants are more complicated than I thought. When I started, I learned to use WD40 on aluminum and Ridgid threading oil on steel, and that was about it. The other day I picked up a fantastic indexable end mill from Shars (where low-budget machinists shop), and I found that the finish varied, so I started looking into the problem. That’s how I ended up reading about coolants.

First, let me say the cutter is great. The big gripe with indexable cutters (cutters with several carbide inserts in the end) is that they give poor finishes due to minor differences in the heights of the cutting surfaces. I cut a piece of mystery steel, and the first 75% of the performance gave me an astonishing silky surface. Better than I could ever get with an end mill. The problem is that the finish got worse after that.

I am not knocking the product. It proved it can do a great job. I recommend cheap Shars indexable end mills. I paid a little over $30 for a 2″ mill complete with three no-name inserts, and it works. Check prices on American indexable end mills and see why I’m so happy.

I was cutting with a light application of Ridgid oil, even though a lot of people don’t use oil with carbide and steel. I read up on it, and I found a couple of sites that said interesting things. First, coolants and lubricants may be counterproductive. Second, it may be possible to grind HSS tools for aluminum that require no lube at all. Two different subjects (aluminum and steel).

One site said that liquid coolants chill carbide edges as they land on them, causing tiny stress cracks. Then the edges break down prematurely. The site suggested that the wear you avoid by using coolant is outweighed by the damage the coolant does. It said something about commercial shops spending 16% of their machining budgets on cooling and only 3% on tooling, which suggests the coolants cost way too much.

I don’t know if it’s true. I plan to throw some steel on the mill and find out.

Another site said clearing chips was the most important part of preventing finish issues. That sounds likely to me. The part I was machining had little swirling scratches on it, and I know they weren’t caused by the inserts. I think they were caused by bits of metal caught under the inserts. If that’s true, then I can get a beautiful finish on steel simply by blowing air on parts as I cut. It will blast the chips out. I think the oil may have made the finish worse by making chips stick to the metal.

A company called Kool Mist makes little devices that blow a mist of air and coolant on parts as you cut. I’m thinking I may get one and omit the liquid. It would blow chips away from my cuts. I’m positive I don’t need anything other than a light squirt of WD40 for aluminum, and it may be that I don’t need any liquid at all on steel.

I read that stainless is too gummy to cut without coolant, so I guess you just have to accept that.

To get back to the HSS/aluminum thing, I find it hard to believe that it’s possible to machine aluminum dry. It’s impossible with carbide in a mill, because the aluminum welds itself to the cutter instantly. I’ve never tried HSS dry on a lathe, but you can get away with carbide, although the finish is bad if you don’t lubricate.

I’m wondering what kind of rake I need to machine aluminum dry with HSS. Maybe I can find the info online.

I don’t think I want to machine that way as a habit, because I love carbide. You don’t have to grind it. Grinding lathe cutters takes a long time. Carbide inserts last forever in aluminum, and you can get a very nice finish. If I start messing with additional HSS tools, I’ll want to get more tool holders, and they weigh about ten pounds each. I feel like HSS is an answer to a problem I don’t have.

Why did I get into this quest? Because I failed at fly-cutting. A machinist I respect told me to fly-cut with high RPM’s, so that’s what I did with my mystery block. The edge of the bit kept wearing down as I cut. I had forgotten this crucial information: he was referring to aluminum, not steel. When I finally did it right, I had to turn the mill at about 100 RPM, which is ridiculous, and the finish was not that great. The end mill flies through work, and the finish is superior. Done deal.

Remember the treadmill my neighbor threw out? Probably not. I have the motor out, and I may want to machine the shaft to take a new pulley. A forum guy warned me about a potential problem. He said that if you take the armature out of a permanent-magnet motor (like a treadmill motor), the magnets will instantly demagnetize, resulting in reduced performance. Like life wasn’t complicated enough. He said you have to put a piece of steel between the magnets when you take the armature out.

This led to more research, and I learned some stuff.

In the dank, dreary past, many magnets were made from an alloy called Alnico (aluminum, nickel, cobalt, iron). If you shake it too much, it loses magnetism. If you drop it, it loses magnetism. If you take an armature out of a motor with Alnico magnets, it loses magnetism. Engineers designed iron objects known as “keepers” to insert in motors to prevent demagnetization when motors (or similar devices) are disassembled.

I found a couple of sites that said that Alnico is history (unless you play the guitar). Now cheap magnets are made from barium-ferrite powder, which can be cast in useful shapes. Barium-ferrite is supposed to be way less snowflaky than Alnico. More than one website told me it does not require a keeper.

The motor I have almost certainly has barium-ferrite magnets, because the next step up is rare earth, and rare earth magnets cost a lot. So I should not need a keeper (not the magnet kind). But the forum guy claims he ruined three treadmill motors just by removing the armatures briefly. So now I’m thinking I should find a piece of pipe and make a keeper, just to avoid the issue.

My small belt grinder has an armature that has been removed, and it works fine. I asked some electronics nerds on a forum, and they claim no keeper is required.

My advice: if you take a treadmill motor apart, use a keeper. Maybe it’s unnecessary, but it definitely won’t hurt, and it will cost you nothing or about two bucks.

What else have I learned? Let’s see. Belt grinders are fine for grinding HSS bits, but the bench grinder is faster, and it’s probably cheaper. Belts wear out fast.

Deburring…I learned about deburring. This means the removal of sharp burrs from metal parts. I have a worn-out belt on my small belt grinder, and I’ve been using it for deburring. It’s fantastic. One or two five-second passes will put a beautiful soft edge on a part. Try it. Don’t even bother with files. They’re for losers.

That’s all the earth-shaking information I have at the moment. I’ll leave you with a video of a guy using an indexable end mill to make a giant steady rest.

“IMMIGRATION! SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS!”

Thursday, December 8th, 2016

Time to Commence Deportations

I had a good experience this morning, and I figured I should share it.

For a long time, I have been obsessed with getting correction from God. He showed me that he wasn’t my genie or butler. His primary job isn’t to fix all my problems and make me rich, contrary to what I had heard from every single prominent charismatic preacher I had listened to. God helped me understand that the earth is like a uterus, and we are supposed to develop here before entering a superior world. That only happens when we accept correction. If you reject correction, you reject growth.

God also showed me that Christians–even Spirit-filled Christians–have resident demons. We give them power through our backward actions and beliefs. Youth is a particularly dangerous time, because young people don’t know anything. Their doors are wide open. By the time you get saved, you may have done a gigantic number of damaging things that opened you to demonic influence.

Let’s see if I can think of some dangerous things we do. Drugs, erotic entertainment, fornication, cultivating self-confidence, gossiping, hurting people unnecessarily with our words, violence, covetousness, cruelty, cowardice, gluttony, and idolatry spring to mind.

This morning I felt a horrible sensation inside me while I was praying. I felt that something foreign was there, and it was disgusting. Whatever it was, it was full of anxiety that radiated outward into me. I hated it. I wanted it out. I started asking God to tell me what it was and to help me get rid of it.

I started thinking about my experiences with drugs. You probably think I’m going to say I was a stoner in high school. No, I’m thinking mainly about stimulants and prescription drugs, and I’m including caffeine.

A year or two back, God told me this: “Caffeine destroys peace.” That’s clearly true, as anyone who has used a lot of caffeine knows. It makes you feel cheerful and energetic at first, and then you metabolize it, and you feel grumpy, anxious, and irritable. You may get headaches. If you quit for several days, you may get what doctors describe as “flu-like symptoms.”

I’ve used caffeine a lot. When I was in law school, I drank a quart of coffee during my first class of the day in order to help me deal with the boredom. Law isn’t all that boring, but it’s not exciting, either. It’s not physics or math. I needed help to make it palatable.

I’ve also used caffeine to get rid of headaches. Stimulants are great for headaches.

After I started praying in tongues daily, my caffeine tolerance disappeared. The other day I drank a glass of iced tea, and nine hours later, it kept me awake. I never had that problem when I was young.

I used several drugs in college. I never liked dope, but I did smoke it a few times just to be sociable. I tried a couple of weird drugs just because friends showed up with something new, and we tried them together. I also used cocaine, a stimulant, on a number of occasions. I liked it a lot, but when you come down from cocaine, you feel tremendous anxiety and guilt. I used nitrous oxide a few times. For some reason, it was popular at Columbia.

I don’t think the recreational drugs I used in college caused terrible problems, although I’m sure they generated some negative results. I think prescription drugs and caffeine were more harmful.

When I was being treated for ADD, they put me on Ritalin, which is a type of speed similar to amphetamines. Ritalin was great. It killed my headaches. It made me feel extremely relaxed. It helped me concentrate. But I developed such a tolerance I could take over a hundred milligrams a day. The pills kicked in in five minutes (not the expected half-hour), and they sometimes quit working after an hour or two, very suddenly. When that happened, I had to chew one or two 20-mg. pills to get back on my feet. It happened during my Advanced Mechanics exam during grad school, and also during the LSAT.

They put me on some other drugs which were horrible. They gave me an oil-soluble stimulant that stayed in my body for days. It made me angry and assertive, and it gave me a sex drive that would shame Bill Clinton. They also gave me some antidepressants which were supposedly helpful with ADD. I hated them. They filled me with anxiety and caused other problems.

Anyway, I didn’t use these things occasionally or sparingly, like recreational drugs. I used them daily, and I used some in huge amounts. I had to tell my doctor I was done with them. I quit. I never got addicted, so when it was time to quit, it was just a matter of throwing them out.

The time I spent on those drugs was the most miserable time of my life. No sleep. Very little food. Constant anxiety. Anger. Crazy sexual desire I could not get rid of. The last drug they gave me kept affecting me for weeks after I quit. It was bad.

I feel like I let some things in, and maybe some are still here! I believe I have to shut some doors.

I’ve been avoiding caffeine, but every so often I’ll have a Coke or some tea because I’m tired of water, and I’ve been having hot chocolate with breakfast because I want to add calcium to my diet. Chocolate has small amounts of caffeine, plus a milder stimulant called theobromine. Today I drank a boring glass of cold milk before breakfast. I just bought two bags of little dark Hershey bars to make hot chocolate, and I guess I’ll have to throw them out.

I wonder if the problem with drugs is that they take the place of God and deny him his glory. If I had had the presence of God and a good prayer life, I wouldn’t have gone to doctors to help me study. God would have helped me.

I know that the presence of God is like the effect of a drug. He emanates peace, joy, love, and a sense of complete relief and safety. Those are the things we try to get from drugs. Even things like beer and coffee. Living close to God is like being on a pleasant drug most of the time. There is a sort of buzz to it.

All over the US, doctors are pumping kids full of stimulants and antidepressants. It’s a wonder they’re not all insane.

I don’t have much faith in psychiatric drugs. People develop tolerances. Their responses change. If you know anyone who is bipolar, you know that every so often they flip out, and sometimes it’s because the medicine doesn’t work any more. We do what we can to help ourselves because we can’t find God’s help, and our own help isn’t very good.

We call people who drink and smoke weed “self-medicating,” but really, the whole human race is self-medicating instead of finding God’s cures.

It reminds me of what the Bible says about money. If you get it the wrong way, it causes remorse. God brings blessings without remorse. There is no crash after a dose of God’s presence.

Chocolate is great, but if it’s opening the door to illegal immigrants in my heart and mind, I can live without it.

Communion is essential. It’s mandatory. Christianity does not work without it. We have to examine ourselves with God’s help and get his correction. When we don’t do this, we continue damaging ourselves. This is why Paul said poorly performed communion causes disease and death. This is why God has made correction so important to me. It’s a cure. It’s a key that opens prison doors.

If you don’t have wine and crackers, do whatever you can. Pray for correction. Be as honest as you can with God. Pray for honesty! You can do that. God doesn’t want you to do it on your own.

I’m sick of certain parts of my personality, and I don’t think they’re completely mine. I have unwanted supernatural guests that influence me. That has to change. I feel like I live in a house with pigs that run around defecating on everything. That must be what it’s like for the Holy Spirit, who has to inhabit this mess.

Keep asking God what you’re doing wrong. Keep praying in tongues. Never forget that you’re surrounded by spirits, or that you have to address this problem. That’s what I take away from this.

Christians don’t want to hear this. They’re too arrogant. They think they’re perfect, and that no spirit other than God has any claim to them. People like that will be stuck here when God’s servants are taken from the world. Then maybe they’ll learn.

The other day God gave me this: “Thank you for giving us redemption instead of denial.”

I look forward to improving, and I definitely look forward to feeling more of God’s presence.

New Toys; New Projects

Wednesday, December 7th, 2016

Too Lazy to Post Photos

I have a few things going on in the shop. Figured I may as well write.

First of all, the woodturning tool rest is all finished. I haven’t used it yet, because I am thinking about dust collection, and I haven’t decided what to do about holding the tailstock end of the work.

When you turn wood in a lathe, you hold the left end in a chuck or some kind of spur, and the motor, which is at that end, turns the wood. The right end sometimes has to be supported, too. For that you are likely to use a live center. That’s a thing that has a point or some other grabby structure on the inboard end, to hold onto the wood.

To use my existing tailstock, I would have to extend the wood across the lathe’s carriage, and that would be a pain. I think I’ll make something that clamps in a tool holder. I’ll have to align it every time I use it, but how often will that be?

Dust collection is supposedly impossible with a lathe. You just reduce the mess as much as you can. I don’t have a dust collector. I have a shop-vac, which is made for a different job. A shop-vac makes air go fast in a small tube. A dust collector moves high volumes of air through a bigger tube. This is what I’m told.

Because there is no hope of good dust collection anyway, I think I’ll try the shop-vac. I plan to get a dust hood, which is a flat, rectangular piece of plastic shaped a little bit like a funnel. You aim it at your dust, and you hook a dust collector up to it. I think I’ll rest one of these upright on the lathe bed, with the hose going down through the openings. It should help a lot. At least it will get the big chunks.

I bought a two-tier welding cart, and I learned a lot about this type of product.

When you buy a Miller or Lincoln welder, you get a serious industrial product made in America, except maybe for the strange items Lincoln sells at Home Depot. I don’t know about those. If a cart comes with your welder, it will probably be a dubious item made in China, from Chinese sheet metal.

My welder came with such a cart. It works fine, but it’s not the greatest cart on earth. It’s a little short, so the tank bumps against the welder. Also, the sheet metal could be stronger where the tank sits. There are little locating tabs around the tank base, and they bend easily.

I also have a plasma cutter, which is similar to a welder in size and weight. It didn’t come with a cart. You can screw wheels to the bottom, but then you have a plasma cutter with no area for tool storage, and it’s way down on the ground.

I got an email from Eastwood, the company that sells reasonably good Chinese tools for working on cars. They advertised a two-tier cart. You can put a welder or plasma cutter on each tier, and it holds two tanks. The weight capacity is 350 pounds, I believe. It looked good, but it’s Chinese, so I looked at other products.

I found out that you can pretty much forget about finding a good US-made welding cart. Cornwell makes one (it may be Chinese, but it has Cornwell standing behind it), but they only sell them from Cornwell trucks. I’m not going to chase some guy in a truck. I ruled that out.

There are a zillion two-tier welding carts on the web, and almost all are the same model, made in China, rebadged. The weight capacity is not great, and they get mixed reviews. I decided to give up and go with Eastwood.

The cart arrived, and it took an hour to put together. It had one defective part, but I’m going to make them replace that. Basically, it’s a nice solid design. It has two shelves of fake diamond plate backed up by horizontal supports. The shelves aren’t bulletproof, but the supports are very strong, so the shelves are more than adequate. It has hooks for holding cords. It has tubes for TIG rods. It also has two trays to hold little items like consumables.

It will hold two large gas bottles, and it uses a wonderful system of sturdy steel hoops.

They must have had issues with the rear wheels and axle, because now it comes with a thick steel rod and two very heavy wheels with bearings.

I put my plasma cutter on the bottom and my welder on the top. Suddenly my garage seems twice as big. What a relief. I highly recommend this product. They say welders are supposed to build their own carts. I could not have made anything this nice, and the parts would have cost what I paid for the entire cart. Go ahead and make a cart if you want. I feel like I got a deal.

I would say the footprint of the cart is about 3′ by 2′, so it’s not small, but it will seem small once your welders, cords, and bottles are off of the floor.

In other news, a neighbor blessed me by throwing out a treadmill. I put it on my truck and hacked it apart. I came away with a 2HP motor and a linear actuator. There was also a lot of metal I might have used for welding, but I didn’t have any place to put it.

I am now working on a control apparatus for the motor. My first treadmill motor came with an MC-60 control board, and for that, all you need is a potentiometer. The current treadmill has an MC-2100 board. People on the Internet insist it requires a PWM (pulse wide modulation) input. I found a schematic for a simple add-on circuit, and I’m waiting for the parts to get here.

I’m thinking I’ll make a mandrel with a 1″ shaft and make myself a two-buff variable-speed buffer. Do I need one? OF COURSE. What don’t I need?

I did some research, and it looks like you want 5000-9000 SFM on a buffer, so I’ll want 8″ buffs and a fair amount of speed. The shaft has to be thick because buffers need long shafts, and long thin shafts wobble. With a long shaft, you have access to deeper areas on parts, and you can also mount sanding drums on the buffer.

Should be pretty cool. If I go through with it.

I also learned that you can use a 2×72 belt grinder to drive a buffing attachment. You buy a 2×72″ drive belt (not abrasive), and you make a buffing attachment that fits on the end of a tool arm. The belt drives the attachment. You can use it for anything that will work on a small arbor. It’s brilliant. Some day I want to try it. Depending on the VFD and the size of the pulley on the attachment, you can get a crazy-wide range of speeds.

Last thing: I’m turning a chunk of mystery steel into a bench block. I found it in an abandoned warehouse. It’s about 3″ x 2″ x 4″. I tried to fly-cut one side, and I learned this: fly-cutting is not for steel. With a 3″ fly cutter and an HSS bit, you have to do something like 90 RPM, and that takes forever. I burned up my cutting bit several times. With aluminum, you can run flat-out, but steel is not as friendly.

I suppose I could put a quality left-hand lathe tool in the cutter with a carbide insert, but for the moment, I’m going with an indexable 2″ end mill from Shars. I happen to have a box of TPMR inserts I bought by accident (no screw holes), and they will work with this end mill. It should be a lot better for steel, although the finish may not be fantastic.

A bench block is like a miniature anvil. You put it on your workbench and rest things on it while you work. You can put a groove in it to hold long things horizontally, and you can put vertical holes in it so you can drill things on the bench and go all the way through them. It’s a nifty item to have, and making it is good machining practice.

That’s about all I have at the moment. I may post photos later when I have more time.

More: Eastwood Rocks

The cart I bought from Eastwood had a minor defect, as I mentioned above. I got on the phone with them and told them about it. The cart has four tubular supports that hold the top shelf. Two are big tubes which are part of the cart’s frame. The other two are smaller tubes, maybe 5/8″ in diameter. On my cart, one of these tubes has crooked threads in the end, and it’s about 1/4″ too short. I had to shim it with washers to make it work.

Guess what Eastwood’s solution is? They’re sending me a new cart. They can’t pull the part and send it, and they don’t want the old cart back. Translation: free cart. I can fix the old one. It already works with the washer shims, but I can weld two ends in a piece of steel conduit and thread them, and it will be a perfect replacement for the defective support. I can even paint them black so the part looks OEM.

This is sweet. I don’t need two welding carts, but the cart doesn’t know it’s a welding cart. I can put my bench grinder on it, and I can put a buffer on the bottom shelf. I can put up to 350 pounds of stuff on it. I can even store extra gas bottles on it, if I choose to get into TIG or something that requires gases other than Argon/CO2.

Eastwood is kind of a neat company. They specialize in finding low-cost stuff that works reasonably well, and they are very aggressive about courting customers and making them happy. They’ve put a lot of self-help videos on Youtube.

I have a free 2HP motor, a free treadmill motor, a free linear actuator, and a free welding cart. What else do people want to give me?

Fast Food, Transformed

Sunday, December 4th, 2016

Let Ronald do the Work

I have decided there is such a thing as food being too good. You don’t actually need to levitate every time you have dinner. Food that’s too good will tempt you constantly. It will be hard to leave alone. You’ll eat more than you should.

That being said, I have a great tip for people who love McDonald’s breakfast food.

I saved some gravy from Thanksgiving. Today before I made my weekly trip to Mickey D’s, I heated the gravy up. When I came home, I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I dipped Mickey D’s biscuits in gravy while I ate.

This is probably the worst thing you can eat, short of pure nuclear waste. But it was phenomenal. I give credit where credit is due; Mickey D’s makes excellent biscuits. Add gravy, and you have something truly wonderful.

I don’t plan to do this again, because it’s way fattening, but it was a great experience.

If you don’t know how to make gravy, I can help you out.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup whole milk
2 tbsp. grease
1 tbsp. flour
1 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. sage
dash of dry white wine
salt to taste

You will want a couple of tablespoons of grease from a Thanksgiving turkey or breakfast sausage or bacon. Something like that. If you use sausage, forget the sage. The white wine is optional.

Get your grease hot (about 4 out of 10 on a digital stove). Fry one level tablespoon of flour in it. You don’t need to burn it. Just get the raw taste out of it. Stir it and smoosh it with a spatula while you fry it.

Add the milk and seasonings. Keep stirring until the gravy bubbles. It will thicken. Add a small amount of wine and cook the gravy until the consistency looks good. Remove it from the pan immediately.

That’s all you need to know. If you like it thinner, use less flour.

This should be more than enough gravy for two people who aren’t trying to kill themselves.

Enjoy.