Scratch That off the List

Three projects are behind me now: my welding cart, smoked ribs, and mac and cheese. Well, four projects if you include my new kitchen blackboard. I put a list of things to do on it. “Paint cart” is at the top.

The ribs are fine, except I think I should decrease the salt and avoid using too much rub. The mac and cheese was gritty in spite of using starch instead of flour. I’m melting the cheese too fast. The cart is just about perfect. Here it is.

I was going to wait for the paint to cure completely before assembling it, but it looked like it would hold up, so I moved ahead.

I already put two welders on it. I need to get a bigger C25 bottle. Perhaps tomorrow.

Once I get things settled, I’ll decide where to put cord hangers.

I hate to sell my Harbor Freight Vulcan cart. It’s a great tool. I just don’t need it any more. My Eastwood carts are okay, but they’re cumbersome, and they always seem to be in the way.

I plan to build a second cart as soon as possible. The workshop has to be tamed, and welding carts are central to the plan. Today after I finished this one, I experienced a taste of my future. Some Vise Grips and other tools were lying around in the way, and I grabbed them and put them in the cart’s drawers. It felt wonderful. I couldn’t see them any more.

I should probably be building a bulletproof cart with rifle ports so I can welcome uninvited Biden supporters (undocumented guests) in November and December, but maybe they’ll be too busy killing Republicans and running over cops in their own cities to visit me out here.

I wore my MAGA hat while running errands today and yesterday, and it seemed like I couldn’t go to a single store without being accosted and congratulated on my good taste. A guy who was rounding up grocery carts told me we had to keep praying.

I have 48 cans of tuna, my own well, and enough ammunition to kill a small city. I hope the rapture comes in December. If not, I think I will still make it through January.

Jim Beam and Corn Starch Trial #1

Our nation is hurtling downward toward chaos, BLM is trying to kill cops in Philadelphia, Christians are predicting a 2020 rapture, and what am I doing? I’m smoking ribs.

I’ve been eating cheeseburgers for lunch. There is nothing wrong with that, but I don’t want to eat a big cheeseburger every day from now on. When I got my new smoker, one of my hopes was that I would be able to increase my protein and fat consumption in style, while–I told myself–reducing refined carbs. Ribs and many other smoked meats aren’t served with buns.

I’m going to try to smoke once a week. That will cover me for three dinners.

Yesterday, I went to Walmart to buy motor oil. You should know about Walmart’s oil prices. Advance Auto Parts had a sale on oil, and it would have cost me about $40 to do one change, with a dubious filter included. I bought 6 quarts of synthetic oil at Walmart yesterday for about $16, and I bought a Fram Titanium filter at Advance. My total cost will be around $28. Not bad.

Anyway, Walmart’s price for St. Louis ribs was pretty good, so I picked some up. They’re smoking right now.

I wanted to marinate them, but I don’t like wasting marinade. I like to use liquor, so a pint costs a lot. Today I tried a new strategy.

Ribs come in shrink wrap. I have giant cattle hypodermics. I made a mixture of Jim Beam, sugar, and salt, and I shot it into the rib package through a tiny hole. I tried to cover the hole with tape, but it wouldn’t stick. I should have tried a waterproof bandage. Anyhow, it was not a problem. The plastic confined the marinade close to the ribs, and none spilled. I was able to rotate the package and distribute the marinade, and I put the package on the counter, meat side down, for half an hour.

It worked really well.

I used around half a cup of liquor. I can’t think of a better use for it. I wish it wasn’t a brand promoted by Mila Kunis, a well-known proponent of the murder of unborn babies, but it will do the job.

Last year, Jim Beam (part of a Japanese company) suffered a huge warehouse fire and lost 45,000 barrels of liquor. They told the press the lost whiskey was “young.” Eerie.

Smoking meat with a rub is not hard at all. I make my rub, put the meat on a towel, apply the rub, put the meat in the smoker, shake the towel out in the yard, and put the towel in the laundry. No mess to speak of.

As for my carb intentions, things are not going as well. The other day, I was starving after a long fabricating session, and I decided to throw some old stuff together and make macaroni and cheese. I got to thinking about it, and I wondered if putting flour in the sauce was a good idea. Flour doesn’t convert completely into a gel. Even in gravy or a roux, it’s slightly gritty. It occurred to me that starch might work better.

I Googled around, and sure enough, people do use starch. I’m going to try it today. I’m also going to use a block of cheese instead of shredded, because shredded cheese has tiny cellulose fibers in it.

The trick to making ribs part of a healthy diet is to stop thinking of them as special-occasion food. Ordinarily, when I eat ribs, it’s a big deal, so I want Texas toast, beans, mac and cheese, and dessert. The key is to think of ribs as just another protein.

Clearly, I have not met that goal yet.

The Smokin-It smoker is a joy to use. Highly recommended.

Workshop-Destroying Decluttering Project Nears Completion

The welding cart project is 95% done.

Today I welded some upright tubes on the tank platform. I thought they would be useful for holding little bars for hanging cables and cords. I haven’t welded any bars to them because I want to put the machines on the cart first. I thought that would give me a better idea where the bars should go.

When I was done welding, I separated the project from the chest and shot truck bed paint on it. It’s drying now.

Tomorrow, I plan to bolt the project onto the cart, put the machines on it, stuff it with welding tools, and clean up the shop. Then I’ll make decisions about welding hangers on it. I’ll have to grind some of the paint off in order to weld them on, but I thought it was better to do some of the paint over than to have to cut bars off and move them. That would require removing paint anyway.

I managed to flash myself while doing a tack weld. I had reading glasses on. Presumably, they absorbed some of the UV rays, but how much? I’ve been praying and using my supernatural tools to prevent pain and discomfort from developing.

It’s not a big deal. Every welder flashes himself sooner or later. Flash injuries are fleeting. Still, it’s frustrating to forget something so important.

There have been times in the past when I thought I had flashed myself, but I never had any pain later, so I was wrong, I was healed by God, or I didn’t get enough radiation to cause problems.

Once this thing is up and running, I’ll use it to make a second one for two other machines. Two new tool chests will really free up storage space.

So Close

I’m here to give an update on my welding cart project.

As usual, I am spending a lot of time trying to get materials and tools, and I am also making errors and changing the design. As a result, I’m not finished yet.

The cart will have an upper restraint for the bottles, and it will be steel plate. It will have 4 holes in it for TIG wire tubes. Today I drilled the holes.

I decided to make 2″ holes. I can’t see myself using tubes any bigger than that. I did not have a 2″ hole saw, and my hole saw arbor was lodged pretty well in a 2-1/4″ saw. I would guess it took me 20 minutes to get the arbor out, and then when I went to Tractor Supply to buy the saw their website said was in stock, I got skunked. Had to drive to Ace Hardware, miles away. I’m glad I did, because they had a saw with carbide teeth.

I measured carefully and started drilling holes. Then I looked at the finished work. I had drilled one hole about 1/4″ away from its intended location. It’s not easy getting a hole saw pilot drill into a small pilot hole, and apparently, I missed.

I wasn’t having it. I took a disk of steel I had just cut out of the plate, welded it back in, and ground it fair. Then I drilled a new hole. I guess I added 45 minutes of work to my day. Polishing the holes up took a while.

After that, nothing important went bad.

I made two tabs to attach the restraint to the cart. I drilled holes in them and attached them to the cart. Then I held the restraint in place and marked the locations of the tabs. After that, I had to weld them to the restraint.

With that done, I needed something to prevent the bottoms of my TIG tubes from sliding around. I bent a piece of flat bar on the finger brake, but I could only put one bend in it, and I needed a U-shaped bar with two bends. The required bends were too close together to work on the brake. My solution was to heat the bar with a torch and bend it in a vise.

I welded it to the bottle platform, and it came out pretty well.

I still needed two restraints for the outboard tubes. I cut 1″ pieces off a length of angle iron, cleaned them up and welded them down. Two of them are only tacked. It’s not possible to get behind them to weld, so I’m waiting until I take the platform off to weld them.

What remains? I plan to drill four holes in the upper restraint. I’ll use false links to attach chains to two of the holes, and I’ll use snap links to attach them to the other two. Then I’ll put tabs on the bottle platform to keep the bottles from wandering.

After that, I have to think about brackets to hold cables and cords. I may paint the existing work and finish it first. Once I’ve used the cart, I’ll have a better idea how to handle the cable brackets.

That’s about it. It’s going to work. The next cart should go much, much faster. I’ll know exactly what to buy, and I’ll have it on hand. I’ll also have a finished plan.

My workshop is in chaos. There are chips and filings all over the floor, along with cardboard from the tool chest box and bits of fallen metal. Tools are all over the place. I can’t wait to start shoving things into the new chest.

I may put the Titanium welder and the plasma cutter on this cart. I was thinking of putting the AC/DC TIG on it, next to the Titanium, but I seem to use plasma a lot, and I want this to be my number one cart. I don’t need two bottles for a welder and a plasma cutter, though. Maybe I can use the current shelf on the next cart and make a different one for this one. I could set it up for one bottle and use the extra space for a bracket to hold the plasma cutter’s air filter.

Anyway, success is fun.

Project Revived by Dose of Plasma

I got myself some more metal today, and I went back to work on the welding cart project.

This project should take a day, plus time for paint to dry. I had problems locating bolts, however, and then I decided to make the job harder than it had to be. I could have made a very simple top bracket for the bottles, but I’m making a fairly nice one that will hold TIG wire.

I had to make a plate with round recesses for the tanks. I didn’t HAVE to; I could have put something simple together from flat bar, or I could have made square or V-shaped recesses. But I wanted round recesses. That meant cutting steel.

I decided to use plasma. That meant I would need something to guide the torch. I thought a lot, and then I remembered I had several large cans of pizza sauce. They’re just the right size. If you press a torch against one and go around it, you get a cut just right for a 7″ bottle.

I won’t go into the complicated workholding solution needed to make this work, but I found a way to fasten the metal down, and I made the cuts. I left a little steel uncut to hold the plate together. Then I cut out the unnecessary steel and used the flap wheel to clean everything up.

Here is the result.

Should be perfect. I just need to weld brackets to it to attach it to the cart. I also have to drill the TIG-wire holds.

It should take half an hour to weld brackets on it, and if I don’t blow it, cutting the holes should be another 15 minutes. Then I have to add chain attachments and paint.

It’s basically done. Not hard at all.

Some carts like this have widened wheelbases under the bottles. I don’t see a need for that. You could knock it over with a car if you tried, but then you could also do that if it were 6″ wider. Short of a vehicle collision, nothing is going to topple it.

If I decide I’m wrong, adding a little steel and moving casters will be easy.

I can’t wait to get finished. The more I work on this thing, the more I realize I need it. There is clutter all over my welding table. I can barely see it. Most of that junk would be inside the tool chest if it were operational.

As soon as this thing comes together, I plan to fill it up and move one empty cart outdoors. Then I plan to get another tool chest and do the job over again, for my other MIG and my plasma cutter. Then I can sweep about 50 pounds of chips, steel filings, and grit off the workshop floor.

After that, I may actually buy a real welding table.

I’m in a frustrating position. The shop is a mess because I’m doing a project, but the finished project is needed to conquer the mess.

The pizza sauce can was not harmed. Thank God for that. That stuff is gold.

I Have a Panic HOUSE

Today I am having my roof fixed. I’m paying $1000 for something I could probably do myself, but I am not interested in rolling off the roof and becoming a permanent yard ornament. I’m also not excited about having my ceiling fall because I didn’t know how to do roofing correctly.

I wanted to put blinds in my former dining room before the roofers showed up. Why? Because it’s a workshop/gun room now. I have a lot of ammunition in that room, and anyone looking into a window would know what it was. These days, ammunition is like gold. You can buy it, but if it’s a popular caliber, you’re likely to shell out three times what it cost last year.

Roofing companies are a top resource for released prison inmates. If you can’t get a job anywhere else, a roofer will probably take a chance on you. Good information to have, if you’re a homeowner or, perhaps more importantly, a homeowner’s wife or daughter. The thought of an electrician or plumber seeing my stuff doesn’t concern me all that much. Roofers are different.

Sadly, I signed a contract before buying blinds, and I didn’t think I had time to get them installed before the roofers showed up, so I didn’t do anything.

Today the roofers showed up without warning, so moving my ammunition out of sight, one container at a time, was not an option. Someone was looking out for me, however, because I had my ammunition loaded on a wheeled shelf unit. I rolled it into a hallway, and I was all set.

I should have bought these shelves a lot sooner. I cheaped out at first. I bought plastic shelves from Home Depot. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. They run $40 each, and when you overload them, they bend. Mine bent. The shelves I have now are fancy chromed Seville Classics jobs from Amazon. I have two units. One is mostly dedicated to ammunition. The other is for reloading components and other items. I have hundreds of pounds on the first one, and it’s not sagging at all. Wish I could say the same of myself.

I moved one of my plastic shelves to the laundry room, where it has become my paranoia storage area.

I went to Walmart yesterday for dishwashing powder and salt, and I bought a big, heavy bag of jasmine rice. I also picked up 4 pounds of great northern beans, canned salmon, two large jars of Skippy, and 6 pounds of pasta. This is a lot of food. One person could probably go a month on it. I also have 6 gallon cans of Stanislaus pizza sauce.

You would think a long-term food supply would take up a lot of room and cost a lot of money, but you would be wrong. My shelf unit is maybe 25% full. My total bill at Walmart was around $80, and I bought a lot of things unrelated to preparation.

I plan to add more rice and maybe some different beans. I have 48 cans of tuna on the way. I want to dry apples. When you’re from Appalachia, not having dried apples is uncivilized. Ordinarily, drying apples is a pain because of bugs, but I have a screened-in pool, so no flies.

I checked into generators. Not a great option, unfortunately. I would have to spend close to $20,000 to get a whole-house rig that would cost me $5 per hour to run. That’s about $3600 per month for electricity, assuming diesel would even be available, and the price would go way up in a crisis. Unless you have your own natural gas well or hydroelectric plant, I think you can pretty well expect to do without power in a hard core prepper scenario. Maybe you can run your laptop off solar panels.

I wonder if people are buying manual pumps for their wells.

There is zero fresh water near me, unless you count swampy ponds.

I suppose I’ll have to hope we still have power during the civil war.

The Internet says my power company uses a mix of coal, uranium, “biomass,” and natural gas. What is “biomass”? Chicken manure, maybe? Is there anything chicken manure can’t do?

Let’s see. Coal comes from the South, so that may still be available after the North turns on us. Natural gas comes from the South. I would guess that biomass comes from the South. Would we still have nuclear power? The plants are in-state, but would we be able to get uranium? Maybe the Chinese would sell it to us on Alibaba or Banggood.

There is a lot of oil in Jesus-friendly areas, and there are also many refineries. That’s good.

If you would like to dry your own apples, I have the ultimate tip. Spend $25 on an apple peeler. They really work. You can core, peel, and slice an apple in 5 seconds. I should go get apples today. You can dry them by setting them on a window screen.

I don’t like factory dried apples, because they put a chemical on them to keep them white. It kills the flavor. To get the real flavor of dried apples, you need to avoid that stuff. Real dried apples taste like apple butter. Factory apples taste like air.

The future is uncertain. Are we looking at a few weeks of pro-Biden terrorist riots followed by a crackdown and resumed calm, will we have a full-blown civil war complete with drawn borders, or will we simply move into an Israel-type situation in which terrorism is a normal part of daily life? Actually, we’re already in that situation, except that the acts of terrorism committed here haven’t been as serious as the ones Israelis face.

A full-blown civil war with new borders would be a catastrophe, because leftists would freeze or simply steal the bank and security accounts of conservatives and centrists, and they would also cut off our access to phones, the Internet, and credit. Leftists would probably be massacred routinely due to their inferior capacity for violence. They’re pretty good at throwing bottles of pee, but they would do poorly while trying to familiarize themselves with firearms, camouflage, tactics, and so on. Jesus people have been shooting, hunting, and serving in the military for centuries.

My hat is off to people who think they can do well after a total breakdown of society. It would be very hard to prepare sufficiently well to guarantee that. I figure it’s realistic to prepare for a bad month or two, tops, and I see no hope of providing my own electricity over long periods. I will have to bank on a future in which companies in my area adapt and continue producing power.

Should I cut some firewood? Arrgh. Anything but that.

In my area, I would probably need wood for maybe 45 days. That’s a lot of wood. To prepare it, I would need to create huge snake-infested piles which would eventually attract termites and rot.

I have a lot of downed wood already. Maybe I should just wait and see what happens. I can cut it into firewood if I have to. I was going to burn it, but maybe it has value.

In any case, there is no possibility my ammunition will get the roofers excited today.

Harbor Freight Makes Dreams Come True

A major welding project crossed a big threshold today. I finished principal welding on my new welding cart. I’m making it from a Harbor Freight tool chest.

This job should have taken one day, but the chest takes metric fasteners, and I’m using the original threaded holes, so I can’t jam standard bolts in. It took me about 4 days to round up 16 bolts. I had to go to three different stores. Metric may be here to stay, but Home Depot and Lowe’s haven’t gotten the news.

I’m planning to make a second cart, so I’ll need 16 more bolts. I ordered a box from Ebay, so when I get started on the second cart, I’ll have bolts waiting.

Yesterday, I welded the cylinder platform to the two tubes that form the new base, and today I welded two casters to the tubes and painted the area around the casters with truck bed coating. Why didn’t I wait until the project was done to do the painting? I could have painted everything at once. The reason is that I wanted to get the welding over with, and I need to have the cart assembled, on casters, before I can do that. I need to weld tabs on the platform to keep the bottles from moving, and I want to put bottles on the cart when I do this, to see exactly where the tabs should go.

I put everything I have together. Feast your eyes.

That platform is 11-gauge steel, which is slightly under 1/8″ thick. I was concerned it might flex if I put two bottles on it, because there is no transverse member to make it rigid. It sits on two 1″ x 3″ tubes. I got on it and jumped up and down, and it didn’t move at all. I guess it’s okay.

Why did I put the casters way out behind the bottles? On the one hand, it increases the turning radius, which is bad. On the other, it gives 200 pounds of bottles direct support instead of hanging them out on a steel diving board. I suppose a cantilevered platform would work, but I didn’t like the idea. If I change my mind, moving the casters will be a one-hour job. Maybe half of that.

I still have to create an upper bracket to restrain the bottles. There are two bolt holes made for a handle, and I would like to use them because they’re threaded. The problem is that they’re so high, I would have to make a pretty strange bracket to hold an 80 cubic foot tank. I may get rid of the small tank and buy another 125. You can never have too much gas. Maybe I could trade the 80 for something exotic, if I can think of a gas I might use on rare occasions. Or maybe Airgas would give me an allowance for it if I buy a new bottle.

My tendency is to buy small tools and upgrade later. I’m always afraid to buy things I can’t lift, and so on. Maybe I should never have bought a small C25 tank.

Once the bracket is done, I have to make some doodads to hold cables, and I have to attach them to the tool chest. I hate to drill holes in it, but I will. After that, I just have to paint and move everything to the new cart.

This will be great. Two machines will fit on it, and they’ll sit at eye level, where they should be. A great deal of welding paraphernalia will go in the drawers, so I won’t keep leaving junk on my table. I hope. It will be a big cart, but it will hold way more stuff than my old carts, and they have about the same footprint.

It’s always great to reach the point where you know a project will work, especially when you’ve sunk hundreds of dollars into it.

Trump Milkshake: Existential Threat to Mankind

Two huge stories are in the news today. It’s hard to decide which one to write about.

For a long time, I felt God was telling me to avoid looking at the news. That was pleasant. Now I feel he is telling me I have to look at it. What’s the difference? I believe the difference is in me. It used to be harder for me to look at the news without being provoked or discouraged. Now, with better supernatural tools, I am more stable, so the news is not as dangerous to me.

“Dangerous”? I must be a Bible-thumping climate-change-denying mask hater! How can information be dangerous? Actually, it can. The informative value can be exceeded by the damage it does to your heart. This is one reason why God tells us to be separated from the world. Merely witnessing what happens around us can tempt us in ways that can be destructive. You have to limit your exposure to the cursed, God-rejecting world in order to avoid being overwhelmed.

Here are the big stories: President Trump has proven his unfitness for his job by ordering a milkshake, and Pat Robertson has “prophesied” regarding the near future of America.

I know it’s hard to believe that a grown man with responsibilities would order a milkshake, but Trump did it. He was in a security briefing, and he called a waiter into the room and offered everyone a malt. We can’t say for sure, but there is no proof he didn’t tell the waiter to hold the nuclear button while he tweeted. There is no proof it didn’t happen, so we can assume it did. When will this man be stopped?

“Journalists” are enraged. They are offended, so they must be right. The theory is that our elected and appointed officials would continue spewing dangerous information while a waiter was in the room, because, well, THERE IS NO PROOF THEY DIDN’T. There is also no proof they or the waiter renounced white supremacy.

I guess I’m a feckless optimist, but I can’t help thinking top officials would stop blurting out sensitive intelligence while ordering milkshakes from a person with a low security clearance.

If hackers take out our missile silos as a result of Trump’s milkshake gaffe, it will just be more proof Trump isn’t groovy. Bush II wasn’t groovy, and now we have another non-groovy chief executive, and I just can’t stand it one more second.

I should rejoin Tiktok just so I can get in the car and do a meltdown video.

As for Pat Robertson, he says he “thinks” Trump will be reelected. Prophets don’t “think” things will happen. God tells them things will happen. God will never tell you he “thinks” this or that, because God knows. There are no opinions in heaven. There are only facts no one there questions.

Anyway, Robertson says there will be post-election bloodshed followed by a 5-year period of peace in which people will serve God and pray together and so on. He says God will resolve people’s disputes. Then there will be a big war, and I believe he said the second coming would come after that.

Can’t buy it. It doesn’t seem to line up with the Bible or the dreams and impressions charismatics have been having this year. I have not seen a reference to a 5-year Messianic age in which the world gets straightened out. The Bible says there will be a millennium of peace, not 5 years. I don’t know where Robertson got his timeline.

I keep saying I have a very strong impression that the rapture will be this year. I don’t call it a prophecy. I haven’t found any ways in which the impression conflicts with the Bible, and it makes sense in too many ways to list. But I make mistakes, and God didn’t hand me a scroll with a detailed prediction on it.

I “think” I’m right. I’m just about sure Robertson is wrong.

He claims to receive information from God about people’s problems, and viewers have called in and said they’ve been healed while watching him. They idea is that God told Robertson these things but did not attach names to them, and when Robertson says “someone” has this or that problem, people who are watching realize he’s talking about them. There is considerable evidence that this actually happens, and I don’t get supernatural information about strangers’ medical issues, so who is more likely to be right about the future?

Just putting it out there.

I’ve decided to buy a little food. You never know. I ordered 48 cans of tuna at a great price, and I’m going to load up on dried beans and rice. I plan to lay in some canned salmon. Canned fish lasts forever, and beans and rice are good for at least a couple of years. Maybe I should get a big jar of compensational multivitamins, too. For maybe $150, I can set myself up with food for several months. I’m not very excited about it. I don’t want to be here to eat it! I heard someone is throwing a big party in heaven, and the food there should be a lot better.

I should dehydrate apples. Imagine life on beans and rice without anything to help push them through the colon. Apples could save my life.

My ammunition situation is good. Example: a couple of days ago I found 1000 rounds of 9mm bullets I had forgotten I had. I need to put them in cartridges.

I bought lead semiwadcutters and started loading them, but I found the overall lengths were not consistent. People said it might be that compressed air in the cases was pushing the bullets back up. The recommended answer: coated bullets. I bought more semiwadcutters coated with plastic. I don’t recall how plastic solves the problem, but I’ll try it. I believe the coated bullets have less grease on them. The uncoated ones left lube all over my dies, to the point where I was afraid it interfered with reloading.

I have no desire to be part of the upcoming civil war, but I like to shoot, and I don’t want to be deprived. And maybe someone who is part of the war will need my ammo.

I want to be ready for whatever happens. These days, I battle demons, literally. I evict them from my presence several times a week. I tell them I will not host them. It’s a very strange thing. After going after a few spirits–let’s say murder, the spirit of antichrist, and laziness–I’ll start to fall asleep. It happens over and over. I think this is because hostile spirits speak into your mind all the time. When you drive them out, you get some quiet.

It’s a very real thing. Everyone has demons. Jesus had Satan himself and had to drive him off more than once. It’s strange that Christians think they can’t have demons, but Jesus could have Satan. Are we better than Jesus?

I now pray for God to bring the rapture ASAP. The more I think about it, the more I realize humanity has had ample chances. The Bible says stripes are for the fool’s back. Some people can’t take gentle hints. Maybe the tribulation will bring a bigger harvest than the rapture. Maybe billions of scoffers will yield once they’ve suffered enough. God has been kind, and things have gotten worse, so maybe it’s time to put away the carrot and bring out the stick.

The thought of being in the lifeboat and encouraging the captain to paddle away from people floating in the water is a little scary, but look at what the world has become.

I don’t want to be here when I can be fined or jailed for refusing to call a man a woman. I don’t want to live to see wealth taxes and “reparations”-based land confiscations. I don’t want to see Christian and Jewish families massacred and raped. I’m very content with the evil I’ve already seen. It will suffice.

When the Tiktok car-meltdown people are in charge, it’s time to be somewhere else. Ask a Cuban or a white South African.

Today I plan to work on my new welding cart. I have to do something while the world burns, and I can’t play the fiddle.

Pork, Guns, and God

I barely survived the weekend.

Two friends of mine drove up on Saturday morning, and they left yesterday. I’ll call them Diamond and Silk. They’re sisters. Diamond is a nurse, and Silk is a newly-minted prosecutor for a Florida county. They’re Haitian. I met them when I was going to Trinity Church in Miami.

We made a deal. I would fix ribs, and they would do all the cleaning up.

I bought two racks of spare ribs, which were twice what we needed. I found a Youtube video on turning spare ribs into St. Louis ribs, and I followed the directions.

Spare ribs have little ribby bits on one side, and the other side is a large piece of boneless meat. When you cut that piece off, you get a piece of meat you can smoke, along with a rack of ribs that are somewhat like baby backs, only fattier and more delicious.

I didn’t really know what was inside spare ribs. I never bothered to figure out where the bones stopped. I was afraid I would need a saw to make St. Louis ribs. Not so. You just cut where the ribs join the cartilage which connects to the sternum. I’ll post a very helpful video.

I think this is a great move. It gives you small ribs that are easy to handle, plus a large piece of meat which is good in its own right.

I smoked the ribs with 2.5 ounces of hickory and my own rub, after hosing them down with Jim Beam. They were spectacular. It should have been illegal to put sauce on them. But we did.

I also made Texas toast. I made a loaf of sweet white bread with butter and sugar in the dough, and then I dipped slices in strained garlic butter (no garlic pieces) and browned them in a skillet. Unbelievable.

I also prepared a blueberry cheesecake. I’m glad I don’t have any of it left, because this stuff is just too good to not eat.

We also had corn on the cob and barbecue beans with smoked sausage bits.

I think I can safely say that no one in Florida ate better than we did this weekend.

We talked a lot about the rapture and the tribulation. Diamond is taking it seriously. She has bags of rice and beans. She had a dream about moving to Tennessee, even though it’s not what you would call her natural habitat. Silk is not all that aware, so she is still a Democrat. She’s baptized with the Holy Spirit, though, and I have confidence she’ll come around if she speaks in tongues as much as she should. Nothing turns people conservative like prayer in tongues.

We got to shoot a little. I have two arrays of steel targets, welded together by yours truly. Diamond has a Ruger EC9, which is a plastic compact 9mm, and Silk has a Smith & Wesson Bodyguard in .380. Unfortunately, they are not integrated tightly into the 2A cult, so they were not ready for the ammo shortage. Diamond had one 50-round bag of ammo, and Silk had nothing.

Luckily for them, they know a guy who was watching the wind. I have .22 ammo to burn, so I used some of it to teach them to shoot. We used an SW22 and a Colt Woodsman. At first, they were shooting all over the place, but by the end of the day, they were hitting the steel most of the time at 7 yards. I also let them shoot my bright stainless Colt 1911 in .38 Super.

Now maybe there is a chance they’ll be able to defend themselves instead of pulling a Pulp Fiction scene and filling walls with wasted lead.

Watching over Diamond and Silk is like looking after 6 hyperactive kids in a mall, so I was pretty worn out when they left.

Today, I got back to my routine.

I had ordered 5 pounds of smokeless powder, and Fedex failed to show up when they promised. To take delivery, I had to sign in person, so I had to either sit at the house and wait or go to the Fedex hub and pick up the package. I was afraid they would send the powder back, and in these times, you can’t afford to lose any powder. Today I went to the hub and picked up the box.

I also went to get my new .22 pistol. It’s a Browning Challenger I, made in Belgium. I think I already wrote about it. I found it on Gunbroker. It looked very good, an excellent specimen is worth $700, and no one was making reasonable bids. All told, including a transfer fee and shipping, I paid about $477.

This is a marvelous pistol. The trigger is magnificent, the bluing is in very good shape, and it shoots beautifully. A real addition to my collection.

I thought it was in near-mint condition from the pictures, but that isn’t true. I can see it has been fired a lot, and the bluing on the forward side of the grip has thin places where two fingers rested on it, but still…$477.

I hope nothing goes wrong with it, because Browning is not good about supporting the model. They aren’t working very hard to make parts for middle-aged pistols.

Yesterday, once I was alone, I assembled some new shelves for the gun room. When I moved my stuff in there, I bought two $40 plastic shelf units from Home Depot and loaded them up. Sadly, they were not up to the weight of ammunition and reloading components. They bowed. I ended up with boxes all over the floor, because I had nowhere to put them. I broke down and ordered two Seville Classics (really Shanghai Classics) rolling steel units. I got them for $150 each. For some reason, the price fluctuates during the day, and I caught them on a dip. They were $168 when I first put them in my cart.

These shelves can hold 4000 pounds if you put feet on them. If you use wheels, the capacity drops to 500 pounds. I guess the spindles on the wheels bend. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious the shelves are not the weak points, so it’s okay to put a great deal of weight on a couple of shelves per unit, as long as you don’t overload the remaining shelves. I filled the lower shelves with ammo and brass. Then I put other junk on the other shelves. No problems. They roll around just find, and nothing is bent.

I was able to keep one Home Depot unit for light objects, so now I have a lot of storage, and I can see the floor. I can actually find things now.

I’m going to get back to work on my tool chest welding cart conversion. I should go ahead and buy a second tool chest.

The year 2020 keeps getting better. I hope it’s a trend that continues through the rapture.

I Love to Work at Nothing all Day

I’ve had a somewhat arduous couple of days. I bought another gun, and there were problems. On top of that, my car’s air conditioning went out, and I became obsessed with fixing it. Finally, I have two guests coming for the weekend, so I’ve been cooking and trying to make the house presentable.

Why did I buy another gun? Because I could, mainly. Also, I had no deer rifle. I had a couple of Eastern-bloc guns that could be used for deer, and I also had an LR-308, a PSL, a Saiga-12, a Ruger Precision Rifle, and a K31. I didn’t have anything a normal human being would use.

Well. I did have a 16-gauge FUDD shotgun, but that’s an unusual choice.

I went with 6.5 Creedmoor. In my opinion, it’s the new .30-06. If someone tells you to get in the truck and go hunting in North America, and all you know is that the prey is over 50 pounds, the 6.5 Creedmoor will kill it. The .30-06 and its short-action copy, the .308, are pretty much obsolete because the 6.5 Creedmoor does everything they do, better. The 6.5 is very, very popular, and the simple reason is that it made a number of older calibers unnecessary. It’s a great hunting round, and because it’s popular, there are a ton of different factory loads for it. If you don’t like factory loads, there is a world of load data available. It’s the Glock of rifle calibers. It’s common, and it works well.

I decided to splurge this time. I love Savages because they’re very accurate and not expensive, but this time I moved a few links up the food chain and bought a Tikka T3x Superlite. Tikka is a Finnish company, and they do very good work. I believe Tikka is really Sako now, and it’s also Beretta. I’m not sure. Gun companies gobble each other up like crazy; Remington/Marlin is now Ruger, for example, and Thompson/Center is Smith & Wesson. Anyway, the name still exists, and they still make the guns in Finland, so the quality has been maintained. So I’m told.

The Superlite is a real hunter’s gun. It’s very light, as you might deduce from the name. The whole thing weighs 6 pounds. It has a fluted stainless barrel and a fancy plastic stock covered with a camo pattern. It only holds three rounds in the box, so it will be one of the last guns President Harris confiscates, assuming people follow through on their insane threats to vote for Biden.

It still amazes me that people take him seriously. It’s not surprising that he became Vice President, because that’s a position typically occupied by certified cretins, but putting him in the Oval Office and actually letting him sit behind the desk is about like putting an unelected third-rate lawyer in charge of a nation’s healthcare simply because her husband won the presidency.

When I was a kid, sometimes my dad would let me sit on his lap and steer the car, but he never got out and told me to go pick up some bread.

I ordered the Superlite from Bass Pro’s website. I had been looking for a Superlite in a color I could stand, and when I saw it at Bass Pro, I couldn’t resist. The picture on the site showed a nice right-handed bolt gun. When I ordered it, I got an email that showed the same picture. When I looked my order up on the site later…same picture.

You can see where this is going.

I went to pick the gun up, and the girl at the counter asked if she should insert the bolt for me while I was inspecting it, and I told her not to bother. Then I got home, inserted the bolt, and noticed it was on the wrong side of the gun.

I had a $1000 non-returnable left-handed rifle.

I called the local Bass Pro immediately, and they told me not to fire it. They said to wait, and they would call me back. I also called the website’s number, and I got an Indian guy with no authority. All he could do was repeat their no-return policy.

At least I think that’s what he was repeating.

I said I knew there was someone there who could make a return happen, and I asked to talk to that person. That person was not even a little helpful. She refused to even discuss a return, and she said I might get somewhere talking to the local people.

Gun shops do not like to take guns back. The rationale is that once a gun goes through a background check, it’s used. Do you buy that? I don’t work at a gun store, but it’s hard for me to believe the government has people who go around to places like Dick’s and Cabela’s, checking serial numbers to see if they’re selling NICS-processed guns as new. I don’t believe that happens. I think gun stores are just worried about idiots who shoot 100 rounds, get buyer’s remorse, and try to bring back dirty guns.

Change my mind.

I’ve probably returned 25 new items in their original packaging to retailers over the last year, and never once did anyone tell me they would have to be sold as used goods. Not until yesterday, when it really mattered.

Anyway, the local people called back, and they said they would be more than happy to take a return. And they had the right-handed version of the gun at the store, for $50 less. They tried to do the second background check without charging me, but the system would not let them. They accidentally refunded me over $9 for something I hadn’t paid for, and when they caught it, they told me not to worry about it.

God bless them. I think I could actually have made a profit reselling the gun on Gunbroker, but I might also have taken a $300 loss, and I did not want the hassle.

I made 4 45-mile trips between my house and Bass Pro, and I had to wait for two background checks in one day. That killed Thursday for me.

Next time I buy a new gun, I will examine it like an MSNBC grunt trying to find racism in a video of Trump eating a bologna sandwich.

Have I actually hunted for deer? Well, no. But I am determined to get around to it.

On the third trip, I noticed the car’s air conditioning was blowing warm. Great. I also had a problem with the car overheating at low speeds. I believe this is because the water bottle I jammed between the idiotic louvers on the radiator has flattened out.

Many cars now have shutters on their radiators. They make cars slightly more aerodynamic at high speed, and this gets you…get this…a 1% increase in gas mileage. Look it up. These shutters break down all the time, and replacing them is a giant job. Mine failed, and when I realized how worthless they were, I decided the best thing was to prop them open. I plan to put a screw in the frame to keep them open permanently. There is no down side to keeping them open, apart from that gigantic mileage decrease.

This is where leftism, which is behind the radiator shutters, gets us. It gives you a $300 part that saves you $5 per year for three years and then fails.

Wonder where the energy to make the part and ship it comes from. Fairy flatulence, I guess.

I’ve learned a great deal about air conditioning since last night. First of all, my car’s compressor isn’t turning on. The electromagnetic clutch won’t engage., There are a bunch of possible reasons. There is a fuse. There is a relay that turns the compressor on. If the system is low on refrigerant, it refuses to engage the clutch. There is a refrigerant pressure switch, and if it goes bad, the system thinks the gas has leaked out, and the compressor doesn’t turn.

Today I spent a great deal of time fooling with the car. I replaced the relay with a horn relay that was next to it. No joy. I checked the fuse. It was fine. I bypassed the relay, and the compressor turned, causing the air to blow cold. I tried to shoot some refrigerant into the system, because I figured that would tell me whether lack of refrigerant was the problem. It didn’t help.

I’m down to two likely possibilities. Either I failed to get enough refrigerant into it to make it catch, or the pressure switch is bad. In any case, the only way I can get cold air is to jam a paper clip into two holes the relay used to fill. That won’t get it done.

I forced myself to give up on the car. I had to clean up the house. I’m way behind. I also had to make a cheesecake for my guests. Right now, I’m writing to kill time while it bakes (instead of doing more cleaning).

Tomorrow, I’m going to make smoked spare ribs, barbecue beans, Texas toast, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese. And yes, I plan to make my guests clean up the kitchen. Because I expect to be recovering on the floor.

I should have bought smoked sausage to go in the beans. Didn’t occur to me. I bought bacon instead. Still, it should be one of the best meals served in the state tomorrow, barring a mishap.

The cheesecake is now cooling. You are dismissed.

Welding Junk Soon to be Off Table

It looks like my welding cart project is going to work perfectly.

To recap, I saw a kit for turning a Harbor Freight tool chest into a welding cart, and while I thought the idea was brilliant, the kit was obscenely expensive. Instead of spending $310 on a kit I would have to attach to a chest and then paint, I decided to spend more like $85 on metal and truck bed coating to make my own kit.

My plan was to run two rails under the chest and extend them out to support a platform for a welding bottle. I thought I could bolt the rails into the holes for the caster bolts. I found out there was a rim of sheet metal around the bottom of the chest, so I had to put something between the tubes and the chest in order to keep the tubes off the sheet metal rim. I decided to make 4 rectangles of thick aluminum and drill holes in them, but then I changed my mind. I had some tubing lying around, so I decided to use it instead.

I needed 4 spacers about 1/2″ tall, so I cut 1″-tall tubing in half. I decided to use the big angle grinder instead of the plasma cutter, mill, or propane torch. I have had problems making good cuts with plasma lately, and I didn’t feel like confronting the issue in the middle of a job. I have never used the propane torch for cutting, and this seemed like a bad time to figure it out. Cutting thin metal on the mill can be unpleasant, and holding metal while you cut it in pieces can be difficult. The angle grinder, on the other hand, is quick and easy.

I bought my 7″ Metabo grinder for cutting metal. I saw a Youtube video in which the same grinder bested a big band saw, so I snapped one up.

Today I clamped my tubing to the welding table, put a line on it to guide me, and dug right in. I suppose it took 15 minutes to make two 19″ cuts, separating the two halves of the tubing. The cuts weren’t extremely clean, but I was going to clean them on the belt grinder and bury the messy parts in weld, so it didn’t matter. Here is the tubing partway through the job.

Here is the tubing being sliced into 4 pieces.

Here are the pieces after deburring.

Positioning these things for welding was a breeze. I used a Vise Grip clamp to hold the pieces on the tubing, and I bopped them with pieces of metal to line them up perfectly. Then I tacked them at the corners, removed the clamp,and welded them in place.

Once that was done, I had to drill holes for bolts. The kit I didn’t buy leaves the tool chest casters in their original locations. I think that’s dumb. It puts your cylinder way on on a cantilevered platform. I’m going to put two of the casters at the end of the platform. That means I’ll need 24 bolts instead of the 16 the chest came with. I’m going to need 8 bolts for the casters on the side away from the cylinder, 8 to fasten casters to the platform, and 8 to fasten the tubes to the chest, using holes that were originally used to attach casters.

I scribed lines on the spacers, dimpled them with a punch, and drilled the dimples with a #26 drill. I followed with a unibit to open them up. Then I went through all three layers of steel with a 25/64″. I think that was the size. Whatever is one step bigger than 3/8″.

I attached one tube to the chest to see how it worked, and it was perfect. You can see it in the photo.

I forgot to put holes at the far ends of the tubes, so I have to do that tomorrow.

This is not a hard job, but it’s time-consuming because it’s hard to find metric fasteners around here. The original caster bolts are too short for the tubing and spacers, so I had to look for 60mm bolts. I needed 16, but I only found 10. I’m going to leave some of the holes empty until I get the bolts. They are in locations where one bolt per side will do just fine, so it’s not urgent.

I could not find M8 x 40mm bolts for the ends of the tubes, so I bought 5/16″ bolts, which cost maybe 20% as much at Tractor Supply. The diameter is nearly the same. Only the threads are different.

Tomorrow, I plan to attach the tubing to the chest, weld the platform on while the tubing is attached, detach the whole thing, add some tabs to keep the cylinder from scooting around, paint it with truck bed coating, and install it.

Why weld it while it’s attached to the chest? Because that way I know it will fit the chest after welding. The chest will hold everything in just the right position. Much better than clamping it to a welding table.

Once the platform is painted and installed, I can move all my welding junk to the chest and get one or two of my old carts out of the shop for good. Then I can install a bracket to hold a cylinder, along with some cord holders.

I said this was a one-day job, but I made it more complicated by welding spacers in and welding the tubing shut. I probably added three hours to the job that way. Then I had to run around looking for bolts.

Of course, painting adds a day, because you need to give truck bed paint 24 hours to cure. When I said this was a one-day job, I didn’t include time for the paint.

With my tools, I think you could do this job, apart from waiting for the paint, in 8 hours if you were even a little competent. You would just need to have everything ready so you wouldn’t have to run errands.

When I’m done with this cart, I plan to make a second one just like it. Then I can get rid of all my old welding carts. It will make a huge difference in the shop.

I also got rid of some junk today.

I have no garbage pickup, so I have to drive to “recycling centers,” i.e. places where things go on their way to be buried in a landfill. I’m sure a little bit of the waste gets recycled, but we all know greenies are liars. Most of my garbage disappears forever. In fact, if you try to recycle anything at my nearest recycling center, you can be fined. If the guy in front of you discards a beautiful dining room table, for example, you have to leave it in the rain so a truck can come crush it.

I call my local recycling center “the dump.” It’s a better description, because so little recycling happens. It’s just 6 compacting dumpsters and some areas for things like appliances and tires. The dump is great, because they don’t enforce the rules. You can put car batteries in the dumpsters, for example. I actually told an attendant when I saw someone do that, and he didn’t care at all, even though the battery disposal area is 50 yards from the dumpsters.

Here’s the real rule: you can put anything you want in the household garbage dumpsters, as long as it’s in a bag or you get it in there fast without rubbing the attendants’ noses in it.

They don’t let you dump construction waste. That’s a problem. Of course, you can cut it up and put it in bags, but that can be a big job. When you want to throw out things like lumber and old Corian, you have to drive a few more miles and drop it in the landfill. That’s where I went today.

I removed a Corian counter from my workshop, along with a bunch of naily wood. It sat in my yard for ages, behind the shop. I also had a heavy pallet I needed to get rid of. These things were getting on my nerves, but I didn’t look forward to lifting them. Today I finally did it. I put them in the special residential dumpsters at the foot of the landfill mountain, and soon they will be dumped on top, where I hope they will slide into Mother Gaia’s gullet and stick in it, sideways.

I forgot to take the bird bath. That was a big error. But I can probably dump it in the furniture area by the local place if I’m fast. Last time I took a bird bath over there, an attendant asked if he could have it.

That’s the story of my day. If tomorrow is even half as good, I will have nothing to complain about.

Welding Cart Project Begins

My latest metalworking project is well underway. I’m turning a tool chest into a welding cart.

I went to Harbor Freight today and got me a 26″ tool chest in blazing green to match my Titanium welder. I also went to my metal dealer and bought steel. I always buy things I don’t need when I’m there, so I can’t say exactly how much of what I spent will go into the project, but it was somewhere around $32. I went to Tractor Supply and picked up some bolts and washers, too. That was under $8. I will eventually have to buy a can of truck bed paint, so add another $13. I discovered I’ll have to add some aluminum spacers, and I estimate they may cost as much as $15.

Add it up, and you get $68. I’m pretty sure. I may put another $10 in it before I’m done. I’m making a cart which will duplicate the features of the ZTFab prefab kit. The kit would have cost me $310, delivered.

I’m using the plan I described in an earlier blog post. I’ll put the chest on two long pieces of rectangular tubing, and they’ll extend past it. I’ll put a piece of plate on the exposed tubing, to make a shelf. The cylinder will sit on it. I’ll make a bracket from bent plate and attach it to the side of the cart to hold the cylinder in place. Very simple, especially if you have a finger brake and a plasma cutter.

Here, you can see the box the chest came in, with the tubing and plate on top of it.

Today I did some cosmetic work. I welded the ends of the tubing shut so they’ll look nice. This will keep bugs from living inside them, too. It’s totally unnecessary, but it gives a finished look you can’t get with open tubes.

I cut short pieces of 1″ by 1/8″ flat bar and welded them over the ends of the tubes, and then I used a Walter flap disk to grind the weld beads and make them invisible. Now the tubes are airtight, which is a little weird. They’re completely sealed.

It probably took me 40 minutes to do this job. I was going to drill holes in the tubing to attach it to the cart, but I discovered I needed to make spacers first. There is a rim around the bottom of the cart, so if I put it on the tubing, the cart would rest on the flimsy rim. Tomorrow I’ll buy a piece of flat aluminum and make 4 spacers with holes drilled in them.

I have said this was a one-day job, but that’s only true if you start in the morning and you have all the parts you need. I can’t get the spacer metal today, so that stopped me. I could have made cylindrical spacers out of round bar, but I would have had to make 16 of them, it would have been a drag, and they wouldn’t have been as nice as rectangular spacers.

Tomorrow I plan to get the needed metal and the truck bed paint, plus a short piece of chain and a snap clip to restrain the tank. After that, things should fall into place. As Jeremy Clarkson says, “How hard can it be?”

Once this thing is done, I’m going to move my Harbor Freight welder and my AlphaTIG welder to the top of it, and I’ll fill it with welding tools and paraphernalia. Then I can put my Lincold welder on the cart I used to have the Harbor Freight welder on, and I can move the big cart the Lincoln was on out of the shop. This will save me a little space, and I will finally have most of my welding stuff off my table and in places where I can actually find it.

I plan to build a second cart and move the Lincoln and my plasma cutter to it.

Moving the tool chest around was not too hard, because I have a Harbor Freight hydraulic cart. I bought the small one. It lifts 500 pounds. The big one lifts twice as much, but moving it in and out of a vehicle by yourself pretty much requires a second hydraulic cart, so I didn’t want it.

At Harbor Freight, I went to to an employee and asked them if they could shove the chest into a Ford Explorer, expecting the answer, “yes, obviously,” but she expressed strong doubt. She hollered at a more energetic employee who gave the answer I wanted. They put it in the car without damaging anything, so I didn’t have to drive the pickup, which has a broken stereo.

When I got home, I slid the box out onto my hydraulic cart, lowered it, and rolled the box off, onto its bottom. No problems at all.

Material handling is a big part of enjoying tools and getting things done. If you don’t spend money on material handling, you will always be limited.

I really look forward to finishing this thing and getting the old one out of my workshop. Things will come together if I just keep pushing.

I Feel the Urge to Fabricate

When my dad and I moved to northern Florida, there were tons of expenses, and a lot of cash was tied up. I developed some pretty stingy habits. Things are different now, and I feel like God is telling me it’s okay to spend a little money and stop struggling to economize. This is why I now have a nice insulated stainless smoker instead of a shopmade creation cobbled together from things I bought at Home Depot.

I feel like I need to target my workshop. I have made a lot of compromises when I didn’t really need to.

Here’s a compromise I made: I bought a Klutch welding table for around $180. Real welding tables which are truly flat and made from thick steel start at maybe a grand. The Klutch is made from 4mm steel, and you can lift it by yourself.

I’m not knocking it. It’s an incredible deal. It will hold hundreds of pounds, it’s flat to within 1/16″ from one end to the other, and it comes with fixturing tools that actually work. I believe the original price was close to $400. Anyway, they used to put it on sale often, and it looks like they’ve slashed the price permanently. If you like welding, but you’re not a fanatic, I highly recommend this table. It works very, very well for me.

Still, it’s only 3 feet long, it does have that 1/16″ crown, the steel is not thick, and a bigger, flatter, stronger table would be easier to use. I didn’t buy it because I thought it was the perfect table. I bought it because it was cheap and I thought it would be easier to take with me if I moved.

I also bought two Eastwood welding carts on sale. Actually, I bought one on sale, it had a problem, I complained, they sent me another, I fixed the first one, they didn’t ask for it back, and now I have two. For $50 each.

These two-tiered carts are very strong. You can put 350 pounds on one. They work just fine. But they are compromise carts. They take up a huge amount of real estate, and they aren’t all that easy to move. Tool storage is not good, either. Each one has two tiny trays.

For a hundred bucks, an Eastwood cart is very nice. It’s not as nice as the $80 Harbor Freight Vulcan cart I bought later; that cart blows the Eastwood cart away. But it’s a good cart. Still, I am tired of wrestling with my cumbersome carts, and it would be nice to have some tool storage.

When you have no proper storage for your welding stuff, you leave a lot of it on your table. Then your 12-square-foot table becomes a 5-square-foot table, and your tools are always full of grit and steel filings.

Welders used to be heavy and large. That has changed with the development of inverter technology. My 200-amp Harbor Freight welder is very light, and it’s the size of a large tackle box. Because welders are small now, people are rethinking welder cart design. A lot of people are putting welders on top of tool chests and adding shelves for gas bottles. You wouldn’t want a giant welder on top of a tool chest, but a 40-pound welder is a different story.

I’m thinking I should get a couple of US General tool chests from Harbor Freight and fabricate mobile bases for them. I could add shelves for gas bottles, as well as cord holders for ground cables and al the other things that hang off welders. I could add tubes for TIG wire. I could put my clamp collection in the bottom drawer. I could put rods in another drawer. It would be stupendous.

A company called All-a-Cart jumped on the trend and started producing prefab kits you can bolt on a tool chest. Their brand is ZTFAB. The cost for the model I need? It’s $279.00. For two bent sheets of steel and a couple of other things. I’m sure it’s a great product, but a) that’s a ton of money for something that should cost half as much, and b) if I’m buying fabrication tools, shouldn’t I be fabricating things for myself?

I believe I can create a better solution for maybe $35, not including paint.

A number of people have created their own solutions, and they have put videos on Youtube. The problem with most of them is that they’re overbuilt. For example, people create heavy-duty closed frames to put under their carts. Why? Every US General tool chest already has a closed frame made from heavy tubing. It’s what the casters attach to. It can support 1,000 pounds (for the 26″ cart). Why do you need to add another complete frame?

My plan is to run two pieces of rectangular tubing under a chest, the long way, and drill holes in them for some of the caster bolts that screw into the chest. I’ll drill holes in the tubing for the bolts, and I’ll get longer bolts. I’ll attach the original casters to one end of the chest this way.

The tubing will extend a foot past the chest on the other end. I’ll put a piece of 11-gauge plate on it and weld it to the tubing. I’ll weld casters to the bottom of the tubing.

When it’s over, I’ll have a tool chest that sits an inch higher than before, on two tubes united by a piece of plate. The bottle can sit on the plate.

I’ll fabricate a bracket to attach to the cart a couple of feet up, to hold the bottle in place with chains. This will only take up part of the depth of the cart, so I can use the rest of the room for TIG wire tube racks and something to hold the air filter for my plasma cutter. Then I can put the Harbor Freight welder and the plasma cutter on top of the cart.

This is a one-day job.

I can get a second tool chest and make another cart for my Lincoln and my AlphaTIG. Then I can put the Eastwood and Harbor Freight carts on Craigslist.

Total investment for my “kits”: maybe $100. Total joy: impossible to measure.

I said I was going to stop being cheap, and then I said I was going to make my own carts in order to avoid paying ZTFAB $400 more than I have to. Okay, I’m not totally over it. But the tool chests themselves will cost me $600, so we’re looking at around $700, all told. That’s a lot more than the $200 I currently have invested in far inferior tools.

Cost for ZTFab carts: $1100+. Cost for fabricated carts: $700. Added value from ZTFab carts: $0.

I like it. It’s a plan.

Backlog of Chores Dwindling as Spiritual Warfare Takes Effect

I got loads of stuff done today.

My utility cart has been giving me problems. I did a trigger job on my Thompson Center Venture, and because of the weather, I had to wait weeks to shoot it. A few days back, the weather got nice, and I threw my mat and rifle in the cart. It would not start.

I took the carb out, which was not fun at all, and I threw it in the sonic cleaner in gasoline. I did this twice. Didn’t help. I decided to take the main jet and the float needle out and look at them.

The float is held on a pin that goes through two posts made from what I suppose is cast aluminum. Generally, float pins are not fitted tightly. They are held captive by the bowls, so there is no reason to have a tight pin. The people who made my carb didn’t know this. It was jammed in there.

I tapped it out with a punch. I really had to whack it. Unfortunately, one of the posts snapped at the base.

I was not happy. I can do a lot of things with tools, but I had little confidence in my ability to refasten a tiny broken aluminum post to its base, inside a carb bowl. I tried some Hail Mary solutions. First, I tried to get solder to stick to it. I figured I might be able to glom enough solder onto it to hold it in place. Didn’t work at all. Aluminum does not seem to like solder.

I then decided to bury it in 5-minute epoxy. Maybe that would stick. Epoxy is impervious to gasoline, and carb floats put nearly no stress on their pins, so if I could get the post to stick, it would probably stay there for years.

Unbelievably, it worked. I’ll post a photo.

How did I fix the tight pin? Two ways. First, I have a number of junk carbs. I happened to have one with the same size bowl and float. There was no possibility I would ever use it, so I took the pin out and put it in the cart carb. One hole was still too tight, so I opened it with a small drill bit.

The bowl gasket in the old carb was destroyed. I guess someone overtightened the bowl nut. Because I had a carb with the same size bowl, I had a usable gasket.

The sonic cleaner didn’t fix the jet because corrosion was the problem. Ethanol gas has water in it, and water makes things corrode. The jet was narrowed because of corrosion. It looks like sonic cleaners don’t do well with thick oxidation. I also saw something protruding into the bore of the jet. A varnish flake? I didn’t know.

My answer was to put the jet in a citric acid solution. It ate the crud, and the jet opened up. I also soaked the needle.

The plugs were black, and I replaced them, too. The old ones had the wrong number on them, so I assume they were the wrong size.

I put the carb back in the cart, and it ran better than ever.

While I was working on this, I ordered a Chinese carb from Ebay, with gaskets. Cost: $13.56. I inquired about carb gaskets on a cart forum, and some guy told me I should stick with OEM products. He said OEM carbs only cost $126 each.

You know, I would love to support American businesses, but a 9.5-to-one price differential is not acceptable. I have a bunch of cheap Chinese carbs, and they are just like OEM carbs, which are probably also Chinese. When you pay 10 times as much for “American,” you don’t get a better product. You get the same Chinese carb, at a Chinese price, from a different American vendor. Good enough.

In all likelihood, my epoxy repair will hold for the life of the cart, but I will have a Chinese carb on hand anyway, because you never know. I may install it preemptively. In any case, I will never again have to go several days with no cart to drive to the mailbox. Getting your mail on foot is just not the Southern way. It’s wrong.

I also ordered a new PCV hose and choke cable. Someone had Bubba’d the old cable with a piece of wire.

My cart is unbelievably useful. I’ve done lots of gardening and tree cutting with it, and I always use it when I shoot. I can’t risk more cart down time. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

After I fixed the cart, I put a new transmission in my Makita cordless drill. A while back, I snapped the screw that holds the chuck in. These screws are hard to get out, and while I was trying, I did something to the transmission that made it fail to work. I think I lost a ball bearing. I pictured myself trying to find the right ball bearing and paying a fortune for it, and I gave up and ordered a transmission. I didn’t know it would take weeks to arrive.

Whatever. It got here, and I installed it. Check that off the list. I also bought a backup drill. Cordless tools aren’t expensive when you buy them without batteries. Life without a cordless drill was not pleasant, so I won’t let it happen twice.

After the drill triumph, I installed a $240 Timney trigger in my Ruger Precision Rifle.

The Ruger comes with a nice trigger, but it’s not TOO nice. I think rifle makers have lawyers who tell them not to sell really soft triggers. You can adjust your RPR trigger, but you can’t really get it down to the target level.

You can make it better by simply removing the trigger spring. So I’m told. They say the trigger spring’s only purpose is to make the pull heavier. It works perfectly without it. So I’m told.

I thought about it, and I thought about all the triggers I’ve modified on my own. I decided to go first class for once.

Installing a Timney trigger is easy. You remove a few screws, pop the old trigger out, and put the new one in. It has two stages. The first stage is 8 ounces, and the second is one pound. THAT’S a trigger.

Now I’m ready to find out what the gun can really do.

But wait! There’s more!

When I was done with the RPR, I took the .204 out and shot a few rounds to see if the new trigger spring was light enough.

Here’s a funny thing about rifle triggers. They all seem light and crisp in your living room or at the counter at the gun shop. When you’re looking through a scope, aiming at a bullet-diameter spot on a target 100 yards away, they suddenly become very heavy and gritty. When I put the new spring in, I thought it was very, very light.

Today, it seemed much heavier. I was not happy at all.

I didn’t shoot all that well. I’ll put up photos. The barrel may need cleaning. I’m not sure I’ve ever cleaned it. When I took my shooting class, the instructors appeared to be in favor of leaving barrels dirty until they started losing accuracy. That’s what I’ve been doing. Whatever the problem is, I decided to do more work on the trigger.

I put the gun on my bench, yanked the new spring out, and cut about two coils out. Now it seems light and greasy-slick. I’m not fooled, though. They always seem that way in the house. I’m going to clean the barrel and try the gun again in a little bit.

I feel like this has been a productive day. Tomorrow, I hope to lube the turnbuckles on my tractor forks and put them back on the bucket. Then I can move some logs I cut.

The weather is gorgeous. Cool, not very sunny, and a little breezy. I was outside for over an hour, and my shirt isn’t even dripping on the floor. Fall is here, and fall should be more productive than summer.

I believe I’m getting a lot done because I’m remembering to do supernatural warfare against demons that try to restrain me. I do it every morning, and sometimes I do it at night. It’s funny how Christians are ashamed to fight demons. They believe God is a spirit. They believe Jesus and the Holy Ghost are spirits. Somehow, they can’t make themselves believe in other spirits! Why is that?

If demons don’t exist, neither does God, so why do you think you’re a Christian?

Christianity says we are also spirits. Do you believe you exist?

Guess that’s all I have. Hope everyone is praying for President Trump. His doctor says things are going very, very well.

Getting too Southern for my Own Good

My oldest friend is a guy named Mike. Just to show you what a rotten friend he is, I will post a photo he sent me recently.

This represents part of his output for one week. He bought a Masterbuilt smoker, and he has smoked his weight in pork and chicken.

These days, I stifle my interest in cooking. It’s not good to be a lover of pleasure, and gluttony is an invitation to inhabitation by demons. I rarely cook anything impressive. But here is Mike, telling me one more rack of ribs won’t hurt.

I live in an area where even the worst barbecue is pretty good. It’s not like Miami, where Cubans and yankees think only of money when they prepare food. Still, the obvious truth is that I make barbecue better than any restaurant I’ve been to. Also, it’s much cheaper, and if I barbecue at home, I won’t have to go to restaurants, which are considered prime coronavirus transmission hubs.

These are the thoughts I had as I pitted Mike against mere reason.

Of course, Mike won. I ordered a smoker.

Years ago, I built my own smoker: the Hoginator. I took a big Char-Broil grill and cut holes in it so I could mount to electric heating elements. I cut another hole so I could feed smoke into it. I fabricated a steel smoke box that sat behind the smoker, and it had a hinged door in it so I could shove wood into it. I smoked with flaming wood, the way you’re supposed to, but the smoke box was over a foot away from the smoker, so not much of the heat got into the smoker. I was able to maintain a nice low temperature.

This time, I thought about building another smoker. For about three minutes. Yes, I think men who buy things they can fabricate are really women, but you have to choose your battles. In order to make a really good smoker, I would have to bend and weld a lot of stainless sheet, and I would have to make it double-walled so I could put insulation in it. Forget that. I already paid my dues with the Hoginator. This time, I’m going to let someone else do the metalworking.

Digression: yesterday I finished straightening the mounting tabs on my middle buster and welding gussets in to keep them from bending again. Metal still bends the knee to me.

I ordered a Smokin-It smoker. They’re made in Michigan, hopefully by Southern immigrants. They have double-walled stainless cabinets. People swear by them. I ordered the second-smallest model. I wanted to be able to jam a turkey into it, and the little one did not look promising. Also, when you buy the cheapest model of anything, you’re usually asking for a bunch of after-purchase Band-Aid modifications and add-ons that take the fun out of it. This smoker will come with everything it needs, including wheels.

I believe it’s a little smaller than a waist-high fridge. We shall see.

While I was trying to figure out what to buy, I learned some things.

First, people say Masterbuilts fall apart in a few years. I didn’t want to take a chance. There are competitors such as Pit Boss and Cuisinart, but they look to be of similar quality. I don’t want to drop $250 on a new smoker every three years until I die. The box I bought should last for eternity.

Here’s another thing: propane smokers are hard to use. The temperature fluctuates. Forget it; not interested.

I learned that electric smokers don’t produce smoke rings in meat. A smoke ring is a layer of reddish meat just under the surface. I was upset to read that I wouldn’t be getting one, until I learned that barbecue judges all agree that a smoke ring doesn’t improve the flavor of the food.

Smokin-It has a close competitor called Smokin’ Tex. Smokin-It gives you a lot more for the money, so that’s why I chose their product.

The smoker will be here Thursday, God willing. That means barbecue on Friday. I need to get some ribs.

I don’t do baby backs. I don’t get them at all. I think they’re for suckers. Spare ribs are much cheaper. They’re bigger. They have more fat and flavor. They’re not dry like baby backs. I plan to pick up a rack of spare ribs.

I’m about to dig up my rub recipe. I’m considering adding a little black cardamom.

I would post my rub recipe, but in all honesty, they’re all about the same. Sugar, salt, mustard, pepper, cumin, garlic…it’s not rocket science.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. A barbecue celebrity named Myron Mixon opened a joint in Miami, and his rub was disgusting. Very litte salt. No flavor. This was after he talked a lot of smack, belittling the competition. His place went bankrupt, even after a lot of Miami people who knew nothing about barbecue posted ridiculous positive Internet reviews.

I prayed before ordering the smoker, and my impression was that God likes it when I entertain friends and that he was in favor of me buying it so I could barbecue for them and still have time to talk about Christianity. I hope my friends don’t read that.

The Hoginator was a lot of work to use. The new smoker should be much less bother.

I should be able to barbecue for 30 people with this thing, so the small gatherings I am likely to draw should be no problem.

Here’s a neat hint for applying a rub: use a bath towel. Drop your ribs on the towel, add the rub, and use the towel to contain the mess while you press the rub onto the meat. When you’re done, roll the towel up with the excess spices in it and put it in the laundry. It won’t stain. This is my original idea, so make sure you send me royalties when you use it.

What about sauce? Here is my conclusion. Store barbecue sauce is so good now, there is not much point in making your own. Yeah, I said it. Stubbs, Sweet Baby Ray’s, Cattleman’s…you name it. There are lots of good ones. Buy four brands every time you barbecue, and make notes on the ones you like.

I will post pork photos eventually.