New Storm Threatens to Ruin my Fall

Tropical storm preparations continue here at the compound.

Hurricane Ian’s path has wobbled this way and that over the last couple of days. It was headed for Tampa. Then it was headed for the east side of the panhandle, where there is not much to destroy. Then it turned farther east. Now it’s headed for Tampa again. If it hits Tampa and continues on the present path, the eye will come pretty close to me.

The good thing about this, from my limited perspective, is that the winds that hit here will have to go across a tremendous amount of land first. Land kills storm winds.

Hurricanes circulate counterclockwise, so when one passes near you, you know the directions the wind will take as it goes by. If it passes on the west, as Ian is expected to, the first winds will be from the east, and they will be weakened because they will have to cross Florida twice; first from the Gulf to the east and then from the east to me. After that, there would be southern winds, also weakened, because they will have to come up the middle of the state. Finally, there would be west winds. They would have less resistance, because they would only have to cross from the west coast.

I think the big questions are 1) how wide is the storm, and 2) how strong will it be, generally, when it makes its closest approach to me.

In 2017, Irma spent a lot of time over land before it came near me, but it was very strong when it came ashore, at over 140 mph. It had a hurricane-force wind swath about as wide as Florida until it was about 100 miles south of me, and the tropical-storm-force field was over 5 times the width of the state even after it passed me.

Ian (which Fox is calling a “monster”) looks like it will be much smaller. When Irma was at the stage where Ian is now, it was much, much wider. If Ian stays smaller, the tropical-storm-force band will be narrower and will also have speeds that drop off faster with distance from the eye.

Right now, Tampa’s forecast calls for 80 mph sustained winds, tops, making Ian a Category 1 storm when it hits the coast. That isn’t consistent with other claims I’ve seen. Some news sources say it will be a Category 4. It’s hard to know who is telling the truth because journalists and meteorologists lie about hurricanes so much.

The National Hurricane Center is fairly neutral, so I’m checking their site. They say Ian will DECREASE in intensity after it hits Cuba, so it appears the Cat 4 story is just another media lie. Here’s what they say:

The NHC intensity forecast calls for Ian to become a major hurricane before it reaches western Cuba early Tuesday. It is then forecast to reach its peak intensity over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico in 36 h. After that, southwesterly shear in association with a deep-layer trough over the eastern U.S. is forecast to significantly increase over the hurricane on Wednesday and Thursday, which will likely disrupt the vertical structure and import drier air into its circulation.

They think it will hit land with winds of about 85 mph, and the center of the probability cone is right around Tarpon Springs, about 15 miles north of Tampa.

If this is more or less what happens, things shouldn’t be too bad here. It sounds much better than what the professional liars are saying. I don’t want a Category 4 storm landing 100 miles away.

Anyway, I have propane, a big cooler, water, and as of this afternoon, a generator that sort of works. I should be able to have hot food and refrigeration for two or three days.

I have not finished my tractor fork project. I don’t know if I will get it done by the time the storm comes. I ordered myself a set of clamp-on forks just in case. I need them anyway because they will turn my tractor in to a fairly decent forklift. Brush forks can sometimes be used for forklift duty, but sometimes they won’t fit whatever you’re trying to lift.

Hope I don’t end up bathing in the pool again. Prayers for me and the other people in the cone would be appreciated.

Fabrication and Revelation

It’s hard to believe how far I’ve come. I remember joking about getting a Bridgeport mill. I thought it was a good example of a tool no normal man would have in his shop. Now I have a mill, three lathes, an arbor press, a plasma cutter, a hydraulic press, and three welding machines. I have two belt grinders and about 5 angle grinders, and I’m building my own tractor fork attachment from old parts and steel tubing.

Today was an intimidating day. I had to take two 56″ pieces of 2″ square tubing with 1/4″ walls and turn them into a frame to hold tractor forks. Then I had to weld them to plates I modified to attach them to my tractor.

I don’t know what a foot of 1/4″-wall tubing weighs, but my guess is around 4 pounds. Okay, the web says 5.41 pounds. It’s a little unpleasant moving a 56″ piece around on a welding table. When you weld it to another piece plus 4 pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls amounting to about 56″, it gets heavy. Then when you attach the whole business to two 3/8″ plates with areas of over a square foot, you can forget about manipulating it safely without machinery.

I had to rip the scale and rust off all the tubing, weld it into a frame without too much distortion, and then add the plates. It was quite a job.

When I got the frame put together, I had to figure out how to hold it in place against the mounting plates while I tacked it on. The answer, as it so often is: a Harbor Freight hydraulic cart. I put the plates on the tractor, put the frame on the cart, lifted it up to the plates, shimmed it so it was in the right place, and clamped everything together. Then I added some very big tacks and moved the tractor into the shop so I could finish welding.

I think things went well. Two of the tacks popped, but I clamped the frame back down as if nothing had happened, and I finished my beads.

Tomorrow I can add more weld to make this thing indestructible. Then I have to get started, cutting up the old fork tines and adapting them to this frame.

How will I hold everything in place while I weld? Beats me. If you had asked me yesterday how I would have done what I did today, I would have had no idea. Ideas will come. God will inspire me.

I used to see ads for welding tables that held half a ton or more. I wondered what kind of nut would need a table like that. Now I am that nut. A bigger table would have been a big help today.

I have been looking at tables online. I am positive I want to stick with fixturing tables. Solid tables require you to weld things to them in order to make them work, and that would drive me crazy. All of my work would have funny places where I had ground off tacks.

Fixturing is great. A fixturing table has dozens or hundreds of holes in it, and you use them to hold clamps that hold your work in place while you weld. This ensures that the work will not warp.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. No it doesn’t. You may think it will when you buy your table, but it won’t. Only two things prevent warping: skill and huge steel. The thicker steel is, the harder it is to warp it. If your steel isn’t all that thick, you have to develop the skill to lay welds down in a way that minimizes distortion.

Fixturing is still helpful, though. You really need to have your work held in place while you work.

If my table were stronger, I could put the fork attachment on it and weld the tines on. The manufacturer, Klutch, claims it will hold 600 pounds, but I am suspicious, and I don’t want to learn they were fudging by having the attachment fall on me after it passes 200 pounds. I put casters on the table, and they will supposedly hold 1600 pounds among the 4 of them. All I can say about that is this: China. That’s the home country of the company that made the 1600-pound claim. Maybe it’s true, and maybe it ain’t.

A company called Langmuir has come up with a table it calls Arcflat. It’s actually a system of cast iron boxes with fixturing holes. You can use one box as a table, or you can buy several boxes and clamp them together. They are supposed to be very precise and very tough, and the whole setup for three feet by four feet would run about $2000, tax included.

That’s a lot. On the other hand, what would a dubious-quality set of pallet forks cost me? Well over a grand. A grapple would run over three grand. And I think grapples are stupid. I’ve seen them in videos, and I have never seen one do anything my forks can’t do. I’ve seen my forks do many things a grapple can’t do.

Pallet forks are the only quick-attach forks available online, they are vastly inferior to the forks I already have when it comes to moving trees and brush, and they cost a fortune. By adapting my old forks, which I would never be able to sell for a decent price, I can get a dynamite setup for under $300. That means my little table, which cost $200 with tax, has paid for itself and then some. It also helped me fix my subsoiler, so there’s maybe another $150 saved. It helped me make a bunch of mobile tool bases, so I probably saved a couple of thousand there.

I would have been smart to buy a big table to begin with. But I didn’t think I had room, I was cheap, and I didn’t think I’d build big projects.

Tomorrow will be the point of no return. I will start chopping my old forks up for repurposing. I’m sure it will work out, because when it comes to fabrication, there is always a way to fix things.

I had a wonderful dream last night. Or maybe night before last. I was in my dad’s house, and my parents were there. My dad was suffering from dementia, as he did in life. He was standing at the kitchen sink, puttering around with things. Sometimes people with dementia look for things to do in order to give themselves purpose.

He picked up some kind of utensil which he thought was supposed to be covered. It was not. He said, “Somebody didn’t cover this. That’s okay. Still friends.”

He was forgiving someone. Covering for them. It was wonderful to hear. The tone of his voice was so sweet. Like it didn’t even occur to him to be angry. “Still friends.” No big deal. Everyone makes mistakes.

It made me think about a problem I’ve had since he died. I have tended to remember him as he was when he was young. He was extremely hard on people, and he was not the kind of person who would forgive quickly. Even after you apologized and made things right, he would keep hammering. In his last months, he changed completely. He was gentle. He loved prayer. Whenever I showed up to see him, he said, “Here comes my beautiful son.” He was like the Dad I saw in my dream.

Since his death, I have tried to remember him as he was when he died, but old habits have crept in and caused me to remember the old Dad who died months before the new one. The dream has helped me to remember the new Dad and forget the old Dad, just as God has.

It made me think about love and what a privilege it is to be a gentle and benevolent person. Love is the reason the universe was created. It’s not an incidental benefit. I have to remember to take pleasure in being like my dad was in my dream. The modern world taught me to be cynical and hard. I changed myself in order to feel safe. That was a mistake.

We are in a lot of danger now. An apocalyptic spirit of murder has been released, and we are nastier to each other than ever. This is especially true of the Internet. It’s a snake pit. Social media sites, in particular, are disgusting and perilous.

The dream was life-changing. From now on, when I feel angry about something someone has done, I’ll just say, “Still friends,” and let it go.

Hope I can get my forks working before the storm. It looks like we’ll miss the real wind, but some trees could still come down, so I want to be ready before the power goes out and I have to use the generator to weld things.

Tractor Forks Gradually Materializing

Looks like my tractor brush fork attachment may be usable by the time Hurricane Ian either gets here or misses us.

When I converted my tractor bucket to quick attachment, I bought a heavy mounting plate and cut the ends off for the bucket. I welded them to the bucket, and this left me with a big piece that could also be turned into a mount with some modification. I decided to use it to hold brush forks on. I have been cutting and welding, and now I have two plates which should be suitable for attachment to a heavy frame which will hold 4 brush fork tines.

I had to make these plates wider, and I also had to add metal to the bottoms. Before I did this, it would have been hard to attach a frame in a way that put it at least as low as the bottom edges of the plates.

Brush forks need to slide freely on the ground, especially if you want to use them as forklifts occasionally. You can’t have something protruding down behind them. In order to have the tines flat on the ground and have ample steel to weld the tines to, I needed to have the frame on the ground, too.

It’s a complicated problem, and my explanation probably doesn’t make it very clear. If I hadn’t added the additional steel, the mount plates would have extended 2.5″ down below the rear ends of the tines. The tines would not have slid easily on the ground, and the bottoms of the mount plates would have banged into things a lot.

It took me a couple of hours yesterday to cut out the steel pieces to add to the plates. I had to use the mill as well as a big angle grinder with a cutoff wheel. Today it took me another 90 minutes or so to weld everything together and grind off the lumps. It was not easy to weld these things and make them pretty because of their shapes, so I settled for ugly strong welds followed by a lot of grinding.

Tomorrow’s work should go by fast. I have two 56″ pieces of 2″ by 2″ tubing with 1/4″ walls, and I have 4 shorter pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls. I will turn all this into a sort of ladder structure which will be my attachment’s frame. The long pieces will run horizontally, and the short pieces will be welded between them at intervals of around 15″. I should be able to accomplish this in an hour or so. Then I have to weld the frame to the mounting plates.

I figure I should be done in three hours or less.

After all this the real fun starts. I have to cut the rear portions off my old forks so they can be welded to the frame. I have to weld them in place. This will give me 4 pieces of tubular steel around a foot long. I will have to cut these so they can be used as struts to keep the tines from bending when horizontal loads are applied to the tips. I figure one strut per tine will do it.

I think I may be able to get this work done in a day. Then it will take me another day to weld it all together. This will put me in position to use the forks if trees come down this week. If they don’t come down, I’ll have time to paint everything.

Once this project is done, I’ll have a quick-attach tractor and quick-attach forks. I’ll be this area’s king of cheap quick-attach tractor guys.

By using bits of the old mounting plate, I saved around $140. The whole project will cost me $198 for steel, plus whatever paint and consumables cost. And maybe 4 bolts. This estimate is based on the assumption that this will work. If I ruin my old forks and can’t make good new ones, I’ll be spending a lot correcting the problem.

I hope this thing will be as strong as I need it to be. I believe it will be. People tend to overbuild weldments and underestimate what they can take, and this generalization applies to me. If I’m only a little worried, it probably means the attachment will be considerably stronger than it has to be.

I am amazed how nice the shop is now. I get things done fast. I know where most things are. I don’t have to search much. Thank you, God, for making this dream come true.

Let’s Let Those Who Hate us Guard our Freedoms

A certain number of leftists are losing their minds because the Fifth Circuit upheld a law preventing big social media companies from performing certain types of censorship.

I’ll show you Wikipedia’s description of the law. A footnote is omitted, but you can find it on Wikipedia.

The law applies to social media companies with “more than 50 million active users” in the U.S. each month, that operate in Texas. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts with warnings or impeding “the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.” The law also has a “prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location”.

Here is what Governor Abbott’s site says:

House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users banning users simply based on their political viewpoints. The law also requires several consumer protection disclosures and processes related to content management on the social media sites to which the bill applies. These sites must disclose their content management and moderation policies and implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove, providing a reason for the removal and a review of their decision. They also must review and remove illegal content within 48 hours. House Bill 20 also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

The law itself is very long and boring. A lot of it is taken up with the wonderful, satisfying requirements that companies disclose just about everything they do as censors and that they provide real mechanisms for complaining and getting relief. Here is the money part which leftists hate:

Sec. 143A.002. CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media
platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s
ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

The state’s power to regulate Facebook, Twitter, et alia comes from the fact that social media companies are “common carriers.” This phrase is what lawyers call a “term of art,” which means it has a specific legal meaning which is not necessarily its plain meaning as laymen might use it. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explains this in its decision:

[T]he common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose nondiscrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining.

If you sell handmade pottery at a table on the sidewalk, you can discriminate against buyers for all sorts of silly reasons, because no one cares about your pottery or has concerns that anyone will be substantially hindered in their enjoyment of privileges common to all of us if they can’t buy it. On the other hand, if you open a motel on an interstate highway, you are appealing to a big customer base and offering an essential service, so you can’t turn customers away because they’re ugly or you suspect they don’t like the Beatles.

I am a retired lawyer and not a great legal scholar, but the common carrier argument makes complete sense to me. If thousands of socialists are allowed to buy airline tickets to go to a riot political event, and the airlines refuse to sell tickets to conservatives, it’s pretty clear that it’s a huge problem even though 1) the airlines are not government entities and, 2) it’s hard to find a constitutional problem with banning conservatives. Similarly, if the social giants work hard to amplify the voices of far-left nuts and annihilate or diminish the voices of conservatives, which they do every second of every day, in order to function as a sort of shadow government, it’s also a huge problem.

I have been muzzled so often, I now expect it, and I don’t think a lot about it. For example, Yahoo News keeps putting up lewd pictures of old, fat, and/or unattractive women, and I have said things like, “Why is Yahoo News trying to make men find unattractive women attractive? It doesn’t work that way. Old women and homely women will always be less attractive. Young women will always be less attractive than old ones.” These comments always got deleted. I remember saying simply, “Gross,” in response to a supposedly provocative story about poor old Madonna or the very elderly Jane Fonda, and Yahoo deleted me.

I think the kids at Yahoo seriously believe 1) the natural sexual inclinations of men are somehow an important problem, perhaps caused by greenhouse gases, and 2) these inclinations can be changed by Yahoo News stories. This is how insane leftists have become. They should run stories telling us liver tastes better than strawberry ice cream.

Old women are liver. Young women are strawberry ice cream. That’s just how it works. Being tall is better than being short. Dumb people are worse off than smart people. Having hair is better than being bald. Some things can’t be changed.

Were my comments hateful or dangerous? No. Were they subject to government censorship based on First Amendment case law? No. Were they libelous? No. They weren’t even untrue. They were just expressions of opinions held by perhaps 95% of normal males.

My friend Mike can’t share funny or critical content about Joe Biden and the hopeless dunce Kamala Harris. Facebook either deletes it or restricts republication so no one or virtually no one sees it. He’s not putting up deepfake videos of the Bidens being shot to death. He’s not making false claims. He’s just putting up critical posts. What happens when people post critical things about Trump and DeSantis? They go live and many people see them.

Youtube is somewhat different. It appears you can post a lot of controversial material there, and they will leave it up. But will they leave it up if a lot of people see it? Probably not. Will they recommend it to people the way they recommend things they approve of? I wonder.

Youtube takes down popular Christians who criticize the abomination of sodomy. That much is certain.

I think the complaint-procedure requirements will cause the giants more agony than anything else. They will have to hire a lot more employees, and they will have to hire a lot of lawyers. They will have to provide explanations for what they do, and if the Texas AG doesn’t like them, they will have to defend themselves in court.

Of course, unlike the faceless censors of Big Tech, the AG is accountable. Wonder if leftist see the irony. They’re suing him, but they don’t want users to have the power sue them. Why? Because they’re right! They’re leftists! This has already been decided.

As it stands now in most of the country, nameless giant employees with no accountability whatsoever can delete or shadowban all they like. They are accountable to no one. They can censor people for laughs. They can censor their ex-boyfriends or teachers who gave them bad grades.

There is no way to complain or get relief unless you have a gigantic number of followers, and even then, your groveling may not help you. Somehow, leftists think that’s okay and that it doesn’t cause abuse. Now the cockroaches will have to operate in the sunlight, and that won’t be pleasant for them. It’s not their natural environment.

They also have a problem because they will have to know which posters live in Texas. And people in Texas will be able to post just about anything they want, and it will be seen by other users all over the world. The law is from Texas, but it allows Texans to speak to people in every single nation where the giants operate.

Smart pundits will establish businesses in Texas. What will Facebook do then?

The remedies aren’t very good. I don’t see anything about damages for users or fines. That should be changed.

The giants and their supporters are complaining, saying the law opens the doors to things like Holocaust denial and racist propaganda. Know what I say? Good.

Right now, I can go to Amazon and buy books by Holocaust deniers who openly say they are denying the Holocaust. I can buy racist, lie-filled books written by leftists who hate whites. I can buy tons of sexist, lie-filled leftist screeds aimed at males. I can buy Mein Kampf. So what?

If the book and periodical industry is full of dishonest and inflammatory material, why shouldn’t the giants publish the same kind of things? Historically, the American remedy for disinformation and misinformation has been correct information. You don’t censor. You supplement. You counter. Do I really have to explain this in America?

Mein Kampf has probably been in print continuously since it was written around a century ago. It hasn’t led to a global Fourth Reich. Holocaust deniers have been in business since before the Holocaust ended. Nuts have published books claiming the CIA knocked down the World Trade Center. Very few people take these authors seriously. On the other hand, the danger of letting elite, untouchable, hidden leftists decide what we can say and read is very, very obvious.

Let’s go ahead and let racists post on Facebook. Let’s let people say what they want about coronavirus. Then those of us who disagree can have their say. That’s how we’ve always done things. It works. Have we forgotten Skokie?

The idea that the giants are private companies that should be left alone is ludicrous. Had they existed in the 1770’s, the Constitution would have language pretty much like that in the Texas law. In 2022, free speech that can’t be seen on the Internet has as much impact as talking to yourself at the bottom of a mineshaft. The Founding Fathers (not “non-birthing persons”) didn’t simply intend to allow us to speak; the Germans had that privilege under Hitler. They could go into their basements alone and say what they wanted. The Founding Fathers intended to make sure our speech could have an impact on other people; that it would reach them.

It’s amazing that this has to be explained, but Americans have become idiots. Mike Judge saw the future. Well, he saw the stupidity and coarseness, but he didn’t anticipate the censorship.

Political discrimination is actually much more harmful than racial or sexual discrimination, but somehow people don’t understand this.

We have laws that allow us to break up monopolies because private companies can have too much power. Leftists argue that inheritance taxes are important because they prevent oligarchs from getting too strong. Somehow, though, half of our population thinks it’s okay to have our speech censored by pimply pierced kids who think a man with a fake vagina is a woman.

I don’t know what will happen to laws like the one in Texas in the future. I believe they will be repealed and struck down, however, because Satan is very angry these days because his time is short. He really needs to control what we see and hear, and he controls the vast majority of Americans.

Look Where I Spend my Afternoons

When my wife and I pray, we always ask that God turn our homes into places of abundance, peace, and order. He is certainly doing that here at our house in Florida.

My workshop is a wonder to behold. Four months ago, you couldn’t walk across it without turning sideways, making a lot of turns, and stepping over things. I didn’t know where many things were. There were oak leaves all over the floor, along with metal filings.

I kept my tractors and my utility cart outdoors because I didn’t think I had room for them. I got an estimate for a second shop because of this.

Now you can walk through the shop. The filings are gone. The leaves and other debris are gone except for certain areas that are not easy to access. My belt grinders are on a gorgeous 46″ tool chest with a beautiful attachment that holds tooling arms and a VFD enclosure. My mini lathe is on another tool chest, and all of my mini lathe paraphernalia are in it.

The tractors and cart are in the shop, and there is still room to work.

On top of all these things, I replaced the carb in my big chainsaw and got a new part to fix the oil pump. The small saw is running correctly, I cleaned out the carb on the utility cart, I installed a new choke cable on the cart, and I pressure-washed the cart so I could work on it without getting filthy.

I have all the steel I need ($198) to turn my old chain-on brush forks into a quick attachment. My tractor is almost completely reassembled, and I fixed the pedal so it reverses at full speed instead of crawling.

I took some of the drawers out of my old Craftsman tool chest and fixed them so they stay closed again. That box is very high quality, and it’s stainless, so I’m glad it works again. I have been cleaning the drawers out and organizing them.

My workbench was buried in random junk. It’s all gone now. There are a few things I leave on it, but I can use it again. I took mineral spirits and turpentine and cleaned it so using it doesn’t make me filthy any more.

The old foam cart I that used to hold my belt grinders is now cleaned up and sitting next to the mill where I can keep my rotary table on it and use it to hold things while I machine.

I put a long drain hose on the big compressor, and I put a weight on the end of it. Now I don’t have to crawl to open the valve, and the hose can’t whip around and hit things.

My arbor press, hydraulic press, planishing hammer, dry saw, and metal band saw are all in one corner now, and that corner has its own air drop with three quick connectors so the hammer and hydraulic press can both be connected at once.

It’s beautiful. And the weather has changed, so now I can use the shop. It still hits 90 in the daytime, but it takes a lot longer to get there, it’s dryer than it was a week or so ago, and it cools off in the afternoon.

I find myself sitting in the shop at times when I would have been in the house in the past. My dream is to live in my shop and sleep in my house, and it seems to be coming true.

Here are photos from a week or two back. The shop looks even better now.

With all this new space, I’m tempted to get a bigger welding table. I’m crazy about my three-foot-long Northern Tool table, which was a tremendous bargain, but I’m about to start work on a 5-foot-long project which will probably weigh 250 pounds when the main weldment is done. I don’t think I can rationalize a table that long, but three feet by four feet would actually make sense.

I may put a new engine in the utility cart. The original engine is a 350cc Subaru Robin, and while it’s a very good engine, Subaru has abandoned it. New parts are hard to come by. A dubious Chinese rebuild kit costs about $400, and a rebuilt engine is over $600, not including the cost of sending my old engine to the rebuilders in trade. My engine smokes, and I’m not looking forward to the day when it poops out for good and I can’t find parts.

I found new surplus Subaru engines in a different configuration for $355, shipping included. Yes, they will be orphans too, but presumably, because they are newer, Subaru will provide parts for them a little longer. I can get an engine and a rebuild kit right now and save the kit until I need it. If Subaru runs off on the new engine, I will still be able to keep it going.

Honda makes nice engines, too, but I believe they need a lot of parts to make them work in carts.

I can get Harbor Freight Predator engines, but I think they would require a lot of fabrication or the purchase of an expensive installation kit. After all was said and done, I’d have a questionable Chinese engine instead of something made by a top Japanese manufacturer.

Some people put big Predators in carts and make them do wheelies. I think I can live without that kind of performance.

My goal is just to avoid buying a new cart. They are incredibly expensive for what you get, which is nearly nothing. A crummy little engine, a simple steel box, and a couple of axles. My cart is extremely useful, so I need to have it running, and I don’t want to drop over $10,000 on a new one.

It’s amazing how much carts cost when you compare them to tractors. A tractor will last 40 years and do all sorts of amazing things, it will have a wonderful diesel and hydraulics, it will have a PTO, and it will be extremely sturdy, and tractors aren’t that expensive. A cart, which is a flimsy piece of junk by comparison, will struggle to haul 700 pounds. And it will cost nearly half as much as the tractor.

Rhodah and I pray for things that are obviously important. We intercede for people who have problems. We always ask God to help them get right with him, because handouts without personal improvement are a waste of time. We ask God to help us to be improved. I think we know what’s important, and a big shop full of tools is not high on the list, but it’s still very pleasing to have him come through with regard to things that aren’t necessities.

Kubota Resurrected

The Mach V is running again. I got the tractor put back together. Nearly.

What a rotten experience this has been. I installed a quick attach adaptor without help, and then I did a lot of welding and cutting on the bucket so it would fit. I felt invincible. Then my steering blew out. Then I found out removing the cylinder for repacking was major surgery. Then I got the silly thing out and got it fixed, and when I put it back in, I cracked the engine’s front cover, resulting in over $2000 in repair costs plus months of life with no tractor.

Now I’m back where I hoped to be a couple of months ago. I thought I would begin working on a new set of quick attach brush forks back then, but I found myself plunged into the horror of cascading parts failures and extremely slow repairs.

Things are going incredibly well now that I have an organized and roomy shop. The weather is terrible; hot and humid with intermittent torrential rain. Because I can get the tractor into the shop, I was able to fix it anyway, in relative comfort.

You wouldn’t believe how fast work goes when you have 6 tool chests and you know what’s in every drawer. I think I got a lot less exercise than I usually do in the shop, because instead of walking around for hours looking for things, I went straight to the chests and got what I wanted.

This morning, I had a tractor with no sheet metal forward of the dash, no battery, no radiator, a gallon of dirty oil, and a two-gallon hydraulic fluid shortage. By around 5:30 p.m., everything was fixed but the sheet metal. No point in buttoning a project up until you see if it works.

When I fired the tractor up, it ran fine. After giving it time to circulate the hydraulic fluid, I used the steering and the loader, and everything worked. My bucket was lying in the driveway where it had been for a couple of days, and I was able to reattach it.

Tomorrow I should be able to get the sheet metal on, and then I’ll order a few screws to replace the ones a battery spill ruined before my time.

I plan to make the battery area better than Kubota did. I’m putting the battery in a plastic tray to catch leaks. I wire-wheeled the bar that goes across the top of the battery to hold it down, and after minimizing the rust, I painted it with a special rust-blocking paint. I put anti-seize on all the screws near the battery so they would’t corrode again.

The original battery tray is a pitted mess, so I replaced it, and I am not spending $60 on a third one. I am determined to keep the acid where it belongs.

I was going to replace the hydraulic fluid, but it seemed like a stupid idea, because I wasn’t sure the tractor was okay. I thought I should run it first. While I was thinking about this, I realized I needed two filters, not the one filter I originally thought I needed, so I didn’t even have the option of replacing the fluid.

I decided to take my two-gallon jug of Tractor Supply fluid, which many people say is bad for Kubotas, and top off the system to get everything running. I think it was a good move. I can’t say whether Tractor Supply fluid is really harmful, but it won’t hurt anything if I use a little to keep the tractor working while I check it out and wait for a second filter.

A fluid change for this machine is pretty cheap. Only around $500, depending on which fluid and filters you use. Chicken feed.

Glad I won’t have to do it again for 200 hours.

I can see why a lot of people never change their hydraulic fluid. If you use a machine for work, you could put in a thousand or more hours per year, so $2500 per year for a compact Kubota and much more for something like a backhoe.

I’m not thrilled with the dealership that fixed the tractor. It came back with an empty tank, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t empty when I sent it. They took a very long time to fix it, and they charged me for things that were not mentioned in the estimate. Could be worse, though. A local diesel place charged him almost $100 for a small hose Mercedes sells for $20, and then they charged him over $14 for hazardous waste disposal. Man, that hose must have been dangerous.

I had a fantastic day working on the tractor, but the joy is blunted by the knowledge that I can’t use it for anything until I make brush forks. The old ones are awful, and they don’t fit the quick attach adaptor. I have to get a new plate that fits the adaptor, and then I have to cut it up and weld the old forks to it. Another couple of hundred dollars. On the plus side, I’ll be doing it myself instead of relying on people who keep telling me it will be done by the end of the week. Every week.

One thing I hated about my old forks was that they moved around all the time. They could not be made to stay rigid, so impacts from things I hit turned them this way and that, and I had to get off the tractor over and over to line them back up. Now that I want to make a new attachment with forks, I’m concerned that rigid forks will send all that torque back to the bucket and cause problems with the hydraulic cylinders.

I guess that won’t happen. The bucket itself has hit a lot of things, and the cylinders are fine. I suppose I could rig up shear pins, but it’s probably unnecessary.

I looked into buying steel for new shop shelves. The quote was $350. That’s around $150 more than I hoped, but even though steel prices are dropping, steel is a lot higher than it used to be. Perhaps that will change now that the recession is picking up momentum. Once China’s real estate collapse finally breaks through the measures the CCP has taken to hide it, steel should be very cheap indeed. As should copper.

Seems like God is making things easier and easier for me. Things I couldn’t do before get done. Hope it continues and increases.

When China Fails, Cambodia Comes Through

Once again, Harbor Freight’s army of Chinese factory workers has come to my rescue. Or has it?

Some years back, I decided to turn a mini lathe into a CNC lathe. I bought a set of plans and went to work, and I got it to work, sort of.

I highly recommend not doing what I did. The plans I bought said to use a long piece of a peculiar type of threaded rod instead of a ball screw, and I ended up with a great deal of backlash. They say you can program it out, but I moved on to other things before I did that. I have considered putting a ball screw in it, but I haven’t done it.

It is possible to make one of these project lathes work, but it may not be worth the effort once you get done. Depends on what you want to do. Lathes are inferior to mills, regardless of what most hobby machinists believe, and this is the reason why CNC mills are much, much more popular than lathes. If you absolutely have to make your own CNC machine, it should be a mill.

Anyway, I brought the lathe up here from Miami either 5 years ago or 3 years ago, and I plopped it on the same Black & Decker Workmate it occupied in Miami. And as it did in Miami, it collected dust and sat in the way.

I considered building a wheeled cart for the lathe, but I never did it. I also considered selling it, but it seems like I always have a hard time drawing people who will pay reasonable prices for things. And I kept thinking the lathe might be worth keeping if I put a good screw in it and learned how to program it better.

Okay, I hate selling tools. There. Now I’m being honest. Happy?

I’m glad I didn’t build a cart, because I just put a new acquisition under it. I bought me a FOURTH Harbor Freight tool chest.

My first two chests are the small US General kind, and they’re Taiwanese. They are holding up my welders now while sitting on custom welded bases I made. The third chest is a bigger US General. It’s Chinese, even though it looks like it was made in the same factory as the other ones. Only the wheels are different. The one I bought today turned out to be from Cambodia, of all places.

I didn’t know the Cambodians made anything. Harbor Freight is certainly playing the field these days. I wonder if the Chinese know they sell Taiwanese products.

The line my new chest belongs to is called Yukon, and it’s supposed to be one tier lower than US General, which produces very, very good chests at excellent prices. I looked the new one over, and my verdict is that there is very little difference in quality, if any. I would say the sheet metal is slightly wavier in places, and the chest is only 18″ deep, whereas the US Generals are 22″ deep.

I wanted a chest that took up less room and consumed less cash than US General, so Yukon’s chest fit the bill perfectly.

The nice thing about Yukon chests is that they have solid hardwood tops, which US General doesn’t provide. It’s easy to screw stuff to hardwood, it’s more ridgid, and it’s easier to replace than steel.

The neat thing about this story is that I used another Harbor Freight tool to get the chest out of my car. Ordinarily, I would have drafted my friend Mike, but he’s out of town.

The employees at my local store assumed doubtful expressions when I told them I had an SUV with no trailer outside, but I had measured the car, so I thought I had a good chance. By way of encouragement, I told them they could just refund the money and take it back if it wouldn’t fit. That didn’t seem to excite them much.

Anyway, the Harbor Freight guy and I shoved the chest into my car, and when I got home, I removed it by pushing it onto my Harbor Freight Central Machinery hydraulic cart. This thing will lift 500 pounds from about 9″ from the ground to maybe 30″.

Everyone needs one of these. Or the bigger one, which lifts 1000 pounds. They are unbelievably handy. And they can be modified. You can put a big table top on one and use it for a workbench. You can attach ramps to one and push or drive mowers and so on onto it. I have repaired and installed wall ovens singlehandedly with one.

I got one end of the chest on the cart, and then I put a $17 Gorilla collapsible aluminum bench behind my bumper. I got the box out so one end was on the cart and the other was on the bench. Then I managed to lower one end onto the floor by myself. The box weighed about 170 pounds according to Harbor Freight’s site, so handling one end was not impossible.

Putting the casters on a heavy tool chest by yourself is an interesting experience, but I came up with tactics that worked, and I didn’t put a scratch or dent on anything.

Getting the lathe off the Workmate was a joy. I didn’t enjoy lifting it, because with the stepper motors, it probably weighs over 100 pounds, but I was glad to put it onto a wheeled platform so I could move it around instead of killing workshop space permanently with it. Also, a lot of junk and crud had accumulated in its part of the shop, and I got to clean it all out. The filth was amazing.

Now I have good access to the lathe, and I can put all my mini-lathe tooling and parts in handy, spacious drawers instead of using the ridiculous toolbox I bought years ago. Toolboxes tend to cling tenaciously to shelves and the floor and discourage the use of whatever is in them. Chests are warm and giving. They practically throw their contents into your arms. In other words, they’re convenient, and convenience is at least a third of getting any job done.

I now think I need to get a ball screw, and I should also think about putting Mach 3, the CNC program I used, on my ancient 2005 laptop. I have never been able to make myself throw this laptop out, and now I have a valid use for it which it is well able to perform.

The big controller box I made for the lathe fits in the chest’s bottom drawer, which is fantastic. It won’t be able to collect any more crud there.

I am now up to…let’s see…SIX tool chests. And I regret nothing. Storage is extremely important if you actually want to get anything done in a shop. Without it, things get damaged and lost, and the things that aren’t lost are impossible to find. Instead of working, you spend half your time walking in circles looking for what you need.

As the photo shows, the chest I bought is blue. I am making a real effort to add color to the shop.

I am now planning to put in a split unit for cooling, and I will have to add a ceiling and insulate the doors. Once these things are done, there will be nearly no reason for me to ever go in the house.

I credit God with my success. When you can’t get things done, there is usually a supernatural reason. Rhodah and I have started seeing things returned and restored.

Now I have to finish putting my tractor back together. That’s easy now that I managed to put it in my shop. It seems like we have torrential rain here every day now. Well…we DO, actually. But now that the tractor is indoors, it’s no big deal.

In other news, I got trolled after my last post. I wrote about the vision my wife had, in which God said the royals would have a funeral soon. The vision occurred on June 22, and I wrote about it a couple of days later. Some guy showed up and made fun of us, and he also ridiculed the gift of tongues and the vision, so he blasphemed the Holy Spirit Himself.

I decided to publish the comment because sometimes when someone does something they will later be embarrassed about, it’s best to see to it they get the exposure they wanted at the time. What he said will not age well.

It’s strange that he ridiculed a documented vision that clearly came true, but I guess he wasn’t concerned with being analytical. I can understand ridiculing people whose predictions fail, especially when they insist they didn’t fail. I’m thinking of the people who still predict a 2020 Trump win. I don’t understand ridiculing someone whose prediction came true, especially when that person’s husband revealed the prediction without making any claims about the source and without asking for money or a new jet.

Anyway, we have prayed for him. As I heard a preacher say recently, everyone will believe in God eventually. Here’s hoping my commenter comes to believe before it’s too late.

Little Shop of Horrors no More

While my wife and I wait to be permitted to see each other in Ireland, and while what we hope are the last days of our wait for a green card pass, I continue to work on my shop.

I finished my belt grinder cart. Photo below. It’s almost as great as it looks.

Is any project ever really finished? I still want to put some kind of arm on it to hold a shallow container of water below the 2″ by 72″ belt. It will catch sparks and keep crud out of the drawers.

Today I have been emptying boxes that have been on the floor since 2019, when I moved my big tools up here. I am also getting stuff ready to throw out. As I work, the shop gets bigger and bigger, and my ideas about building a new shop seem more and more ridiculous.

My next project will probably be shelves.

I have a huge 4-tier 4′ by 8′ set of shelves against one wall. I am not happy with it. It used to have the long side against the wall, making it very difficult to use because of the reach. Now both long sides are exposed. It’s still not great, because it juts out into the garage and takes up too much room.

I figure it has almost 128 square feet of storage, not including the floor. I would like to create a similar amount of shelving on the walls. This would open up the center of the shop.

I got an idea from Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. You would think a person like me would be a big fan of the show, because it’s all about tools and a sort of engineering, but I’m not. I don’t have the attention span for it. It drags a lot while they’re building things and explaining. I’m always thinking, “Come on man. Blow something up.”

Also, the chemistry of the hosts is somewhat off-putting. Everyone knows they don’t like each other, and it shows. When I watch, I always feel like Hyneman is trying hard not to sock Adam Savage in the mouth, and while I can see how Savage would get on a person’s nerves, I think most people would get along with him better. Just a guess.

Anyway, Hyneman’s primary business is in a terrible building which is about 100 feet long and 12 feet wide. I assume he must have gotten a great price. To cope with the shape of the building, he created his own shelves. They cover one wall. He could have gone out and bought prefab shelves and attached them, but they would have been expensive, and I don’t know if anyone sells appropriate shelves. His ceiling is very high.

He got himself some 1″-square tubing and welded it into a system of shelf supports. It’s brilliant. He has vertical tubes which appear to be about three feet apart, and he welded horizontal tubes to them to hold the shelf material. I don’t know what the material is. Probably plywood.

As he pointed out, welding is extremely fast compared to drilling and screwing, and square tubes are very easy to weld together because they have a lot of flat surfaces. I don’t know what tubing costs right now, but steel prices have been dropping, so it may be possible to get 12 feet of tubing for around $10. If that’s true, I could put up a framework for maybe $120. Two shelf units 9 feet long with 4 shelves each would give me 108 square feet of shelf. It would be better to use 6 shelves per unit, because shelves that are too far apart are wasteful. This would give me 162 square feet.

Plywood is expensive, but not like it used to be, and I could cannibalize the plywood in my existing unit.

As part of the project, I would like to get a small shed for materials. Then I could keep more tubing and plate and so on. Grabbing stuff you already have is always better than driving to buy more.

The shop has gotten so much bigger, I am once again able to park my garden tractor and utility cart in it. The big tractor is too much to ask for, but with all the new space, I should be able to forgo a new shop and put up a smaller shelter for the tractor and a few implements.

Guess I better get back out there. Those dead roaches aren’t going to sweep themselves out into the yard.

Doing Your Best Doesn’t Always Help

Some people are impressed by surgeons. Some people are impressed by gymnasts. I am impressed by painters.

I don’t mean all painters. Painting a picture is easy. Painting a house is easy. People who can do these things are a dime a dozen. I’m impressed by people who can paint THINGS. Even a mailbox is hard to paint well. How people manage to paint cars and motorcycles is beyond me.

I made myself a nice tool arm rack for my belt grinder. I created it to fit on the side of a Harbor Freight tool chest. It wasn’t hard. Just cutting, welding, and grinding. Then I tried to paint it. What a nightmare.

I figured I would use Rust-Oleum farm implement paint in John Deere green. Truck bed paint is tougher, but it’s always black or a color which is repulsive. I got myself a can of primer and a can of paint, and I figured I was on my way.

First problem: it rains here every day now. Torrential rain. It starts in the afternoon and goes on for hours. Sometimes it starts again at night. I don’t have a shed where I can hang things to paint them, and painting them in the shop is a problem, so I ordinarily hang them from a limb of a magnolia tree I plan to cut down. Finding a time to hang this project was difficult. Seemed like every time I went outside, it started raining.

I finally got it primed, and I found a way to paint it in the shop. When I painted it, the paint was rough. This was a new problem. I have gotten better results with earlier projects.

It turned out to be a couple of things. First, spray paint is harder to apply smoothly than brush paint, which I have used in the past. Second, the primer I picked was a high-build primer. I thought it would cover imperfections. Instead, it provided imperfections of its own in the form of a sandy surface.

I took an angle grinder and removed all the paint and primer. I chose a new primer and started over. By this time, I had lost days.

I didn’t take chances. I sanded the new primer before spraying, and then I added the paint. The result was adequate. It could really use more sanding, but it will do, and I can always wet-sand the paint and add another coat.

I planned to put a sheet of 3/4″ plywood on top of the cart to distribute the weight of the grinders and give me something to screw them to. Yesterday I made the sheet. I cut, sanded, and primed it. I used a roller to prime it.

Before I could prime it, I had to deal with the primer that shot all over the table saw, the project, my drill, my apron, the floor, and me, among other things.

I had obtained a tool for stirring paint. It goes in a drill. I lowered it into the can and used the low gear to stir. No problem. Very controllable. I figured it was so easy, I could go ahead and use the high gear.

When I changed gears and pulled the trigger, half of the paint went up, out of the can for good, and onto everything around it. It happened instantly. No possibility of controlling it.

An hour later, after learning that turpentine is the only really good thing to use to clean up spilled latex paint, I took my 6″ mini roller and painted both sides of the plywood.

Then the bugs took notice.

A june bug flew in from my left, did a spiral, and corkscrewed into the fresh primer, where it lay kicking its legs. A swarm of little flies showed up shortly thereafter.

I fixed things by putting a fan next to the plywood to prevent bugs from landing.

Today I got another 6″ roller cover. Cleaning roller covers isn’t really possible. You can squeeze enough paint out to keep them usable for a couple of days, but you will never be able to clean a roller cover to the point where you can use it to paint a new color. I picked Home Depot’s best cover, supposedly. I didn’t want to take chances.

I stirred the paint successfully and started applying it. Then I saw a big cluster of fibers stuck to the board. I thought it fell from somewhere, but I was wrong. It came from the roller. All over the board, there were little hairs that came from my expensive “professional” roller cover.

Now the board is drying. It has one coat of paint on one side, and that coat has fibers in it. I can’t do anything to it until tomorrow, when I hope I can sand it and make the fibers vanish without destroying the primer and paint.

I can’t believe Home Depot sells this terrible product. It is also extremely irritating to try to do everything right and then be let down by a product which is not merely worthless but destructive. It’s bad enough when a product doesn’t work. When it destroys other things and ruins hours or days of work, it’s a catastrophic product.

It should take two days to paint a board well. I figure I am looking at 4, minimum. Sand and paint tomorrow. Paint the day after. Paint again the day after that.

Other than that, the project is going well. I attached the rack I made to the cart, and it fits perfectly. It will hold 4 tool arms very well. There is a holder for a 5th arm, but it has limited potential because the enclosure for the VFD is under it and prevents the holder from allowing a long arm to slide the whole way in. I put the holder in anyway because I may get a new VFD some day, and the holder might conceivably have a use for a shorter arm.

Adding the 5th holder at this point was easy. Adding it later would have required removing paint, welding, grinding, painting again…

If I get a different VFD that doesn’t require a platform, I’ll still need to do some of these things, but it will be a much simpler job.

After all this, I have to put my table saw on wheels. The base I have on it now is an add-on from Amazon or somewhere, and it’s about 1% as good as one I could make myself. I’ll go back to truck bed coating. It’s very easy to apply.

I’m wondering if I should keep my little Rockwell 1×42 grinder. It’s a nice tool, but I have a 2-HP motor and a spare VFD sitting around. That’s maybe $1000 worth of hardware. It’s the parts of a grinder that make up most of the cost. I could probably make the rest for $100. Two pulleys, a spring, and a body made from a small amount of welded tubing or plate. Couple of other things. A cord.

I could make a second 2×72 grinder that rotates so the belt is horizontal. Or I could just make a grinder which is fixed in a horizontal position. There is no reason to have a rotating grinder when you have them in two orientations.

At least I don’t think there is.

If you have two grinders, you can put different belts on them so you can go back and forth when you’re doing different jobs.

Anyway, I hope to see this project finished this week.

Shop Growing Less Chaotic

My newest metal fab project is taking shape. I’m making a cart for my belt grinders, and the basis is a Harbor Freight 44″ US General tool chest.

Here is what I have so far.

The more experience you get with fabricating, the faster things go. I think I got all the metal together around a week ago.

When you have a 2×72 grinder, you have long metal arms holding various types of tooling. As of now, I only have a flat platen and a small wheel holder. A platen is a flat thing that sits behind the belt so you can grind things straight, flat, and true. You can do a lot of other things with it. A small wheel holder holds several different wheels that allow you to grind small semicircular recesses into projects.

I should buy a large wheel and a medium-sized wheel as well. Each of these will need its own arm.

The two main features of the cart are the arm holder and the platform the grinders will sit on. The holder is done. The platform will be a piece of 3/4″ plywood, and both grinders will be screwed to it. It will sit on top of the cart.

I was considering buying a dustproof variable frequency drive (VFD) to replace my old VFD and the big shopmade enclosure I made for it. In the end, I thought I should avoid spending $430 for nearly nothing. When you can fabricate, you don’t have a lot of excuses for refusing to improvise and save money.

I had a piece of 11-gauge steel plate which was scrapped because I made some mistakes altering it for another project, so I cut a 6″ by 10.5″ piece out of it and made a little shelf for the enclosure to sit on. I welded it to the lower horizontal bar on the cart attachment. The box seemed floppy when I bolted it on, so I welded a little arm onto the vertical part of the attachment and ran a bolt through it into the enclosure. Now it’s rigid.

A $430 dustproof VFD would look better, but it wouldn’t do anything this one won’t do.

Wood prices are crazy. They went up, and then they crashed. Some things are getting cheap. Others are still expensive. I found I could buy excellent hardwood plywood, precut to 2′ by 4′, for not much more than low-grade plywood, so I bought it. I could have bought an entire sheet and saved a little, but I am tired of keeping large pieces of material around for no purpose, and bringing a big sheet here would have meant a certain amount of exertion.

If I had bought cheap plywood, I would have had to spend time filling in voids and sanding it to prevent splinters.

I usually paint my workshop creations with black truck bed coating, but this time I decided to go with tractor paint in John Deere green. Tractor paint is not as tough as truck bed coating, but it’s very tough by paint standards, and the cart will look nice with a green attachment. I may paint the wood green, too. And the enclosure.

Drab colors are customary for tools, but I am moving away from that. I guess it’s because I have three Harbor Freight tool chests, and they come in vivid colors. A little color makes a shop look less like an archvillain’s lair. Also, when you get old, color helps you see what you’re working on.

After this, I have to finish the rolling kitchen island I started. I also need to paint two tool stands and a mobile base, all fabricated by yours truly. Then I should put a real mobile base on the Powermatic 66 and get rid of the one I bought.

With those jobs behind me, I should get rid of the silly 4′ by 8′ shelves in the shop. The previous owner used them to hold materials and so on. Shelves that big are stupid. It’s hard to reach the middle, especially on higher shelves. They kill a quarter of the shop and don’t provide a good return. I think I may buy steel tubing and make cheap, strong shelves for the south wall. Jamie Hyneman, the Mythbusters guy, did this in his shop, and it works well.

I thought I needed to build a new shop, but the more I get this one in order, the more I think I should wait. This shop is now so efficiently arranged, I can get the lawn tractor and utility cart inside. I should probably get a cheap shed for materials and certain outdoor tools, since they don’t need to be in the shop, and then add a pole barn for the tractor and pickup.

The real dream is air conditioning. I already have enough power. I just need insulation on the doors and roof. One of my doors is a roll-up, and that’s a problem. It’s not possible to insulate an old roll-up. You have to buy a new one with insulation built in. That would run about $4000.

If I had air conditioning, I would never leave the shop.

Maybe later today I’ll put primer on the cart attachment and cut the plywood and prime it. Paint takes forever to dry properly, so I will be lucky if I can get this project truly over with in two days.

I feel like God is helping me get this place together. I’m making progress much faster than before.

Parts of Shop Floor now Visible

It’s a momentous day. I finally finished my second welding cart.

Last year, I took a Harbor Freight US General tool chest and turned it into a cart. It is the greatest cart imaginable, so I decided to make a new one for my Lincoln MIG and Hypertherm plasma cutter. I believe I have written about it before.

While the pandemic was making prisoners of us all, I barely did anything, apart from getting married. Things here deteriorated. My projects languished. Over the last couple of months, I have gotten back to work, and making a new cart was a priority.

The factory-made Eastwood cart I’m replacing is great, but it has no storage apart from a couple of tiny trays and 6 tubes for MIG rods. It has no drawers. It’s also hard to move. Something about the wheels. It holds two machines, and they are both too low. It put my welder’s controls at belly-button height, and the controls on the plasma cutter were at knee level. Very inconvenient.

The cart I just made will take two 120-cubic-foot bottles, and it has a mount for what is known as a toilet paper filter. This is an air filter that uses something that looks exactly like a roll of European toilet paper for a filter.

Maybe it is toilet paper. You may be familiar with the European stuff. I wouldn’t say it’s rough, but I would guess it’s about 120 grit.

The new cart holds the filter at eye level so it’s easy to hook an air hose to it.

I have not yet made any effort to create hangers for cables and so on. I don’t think I’ll need them. Once I put a bottle on the cart, I’ll be able to drape my welding stuff on it. This sounds sloppy, but in reality, it’s extremely convenient, and it’s neater than a bunch of hooks hanging out in the way. I should be able to wrap the plasma cutter’s wiry things around the filter mount.

All the weldy things I haven’t shoved in my other chest will go in this one, so I can forget about the toolbox I’ve been keeping small items in.

If you’re wondering about those huge, neat-looking welds, you should know they’re not welds. I welded first and then molded epoxy putty around the welds. It gives a nicer look and provides the impression that I closed things up completely with weld. Using too much weld is stupid for various reasons.

It’s amazing how much space I freed up with this thing. The Eastwood cart was much smaller, but somehow it took up more space. I can almost walk around the shop now.

I really like Eastwood. They sell stuff that actually works, at modest prices. They make working on cars accessible to ordinary people. Nonetheless, my cart is better than theirs. It should be. Their cart now costs $206, I’m putting around $400 in mine.

My next similar project is a grinding cart. I bought a bigger Harbor Freight tool chest, and I’m going to put my belt grinders on it. I plan to make some kind of extension to hold grinder tool arms. They are just too bulky to go in drawers.

My old grinder cart is a two-tier plastic job from Northern Tool. It serves well for an $89 cart, but it’s open, so grinding stuff falls into the bottom tray, and it’s also sagging. Northern Tool says it will hold over 500 pounds, but I have way less than that on my top tray, and it’s bending downward in the center. The new cart will give me a place for tool arms, and I’ll be able to put belts and other junk in the drawers.

I may splurge on a KB Electronics dustproof VFD for the big belt grinder. Right now, I’m using an ordinary VFD in a fancy but inexpensive enclosure I built. It works, but the box is roughly as big as a shoebox, it’s heavy, and putting it on the new cart would make considerable fabrication necessary. A dustproof VFD could be placed on a stalk next to the grinder, mounted on the same board.

Then I would have a 3-HP VFD in a dustproof enclosure and nothing to run it with. Hmm.

A big belt grinder is pretty much indispensable if you really want to get anything done with metal.

After this, I just need air conditioning and insulation, and I’m done.

Then Keep the Truth to Yourself

My tractor problems came to a head this week, so I decided to hand it over to the local dealer. They truly surprised me with their willingness to help. With that off my mind, and with the gift of a rare day of bearable shop weather, I got back to making my second welding cart.

I did something interesting this time around. I used epoxy putty to fake nice welds.

Fabricators with no STEM education tend to overbuild everything, and because most amateurs have no STEM education either, they generally approve. I don’t. Using way too much material is a way of saying you don’t know what you’re doing.

I’ve seen all sorts of weldments that were way over the top. I’ve seen several inches of weld where one inch would have done fine. Using too much wire causes unnecessary distortion, it wastes wire, it wastes time, and it makes things harder to take apart and repair.

A steel weld has a tensile strength of 70,000 psi, so how much do you really need for your little project?

My new cart has 4 wheels, and I want one pair to be farther apart than the other to make the cart more stable. To accomplish this, I put a long crossmember under one end, and I welded the casters to it. To make it elegant instead of amateurish, I cut recesses into the bottom of the crossmember, welded 1/4″ plate rectangles into them, and I attached the casters to them.

The whole thing will rest on 1″-thick tubes, and I could not weld the casters to the tubes without a lot of fabrication unless I wanted one end of the cart to be 1/4″ higher than the other. With the plates set in recesses, the tubes and plates are 1″ thick, matching the tubes at the other end of the cart.

I used 4 3/4″ beads of weld to attach each plate to the crossmember. This was way more than I needed, but I couldn’t make the welds much smaller. When I was done, it looked fine, but it didn’t look anything like as good as long welds that completely filled the joints.

I got myself some epoxy putty, crammed it into the joints over the actual welds, and molded it smooth. Now after the paint goes on, it will look like I have gigantic welds, but I won’t have distortion or a half-empty wire spool. Pretty neat.

I spent some cash on JB Weld putty, but I don’t care. It was for fun. I could have used Bondo and saved money, I suppose.

Today I attached the upright tubes that will hold up the platform that restrains the tanks. There will be two shorter tubes in front of them. The rear tubes have to be long to use the original screw points on the tool chest I’m using as the heart of the cart.

The tube on the left will be behind my plasma cutter, which will occupy one spot on top of the chest. This tube is long because it will hold up an air filter for the cutter. The filter has been bouncing around on the floor ever since the cutter was new.

All the hard work is done. Making the platform is easy, and so is attaching the front tubes. I’ll put some bits of angle iron on the platform to keep tanks from sliding, and I may add some similar features to receive the ends of TIG tubes, but I probably won’t. I will not be using this cart for TIG, so I don’t see any reason to clutter it with TIG stuff.

Once this is done, I can take my old cart apart and add a long crossmember to it. I may also lower the platform that restrains the tanks. It’s fine for 120-cubic-foot tanks, but shorter tanks are too low to fit. I didn’t think about that when I build the cart.

I have yet to see another cart on Youtube or anywhere else that appears to be as well-designed as mine. People do a lot of things that seem counterproductive.

Some people will take a small rolling chest and put a table over it. That makes no sense to me. Fabricating produces spatter, slag, and filings. If your welder and other tools are under your table, all that stuff will fall on them, and you won’t have much room under the table for things that project through it, like clamps.

A welder under a table will also be hard to work with. The dials and so on will be way down at knee level. Everything will be in the dark.

I have 5 angle grinders under my table, hanging on metal bars I added to it. This is no problem, because grinders are made to handle grit and crud. I considered putting a storage shelf down there, but it would fill up with nasty stuff in a hurry. Even if I used expanded metal to let things fall through, whatever I put on the shelf would be covered.

The grinders are incredibly handy. I have a grinding wheel, a cutoff wheel, a flap wheel, a stripper wheel, and a die grinder arbor on them. They’re connected to a power strip I attached to the table, so they’re always ready to go.

I’ve also seen people put tool chests inside extremely heavy tube frames. That’s crazy. Tool chests have frames built into them. An additional frame adds weight and size while providing no additional functions worth having.

Some people put clumsy hangers all over their carts. My cables drape over my tanks very nicely. Hangers would get in the way without doing anything the tanks can’t do.

Some of the Youtube carts I’ve seen remind me of Dr. Seuss’s Electro-who-cardio-shnoox. I may be spelling that wrong. All sorts of doodads and attachments that seem cool but actually get in the way and provide no benefit.

The dumbest cart I ever saw was a Chinese Snap-On. It’s basically a cabinet with a fixturing table on top. You shove your welder deep into the cabinet, and you weld on the table. Some poor Youtube guy bought it, and he was proud of it. The Snap-On disease leads to very poor decisions.

His welder was way under the cabinet where it was hard to get at, and he had about 4″ of useless space between the top of the cabinet and the underside of the table. The storage consists of three little drawers.

The table is about the same size as my $180 Northern Tool table, but it’s over twice as thick. Big deal. I weld heavy stuff just fine, and my table came with some useful clamps.

I have developed a lot of confidence on this table and the $56 table that preceded it, so if I want a new table, I won’t be afraid to build it myself, and it won’t cost Snap-On money.

The video guy paid $1400 for his welding station, and he truly believed he had done something smart.

Many, many people buy Snap-On products for the exact same reason women will pay $3000 for a Chanel purse. If you’re a woman and you’re thinking of marrying a man who loves Snap-On tools, make sure he’s rich, because he likes pouring money down the commode.

I don’t like the way Snap-On takes advantage of insecure blue-collar people who don’t understand the way money works.

Anyway, if the weather is bearable tomorrow, I may finish the metalworking on this cart, and then later this week I can do the paint. I can’t wait to finish it and get rid of the open cart it’s replacing.

I just realized I put those tubes on the wrong sides of the platform!

Oh, well. It’s always something. Looks like the job will be 30 minutes longer than I had hoped. I generally make one big mistake per day, so this is nothing unusual.

Switzerland or Bust

I haven’t been here in a while except to check comments. I wrote a few things and then discarded them.

Things are going well. Rhodah and I are preparing for our next trip. The Italian Embassy in Zambia assured us she would be granted a visa, so we hope to visit Paris, Lucerne, Florence, and Rome later this year. I will be going over old ground again in this post, but it helps it to stand on its own.

The European visa system has been confusing for a long time, but covid made it worse because various countries did their own thing with regard to restrictions. For a long time, we did not understand any of it very well. For a while, I couldn’t go anywhere with or without her because covid paranoia was at its height, and travel to the better destinations was forbidden for everyone. Then countries started opening up and coming up with all sorts of different rules, and they were harder on Zambians than Americans. Now things are sort of normal in most places, but it’s still hard to get nice countries to let Zambians in.

When we tried to plan the upcoming trip, we originally thought we would try Israel, with Italy and Greece as backups. Then we got absorbed in Italy and Greece and let Israel go. The Italians said they could give us visas for both Italy and Greece, and they have an embassy in Lusaka, so we worked with them. Other countries would have made her mail her passport to South Africa or Zimbabwe. We thought that would cause an unacceptable delay. Then we found out the Italian process was slow.

The embassy employee who interviewed Rhodah got very upset with us because we had not bought airline tickets. We made hotel and tour reservations, but we didn’t buy flights because they are nonrefundable and we were not sure we would be approved. We had been rejected by other countries in the past. The employee said failing to buy tickets was a major reason. She said we had to buy tickets and then try again.

Now we have tickets, so if they don’t let us in, we can kiss a large sum goodbye.

While we were playing this game, we learned that any Schengen area country can grant a visa for any other Schengen nation. The Schengen area is almost the same as the EU; it’s a bunch of European nations that cooperate in travel and immigration matters. There is no such thing as a visa for one Schengen country. If Spain says you can visit, you can to go Sweden or Poland or any other Schengen destination. We had been given the impression that Italy could only get us into a few countries, and that’s why we chose Greece for the second segment of our trip.

Greece is a wonderful tourist destination, but who wants to go in summer? Knowing we could do better, we decided to go to France and Switzerland instead.

If you have to apply for a visa before traveling, like many non-Americans, you have to choose one main destination. You have to spend more time there than anywhere else. For example, if you spend three nights in Spain and two each in Sweden, France, Germany, and Austria, Spain is your main destination, and you have to get your visa through Spain. If you spend equal amounts of time in Spain and Germany, but you enter the Schengen area through Germany, Germany is your main destination.

Once you’re in Europe, there are no border checks. Or so I am told. You can go wherever you want. If we wanted to, we could forget Italy entirely and spend most of our time in Switzerland.

Unfortunately, if you say a country is your main destination, and then you spend more time somewhere else, the authorities may find out, and then you may have a problem when you take your next trip.

They say they’re trying to prevent smart tourists from overloading embassies that are known to be easy. It’s silly, really. If France trusts Belgium to ascertain that I’m not a terrorist or potential illegal alien before a trip to Belgium and France, with Belgium as the main destination, France should also trust Belgium if I decide to spend more time in France. This is obvious.

In any case, we will be spending more time in Italy than anywhere else, so the Europeans should have no problems with us in the future.

The Italians make hoteliers and short-term landlords inform the local police of the identities of their foreign guests, so I suppose the government would know if we cheated. I’m not sure.

We will be celebrating our anniversary in Europe, belatedly. Don’t worry. I’m bringing a present. I got Rhodah some really nice dishtowels. They’re factory seconds, but you would never know it.

In other news, the saga of the tractor may be coming to an end.

My tractor needed a skid steer quick attach mount in order to be really useful, so I installed one and modified the bucket to accept it. Buying a new bucket was not possible because of Joe Biden and the apocalypse. The installation and fabrication were unpleasant tasks.

At the same time I decided to make these changes, the steering cylinder started spurting fluid, so I had to take it out and have new seals put in. This was surprisingly hard, because Kubota puts its cylinders in the wrong place. I could not replace the seals myself because Kubota won’t publish specs, so I had to pay a shop.

When I got the cylinder in, I turned the steering wheel to move it so it would line up with the attachment points. The rear end of the cylinder ran into my engine’s front gear case and knocked a little hole in it, and engine oil started shooting out. For several weeks, I have been trying to get it fixed.

I could just call the dealer and tell them to take my life savings, but I thought I could fix it. I bought a new cover and cleaned it up and painted it, and I got all the gaskets and so on. I removed the tractor’s top cover, radiator, and fan. Then I learned that the bottom two bolts on the gear cover were buried between the frame sides, behind the front axle.

No problem, right? You undo a few bolts and move the front axle forward.

Wrong. You have to remove the front half of the tractor’s frame from the engine and move it forward. Mind you, my tractor’s engine can’t be started until the oil is contained, so I can’t run the hydraulics, and I can’t get the front loader off without them.

In short, it’s not going to work.

I had a guy out here claiming he could fix it, but he vanished. Does’t return emails or texts. Phone won’t accept voicemails. He is gone. It’s either me or the dealer.

I finally decided to get some steel-reinforced epoxy putty and jam it in the hole, which is very small. As far as I know, oil in an oil pan is not under pressure, so it should just be a matter of creating a seal. People say epoxy putty works, so I’m going to try it.

If it works, I’ll put the tractor together and keep using it while watching the oil. Then when the weather is cool, I’ll decide whether I want to do anything else to it. It may hold for the life of the tractor.

If I can’t get it to hold oil, I’ll give up and pay the dealer right away. But I don’t see how it can fail.

I don’t want to keep fooling with it in this heat. The sun bakes the area where the tractor is sitting, and for some reason, it seems it always starts raining as soon as I walk outside. The bugs are pretty bad, too. I would rather deal with this problem in October or November. January would be ideal.

Sometimes I feel like an idiot for trying to fix the tractor myself, but that’s not right. You’re supposed to try to fix things yourself. I probably saved $1500 fixing the steering cylinder, because it involved removing a lot of parts from the tractor. Over the years, I’ve saved a huge amount of money doing things myself. I cut and moved trees. That’s incredibly expensive. I installed appliances. I did electrical work. I painted. I mowed. I fixed small engines. I used woodworking and metalworking skills to make things instead of buying them.

When you do things yourself, you will sometimes make an expensive mistake, but over time, you come out way ahead, and you become much less dependent and helpless. I apologize for nothing.

I paid a couple of guys $6000 to dig a trench and run 120 feet of wire to my workshop. That was insane. Once the wiring was in and I had 100-amp service instead of the old 50-amp service, I installed outlets and a big breaker box myself. I installed overhead pneumatic lines with multiple drops. I could have done the wire run, too.

I built a shooting platform with a steel roof. It will outlast the pyramids. I built a shooting bench out of thick-walled 2″ square tubing and pressure-treated 2 by 6 boards. If Jesus delays, it will be in use 200 years from now.

I don’t care about making the tractor worse. It’s part of the cost of not being useless.

I had a big oak in front of my house, and it snapped maybe 20 feet up. The upper part got stuck in a horizontal position. The cheapest price I got to drop it on the ground, with no bucking or disposal, was $800. This would have been a 15-minute job. A tree company could do fabulously well charging $200 for 15-minute jobs. I would have been glad to pay that much.

I ended up using a fishing rod to cast a line over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a rope up. Eventually, I had a huge towing strap on it, and I pulled it down with the tractor. Cost: nothing. Cutting it up and moving it probably took an hour. After that, I felled the upright part myself and got rid of it. I still have the stump, but the $800 job would have left it as well.

I can rent a skid steer or excavator and rip up every stump and rock in my yard for under $500. Better than stump grinding, which leaves material in the ground. I’m planning to do this once the tractor is working. I need it to move the wood.

Sometimes I think about buying a new machine. A tractor is a pretty poor all-around tool for this farm. It only lifts 1500 pounds on the loader, and it can’t hold a light to a skid steer or excavator when it comes to digging and unearthing.

Someone told me I should get a telehandler. This is like a skid steer, but it has a telescoping arm on top of it. You can put skid steer attachments on it. You can use it as a forklift and put a car on top of your house if you want. They’re not great for digging, though. They’re about like skid steers. You can move a lot of earth as long as you like shallow holes.

A skid steer would be nice. It would pop big rocks and stumps out effortlessly, and it would be a good forklift. It wouldn’t dig deep holes like an excavator, though, and it would duplicate some of the tractor’s functions.

An excavator would tear out rocks and stumps, and it would let me dig any kind of hole I wanted.

I think the best machine, though, is a true backhoe. There are fake backhoes which are really tractors, and they’re not that great. They call them “TLB’s.” Tractor-backhoe-loader. A real backhoe has a backhoe boom attached to its frame. A TLB has a wimpy three-point attachment, and people complain about them all the time. A real backhoe can exert 5 tons of upward pressure with the lip of the front bucket. A tractor is doing well if it hits 1.5 tons. No comparison.

A real backhoe would push fairly big trees over, making it unnecessary to fell them with saws. Pushing them over would remove the stumps from the ground, solving an enormous problem. If anything remained in the ground, the front or rear bucket would make very short work of it.

A backhoe is great for digging. You can dig a hole for a swimming pool or septic tank with one.

I could use a backhoe to move my berm and make it higher. That would be hard with a tractor.

You can get a decent used backhoe for between 20 and 30 thousand dollars, and you can sell it for about what you paid when you want to get rid of it. That’s a deal, compared to renting by the day or paying someone else to run a machine.

The key is not to have any expensive mechanical problems while you own it.

Something to think about for the future.

Anyway, once the tractor is functioning, I will build a fork attachment for it and start cutting unwanted trees. After that, I can think about machinery to pull the stumps.

Not the Kind of Leak I had in Mind

The festival of sudden inconvenient repairs continues here at the compound.

Let’s see. I put in a new air conditioner last week. My garden tractor’s alternator quit. My other tractor still has a broken front gear case, and the steering cylinder is not connected. I had to clean my roof gutters. I had to fix a windshield leak on my Dodge Ram. I am still trying to build a new welding cart.

My well pump’s expansion tank pipe broke three days ago, and I had to fix that. Day before yesterday, in a completely unrelated surprise, the pump stopped working. I found out the on/off switch was a mess, and the pressure switch didn’t look too good, either. Worked on it in the heat and humidity until I realized it was going to require an expert.

The pump guys came, and they put in a new pressure switch and replaced a burned relay. Along the way, they learned that the check valve was finished, so that accounted for the rest of the $392.50.

I still have to replace the on/off switch. I am tempted to leave it as it is; three sets of wires held together with wire nuts. The circuit breaker is 25 feet from the pump, so the on/off switch is more or less redundant.

I will put a new switch in anyway.

Before the pump guys arrived, I had to bathe in the pool twice. After they fixed the pump, I thought everything was grand. My bidet attachment was working again. That’s something you really miss when it’s gone. I thought I was in for some smooth sailing. Then I noticed the water on my bathroom floor.

I had been using a bucket and pool water to flush the can, so I thought I had spilled water on the floor. No; no such luck. The toilet was leaking where the fill valve met the tank. I tried to fix it last night, and then I gave up and shut off the water supply. This is why I have a guest bathroom.

Today, I fooled with it again, and I got some wonderful news.

I have a Briggs Vacuity toilet. This is a green marvel from the infancy of hippie-approved toilets. Under the hood, there is a Rube Goldberg contraption that would drive Montgomery Scott himself to find a way to freebase Romulan ale.

I can’t explain it because I don’t understand it. Inside the porcelain tank, there is a smaller plastic tank. Inside that tank, there is an upside-down plastic jug. There is an air tube that comes up from the bowl.

Because of the plastic tank, you can’t get by with a single gasket that surrounds the fill valve pipe inside the porcelain tank. You have to have a gasket between the plastic tank and the porcelain. Guess what that gasket does. It goes bad. Guess how you replace it. You remove the entire porcelain tank, remove the plastic tank from the porcelain, install the gasket, and put it all back together. Along the way, you have to replace a bunch of other gaskets because only an idiot replaces one gasket when he has something taken apart.

Guess what the geniuses at Briggs did. They stopped selling gaskets. This toilet is unbelievably stupid, and Briggs knows it. They abandoned it.

That’s not completely true. You can still buy other parts that can’t save the toilet once the $1.51 unobtainable gasket goes bad.

Guess how many Briggs Vacuity toilets I have. Four.

I see the future, and it is not good.

I looked at this thing for a long time, and I came up with ideas.

1. Take the tank apart, cut off all the environmentalist bits of plastic except for those required to make the toilet function, plug the vacuum-tube hole permanently, and reassemble what’s left as a normal high-flow toilet. This will happen eventually, but not today, because I needed my toilet ASAP.

2. Buy a big rubber washer with a 1″ hole and put it on the outside of the toilet around the fill valve pipe. The other gaskets are all inside the tank. If there is a good solid gasket on the outside, they become irrelevant. I suppose some water inside the tank will go where liberals don’t want it to go, because it will be able to move from the plastic tank to the porcelain tank, but it will fill and flush just fine, it won’t run, and it won’t leak, and also, who cares what liberals want?

3. Buy and install a new toilet. I have never installed a new toilet, and this is not the weekend to start.

If I did buy a toilet, it would be a Toto one-piece toilet.

I have had two Toto toilets in the past, and they made defecation something to look forward to. They worked flawlessly, they were comfortable, they came with slow-close lids, and I’m pretty sure they would have flushed bricks.

Toto is a Japanese company, and we all know the Japanese have a sick obsession with quality toilets. They make toilets that massage and sing and so on. Japanese toilets are the Swiss watches of toilets.

Today I learned that one-piece toilets are totally superior to two-piece toilets. They are much more reliable. That’s all I need to know. There is no more important toilet attribute.

I think I should eventually try to convert one of my Briggs socialist hippie toilets to full-flow, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll install one Toto a month until they’re gone.

I really hate all the green garbage they’re selling us. Green products don’t work. They cost more. They kill American jobs. They kill great companies that employee huge numbers of people. They waste a huge amount of man hours, materials, and resources, just so we can be fashionable. Yes, there are fantastic green products, but we never seem to get those until our landfills are full of the bad green products that came first.

I am hoping I can go to bed tonight. I mean, just go to bed. Without hearing funny noises from the air conditioner or seeing water on the carpet or smelling smoke or having the ceiling collapse.

It’s a Saturday, and that’s bad. Friday night is the most likely night for something expensive to fail, and Saturday comes next.

In better news, I had a great Christian encounter today.

Five years ago, when my dad and I moved here, the man who owned the house sold me his two tractors and utility cart. He offered all three for much less than the big tractor alone was worth. I had to have someone look the machines over before writing the check, so I Googled and found a mechanic.

He checked the machines out and said they were okay, I sent him money, and that was that.

When I damaged the Kubota so badly I was no longer willing to try to fix it myself, I thought of this mechanic. I called him, and he said he would take the job. It took weeks for us to work things out, and he arrived today.

While we were talking, it became obvious to me that he was not a Democrat, and that meant he might be a Christian. I steered the conversation toward God, and then things took right off.

Like me, he has met Jesus. I mean personally. I don’t mean he suddenly believed and calls that meeting Jesus. Jesus himself came to him.

He was a kid, and he and his friends fished together. They liked to fish under a bridge. Over time, they had dug back into the dirt under the bridge, creating a little cave they could sit in. The mechanic, whose name is Paul, couldn’t go with them one day, and on that day, a truck crossed the bridge while they were sitting under it. The cave collapsed, and they all died.

Later, Paul prayed about it. He was very disturbed. While he was praying, something came to him and started trickling into him. While it was there, he felt complete peace and love. He knew nothing bad could happen to him while it was there.

I told him it was Jesus, because the same thing had happened to me. He agreed, saying that was what he had thought.

We must have spent an hour and a half talking about this. We learned we had a lot of common interests. He showed up in a 28,000-pound Dodge truck with a crane and a Miller Bobcat welder/generator on it. He loves guns and shooting. He hates what the world is turning into. His wife home-schooled his kids.

My buddy Mike is living here now, and I got him to come over and meet Paul so they could share their experiences.

I don’t know if we’ll become friends, but for the first time since I’ve moved here, I felt like I had met someone I wouldn’t mind knowing.

Later, I was talking to my wife on Whatsapp, and I told her about it. She said that when she has an encounter like that, she has an unusual feeling: the feeling that she and her new acquaintance can be close. Good friends. I didn’t coach her. She said that before I told her what I had felt.

We prayed for Paul and his family. I told him a few things about the Holy Spirit and tongues. Maybe it will go somewhere.

He didn’t fix the tractor because there was an issue he was not sure he had the tools to handle. He usually works on big machinery, not little tractors. He called a friend of his who works on small machines, but he didn’t get a call back while he was here. We agreed on one thing: we would get it done.

I felt a lot better about the accident. God used my broken front gear case to bring Paul here when he needed to talk to me and have my wife and me intercede for him and his family. The repair may cost me as much as a couple of grand, depending on who ends up doing it. The dealer might have to be involved. I don’t care. If God is behind what’s happening, it’s more important than a little money.

Almost There…

After the apocalypse started, I lost interest in tools and my other secular pastimes. Now I am feeling more motivated, so I have completed a bunch of projects that needed to be done. I am almost done building my second Harbor Freight U.S. General tool chest welding cart conversion.

Last night I finished most of the welding on the lower part of the project, which is the foundation and the hard part. After this, everything should flow pretty quickly.

Here are some photos. In one, I have the project mocked up with the chest turned on its side. This shows how the parts that form the base go together.

The other photos were taken after the welding was done.

I made a mistake and made one of the rails half an inch too short, in spite of measuring repeatedly. This is a problem highly creative people have. There is nothing that can be done about it. We get distracted and make mistakes.

I was annoyed, and I thought I was going to drive all the way back to the metal place to buy a new tube so I could start over. I felt torn, though. One of the great things about steel is that you can add as well as subtract. Wood is less forgiving. There are some mistakes you can’t fix. If you’re good with steel, you can make things look like they never had to be repaired.

I finally decided to add more steel to the tube. The desire to have perfection was overcome by the desire to overcome. When I was done adding the new metal, I mocked the cart up, and for a minute, I had a hard time remembering which tube had been repaired. From several feet away, I couldn’t tell right away. I call that success.

I had to roll the box on its top to get the rails located and tightened down so I could locate and weld the member that would hold the casters. I couldn’t have gravity pulling the rails down and making it hard to figure out when they were loose on the mounting bolts.

I had a hard time figuring out how to roll the box over without risking bending the metal that protruded from the top. I eventually remembered that I had the styrofoam the chest came in. It was made to fit the top. I attached it and solved the problem.

I didn’t put a ton of weld on the base. It’s always tempting to close things up with weld and make them pretty and as strong as possible, but it’s a stupid thing to do. It causes warpage, it makes things impossible to take apart when you want to change them, and it wastes a great deal of gas and wire.

I still have to close up the ends of the tube the casters sit on. It’s not necessary, but I want the cart to look finished, and I don’t want bugs moving into the tubes.

I should be able to finish all the fabrication today, since the rest of it is simple. I need to make sure the upper platform is the right height for an 80-cubic-foot bottle, and I have to invent a support for my plasma cutter’s filter. After that, nothing remains but paint and gloating.