Because Squirrels are too Fast to Club

I had some fun with the John Deere today.

I love being able to type that. I have a John Deere. I’m not in Miami. I hear English every day. Everyone is polite here. Today I took my dad to a barbecue joint, and we were waited on by an attractive young lady who was so nice, it would have been a privilege just to sit at her booth and drink water.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Miami and New York, so I suppose it’s understandable that I would forget that women can be positive factors in one’s life. They really are wonderful when they function correctly.

With all the female prizes I’ve known, when I think of women, my first thoughts are of things like whining, verbal abuse, endless manipulation, constant demands for insincere affirmations of attractiveness, the danger of having one’s house given to a person who will then use it to fornicate with the man she cheated with during one’s marriage, endless alimony, emasculation, bickering, and being seen as an annoying but necessary ATM with feet.

There are women out there who make men’s lives better instead of much, much worse. There really are. I’m pretty sure.

Anyway, I was mowing the yard, and I ran out of diesel. In my brilliance, I thought the best move was to drive toward the workshop (and the diesel can) until I got as close as possible. That turned out to be a poor strategy. It takes quite a while to get the air out of the fuel system when you run one of these things dry. On the up side, I saved myself maybe 9 seconds of arduous walking.

I got the tractor running and put it away, and then I started working on guns. On my cool new workbench.

I have been trying to get outfitted for quality squirrel extermination. I don’t want to wound them and have them sue me later. I want to be able to nail a squirrel reliably anywhere within a hundred feet. It’s not as simple as one would think.

I love scopes. Unfortunately, in order to use one at varying distances with squirrel-level accuracy, you have to know what the bullet does at every range. If you don’t, you can miss a squirrel four feet away. Figuring all this stuff out is surprisingly challenging. Then you have to add in the inherent inaccuracy of the .22 rifle and the small size of a squirrel’s kill zone.

I thought I would try a peep sight on the new Savage A22. A peep sight lies closer to the bullet’s path than a scope, so when shooting up close, it should work nearly perfectly. When shooting at longer distances, it should be nearly as accurate as a scope, with a much easier target acquisition process.

I ordered a peep sight, and then I started thinking about it. I only have two rifles a peep sight will fit: the Savage and a Marlin 60. The Savage is superior in nearly every way, and it has a dynamite Accu-trigger. It seems like it’s the prime candidate for a scope.

The peep sight I bought only works with Weaver and Picatinny mounts, and the Marlin has a dovetail. This means I need to consider a different sight. I can cobble an adaptor together, but it will raise the rear sight too high.

My current plan is to get a Tech-Sight made for the Marlin. This company makes aperture (peep) sight packages. You get the front and rear sight in one box, so you don’t have to buy the rear sight and then try to figure out which front sight you need.

This is where things stand at the moment. I now have a Nikon scope for the Savage, and I’m going to pick up some rings and install it. I already put Weaver bases on the rifle.

If this works out, I’ll have two pretty good options for killing squirrels.

I am still banned eternally at Rimfire Central, and no one ever responded to my requests for information as to the cause. I’m wondering if there is a nut over there moderating. Is it some firearm person I offended during my blogging heyday?

I dealt with some real jewels back then. I remember getting all sorts of flak on a gun forum because I said I, as a lawyer with three years of graduate education, was smart enough to read a firearm statute and understand it. There was no way to make ignorant laymen understand that this was what people paid me hundreds of dollars per hour to do, and that there had to be a reason why they were willing to cough it up.

The guys I argued with thought I was earth’s greatest egotist because I thought I could do my job. They were incensed because I said I could figure out a statute. Imagine what would happen if I told the Florida Bar I couldn’t interpret a statute! “Dear Steve: as a newly suspended attorney…”

It’s kind of astonishing that they thought they knew enough to argue with me. I don’t tell dentists they’re wrong when they tell me about my teeth.

There are a lot of insecure jerks in the firearms world. Guys, wearing tactical pants and owning guns doesn’t make you a superhero, a sniper, a SEAL or…much of anything. Lighten up and get over yourselves. Anyone who can stand in line at Walmart can have a house full of guns.

Could it be the forum poobahs are mad because I said the guy (“Arrowdodger”) who makes KAT triggers for Marlin rifles didn’t respond to my efforts to contact him? If so, they really blew it by banning me, because very few people saw my remarks there, and thousands will see them here, where they are beyond the reach of forum bans and will be on display in perpetuity. I certainly didn’t mean to disparage him or cause him any problems. I admire anyone who comes up with a product like that.

Other people have complained about being unable to reach him, and they haven’t been banned, so I suppose my ban has nothing to do with him.

I will never know. You can’t get closure when communication is impossible.

It doesn’t matter. I can live with the 3000 forums I already belong to, and besides, I can always rejoin from a different IP address. There is no way for them to track me.

I hate to lose a neat username, though.

I’ll try to get out and get scope rings tomorrow. Then comes squirrel Ragnarok. I hope.

I am Retiring the Ottoman

FedEx has done me dirty. They delivered my electronics bench two days early.

Yesterday one or more of my army of gadgets told me the bench had been delivered. I went outside with all the enthusiasm of Navin Johnson picking up the new phone book.

I saw nothing.

FedEx has my gate code. When you live in the sticks, and you have an electric gate to keep pilgrims out, you have to give your code to a few organizations unless you like seeing your packages sitting in the rain. Every so often, a lazy driver decides punching the code in is just too much work.

Eventually I discovered a large box beside the gate, a long way from the house. Great.

The weather has been very bad here lately. Rain, rain, rain. The serious rain is over (for now…I keep telling myself), but the ground is wet, so when the sun comes out, steam fills the air. Nasty. I drove our SUV to the gate, put 100-pound-plus box in the back, and dumped it in the garage. Then I took everything out of it and moved the parts upstairs. By the end of the process, I was wet with sweat, and I felt like I had marched across the Everglades.

Is this enough whining? I’m not sure. I can always add more later.

The thing to focus on is that I got my bench early.

This bench is possibly the greatest product ever made for any purpose. It’s Chinese, so I guess that’s a bad thing. They can make fantastic stuff when they want to. Is America trying to compete in the $240-workbench market? I’ll bet we’re not.

The bench top is wood. No, not “pressed wood” or “flaked wood” or “former wood now best described as cardboard.” It’s actual wood. It’s not just wood. It’s some kind of hardwood, like maple. It’s glued together from small pieces, but so are bowling lanes, so no problem there. I would say the top alone weighs 80 pounds. It’s magnificent.

The frame is sturdy steel with some kind of super-duper coating on it. I don’t know if it’s a powder coat or some kind of fancy paint, but it’s flawless. The frame is full of threaded lags for screws, and every part has a label on it saying what it is and how to orient it.

You follow the clearly written non-Chinglish instructions, screwing one part to another with the provided screws and bolts. You use the nice screwdriver and the functional sheet metal wrench they supply, and if you lose a fastener, you open the little bag that contains spares.

When you’re done, you have a bench that holds 750 pounds. It has a steel pegboard on top, with a number of included hangers. It has an LED (not fluorescent) fixture over it, and it also has a power strip and a big drawer with steel partitions you can move.

Dude.

This is too much. Chinese products should not be this good.

I only dinged the top once during assembly. I wish I hadn’t, but this thing will continue to receive dings if I use it, so I’ll have to get over it. It’s a shame they made it so perfect. The initial perfection made the ding hurt.

There are ways to raise dents out of wood. I may try one.

I have the bench set up in the corner of my androgen-therapy chamber, i.e. my upstairs bonus room. I will permit you to look at a photo. For a fee, you may drop by briefly and touch it.

No. I take that back.

The company that makes these things is called Seville Classics. I’m glad I found out about them. They make other shop stuff, and it’s probably just as good as this bench.

The news for America isn’t all bad. This bench would be useless for woodworking. But then it’s not a woodworking bench. I should keep quiet. They’ll probably design one next week and put it on Amazon.

Now I need a chair. I was going to use my dad’s old ergonomic office throne, but it’s too low. This gives me a fresh puzzle to solve.

A long time ago, I bought a Craftsman shop stool with a padded back rest. This is a Chinese item probably NOT made by Seville Classics. A thousand retailers sell pretty much the same stool, with various logos on it. Mine is pretty bad. I’ve had to re-weld the backrest supports twice, and I feel like twice is enough. I don’t want to buy a new one that has the same weakness. When I look for a new stool, I keep running into the Craftsman stool other different names on it.

It’s surprisingly hard to find a nice padded work stool. I guess people want hard, uncomfortable seats that last longer. Forget that. I want comfort. I want a cupholder and built-in shiatsu machine if I can get them. If my comfy chair breaks, I’ll buy a new one and send the old one to a landfill. It’s the American way.

Seville Classics makes a padded stool which is probably nothing short of divine, but it has no backrest. Chinese workers don’t need backrests like soft Americans.

I’m thinking of getting a drafting stool. This is basically a tall office chair with a thing to put your feet on. They come with casters, which may not work well on carpet. Some clever person invented steel glides that fit in caster sockets, so if I hate the casters, I have another option.

The danger is that once I get the chair, I will do nothing but sit in the chair with a beer in my hand, thinking about how wonderful life is until they come to put me in a home.

Maybe I could put stilts on the recliner…

I also need a little tool storage. I am determined to be serious about the “little” part. I’m not going to splurge for a bulky rolling tool cart. I’m not. I’m not.

I’m not.

I think I’m not.

Maybe it will fit.

Note to self: stop.

An Israeli (!) company named Keter makes a little plastic cart with drawers. It’s way cheaper than steel, and it’s probably a lot tougher than cheap steel rolling chests. Most steel rolling chests are made of a material I would describe as foil. Harbor Freight makes surprisingly sturdy steel tool chests, but there is also a lot of junk out there.

Seville Classics makes a neat rolling cabinet with drawers.

That just slipped out.

I have to get more pegboard hangers and figure them out. I didn’t expect pegboard to be confusing, but it is. Tools don’t seem to fit the supplied hangers.

Because the quality of the hangers is good, I have to be careful what I buy. I know what will happen if I don’t watch it. I’ll have 30 very nice Seville Classic hangers and 50 Amazon hangers made from paper clip wire.

If you want a prefab bench that will last for eternity and not cost a thousand dollars, this one is tough to beat. I recommend it highly.

Put the Skee-Ball Machine Down by the Stuffed Moose, Boys

I am working on my lofty sanctuary.

The new (still new to me) house has a big upstairs room where I hang out, and I am getting it ready for more effective use. This room has to be my office, music room, TV room, gymnasium, and upstairs workshop.

It doesn’t have to be, exactly. I have spare bedrooms. But using this room for multiple functions seems like the way to go.

I’ve had my recliner, couch, and entertainment system up here for a long time, along with the exercise equipment, some musical things, and the computer. But I haven’t done much to organize it or add a tool area. Last week I moved all the furniture, got rid of some things, and started adding tools. I even vacuumed.

As noted in an earlier post, I have a prefab workbench on the way. Sneer if you want. It would cost me something like $150 to cobble something together from two-by-fours, and it would be a big pain in the butt. I will end up putting about $250 in the prefab bench, and it should be up and running an hour after UPS drops it off.

The bench won’t be here for three more days. I’m using a folding table in the interim. Once the bench is here, I plan to use it for electronic instruments and whatever else shouldn’t be on the bench itself.

I’ll show you what I’ve done so far, and you will have to accept it and continue functioning if I go over things I mentioned last week.

I’ve been picking up tools. I’m not trying to have a complete shop up here. That would be redundant. I’m trying to assemble enough tools to prevent me from having to go up and down the stairs 300 times whenever I have something to do on the second floor. Also, it will be nice to have a bench within view of the big TV/monitor. These days, you have to be a fool not to use the Internet when you work on things.

I’m not trying to locate the finest tools on earth. I just want things that will work well and not fall apart. If something fails, I can always go to the main shop and get something better.

The bench itself will be Chinese, of course. It will have a light fixture, pegboard and hooks, a big drawer, a solid wood top, and a power strip.

I got myself a Tekton socket set. It was pretty cheap, and it’s Taiwanese. It will cover the vast majority of jobs I need to handle up here. Looks very nice.

I needed screwdrivers, so I got the blue Felo set in the photo. Seven drivers which will turn most screws. I also have a cheap set of Grace gunsmithing screwdrivers, and I think I’m going to leave my old Wiha precision drivers up here and get new ones for the main shop.

No intelligent person turns screws manually when he has a choice, so I have a DeWalt gyroscopic screwdriver.

I love the Ridgid Jobmax. Make fun if you want, but if you’ve tried one, you know how handy they are for little jobs that involve multiple power tools. They saw. They sand. They turn fasteners. They drill. I had a cordless Jobmax plus one with a cord. I am replacing the cordless one the main shop with an 18-volt version with more grunt, and I’m moving the old cordless up here. I got a few new tool heads because…stairs.

A long time ago, before I realized my dad was becoming demented, I bought him a 12-volt Panasonic drill and impact driver set. The set was cheaper than the driver all by itself. Go figure. The drill is small, but it will work fine for most of what I’ll do here. The driver is very nice indeed. It can’t match my corded Makita, but it’s a very serious tool. This set has crappy non-lithium batteries, but my dad has never used it, so they ought to give me a year or two of good use.

I got me a set of Bondhus ball-end hex wrenches for a pretty good price. There is no excuse for skimping on quality when the best costs $18 and garbage costs $14.

I splurged on Klein side-cutting pliers. Very expensive for little pliers, but people love them, and I was feeling whimsical.

I have a set of Gearwrench metric and standard box wrenches on the way. I thought I could use some tools we already had, but I was wrong. A long time ago, I bought a set of Craftsman sockets and wrenches for my dad’s boat, and I wanted to use them up here. When I opened the box, I saw that some of the items had walked away. People who work on boats are very dishonest, which is unfortunate, because the vast majority are also incompetent.

Individual Craftsman sockets and wrenches cost a lot to replace, even when entire sets are cheap. I looked at replacements and decided I was better off getting the Gearwrenches. The quality is better, and the price is very good.

I also found a great price on a set of Craftsman metric and standard ignition wrenches. These things are very handy.

I will probably get some kind of bench block. I’m not sure what to do about workholding. My feeling is that if a job requires me to use a vise, I should probably take it to the main shop.

I’ll be putting my Ersa soldering station here. It’s too nice for the garage. I can move my old Weller out there.

The lamp is the one from my electronics station back in Miami. I’ve been using it as a living room lamp. I’m going to get a floor lamp from Home Depot to light the room. I have articulated magnifier lamps I’m not using, and I will probably put one on the bench and put the one in the photo elsewhere.

I don’t know what to do about seating. The bench is taller than the table (which can be raised). I have a very, very, VERY expensive ($1400) ergonomic office chair my dad doesn’t use any more. If I can raise it high enough, I’ll make it my tool chair. If not, I’ll have to think.

I’m sorely tempted to move my CNC lathe up here. I have the wall space for it. Hobby CNC is a computer-intensive game, and it would be nice to do it near the main PC and the fridge.

When all is said and done, I will live in obscene luxury up here. I will be able to watch my favorite Youtube tool gurus from my workbench in total comfort. Guys I went to high school with are probably fussing over the color schemes for their new Lear jets, but to me, a couch, a recliner, and a nice workbench equal extreme self-indulgence.

If I were married, my wife would be reading over my shoulder and working on the necessary papers to put me in a mental home. When you’re a single man, putting a CNC lathe in your den is not a problem. I could put a mechanical bull in here if I felt like it.

I have started to think the machine tools (the big ones) should be in the garage, not the main shop. Space in the main shop is not as generous as I had hoped (at least the way I have things arranged now), and the temperature in the garage is usually more comfortable. Also, it’s nice to have space between your machine tools and the things that throw sawdust.

I need to make a firm decision and get a quote from an electrician.

In any case, I am living the dream. I know you want to be me, especially if you live in a house full of throw pillows, cats that aren’t stuffed, potpourri, and Hummel figurines.

I’m going to go over to the table and smell the tools now. Don’t wait up.

I Have a Taste for Edgy TV

I want to brag about a great achievement. I have recorded and watched nearly every episode of Forged in Fire.

When I first saw promos for the show, I thought it was stupid. I didn’t trust reality TV game show contestants to know anything about making knives, and I figured the whole thing was BS. I am not sure my opinion has changed, but nonetheless, I got suckered in.

Here is how Forged in Fire works. Four oddly-dressed guys with strange social quirks arrive in a room full of forging equipment. Two guys just like them, plus a very unusual martial arts expert, sit at a table to judge them. A man who used to be an Army Ranger or something stands by the table and plays emcee. The contestants get three hours to make blades out of weird materials. Then one contestant gets tossed. Then they get three more hours to finish their knives. Then one more gets tossed. Then the remaining two are sent home for five days, during which time they produce blades to be entered in a final competition.

They don’t tell you the show takes two days to film. After the contestants make their knives, the people who run the show temper them, and the contestants return the next day. In the interim, the contestants are sequestered in the Hallowed Hall of the Bladesmiths’ Guild, or as you and I call it, “La Quinta.”

The winner gets a life-changing check for $10,000. It’s kind of funny watching the emcee say, “TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS,” like he’s telling them they won at Powerball. It’s a real Dr. Evil moment. “I’ll destroy the world unless you give me TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS, plus some frickin’ sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads.”

There are only three guys who are there every single time. The first is David Baker. He made swords for the Highlander shows. He has a goatee. He will remind you of the old guy who played the Wizard of Oz. He wears a very tight vest with a tie. Makes me uncomfortable to watch him.

The second permanent fixture is Wil Willis. This is the Army guy. He has thick, kinky hair which is different in every episode. You never know what it will be. Man bun. Pony tail. It’s like he, or his hair, is searching for something.

The third fixture is Doug Marcaida, a Filipino who teaches an art called kali. I know nothing about it, and neither do you, which means it’s probably not a great martial art. Knives figure prominently. Martial artists agree: an art which allows you to carry a bunch of knives is more effective than all the ones that don’t.

Marcaida is great because he tests the weapons to see if they will kill. The show buys very expensive see-through ballistics dummies made of gelatin. They have plastic bones and guts, and they’re full of colored fluids to simulate blood. Marcaida lunges at them and does all sorts of gross things to them. Then he sticks his fingers in the wounds and makes them spurt. If he likes a blade, he sort of bows his head and says, “Your weapon…will KILL.” This is the highlight of the show.

The “kill” and “weapon” stuff is contrived. The show’s creators are behind it. Most knife makers pay the bills with things like chef knives, but no audience wants to see a show where people compete to make kitchen equipment. No one wants to hear Doug Marcaida say, “Your weapon…will SPATCHCOCK.”

The contestants make knives in what is possibly the worst way known to man. They take steel that rusts, heat it up, and pound it with hammers. This was great technology in 300 B.C., but now we have magnificent stainless steels and electric grinders. If you actually want to make a good knife, you buy stainless, grind it into shape, and send it off to be heat-treated.

Forging knives on an anvil is very cool, but the results are hard to predict, and you end up with a rust-prone knife which is inferior to modern knives in every possible way, including cost of production. It may have hidden faults that will make it snap when you put pressure on it. The edge may have soft spots. The steel may have a coarse grain that makes it weak. Still, a home-forged knife looks pretty neat when you put on your kilt or viking horns or whatever and prance off to frolic with your interesting buddies at the nearest medieval reenactment festival.

“Toss me a Pabst, ye varlets, and check out my new panzerstecher.”

Unless you know what you’re doing, using a forge to make a knife is an iffy business under the best circumstances, but when you get just three hours to do it in a TV studio with no air conditioning or fans, and you have to make the knife from an old tricycle or a frying pan, it’s even riskier. The creators of the show love to give the contestants total garbage to work with, and often, the results are about what you would expect. The amazing thing is that many of the smiths manage to make beautiful knives that actually work.

Blind hogs and acorns, I guess.

Many of the contestants are certified “master smiths,” accredited by an organization known as the ABS. The BS part may be dominant. Over and over, men who say they are master smiths make awful knives on the show, and sometimes you’ll see them get thrashed by kids just out of high school.

I could start an organization tomorrow and call it the International Guild of Expert Knife Dudes. No one could stop me. I could certify people left and right, in exchange for beers. I kind of wonder if this is how the ABS works. Except they probably ask for mead.

If you’re a master at anything, you don’t screw up royally, even on TV. Take a master cooper, hundreds of years ago. A guy like that couldn’t survive if 30% of his barrels leaked. Full-time, serious craftsmen know their stuff. They learn from repetition. I seriously doubt that a man who spends an hour a week using a propane forge in his lawnmower shed is a real master.

If you want to win on Forged in Fire, I can tell you how. The contestants always do the same dumb things. They don’t get beaten; they lose. All you need to do is avoid their mistakes.

1. Do NOT try to impress the judges with a fancy blade with unnecessary Damascus, a fuller, finger rings, USB ports, or anything else that isn’t required. You will fail. You have three hours to do a day’s work, so cut the crap and make something that functions. Let the guy with the Viking-rune face tattoos do the overreaching.

2. Do NOT take the judges seriously when they tell you to incorporate a useless type of steel in your blade. If they say you have to use a Slinky in your knife, weld one quarter of an inch of Slinky to the end of the handle and let it go. Do NOT incorporate huge amounts of Slinky in your blade or try to harden Slinky steel. It will fail, and it will not walk downstairs by itself, either.

3. Do NOT try anything new. Are you kidding? This never works. As a cook, I learned something a long time ago: when you’re cooking for guests, you don’t experiment. Cook your dishes exactly the same way you cook them every week, or you will be disgrace yourself. Same thing goes for making knives. If the camera catches you saying, “I’ve never tried this before, but…”, you WILL be sent home after the first round.

4. Do NOT wear a leather hat, a leather vest, leather pants, a leather apron, musketeer boots, and your favorite long-sleeved wool tunic. Do NOT dress in your favorite impractical nerd costume, even though all your pals down at the D&D club are watching. Contestants say it gets to over 100 degrees in the studio, and heat exhaustion will get you even if you’re wearing all your mystical Asatruar amulets and praying to Wodin. Not even boots of escaping can save you from the laws of physics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people collapsed on chairs while the show’s EMT’s try to get them to drink fluids. If you’re wearing a hat indoors while working over a forge, people already know you’re bald, so go ahead, take it off, and release some heat.

5. MICARTA! MICARTA! MICARTA! How many times do I have to say it? NEVER make a handle from something brittle like antler, bone, “stabilized” pine cone, wood, kirinite, or ANYTHING THAT BREAKS. Micarta is essentially fiberglass made with cloth. It is nearly impossible to break. USE IT.

6. MEASURE YOUR BLADE. The hosts always tell people how long to make their blades. Then people show up with blades that aren’t even close. How are you a master smith if you can’t work a ruler?

7. Do NOT wait until two minutes before the time is up to heat and quench your blade. Your blade will warp. Your blade will fail to harden. Something bad will happen. Give yourself time to fix whatever goes wrong.

8. When you’re making your blade at home, PUT THE QUENCH TANK OUTDOORS. Do NOT start an oil fire inside a building where you keep $100,000 worth of tools. Obvious?

Forged in Fire is a lot like life. Avoiding obvious mistakes will get you far. If you don’t smoke, drink, use drugs, or stuff yourself, you will probably make it to 70 in good health. If you don’t make the classic Forged in Fire mistakes, you are almost certain to make it to the last round.

I don’t know if it’s smart for a knife maker to appear on Forged in Fire. When you make blades in private, no one sees your mistakes. If you make a bad blade and it breaks, you can replace it quietly. If you screw up on Forged in Fire, people will think you always screw up, and there goes your already-struggling business. One contestant complained about his business tanking after his loss.

There’s a Youtube guy who makes neat videos on knife forging. He comes across as a person of gravitas; a guru. He seems totally self-possessed, and besides, he makes Japanese-style blades, which adds a level of smugness. I don’t know why people are so convinced the Japanese are the master race. They make nice cars, but they have nearly every Western vice, plus dental problems and racism.

This guy appeared on Forged in Fire and made a blade that snapped in the first round. He says it was because the studio lights were so bright he couldn’t tell how hot the knife was when he quenched it. Probably true, but if you’re going to spend $300 on a dubious handmade knife, is this the guy you’ll choose?

Some of the contestants really are masters. They plod along quietly and do everything right. They produce works of art, even in the early rounds. Tellingly, they rarely require breaks or oxygen masks. They do very impressive work without struggling or fretting, which is what you should expect from masters.

I remember a guy named Burt. He has a gorgeous workshop. He makes flawless knives. He even makes them for his wife. Their kitchen is full of them. His work is on a level way beyond the stuff most other contestants make. When he works, nothing goes wrong, because he knows his job. That’s what “master” means. Once you’ve seen a guy like Burt at work, it’s hard to be impressed by someone who dresses like Robin Hood and makes blades with cracks in them.

I love the tools some of the contestants have at home. I admit, some work in the dirt, using modified hibachis or whatever. On the other hand, some have huge shops with giant power hammers and machine tools. The quality of the tools and the quality of the work aren’t always related, however.

The Forged in Fire people have a new show: Knife or Die. It’s hard to discuss, because I don’t want to ridicule anyone. Any person with a desire to compete can show up with a big knife, and they will turn you loose on an obstacle course of things to cut. The first episode featured a Caucasian man wearing an Aikido costume and running shoes. I am serious. He carried a katana or “samurai sword,” even though aikido guys aren’t taught how to fight with swords. He hit a block of ice with it, and it bent in the middle.

That was a major blow to the Japan cult. Katanas are supposed to cut concrete blocks! At least that’s what they say in the Tokyo airport gift shop.

Why does aikido attract troubled people with unrealistic expectations? A high school friend of mine took up aikido. The Internet says he runs a dojo now. He gave his life to aikido. Unfortunately, aikido has a serious problem: it doesn’t work at all. Sure, you can twist people’s wrists and immobilize them if they are stupid enough to give you their hands, but everyone who has tried aikido in the ring has had his behind handed to him in individually wrapped slices. I can’t understand devoting your life to a martial art which can be defeated easily by 95% of angry untrained drunks. Would you open a store that only sold appliances that didn’t work?

Here are the words that start every single aikido demonstration: “Give me your hand.”

People are enchanted by Japan. They think the Japanese have deep wisdom we lack. They do, and here it is: do your job well and treat your elders and your boss with respect. That’s about it; the rest is hocus pocus. There are no Japanese superpowers. There is no chi. Steven Seagal has never once used magical Japanese aikido to fight a real fight because he knows he would experience humiliating losses.

Forged in Fire has its funny moments, but Knife of Die is a little too ridiculous to lampoon. It’s almost sad. It’s probably dangerous, too. Untrained eccentrics swinging razor-sharp knives of unknown quality in a timed test are a recipe for deep wounds and severe blood loss. I would hate to be in the studio when half of a knife goes flying off at 60 miles per hour.

They hired Goldberg, a former professional wrestler, to do commentary. Thank God. A TV wrestler! That will give the show a little dignity.

It’s a fun watch, but not nearly as entertaining as the original.

Now you know how to win on Forged in Fire. If you compete, I will expect a check for $5,000.00. You better cough it up, because if you don’t, I have my aikido costume and running shoes hanging in the closet.

Even Better Than a DVD Bundle From T.D. Jakes

As I said I would, I will continue to post things I’ve heard from God.

A couple of weeks back, I got this: “I am in a place of perversion and poison.”

God was not referring to my house. He was talking about the world I live in.

When you have ants or roaches in your house, one way to get rid of them is to spray poison in places they live in or pass through. Satan takes the same approach to us. We are surrounded by temptations, provocations, and dangers. The world is salted with them. The devil does particularly well with lust and anger. You can’t drive down a highway in a major city without seeing nearly naked women on billboards, and forget about turning on the TV. Even if you only watch shows you think are safe, the commercials are crazy. As for anger, go to a news site on the Internet and read the comments. And TV is not helpful, either. News shows are difficult to sit through without taking antacids.

Lot was rescued from Sodom, a filthy city of cruelty, greed, sexual perversion, and selfishness. He wasn’t happy while he lived there. Here is a passage from 2 Peter:

For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them to destruction, making them an example to those who afterward would live ungodly; and delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds) then the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment, and especially those who walk according to the flesh in the lust of uncleanness and despise authority.

Lot’s story is a clear picture of what we go through down here on this scab of a planet as we try to serve God.

Jesus referred to his servants as the feet of God, figuratively:

And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet. Assuredly, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!

He said that as he sent disciples out to evangelize. The ostensible meaning of his words was that they should leave houses where they were rejected on this particular mission, but on a deeper level, he was describing all of his servants, until the end of the age.

Feet are the body parts that touch the earth, and we are the parts of God that touch the earth. Feet are dirty. Jesus washed people’s feet in an act that symbolized the way the Holy Spirit sanctifies believers who listen to him and spend time with him.

We have to live down here in order to reach other people, and while we are here, we live in bags of unrefrigerated meat we call bodies. In the Bible, dust is flesh. We are trapped temporarily in flesh bodies, exposed to all sorts of contamination from the world around us. When we die, the dust drops off, and contamination no longer has a way to get at us.

While we are here, we have to cope with the filthiness of the world. It is not a good place. The world doesn’t work. It is dysfunctional. It’s a mistake to try to see it as healthy or to attempt to fit in and function smoothly as part of it.

Doing evil things is counterproductive, but it can also be counterproductive simply to see or hear about them. Satan knows this, so he is constantly broadcasting the most poisonous things he can come up with. This is why he gave us slut walks.

A while back, I received this: “I am behind enemy lines.” Nothing could be more true. I don’t belong to this place. It’s as if I were a flu virus and Satan were constantly sending antibodies and white blood cells and whatever else after me. This isn’t my home. I’m here to make trouble. I am a guerrilla and a counterinsurgent. I have to avoid looking for rest here, like Samson falling asleep in Delilah’s lap.

The earth is a real mess. It is disgusting. It’s frustrating to think about it. No one wants to live on a planet where he has no chance of fitting in and prospering.

God gave me this last night: “Extremely effective.”

This one hit me hard. I thought it was a strange thing for God to say, and I certainly doubted it applied to me, so I asked him to confirm it, and his response practically blew my head up. By that I mean I felt an overwhelming rush of faith and affirmation that left me immobilized as I waited for it to run its course. Okay, okay! I accept it!

This week I moved to a new level with regard to getting things done. I attacked some intimidating business issues and got them fixed. I got confirmation that other problems didn’t actually exist. I’ve been having trouble motivating myself to take care of certain jobs on this property, and I have been ramping up my efforts, not through willpower, but because I suddenly feel eager to get to work, and also because I feel liberated to get things done.

Yesterday I put LED bulbs in the fluorescent fixtures in my bathroom. They had been flickering for weeks. I hate fluorescents. They hum. They supposedly give off positive ions that make people feel bad. They don’t last long. I like replacing them with LED tubes.

The fixtures in my bathroom are a real pain to work on. I had to stand on the sinks in a crouching position while I cut and stripped wires and made new connections. It was very unpleasant. I got it done, though, and all of the fluorescent tubes–even the ones that still work–are in a box waiting to go to the dump.

I’ve been doing laundry like crazy. Not sure how two men can come up with so much to wash, but we do.

My dad’s special issues make washing his bedclothes complicated. I have to wash mattress pads and a quilt as well as the usual stuff, and all the white things get bleach and a 2-hour cycle. Doing his laundry correctly takes more than one day. My own laundry is easy.

I rearranged the furniture and exercise equipment in my special upstairs testosterone chamber. The arrangement I threw together last year wasn’t working out. Now I have room for a workbench (ordered), and I’m not jammed up in one end of the room.

I ordered some tools for this room. I’m not going to march to the workshop (or even down to the garage) every time I need a pair of pliers. I’m going to have a lighted bench with pegboard plus enough okay-quality tools to handle 95% of the jobs that have to be done upstairs.

I shouldn’t mention tools because I get distracted, but…I decided to get an 18-volt Ridgid Jobmax for the farm. I’m going to take my 12-volt job and add it to the upstairs tools. The Jobmax is not great at much of anything, but it’s good at almost everything. If you keep a Jobmax handy, you will pick it up over and over and avoid having to break out other tools which are less convenient. Very nice tool to have if you like convenience and you don’t mind blowing a couple of hundred bucks to get it. It drills, drives fasteners, and does oscillating-tool stuff.

It’s not a cheap solution, but I don’t care. It makes life easier.

I also ordered a set of 7 Felo screwdrivers with plastic handles. This is a German company that makes very nice tools. The set runs less than $30, and it should cover a lot of ground. I also picked up a surprisingly affordable dual set of Bondhus ball-end hex wrenches (metric and imperial).

I should probably get another $35 Harbor Freight 115-piece drill index. Greatest bargain on earth. Not the world’s greatest bits, because they tend to grind the ends a little funny, but they nearly always work fine, and they cost maybe 15% of what you would pay for real drill bits.

A long time ago I picked up a boxed set of Craftsman wrenches for my dad’s boat. I’ll mount them on the bench pegboard along with the Felos and hex wrenches if I can.

Still need some pliers. I think I’ll splurge for Channelocks or maybe even Knipexes. Life is short.

Once my soldering station is up here along with my other electronics stuff, I’ll be cooking with gas.

I would like to do reloading here, but it will be hard to come up with an intelligent way to fix the press to my workbench. The bench has a big drawer, and the press would block it if it were mounted permanently. I may be able to use clamps.

Maybe I should finish things off with a Dremel kit. If you can’t do it with a Jobmax or a Dremel, you probably need to hire someone. Throw in duct tape and WD-40, and you can rule the world from your garage.

I already have a gyroscopic DeWalt power screwdriver for the house. I bought it because it was shorter than the big DeWalt driver. You put it in the screw, push the trigger, and turn it, and it knows which way it moved. It starts cranking in that direction until you turn it back, and it varies the power depending on how far you turn it. Frankly, I think it’s stupid. It would work just as well with just the trigger. But it was short, and it’s DeWalt.

I’ll need a little bit of tool storage. I don’t want to jam a big Harbor Freight rolling cabinet in here. Maybe some kind of portable from Home Depot.

I hope God is telling me I’m going to be more effective.

All my life, I’ve felt constrained, and I know the cause is supernatural. A few years back, a pastor cast a spirit of acedia out of me. Acedia refers to a condition of laziness, apathy, and discouragement. I’ve fought these things all my life. The pastor was teaching about acedia, and I started to feel cold. My hands felt like ice. I felt nauseated. I went up for deliverance. For weeks afterward, I got things done. It was wonderful.

Eventually, acedia came back, and since then, I have battled it off and on.

I know why it came back. I was taught about deliverance, but I didn’t learn anything about the cords that tie demons to us. I hadn’t opened up to God about whatever it was the bound me to acedia, so it had a way to get back in. I still don’t know exactly what it is that tied us together, but I have been confessing and repenting much more deeply lately, and various bonds are snapping.

Will I be free of it long-term? I suppose so. If not, why would God give me a word of confirmation?

We’ll see what happens. I have made mistakes before.

I think acedia follows families. When my dad was a young lawyer, my mother used to have to wake him up and put his shoes and socks on him to get him to go to work. As far as I know, my sister hates all types of work. The thought of being required to work makes her very angry. When she has luggage, which is always excessively heavy, she assumes other people will carry it and gets mad if they refuse. I can’t recall seeing her do any type of labor.

She has real problems, though. She used to lose her mind when we traveled together and I sat in the front seat, as if it were her personal throne. She would stand by the car and demand I move, which was a strange spectacle to those who witnessed it. I’m talking about a middle-aged woman, not a toddler. You can probably guess whether I moved or not.

I’m so glad I’m rid of her. She must be making other people extremely miserable right now.

I got one other word: “Only the Lord rules.” I think this was about authority. I believe God was giving me reassurance about my continued authority over the angry but powerless spirits and people around me. They are not to be taken seriously, because no one important is on their side.

It’s sad to see people lose, but it’s very good to win, and the losers bring it all on themselves. I can’t feel bad about problems I didn’t cause and can’t fix.

I hope this is useful to people.

One Bubba’s Experience With the Marlin Model 60

This week’s big triumph: I got my Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle set up so it actually works. I installed an M*CARBO trigger kit, plus sling studs.

I needed the trigger job badly. The Model 60’s trigger is so bad people complain about it all over the Internet. To shoot, you pull it back about half an inch, and then you squeeze like crazy and hope something happens. The factory pull weight is so hard, if you shoot a Model 60 after shooting a normal gun, you may think the safety is on. That happened to me.

When a gun is hard to fire, you will tend to take longer to shoot, and the gun’s point of aim may wander while you’re focused on making it go off. It’s very annoying. I suppose you can overcome it, but who wants a lousy trigger?

There are two outfits that I know of that sell Marlin 60 triggers: M*CARBO and some guy whose Internet handle is Arrowdodger. Mr. Arrowdodger sells the KAT trigger, which is supposed to be the very best. I will never know, because he doesn’t respond to inquiries. I don’t know if he’s ill or what, but I gave up. M*CARBO sells a kit which includes a trigger, a bunch of superior springs that go in the general region of the trigger, and replacement recoil springs.

One of the irritating things about the Marlin 60 is that it is not up to the task of firing hypersonic .22 ammunition like CCI Stingers. It’s 2018, and you would think Marlin would have gotten with the times. They have not. According to M*CARBO, you can shoot Stingers and similar rounds if you use a better recoil spring.

They sell two springs with their trigger kit. One is for hypersonic rounds, and the other is for standard velocity. They claim the hypersonic version will work with standard velocity rounds, so I decided to install it, failing to see the advantage of a weaker spring that only works with one kind of ammunition.

M*CARBO (boy, is it annoying typing that) has excellent videos on its site, telling you how to install stuff. I used the video for the trigger kit, and things went well. One minor thing: you should use plastic tools to remove the E-clips on the gun’s receiver. I used a screwdriver, and now I have tiny scratches in the bluing. These scratches are not visible when the gun is assembled, but still.

I got the gun put together and took it outside. I only fired a few times. I used standard velocity ammunition to make sure the recoil spring worked with it. No problems. The trigger is wonderful. You can tell when the gun is going to go off, and you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to shoot it.

Now I can use a wider array of ammunition, and there is some hope that my game will not run off while I’m straining to shoot.

I needed a sling for the gun. It’s annoying, carrying a gun in your hand all day, and without a sling, you have nothing to wrap around your arm to give support when shooting offhand. I had some studs I bought when I got the gun. Studs are little metal things slings attach to. Many guns come with them. The Marlin only cost $170, so you don’t get a lot of frills.

When I bought the gun, I didn’t know it was hard to put a sling on it.

Ordinarily, you run a wood screw into the forward part of a rifle’s stock, or you put a nut inside the stock and use a stud that has a machine screw for a base. To do these things, you have to have some wood to work with. You need maybe half an inch of wood for a wood screw, and in order to use a machine screw and nut, you need to have at least a quarter of an inch of wood clamped between the nut and the stud base.

The Marlin has a tube magazine, like a second barrel, under the barrel of the gun. This takes up room in the stock, and it displaces the wood you need in order to attach a stud. The wood up front appears to be less than 1/2″ thick.

The classic solution to this problem is very bad. You put a normal stud on the buttstock, and you use a special front stud with a ring on it, to clamp around the tube magazine. This puts a lot of strain on the flimsy magazine. It’s a stupid idea. I wasn’t having it. I decided to use the machine screw stud and nut.

The nut on the stud was about 1/4″ tall. That’s too much. I wanted to have at least 1/4″ of wood under the nut after the installation, and I needed the nut to be sunk into the inside of the stock so it would be out of the way of the magazine. I needed a nut somewhere between 1/8″ and 3/16″ tall, and I needed a counterbored cavity inside the stock for the nut to sit in.

I took a belt grinder and thinned the nut down to a little over 1/8″ in height. I didn’t need 1/4″ of threads to make the stud work. It wasn’t going to be under that much stress. What I ended up with was more than adequate.

I used a 3/8″ Forstner bit to start a hole inside the stock. I couldn’t use a drill, because the U-shaped bottom of the inside of the stock wouldn’t permit the bit to rest flat and stay in place. I held the bit in my hand and turned it slowly until I cut away enough wood to get the bit down on the bottom of the interior. After that, I put it in a drill and made a cavity deep enough to sink the nut.

I took a very small drill bit, placed it in the center of the cavity, and drilled through the stock. I put paper towels and a block of wood under the stock to minimize tearout. This gave me a pilot hole for the machine screw hole. I used a bigger bit to enlarge the hole, and I was all set. The nut fit in the cavity, and the stud tightened up in it nicely.

I still had about 1/4″ of excess screw sticking out into the inside of the stock. I took everything to the belt grinder and slowly shortened the screw until it was below the deck. Sweet.

It looks fantastic, and it works perfectly. Much better than yanking on a magazine tube.

The buttstock stud, which should have been easy, was harder to install. The wood used in the stock is very chippy and teary. I knew that from installing the front stud. I had to drill a hole for a wood screw in the rounded bottom of the buttstock, without ripping up the wood.

The directions said I had to create a 1″-deep 5/32″ pilot hole for the screw, and that I had to open the first 1/4″ of the hole up with a 7/32″ bit. No problem, I thought. I drilled a starter hole with a very thin bit and finished with the 5/32″. Then, thinking I was clever, I used a rotary stone from my Proxxon kit (like a Dremel) to chamfer the daylights out of the hole’s opening. I thought this would make tearing impossible. I was wrong. It tore anyway. Now when you look at the stud, you can see a tiny area of torn wood.

This was exasperating. I did my best to prevent it from happening, and it happened anyway. I should have done the entire counterbore with the stone.

I can fix the tearout with filler and stain, and I guess I will. No one will ever see it unless they look at the picture I took. Lesson learned.

Now I’ll be able to carry the gun like a civilized person. I’ll be able to shoot it with a sling. I’ll have a pleasant experience when I pull the trigger.

This gun has really shaped up. It’s going to be superb. Much better than I had hoped. If you don’t mind tinkering with your firearms, you would do well to get one of these things.

In the end, with a sling and scope, it will be about a $350 .22 rifle. That’s not so bad. I felt great about paying almost that much for a .22 pistol with no additional doodads at all.

It’s going to be a real squirrel killer. It may do well on coons and other things, too.

The wood is gorgeous. It has tiger stripes and swirls all over it. It’s so nice, I am tempted to have someone refinish it to bring out the grain. I’m afraid to do it because I am not good with finishes.

I’m no gunsmith, but I had no choice here, unless I wanted to pay a real smith a fortune to fix up a lowly .22. That was not going to happen. I think I did well. A few tiny scratches no one can see, a tiny tear I can fix, and a new and superior method of attaching a sling to a Marlin 60…I’ll take it.

Now that I have a forward stud, I can use a bipod. One of these days I’ll go out back and see what she’ll do. I fully expect 1/2″ groups at 50 yards. I don’t think I can be highly consistent with 3.5-cent ammunition, but I should do well enough to make rodents tremble. That’s all I’m after.

Hope your shooting endeavors are going at least as well as mine.

Tough Afternoon

Today I spent a huge amount of time praying in tongues and reading Christian material. I am determined to have peace, and the price is prayer time.

In the afternoon, I fired up the tractor and enjoyed the outdoors. I’m still amazed that I live here. Back in Miami, I would be hiding from the world around me, trying to distract myself from my surroundings. I didn’t like going outdoors because I didn’t really want anything to do with my neighbors. Also, it was hot. Here, I embrace my environment.

Here’s the view over the top of the tractor.

I bush-hogged a bunch of weeds at the east end of the big pasture, and I moved a whole bunch of oak branches to the burn pile. Some of this stuff is from Irma, and some fell later. The pile is enormous. I’m somewhat less eager to light it these days. Setting fire to the pasture made me realize I’m better off burning debris when I have help. It’s best to have one person to watch the fire and one person to go get more limbs.

Look at the burn pile. I think this is a new record.

The weather is wonderful. I wish we were still having 65-degree days, but it’s still better than Miami. Down there, the temperature is 82. Up here, it’s 73, breezy, and comparatively dry. Tonight we will drop to a pleasant 56.

The Vogons Were Amateurs

Leftists get very upset when you criticize the government, because when you do, you criticize their god. They know how important it is to their agenda that everyone think the government does a great job. But what happens when you actually deal with the government? They screw up and screw up and screw up, and just as conservatives say, they don’t care, because it’s almost impossible to get government workers in trouble.

Seems like the cops and our precious military personnel are the only government agents they hate.

I am here to criticize the god of the left. I had a horrible experience (again) with the Post Office. No, I am not referring to Shakir the Angry Muslim Mailman, who had the nerve to put tip-soliciting cards in my box on a Christian holiday and who got furious because I used to stamp “DELIVERED TO WRONG ADDRESS!” on the multiple pieces of other people’s mail he gave me each week. No, I am not referring to his successor, the crazy lady with the wrist cast who got the Post Office to force me to move my mailbox 20 feet closer to the driveway (until 10 minutes after she was replaced, at which time it was moved back). I am referring to the problem I had with a knife I ordered.

I picked out a knife on Ebay, and because the price was so low, I splurged on express delivery. I was supposed to receive it yesterday. I signed up for email delivery updates.

By the way, do you have an ex-wife or maybe and ex-boyfriend you want to stalk and murder? The Post Office has a handy service that will help. You can sign up to have photographs of all of their mail emailed to you. You don’t have to provide an ID. The government photographs all of our mail (not in order to gather information on us; oh, no), and they decided to make the pictures available to us so they can pretend it’s a feature, not a grotesque threat to our privacy and liberty. If you’re planning to slit someone’s throat, and you want to know if someone else has been sending them love letters, now you know what to do.

Anyhow, I gave the Postal Service my phone number and received updates on my phone. I wrote about this already.

Yesterday, I received a very nice update. It said the driver had taken the package back to the Post Office.

It did not say, “We are at your gate; please let us in.” It did not say, “We are on the way with your package.” I did not hear a horn honk. They had my number. They were too inept to use it to call me.

Today I gave up and drove to the Post Office.

There aren’t many unpleasant drives in Marion County, but today I found one. I had to drive about 9 miles to get the package, and it took about 25 minutes. That’s urban Miami speed. The roads were torn up. I got stuck behind a country trailer loaded with someone’s personal furniture (I’m sure that was kosher), and he turned at every turn I had to take. I thought I would never get there. I went in and picked up the knife. I talked to an employee just long enough to confirm that they didn’t give a crap about my problem. I went home. Very slowly.

God bless Federal Express. Think how much worse the Postal Service would be if they didn’t have Fred Smith showing them up every day.

I contacted the Ebay seller and told them negative feedback was on the way. We’ll see if they care. You don’t send a small package and demand a signature without informing the recipient.

I can’t believe I finally got my knife. I wasted 10 days trying to get one from an incompetend Amazon seller, and then I thought the Ebay knife was the answer to my prayers. Then they tortured me as much as possible until I got it home.

It looks very serviceable. The blade is very heavy. The edge is great, if the job it did on my junk mail is any indication. The sheath is not elegant, but it ought to function very well. It’s Kydex with a few rivets.

I don’t wear a belt, and the sheath is made for a belt, so I guess I’ll have to come up with a different solution. I’m not defiling my ensemble with a belt. I think people look insane when they combine belts with suspenders. It’s the Lumbergh look from Office Space. Maybe I can get some Kydex and some Internet know-how and make a sheath that hooks over my waistband.

I love micarta handles. Whenever I watch Forged in Fire, I always scream, “USE THE MICARTA, YOU IDIOT!”, because smiths are always choosing nutty handle materials that shatter. As far as I know, micarta is the adamantium of knife handle materials. It’s basically fiberglass made with ordinary fabric.

I learned some surprising stuff about knife steels. I think I have been too hard on 420HC, the metal used in my disappointing Gerber Gator II’s.

The alloy 420HC is cheap compared to 440C and a lot of other metals, and generally, knives made from it are not great. It appears that one company is an exception to this rule: Buck. They take 420HC and harden the edge to something like Rockwell 58. That’s acceptable. I had read that Buck had special heat treating skills, but I assumed it was marketing BS intended to cover yet another great company’s descent into the toilet. It looks like that was wrong.

If what I’m reading about Buck is right, they may be providing very good 420HC knives at very good prices. I am still suspicious, because Buck itself uses the phrase “medium edge-holding” to describe the knives, but maybe they’re okay. This metal has some advantages. It’s very tough, so it can take a beating, and when you get it sharp, you can get it very, very sharp. Some metals are hard to put a serious edge on.

Some day I may try a Buck folder just to see what it’s like. I would not be shocked if I were disappointed, but maybe I wouldn’t be.

I hate a knife that gets dull fast. Sharpening twice a month is okay. Sharpening three times a day is not. There is some very impressive steel out there, and it’s not unreasonable at all to expect stellar performance, so I prefer not to fool around with junk. In the kitchen, cheap steel can be useful, because you can always keep a diamond hone handy, but elsewhere, you want a knife that doesn’t have to be suckled and coddled.

I wish the Post Office had a face so I could punch it. I will pray about that.

Time to go check the game camera. I hope it actually did something last night.

Wolf in Hog’s Clothing

I feel like there are forces out there that only want me to have crap knives.

I decided I needed a sheath knife for hunting. I looked around and settled on a semi-custom job made from 440C stainless: the Entrek Javalina. It’s a 4.25″ knife that comes with a Kydex sheath.

I ordered it on February 23, and I splurged on expedited shipping. I think I paid $7 extra. I kept waiting to be told that had shipped, but the seller, Knife Country, didn’t make a peep.

I finally contacted them to ask what was going on, and all I got in return was a crummy cut and paste of the tracking number and order date. I wouldn’t buy another knife from them if it cost $5 and was forged by Vulcan himself.

The knife finally arrived today, 10 days after I ordered it. Yes, 10. That’s expedited. It arrived the day after squirrel season ended. I took it out of the box…and it was the wrong knife. It was an Entrek Wolf, which is a slightly larger knife with a finger groove and a tanto-style blade.

Talk about annoyed.

I don’t want a tanto blade. I’m not even a Lone Ranger fan. I want a blade with a curve to it, so I can sharpen it easily and cut skin without a lot of effort. I’m sending it back, and in my little Amazon form, I gave Knife Country a piece of my mind. I have to start over. It looks like I’ll end up taking 15 days just to get a danged knife.

The up side of all this is that a look at the Wolf forced me to overcome my prejudices and admit that a finger groove, which makes a knife look kitcheny, is a good thing. It will help prevent my hand from sliding up to the blade.

“Groove” is a knife-nerd misnomer. It’s really a semicircular concave area, not a groove.

The Javalina is a neat, old-school-looking knife, but I now want a finger groove, so I’m ordering a Beaver. Yes, that’s the name of the knife. I went from a filthy hog that roots around in the forest to a fat, waddling rodent with a name that makes immature people titter.

Who comes up with these names? Mr. Entrek’s wife?

The Wolf looks very nice. The blade is around 3/8″ thick, so I don’t think I would have to worry about snapping it on a really tough squirrel pelvis. The edge grind is not perfect, but it’s hand-finished, so you have to deal with little variations.

The knife looked very short when I took it out of the box, so I Googled around, and I saw that 4″ is pretty much standard for hunting knives. I think this is the smallest hunting knife I’ve ever seen. I guess they were bigger in the past, and then people got real and went for practicality, not flash.

I found out Amazon is not the place to get knives. Ebay sells the Beaver for $123, which is a whole lot less than Amazon.

I could build this knife for $60, including heat treating. That hurts. But my belt grinder is in Miami. I don’t have the best tools to shape the blade. Also, there are supposedly tricks to heat treating, so maybe the folks at Entrek know more than whoever I would end up sending it to for treatment.

The blade on the Beaver is bead-blasted, which is not something I like. You can always polish a damaged smooth surface. Once bead-blasting is messed up, you’re done. And I will mess it up. Count on that.

I also have a new folder on the way. I used to carry a Gerber Gator II, which is a really fine knife for people who enjoy sharpening. It’s made from 420HC steel. You can only harden 420HC to about Rockwell 52. I think plastic forks are Rockwell 53. A good knife will be Rockwell 58+. The Gator had a great shape and a wonderful handle, but it got dull every time I used it. I want a knife of roughly the same size, except not junk.

Gerber used to make very, very nice knives. Now Gerber is the new Camillus. If you don’t know how insulting that is, try a Camillus knife. They used to sell them at drug stores. Gerber uses bad steel because it’s cheap.

I tried to find a nice folder in 440C, but it’s not that popular, because knife makers love trendy new steels. I learned that Cold Steel now has a steel called CTS-XHP. I don’t know what it is. I’ve had two little Cold Steel folders, and they were fantastic. I carried the first one for years, and then I lost it and replaced it. It always looked brand new. Weird.

Cold Steel used to use something called AUS8, which is supposed to be slightly less good than 440C, but similar to it. In 2015, they moved to CTS-XHP, which is an American-made wonder steel. AUS8 is Japanese, except for the Chinese version.

Cold Steel put out a crazy video to show why they switched. They took a folder made from AUS8 and used it to chop manila rope. They got it to cut over 1400 times before it got dull. Then they tried CTS-XHP, and they had to quit when they got past 6000 cuts. The guys who were testing the knives were getting sore.

I decided to order a Cold Steel CTS-XHP folder. Then I learned they’re moving to a different steel because CTS-XHP is hard to obtain. Great. I’ll fall in love with this knife, and then when I lose it and replace it, I won’t be able to get the same steel.

If you think you want to try this steel, this is the time to buy a Cold Steel knife, because old stock won’t last forever. The steel they’re using now isn’t as good. How do I know that? Because Cold Steel would still be using CTS-XHP if they could get it.

I hate, hate, hate bad steel. It’s okay for a cheap kitchen knife you can sharpen in 15 seconds, but not for a carry knife that cuts things tougher than tomatoes and celery. There is no excuse for bad steel, and there is no excuse for trying to make people think crap steel is good.

Knife makers are really sleazy about steel. Buck pimps 420HC like it’s a miracle metal, but they use it because they’re stingy, not because it’s good. I’ve seen companies brag about their 440A knives, hoping to make people think it’s like 440C. It’s not; 440A is soft garbage.

You are bored now. I understand that. I don’t care, though.

Entrek knives are probably very good. The one I’m sending back looks indestructible. I guess we’ll find out. I’ll also report on the Cold Steel I ordered.

Wonder what they’ll send me this time.

The Dubious Value of Verbal Aptitude

Last night I looked at Amazon Prime to find something to watch while I had the birds out of their cages. I saw that they offered a documentary on the atomic bomb. I’m a sucker for books and videos about the bomb, going back to The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, so I had to watch.

As I expected, I found it entertaining. I haven’t seen all of it yet. I hoped to see some mention of Richard Feynman, a great physicist who worked on the bomb in his youth, but he has not appeared yet.

A friend of mine bought me a new copy of Richard Feynman’s first book, Surely You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman, as a Christmas present, and I have been reading it over the last few weeks.

I first bought the book years ago, when I was a physics student. I bought a lot of physics-related nonfiction. When I dropped out of grad school and moved back to Miami, I put my books in boxes, and later, I found that ants had eaten a lot of them. At some point after that, Feynman got publicity from some source or other, and his book became popular.

It’s always a bummer when other people catch onto something you like. Everyone thinks you jumped on the bandwagon, and you end up having very unsatisfying conversations with real bandwagon jumpers who lack any sort of real understanding. It reminds me of my experiences with brewing. I was a beer freak even when I was in high school, and then at some point other people got into quality beers and homebrewing, and suddenly the world was full of hipsters who were instant beer experts.

I’ll tell you something funny. No matter how popular good beer becomes, there won’t be many people who can tell Miller Lite from Dogfish Head. That’s just the way humanity is.

I loved Feynman’s books. I won’t lie; I didn’t understand the third one I bought. It was about quantum electrodynamics. I didn’t have the patience to work my way through it. But the first two were great. They were autobiographies. He wrote about his experiences as a smart kid, as well as his time working with great men of science.

I learned something interesting from the bomb documentary. The thing I learned was of great historical importance, but I had never heard about it before. My best guess: liberal journalists and academics suppressed it. It concerned the United States and atomic policy, and it cast the United States in a very favorable light, so it’s the kind of thing hippies would naturally find infuriating and worthy of concealment.

The United States, on its own, tried to get rid of nuclear weapons and prevent the arms race.

For a short time, before the expected and unpreventable betrayal by leftists put the bomb in the hands of evil communist regimes, the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. We proposed destroying them and working to create a global ban on new production, combined with verification. The Soviets were working on their own bombs, and they refused to cooperate until we destroyed our weapons. Of course, the demand was ridiculous. We knew they were working on the bomb, and we didn’t know how far along they were. We knew we didn’t know how far along they were. It would have been idiotic to disarm and hope they didn’t have bombs waiting to be deployed.

The Soviet empire was, as Reagan put it, evil, and there is no way to justify the canard that westerners were just as bad. Even the disenfranchised in countries like the US had it much better than ordinary Soviet citizens, who were prisoners and slaves in their own nations. The Soviets were warlike and aggressive, and their policy was to expand by means of force. Unchecked, this would have resulted in a world system in which all human beings were humiliated prisoners and slaves. Taking a chance of making the USSR a nuclear monopoly would have been criminal.

I’m old, and I’m not especially ignorant, yet until last night, I was unaware that the US had tried to prevent the arms race. Thank you, crooked disseminators of information.

Today during breakfast I decided to Google and see if there were any documentaries about Feynman, and I came across a very interesting site. It’s called Cosmolearning. I know very little about it, but the “About” page says, “Collecting the top educational videos on the web, generously offered by hundreds of universities, educators, and professionals, we share their passion for teaching by providing a platform for world-class education free of charge.”

They had several videos on Feynman. Now I have some good stuff to look forward to.

Feynman’s autobiographical books are good reading not just because he writes about science, but because he writes interesting tales about a remarkable person with an engaging personality. He writes about his feelings, not just his accomplishments. A lot of his stories are funny. Some are moving.

One deceptive thing about the books is that Feynman undersells his intelligence. He was not just brilliant. He was extraordinary among brilliant people. But he describes himself as a guy who was dazzled and intimidated by the bright people he worked with.

Feynman writes about working on the bomb as a young man, as though he hadn’t graduated from college. He mentions overseeing high school boys at Los Alamos, as though he were some kind of low-level babysitter. I looked it up, and I found out that he had received his Ph.D. in 1942, at about the age of 24, before starting to work on the bomb.

So much for the babysitter narrative.

Feynman scored 125 on an IQ test, and that’s not impressive, but he also blew the tops out of very difficult math exams. His aptitude for math and physics was freakish, regardless of his self-deprecation.

It has been suggested that Feynman’s surprisingly low IQ was due to the nature of the test he took. After all, IQ is a test score, not a definitive quantization of intelligence. A very smart person can, legitimately, have a low IQ. You just have to measure the right things.

Most physicists are not good at verbal tasks. I know that from working with them. The great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said more or less the same thing in one of his books; he remarked that he was unusual because his gifts were balanced. It may be that Feynman’s test measured verbal ability more than mathematical aptitude. My guess is that a score of 125 on such a test would be unusually high for a physicist. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that other brilliant STEM thinkers had disappointing IQ scores.

Anyway, the notion that Feynman was anything less than astounding is untenable.

This got me thinking about smart people, so I Googled John von Neumann. If you don’t know who he is, it suffices to say that he appears to be the smartest person, among people of note, of the last century. He intimidated people like Edward Teller the way Edward Teller would intimidate you or me.

The power of von Neumann’s mind was incomprehensible. He made gigantic contributions in a number of fields in which most solid workers have no hope of making any type of memorable impact.

I have to say that I was depressed a little by looking into these things. God gave me some pretty good gifts, and I didn’t do anything with them. Earthly achievements aren’t very important in the Christian scheme, since everyone in heaven is a greater genius than 10 von Neumanns, but doing nothing with your gifts is not something that makes you feel good.

I always wonder what would have happened, had I been raised in a healthy family, by people who knew how to help their kids win. These days, I goad my friends to avoid the minefields I walked into. I tell them they need to get their kids started on music, math, and languages EARLY, EARLY, EARLY. Once you hit maybe 16, everything gets harder to learn, and your future success becomes limited. Earthly gifts aren’t everything, but being strong is usually better than being weak.

This week I realized something funny: extreme verbal aptitude has very little value. If you have a ton of STEM aptitude, you can use it to get a fine career that will feed you for life, and you may be able to make an extraordinarily large amount of money and look after yourself and others. A STEM person with an IQ of, say, 180 will find a lot of open doors. But what if you have an extreme verbal aptitude? There’s nothing you can do with it. No one will pay you to do crossword puzzles. It will help you as a lawyer, but let’s be honest; a lawyer with an IQ of 145 (common) will be able to do absolutely everything the law demands, very, very well. We have probably had good Supreme Court justices who were not that smart.

God gave me a very high verbal IQ, and now I know how unmarketable it is!

I do very well in STEM pursuits, but I got a late, late start. I was 30. I went from algebra dropout to grad student in a top physics program in 4 years, but I got burned out and quit (also, I suspect my memory was fading and making it harder), and I very much doubt I was ever going to come up with anything useful. I would have ended up doing experimental physics somewhere, shooting lasers through cold gases or something, and taking endless measurements to be interpreted by people who were smarter than I.

Maybe there is something useful about extreme verbal aptitude, and I just haven’t figured it out yet. Or maybe it’s just a gift to keep me entertained. I would not wish it for a son or daughter. A nice solid 650 verbal SAT and an 800 math SAT would get a kid much farther in life.

It seems to me that smart STEM people give us things that are useful, whereas verbal freaks do nothing but misunderstand and spread misunderstanding. They write books and essays full of godless opinion and conjecture, dragging the rest of us along in their wakes. The academics who are constantly hacking away at Christians are mostly verbal people.

I think of Justice Brennan, the famous liberal sage. He was wrong all the time, and his views were poisonous, but he was so smart, he convinced people (probably including himself) he was right. What a wasted life.

Now I’m more depressed than ever!

I may not be inventing great things or advancing physics, but thank God, I haven’t ended up like Sartre or Noam Chomsky or any of the other umpteen million verbal people who spent their days filling other people’s minds with sewage.

I think STEM gifts are better than verbal gifts, but on the whole, freak aptitudes are not that wonderful. The most important thing in life is a relationship with the Holy Spirit. After that, you want a nice, solid above-average brain, and more than that, good habits. The world is full of contented, successful people who serve God and couldn’t equal Feynman’s 125 on their very best days.

Incidentally, Feynman was an atheist. I enjoy his books, and I admire his mind, but in all likelihood, he is in agony right now, defeated forever. Terrible. I will never meet him.

Von Neumann is a different story. When he learned he was seriously ill, he sought God. He was a Jew by birth. I guess he was not religious prior to his illness, because he didn’t look for a rabbi to help him. He became a Catholic, and even on his deathbed, he was very afraid. I hope he made it.

How about all these huge Jewish brains? Where do they come from? What is God’s purpose for them? Feynman, von Neumann, Einstein, Bohr (half Jewish), Oppenheimer, Norbert Wiener…some almost incredible, others merely amazing. You could sit and list them all day. It almost makes you wonder what life would be without them. Would we have nuclear technology yet?

Gentiles do okay. Tesla, Gauss, Leibniz, Newton, Dirac, Fermi, and so on. But we SHOULD do okay. The vast majority of human beings are Gentiles. Something like 99.8%.

Strange.

I often wonder why God bothers giving us gifts at all, when the real answer is to connect to the Holy Spirit and get him to take care of you. But I suppose gifts are useful to keep you alive until you find the Holy Spirit. You have to use whatever crude weapons you have.

Whatever my potential was, I missed the bus, so now I get my thrills playing with farm machinery and machine tools. C’est la vie. At least I can function as a walking cautionary tale and help other people.

I’m going to look for more stuff on the Cosmo Learning site. Maybe I can still jam a few more things into the worn-out container which is what’s left of my mind.

Yes it Is

Suddenly I find myself gifted with something I did not expect: free time.

I had a horrendous time making the move up here, and then Irma came and made things 20 times worse. I had to buy 3 chainsaws. I burned one tree after another. I ended up with 3 different pairs of work boots, 5 pairs of Carhartt jeans, suspenders, and 2 pairs of overalls. Not to mention a collection of baseball caps, which you actually need for farm work because the sun is annoying and things hit you in the face all the time. I was busy, busy, busy.

Now things have slowed down. It turns out you don’t absolutely have to get rid of every downed tree on a property right away. Once you dispose of the ones that block roads, land on fences, threaten passing cars, mash your chicken coop, and so on, it’s not imperative that you maintain a fierce pace cutting up the ones lying on their sides in the woods. I will be moving trees for a long time, so there is no point in getting in a hurry. Also, it appears that the bugs are capable of disintegrating a live oak in under 2 years, so they will probably end up doing much of the work.

Here’s another interesting thing: the grass stopped growing. Things grew quickly here when I arrived, but once we had a couple of freezes, the landscaping workload looked very different. I can’t mow. I’m afraid to plant things. Some things I used to trim are either dead or playing possum. Mainly, I just clean up. And now I have child labor to help. My friend Amanda has 3 boys just the right size to be exploited by a non-recycling, yoga-hating, organic-food-ridiculing conservative. We are teaching them capitalism by forcing them to pick up sticks in my yard, for a suitably unconscionable weekly pittance.

I think putting the boys to work was a good move. They will learn that you can’t spend your whole life playing video games all day, and because they will get to spend some of the money, they will learn that affluence and work are connected. And they’re doing man’s work, which is fun. I taught them how to drive the EZ-GO and run the dump bed, and they zip around all over the place, presumably feeling important and grown up. Kids need that. You can’t give people responsibility without authority. It’s demoralizing. Ask a Border Patrol agent.

When my friend Mike was here, he was an even better overseer. He had them throwing stuff on the burn pile while it was actively burning. Don’t know if Amanda knows that. Mike is very good with kids, especially compared to the DNA source who abandoned these boys.

Mike is coming tomorrow. I guess we will devise new torments for them. And they WILL like it. I told him he is the guest slave driver.

Their attitude is great. I think the money helped. The first time they worked, it was a gift to me from their mom, and after a short time, one of them came up to me and said, “Can we be done now?” That is changing.

My biggest contribution to their upbringing is Frisbee. Somehow they ended up throwing one of my disks, and I found out they didn’t have proper Frisbees. I got each one a Diskraft disk (better than Frisbees) for Christmas. They are starting to get it. Sometimes a disk will make it all the way to an intended recipient, and I have seen a few catches.

Wham-O brand Frisbees are Chinese these days, so Diskraft is the way to go.

Boys are like car engines. They function best under a load. You have to give them things to do. I know this because my parents did not do this.

To return to the point, I am less busy now, and it makes me nervous. I feel like there is something I should be doing. Of course, that’s true. There is always something I should be doing. But I wonder if I’m missing anything.

I now have time to exercise and practice music. I didn’t expect that. I took up the mandolin, banjo, and guitar again, and this week I started looking at piano instruction.

Amanda’s boys need to learn music, if they want to be civilized, so I have been helping her find options. Lessons would be great, but they’re not cheap. One son wants to learn piano, and another likes the guitar. The third mentioned the saxophone.

I can help a little with the guitar, and I recommended a site called Justin Guitar for materials and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it should be helpful. For piano, I found something new: Playground Sessions. Quincy Jones is the “co-creator,” which probably means someone paid him money to use his picture.

I tried Playground Sessions myself, and I am impressed. You download free software and pay a small fee every month. You get video lessons and interactive sheet music. You connect a MIDI keyboard to the computer, and you play along with the software. You get background music and a countdown, and you get a score every time you try to play something. They have a real program, not just random pieces, and you learn things in an order that builds your skills. I really like it. It’s what I was looking for years ago when I tried Adventus Piano Suite, which is a very annoying piece of software which sort of comes close to teaching piano.

If you want to learn to play an instrument, you really need to learn to sight-read and play with accompaniment. I learned to play the banjo using tablature and my memory, and it was a very bad choice. It was better than no music at all, but I was musically illiterate. It’s a gigantic handicap. And if you can’t play along with other people, you’re useless most of the time, and you won’t be able to connect with anyone else musically. Also, your timing will be bad.

Learn to sight-read. Learn to play in a group. If you can’t do these things, you’re a crippled musician. Like me.

Cutting news websites out of my life increased my free time. I used to look at them periodically throughout the day. Now I start to look at Drudge, and I remember I don’t do that any more. Then I have to find a way to fill the time I’m not wasting. I still glance at the news, but not much.

I can read again. I can exercise. I may start to do things with tools again, and I mean things not involving dead trees.

If you’re interested in piano, take a look at Playground Sessions. It may be a good idea even if you’re taking lessons. If you have a spacy teacher who isn’t organized, look at it and find out what he or she should be teaching you.

Time to practice.

Approach the Throne With Awe and Bacon

This is easily the greatest day of my life. I am still not in Miami, and I have a new recliner.

My new house has a big upstairs room which I have turned into my command post. I started out with two plastic Adirondack chairs from Home Depot; perhaps this is appropriate, since I graduated from the Adirondack-Florida School for boys. Anyway, for almost three months, I sat on those chairs, and then I got a couch, which was fantastic yet lacking in foot support. Now I have a proper recliner, with a motor in it to make sure I don’t get PTSD from turning a lever.

This is magnificent. I don’t know why I haven’t had recliners all my life. I have always loved them.

Two days from now I will have a real TV stand, so I’ll be able to get the TV off the floor. I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.

I even have a lamp now. I stole one of my dad’s end tables from the living room, and I commandeered the elbow LED lamp I used to use for my garage electronics station. I was going blind from relying on the overhead lights. This is bliss. This is paradise.

I am never getting out of this chair. I’m going to be like one of those obese people you read about, who end up welded to their chairs. I’ll find an enabler to bring me root beer and donuts.

Well. I guess I won’t.

I’m not sure what else to do with this room. I have been considering putting my electronics stuff here, with a dedicated desk, but it would be 50 yards from the rest of my tools. Inconvenient if I needed regular tools while working on electronics, or electronics tools while working on regular stuff. I could duplicate a few things to reduce the walking. Maybe I could put my electronics tools in a new box I could move to the workshop when needed.

I have considered putting my CNC lathe up here. It’s small, so it’s suited to an indoor location, and it would be good to have it near the big TV for CAD purposes. I don’t know if I can carry 110 pounds of awkward metal up the stairs, though. Actually, carrying it back down would be worse.

I picked a Barcalounger Vintage recliner. The Vintage line is supposedly better than the basement-grade recliners they sell for $300. I hope so. I read a lot of recliner reviews while shopping, and they were generally discouraging. China this. China that. I decided I would have to quit nitpicking and worrying and buy something.

The recliner I picked is a little funny-looking, but it was discounted heavily, and it has cloth cushions. For some reason, that spoke to me. I love leather furniture, but recliners are about comfort, and when it comes to comfort, cloth is king. When you look at this recliner, it says, “I don’t care what I look like. I just want to embrace you and make you fall asleep watching Forged in Fire.”

But enough about my plans for the week.

Oh, this is great. This is magnificent. You don’t know how great real furniture is until you sit on a plastic chair for three months.

Sorry if you’re annoyed that I wrote about a chair. I had to share my joy. I will try to show restraint when the ottoman that matches the couch arrives.

No promises.

CNC Lathe Next

My friend Amanda has a son who has some cognitive issues. Oddly, in some cases, people with his problem turn out to be unusually well suited to the trade of CNC machining. Mental characteristics that cause problems in many areas of life can be assets in machining. There’s a dude in California who runs a school that trains such people.

I learned about this from a TV show called Titans of CNC. A man named Titan Gilroy was convicted of a violent crime, and when he got out of prison, he learned CNC and started a big, successful shop. Now he teaches inmates at San Quentin. He has a son with Asperger’s, and he discovered that his son was very good at CNC. Now he works with the guy who runs the school.

I mentioned this to Amanda a few weeks back, and I said I had some interest in CNC and robotics. We showed her son some Youtubes, and he seemed interested. That’s good, but it’s also a problem. I have only one CNC tool, and it’s a home-built adaptation which I haven’t perfected. Not counting my vacuum cleaner, I have only one robot, and when I bought it and assembled it, I was not able to make it work.

Since showing her son the videos, I have retrieved my CNC lathe from Miami, and I am ready to see if I can make it work. Last night, I took the robot out of the box I had tossed it in, and after an hour or so of reprogramming and researching, I figured out what was wrong with it. Now it’s working.

The robot is a B-robot, from a company called JJ Robots. It’s a two-wheeled balancing robot a little bigger than a box of Pop Tarts. It’s based on an Arduino Leonardo board.

Here’s how it works. It has a tiny board containing circuitry that measures the robot’s vertical orientation. This shouldn’t amaze anyone. Cell phones have circuits that tell them whether they’re level or not. The robot checks the board’s output, and then it accelerates in the direction of the tilt, bringing it back to vertical again. In other words, when the robot starts to fall in a certain direction, it takes off in that direction, bringing itself back under its top. It can do this so often it appears nearly stable.

I found I had installed the orientation board sideways, so the robot was sensing angular deviation along the wrong axis. The robot can’t fall from side to side, so the board’s input was useless. I reinstalled it according to the directions.

The robot still refused to stand. I took a look at what it was doing. It was accelerating away from the direction of fall, making the fall worse. I then turned the board 180 degrees, and everything worked.

Now I have a self-balancing robot.

I had some other problems with it, and they’re even more boring, so I don’t want to get into them too much. I found I could not upload programming to the Arduino. Somewhere on the web, someone said I had to press the board’s reset button immediately before uploading. Not exciting, unless you’re a nerd.

The robot has wi-fi. When you turn it on, you connect your phone to the robot’s network, and then you use an app to steer the robot. Obviously, it needs an onboard camera, like a drone, so you can see what the robot sees as it moves. Maybe I can figure that out some day.

Anyway, next time Amanda brings her son around, I can show him the robot and see if he has any interest. Maybe in a week or two, I can get the lathe working better.

It’s a little strange that I decided to buy and assemble a robot, but the whole exercise has turned out to have a purpose I could not have anticipated. That’s God for you.

Robotics and CNC are not the same thing, but it’s basically the same skill set, applied in different ways. Programming, boards, and servos or steppers. My guess is that a person who has CNC aptitude also has robotics aptitude. The question is which one he will like well enough to stick with.

Her other two sons are interested in music, but the instruction opportunities are limited. I suggested Adventus Piano software for one and Justinguitar.com for the other. Justinguitar.com is a teaching site run by, as you might guess, a guitarist named Justin. It has lots of exercises and videos. It’s not a teacher, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

The hard thing will be to get them to learn to sight-read. This is much more important than learning to play. Any idiot can learn to play songs by memorizing them. Ask me how I know. A real musician can read music, and he must also understand theory. A singer who can sight-sing and who understands theory is a better musician than an untrained pianist who plays extremely well.

Math, languages, and music. You have to learn while you’re young. After you’re seven or eight years old, your aptitude drops off, and as far as I know, you can’t get it back.

It’s hard to tell when you’ve scored a point with her kids. Other kids get excited. Hers just sit and think, and sometimes they want to know how soon you’ll be finished so they can do something else. She says it’s working, though.

Sooner or later, if they want to get anywhere with music, they’ll have to find people they can play with.

The robot is interesting to me because the concept doesn’t have to be limited to a tiny machine. The stuff that tells it what to do could be installed on a robot the size of a building. I could yank the guts out of it, find a way to make it run bigger steppers, and make a robot big enough to run around the yard. Jam a lithium battery in there, and it could run for an hour. Not sure what accessories I could add to it to make it useful. Anyway, it doesn’t have to be a small toy. Could it ever be useful for anything? That’s a hard question. I would have to come up with a function for it.

I wish I could make it paint the fence or kill squirrels.

Now that the major crises of moving are abating, I feel like I’m getting my life back. I had time to work on the robot. I’m anxious to get my machine tools up here. Next year, life should be less hectic, and I should be able to get more done. Maybe I’ll be able to make some knives. Right now I can’t run my big grinder without a gas generator and an adaptor (which I don’t have), so knife-making is not possible.

I’m giving up on tree removal. The trees that cause problems will be moved. The rest will be ignored until it’s convenient to do something. It’s just too much work. Surrendering will give me more free time.

Guess I’ll go check out robot accessories. If I can find one a kid could use to drive his brothers nuts, I think it will be a hit.

Plus Fascinating Shoe Information

Today is a busy day for me, so I am procrastinating. I should be out buying an upholstery needle and a spare folding table, but instead I will tell you about the stump I cut yesterday.

The huge oak that fell on my chicken house is long gone, but the stump lingered until yesterday. It was intimidating. I didn’t think my tractor could pick it up, and it was thicker than my 20″ chainsaw is long. Also, it was down on the ground were cutting it would be difficult. Yesterday I decided to give it a shot.

I had to cut from both sides, and cutting from the bottom was not possible, so there was no way to fix it so it would not split at the bottom. I cut for around 10 minutes, and finally, the free part dropped.

I took my handy-dandy timberjack, and with a lot of effort, I managed to start the log moving away from the rest of the stump. This is when I discovered the split. The log had split at the bottom, and there was still a strap of wood attaching it to the stump. I opened the kerf up so I could get at the strap, and I cut it with the tip of the saw.

Once the log was free, I moved it a couple of feet so the tractor forks could get at it, and I put the tines on the ground beside it. I used the timberjack to roll it onto the forks. Not easy, which told me the log was really heavy.

When I got it onto the forks, I hopped on the tractor and cranked the tines upward. The log moved, much to my relief. It rolled back toward the tractor. I then lifted the forks, and the log was free of the ground.

It’s a big relief to know I can move things this heavy, because I have a lot of them.

I took the tractor down to the gate by the highway, and I drove through the gate. Cars were whizzing by at maybe 70. I had planned to drive down the right-of-way and dump the log maybe 50 yards from the gate, but I would have been driving into traffic, and it made me nervous. There isn’t a lot of traffic here, but I picked the busiest time of the day, and such traffic as we have really moves.

I settled for dumping the log by the driveway. In the photo, it’s at the base of the pile by the road.

The county has given people until November 27 to get everything to the side of the road. It’s not looking good. Let me rephrase: it’s impossible. But I can move a few really annoying things into their lap, and it will be worth the effort.

When I was done, I tried something crazy. I put the front end loader down on the dirt above the stump, and I pushed. The stump rocked back. That surprised me. I was trying to rock it back into its hole. I didn’t succeed, but I made a big difference.

Now that I have put in some hours in two different pairs of work boots, I have drawn a conclusion. I like Danners better than Keens. My Keens give great protection, and unlike the Danners, they came with toe caps that prevent cuts to the leather, but the factory insoles are like concrete. They felt better when I bought them, but I suppose I have compacted them. I looked into aftermarket insoles, but Keen’s site says the Braddock boot is not compatible with them. I don’t know how that can be true. Keen makes insoles, though. I sent Keen a message asking whether their own insoles would work.

I am sorely tempted to get a shorter version of the Danners I bought. These boots are wonderful. The toes are vulnerable to cuts, but I solved the problem by applying KG Toe Guard to them. The Danners are selling for a little over a hundred bucks right now, which is crazy. Maybe the toe issue offended other consumers, and Danner is trying to unload the boots and discontinue them.

My Keens are American. My Danners are from somewhere else. Wild guess: China. People say to avoid foreign Danners, but my experience with them has been great, and at a hundred bucks, it’s hard to go wrong. If they last half as long, so what? They cost half as much.

When I’m rolling heavy logs, I’m very grateful for safety toes. Yesterday I imagined that severed stump rolling back on my toe. It weighs hundreds of pounds. It would not have done my toes any good. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it would have pressed my foot into the ground and then broken my leg.

Logging is not for the stupid. You have to think of all the physical possibilities in advance. Otherwise, you learn about them on the fly, very suddenly.

Wood seems to rot very quickly here. Maybe my problems aren’t as bad as they seem. Maybe my fallen trees will disappear in a couple of years if I get them on the ground and kill them with diesel. When I visited this place in the summer, there was a fallen log that looked fairly solid, and it’s disintegrating now.

I have to order some blackberry briars, and I have to make some decisions about new hedges. The sellers installed maybe six different kinds of hedge. Too busy. I need one bulletproof hedge species. A number of the existing hedges are looking crappy; I suppose hedge plants don’t last forever. It’s time to remove a section and plant something new. I figure I can do this about four times a year, and by next winter, the house will look a lot better.

The sellers put some truly worthless plants by the workshop. The shop has a porch with pillars, and each pillar has its own disappointing ornamental plant. I think I should do blackberries on each end and leave the middle pillar alone. Or maybe it would be best to do some kind of ground cover all the way across.

Blueberries do very well here, so I’ll need those, too. I can also grow kiwifruit and raspberries.

If you want ten or twenty tons of free firewood, and you want to cut it yourself, let me know. I’m the guy to see. Otherwise, I’ll just sit here and root for the termites.

Facing my Tractor Fears

Today I overcame one of my big fears. I drove the tractor on the right-of-way by my farm, parallel to the road, leaning over, with a big log on the front end loader. And I did not roll the tractor and die.

Marion County and FEMA are sending trucks to carry off Irma debris, and it’s a huge gift to citizens. I can’t even guess what it would cost to pay a tree service to haul tons of wood off my land. Free is preferable. The problem is that it’s not easy to get trees cut and moved. I’m alone, I didn’t have the right tools or access to the whole farm until some time after the storm, and the only place where I can put the trees and count on having them picked up is along a scary ditch.

The free pickups will not last forever, and I am way behind.

My property consists of two adjoining lots that abut a highway. One lot is at the top of a hill. When cars approach that lot, they are approaching a high place. They can’t see past it. The area by the road is fairly flat, and it would be a great place to put wood, but I would have to drive the tractor right beside the road in a place where drivers doing 70 would be very surprised to see me.

The other lot is easy for approaching drivers to see, but it has a lot of growth on the right-of-way, and the ditch is not as flat. This is the safest place to put things, but I was putting it off because of the ditch’s slope.

Somebody in the government surprised me by coming by with some kind of machine (which I never saw) and cutting back the brush by the road. That’s a huge help. Now I can go up and down the lot with the tractor well off the road. The trees and shrubs don’t obstruct my path. With the obstructions gone, the only things preventing me from dumping trees were cowardice and laziness.

Today I drove the Kubota down to the end of the lot and moved a few big logs down the ditch and dumped them. It wasn’t bad at all. I kept the bucket low so the tractor’s center of gravity would be down by the ground, and I moved carefully. Everything worked out well.

If I really work at it, I may be able to get rid of a third of my big logs before the government bails on me. A third is better than nothing.

After I moved the logs, I went back to the area by the house and picked up a 12-foot-long trunk. I wanted to see if the Kubota could lift it. No problem. I took it to the gate between the house and the burn pile, and I raised it so I could get through the gate. Then I lowered it again and took it out by the pile. My friend Mike was here over the weekend, and he played with the tractor. He dumped a lot of wood not far from the pile. I decided to add the trunk.

I lifted the trunk, because you have to have the loader up high in order to lower the forks and drop things. Then I dropped the trunk. The rear wheels of the tractor either left the ground or tried to, and the tractor tilted to the left. This all happened very quickly, and then the trunk fell clear and the tractor righted itself.

This was not quite what I was hoping to see.

For a fraction of a second, I wondered whether I was in the process of rolling the tractor over. On myself. My new lesson: avoid dropping heavy objects quickly. I don’t think I’ll need to repeat the lesson. It made a pretty deep impression on me.

Maybe I should start using the safety belt. I don’t want to overreact, but it’s just possible that I need to start buckling it.

The weather here is very nice now. Working outdoors is much easier than it was a month ago. Sadly, there is more dust, because the ground is dry. But I’ll take dust over mosquitoes, sweat, and heat stroke.

I can’t burn anything in this weather. The other day I was near the burn pile, and I used my plumber’s torch to light the grass by my feet. It did not go out. The fire started spreading. Once I was sure it was not going to die down on its own, I stamped it out. My experiment told me what I needed to know. No burning until it starts raining again. Everthing I can’t put by the road will have to sit and molder.

I’m getting better at taking care of this place. I may conceivably develop the necessary skills before the farm disintegrates from neglect. I have chain saws, two leaf blowers, a string trimmer, and a lithium-ion hedge trimmer that has to be seen to be believed. I’ve learned how to kill unwanted plants with diesel. I’m starting to understand how badly the previous owners chose ornamental plants, and what I need to do to fix it. I’ve even boned up on good choices for tree planting. I’m thinking chestnuts, black walnuts, peaches, and maybe a persimmon.

I feel nervous about killing and burning a bunch of plants and trees the sellers clearly worked hard to put here, but it has to be done. I have like eight different types of shrubs around the house. I need to cut back to one or two. I have the ugliest, most oddly situated magnolia trees on earth. They need to be cut down. I have 70-foot live oaks 50 feet from my house, killing the grass and threatening to fall on me. They have to go.

I have three citrus trees, and I’m pretty sure every one has citrus greening. The fruit are disgusting. And what fruit they are. Navel oranges! The Ford Granada of oranges. No juice, no flavor, and hard to peel. Tiny grapefruit. Ponderosa lemons.

A ponderosa lemon is a ridiculous lemon-like fruit which is nearly as big as a grapefruit. People call them lemons, but they have no taste other than tasting sour. In Miami, damaged citrus trees are famous for dying back to trunks which sprout ponderosas. I guess they’re used for root stock. Anyway, it’s a pathetic fruit. I suppose you could use them to add acidity to food.

There are a lot of great citrus fruits to choose from. Best of all, hands down: the tangelo, also known as the minneola or honeybell. It’s like a giant orange that tastes a hundred times better, and you can peel them with your fingers. Another winner: the tangerine. But if you have tangelos, tangerines are somewhat superfluous. Pummelos are great. A pummelo is a gigantic, dry-fleshed grapefruit which is very sweet. Persian limes are good. If you’ve never had a lime grown in a backyard, you have no idea how good Persian limes are supposed to be. Key limes are good for cooking. Kaffir limes produce leaves you can cook with. Ruby red grapefruit are great for juice or eating with a spoon.

Why anyone would pick the trees currently dying in my side yard is a mystery.

I need to have a county agent come out and confirm that they’re sick. Then down they come. Sad, but citrus is being eradicated all over the world, and it’s best to get it over with and plant something else.

There is a new greening-resistant fruit called a Sugar Belle. It’s sort of like a tangelo, but I think it’s more acidic. I may see if I can get a couple of trees. They’re patented, so you probably can’t pick one up at Home Depot.

If you didn’t know citrus was being wiped out by a plague, sorry to break it to you. Enjoy it while you can. The plague is global, so eventually citrus will be hard to find.

I plan to cut some of the hopeless shrubs around this place and put in blackberries and raspberries. I should get on that immediately.

Years from now, right before I die, this should be a very nicely landscaped farm.

I’ll try to post photos next time. Hopefully no gore.