A Gas-Powered Brush Cutter Beats a Herring Every Time

The joy of the Lord is strength. It will help you get up and get things done. I am learning that firsthand.

Every day, I say something along these lines: “In the name of Jesus Christ, who is God, I speak the Lord’s opposition to every created being who is against the Lord, me, or his children on this property and every other property that belongs to me. I speak victory to the Lord, to his children, and to me, and I speak the glory to Jesus Christ. I am a son of God, and this is how things are supposed to work.”

When I do that, I have strength to get up and do things. When I don’t, I may or may not have strength.

Today I tackled some lingering tasks.

The lady who used to live in this house made some unfortunate landscaping choices. She put some sickly hedges beside the house on one side, and some were beside the driveway. They looked awful. They were diseased. They grew too high for the area. I decided they had to go. The lady who came out from the university’s extension office agreed fully.

I started ripping them out with the tractor this week, but I learned that they were not as easy to remove as other hedges I had destroyed. They had stubborn roots, and they liked to slip out of the rope I used to grab them. I found out there is a device called a grubber that grips shrubs securely so a tractor can remove them, but grubbers are made in China, and they tend to break, so I went outside today and used a sharpened hoe. It was not pleasant, but it worked.

I pulled every visible trace of the shrubs, and then I planted two dwarf podocarpus bushes. These bushes look great, and they’re indestructible. They require no fertilization and no pesticides. They won’t grow higher than three feet. I’m starting to think every shrub should be a podocarpus.

I filled the area in with bagged soil, and then I added melaleuca mulch. Hopefully, I’m done with that particular spot. Now I have 15 more feet to do, beside the house. I may buy that grubber after all.

I found a cable while I was digging the shrubs out. I had been afraid of that. Intelligent people bury cables a couple of feet deep, but not everyone is responsible. I found what appeared to be a phone cable about six inches down, right next to a shrub root. I didn’t cut it with the shovel. Not at that point, anyway. I may have cut it elsewhere, because I was using a sawzall on roots. I don’t care. I don’t use the phone cable. If I ever decide I need it (very unlikely), I can run a new one myself and do it right.

Yesterday, I hosed the old shrubs with 2,4 D, which is a weed killer. I figure any bits I leave in the ground will be less of a problem if they’re already dead. If I don’t kill the shrubs before pulling them, I may leave living roots which will try to come back.

Yesterday was weed-and-feed day, which is why I had 2,4 D on hand. I sprayed the whole yard. It does a dandy job of killing things I don’t like. This is an incredibly weedy region, so heavy applications of chemicals are mandatory unless you want to live in what looks like an abandoned lot.

I had a hard time getting my Fimco motorized sprayer to work. It refused to prime itself. I replaced O rings. I replaced hose. Finally, I realized Fimco just makes bad products. The design of the equipment, not the condition, was the issue. It does not seal very well, no matter what you do. I had to open the system up, pour water into the pump, and then turn it on. Now I have a new project. I’m going to add a T to the system with a hose and valve for priming the pump. I’m not going to let bad engineering force me to take the pump apart every time I want to use it.

Today after I fixed the shrubs, I got the pressure washer out and bleached the hidden side of my workshop. I bleached the house and shop a month or two ago, but I didn’t get around to the side of the shop that faces the woods. It was pretty bad. Today I went through more than half a gallon of high-powered pool bleach, and I still need to bleach the shop one more time.

I like using the pressure washer, because I brought it back from the dead. I installed a new hose. I fixed the carb. I put a new muffler cover on it. I have a cover for the cylinder head, and I’m going to replace that. I even have special paint to fix the rusty frame. I found out where to get cheap replacement pumps, so when the original Chinese pump dies, I’ll be able to keep the pressure washer running. The motor is a nice Honda, so I should be able to keep the pressure washer going for a very long time.

Later on, I grabbed my portable pump-up sprayer and wandered through the woods by the house, hosing everything down with glyphosate and Dawn. Grape vines, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy are taking over, and I’m not having it. I must have blasted a third of an acre by hand today. I also got out the gas brush cutter and cut away a lot of the shrubbery by my water pump.

I have complained that every tree here is a trash oak. Today I noticed that the same principle applies to weeds. Every weed is a grape, Virginia creeper, or poison ivy. It’s not completely true, but it’s true enough. When you look out through my woods, you see grape leaves everywhere. The plant life here has almost no variety.

It reminded me of something I already knew: the woods in Florida are not friendly or particularly useful.

In Appalachia, you can walk through the woods without problems. You can sit down. You could take a football and play catch under the trees if you wanted. There’s a lot of room, because weeds don’t take over. There is also a huge variety of plants, and many are useful. Ginseng, blackberries, teaberries, sassafras, various mints, and huckleberries come to mind.

Florida is not like that. It’s grape, grape, grape, Virginia creeper, grape, grape, poison ivy, all day. And the grapes don’t bear fruit. Almost all of the plants are male. When you find grapes on a female vine, they’re about the size of garbanzo beans. Mostly skin and seeds.

So, to recap, the trees are useless and tend to fall on expensive things, and the plants are worthless and annoying.

I think I need to rig up the sprayer and blast the woods with 2,4 D or glyphosate. Hunting season is coming, and I don’t want to be buried in grape leaves while I punish squirrels for existing.

I love it here, but I can see that when I try to make this a substitute for Appalachia, I am jamming a square peg in a round hole. It’s never going to be Tennessee or North Carolina. I can see why so much of the land here was undeveloped until fairly recently. It’s not like settlers could come here, build log cabins and barns from quality wood, make furniture, grow crops, and gather berries and herbs. The land doesn’t have much to offer unless you’re an animal.

This is a neat place to live, in the age of concrete block houses, air conditioning, and grocery stores. Before technology tamed this place, it was not hospitable.

That’s my impression, anyway.

I’m glad I have the Lord’s joy, because I am working a LOT. I have a lot to do. Because so much of the landscaping is screwed up, I’m doing much more than maintenance, which is a big job all by itself. Things should ramp down once I get the shrubs fixed, a couple of trees planted, and some rocks removed.

Unfortunately, I’m doing these things during the summer.

I hope the place looks better, not worse, when I’m done. If I move, I’ll have to sell. I don’t want buyers to show up and grimace at the landscaping.

Buying Tools is Never Wrong

I know the entire world is wondering what happened when my jackhammer arrived.

My back was bugging me last week, which is one reason I bought the jackhammer. It arrived on Friday, and I felt good enough to break it out and use it. I only had time to run it about 45 minutes, but that was long enough to convince me everyone needs a jackhammer.

I guess it sounds stupid to say a person whose back hurts needs to buy a tool that weighs over 40 pounds and has to be held up while it rams a huge piece of steel into hard objects, but you have to consider the alternatives, including doing nothing.

I was trying to get a giant rock out of my yard. I pulled on it with a strap attached to the tractor, and as far as I can tell, I was able to rock it about a quarter of an inch. I bought rock-splitting wedges, and they worked great, but splitting chunks off an oddly shaped rock requires contorting yourself into odd positions while crouching in a hole in the ground, and you will have to do repeated splits. I used my rotary hammer to break up the rock, and it works well, but it’s much slower than a jackhammer, and because it’s only maybe two feet long, a certain amount of contortion is still needed.

The only other choice I had was to do nothing. I could put the dirt back in around the rock and continue trying to remember to drive the lawnmower around it for the remainder of my stay on this property. I wasn’t having that. That rock needs to go, and besides, I like using tools to make problems go away.

I bought a refurbished hammer from CPO Outlets, which is known for selling refurbs. Sometimes their deals aren’t all that great, but they sold me a thousand-dollar hammer for under $600. That was hard to pass up. I’ve bought other refurbs from them, and I think it’s smart business. A refurb, typically, is a tool someone bought and then returned because he didn’t like it. The manufacturers have to look them over and make sure they’re up to new standards. They are basically new tools, but they can’t be sold as new, so you get a break. You are likely to get a full warranty, so it’s hard to see any reason not to go for it.

I could have gotten a Chinese hammer for a lot less, as I have said, but it would have been Chinese, so it might have crapped out quickly, and I doubt I could have gotten it repaired.

Interesting thing: the manual for the hammer I bought bragged that it wouldn’t need to be serviced until I had 300 hours on it. That surprised me. None of my other tools have manuals saying, “Get ready for this tool to die at 300 hours.” Made me wonder if Chinese was the better solution. I don’t know how much money it costs to get a jackhammer serviced, so right now, I can’t judge. For all I know, it just means I have to take out a couple of screws and replace an O-ring.

CPO Outlets enhanced its profit margin by not including a bit for the hammer, but that’s okay, because I didn’t want the bit it would have come with. They come with pointy bits. I wanted one like a big flat-bladed screwdriver. When I checked them out online, I saw startling prices. Like $40 each. Then I noticed a DeWalt for $15. It was exactly what I wanted, and it was from a real company, so I ordered it. It works fine, and I can’t find anything wrong with it. I feel like I scored.

I took the hammer out to the hole, put the bit against the rock in a place where I thought it needed to be hit, and went to town. Right away, I was surprised to see how pleasant jackhammering was. I was nervous when I started. I thought the bit might jump around and put my feet in danger. I thought I might be jarred a lot. I equipped myself with safety glasses, a respirator, and ear plugs because I was concerned about noise and flying quartz chips. In reality, the bit stayed nearly where I put it, I was not jarred at all, nothing the bit broke off flew anywhere near my face, the machine was quiet, and if there was inhalable dust, there was so little I could not see it.

When I think of jackhammers, I think of fat guys on city streets operating huge air-powered hammers that seem to make them bounce around like toys on top of a washer full of towels during a spin cycle. It was not like that at all for me. It was more like having a pleasant belly massage. I guess the four fat springs on the hammer suck up nearly all of the pain.

Hammering made me wonder if I understood how rocks work. I think of rocks as things that exist in two states: shattered and not. I don’t think of them as things that can weaken gradually, like fatigued metal. When I hammered on my hard quartz rock, I found that sometimes the bit would stay in one place a long time, seeming to do nothing, and then the rock would suddenly give way, as though the prolonged hammering had softened it up. That was strange.

I had some problems with the bit getting stuck. Sometimes it will go straight down, making a tight hole, and then when it gets too deep, I’ll have to pull it back out. The hammering action doesn’t work when you’re lifting the hammer, so the machine doesn’t help at all. Also, you’re not supposed to pry with the bit. The hammer isn’t made for that. Which is a shame, because the bit alone probably weighs 8 pounds and could certainly pry as well as a typical pry bar. The hammer and bit, together, are about four feet long, so I would have a lot of leverage if I could pry with them.

It seems like I need to keep the sledge and rotary hammer nearby, in case the jackhammer gets stuck. I can beat the rock with the sledge or chisel the jackhammer it out with the rotary hammer.

I cracked a lot of big chunks off the rock in the short time I spent using the hammer. I can see that one of two things will happen. I may crack enough junk off the rock to make it small enough to tear out with the tractor, or I will simply remove stuff until the remaining rock is so far below grade I won’t mind burying it and moving on with my life.

Was this a stupid buy? I don’t know. I didn’t need to remove the rock at all. I could have painted it day-glo orange and driven around it. The house is 19 years old, and the previous owner never had to remove the rock. On the other hand, the rocks are annoying, and they really should be removed. It would cost me maybe a grand to get them removed with a bulldozer, and it would tear the yard up even worse than I have. After all that, I would not have a neat jackhammer and splitting wedges, or the ability to use them, in my tool arsenal. I would just have a bill and a messed-up yard.

It’s fun tormenting the rocks, and I have amassed a very big rock collection which I could conceivably use for decoration.

In other news, my friends Freddly and Freddelle visited this weekend, along with Freddly’s children Noah and Grace. Noah is my godson, and he is 4. I think. Grace is 10 months old. Freddly’s husband couldn’t make it.

Freddelle is a law student at FSU. I have known her since she was 17. We met at Trinity Church. She found out I was a lawyer and immediately began grilling me for advice. Over the years, I have been able to be somewhat helpful to her. She calls me a mentor. I would say I’m just a guy who gave her advice a few times. She had doubts about even getting into law school, and here she is, coming up on graduation, with one solid job offer already in the bag.

Freddly was an armorbearer at Trinity. The code name she gave herself was “Oreo,” which I found extremely amusing. I was somewhat instrumental in helping her reattach with God after the Wilkerson family and Trinity disillusioned and discouraged her.

When they started talking about visiting, I wasn’t sure what two Haitian girls who were suburban at best would do here, but things worked out very well. We went to a barbecue place and a great Italian restaurant, and on Sunday, we went on a glass-bottomed boat at Silver Springs. Noah was beside himself. You would think he had never seen a fish before.

Noah likes trucks and tractors, so that’s what he gets for holiday presents, and he was well-prepared for my farm. He has a Tonka John Deere, so we got the real John Deere lawn tractor out, and he helped me drive it around the yard.

Noah loves Marvin and Maynard, and I think they enjoyed his company, too.

The ladies and I talked about various Christian topics. They seem much more well-grounded than I had thought. I told them I was thinking of moving to Tennessee, and I mentioned the strange trend of Christians moving to that state. Freddly told me something crazy. She had had a dream in which she visited Tennessee. This was before she knew about my plans, and she has no Tennessee connections. She said she visited to see if it was okay for black people move there.

Something is going on in the supernatural.

My back is at about 95% now. I don’t know what I did to it, but it was not serious. I almost never have back problems, so a week of limited activity was a strange and unwelcome experience. Today I went out and did a few things. A three-trunked oak fell over for no reason at all, so I had to go out in the woods and cut all three trunks to take pressure off the trees it was leaning on. There was poison ivy everywhere. I had to walk like I was in a minefield. Before I started my saws, I hosed the whole area with glyphosate. I may have to go back in there, and obviously, it’s harder to get a rash from dead vines than big juicy leaves with oil all over them.

I noticed something interesting: when you cut a lot of wood and throw sawdust everywhere, it covers up poison ivy and makes an area less dangerous. I don’t think I’m very sensitive to poison ivy, because I have eaten mangoes with sap on them for decades with no problem, and I worked in the poison ivy before I knew what it was without getting rashes, but I don’t want to be exposed any more than I have to. When I came home, I used a brush and dish detergent to scrub the soles of my boots.

Cutting leaning trees is dangerous and difficult, especially when you can’t stand wherever you want. I relied on bore-cutting, which means cutting the middle out of a tree before you sever the remaining strap or straps on the outside. It prevents the tree from splitting, which can throw a trunk in your face. I was not able to get the tree down completely in the time I had, but I severed it from its roots, ensuring that it will dry up and rot faster, and I cut enough off the trunks to give substantial relief to the trees holding the fallen tree up.

I can get more done once the ivy is dead.

I am no arborist, but from watching Youtubes, I can tell I know a few things a lot of the old pros don’t. Some of them don’t know much about bore-cutting, for example. I’m not afraid to cut a leaning tree which is hung on other trees, because with a bore cut and two or three wedges, I can fix it so the tree can’t split in a dangerous way or pinch my saw. I can also fell a leaning tree that isn’t hung, as long as I’m okay with it falling in the direction of the lean. I don’t know enough to log or take down rotten trees that are still vertical, and cutting free leaning trees so they fall away from the lean is too much for me, but I know enough to do what I need to do on this farm.

Cutting leaning trees that are not hung is very dangerous. If you leave the wood in the center of the trunk, the torque from the lean may make the tree split up the middle, and then you get what’s called a barber chair. It’s a heavy trunk supported on a springy bit that has split away, and the trunk may bounce and swing unpredictably. They kill people all the time.

Here’s a video of a tree barber-chairing.

This shows why you should always wear a hard hat when you cut anything taller than you are. You can cut a tree a foot from the ground, but if it barber chairs, the base of the trunk may rise up over your head and then come down on you.

A barber chair ruins a lot of the wood in a tree.

I’ve noticed that some of the techniques loggers use are designed to spare the wood. For example, they often cut almost flush with the ground. My wood is worthless, so I don’t care about any of that. When I look at videos and read about tree felling, I discard the stuff that doesn’t apply to me and could cause problems.

Cutting a tree flush with the ground is hard on your back, and if something goes wrong, it may be hard to straighten up and run. You also end up with a stump you can’t pull out with a chain or rope. I have had to deal with stumps people cut this way (stupidly), and I wouldn’t dream of cutting them like that. The higher you cut a tree, the more leverage you have when you pull the stump with the tractor. I try to cut low enough to be safe and high enough to leave me with something to pull on.

It’s funny, but the oaks here rot like crazy while they’re alive, but once you cut one, the stump lasts forever. It absolutely will not rot. You really have to think about stump removal when you cut an oak here. You can always have a flush-cut stump ground, but it’s expensive, and then you end up with a permanent mass of wood just under the ground, where you had hoped to plant something.

It’s dumb.

I had a maple struck by lightning, and because it was not a dangerous tree, I ended up cutting it about six feet up. After that, I had no problem pulling it out. Took about three minutes. It was nothing like the flush-cut stumps that required hours of digging and hacking.

I guess the world has read enough about my doings for one day.

I’ll try to post some jackhammer photos eventually.

It’s Easier to Replace Money Than Body Parts

Sometimes I wonder which of the following two things are true.

1. I spend too much money on tools, and I should just tough it out with what I have or pay other people to do things.

2. I don’t spend enough on tools, and I make my life unnecessarily difficult.

I just bought a 35-pound jackhammer to bust up rocks in my yard, and Juan Paxety said this in a comment:

The car guys on npr used to say the stingy man pays the most. He buys low and buys up until he gets what he originally needed. You know you need a Cat D-8.

I responded and said I wasn’t listening, but of course, I am.

Over the last day or two I’ve been thinking about one of my basic principles, which is that you should never risk hurting yourself when a tool purchase or hiring a tradesman can keep you safe. How true have I been to this principle? Maybe not true enough.

I strained my back twice in one week, removing boulders from my yard. I didn’t think I was exerting myself too much, but I did pick up a couple of fairly heavy rocks. I spent a good deal of time shoveling smaller rocks and dirt. For some reason, shoveling seems to be hard on my back, even when I’m not lifting a lot at any given time. I think it’s impossible to shovel with good posture. It’s just the nature of the activity. It seems to invite problems.

I got myself some splitting wedges and feathers. I don’t think I harmed myself by using them, because they don’t require much effort, but I did have to get down in the dirt and hunch over in order to install them, so it may be that I aggravated whatever problems the shovel caused.

Now I’m about to start using a jackhammer, which is what I should have used to begin with. I should be able to crack the rock up quickly without a lot of bending. If I had bought the hammer to begin with, would my back have been strained? Maybe not.

I have been considering the big chunks of rock I’ve been pulling out of the hole. They need to be moved. Even if I use the tractor, I’ll have to lift them onto the forks or into the loader bucket somehow, and lifting large objects that are very close to the ground is a bad idea. When I thought about the problem, it reminded me that I don’t have a decent hand truck.

A long time ago, in Austin, Texas, I bought myself a Home Depot hand truck so I could load a U-Haul and move back to Sodom. I mean Miami. It’s a great thing to have, but it’s not perfect. One of the Chinese welds on the crossmembers broke, and I had to redo it. It has inflatable tires, and that means they’re always empty when I need the hand truck. Inflatable tires on a hand truck…very bad idea. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reinflate them.

I want to get a new hand truck that works better. I figured I’d go to Home Depot and spend eighty bucks. Then I started looking at reviews and complaints. There are a lot of problems with cheap hand trucks. First, you have to eliminate all hand trucks with inflatable tires. Then you have to look at reviews and see what people say about hand trucks falling apart. I read up, and the conclusion I drew is that a person should invest, once in his life, in a good hand truck.

I wanted to spend less than a hundred bucks, but I think I’m going to blow over $300 on an aluminum hand truck made by a company called Magliner. They’re made for daily use. The one I want can be opened up so it holds things at a 45-degree angle to the ground, or horizontally. It has fenders on it to keep things from rubbing on the wheels, which are made from foam and can’t deflate. It has a thing that lowers to allow you to put bigger objects on it. It will stand up to hard use, and because it’s aluminum, it will be easier to lift than a steel hand truck.

It seems crazy to me to spend that much money on a hand truck, but then I thought about the product’s main purpose: to prevent idiots from hurting themselves. Injuries are not fun, and they can be expensive. They can be permanent. If I hurt myself seriously trying to move something, I would feel great about receiving a successful treatment for $300, so why not pay that price in advance to avoid the problem?

There are some tools I can live without. I didn’t need the Harbor Freight planishing hammer I bought because they had a crazy sale. I didn’t need my third angle grinder, really. Tools for moving things are different. You need them. They are safety equipment. I see now that it’s important to put safety gear in a class by itself when I think about obtaining new stuff.

In a way, the jackhammer is safety gear. It will reduce hazardous exertion. My pole saw is safety gear. It allows me to put six feet between me and trees when I make risky cuts, and it allows me to cut from a ladder or cut over my head without risking death. Jackstands and chocks are safety gear.

I don’t know why I didn’t see this before.

Now that I see things correctly, a $300 hand truck doesn’t seem like a silly impulse buy. It seems like a prudent investment in continued wellbeing.

I should go ahead and put a 1000-pound electric hoist in the shop. They’re cheap, and one would certainly make it easier to yank the 300+-pound deck out from under my mower. I could lift the front of the mower and pull the deck out with the tractor, like an intelligent person.

The difficulty with installing a hoist is finding a way to support it. I have flimsy truss chords in my workshop, so it’s not like I would trust one to hold a hoist up by itself. I’ve read that you can sister them (fasten additional pieces of wood to either side) to prevent disaster. I don’t know if it works.

My garage in Miami had stronger trusses which were 5 feet shorter. I threw a 2×8 across three and hung my chain hoist from the middle of it. No trouble at all with loads over 500 pounds. I think that would be risky here.

Northern Tool sells a 2000-pound gantry crane cheap, and they also sell electric hoists. I suppose a mature person would buy a gantry instead of hanging a hoist from trusses. I don’t like gantries. They have feet, unlike a truss-mounted hoist. Always in the way. It’s probably a smart idea, though, because I could lift a ton instead of a few hundred pounds, and it could not pull my roof down.

I’m looking around the web as I write, and I just saw a great suggestion for moving relatively small things around: a Hoyer patient lift. This is something I should have had the common sense to buy for my dad. It’s like a garage engine hoist for a person. They will move 400 pounds from 30″ off the ground to 78″. That’s hard to beat. Someone on Craigslist is trying to get rid of one for $50, and they ordinarily sell for close to a grand. That’s a perk of living near Ocala. I hate to say it, but people die at an enormous rate here because of all the retirement and assisted living communities, and their stuff has to be liquidated.

I look forward to receiving my jackhammer, and I plan to be more open to spending money on things that will protect me from exertion.

Man, a bulldozer would be fun.

When all Else Fails, Spend More Money

The giant rock in my side yard is proving to be a stubborn and clever foe.

I have lots of rocks on and under my property. The other day I pulled a 6-footer out of the yard with the Kubota. I got cocky and started working on another rock. The more I dug, the more rock I saw. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve stumbled upon one of the longest roots of the country of China.

Last week, I shoveled and lifted quite a bit. I try not to lift anything heavy, but I still managed to strain my back. I felt bad on Saturday, but I prayed and did my thing, and on Monday morning, I felt great. So I went out to do more work, and on Tuesday, I strained my back again.

This time, I decided not to pray alone. I made sure I contacted my friend Amanda. She has been getting a lot of miraculous healings, and she prayed successfully for her son when he cut his toe very badly. It occurred to me that I ought to be contacting her whenever I had a physical problem. I believe in investing in success.

Last night little voices kept trying to tell me I had a serious problem which would not go away, but I got up this morning and felt fine.

When you help other people develop in Christ, they tend to come back and pay you dividends. Preachers don’t talk about that much, because most of them don’t know much. It’s a little bit like raising kids. If you raise successful kids of good character, you’ll have help when you get old. Same principle.

I had pastors who did me some good, and I tried to do good things in their churches, but they couldn’t be blessed. They wrecked whatever I gave them. Many people complain about the way their lives go, and they don’t realize they have turned themselves into people who are only capable of being cursed.

You can’t bless everyone. Curses bounce off God’s children, and blessings bounce off the children of darkness. It’s another example of the symmetry of the supernatural. You could give my sister 10 million dollars tomorrow, and in three years, she’d be broke, and she would also have made a lot of people suffer.

When we involve ourselves too deeply with cursed people who refuse to listen, they become parasites to us. Good things leave us, go to them, putrefy, and are lost. When Satan can’t get a grip on you directly, he may be able to use a cursed person you pity as a handle. This is the essence of enabling.

My back feels good, but I am not interested in a routine of injury and prayer, so I decided to invest in a jackhammer.

So far, I’ve been using a rotary hammer and some splitting wedges. The wedges work very well, but in order to use them, you have to have a rock of a suitable shape, and you have to be able to get at the part you need to split. Also, when you’ve split a rock, you have to be able to get the pieces out of the hole. A jackhammer should allow me to break the rock up into pieces which are light and easy to pick up.

I considered getting a Chinese jackhammer. They’re bargains. You can buy one, including an extended warranty, for less than a third of the price of a name brand. I found a refurbed Bosch for about twice the price of a Chinese model, and I felt like it was a better choice. It’s less likely to break down, and if I decide to sell it, the low up-front price, combined with the Bosch name, should permit me to get out with a very small loss.

I don’t know what I’ll do with a jackhammer once my few troubling rocks are gone. You can use them for other things. You can drive grounding rods with them. I don’t see that happening. You can use them for general destruction of annoying objects.

It will be nice to have. It was nice to have my little-used rotary hammer around when I needed it. I don’t know how easy it will be to use far from the house. My portable generator will power a welder, and it should run a jackhammer, but I can’t say until I’ve seen it.

The big rock moves very slightly when I yank it with the tractor. Maybe if I cut enough off of it, it will come out of its hole before being broken to tiny bits. I hope so.

I’m already using one rock from the job as a landscaping decoration, and I plan to use others. Bonus!

Sometimes I wish I had a skid steer. I suspect a skid steer is a better tool for this farm than a tractor. Skid steers are more powerful. They lift more, too. A skid steer can rip out stumps a tractor can’t even move. I think a skid steer would have enabled me to remove every annoying rock I have in a couple of hours.

If you’re wondering why they’re called “skid steers,” it’s because their wheels don’t have any steering mechanism. They’re always aimed straight ahead. To turn a skid steer, you move one pair of wheels one way while moving the other two the other way (or stopping them completely…I think). The result is that one pair of wheels may skid across the ground while the others turn.

Now you know.

I will post humiliating photos of the defeated rock when I have them.

My Boulders are Calving

Today I had fun with some new tools. My feathers and wedges arrived from Amazon. I bought a set of 10.

A wedge is really basically the same thing as a masonry nail, except it’s bigger. A feather is a tapered piece of metal that flanks the wedge. There is one feather on each side of the wedge, and the wedge slides between them.

You drill a hole in a rock you want to split, and you push your wedge and feathers into it. After drilling several holes in a line and putting wedges into all of them, you bop the wedges with a small sledge. As they tighten up, they force the rock apart. Before you know it, the rock splits. It’s hilarious. It’s not hard at all. A long-handled sledge would be too big for the job. You use a little one, like a blacksmith’s hammer.

I have a lot of rocks in my yard, and I hate them, so I am removing them. The other day I pulled a six-footer out of a hole with the Kubota. I am now working on one which is apparently considerably larger. I haven’t been able to budge it. I put a strap on it and yanked with the tractor. A piece of the rock snapped off, the strap slipped, and the strap came flying at me at considerable speed. The end of it missed my head by less than a yard. I didn’t think I could stretch a strap over three inches in width that much.

People say a flying strap will kill you. I can tell you from watching this one fly by my head that it wouldn’t even have bruised me. Nonetheless, I was not pleased to observe its flight. I was trying to use common sense, and I had read a lot about safety in these situations, but the strap took off anyway.

The rock is oddly shaped. It has big projections on it. My theory is that if I split them off one by one, the rock will eventually give up. Picture a fat guy using his hands to hold onto a doorframe while you try to pull him out of the room. Cut off his hands, and he will come flying out.

The rock has, or had, a big wing pointing north. I put 4 wedges in it and bopped them with the hammer, and a crack opened up, severing the wing. Unfortunately, it was still pinned by the main body of the rock. I moved around 6″ closer to the rock and made another cut. Now I had three rocks. The big rock, the wing I couldn’t move, and a piece between them. Oddly, the middle piece was easy to move, even though it was stuck between two rocks that refused to budge. I picked it up with my hands and threw it out of the hole.

I used my Makita rotary hammer to drill the holes. Everyone should have a rotary hammer. It’s in between hammer drills and demo hammers. My hammer is about 1-1/6 horsepower, and it will do three things: hammer, drill, and hammer-drill.

I needed to make 5/8″ holes for the wedges, and when I got started today, I found out my only 5/8″ carbide bit was for my little hammer drills. My cordless hammer drill is very nice. It will push a 1″ auger through oak as though it were cheese. I tried it on my rock, and after maybe a minute, I was probably only 1.5″ in. I was not having that.

I drove to Ocala, bought a 5/8″ SDS-Plus bit 18″ long, and got out the rotary hammer. I would say it cut roughly twice as fast as the hammer drill. Well worth the drive. I am sorely tempted to get a considerably bigger rotary hammer. Makita makes one that hits with 4 times as much energy as mine. That would be a joy to behold.

It’s really hot and muggy these days, so I can’t work hard for more than maybe 90 minutes. “Won’t” may be more accurate. I made two cuts, and my clothes were already heavy with sweat, so I called it a day.

The rock is defeated. I don’t know if I’ll continue until the whole thing comes out, but I can definitely knock the top off, and if I do that, I can bury it again, and it will be well below lawnmower range. The challenge of removing the entire thing is tempting. I don’t think I’ll be able to resist. I enjoy mocking the rock too much.

Once I get the rock removed or beheaded, I’ll be able to clean the area up, add soil and mulch, and plant my blackberry plants. Then I can move on to shrubs that need to be murdered and replaced.

It’s surprising to me to see such hard rock in Florida, which I think of as a giant sandbar. Parts of the rock are hard and glassy like flint, and other parts are basically sandstone. They’re mixed together, along with empty voids. I wouldn’t have expected to be able to drill it so easily, but it shatters readily, so the drill goes right in.

After this, I have one more rock to go. There are others, but they’re in areas where they don’t cause problems. I have a big ridge of very large boulders on the west side of the property. Some are as big as several couches. They’re fine. They look good, and they’re not in the way of my lawnmower.

Don’t let rocks push you around. If they try to intimidate you, show them your drill and wedges. You don’t need expensive equipment to turn them into pebbles.

Slouching Towards Bugtussle

Today I surprised myself. I contacted a realtor about a property in Blount County, Tennessee.

One of the problems I’ve had since my dad died is a reluctance to take ownership of things. For example, sometimes I say “we” when I’m talking about things we used to own together. “We have two wells.” “We have a pool.” Things like that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just managing things for my dad. I have even been reluctant to change the bad landscaping at my house, just because I feel like the previous owners knew something I didn’t and would disapprove.

I can tell you something that has helped me. Sometimes I say, “My dad moved to a far-away country and gave me everything he owns here.” This is true. He owns nothing in this world.

The idea of selling properties and moving to another state by myself is slightly intimidating. I wouldn’t be asking anyone’s permission. I would just go. I didn’t think I’d start looking for a new place so soon.

I was waiting for God to give me ideas about where to go. The older I get, the more I realize we screw up our lives by putting ourselves in traps God had nothing to do with. We choose horrible husbands, wives, careers, and homes. Then things go badly, and we’re stuck. You can’t just drop a spouse like a bruised peach at the supermarket. You can’t make a better career appear instantaneously. If you’re in the wrong home and the wrong area, you probably have a mortgage, and that means you’re stuck like a coyote with its paw in a trap. I don’t want to “follow my heart” or “go with my gut.” I don’t want to trust my ridiculous judgment. The world tells us to do those things, but worldly people live in defeat and regret. I want to get guidance from God.

I felt he was telling me to move to Tennessee, but I couldn’t figure out where to go. I knew I didn’t want to be in a flat area or a city. I wanted to know I was in Appalachia. I didn’t want to be in a county where they still had Klan meetings. I didn’t want to be close to Gatlinburg or the other tourist traps.

This morning I started to think he wanted me to move to Blount County.

I read up on it after I got this impression. It seems like a nice place. Good climate, nice hills, and real stores within a reasonable drive. Land prices are cheaper than they are here. I could set myself up on hundreds of acres of woods.

This week the nightly lows will be in the sixties in Blount County. That would be nice. I love Ocala, but it’s up around 95 degrees every day right now, and it’s only going down into the upper seventies at night. Working outdoors during the day is nearly impossible. You can put a couple of hours in, pausing frequently, and then you have to quit.

The human body is funny. When you overheat, you get tired, even if you’re not working hard. Your body will refuse to give you full performance, and it will make you breathe hard as if you were exerting yourself. It’s not helpful when I’m trying to cut downed trees or dig up a boulder.

I contacted a couple of real estate brokerages online about a property, and in my messages, I said, “No calls, please.” Both called within seconds. They apparently refuse to deal with me over the web like normal people. I sent the calls to voicemail.

Real estate agents are really annoying. When you call about a property, they don’t see you as a person who wants to buy that property. They see you as a lead. They want to turn you into “their” customer. Then they get 3% of the sale price of any property they tell you about.

I wanted to see what the property was shaped like. A lot of big properties are long and skinny, and I’m not having that. It doesn’t do you much good to have 300 acres if your neighbors are 100 yards away in both directions. I found the property on a government website, and it’s shaped like a lizard. No good. Oh, well.

I see where the term “gerrymander” comes from.

I got tempted to stray from Tennessee, and I looked at a place in North Carolina. It’s remarkable. It has two well-kept, very livable buildings. One is the main house, and the other is a sort of shop with its own kitchen. Really nice. It only has 40 acres, though. The number 300 keeps rolling around in my head. I really like big pieces of land. I always have. My favorite of all my grandfather’s farms was around 300 acres.

I am sorely tempted to spend a few days in Tennessee, just looking around.

In other news, I made real progress with my grilling. I went to Home Depot and got me a Bernzomatic TS8000 torch. I already have a Turbotorch, but it’s for the workshop. The Turbotorch was recommended to me as the best torch of the type, but it has been balky ever since I bought it, and it doesn’t seem to burn any hotter than the one I just got.

Today I made two 6.5-ounce burgers (because I had exactly 13 ounces of meat) and put them on the grill at its highest post-modification setting. As I grilled, I applied the torch to scorch the outsides of the burgers. It worked very well. I got some deep browning as well as a little crunch, and the insides of the burgers were hot and juicy. One had very little pink in it, and I always shoot for medium, but burgers are not steak, and medium-well is still very good. Medium can actually be a little mushy.

I have a Searzall tool on the way. I think I wrote about it. It’s a torch attachment for searing food evenly. Once it arrives, I should be all set. Regardless of the appalling shortcomings of propane grills, I’ll be able to put a good sear on the outside of every piece of beef I cook.

It’s amazing that the grill industry makes such feeble products.

I sound like I’m knocking my new grill. I think it’s an excellent product, as propane grills go. I believe it cooks as well as a $2000 grill. I should know; I had one. I just think the entire industry should be doing better. A $2000 grill should make amazing steaks, and when you buy a $100 grill that cooks as well as a $2000 grill, it should produce the same result. I have a $100 grill that, as delivered, cooked steaks just as well as an industry-leading, yet disappointing, $2000 grill.

It would be nice to have an electric salamander some day. That would put an end to the striving.

I still plan to get a square cast iron griddle for the butane stove. Frying puts a magnificent crust on a steak. I guess I could fry and then touch up with the Searzall! That would be interesting.

The feeling I get is that grilled burgers need to be at least an inch thick before cooking. Otherwise, the insides cook too fast. It’s just physics. I think the torch allows me to do a better job with thinner burgers.

I wonder how a propane knife forge would do. Someone needs to try that. It sounds stupendous. I guess the melting fat would be a problem, because it would run into the insulation and burn.

There’s a Youtube video of a lady cooking a steak using a forge. She’s not much to look at, she has a whisker problem, and her miniskirt is too short for a woman of her years, but she may be onto something.

Poor thing. It must be hard landing a man when you look like that. You have to give her credit, though. She’s in there punching. Takes good care of herself. Look at those toned legs.

I’m sure I’ll report on the Searzall when it arrives. Try to contain yourselves.

Cactus Cooler Cans Under the Cushions

I hate strongholds. Unless they’re good strongholds.

A stronghold is anything that’s hard to change. If you can’t quit overeating, it’s a stronghold. Cancer that won’t yield to prayer is a stronghold. Unassailable faith in God is also a stronghold; it’s just a positive stronghold.

I have rocks and stumps in my yard. I don’t know if they have anything to do with the supernatural, but they are stubborn obstacles to my enjoyment and improvement of the lot. Remember Joe Starrett in Shane? He had a big stump in a field he worked, and he never quit striving to get the stump out, because it drove him nuts. The novelist had the same feeling about stumps that I do.

I got myself a subsoiler for my tractor. It’s a big hook that goes down in the ground. You can hook it to stumps and use the hydraulics to lift them. It works well on small stumps and fairly big rocks, but there is a limit to what you can do with it. There are some big stumps on my land, and I have seen rocks half the size of cars.

I had three stumps and several rocks jutting out of the ground in an area where I wanted to put blackberry briars. I already have the plants. I managed to get the stumps out this spring, but the rocks would not yield. I started digging around them to find out where the edges were.

Today I dug around a couple of really annoying rocks, trying to find where they ended. The rocks were up against each other, and I figured that if I could find a way to move one, the other would then have less to anchor it, and I would be able to extract it, too. I unearthed a sort of horn on one rock. I decided to loop a tow strap over it, put the tractor in low, and pull.

When I took off, I was surprised to see a patch of ground the size of a yoga mat lift up. The two rocks were actually one.

I pulled the rock up halfway out of the ground. Then I propped it up with a piece of 4×4. With the rock in that position, I was able to loop the strap under it. The rock had a waist to it, so once the strap was around it, it could not come off.

The big danger was that if I reached under the rock with the strap, it might fall back on me, and then there I would be, waiting for death with a large rock on top of what used to be an arm. I avoided the problem by using a Johnson bar to shove the end of the strap under the rock. I then pulled it through from the other side.

I am painfully aware that many people die every day from doing stupid things. It’s very important to try not to be stupid when you use tools. That sounds simplistic, but it’s the truth. Most people who go to emergency rooms with horrible tool-related injuries did something stupid. Reaching under a half-ton rock held up by sand and a small piece of wood is very stupid.

When I took off with the tractor, the rock came right out, and I dragged it easily. That surprised me. It makes me rethink everything I knew about stumps and rocks. Maybe the strap is a better tool than the subsoiler.

Now I have a six-foot-long rock sitting in my hard. I’m considering using it for landscaping. I could probably sell it, but it doesn’t look too bad in the yard, and it’s a conversation piece.

The shovel in the photo is 44.5″ long, so that gives you an idea how big the rock is.

I feel fantastic. It’s great when an annoying problem suddenly gives way.

There are still two rocks I really want to uproot. Maybe it can be done. I hate getting in there with a shovel and doing all that exploratory work, when I have a tractor. Sometimes you have to do things the hard way.

If you need a thousand-pound rock, let me know. I am always open to offers.

My Fancy Sheath Gets Fancier

My leathercrafting adventures have not ceased.

I bought some sheath knives because I really wanted…I mean “needed”…them. The sheaths didn’t work for me because they were made for belts. I wear suspenders. I wanted sheaths that would fit in the accessory pockets of Carhartt jeans.

I got me a 12” square piece of leather from Amazon and made two sheaths, and they turned out to be perfectly okay, except for one thing. My Entrek Beaver…I mean my Entrek Roid-raging Mega Jaguar…fell out the other day.

The Mega-Jaguar (I can’t accept “Beaver.”) is a heavy knife with a heavy handle. I made a sheath which was tightly molded around it, hoping it would click into place and stay put. The weight of the handle apparently overcame the tightness of the sheath, and the other day I heard a tinkling sound while I was walking on my concrete driveway. The Mega-Jaguar had fallen out. I didn’t see anything wrong with it right away, but later on, I discovered a mashed place on the handle, and later still, I found microscopic chips on the edge.

I had to either make a new sheath or fix the old one.

The answer was a retention strap with a snap. I got on the web and looked up snaps.

Here’s how snaps work. A snap has four parts. It’s really two rivets. One rivet is the male part, and the other rivet is the female part. You have to get a rivet-setting tool, which is a steel rod with a little rounded tip, and you also need an anvil, which is a little bar of steel with several round depressions in it.

The whole business, including snaps and tools, is probably under $20. I can’t recall exactly.

You punch a hole in your leather. You take one your rivets, and you put one part of it on each side of the leather. You rest one side of the rivet in the anvil, and then you bang on your setting tool. It flares a little metal thing in the rivet, and you have half a snap, permanently attached to your leather.

Yesterday, having dropped my beautiful handmade knife in the driveway, I finally got around to making a strap. I also removed all the stitching from the sheath, removed the cheap aluminum Chicago screws I had used to attach the pocket clip to the sheath, and replaced everything. The first time I stitched the sheath, I did a job which was perfectly sound, but it didn’t look all that great, so I wanted to improve it.

Here is what I ended up with.

If you’re planning to use Chicago screws in leather, buy Tandy brand screws. Don’t fool with the crummy aluminum ones. I bought a bunch from a company called Grizzly, and they seem to be pretty bad.

I had a problem finding screws which were the right length to go through two pieces of 8-ounce leather. My solution was to make a little leather washer for each screw, to take up the excess length. It worked extremely well. The washers don’t slip at all when I tighten the screws.

The sheath is perfect now, and by “perfect,” of course, I don’t mean perfect. It’s not an example of great craftsmanship. But it’s only slightly worse than many store-bought leather items, and I was able to design it my own way instead of buying some piece of junk off Amazon and trying to make it work.

Last night, I worked on the knife’s blade. I have very nice DMT diamond stones, but I used cheap diamond hones from my kitchen. They’re easier to use, and the knife can’t tell how cheap they are. They put a perfectly fine edge on it. If you put on your reading glasses and squint in strong light, you can detect the places where the chips were, but they will disappear after one or two more sharpenings.

I had a piece of 300 sandpaper on my indoor workbench, so I grabbed it and polished the dented place on the knife’s handle. It looks very good now. I may polish the other side of the handle to make it match perfectly!

To hone the blade, I took a great tip from a reader. I used a leather strop with diamond spray. I bought the spray from a business called Sharpening Depot, I think. It’s a tiny little bottle full of a milky substance which contains 1-micron diamonds.

Initially, I charged my strop with green honing compound, and it worked perfectly well, but these days, people go for the diamond spray, and I can see why. The green stuff contains wax, and it accumulates on knives and interferes with the cutting action until you remove it. I had to stop stropping and use acetone on my knife every time I wanted to see if I was done sharpening.

Last night, I put acetone on a paper towel and used it to clean the strop instead of the knife. I pretty much obliterated the green compound, but it wasn’t helping anyway. I sprayed it again with diamonds, and it worked very, very well. It’s also fast. When you give a clean strop 8 or 10 strokes, it begins to turn black from the steel that’s coming off the knife.

Now what do I do with the green compound?

I would like to put diamond spray on an MDF wheel and strop using my buffer. It would be much easier to maintain the correct angle on a buffer. I could also put a cork belt on my 1×42 grinder and charge it with diamonds. That would probably be better.

Of course, I already have the cork belt.

The knife cuts like crazy now. It seems to want to bite into things.

I like the kitchen hones because they’re quick and easy to use, and they’re also light and handy. Diamond stones are heavy steel plate. I won’t even consider a wacky machine like a Tormek. I don’t want to have to run for a machine every time my knife gets dull. Maybe a Tormek is better. If so, hooray. I still don’t want one. My knives are sharp enough to scare me already. I don’t think it would do me much good to make them sharper.

When you sharpen a knife as much as possible, you end up with a very fine edge, and it sort of disappears as soon as you start using the knife. You start out with a knife that’s freakishly sharp, and after a few cuts, it’s merely very, very sharp. Is very, very sharp really that bad? It’s the best you can do unless you want to sharpen your knife several times a day. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.

I’ve sharpened plane irons until they were like razors. Use them for a very short time, and they’re not like razors any more, but they cut very well nonetheless. The whole game is not about perfect sharpness, which disappears quickly. It’s about excellent sharpness which lasts a long time.

People buy crazy things these days to get things sharp. Waterstones. Tormeks. In the old days, when a woodworker wanted to sharpen his plane or chisel, he didn’t have nutty sharpening tools, and he didn’t sharpen anything to 8000 grit, but he still did excellent work.

I’ve made two sheaths. Now I need one for my Benchmade Bushcrafter. It’s quite a knife. My hat is off to Benchmade.

I want to buy more knives, because if you like knives, that’s what you do. I think I should make my next knife, though. I can buy all sorts of high-tech steel, and I can send knives out for heat-treating. I should be able to make a stainless knife as well as anyone, and now I can also make sheaths.

I have to force myself to use my expensive knives, because I’m afraid to ruin them. If you can make your own knives, that fear goes away. There are a lot of $300 knives out there, but I consider a $150 knife expensive. I should be able to make knives from excellent steel for between $50 and $100 each, and I would get exactly what I want.

The ability to make knives and sheaths is pretty neat. If you have a reasonably well-equipped garage shop, you probably have nearly everything you need. If you have a drill press, an arbor press, and a 2×72 grinder, you’re most of the way there.

I don’t think any shop is well-equipped without a 2×72. It’s an incredibly useful tool. It’s amazing that they’re not more popular.

When I get the Bushcrafter sheath made, I’ll post a photo.

Grill Hack Plus Powerful Testimony

I have been a very, very bad boy.

I got myself a stainless portable grill from Pit Boss. Very nice grill. It will make a credible rib eye, IF you let the fat burn off the heat deflectors and add additional heat to the meat. Otherwise, it’s not quite optimal. You have to play around a little to make it do an acceptable job using the racks, and it’s definitely too weak to heat a cast iron griddle for steaks. The propane flames are not very high when you use the grill as adjusted by the factory.

I got myself a Loco-brand high-pressure regulator to increase the flow, but when I tried to use it, the burners wouldn’t accept the additional gas. The flames blew out. I figured it was time to take the regulator back to Lowe’s.

Today I Googled, and I learned something great: gas grills have carburetors.

A carburetor mixes air and fuel in the right proportions. You can’t just pump propane through a burner and hope for good results. You have to have the carburetor (“air shutter”) adjusted correctly.

Guess what I did?

An air shutter is just a metal sleeve that’s open on one side. Air flows through the open space. You rotate the sleeve to get the right size space. Sometimes grills need adjusting, and you’re supposed to adjust the air shutter to fix them. You’re supposed to do this while the grill is on low heat.

Right. Low.

Again, guess what I did?

I got me a Philips screwdriver, LIBERATED the air shutter on my right burner, turned on the gas, and adjusted it until the burner would support a really decent flame. When I saw that this worked, I did the other side.

Will my grill still work on low heat? Who cares? Why would you want a grill to work on low heat? What possible benefit is there in that? Are you planning to heat baby food on the grill? Grills are for charring meat and other food, period. If you’re cooking things on moderate heat in a grill, you made a mistake. What you really wanted was a toaster oven.

This is exciting. I may be able to produce correctly cooked steaks on the grill now, both with the rack and with the griddle.

I hate the way hippies and lawyers ruin grilling. I know they’re behind the pathetic limitations on gas grills. They’re behind everything that ruins fun.

A grill that doesn’t heat up enough is like a Mustang with a 4-cylinder engine. What is the purpose? There is none.

I was going to try to have something other than steak for dinner tonight, but you can probably guess what I’m going to do. I’m off to the store shortly.

I’m not one of those people who think all meat has to have a black, crunchy layer of carbon on it, but grey steaks or brown steaks with a few wimpy black grill marks are just wrong. Burgers should also have some charring.

I admit, I like fried burgers from Wendy’s and Five Guys, even though they’re not really cooked correctly. Somehow, these chains make grey, well-done burgers work. But a good grilled burger with some charring is a whole lot better.

I am really pinning the Smug-O-Meter today.

Will the excess heat destroy the grill? I don’t care. The experiment is too important to drop for the sake of a grill. This is for science, people.

In other news, I have a testimony. My friend Travis got released from probation, unexpectedly. I have his permission to tell about it.

I can never remember whether I’ve revealed his name here before. Often, I use fake names for people, and I can’t keep track. Anyway, he is house-sitting in my dad’s old house while I sell it.

A few years back, he did something that wasn’t very clever. He tried to move a car across town with an expired tag. These days, cops have scanning machines that look at license plates, and when a scanner sees a bad tag, it lets the cops know. Travis got pulled over, and because he had some license issues already, he panicked. He took off. That’s a felony. The cop claimed he tried to hit him, which is a great way to pump up the charges. That’s also a felony.

Travis got five years of probation, and it has been very hard. He can’t travel without permission. He had to do miserable manual labor at a park. He had to meet with his P.O. over and over. His P.O. and the other people with oversight kept screwing up and causing problems for him. For example, the people at the park failed to record a bunch of his hours.

His P.O. violated his probation because he failed to meet with him. Travis had gone to his office and called him many times, but the P.O. wasn’t there when he was supposed to be, and he didn’t return calls. Travis had to go to a hearing today. The big danger was that they would revoke his probation, give him a felony conviction, and put him away.

Of course, I have been advising him all along. I don’t give him legal advice, per se, but I tell him obvious things. Never complain. Never look angry. Always sound grateful. Be polite. When you have to go to court or to see your P.O., be on time. Keep records of everything. Take responsibility for what you did. Do everything they tell you to do. I also gave him all sorts of spiritual advice.

We have been praying about his hearing. Today he called me while I was planting dwarf podocarpus shrubs, and he gave me the amazing news. The judge terminated his probation instead of revoking it. He is done. No conviction. No more meetings. No more working at the park.

He said he was nervous because the judge was crabby. She had been laying the smackdown on people before his turn came. When he was called, he had all his papers. He was polite. He didn’t interrupt. She told him his probation was terminated as of today.

Sounds good, right? It gets much better.

His dad has MS. He is in a bad nursing home. He has been steeped in bitterness, pride, and anger for years. When his son got a scholarship to the University of Miami, he did virtually nothing to help. Sometimes he told Travis he wanted him out of his life.

We have been praying for his dad ever since I can remember. Travis was afraid he would die before he turned back to Jesus. This week, his dad was hospitalized for an infection caused by a catheter, and he was intubated. It looked bad.

I asked God about it, and he seemed to say Travis’s dad would repent.

We prayed and spoke blessings and curses, and yesterday, unexpectedly, Travis’s dad repented and gave his life back to Jesus. Now they pray together. You can’t imagine Travis’s relief, but I can. My dad finally gave in this year at the age of 87, a few weeks before he died.

Pretty good week, wouldn’t you agree?

As Travis said on the phone today, this stuff really works.

I’m amazed that God has been able to make good use of me. I think of myself as a selfish and solitary person with few human interactions, but somehow I have found myself at the center of a small group of people who listen to me, and when I tell them about the things God has used to change my life, he changes theirs, too. God used me to help Travis, and he used Travis to reach his dad. Travis has a lot of friends he’s influencing, too.

The Bible says people will know God’s children by their fruit, and people misinterpret this and say it means their works or their personalities. In reality, it refers to other human beings they reach. Jesus said he was the true vine, and we were the branches. He said any branch that didn’t bear fruit would be cut off and burned. What is the purpose of a branch? To bear fruit. What is fruit? It’s a means of reproduction. God uses us to reproduce his nature in human beings.

This is a good day.

I’m off to Winn-Dixie. Hope they have some nice cheap rib eyes.

Another Triumph From the World’s Worst Engineers

Today’s fun project: finding a new pool pump.

Here’s something everyone considering buying a pool should know: it’s a mistake. You’ll use it 25 times in the first year. The second year, you’ll use it twice. After that, you’ll hate it, and you’ll miss the nice, trouble-free grass you gave up in order to have it built.

Thinking your kids will love a pool slide? Wrong. Can’t have one. You will not be able to get home insurance. Diving board? Can’t have one. Anything fun will not be permitted. Tort lawyers have seen to it.

Without a diving board, a pool is just a hole full of water.

You may also have to build a ridiculous fence around your pool to keep the local brats out. Yes, even if they’re trespassing, their parents can sue you if they get hurt in your pool. Man, there is nothing more fun and aesthetically pleasing than a pool with a high aluminum fence five feet from the edge on all sides.

Pool hardware is garbage. I don’t care who makes it. The big names like Pentair and Hayward make stuff which is basically Harbor Freight quality.

You can pretty much expect a brand-name pool pump to puke its last in two to three years. The motor will die, because they’re cheap and they have open frames and crummy seals that let rain in. People in most industries have managed to figure out that you don’t put open-frame motors outdoors where it rains, but pool engineers are a special breed.

A motor will run you a minimum of $200. Assuming you get lucky and get two full years out of each new motor, you’ll be paying $100 per year or more in new-motor expenses, in addition to the cost of installation if you don’t feel like doing it yourself.

A pool pump will cost you at least $500 to replace, and if your state forces you to get a variable-speed pump (which probably won’t be cheaper to run no matter what they tell you at the pool store), you can expect to pay a minimum of $750.

I don’t know what pool service costs where you live, but I would be paying over $1200 per year here, and that’s cheap. It doesn’t include “special” expenses that occur from time to time. “This month we need to add stabilizer (because we only use cheap non-stabilized chlorine).” “This month you need a new skimmer basket (because they’re made of plastic comparable to that used in disposable forks).” “This month you need a new filter cartridge (because you weren’t smart enough to get a sand filter).”

I take care of my own pool, and I never, ever use it. I have been in it ONCE, and that was because the power was out due to a hurricane. I had to bathe in a bucket of pool water, and I needed to rinse the soap off. Sometimes I come in from doing landscaping or cutting trees, and I’m soaked in sweat and covered with things like sawdust and dirt, and I think, “Man, that pool looks good.” Then I come to my senses and take a shower instead. A tiny 35-foot pool with no diving board is just not worth the effort.

I do not see the appeal of tiny pools. You’re always standing right next to everyone. My parents had 40-foot pools. To me, that’s the minimum size for pool usefulness. If you can get from one side of the pool to the other in three seconds, you might as well go to Walmart and get one you can blow up. You always look like you’re standing up in the bathtub. You’re determined to enjoy yourself, even though you know the experience is lacking.

My parents had a pool built when I was in elementary school, and I enjoyed it, but I had a diving board plus a tree next to the pool, so there were things to jump off of. These days, swimming is a total waste of time. I can’t understand why kids love it so much. They scream and hit each other with things, and apparently, that’s a good time. When I was a kid, we did cool things like diving for stuff, using my dad’s scuba equipment, turning live lobsters loose, long jump contests, swimming with my enormous dog, and leaping from the avocado tree. The screaming and hitting didn’t even occur to us.

My pool has a screened enclosure. On three sides, there is about 5 feet of concrete between the pool and the screen. Barely room to pass someone else. You can forget about running up to the pool at top speed to see how far you can jump. The side near the house is bigger, but it’s not really big enough for a decent barbecue. Basically, it provides a place for adults, who are not having fun, to sit and yell, “DON’T DO THAT,” and, “FIVE MORE MINUTES.”

If your income is over, say, $500,000 per year, go ahead and get a pool if you really want to. You can afford the maintenance, and you can afford the insane cost of construction. If you’re a normal person, you will hate yourself every time you look at the pool, especially when relatives you don’t really like come to see you just so they can use it. Especially when you write a monthly check to the bank to pay off your pool loan!

Maybe you can tell I’m not happy today, or is it too subtle? I just ordered a new pump from Amazon, because my old pump is making a noise like a phaser on overload. It’s going to die in a few days, even though I installed the motor after I moved here.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to replace another motor, in a Miami home I’m trying to sell. It was installed in 2017.

The old motor here in Ocala died from age. The one I replaced it with died from design problems. The filter developed a strange issue which took a long time to diagnose and repair, and as a result, the pressure was high. A product not sold by scammers would have had no problem with 40 pounds of pressure, but a pool pump housing is another story. Scammers are the only people who manufacture them. My Pentair developed pressure cracks that had to be patched with epoxy. Little streams of water shot onto the new motor. Even though I managed to plug some and divert others, the water hastened the day the motor would croak.

The new pump will arrive in a few days, and I will have to go out in the very unpleasant July heat and install it. This will take at least two hours. Then, in two years, I’ll have to do it again.

The pump I ordered is a Hayward Super Pump. Hayward is a top name. Doesn’t help. I have had two other Hayward Super Pumps. They both died young. They’re just no good. The motors come from Mexico. Do I need to add anything? Name something Mexicans build well, apart from pinatas and tunnels.

Why did I buy a third one? Very simple. Hayward’s big competitor, Pentair, refuses to warranty pumps installed by amateurs. With Hayward, I’ll get an 18-month warranty. Amazon sold me a three-year warranty on top of that. Now I’m all set. For 4.5 years, I should be able to force someone else to pay for new Mexican motors. I figure I saved myself $350. Ole!

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t go near an extended warranty. Generally, you should never pay to insure anything you can afford to insure from your own funds. There are exceptions, however. Cell phones. Laptops. And pool pumps.

With Hayward and Amazon, I got a bad pump and a very good warranty. If I had gone with Pentair, I would have gotten no warranty and probably a worse pump. The Pentair I’m replacing is basically fiberglass-reinforced cheese.

My new portable grill just arrived. I think I’ll have a steak and not think of the pool.

Additional Links for People With the Temerity to Disagree With Me

5 Huge Reasons I Hate Swimming Pools

A Swimming Pool is a Terrible Investment

10 Reasons You Will Regret Buying a Home With a Swimming Pool

Even More

An industry source tells me single-speed 2-HP pumps will be illegal NATIONWIDE in 2021. How about that? If I can’t replace motors as they die, I’ll have to shell out at least 50% more per pump, and there will be NO energy savings.

More

This would be a dream come true.

How Much Does It Cost To Remove & Fill In A Swimming Pool?

Pawn Shop Beauty Purrs Like a Kitten

Today has gone well.

A while back, I bought a Baldor 332B buffer with a Baldor G14 stand. I paid $250. You could probably buy this combination new for $1100, not including the safety switch that was bolted to the one I bought. I felt $250 was a very good deal.

When I got the buffer home and turned it on, it rumbled. It didn’t squeal, which is what I would have expected from bad bearings. It just seemed unbalanced, like it wanted to move in a circle in the plane of the wheels’ rotation.

I put a dial indicator on it and turned the shaft, and it showed less than a thousandth of runout. When I turned the motor on, the indicator went nuts, suggesting something was seriously wrong. A bearing that causes problems at 1800 RPM may work very nicely at 20.

I ordered myself some stuff from Caswell Plating, which is a magnificent website for anyone who wants to buff or plate things. I now have assorted good-quality compounds plus enough wheels to allow me to avoid mixing compounds on the same wheel. I also ordered some sealed NSK bearings.

Today I put the bearings in. As usual, I made mistakes which taught me new things.

Grinder and buffer bearings are pressed onto armature shafts. They aren’t held on by collars. Baldor will make a grinder shaft a certain size, and then they will install bearings, the internal diameters of which are actually smaller than the diameter of the shaft. The use presses to shove the bearings onto the shaft, and the inner races of the bearings have to stretch to get over it. This creates a tight fit.

I had to push the old bearings off and push the new ones on. I should have used my arbor press, which is a fairly sensitive tool, but it’s not on a stand right now, so I used a hydraulic press. It’s easier to put up a photo than explain.

The first time I tried to press a bearing off, I didn’t clean the shaft first, so the bearing got hung up on the rust and crud. That was a dumb mistake. I put it back in place and reinstalled the armature. Then I ran the buffer and used an old grinding belt to remove the rust. After that, I polished it with emery cloth.

I put the shiny new armature in the hydraulic press and put 3-in-One oil on the armature and let it run into the bearings. They came off with no problems. The reverse procedure shoved them right back on.

Everyone should have a hydraulic press. At $160 from Harbor Freight, they are too cheap NOT to buy.

By the way, that red thing is a plastic case for Taiwanese impact sockets. It’s what all top buffer mechanics use to hold their armatures. The dust is imported from Austria, and it has special protective qualities.

Putting the buffer back together was no problem, and now it runs very smoothly, without rumbling. The bearings were definitely bad.

I stuck a couple of wheels on the buffer for a photo op. Still trying to decide whether I should clean it up. I could remove the pins holding the nameplate on, give it a neat paint job, and put the plate back on.

Now I have to figure out what to do with it. The Baldor stand is not good by itself. I can use it as it is, and I’ll probably be fine, but it’s not a brilliant move. Buffers are extremely dangerous. Unbelievably dangerous, considering how tame they look. I need to have a stand that will provide some resistance to movement.

I am not willing to screw the stand to the shop floor. I don’t have a floor plan together, so I know I’ll be moving the buffer, and I don’t want a workshop floor full of holes. My plan is to make a heavy wheeled base from plywood. I also plan to put a foot switch on it so I can turn the buffer off in a big hurry without reaching toward the wheels. The current safety switch requires you to fumble around with your hand not far from the wheels.

I’m thinking I may also throw a rope over a truss and attach it to the buffer. That will keep it from going anywhere if it decides to ramble. Not ideal, but much better than nothing.

You educate yourself, you do what appears to be reasonable, and you live with the risk. That’s how life works when you have tools.

I read a fascinating safety analysis written by two engineers, and they focused entirely on things like guards. Apparently, buffer movement is way down on the list of dangers. They concluded that guards make buffers more dangerous, which is amazing. They did tests and found that an object tangled in a buffer wheel can go around the buffer several times in spite of guards. It can also reach a linear speed over 10 times that of the wheel, so 420+ miles per hour. The possibility that a buffer might fall over doesn’t seem nearly as scary.

While I was learning about buffers, I learned something disconcerting: it’s unsafe to buff the insides of things with bench buffers. It’s much easier for a buffer to catch something when you buff the inside. If you were to buff a metal hoop, for example, the buffer might take it out of your hands and start spinning it. Bench buffers speed up buffing certain things, but they’re not for every job. When you have things that aren’t safe for bench buffers, you have to look to handheld tools, even though they’re slower.

I only have one really good handheld buffing tool. It’s an air buffer, which is like a die grinder that holds buffing tools. When I say “really good,” I’m not telling the truth. My 17-CFM compressor, which is enormous by home shop standards, can’t keep up with it. You buff and stop and buff and stop. It looks like I need to get an electric die grinder. They’re actually superior. They don’t quit over and over, and they have more torque.

So. New tool. More wheels or buffs or whatever. It never stops.

In other news, something very exciting happened today. I performed a healing. I was alone, so I didn’t get to heal someone else, but still, it was great. I woke up, and my shoulder was sore. It’s a chronic thing. It doesn’t prevent me from doing anything, but it’s annoying. I think it’s referred pain from my gallbladder, which has had minor problems. I don’t think my shoulder has had a physical problem of its own. Gallbladder issues often cause shoulder and back pain.

Anyway, I have been watching all sorts of healing videos. This morning I told the pain to leave, and I put my hand on myself and so on. I felt my shoulder a few seconds later, and the pain was almost gone. I kept working at it. Sometimes when you get a divine healing, you only get part of it at first, and you have to go on. This happened to Jesus, so it’s not a sign of failure. Anyway, I can’t find the soreness now.

The Bible says God will perfect (complete) that which concerns me. That’s in a psalm. It’s true, so there is no reason to stop when a prayer is partially answered or a curse or blessing doesn’t come to pass in its entirety.

I’ve healed myself (sloppy language, since I’m just a conduit) many times, but this time, it was very dramatic and fast.

I keep hoping God will use me to heal other people. I really hate spirits that cause problems that seem incurable, and I hate the fact that most Christians think doctors are better than God.

Maybe tomorrow or Sunday I’ll work on a buffer stand base. I have some ideas.

Tooling up for Buffing

Today I’ve been getting up to speed on bench buffers. I bought an old Baldor yesterday, and I need to get it working correctly. I also need things like wheels and compounds.

I learned a lot this morning. I watched a Youtube video from Eastwood. They’ve carved out a place in the market by selling car enthusiasts pretty good tools for very good prices. If you buy Eastwood stuff, you may not get the very best performance and reliability, but you will also get into the game a lot faster and cheaper.

Eastwood has a lot of educational videos. I’ll embed their buffing lecture here.

Here is what I learned:

1. I should get one spiral-sewn cloth wheel for every abrasive I use, except for emery and polishing. Otherwise, I’ll have to use a device known as a rake to clean the compound of of the wheel every time I change abrasives. That isn’t happening. The video guy says you should store your compound and matching wheels together to prevent mixups.

2. I need a hard sisal wheel, several spiral wheels, a loose cloth wheel, and a canton flannel wheel. Sisal is for emery, which is very coarse. Spiral wheels are for tripoli, stainless steel, plastic compound, and red rouge. The other wheels are for polishing with diamond rouge. I may have this wrong, but I should be close.

3. The basic abrasive compounds are emery (coarse), stainless compound, tripoli, plastic compound, red rouge, and white rouge.

I hope I got this right.

My buffer has 3/4″ arbors. Chinese buffers typically have 1/2″ or 5/8″ arbors. That means it’s not easy for me to find wheels. The answer is Caswell Plating. This is a company that sells plating, polishing, anodizing, and oxide-finishing products. I found what I needed (or thought I needed) on their site. I also bought assorted abrasives.

My buffer does not run as smoothly as I would like. It doesn’t screech, but it rumbles a little. I don’t think it should do that. I looked up the bearings for it, and I have a pair on the way. I don’t know if they’ll improve things, but for $14, it’s worth a shot. I suppose there could be something out of balance inside the buffer, but that seems unlikely. It had to get past Baldor QC.

I checked the runout with an indicator, and it’s well under 0.001″. The bearings make a little noise when I rotate the wheels by hand.

To get the bearings off and back on, I’ll have to use my hydraulic press. That may be awkward. I’ll have to hold a long armature and shaft vertically on steel plates. Ordinarily, you could use a bearing puller to remove a bearing, but I would need one with an 8″ reach and a 2.5″ capacity (diameter), and they don’t pop up when I search for them online. Some guys use hammers to remove old bearings and beat new ones on. That seems stupid. I don’t think hitting a new bearing with a hammer can improve it any.

I found out why the buffer has a magnetic switch. It’s a safety thing. If the power goes out while the buffer is running, the magnetic switch prevents it from turning back on when the power returns. It also has some kind of thermal protection, which I didn’t bother reading about.

I don’t really need the switch, but it’s not hurting anything, and it could frustrate a kid who walked by the buffer and tried to turn it on. You can pull the skin off your hand, like a pink, bloody glove, with one of these machines. I suppose it’s nice to know that will be harder for kids to do.

I am trying to figure out what to do about stabilizing the buffer. I’m resisting drilling my floor as hard as I can. Every time I moved the buffer, I would have to drill new holes. Ugly. But buffers are dangerous, and they need to be secured. I could secure it to a heavy bench or something, but then I wouldn’t have that cool Baldor pedestal under it. I could put the pedestal on my bench grinder, however.

The main thing, when you use a buffer, is not to be an idiot. You have to study up on safety and avoid doing stupid things. Not long ago, a well-known knifemaker was buffing a knife, and his buffer took it out of his hands and threw it back to him, right into his heart. Naturally, he died. Sounds like he was standing in the wrong place and holding a small object in his bare hands while buffing. Those are things everyone knows they shouldn’t do. I read stories like that, and I try to plan ahead.

I don’t know if a buffer can hurt you when you stand to the side. I know it’s a lot safer than standing in front of it, waiting to catch whatever it throws. Before I put solid metal wheels on my bench grinder, I always stood to the side when I used it. I try to stay out of the plane of my chainsaws. When I use a table say, I try not to stand directly behind the wood. You do what you can.

Most people, including professionals, bring tools home and flail away with no training and no common sense. It’s awfully unusual to hear about an accident that didn’t involve stupid behavior.

I believe I’ve watched every episode of Forged in Fire. I’ve seen people hold things under a drill press with their bare hands instead of clamping them. I’ve seen people lean over a container of warm, combustible oil while shoving a red-hot knife into it. It’s startling what people who claim to be experienced will do.

When my bearings arrive, I’ll pop them in and see if the buffer sounds better. It pretty much has to, unless something is unbalanced, and that’s unlikely. I could fix something like that if I could find places to remove metal inside the buffer. I don’t expect a problem, however.

I expect to be fully operational within a week.

I forgot to order a wire wheel! I better get on that.

Hope your Sunday is going well. Mine sure is.

Buffer!

I’ve wanted a buffer for a long time. They’re very useful. You can shine things with them. You can also use abrasive flap wheels and wire wheels with them. Great tools. But I was too cheap to spring for a used American buffer, and I had doubts about Asian. The most promising thing I found was a Taiwan Jet buffer for $400 or so.

The Jet would probably have been excellent, but I couldn’t get past my stinginess, so I waited. Recently, I found a used Baldor (American) online. They still make this model. It’s a 332B, with a 3/4-HP motor. It runs at 1800 RPM, and it takes 8″ wheels. It already had a sturdy steel pedestal on it, with shelves.

I offered $250 for it. I think I could have done better, but these days, I try not to be ruthless when I negotiate. Even if I could have gotten it for $150 or so, the $270 asking price was very modest, and $250 was a great deal.

I drove to Orange City today and picked it up. Here are some photos.

It appears it came from a school in Seminole County. A school won’t run a buffer 24 hours a day, and that’s good. On the other hand, a school will let Beavis and Butt-head impersonators run wild with quality tools, and that’s bad. It’s hard to hurt a buffer or bench grinder, though. Basically, three things can happen. The shaft can be bent. The capacitors can die. The bearings can die. If the shaft is okay, the other stuff is chicken…is easy to fix.

I was surprised to find that the person who was selling it online was actually a business. In fact, he was a pawn shop. Had I known that, I probably would have offered less. I pictured some guy selling his precious tools in order to pay bills. In reality, that guy had already sold the tool to the guy I was buying it from.

No matter. Still a good deal.

The buffer had two wheels on it. One was an abrasive flap wheel, and it looks very good. The other was a 4″ cloth wheel with red rouge on it. I don’t know if an 8″ wheel can be eaten down to 4″. I didn’t look closely. Maybe the previous owner had a practice of using 4″ wheels on an 8″ machine.

Took the wheels off and ran the buffer. I can feel a tiny amount of movement when it runs. It feels okay, but when I turn on my Dayton grinder, I can barely feel anything. I don’t know if the Baldor is running normally or whether it needs bearings. I’m working on finding out. It’s silent, so that’s good.

The pedestal has a base about one foot square. It will not be stable enough for buffing. I think I’m going to get two rectangles of plywood and glue them together to get a platform about 1.75″ thick. Then I can put casters under it, far enough apart to make the buffer stable. I don’t want to screw it to the floor. It would be a big problem, having a tool that big stuck in one location.

The buffer has a starter box. I don’t know why a 3.4-HP 115V tool would have a starter box. I’m trying to find out.

I don’t know exactly what I want to do, regarding default accessories. I was thinking I’d put a wire wheel on one side and a cloth wheel on the other. I suppose I’ll need several wheels and several types of abrasive. It’s very easy to change accessories, now that I’ve knocked the nuts off with an impact driver, so it’s not an important decision.

I would like to clean up and restore the buffer, but it’s pretty cool the way it is. It has an inscription on it, indicating it came from a school system down here.

I think I’ll really enjoy this thing. Buffing and wire-brushing are important parts of shop life. Without proper tools to do these things, life is glum.

It turned out the pawnshop was near the home of my goddaughter, so I went for a visit and took everyone for ice cream. She’s 6 now. Her oldest sister is making plans for college. Time just zips by.

I talked with her dad about prayer and so on. He and his wife are doing very well these days. They had some rough times a while back, but they’ve ramped up their prayer efforts, and it’s paying off. I’m hoping they’ll come up in July so we can pray.

Good tools, good friends, and a very pleasant drive. Hard to think of a better way to spend a Saturday.

Do More With Dumore

Yesterday was productive. Spiritual progress began while I was still in bed; God helped me to be very effective in my time with him. Natural progress started before I left the bedroom. I had some problems with the recorder’s office in Dade County, as well as the Florida Revenue Department. People from both organizations called, and their errors were corrected. It’s not easy to call them yourself. You have to wait forever on hold. Much better when they call you.

I also fixed my TV before starting the day. I have a 55″ TV in my bedroom. In the past, I chose not to have a bedroom TV because it seemed inappropriate, but now that I use TV’s to listen to Julie True and watch Christian videos, it’s a different story. I got a Roku TV a few months ago. Unfortunately, it had started to make buzzing sounds when I played music.

I found that when I pressed my finger against the back of the TV in a certain area, the buzzing stopped. That meant something was touching the inside of the panel. I put the TV on my bed and opened it up. I found that a lot of wires and cables were stabilized with cheap vinyl tape, and one data ribbon was twisted unnecessarily, bringing it closer to the rear panel. I removed the cable, took the twist out, and reinserted it. Then I added a couple of pieces of Gorilla Tape. I put them on things that looked like they could vibrate against the cabinet. Bang. Problem solved.

I believe I would have gotten more done yesterday, but I had some issues with a weed eater and rotary tool I ordered. The weed eater’s box had been torn open, and things were missing. I contacted the manufacturer and the company that sold it to me. I ordered a new weed eater. Today the one I received goes back.

The rotary tool didn’t work out at all.

I have a Dremel I got in about 1995, and it has had a number of problems. It pooped out while I was using it to burnish the edge of a holster, so I Googled around to see who made good new rotary tools. I figured Proxxon was the answer. I already have one, and it seems okay. I learned that people often complain about the electronics failing, so I gave up on Proxxon.

I decided to go with the reviewers, and I bought a Dremel 4300 kit. I paid $100, and when the tool arrived, it turned out to be useless. I put my leather burnisher in it, and as soon as I turned the tool past 15000 RPM, it went nuts. It started screeching, and the tool wobbled in the chuck. There was no way to make it work. I tried a collet, and I got the same result. The same burnishing tool works fine in my Proxxon, and it worked fine in the old Dremel, so my best guess is that the one I bought is defective. If not, the design is incompetent. I’m sending it back. I started looking for options again.

It appears that no one on earth makes a good corded consumer-grade rotary tool. There are Dremel and Proxxon, and then there are the Chinese clones. I looked for tools made by real companies like Makita and Dewalt, but there was nothing. Milwaukee makes a cordless job which is probably good, but I’m tired of chargers.

I decided to check out Dumore. This is a company that makes industrial tools like tool post grinders. Their products are extremely expensive. A simple Dremel-like tool will run you over $300, and it won’t work with all of Dremel’s gadgets. On the other hand, they run for lifetimes, not weeks.

You can get a used Dumore inexpensively on Ebay. Oddly, the same tools that sell for over $300 new routinely sell for between $50 and $100 in fairly good condition. I checked the Dumore parts site, and things like bearings are not expensive. The highest price I saw was somewhere over $30, and most bearings I saw cost $4.41 each. Bearings and switches are the only things in a Dumore than can be expected to fail with any frequency (I think), so I don’t see any reason to be afraid to buy used. I would guess it’s unusual for the windings to fail.

Most or all of the Dumores I’ve seen don’t have variable speed, but this can be fixed with a simple, cheap external controller, so it doesn’t matter. A foot pedal is a nice addition to a rotary tool. You can put it down without handling the switch.

The Dremel is going back to Amazon, and my next rotary tool will be a Dumore. No more playing around.

Dremel prices keep going up, but the quality doesn’t keep pace. It’s strange that companies like Makita and Milwaukee haven’t gone into competition and exterminated Dremel.

I got the rotary tool mess fixed yesterday, and I also succeeded in burnishing the edge of my latest knife sheath, so it’s finished, but for improvements I may make later. I used the Proxxon.

I keep thinking I should get a Foredom eventually. This is a quality rotary tool with a flex shaft. I have a Chinese clone which works very well, but I know I’ll eventually want a second flex tool.

It appears that today will be productive, too. I already re-worked a lease with the lady who helps me rent properties, and I had a very powerful prayer session before I left the bedroom.

God willing, it won’t rain today, and I’ll be able to mow the yard.

I love it when God helps me get things done.

Heinous Retaliation Soon to Commence

The excitement here never lets up. Today I expect my new weed eater to arrive.

I know people call them “trimmers” because “Weed Eater” is a trademark, not a description, and Wikipedia says Weed Eater was swallowed by another company and turned into Husqvarna AB. I don’t care. I call them weed eaters.

Why am I buying a weed eater when I already have one? Simple. I bought the wrong one because of a lack of confidence.

I hate dealing with ethanol-tainted gas. Ethanol is a scam which hurts everyone except a few greedy farmers and politicians, and it ruins carburetors and other machine parts. I bought an electric weed eater in order to avoid dealing with carb varnish. I got an EGO trimmer, which uses a huge lithium battery.

The trimmer works well, but let’s face it: it’s not a 30-cc gas trimmer. Also, the batteries only run something like 20 minutes, and I have a big property. I can replace the battery as needed, but then what if I want to use the EGO hedge trimmer and the edger on the same day?

I decided to write off my loss and get an Echo trimmer. I ordered a monster. It’s the second-biggest one they make. It’s crazy powerful, and it weighs two pounds less than the EGO.

I also ordered blades for it. String trimmers are great, but once woody weeds get over 3/8″ thick, you have problems. The answer is to mount a circular saw blade on your trimmer. You can zip through limbs 3″ thick with a blade. It’s amazing. You can see people do it on Youtube.

The blades will fill a gap in my yard-machine armory. I have a hedge trimmer, and it’s okay for light trimming, but if you want to cut a hedge back one or two feet, it’s not good. When you drop down into a hedge’s lower regions, you run into thick limbs, and they don’t cooperate with hedge trimmers.

I have a number of hedges which I think are too high. I want to take some of them down two feet. I want to take others down a foot. This would be a nightmare with a hedge trimmer. I’m hoping the weed eater and blades will massacre the thick stems without much effort.

The people who used to own this place let the hedges rise up over the lower panes of the windows. That seems wrong to me. If you told your builder to put your windows at a certain height, presumably, you didn’t plan to block the panes and stare at the backs of your hedges all day. I want to see some of the land I paid for. My plan is to cut the hedges six inches below the window sills.

The blades should also be nice for getting rid of grapevines in the woods near the house. They’re so thick it’s hard to walk in some areas, and they also provide great cover for rattlesnakes to hide while you approach them.

Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to buy a series of blades until I find the one that works. There are a number of people who have tested blades on Youtube. One guy actually put together a chart showing which blades did what best. What you want is a pair of Renegade blades. You want a 32-tooth blade and an 80-tooth blade.

I guess you could buy circular saw blades at Home Depot, but the ones modified for weed eaters have holes drilled in them to make them lighter.

Once I have the new weed eater set up, I’ll be able to use it for everything except trimming near things I don’t want to cut. They would destroy things a string would bounce off of. Because I still have the lithium weed eater, I suppose I can use it for string trimming and leave a blade on the new one.

I wondered if I should get the very meanest trimmer Echo made, but it was considerably more expensive, and it seemed like overkill, based on what I had gleaned from the web. People are getting very good results with trimmers smaller than the one I ordered.

I hear UPS outside. That guy must think I’m nuts. He’s here like 4 days a week. He’ll have to deal with it. I’m not going to drive half an hour so I can spend more in a real store and not get the exact product I need.

It will be nice having my hedges under control. I don’t want my house to look like the Addams mansion.