Relief is in Sight

As usual, too much is going on to write about.

First of all, I finished the JTM45 clone I was building for my friend Joe. The JTM45 is a Marshall amp which is a pretty faithful copy of the Fender 5F6A Bassman. The version my friend chose uses KT66 tubes, which are fundamentally similar to the Bassman’s 6L6s.

We had a number of problems. He bought a Mojo Tone chassis, and it didn’t fit the Classictone transformer he chose. I’ve been getting help from amp builders, and they have convinced me that Mojo is not a good place to get chassis. The cutouts and round holes are not well thought-out, so you can end up with things that don’t fit.

To make the power transformer work, I had to enlarge and move the existing opening, and I had to machine (from scratch) an aluminum spacer to connect the transformer to the chassis. This was a lot of aggravation, but the result was beautiful. Looking at the amp, you would never know the transformer didn’t fit. I’ll repost a couple of photos.

I also had a problem with one of the power supply capacitors. The JTM45 is a box of components that sits in a wooden cabinet with a flat bottom. The box is supposed to rest directly on the wood. But Mojo predrills holes that situate the capacitor below the box. It projects down out of the box about half an inch. This is just crazy. There is no way on earth to make it fit the cabinet (which Mojo makes). Last week I got the amp running, and Joe brought me the cabinet. I had never seen a JTM45 cabinet before. I just assumed there was a way to make it fit. But incredibly, there was not.

We looked at the chassis for a while. I loosened the screws holding the cap, and I swung it up out of the way. It fit perfectly. Here is the mystery: why didn’t Mojo drill screw holes that put it in this position? I thought there had to be a reason, but I couldn’t see it.

I got out a punch, and I made two dimples on the inside of the box. Then I used my Jobmax right-angle drill, some WD40, and a nice cobalt drill bit to make two new screw holes. We screwed the cap in place, and everything was fine. What a relief. If it hadn’t worked, we would have had to use different capacitors, or I would have had to undo a bunch of wiring and move the cap across the box.

We put the amp together, and Joe fired it up. The sound is incredible. Maybe as good as the Bassman. It’s clear. It’s pretty quiet. It’s sweet.

We had some noise problems at first, and that scared me, but it turned out the JJ 12AX7 in V1 was the issue. Evidently these tubes are inherently noisy. Joe put a Tube Amp Doctor 12AX7-SC in there, and the noise dropped, and the amp also sounded better. It had a sweeter, creamier tone, somewhat like a 12AY7. Lesson learned.

Here are a couple of photos I took that day.

The other guy in the photos is Zach. He’s a blues guitarist. He wants to build a Trainwreck clone.

I’m not totally sure what my next project will be. I want to build a Bassman-based amp with 4 6BM8 output tubes. A guy who calls himself “Da Geezer” designed a 6BM8 amp called the Little Wing, and it’s based on the Bassman, but it lacks the second channel and added inputs. It’s limited to 7 watts because it only has two output tubes. He says I can put the Bassman front end back and add extra tubes so I can have more juice when I want it.

I’m also looking at a wrecked Fender “The Twin” red-knob amp. This is a 100-watt amp with a switch that cuts the power to 25 watts. They were not popular, but they’re very good amps. I found one on Craigslist for $200. It needs about $320 in parts to get it working. I’m considering offering $50. I don’t think anyone else will buy it. It’s too messed up.

It’s nice to be able to rebuild and redesign basket-case amps. It really doesn’t matter what I buy, because I can turn anything into a good amp.

I’m also considering moving to a new church. One of my buddies–the head Armorbearer at my church–had some issues he had to address. His wife is a very nice lady, but she felt my church was too cliquish. She couldn’t really connect, even though her husband had a position of prominence. This is not a big shock. Our church tends to promote young, good-looking, hip people, as well as people who make money or have connections. There is a big concern with what’s cool and trendy. And it also helps if you can do something the church really needs. I don’t think she fit in the desired categories. She’s not an MTV type. So she may well have been excluded.

She found another church, and she started attending, even though her husband was still volunteering at Trinity. I started hearing good things about it. Lots of prayer during services. Focus on the Holy Spirit. No yammering about self-help and money. I envied my friends, but I thought the church was near their home, up in Coral Springs. I was not going to drive that far. Also, even though I’ve become completely disconnected from the teaching at my church, I have strong attachments to the people, and while I wasn’t receiving much from the church, I felt fulfilled with regard to giving and interacting with others.

Now my buddy is done with Trinity. He’s cutting ties and moving. And this weekend, he told me the church is in North Miami. I was shocked. How could I have been unaware of this? It’s a shorter drive than the one I make now. When I heard that, I felt like a weight slid off my back and a door opened before me. Maybe God had been preparing this place for me during the months when I was praying for a better church.

I had assumed that God wanted me to stay at Trinity for at least a few more months, and I was content with that. I love the people. It’s not like I’m miserable there. But it’s wonderful to know I may be able to get out sooner. I’m visiting the other church this weekend. I have very high hopes.

Ending a relationship is funny. Until you make the decision to quit, you may not realize how much you’ve wanted out. I still remember dumping a maladjusted girlfriend when I was in law school. Before the breakup, she didn’t seem all that terrible, but after I pulled the plug, I realized what a mess she was, and how annoying her nasty side could be. I had stifled those thoughts when we were together, in order to make it work. I guess the same thing happens when you leave a church. You realize it’s okay to feel relieved, so the stress just melts out of you without warning. Suddenly you feel like you’re standing straighter.

I can tell you what I look forward to.

It will be nice not to have to hear Steve Munsey’s self-serving money-based doctrine. There are no authentic lists of “seven blessings” associated with giant cash offerings at Passover, Pentecost, and Yom Kippur. That’s something he made up, and we hear about it all the time. Jews never had to give big cash offerings on the feast days, and they were never promised “seven blessings” in return. If your church is in debt, the answer isn’t manipulation, legalism, Judaizing, and gimmicks. The answer is to please God and obtain his help. My church can’t get prosperity the way we’re supposed to, so we’re trying to do it the Munsey way. And it doesn’t work. We still have debt.

It will be nice to be able to talk. Kids run our sound and media department, and a young, headstrong pastor is in charge of them. That means we hear obnoxious disco music even between services. It drives people crazy. Many, many people complain about it. People come to church and leave on the first visit because of it. It’s probably killing our growth. The new place has loud music, but they shut it down after worship, the way you’re supposed to.

I look forward to having my freedom back. If I were doing what was demanded of me, I would be serving at two services on Sunday, attending a Saturday service, attending a volunteer “DNA” meeting once a month, attending a 6 a.m. Armorbearer training session once a month, serving several days in a row at our yearly Rendezvous conference (for which I would be expected to buy a ticket), serving extra days when asked (with short notice or no notice), and cooking on demand. That’s too much. We’re told we have to tithe our time. Well, I pray two to four hours a day. That’s 14 hours right there, minimum. I guarantee I spend at least 16.8 hours a week with God. So anything I give my church is above the tithe. And prayer is much more important than anything I do at church.

I’m hoping I will never have to hear the word “VIP” again. It’s disturbing that I ever heard it in church. We reserve seats for holy people like Luther Campbell and Tim Hardaway (a basketball player). We chauffeur visiting speakers around, and it’s understood that we’re not supposed to talk to them too much, because…they’re VIPs. Which makes you wonder what we are. I call us “VUPs.” Figure it out.

We have actually had secure areas for VIPs, with special food other people can’t have. Aren’t VIP areas for strip clubs? Am I crazy? Why would you have one in a church? I can understand having a place for people to put their feet up and collect their thoughts. But that’s not the same thing. We have never had a lounge for volunteers, even when we worked 15-hour days.

I hope I’ll actually be able to talk to a pastor once in a while. And I don’t mean talking about volunteer work. I’d like to KNOW these people. Right now, I don’t talk to any of our pastors. They’re busy. Half the time, they’re on planes or staying in other cities. And they have no interest in talking to me. They say hi and so on, but when I go home at the end of a service, I know for a fact that I won’t have any communication with a pastor for seven days.

I would like to know that I won’t be badgered for money. Christians talk a lot about tithing. Here’s a terrible secret: God doesn’t require us to tithe. Preachers hate hearing that, but it’s true. Tithing comes from the Jewish law, which does not apply to us. It’s a good IDEA to tithe. But really, you’re supposed to develop a relationship with the Holy Spirit, and you should give (or withhold) as he directs. I am really tired of being goaded. Every Sunday, we put a pastor on the stage to give a pitch, and they tell us God will give is a big ROI. I realize we have a lot of cheap people who need to learn to give, but if we introduced them to the Holy Spirit and helped them grow, the giving would come naturally. We wouldn’t have to jawbone them like reluctant car buyers.

I want to hear about the Holy Spirit, and I want to experience his presence in church, as I do at home. I’m tired of backward self-improvement nonsense masquerading as doctrine. I can’t believe we let Brian Klemmer come to our church and teach the same stuff they used to teach at EST seminars. Find that in the Bible for me. I’ll give you a hundred years to look it up.

I guess this is a horrible thing to say. Brian Klemmer came to our church (selling expensive secular self-help seminars), and he told us he had a 500-year plan for his life. As a Christian, he had plans for what he would be doing hundreds of years into the future. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but can anyone seriously believe that right now, he’s working on that plan? He died from a torn carotid artery a while back. Is he really in heaven, carrying out a plan his tiny human brain made, in a place he could not understand when the plan was made? Is anyone stupid enough to believe that? But we sat there and lapped it up.

I know there are no perfect churches. But not all churches are sick. There are ministries you can support and be part of without feeling like a sucker.

The main thing that bugs me about my church is that I can’t recommend it to people. New people come in, and I’m glad they’re trying to get to know God, but I know they’re headed for some serious disappointments if they stay. I have friends who get discouraged. I can’t tell them to stick it out. Not in good conscience.

I’ve been praying for the church to change, and my faith has been telling me it will, but I still think I’m leaving. I think a bunch of us will leave. Two Armorbearer families are gone. I’m on the way. If it works for me, I’m going to go after my friends who are discouraged. Maybe the heart of the church will leave, and that will provide a much needed wake-up call that leads to restructuring under new leaders.

Man, I look forward to dropping the loads I’ve been carrying. I want to be in a church where I can support what they’re doing. I don’t want to bite my tongue all the time. I don’t want to have to tell my friends what they’re hearing is wrong, or that they’re right to feel used or mistreated.

I told the Armorbearers I would not be in church next week. I have learned not to ask permission. I informed them I would not be there, and I said it would be nice if someone filled in. One of the young guys volunteered. I’m covered. At our church, there’s a lot of pressure to show up and work, as if it were a job, so we really feel like we have to get approval to take time off. I managed to get over that.

I may not be able to wait for Sunday. There’s a Tuesday night service. While the kids at my church are dancing to secular music and trying to hook up, I may be at a normal church service.

Here it is, the week after Passover, and I may be on my way from a place of profitless servitude to a place where I can work for God. How appropriate.

A Mighty Fortress is My Garage

The Garage of Blues has undergone yet another metamorphosis.

I could not deal with my old Clausing lathe, so I started shopping for a new lathe that actually worked. I got tired of shopping, and I prayed for God to send me a good lathe at a good price. The next day, I got a sudden email message advising me that a reputable seller had knocked thousands off the price of a machine, and that it had been equipped with some stuff I like, and that stuff I did not want had been removed.

SOLD.

I took some photos while the riggers were moving it in. They gouged it slightly, but having seen what BAD riggers do, I was still satisfied. Here it is.

That thing is a 16 by 40. It can swing a part almost 17″ wide. It’s not packed with features, but the quality is very good, and the construction is heavy. It only has 12 speeds, but the range is nice: 20-2000 RPM. The motor is 7.5 horsepower, which is insane. The threading options are a little limited, but change gears can be had. The ways are a foot wide, the castings are Meehanite. It came with a neat light and a DRO. No complaints here.

Og told me to get a 12 x 36, and he was probably right. He was right when he told me to get a Grizzly instead of the Clausing. But come on. This baby has a 2″ bore. I can part stuff that would otherwise require a saw. You know I needed that.

I actually wanted a 14 x 40 with variable speed, but the seller I had in mind would not give me a quote. He kept saying he’d get around to it. He said he sent it, but it must have gotten lost in cyberspace. After two months, I gave up on him. I think the smaller lathe would have been fine, and it would have had a big bore on it, but I can’t hold people at gunpoint and force them to do business with me.

I could not get him to sell me the smaller lathe I wanted, and once I had decided on the big lathe, people told me not to use a VFD, which is the cheapest way to run a big lathe on single-phase power, without derating and other potential issues. They told me I needed a digital phase converter, which is pretty ridiculous. They cost a lot. I was determined to get a VFD, but over time, I decided to bite the bullet and do it right. So now I have the phase converter on my wall. Right now it’s only connected to the lathe, but if I feel like it, I can add the mill to it and bypass the existing VFD, which does absolutely nothing except provide three-phase power. I can also put up sockets and run whatever three-phase stuff I get later. This is advantageous, because a lot of great three-phase equipment goes on the market for low prices, and it’s generally better than single-phase machinery.

I went with Gator chucks. Ordinarily, the lathe would have come with no-name Asian chucks, but they were not included, so I got to pick my own. Gators are made in mainland China, but the company has a very good reputation. I got an 8″ adjustable 3-jaw chuck, which is practically my fiancee now, and I also got a 10″ 4-jaw which I haven’t even tried, because the 3-jaw is so great. I can’t measure the runout on the 3-jaw, and so far, that has held true on diameters of 1″ and 1.5″, so it appears to work well, at least within that range.

I was going to get cheapo Chinese carbide holders, but I got yelled at when I mentioned this to actual machinists, so I found a great deal on two Kennametal 3/4″ holders, and the seller threw in 10 inserts. Very nice. Super rigid.

The lathe isn’t leveled yet. I was going to use the famous “Rollie’s Dad” method, but research led me to conclude that it wasn’t really that great, so I reluctantly ordered a good level. I went with Tools4cheap. I’m hoping the level lives up to the hype.

The lathe is a DREAM to run. It scared the crap out of me when I first got it going. I accidentally started the giant chuck spinning at 2000 instead of 500. But it does what it’s supposed to do. The repeatability on the 3-jaw chuck is a wonder to behold. The worklight is bright and very easy to position. The controls work MUCH more smoothly than the ones on the Clausing. It just does what it’s supposed to do. I don’t fight all day to make the tool work. It’s just like my gorgeous milling machine.

I finished up my 304 stainless garlic press. It works great. You stuff it with garlic and whack it with a hammer, and pureed garlic poomps into a little chamber. Then you pump the piston again, and the garlic pops out on your cutting board. This is the first decent garlic press I have ever seen. And I’m improving it. I’m making a big base that includes the pulverizing holes and the chamber for the crushed garlic, and it’s going to thread onto the main housing. It will come off easily to go in the dishwasher. I love it. It’s so cool I can’t stand it.

After this I may make a nutcracker. I don’t need one. I just hate nutcrackers. They’re wimpy. They slip and shoot nuts across the room. They break. I’m going to make one that will open a golf ball, if that’s what turns you on.

Today I used the lathe to bore out a 1 1/2″-wide piece of stainless, for the garlic chamber. I saved my old 1/2″ Albrecht chuck from the Clausing, and I got an adaptor sleeve to make it fit the new tailstock. I drilled the work with three bits, creeping up to 1/2″, and then I went to a boring bar that would fit in the hole. Then I put it on the mill and flattened the bottom of the bore. Going back to the lathe, I turned on the DRO, put in a bigger bar, and set the bottom of the bore as zero. After that, it was a simple matter to open the bore up until the walls were about 3/16″ thick. The bar screamed like hell–nothing I do seems to change that–but the finish is really nice, so I guess it’s okay.

I have to figure out what to use for the internal threading on the end that joins the press body, but other than that, this will be a cakewalk. God willing.

I wonder if cooks would pay for stuff like this. It would be pointless to make these things for less than thirty bucks. But they would last forever and work like nothing else on the market.

I love the garage more every day. I have a guitar amp out there, which I’m halfway done building. I have my tools set up in a nice ergonomic way. I have peace and quiet. I have air conditioning and comfy chairs. I have hundreds of albums on the MP3 player. And I have the ultimate place to pray. I generally do at least an hour and a half out there in the evening.

I have been asking God to tell me what my job is. Crazy as it sounds, I think he answered. I think prayer is my job. Some people go to Calcutta. I go to the garage. It suits me to a tee. Prayer is the most powerful thing anyone can do, even if no one appreciates it. And if you’re in God’s presence every day, for long periods, good stuff is going to happen to you, regardless of whom you pray for. It’s a little like being God’s treasurer. You’re distributing his supernatural wealth. Some of it is going to stick to you.

I believe God has given me a fortune, and the substance of that fortune is faith, which is much more valuable than money. If God gives you a fortune, you have to share it. So, unless I’m wrong about what he wants me to do, this is going to be my primary function for a while. Pray for others. Pray for the country. And of course, pray for yours truly. Come on, man. I need a little piece of the action. You can’t muzzle the ox that treads out the corn.

Life has changed a lot. Things work better. Things that used to cause me stress are turning into blessings. Even the collection calls from student loan servicers and collection agencies are kind of pleasant now. I executed a release, so they can never get another dime out of me, but they still call from time to time and ask–very courteously–if I know where they can find the borrower. Now I feel I can relate to them, instead of seeing them as relentless sources of aggravation.

If you’re a cosigner for someone who won’t pay, for God’s sake, ask about executing a release. Not a settlement. A “release.” Trust me; this advice is gold. I got my freedom. Get yours. They will negotiate. You may lose some money, but thereafter, you will sleep well while the person who took advantage of you has to worry about things like wage garnishing, lawsuits, and debts bankruptcy doesn’t affect.

I don’t think I’m going to be here too long. My faith tells me I will find a better place to live. I don’t want to budge until I get a clear indication. I truly look forward to kissing Miami goodbye forever. My family endured so much sorrow here. I don’t need to look around me and be reminded. My life is in the future, so I don’t want to be wrapped up in the past. I think God has given me the Garage of Blues so I can have a little comfort while I wait.

I think my dad is coming around. He sees how I am blessed. That has to have an impact. My sister…another story. Some people are extremely hard for God to teach, so they go through shocking trials. I’m not worried. I keep asking God to do specific things to bring her around, and he keeps doing those things. Whatever happens, she will have the best shot prayer can provide.

I have to go work on the amp. I can’t wait to hear it!

MORE

People are asking about the garlic press. I have really bad photos. The end result is what matters, so here are two photos of the garlic on its way out. This should give you an idea of what it does to the garlic. The press is one inch in diameter, to provide scale.

The garlic may look solid, but that’s because it was mashed into a cylindrical space. It has passed through several 1/8″ holes.

New Lathe Falling Into Place

I am sitting here waiting for the new lathe.

I didn’t know if I should get a new lathe. Sometimes I feel like I spend stupidly. Other times I feel like I don’t spend enough. A month or two back, I felt like God was telling me to let GO already. When I wanted or needed something, I scoured Ebay and Craigslist. I bought used stuff. Sometimes I went without stuff that would have made life easier, or I bought tools that were one size too small. I felt like God told me, “You are praying for stuff I already gave you. Just SPEND THE MONEY.” I felt like I was serving my money, instead of it serving me.

I had that silly Clausing lathe. It wasn’t small by home shop standards, but it wasn’t big enough to be versatile and convenient to use. I couldn’t part long stock bigger than about 1 1/2″ in diameter. I couldn’t find rests for it. I couldn’t do a single metric thread. I thought I should give up and get a Grizzly in a comparable size or bigger, and I looked around and checked out models.

I found that you had to spend some dough to get a 2″ bore, which is a big convenience. And I learned that good used lathes were so expensive, it was hard to get anything bigger than a 25% discount over new. You can get stuff other people consider too old to use, and it’s cheap (like the Clausing), but it’s not the same as a new machine.

I got fed up with shopping. I prayed for God to send me a good deal on a new lathe, and the next day, I got a surprising email from a seller. I’ve written about this. New machine. Thousands off. Lots of good added equipment. Things I didn’t want to buy, removed. I had to jump on that. It took two days to get my nerve up, but I prayed about it and bought the machine.

Now it’s about to be delivered. I thought I would have to change some wiring to make it fit. I have an interrupt box and three 220 sockets in the area where the lathe will go. I thought I would have to move everything three feet to the right and remove one socket to allow for a phase converter. I took a few screws out, took down my air hose reel, and looked at the lathe measurements. It turned out the lathe is not tall enough to obstruct the wiring. In fact, the wiring, which was not really in the right place for my old setup, was exactly where it needed to be for the new arrangement. How about THAT?

I screwed everything back together and went in the house.

God prepares you for stuff, when you don’t even know it’s coming. He’s like Mr. Miyagi. One day you’re doing “wax on, wax off” ten thousand times. The next day, you’re using what you learned to wipe the smirk off some punk’s face at a karate tournament.

I have some work in front of me. I have to wire up the converter, and I have to move all the other tools in the garage (except for the mill) after the lathe is moved in. I have to put a cord on the lathe. I have to find a place to put the hose reel. But that’s about it. I probably won’t even sweat.

I have been praying for God to help me organize the garage. I came up with a surprising plan which is going to make life much easier.

Yesterday I opened up the garage floor and moved the Clausing out of the way, all by myself. All I needed were some pieces of conduit and a crowbar. I won’t have to pay the riggers to move it. They should be out of here in twenty minutes.

It will be a week before I can turn the lathe on. The converter people are VERY slow to ship. But I’ll be able to lean on it and turn the dials and go, “VROOM VROOM” all I want.

Don’t let anyone tell you prayer in tongues won’t order your life. It works, and it’s amazing. And it does other stuff for you. I sit out there in the evenings and pray, and not only does God give me faith, he gives me different flavors of faith. He gives me faith that rushes through me like water under pressure. He gives me a type of faith that feels like a mountain of lead falling on my doubts. It’s so strange. I never expected it.

Now if someone will just buy that Clausing. I’ll have my garage back, and I’ll be able to use my tools instead of working on them all the time.

Let Yourself be Machined

Yesterday a rigger came by. Riggers are people who move big machines. I got a very good rate on shipping my new lathe to Miami, but I can’t have it shipped directly to the house. I had to ship it to a commercial address with a loading dock. It will be unloaded there and moved to another truck, and that truck will bring it here.

It has to go to a facility with a loading dock because freight trucks don’t come equipped to lower two-ton loads three or four feet, from their beds to the pavement. You have to have a forklift and maybe some other stuff, like pallet jacks and things called “skates.” So the easy way to deal with this is to ship your stuff to riggers. They put it on the ground and slide it into your garage for you.

The rigger sent a guy over, and he looked around and essentially said they were going to shove it in there in one move and go home. He did not seem intimidated at all. I guess they’re used to moving things like 20,000-pound turret lathes, so a comparatively tiny manual lathe must seem like a joke.

I listed the Clausing for sale. I don’t know if it’s going to move without an Ebay ad. I may have to do that. I don’t know how to put it on a pallet. That will be great fun, I’m sure. I found places that give pallets away, so I should be able to come up with a fair amount of free wood.

Yesterday the 3-jaw chuck arrived. This is kind of interesting, if you’re a tool person. It’s Chinese. Not Taiwan. Mainland China. The land of sand-filled castings and pot metal screws. But it’s a very good chuck. The brand name is Fuerda. Their chuck line is called Gator. Ask anyone who uses one. They have a great reputation. They’re not as cheap as other Chinese chucks, but they beat the pants off Bison and Toolmex, who manufacture in Eastern Europe.

Fuerda and Phase II both make good tools in mainland China. I think we’re going to see other brands moving in behind them. Even the Indians are making some good stuff.

I decided to go with an adjustable chuck. These things have screws that let you move the chucks until they’re very concentric with the spindles. It’s a little bit like having 4-jaw accuracy with 3-jaw convenience, except that you don’t adjust them for every part you chuck. As I understand it, it’s not qoing to be quite as good as a 4-jaw chuck, but it will be considerably better than an ordinary 3-jaw of comparable quality.

It also has two-piece jaws so I can turn the jaws around for big parts or remove them to use soft jaws. When I started looking for a chuck, I thought adjustability was the most important thing, but people corrected me. You want those 2-piece jaws (just like that cowbell). I thought they were just for holding bigger stuff; you don’t have to take the jaws completely out and reverse them, because you can turn the upper parts around. But that’s not the whole story. If you have one-piece (“solid”) jaws, you can’t screw anything to them. The screw holes that remain when you remove the top parts of two-piece jaws allow you to attach other things, and soft jaws are the primary examples. You can make special jaws to hold unusual parts and to give you good repeatability (I think).

The chuck looks good, and the jaws move well. The machining is nice. Not perfect, but I think it’s more than adequate. My big complaint is that there was grit on the adapter plate that allows you to put the chuck on a D1-6 spindle. I think it must be grinding residue. It’s greasy and gritty and black. When I tried to put the cam pins on the plate, the grit prevented them from going in all the way, so I had to clean the plate with brake cleaner, hose everything with Eezox, and start over. It looks like there are some grit spots that will never go away, but they won’t interfere with the chuck’s functions.

I got myself a couple of tool holders and some 1/2″ HSS blanks. The tool post on this thing will accept 1″ carbide holders, and I was afraid that meant I had to buy everything in that size. Then I found out 3/4″ tool holders were fine, and I could use 1/2″ blanks. There are a lot of Kennametal holders (with extra inserts) out there for good prices, so that’s what I got. The ones I bought don’t have clamps to support the inserts, but I am told they should be fine if I’m not an idiot when I use them.

I truly look forward to using the lathe. The Clausing was a huge compromise. I couldn’t find tooling for it. It was worn. It had no metric threading. It’s fine for people who are more worried about saving money than getting things done, but I wanted to be able to use my lathe. The new one has very nice rests, good threading options, an insanely heavy bed for rigidity, and good speed options. It has a clutch and a brake, a feedscrew AND a leadscrew, and a DRO. I can already sense the relief I’m going to feel when I use it. So many frustrations will be things of the past. I won’t have to stick indicators on the lathe to find out where I am. I won’t have to take tiny cuts. I’ll be able to machine thin stuff with the follow rest. If I have a metric thread to do, I may actually be able to do it without shopping for dies. It should be just like using my mill. I’ll concern myself with machining, not with clever ways of making dubious tools work.

The garage’s existing wiring will power this thing. I’ll have to use a machine to provide 3-phase, but I won’t need an electrician. The motor, truthfully, is way bigger than I will ever need, and I should probably put a smaller one in, but it will run without major surgery on the house.

The Garage of Blues is getting weirder and weirder. I feel like I have to get out there and pray in the evening, or nothing is going to go right. God manifests himself to me there, more powerfully than anywhere else. When that happens to you a few times, you get to the point where you have to have it. Maybe this is why so many early Christians, who greatly exceeded our familiarity with the Holy Spirit, were so willing to die rather than renounce the faith. The more of God’s presence you get, the more value it comes to have. Jesus said the kingdom of God was like a pearl of great price which a man bought after selling everything else he had. No matter how great the value of eternal life is, the promise of salvation will not give you the inner strength to face execution. Daily intimacy with God is probably where that kind of determination comes from. When they offer you a choice between the axe and renouncing God, it’s like asking a junkie to quit cold turkey.

Sometimes I have strange sensations when I’m out there; partly physical and partly spiritual. I can literally feel the Holy Spirit doing things in my body. Sometimes I feel a strange pressure in part of my skull, as if something is being moved. It’s very odd. I don’t understand it.

Very often, I’ll feel God’s power lifting me up, like a stimulant. I’ll go in there feeling down and lethargic, and something will rise up inside me and make me sit up in the chair. It doesn’t come from me. I can’t tell when it will come. Usually, it starts to happen after about twenty minutes of praying in the Spirit.

I can’t handle stimulants any more. I can’t drink a cup of coffee or smoke a cigar. I’ll stay up all night. I can drink Coke and tea, in limited amounts, but that’s about it. Something inside me is making me alert and energetic. It’s as if the Holy Spirit is a drug, and he doesn’t want other drugs taking his place.

I was right when I started to believe that Christians do not emphasize the supernatural enough. We talk about character and hard work, but that’s stupid. Heathens can have character and do hard work. If these things were what mattered, Asians would be the most spiritually advanced people on earth, but they’re not. Christianity can’t break 2% in Japan. The Bible doesn’t tell us how hard Jesus and Moses worked. It tells us that God did powerful things through them by supernatural means. Not as a reward for what they did, but for what they believed.

The other day I was reading the Gospels, and I noticed that Jesus defined God’s work. He said, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” That amazed me, even though I had surely seen it before. Obviously, you have to try to do good things, but the real work is done by your faith. To this day, all man’s technology and effort can’t part the Red Sea and dry the bed, but the faith of Moses did it in an instant.

Christians hate this message. We are just like the ancient Jews. We LOVE talking about how hard it is. We love tightening up our little pinched faces and wagging our fingers at people and telling them nothing comes easily. We love citing the passages about the persecutions that will come to us. What a great way to persuade people to run from God! Give up everything you like doing, hang out with stiff, uptight people, and live in constant defeat! Who wants to sign up?

We act this way because we’re arrogant. We want to think we do things for God. Secretly, we want to think he owes us. We love thinking we’re better than THOSE people…the ones who don’t sacrifice and pray and do. But Jesus said we would come to him at the end and point to the good deeds we had done, and he would tell us he had never KNOWN us. He wants us to take on HIS projects, not ours, and he wants us to succeed at them by HIS power. That only comes through the Holy Spirit.

Think about Samson. What did he do to deserve his strength? Let’s make a list. He chased heathen women. He violated his Nazirite oath by handling unclean things. He married a woman who worshiped Dagon. Yet God gave him the strength to kill a thousand men in one fight. God remained with him until he voluntarily gave up the source of his supernatural power. If God only gave power to people who consistently did right, he would glorify us and not himself. Over and over in the Bible, we see God giving assistance and power to people who forsake other gods and admit they need his help.

God resists the proud but gives success to the humble. How can you be humble if you think you’ve earned God’s help? Seriously, now.

So anyway, things are getting stranger and stranger, and I am seeing more power and change. I only wish I could put other people on the same track. I keep a diary of things I think God has said to me, and the other night, I felt that he had told me this: “I no longer have needs; I only have desires.” I think that’s true. My health is good. I enjoy life. I have things to do. I am not worried about money. God heals me. He gives me his help every day. Usually, when I pray for something for myself, it’s something I really want to have, not something I actually need. That’s great, but it seems to me that if I’m stabilized, I should be able to devote considerable strength to helping other people who are still in trouble.

The biggest obstacle I’ve found is people’s insistence that they already know the way. Nobody wants to hear that God wants them to believe more and do less. Some people want to drive. Others derive a perverse pleasure from pushing the car. “Look at me, pushing the car in the hot sun, all sweaty and holy! I’m so wonderful! Thank you, God, for making me so great!” Personally, I would rather admit I’m a nothing and enjoy the air conditioning.

I have some friends who listen. The worst thing I can say about them is that they’re just like me. They develop a good routine of praying in the Spirit, and their lives improve fast. Then something distracts them, and like a manic depressive who forgets his lithium, they stop praying. And things go downhill. Then someone has to remind them how it works, so they’ll get back to prayer. It’s frustrating, dealing with people who are no better than you are.

God compares us to bits of clay on a potter’s wheel. That’s funny. If you think about it, a potter’s wheel is actually a lathe for clay, and the cutting tool is the Holy Spirit.

I hope I haven’t offended anyone, but I probably have. I hope the people I haven’t offended will take this and run with it.

Meet God, Over by the Band Saw

The Garage of Blues is turning into a real sanctuary. I opened it up and made it a place where I can work and even just hang out comfortably, and now I find myself going out there in the evenings to pray.

I keep telling people to pray in tongues. I keep telling them it will build their faith and change their lives. Every once in a while, a little voice tells me I might be wrong. But it keeps WORKING and WORKING and WORKING. Maybe it only works for a few years in a row!

I thought the garage would be a place where I could use my talents and spend time with friends. That was not the real purpose of the place. I keep my hideous camo backpack chairs out there, and I listen to Julie True and Grace Williams, and I pray for long periods. I am drawn to it. Finally, I feel like I’m spending enough time in prayer. And over the last week or two, amazing things have happened. I’ve felt power running through me. Faith has poured through me like water through a fire house, and I know it didn’t come from me.

I haven’t written much about the ridiculous lawsuits I faced a couple of years back. I am not interested in stimulating the plaintiff further. But I can tell you one interesting thing. I knew they weren’t going anywhere.

When I looked at the first complaint–I am not going to insult the plaintiff’s skills here–all I am willing to say is that I did not see it as a threat. As a lawyer, I saw nothing there that I thought was worthy of concern. Read into that what you will. The same thing is true of the complaint in the second suit.

Strangely, though, I went through periods of anxiety. I was sure I had nothing to fear–intellectually, I was sure–but sometimes I was worried anyway. It drove me to pray. It helped motivate me to find a church. One day, I was driving home from the grocery store, and I decided to pray about the latest lawsuit, and suddenly I felt faith gushing through me. I grabbed the center console of my truck, because I felt as though I would be swept away. I had to hang on in order to keep my balance, even though I was sitting.

My faith told me I was in the clear. It was a shocking experience. It was strange and unexpected, and I knew the power didn’t come from me. And it turned out my faith was right. In fact, God answered some very specific prayers about this situation later, and he did it in front of my father, whom I have been trying to reach for God. It was nothing less than astonishing.

Why tell you this? Because it demonstrates what prayer in tongues does. It’s like putting air in a compressor. Faith isn’t just belief. It’s a supernatural substance. It leaves you and goes to do its work when you pray, just like air powering an air tool. When you pray in tongues, you build up a supply of faith, or maybe you just widen the channel through which it travels. Then later, when you pray with your understanding, that faith is on tap. It will come out and surprise you. It will bully your doubts and fears. You have to experience it to know what I mean.

It may not happen until you’ve been praying in tongues for months or years; you shouldn’t expect to get it the first day. But it does happen. And now it’s happening to me several times a week, in my garage. It actually scares me sometimes. I want it. Don’t doubt that. But it’s unnerving when God manifests himself boldly. It’s rewarding, and it’s also humbling, because it reminds you that there really is a God up there who sees the stupid things you do.

I’m getting a new lathe. The old Clausing isn’t cutting it. So to speak. The search has wasted a lot of my time. I get obsessive when I have to spend a big sum, and I shop a lot. I was tired of being caught up in the quest. Last week, in the garage, I prayed for God to bring me the machine I needed, at a good, but not predatory, price. If you believe in the Golden Rule, you should not go out of your way to pay people as little as possible. I finally realized that a few weeks back.

A lathe is an insignificant thing. It’s not a new leg or relief from blindness. It’s something that brings me pleasure, like a new pistol. I don’t really need it. You would not expect God to be highly motivated to bring me one. Nonetheless, I got that same blast of faith as I was praying. It shook me; literally.

That was Thursday. On Friday, I got a surprise email from a machine salesman I had been talking to. For some reason, his company had knocked 10% off the price of a lathe that interested me, and they had removed some stuff I did not want, and they had added things I did want. Not for me. For the general public. They put it on Ebay. The salesman found out after the fact. I knew this was the best deal I was likely to see for months. It was much better than it sounds, because of the expensive accessories that were added and subtracted. I prayed about it, and I felt like I had the go-ahead, so I pounced.

I have no idea why they cut the price. They could just as easily have sold it for full value.

If God will send faith through me to help me find an extravagant toy, what will he do when I have a real problem? It’s pretty exciting to think about it. We don’t understand how good God is. We can’t help but underestimate him.

I don’t have time or a good enough memory to list all the other improbable things God has done for me after sudden bursts of faith, but believe me, it’s more than lawsuits and machine tools.

During my time in the garage, he has sent faith through me for some other things, so I am waiting and watching.

I should not be surprised that God helped me out with something I didn’t need. My church has its faults, but our pastor was right when he told us this: God responds to faith, not need. Think of all the Jews who cried out to him during the Holocaust. Who could have needed him more? Yet they were not saved. How many children die of cancer every year? How many rapes are permitted to occur? Think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were full of women, old people, pets, and babies.

God is the personification of compassion and justice. If need were what counted, the world would be a much safer place. The Bible tells us faith, not need, is accounted to us as righteousness. I can’t defend it or explain it. I am not God. But because I am not God, and I know my place, I will not criticize it.

I get things I don’t deserve, and God withholds bad things I do deserve. That is the reality of my life. I am not gloating. I’m stating the remarkable facts. Over time, it’s becoming more consistent. I don’t claim I’m immune to adversity, but he truly does take extraordinary care of me, and I believe he will do it for you, if you do what I do. It’s not a matter of permanently ceasing from sin. It’s not a matter of doing great numbers of good deeds or of being exceptionally virtuous. Those are all wonderful things to aspire to, and you should try to be good, but faith is what makes the wheels move.

People tell me I’m wrong, and that life is not supposed to be easy. But Jesus said his burden WAS easy. Christians will encounter persecution and mistreatment, but we get victory. Look at Jesus himself. He was persecuted all his life, and people tried to kill him on a number of occasions. Until the time when God was ready to give him up–for his own purpose–he was safe, and he had inner peace.

I don’t think I’m wrong. I think this is the way I’m supposed to live. Maybe one day God will let people who hate me take a hand in sending me to paradise, but I don’t think I’m going to live in defeat and suffering in the meantime. I think I’m going to win when I should lose.

Of anyone who would offer to correct me, I would ask, “What is your testimony? How many healings have you had? How many visions? How much peace do you have? How often does God’s overwhelming presence–not a mind-manufactured feeling of peace, but his supernatural, palpable presence–come to you in a week?” If nothing supernatural is happening in your life, you’re not living in God’s power. You’re trying to do it on your own. You’re living on pride and portraying it as a deep understanding of how undeserving you are. The fact that you’re undeserving does not mean God doesn’t want you to have it. What if he took that attitude toward salvation?

If it makes you happy to make pilgrimages on your bloody knees, and to live in poverty, and to talk about all the things of which you deprive yourself, so be it, but you should know that you’re really saying God owes you. God doesn’t owe me a thing. I get things I don’t deserve, all the time. I can’t be aware of more than a tiny fraction of the things he does for me, but even that fraction is overwhelming. I am a charity case. A trust-fund baby. I am only too glad to say so. There is no way I can earn this.

Why do you think the angels and the dead praise God incessantly? Because they were told to? Because they’re afraid? Of course not. It’s because you can’t be near him without being blessed. We say God is good, but do we really know what it means? It doesn’t just mean he never sins. It means he never stops doing good things for others, and he always does far more than we deserve or expect. The God who ordered us to go the extra mile goes the extra light year. If he didn’t, he would be like the teachers who laid heavy burdens on people, yet refused to touch them with their little fingers. He would be a hypocrite. Does that sound like God to you? If he asked anything of us, it’s because he was already doing it for us, himself.

Try it yourself. Try it for a week. No charge. Nothing lost. I won’t give you a money-back guarantee, because money is not going to change hands. Just do it. If it doesn’t work, go be an atheist. I’ve been getting results, and so have other people who have listened to me. I don’t think your experience will be any different.

Get With the Program

I haven’t written in a long time. Sorry. Back in the dim past, I thought this blog might be my ticket to a writing career, and apart from that, I just enjoyed the work. I got to know a lot of interesting people. I got myself on national TV. I felt that I had a voice. That was swell, but I no longer feel drawn to sit here every day.

I may be having too much fun in real life to allow me to devote myself to blogging. I’m getting to do so many things I’ve always wanted to do; I can’t tell you how wonderful it is.

Things I used to fail at suddenly work. Doors are opening. Problems are fading. My hope keeps increasing.

I keep seeing the answers to my prayers, as they materialize. It’s very odd, but I’ve learned that I have to pay attention, because very often, God will give me exactly what I asked for, but because I couldn’t anticipate the form it would take, I won’t recognize it immediately. You have to recognize these things and thank God and glorify him, if you want them to keep coming.

I had a dream–not the kind you have when you sleep, but a hope–that I would some day have a big garage-like room where I could put my tools and my musical instruments, and I wanted it to have seating space. I wanted it to be a place where I could do the things that I do. Creating things. Fixing things. Playing music. Socializing with friends. One day not long ago, I looked around my garage, and I realized God had already given me a small version of it.

The garage used to be out of control, and there were things I could not get to work right. The milling machine had some problems I couldn’t figure out. I couldn’t find a decent air dryer for the compressor. The lathe lacked tooling and threading options. I enjoyed the garage, but it didn’t work as it should have. I prayed for God to help me organize it and to help me get the tools working as they should.

Suddenly, the clutter is disappearing. There is space to work. I have an air conditioner. The air dryer is installed. Both compressors work, and I have a hose reel on each. The table saw and router are ready to go at a moment’s notice. The drill press and band saw are on wheeled bases so I can use them whenever I want. The workbench is positioned where it should be, so several people can work there at once. The mill is fixed. I’m working on choosing a better lathe. The scrap pile, which was like a beast I could not tame, is about to be subdued. I couldn’t get this stuff going on my own, but now it’s happening.

I’m also having barbecues. My friends and I have great food and good times, and we spend time in prayer and talk about God. It unifies us and helps us.

I think I have the guitar figured out. I’m using fingerpicks now, like Freddie King, and I’m even playing the banjo to get my picking skills back.

The guitar I started last year is finally nearing completion. Look at this.

It’s going to be really beautiful, not to mention unique. I couldn’t get it done on my own. All it lacks now is shellac, nitro, and hardware. I already have the HVLP guns to finish it. It’s moving right along.

I don’t believe in the TBN prosperity gospel AS PREACHED. I do not believe we’re all supposed to be rich, or that God gives us money in exchange for paying off Kenneth Copeland. I don’t believe the self-help gospel, either. There is a big difference between a man of faith and a man of positive thinking. But I know–I KNOW–that God will give you good things if you get into his will. He DOES heal. He DOES open doors. He DOES give you the desires of your heart. Not because you wrote checks to Benny Hinn or Steve Munsey, but because you prayed in the Spirit, helped the needy, fasted, stood on the word, and put God first in your life.

This life is not supposed to be miserable. Your body is supposed to be an embassy; a piece of heaven itself. Heaven’s laws, not earth’s laws, are supposed to rule your life. You’re going to have a certain number of problems, because the earth is a battlefield, and you’re a combatant. You can’t live here without being affected. But you are supposed to live in victory. That, I’m sure of.

For me, all this has flowed from praying in tongues. It put a foundation under my life, and everything else grew from it. It may not conform to your doctrine. I’m not talking about doctrine, though. I’m talking about what my God has done for me. There is a ton of support for it in the Bible, but you pretty well have to be full of the Spirit to see it, and if you choose, it’s very easy to deny it. At the moment, I don’t feel like writing a term paper to support my observations, but if you try what I’ve done, you will see whether or not I’m right.

God told me about this over 20 years ago, and I still walked away. I paid the price. I should have been married and doing something fulfilling by now. Instead I wandered in blindness. I got involved with a completely inappropriate and hopeless woman who would have ruined my life (she gave it a good try), had God permitted the relationship to continue. I fiddled with career moves that were doomed for lack of blessing. But now I am fortunate enough–sufficiently blessed–to see redemption in the time I have left. There is still quite a bit of toothpaste in the tube, and God is making the most of it for me.

I won’t complain. I caused my own problems. And things are going extremely well now. I feel like a young man. I have energy. I don’t have pains. I have no prescriptions. I don’t wear glasses or sweat about what I eat. I can lift the things I need to lift. I don’t get back aches or sore feet.

I don’t sit around wondering if this is all there is or why I should go on. Every morning is Christmas morning. Life is a succession of undeserved gifts.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m gloating. I’m not. I’m just amazed at God’s power and generosity.

God is going to take me out of this place. My faith tells me I’m headed north, to a place with a Garage of Blues bigger than this one. It will be dedicated to him, as my current garage is, as will the rest of the property. The whole place will be a sanctuary. A place of peace and rest. Wait and see.

This weekend I’ll be cooking again. I’m smoking a Boston butt, and I’ll be making fries fried twice in beef fat. I’ll also make cole slaw and a mango cheesecake. The cheesecake is beyond description. I use my own mangoes, which I freeze. You can’t get mangoes like this in a store.

Friends will come by, and we’ll start the day with the blues and good conversation. Later on, we’ll have Christian music and prayer, and we’ll let the Holy Spirit lead. It should be great. It’s really God’s party, so I am counting on him to make it work.

I better get up and do something worthwhile. I just felt like providing an update. If you like what you see, try it yourself. I will help if I can.

Like Dancing With a Fat Lady With a Square Head

Whee. What fun I just had. I decided to move the compressor over near the machine-tool wiring, and I put the vertical band saw where the compressor used to be.

The compressor is the size of a refrigerator, and it weighs 500 pounds. Most of the weight is on top, so if it starts to fall, anyone around it stands a good chance of being turned into a stain.

I could not remember how I got it where it was, but there were several pieces of 1/2″ electrical conduit under it, so I could tell I must have tried to roll it on them, sort of like the old photos of slaves moving blocks for the pyramids.

Every time I move a big machine, I forget how stable they are. I lose all sense of what it takes to turn them over. This makes for a very nerve-wracking beginning. Today I had to lean the machine back to pull the isolation pads out from under it, and I kept thinking it would keep going and end up horizontal.

Those pads are crap, incidentally. Save yourself some money. Cut pieces out of an old tire. The pads deteriorate for no apparent reason. The ones I have are falling apart.

I tried moving the machine without the pipes, because I was afraid I’d push it over and die in an embarrassing way. I got it to move about a foot before giving up. It didn’t seem possible that the pipes would help; the machine’s feet are small, so you would expect it to come off of the pipes before going very far. Surprisingly, you can shove it about five inches at a time, which is more than enough to get the job done, and you can even turn it as long as one foot is on a pipe.

I was sweating pretty badly, even though the AC was on. Later I realized it had reset itself to 77 degrees instead of the usual 70. Swell.

I put the compressor behind my work stool, by my bench. Now when the 5-HP Baldor explodes into action like a MOAB, it will be two feet from my head. That will be nice.

I could just make a long cord for it and experiment with new places. I may do that. I already have a nice piece of 50-amp RV cord.

It’s funny; people talk about the necessity of using huge wires on machine tools, but the motor on my milling machine has what appear to be 12-gauge wires on it, and the wires on my 5 HP compressor motor are thin, too. I can see that it’s important to go overboard in the walls of a house, especially when wires are packed into small spaces that retain heat, but I’m not afraid of a nice extension cord, especially when the manufacturer says 50 amps are no problem.

The compressor is going to have a 3-prong plug and its own 220 receptacle. I have to get that taken care of. Everything must be up to code. This is Karl Goebbels, after all. I mean Coral Gables. I don’t want to get shipped off to a gulag.

I’m hoping the 2-HP air conditioner and the 5-HP compressor won’t mind sharing 40 amps. If they do, I’ll have to have the wiring upgraded, but that won’t be a big deal, since the existing circuit has blazed a trail any electrician can follow.

Tomorrow, God willing, the air dryer arrives. I’ll mount the hose reel on the wall above the compressor, and I’ll finally have compressed air I can use. I may go nuts and buy a cheap blasting cabinet.

My mobile bases are on the way from Grizzly, so I’ll be able to move stuff around and get the ultimate ergonomic and aesthetic solution. I can’t budge my drill press. It’s supposed to weigh around 200 pounds, but I added a sliding table and a big drill press vise, and I’m storing an 8″ rotary table and an 8″ chuck on the base.

Guess I could try the pipes. I’ll have to move it eventually, because it’s not going to jump on a mobile base when I whistle. My hoist is nearly directly over it (because I used it to put the drill press in the garage), so I guess I can lift it.

I’m so glad I didn’t go with my original plan, which was to run new conduit over the roof trusses, 12 feet in the air.

I hope I don’t have to move the compressor again, but very little is certain in this life.

The Garage of Blues is getting so cool, I’m afraid one day I’ll show up, and they won’t let me in.

For the longest time, I’ve been dreaming of a big garage-type room where I can relax and conceivably even entertain. God is giving me a foretaste of it. See Psalm 37, verse 4. He really does the things he says he’ll do.

I think I’ll go look at the mess I just made, without making any effort to clean it up.

Wheels

I’m anxiously awaiting my Ebay NOS refrigerated air dryer. I’ve been trying to figure out how to work it into the decor of the Garage of Blues.

Right now, things are working well. The vertical band saw and drill press form sort of an island in the middle of the garage, the mill is in a corner, the lathe is along a wall, and the table saw is on the other side of the room. The big compressor is between the garage doors. It’s a nice, ergonomic arrangement, but with the arrival of the dryer, things will have to be rearranged.

I have two 240 circuits out there. One is 60 amps. It’s for the table saw, vertical band saw, and both big machine tools. The other is 40 amps. Right now, the air conditioner is the only thing on that circuit. I was thinking of walking the compressor over to the machine side of the room and making a cord and plug for it, so it could go into the table saw socket. But that won’t work, because it has to be able to run at the same time as the plasma cutter, which has to be on the table saw circuit. So it looks like I have to put the compressor on the air conditioner circuit. I still think a socket is a good idea, though. Hardwiring costs you versatility, and I can’t think of any advantages it provides.

I guess I need a new socket on the machine wall, hooked up to the air conditioner line. I’ll have to put my compressor where the rolling tool chest is now. To keep easy access to the tool chest, I’ll have to put it where the drill press is. So the band saw goes where the compressor is now, and the drill press goes to the band saw’s location.

This adds up to a sad conclusion: I need mobile bases. I welded a mobile base together for the band saw, but I stupidly listened to some guy who said it would be a problem if it was too tall, so I fabricated caster mounts that would keep the height down. They work, but they’re flimsy, and the saw is hard to move. I covered the base with truck bed paint, so as far as I know, there is no practical way to clean it off, cut it up, and redo the casters. I don’t want to weld something that has flaming plastic all over it. It’s a big waste of metal, but I don’t know what else to do.

I’m going to have to put a base on the drill press, and I need a better base on the band saw. That will let me move stuff pretty freely, and it will make the garage much more versatile. So it’s time to take a stiff drink, log onto the Grizzly site, and place an order.

I’m not worried about the compressor circuit. I already have unused Romex lying around, plus unused conduit, so all I need are a socket and plug.

I also have to spend some loot on the truck. It looks like it has a camber problem. On a truck like this, you can’t adjust the front end camber using the tools they have at ordinary car shops. You have to find a place that does frame bending and so on. I’ve been getting alignments about every ten minutes, and the truck has been eating tires all the same. The folks at Firestone finally let me know that they couldn’t do anything about it.

There are a couple of shops in town that can do this. They cater to pimps, fake pimps, professional athletes, rappers, and low-riders. Thank God we have so many vain people in Miami. If you want to put 48″ rims on your pink and chartreuse Subaru, these guys will twist the frame and suspension parts to make it happen.

I have no idea how I ended up with a camber problem. The truck was used when I bought it. God only knows what the previous owner did. I’m going to make them check and make sure he didn’t add any stupid parts to the suspension.

I’m kind of disturbed by the amount of cash I’m laying out (the air conditioner also crapped out), but I think God has a purpose in all this. With these little problems, and with other unexpected needs for cash outlay, I think he’s reminding me not to be stingy. Not with others, and not with myself.

I don’t consider myself a fundamentally generous person. I come from stingy mountain people. In Eastern Kentucky, if someone gives a waiter a tip, they expect a free car wash. This is just how it is, and I am not immune to the influence. I try to listen when God tells me to give, but if I hadn’t drawn closer to God, I don’t think I’d be giving anybody much of anything.

Jesus told us we had to love each other. That obligation involves practical help as well as prayer. You have to give other people your time, money, goods, and so on. If God gives you a lot, he expects you to give a lot. And if that seems like a bummer, consider the people he isn’t blessing. They don’t lend or give, but then they don’t receive, either. I always remind myself: B.B. King says you have to pay the cost to be the boss, and it’s true. The people God puts in charge and makes prosperous have to help everyone else. The alternative to being a giver and lender is to be a borrower and charity recipient. It’s clear which is better.

This is a topic you can’t discuss much without inadvertently glorifying yourself, so I’ll leave it at that. I’m not getting into my own experiences. I would advise people not to feel bad when God requires them to give, because it suggests he wants to bless you.

Charismatic churches have turned giving into an onerous obligation, and they claim it’s all about giving to ministries. They occasionally mention the poor, but mainly, it’s, “Give me that thousand-dollar ‘seed gift’ so God can buy me a third 707.” They lie and manipulate to get money, and then they spend it on garbage. They lay guilt trips on their flocks, while they’re spending foolishly and putting churches in debt. I’m all done with that. God talks a lot about helping people in need. The stuff about giving to ministries is pretty sparse, once you get past the business about temple sacrifices (which have never applied to Christians). It’s great to give money to your church, but it should be because the Holy Spirit told you to do it, not because Steve Munsey made up a fundraising fable.

The other day I found out our church spent the cost of a Mercedes on eight annoying lights for the stage. I’m not exaggerating about the price.

There are a lot of things we actually need. We have debt. The person who told me about the lights saw that I was shocked and offended. Then he started to explain that someone high up in the church used to be a lighting guy. I raised my hand and told him to stop. That was all the explanation I needed.

Thank God he wasn’t a hockey player. We might have an ice rink.

These lights are extremely ugly, and they shine bright beams directly into the eyes of the congregation. Somehow Billy Graham got along without them. If the church was turned over to me tomorrow morning, they’d be on Craigslist before lunch. I don’t get it. We have a mortgage to pay off. I don’t think the Holy Spirit needs those lights. It’s not like he’s trying to land on an aircraft carrier at night.

I have learned not to give anything to the church–nothing beyond tithing–unless the Holy Spirit sends me orders on engraved stationery. I have to be a good steward, and I’m tired of seeing things rot and go to waste. Giving to other people is way more important, and it does much more good.

I’m also learning that financial foolishness is normal for churches. The people who run churches are like government workers; they don’t have real jobs. They don’t have to produce a service or produce and make a profit. They ask for money. They receive it. They spend it, either stupidly or wisely. Then they ask for more. If they waste money, it doesn’t affect their pay, unless the congregation knows about it. Charismatic churches tend to have zero accountability to their flocks, so people have no idea where the money goes, so they aren’t likely to complain. This must be the reason why churches are so corrupt and mismanaged.

Here’s a story I heard from a musician. He went to a church near me. Not my church. He was poor. A paying job came up. He told the church people he had to take the job. They berated him and tried to make him feel guilty. They said he had to play at a service instead. Remember now, as a tither, he pays their salaries, and they’re telling him not to work!

When the service rolled around, it turned out it didn’t conflict with his job. He also found out they knew it would not conflict when they were tormenting him.

The church had a singer who was working on their lights. He wanted to sing, he was talented…they had him doing lights. Typical. The church folks told him they wanted to give him a high-paying job as a singer. The condition was that he throw my musician friend out of the band. Nice. He refused, probably because he had some inkling of what the Lord would want him to do.

If you’re a Christian who works or volunteers in a church, stories like this will come to you, and you will learn that well-run churches are either nonexistent or very rare.

The problem is that people in leadership have no faith in God. You’re supposed to do what God tells you to do, regardless of whether it seems logical, and then you wait for God to bless you. We should be talking about the Holy Spirit and living in his power. We should be letting God draw people and money to churches. Instead, we rely on gimmicks and manipulation. Obviously, we don’t really believe God will back us up. We feel we have to “help” him. So the flesh takes over. Then you end up with eight lights that cost as much as a condominium.

There’s a positive side to knowing that churches are run badly. We’re taught that “church” doesn’t mean a building. It means the people who gather there. We should take that seriously. We should also remember that it doesn’t mean the people who are in charge. They’re just part of the whole. God is not a respecter of persons, even if most churches forget that. We use the word “VIP” in my church, and that’s really discouraging, because it shows our priorities are not in line with God’s.

My current take on all this is that as long as I’m doing good in my church, and I’m meeting and interacting with good Christians, the church is serving its purpose. The other stuff–what goes on in the offices and on the stage–may or may not be of God, and it may have very little to do with what God sees as the church’s purpose. The things sincere people do, under the radar, far from the stage, may be the primary functions of the church.

Oddly, I have become much more content with my church. If a worldly motivational speaker shows up hocking DVDs and pretending to be a guest pastor, I’ll just ignore him and wait for him to shut up and leave. If Steve Munsey comes in and claims all the Jews went to Jerusalem on Yom Kippur, I’ll smile and do my job, even though I know he’s wrong. I’ve met wonderful people. I’ve learned great things. Powerful things. I’ve gotten closer to God. Sometimes the people on the stage have helped. Much of the time, they have not, and I’ve moved forward because of someone else. That’s good enough. It doesn’t really matter where the growth comes from.

I still can’t believe I need new mobile bases.

Festival Seating

Let’s see if I can recap all the stuff that has gone on since my last post.

I’m ramping up the machining. I quit for a long time. My milling machine was acting up, and I was irritated because the lathe I blew a pile of cash on turned out to be incapable of cutting metric threads. Now I’m back. I’ve been writing about this.

I’m trying to choose a new lathe. The old Clausing I bought doesn’t cut the mustard. No metric threads, overpriced and rare tooling…I’m done.

I’ve been looking at all sorts of stuff. The most appealing new machine is the Grizzly G0509G gunsmith lathe. It’s a 16 x 40 with a 2″ bore, so it would be a long time before I came up with a project that wouldn’t fit on it. It has higher tolerances than other Chinese Grizzlys. It has NSK bearings, not the La Choy or Joyce Chen or whatever brand that goes in most Grizzlys.It cuts a million different threads. It has a short headstock suitable for gunsmithing. Everyone loves it. It’s a good safe bet.

Still, I am considering older machines, provided they’re in really good shape.

This week I found a Mori Seiki on Craigslist for $3800. I was stunned. It’s not far away. I emailed the owner the same day the ad appeared, and naturally, I haven’t heard a peep. Very annoying. I assume some dealer pounced on it as he was typing up the ad. I’ll probably see it listed at AM Metalmaq in Hialeah, for $15,000. They always have astronomical prices.

The Mori Seiki is 17″ by something. I don’t know what. It’s an MS-1250G. If it’s in good shape, it will last longer than I will. The headstock is long, so it’s not ideal for gunsmithing. But it’s real quality, and if the bed isn’t too long, it will fit in the garage.

Same guy is selling a Webb lathe and a Webb mill. He has good taste.

I finally got an air dryer for the compressor. I wanted one that would do at least 20 CFM, and I was scared of the Chinese ones on Ebay. Some guy listed an Arrow Pneumatic 20 CFM dryer on Ebay, NIB, for $410. That’s an acceptable price as-is. New, a dryer with this capacity costs well over a thousand dollars. Even an Eaton would be a four-figure buy.

The seller insisted on using freight, which is expensive. I couldn’t get him to respond to messages about using UPS instead. This is a very small machine; freight is overkill. He wanted $155 to ship it. I got disgusted and made a lowball offer, subtracting the difference between freight and UPS. Surprisingly, he jumped on it, and when the freight bill came, it was $120. I would have been happy to pay the asking price. So because he didn’t feel like answering my messages, he ate a big loss and gave it to some freight company.

This will allow me to use the compressor the way it should be used. I don’t like to use the plasma cutter because of the water problem. It also discourages me from painting and blasting. I had checked into cheap inline dryers, but they seemed like the chintzy, problem-filled approach, so I let the whole business drop. I have seen okay deals on used refrigerated units, but most of them are huge, and they run on 220, and I just didn’t want to get involved in any more giant, worn-out machinery.

Hopefully, next week, I’ll be firing the new one up.

I am working on a 304 stainless garlic press on the lathe. This metal is supposed to be a pain to machine, but it’s working almost as easily as aluminum. Go figure. The press is basically a piston with holes to let the garlic out. As far as I know, it is literally impossible to buy a decent garlic press made in a factory. The steel ones are wimpy. The pot metal ones snap. The aluminum ones stain the food. I’ve had enough.

I was working on the bore the other day when the lathe went nuts. It started making horrible noises, and I shut it down. The motor belt had come apart.

When I looked it over, I found that I had mounted the motor so that the motor pulley and the speed-change pulley between the motor and spindle pulley were not in the same plane. They were way off. I have no idea how I managed to do something this stupid. When I was installing the new motor, I must have taken a break and forgotten that it needed to be shifted. The setscrew in the pulley had come loose, possibly from vibration caused by the belt problem, and it had slid halfway off the motor shaft.

I had to buy a new belt, pound the pulley back into place, set the screw, and install the belt. To install the belt, I had to take the speed-change pulley off its bearings so I could slip the belt over it. What a nightmare. I was covered in grease. I shifted the motor and got everything put back together. Then someone told me I could have bought a linked belt which came apart and could be installed without removing anything.

Arrggh.

Anyway, the lathe runs more smoothly now, and I feel like an idiot.

I’m working on a follow rest. I needed to make an angled cut on the aluminum block it’s made from, and I realized the only way to do it was to use my rotary table. Then I discovered a new problem. The clamping set for my mill doesn’t fit the rotab. It’s too big. And I really don’t like lifting the 120-pound rotab from the floor to the mill for little jobs. I decided to add a third rotab to my collection. I wanted a 6″ job, but for reasons known only to Enco, the 8″ ones are cheaper, so I got myself one, and it’s ready to be put to work.

I also got lathe dogs, radius gages (“gauges”?) and telescoping gages/gauges/whatever. Little stuff like this can really slow you down when you don’t have it.

The garage is turning out to be a gift from God. I used to call it the Disco Garage because it had a TV and Stereo. Now that I’ve opened it up and organized it to some degree, adding an old MP3 player with hundreds of CDs, I’ve rechristened it the Garage of Blues.

I ordered two hideous camo backpack chairs from Amazon. They discounted them heavily because no one would buy them. When they arrived, I found that the seats were about ten inches off the ground. I couldn’t send them back, because the shipping cost more than the chairs. I thought it was a terrible buy, but I put them in the garage, and now I love them. I turn down the lights, open a Coke, put on Freddie King, and drift off into a state of total bliss. I really can’t describe the peace I feel out there. There is something about the smell of concrete and tools and oil that does things to a man. It’s better than Valium. I assume. I don’t know much about Valium.

I stuck my creaky old laptop out there, and I have it on wireless. Now I can listen to the blues, machine off and on, and post crap to Facebook without leaving the garage. It’s paradise.

Here’s a photo. I guess it can’t capture the ambience, but seriously, I sit out there thanking God over and over.

Speaking of God, I saw Perry Stone on TBN this week. I can’t believe they let him host their show. TBN is largely about money and ego, and Perry Stone is starting to be highly critical of the hairspray-and-Mercedes crowd. He is saying the same things I keep saying to my friends. This week he had Paul Zink and Damon Thomas on his show, and they started saying the same stuff! They FLOGGED the moneychangers. It was glorious. It showed me that the things I’ve been saying really do come from God.

Damon Thomas said we use the term “megachurch” to describe a place that’s full of people (and therefore tithe money and glory for preachers), instead of focusing on the presence of the Holy Spirit. Perry Stone said we should be looking for the “mega-presence.” They laid into preachers who sit around and brag about attendance, and who spew comforting, politically correct, Dr. Phil-type garbage instead of introducing people to God. It was wonderful. I often tell people I know that we are hearing a lot of Dr. Phil nonsense, and Damon Thomas actually mentioned Dr. Phil, the same way I do! Amazing.

My church goes way overboard on the self-help stupidity, and we have become obsessed with filling seats and getting tithes and offerings. We talk very little about supernatural things, even though we’re charismatic. We bring idiots in, and they teach an inferior version of the self-help that’s available from secular sources. We bring Steve Munsey in, and he teaches his ridiculous lies about the Seven Blessings of This or That Jewish Holiday, and we put up with it because when people hear it, they give money. It still amazes me that no one has called him out on his bogus claim that all the Jews in Israel went to Jerusalem on Yom Kippur. Anyone who can work Google can prove that’s a lie. And any observant Jew can tell you there were no extravagant money offerings, except those people gave on their own initiative. The offerings were generally small, and God scaled them down for poor people.

Watching TBN, I felt ashamed for not being more outspoken. God put me here to be the salt of the earth, and although I am definitely saying enough to annoy people, I am not blunt enough. The salt is not having its intended effect. So I decided to say exactly what I think from now on, when it comes to things that happen in our church. We have been taught to condemn people who say anything critical, and it’s easy to get caught up in that. Legitimate godly criticism has been compared to gossip and grumbling. But it’s not. Find me a Biblical leader who sucked up and pleased men, and who never criticized. There is no such person. But there were plenty of bootlickers who earned God’s wrath.

Obviously, if we teach people to pray in the Spirit and walk by faith, they will receive success and healing and happiness, and that will draw people to the church. This other stuff is filth and ignorance. It’s misdirection. It will never work. I keep praying for God to change my church, and he’s going to do it. My faith tells me that. If I get on people’s nerves, good. I pay the church’s bills. It doesn’t pay mine. I’m not going to worry about the consequences.

We tell people to live by faith, but the church itself operates without faith, according to the world’s rules. That’s no good.

On Sunday, the church tried to get people to sign a pledge, swearing to tithe. Needless to say, I didn’t fool with that. Jesus and James told us not to swear. Anything beyond yes or no is from Satan. He sees the stupid oaths we swear, and he uses them as nooses to hang us. It’s amazing that churches and ministries can’t see the obvious hypocrisy of requiring Christians to swear.

I guess they would say a pledge isn’t an oath. That would be weaseling and hair-splitting. The dictionary equates swearing and oaths and pledges.

God continues taking care of me. He gives me things I will never deserve, and he withholds the bad things I do deserve. It has very little to do with being good. It’s a reward for faith, and even that faith came from him. Anyone can have this, but they will never find it as long as preachers lack the guts to teach them. Very sad. I wish Damon Thompson had a church down here.

What else is going on? I’m building a new guitar amp. A young friend from church is coming to the Garage of Blues tomorrow, and we’re starting work on a JTM45 clone. I can’t wait.

That’s about all I have today. If any of this sounds good to you, follow my example. Pray in tongues copiously every day, and try to communicate with God in private. This is the foundation of a successful life, and everything else grows from it.

Even Solomon Couldn’t Sift Through This BS

I’m going to get rid of my annoying Clausing lathe. I was a moron to try to save pennies by buying an old lathe with no features. I want something that has a 2″ bore or bigger, and I want metric threads on tap (pun possibly intended) instead of having to perform major surgery on the lathe.

Every time I start to think I know a little bit about what I should buy, I hear a conflicting story.

When I was looking for my first lathe, I was told I had to buy “old iron.” American machine tools RULED, even when they were 300 years old and wouldn’t turn on! They were so BITCHIN’ compared to CHINESE JUNK, only a FOOL would buy anything else!

Then I bought my geriatric lathe, and I started hearing stuff like this:

It’s a cruel trick to witlessly seduce a noob into buying what was once a great machine tool that today is worn-out with broken and missing parts. For a year the poor sap will break his heart trying to get acceptable quality work from a machine that would challenge a machinist of 40 years experience. Then thoroughly dicouraged and thousands of dollars poorer he junks the lot and takes up a lesser vocation.

When a noob asks you a question and you respond from basis of experience you are undertaking a responsibility. I strongly suggest those of you with experience AND strong opinions, set aside your personal preferences and guide your protege into choices he can live with.

PM is a bit zealous on the old iron topic and many there recklessly propagandize the poor noob into believing the old worn-out American junk is superior to new, snug better quality Asian import machines. I delight in scotching their prejudices with personal experience, matching machine to task scenarios, and actual quantified data when appropiate. Tragic to say the noob has been misled in ALL machine shop message boards.

That comes from a guy named Forrest Addy, who is openly worshiped by machining-forum nerds. “PM” means the Practical Machinist forum.

Og said to go ahead and buy Chinese, but I thought the “old iron” people had a clue, so I wasted my money on the Clausing.

I’ve been looking around to see what’s available, and I’ve been thinking the Grizzly 16″ gunsmithing lathe might be a good move. It’s very cheap for this type of lathe, because it’s Chinese, but it’s hyped as having a bunch of special touches, and it looks like the hype has some ground under it. I spoke with a Grizzly tech, and he said the claims are true. It really does have special bearings and gears. It runs exceptionally smoothly. It’s a decent machine.

Shiraz Balolia, the president of Grizzly is a world-class marksman, and he had this lathe created because of his interest in gunsmithing. That’s actually true; it’s not just catalog puffery. It may look like other Chinese lathes, and it may be built in the same plant, but it has improved parts and tolerances. I find that credible, simply because I know how it is to get caught up in a fun project related to a hobby. Also, Balolia chose this lathe for his own use and kept it for a few years. As he has pointed out, he can have any lathe he wants. And you can download the specs and sample measurements from Grizzly.

While I was researching this, a very experienced machinist suggested a different lathe. It costs $2950, which is extremely low for an American 16″ lathe, and it has a sliding gap, which is the only kind of gap which can be used without messing up the lathe. Removable gaps can’t be reinserted accurately without major work or extraordinary luck. Funny how lathe makers don’t mention that in their ads. I found that out this week, so I no longer care whether I get a gap.

Here is the lathe he suggested:

That’s an ancient 16″ Leblond with a sliding gap. There are other photos. The ways are rusted. The compound is rusted even worse. There is so much rust on one of the screws, the surface appears to be eroded by maybe 1/16″. It has clearly been sitting in the rain for a good long time. But this machinist, who is respected by people I respect, said he would buy it sight unseen.

You can see why I’m puzzled. It looks like scrap iron to me. Does the motor run? Is the saddle frozen to the ways? Does it have .125″ of way wear near the spindle? Who knows? I wouldn’t go near it. But if a really good machinist says he’d buy it, who am I to discount his opinion?

I’m not going to buy a piece of junk like that. No way. But you can see how it would be hard to make it fit into my understanding of machine tools. And it makes you wonder: if something that abused and worn can be considered a good buy, what does a REAL junker look like?

I’m learning more about the machining itself. It’s pretty irritating, but it’s better than living in ignorance. Here’s an example.

There are lots of DVD teachers out there, and they give the following procedure for chucking round things in 4-jaw chucks. Stick the work in the chuck. Tighten it. Put an indicator on the part. Turn the part by hand and adjust the jaws one at a time until the runout goes away.

The old guy who suggested the Leblond says that’s wrong. If you do that, it will be okay where the indicator touches it, but farther out, it will be out of whack. So you have to wrap the base of the part in a soft sheet of metal, like copper, and…I don’t really understand this…chuck the sheet and part (chuck jaws touching sheet) and bang around on it until you get perfect alignment all the way down.

I’ve seen lots of people talk about 4-jaw chucks, and this was news to me.

I’ve also learned that you can tram a lathe using a precision angle block. This is just a precisely ground hunk of metal with two perpendicular sides. You put it on the table, put the extended quill against it, and adjust one axis until there is no light between the quill and angle block. Then you do the other side. Takes two minutes. Do this, and you’re accurate to within half a thousandth over six inches. You may want better accuracy for fly-cutting, but for 95% of what you do, this will cut the mustard, and it gives you the freedom to move your mill’s head whenever you feel like it.

The blocks are cheap on Ebay. I found a new one for $60, delivered. This should be a great help, and I can also use it on my table saw, drill press, and band saw.

I’m learning that you can always make machining easier or harder than it already is. There is no end to this stuff.

Yesterday I tried to open up the opening of the follow rest I’m making. I had a tough time trying to find a way to clamp it. I couldn’t get it to fit in the vise with the V-blocks needed to hold it at a 45° angle, so I decided to try clamping it to the table, using parallels as spacers. This is as far as I got.

I finally realized I was reinventing the wheel in order to avoid lifting my 10″ rotary table from the floor to the mill. I decided to face the risk of an episode of incontinence, and I picked the 120-lb. table up and stuck it where it needed to go. Then I learned that my clamping stuff won’t work with it. The T-slots are narrower than my mill’s slots. So I had to get a whole new clamping kit, plus several additional T-nuts. That’s on the way from Grizzly. Also ordered some lathe dogs, finally. I don’t know why some lathe dogs cost $40 and others cost $3. They seem fairly primitive. I ordered the $3 kind, so I guess I’ll learn the answer.

I realized I needed a THIRD rotary table. The tiny 4″ one won’t hold a big part, and I really don’t want to lift the big one more often than I have to. I figured 6″ would do. I checked Ebay and the other sources. Used ones are getting hard to find. I was surprised. And Asian prices are creeping up. I’m glad I bought my other tables a long time ago.

Enco has an insane pricing structure. I checked 6″ tables, and it turned out 8″ tables were considerably cheaper, so I did what I had to do. Same company. Same quality. Go figure. This happens a lot at Enco.

I keep checking lathe prices. I don’t know if I’ll go with Grizzly, but whatever I do, I’ll know a whole lot more about lathes than I did last year.

I still think you have to be an idiot to buy old American machinery that isn’t like new. Last night I realized it perverts the whole business. You buy machine tools so you can make things from metal, but then you find you spend all your time wet-nursing a senile machine that deserves to go to its final reward. Machine repair is not machining. Two different things. You can buy a car from the junkyard and make it run, but most people just want to drive, right? Same idea.

I guess if you have 40 years of machining behind you, you can make any machine work. I don’t really know. I don’t know how you can take a lathe with .005″ of wear by the chuck and flat ways 10″ away and make a straight part 15″ long. It must be magic. I can’t do it.

Don’t buy a worn-out machine unless you or some helpful buddy who lives under a mile away is a complete machining wizard. That’s probably the bottom line.

I thank God for letting me do all this incredibly cool stuff. It amazes me that I get to do so many things I’ve dreamed of.

No Reserve ‘Chute

The hunt for a better lathe continues.

This whole enterprise has me thinking about my first big power tool. About three years ago, I saw a used table saw on Craigslist. It was a Powermatic 66 set up for cutting Corian counters. It had the long Biesemeyer rails, and it came with about 16 expensive blades. Price: $500. That’s a good deal, even for an eleven-year old saw.

The problem was that it weighed about 600 pounds. I had nobody to help me move it, and my only “big” vehicle was my dad’s Ford Explorer.

Being crazy, I decided to go for it. I drove to Jupiter, Florida, early in the morning, and I met the owner at a storage facility. His business was dead, he had to get the saw out THAT DAY, and he was not going to let me check to see if it came apart for moving. And there was a surprise. When I had called about the saw, he had said something about helping me move it, but when I got there, he was wearing a back support, and he said I was on my own. I believe he was hoping I’d give up. He knew he had underpriced the saw.

Still being crazy, I gave him my $500 and got to work. He took off and said I should lock the unit when I left.

I had a Panasonic impact driver. This is a magnificent tool no one should be without. It turns just about any type of fastener easily, without stripping. I also had a socket set. I started removing screws and bolts.

I discarded the crummy plywood table he had put on the saw. That meant I just had to get the wings, rails, and motor off, to make the saw light enough to move. I got it dismantled, and then I wondered…how was I going to shove the cabinet into the Explorer? If I didn’t get it done, I was going to have to leave with everything but the saw itself, and the unit owner would get to auction off my new used tool.

There was a big pile of two-by-fours in the unit. They were cut to about five feet in length. The unit had a raised floor, about 2″ above the pavement outside. That gave me a 2″ vertical surface to brace two-by-fours against. I backed the Explorer up and put a few two-by-fours against the vertical surface, and I put the other end against the rear of the Explorer. Then I covered the two-by-fours with towels, walked the saw over to the truck, spent a moment of terror leaning it over onto the two-by-fours, and pushed.

Incredibly, the saw went up the ramp, and pretty soon it was in the truck. After that, putting all the other junk in there was a lark. I got the saw home, unloaded it on the grass so it wouldn’t bang on the driveway, put it in the garage, and assembled it. Suddenly I had the most amazing table saw in, probably, a one-mile radius.

I still had to put a new plug on the end of the cord, to match my welder’s 220 receptacle, but basically, I was done. I felt like I had jumped out of a plane with a needle, thread, and a bolt of cloth, and I had made myself a parachute on the way down.

On the way to Jupiter, I had doubted my sanity and my maturity. I was really afraid I would end up paying this guy $500 for a saw I would never be able to take home. Yet somehow, it ended up in my garage, and it has been a joy to use ever since. As I think I’ve mentioned, the other day I cut an aluminum four-by-four with it, lengthwise, and the cut was so regular from one end to the other, I could not detect any variation when I put the aluminum on the milling machine. It would have to be within one or, at most, two thousandths for that to happen. That’s a wonderful saw, people. And those blades retail for something like $200 each. I don’t know, because I have so many, I’ve never had to buy one.

Now I’ve realized my Clausing 5936 lathe–the supposed bargain–was a huge mistake. No metric threading. Unbelievably expensive replacement parts (Clausing charges $400 for a new PLASTIC lever for the front of a Clausing Colchester). More wear than the seller admitted. No brake. No clutch. Extremely scarce and expensive used accessories. It would be fine for someone who wants a CNC or ELS machine, or someone who doesn’t care about metric threads, but other than that…MISTAKE. So I’m looking for something different. And that means another episode of being intimidated by huge tools. Will it fit in the garage? Will the concrete break in half under the weight, sending the garage contents into a brand-new sinkhole? Will I have to hire illegals every time I want to change the 100-pound chuck? AM I STILL CRAZY?

Thing is, crazy though I may be, all of my tools have worked out reasonably well, in terms of space and manageability. I reorganized the garage the other day, and it’s so roomy now, I’m getting two folding chairs for guests. I love it out there.

I’m trying to make a rational choice. I’m trying to distinguish neurotic fear of big tools from reasonable concern about overdoing it.

There are so many temptations out there. Here’s an example. Most lathes have small spindle bores. Lathes have passages through their spindles, so you can put long things in the chucks and have the excess go through the head of the lathe and out the side. If you can’t get something through your spindle bore, you have to turn it over the ways. This means using a live center and God knows what else to support it. It’s inconvenient and a little bit tricky. If you have a big bore, a lot of your projects will go right in the chuck, instantly. And I recently learned that some quality lathes have 2″+ bores. But you pretty much have to go over 3000 pounds and a 14″ swing to get that.

On top of that, it seems like the selection of really nice used lathes is better when you go past 12″ in swing. I’ve found a few I’d have real confidence in, unlike the beater I got last time I shopped the used market. I found a couple which are basically new.

All of this information adds up to “bigger lathe than I originally wanted.” I started out looking at 13″ lathes, but the pickings aren’t that great.

I keep going to the garage with a tape measure, trying to see what I can realistically fit out there. One problem with big lathes is that they tend to be a little over 3 feet wide, not including handles which project from the front. You can’t put them directly against the wall, either. You really need a few inches, at least behind the pedestals, so you can remove crap and adjust the leveling screws. So you need to sacrifice maybe 46″, measuring from the wall out. I think my current lathe comes out about 33″.

It will fit, but when I consider going for it, I ask myself, “Am I being brave, like I was with the Powermatic, or am I just nuts?”

Asking other guys with tools is not helpful. They’re worse than I am. They’ll say things like, “I had problems moving around my 22″ lathe until I moved the living room furniture out in the yard. You might try that.” I know a hobbyist who has a JIG BORER. “What’s a jig borer?”, you’re asking yourself. Right. Exactly. This guy bought a one-ton machine to do something so obscure, most people don’t even know what it is. He has a 14″ Nardini lathe the size of a Yugo. I’ll bet if I asked him whether I should buy a 14″ lathe, he’d say it would be convenient to use when my REAL lathe was set up for other things. He’s looking for another big lathe, himself.

The other funny observation I must make is this: I still spend more time working ON tools than WITH tools. Today I have to resume trying to get the power feed and handwheel shimming fixed on my mill, just so I can use the mill to finish the follow rest for the Clausing! So I’m working on one tool so I can use it to work on another tool. That’s like Borges. It’s like M.C. Escher’s to-do list.

I don’t care. It’s all tremendous fun. I truly believe it shows how God is aligning things in my life. He created me with certain gifts and desires, and finally, I’m getting the means and the opportunity to do things with them. That’s Psalm 37, verse 4. No doubt about it. If your life is awful, and you’re stuck doing things you can’t stand, consider that. There is a way out, but you probably won’t find it without God, because if you did, it would discourage you from looking for him.

I Know Why Your Vacuum Cleaner Died

The machining adventures continue.

I’m trying to make a follow rest for my old Clausing beater lathe. I want to get a bigger (or at least better) lathe, but while I have this one, I’m making the best of it. I’ve seen people say a steady rest is more important than a follow rest, but so far, I’ve never needed a steady rest, but I’ve been bitten in the butt by the lack of a follow rest. Without one, it’s very hard to turn anything long and thin, and that kills a big percentage of the projects I want to do.

A steady rest provides a sturdy support for a big, long, rotating object which extends way past the spindle. Sometimes you can use a live center for this without a steady rest, but sometimes you can’t. I think. I don’t need to turn long, heavy objects. At least not yet.

I’ve been watching my lathe videos this week, and the guy who made them uses a 17″ South Bend with a 3″ spindle hole. I think he bought it because he’s a motorhead. He runs a place called Precision Measurement Supply, in San Antonio, and he sells products for other motorheads. He says he can put a driveshaft through the spindle of his lathe. That’s pretty cool.

Naturally, whenever I look at a lathe now, I think the spindle bore is too small.

My lathe has two flat spots on the saddle between the tool post and the spindle. Each one has what appears to be a 5/16″ threaded hole in it, so at some point, somebody must have anticipated mounting something there. It happens to be the perfect place for a follow rest. The holes are almost 9″ apart, so I’m bridging them with a 10″ bar of aluminum, and I’m going to find some way to put the follow rest on it.

I had a hell of a time (sorry, Christians) getting the bar ready. Back before I knew anything about cutting metal from raw stock, I got some good deals on “drops,” or spare pieces of metal, from a big metal retailer. I bought an aluminum four-by-four, if you can believe it. It was something like 3 feet long. I figured I’d slice it up in a hurry with my dry cut saw, but for some reason I no longer recall, I decided not to do that. I got myself one of those infamous 4 x 6 horizontal bandsaws. Mine came from Northern Tool, but it’s probably just like the Harbor Freight jobs. It looks like they made it on the shift that started on the morning after the Chinese New Year. Pretty sloppy. But it works.

It has always been very temperamental, so I leave the cutting speed low, and I fiddle with it a lot. I decided to use it to cut a 10″ length of aluminum four-by-four, and the blade kept popping off. I got it to stay on, and I made the cutting pressure very light so the saw would stop throwing up. That made the cut take forever, and that made the motor got hot. Well…bad workmanship made the motor get hot. You should be able to run it all day, but it died after an hour or so.

Oh, the misery I went through, getting the saw to work again. I finally learned that it had a thermal fuse inside the motor housing. This is like a little resistor, and it burns up at 268° F, I believe. Let’s see…128 C…262.4° F? Is that right? Too lazy to check. Anyhow, these things are so cheap, they don’t reset, and nobody wants you to know they exist, because if you think the motor is fried, you’ll buy a new saw. Other AC motors have these things, too, so if your vacuum cleaner dies, open it up and look. You have to go to Radio Shack and spend $1.79 on a new thermal fuse (or “cutoff”), and then you have to solder it in where the old one was, WITHOUT getting it so hot it blows again. Don’t ask me how I know.

I got the saw running again, and it blew after 40 minutes of running with no load. I did all kinds of research on things that make motors hot, and I think I know what’s happening.

Typical electric motors have bearings at each end. At one end, they have a bearing which is fixed rigidly in the motor housing. At the other end, they have a bearing which is supposed to be snugly inserted yet able to move when heat makes things expand. My motor, in spite of being made by the finest Chinese prison laborers, had a very tight fit on the bearing that should have been able to move. I think this caused the other bearing to get pulled out of whack. It was proud in the endbell, to put it in engineerese. I’m guessing here, but I suspect that misaligned bearings or bearings under the wrong kind of pressure can make a motor hot even though they don’t resist rotation all that much. Anyway, I can’t find anything else wrong with it. I may open it up and relieve the endbell’s surface with sandpaper. I found some experts yapping about it on a forum, and they claimed you could have .010″ of clearance between the endbell and the bearing without causing it to rot the endbell, as some others claim it will do.

Here’s a digression. I’m considering getting a surplus 3-phase motor and wiring it up to one of my existing machine tool VFDs. I realized I can run more than one motor from a VFD, and since my VFDs are bigger than 1 HP, they’ll be big enough to run anything I put on the saw. I can put a switch on the wall, selecting a machine tool or the saw. Pretty neat.

I got the saw to cut the four-by-four, and I faced it on the mill, but then I had to cut out a piece about 1.5″ on a side and 10″ long. I considered using the table saw, but I chickened out and used a big end mill. Man, what a job. It took something like an hour, and I made piles of chips. I Googled around and saw that knowledgeable people weren’t afraid of using table saws on aluminum, so I got out the WD40 and the featherboards and went to town.

It’s amazing how well a table saw will cut aluminum. I was done in five minutes, and I’m slow. The cut was beautiful, I didn’t waste nearly as much metal, the chips vacuumed up in a few seconds, and the cut was so straight it was within a thousandth or so of perfect. Incredible.

From now on, the table saw will be my first choice for aluminum. I have plenty of surplus triple-chipped Corian blades, and my time is worth something, believe it or not.

Here’s the aluminum after I cut it out.

After that, I used the mill to make it pretty. Here it is, as of last night.

Today I used a radiusing end mill to round it off and make it even prettier. I hate this end mill, because the manufacturer gives you no clues on how to locate it on the work, but if you bump the outside of the fat part, set the DRO, and then go in about .125″, you’ll be close enough for government work. Once you get the z measurement dialed in, you lock the quill and worry about the x and y.

I keep looking at lathes. There are some real deals out there. A guy who sold me some mill tooling had a beautiful Clausing 8015VS 13 by 50 on his site for a price which escapes me. Under ten thousand. It looked brand new. He also had a Chin Hung 16 by 67 for a similar price. Both of these things looked unused. I would never consider a lathe that big under ordinary circumstances, but the clean paint and unscarred ways made my heart thump. I started measuring in the garage. Thank God, after I emailed him, he took the Clausing off his site. I guess it’s sold.

I could put the Chin Hung in my garage, amazingly. But it’s just insane. It’s about 110″ long and 40″ wide.

It’s a wonderful machine. Tons of speeds, great rigidity, and quality construction. The same lathes are sold under the Kingston name.

I’ll try to forget I saw it. But it sure is beautiful.

I am starting to think I need a tool post grinder. Because they’re cool. My lathe DVDs feature a tool post grinder segment. You can use these things to put perfectly round points on things like scribers and centers. You KNOW I can’t live without that. Come on.

I highly recommend the DVDs. The series is called “Lathe Learnin’.” They run $125. I think Smartflix has them, but I don’t believe in stealing intellectual property, so I don’t keep copies of rented DVDs. I wanted something I could keep and watch over and over.

Some DVD machinists are extremely fastidious. Rudy Kouhoupt is an example. He must be the best machinist who ever lived, because I was watching one of his disks today, and I think I’m about 20 minutes into the discussion of punches. Seriously, I know every type of punch, and I know exactly how to sharpen them, and the video isn’t even about punches. He did a video in which he ground lathe tools, and before he even got started, he milled out a special adjustable grinding table with a sliding rest.

The problem with the super-persnickety machinists is that they will teach you to sit on your butt doing nothing, unless you can do everything perfectly. The Lathe Learnin’ guy is the other type of machinist. His motto ought to be, “OPEN A BEER AND GO FOR IT,” because all he cares about is getting it done. He shows you all the tricks a real machinist will use when he has deadlines to meet, customers to please, and less than twenty million dollars in tooling financing.

I tend to get caught up in trying to do things too well, so his approach is really helpful.

I want to finish that follow rest, but the mill power feed has gone nuts again. Something funny is happening inside it. I better call the importer and see what they can tell me.

Anyway, I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere with my tools. It’s a great feeling. God really does give you the desires of your heart, once you agree to do things his way.

Chihuahua Lathe Making Chips

Og is getting his revenge.

I bought a Clausing lathe a few years back, and it turned out to be in worse condition than I had been led to believe. Also, it wasn’t the lathe I thought I was buying, and the seller would not pay the whole cost of return shipping. It doesn’t do metric threads, and the stuff to change that is extremely expensive, IF you can find it. Og said I should get a new Chinese lathe, and he was right.

Last week, I took delivery of my first Chinese lathe: a Big Dog 7 x 14. It came with a tachometer, two rests, a drill chuck, threading gears, a three-jaw chuck, a turret post, and centers. For a few bucks more, I added a quick change tool post, a carriage stop, a four-jaw chuck, and parting tools.

I’ve been using it for a while, although I’ve been extremely busy with Noche Buena stuff, so I haven’t been able to do much. It’s fantastic. It’s convenient, it takes surprisingly deep cuts, and it seems to be well made. The first time I put something in the three-jaw chuck, the runout was undetectable on a dial indicator. The needle wasn’t still, but it moved so little and so randomly I couldn’t tell the runout from the surface noise. That’s pretty danged good.

The rests are wonderful. A Clausing rest costs anywhere from two hundred to three hundred bucks, and they turn up for sale about once a decade. That means you can forget about turning anything long and thin, or about 50% of the things you would want to put on the lathe.

The Big Dog is portable, so you can run it on a Workmate, which is probably Og’s favorite tool of all time.

I am no machinist, but I think I can safely say that anything that fits on this lathe, you can work. It may be a little slower than a big lathe, but it actually gets the job done, which sets it apart from the Clausing.

I wanted to make a stainless shift linkage for my Moto Guzzi motorcycle. This was going to be my first semi-precision project. It would require machining a rod to .078″ in diameter and threading both ends. When I got started, I realized the Clausing was not going to thread it, and that’s really the honeymoon ended.

This week I started again, on the Big Dog. I had a stainless hammer handle I had made, and which I knew I would never use, so I decided to turn it down to the right size. It’s really too short to do this conveniently. In order not to be crowded, you need some extra metal at the ends. But it seems to be working. I put the follow rest on the lathe and went to town.

When I got to work, everything went fine, except for the tailstock position. The live center kept backing out of the work. At first, I failed to lock the ram, so that was my fault, but it also happened when the ram and tailstock clamp were locked. I found that there was a little locknut on the front of the tailstock, and it determined how tight the clamp was. A few seconds’ work with a wrench fixed it.

I have some cute little carbide tools for the tiny tool post, so I decided to use one, in addition to an old 1/4″ round-nose tool I had ground. It worked great. Long stainless chips spiralled all over the garage, and the finish on the work was not bad at all.

If I can get the threading to work, I’ll try to finish this thing. I may have to scrap it and start with a longer piece, but it has served its purpose as a learning tool, so I can’t complain.

I’m looking for a bigger lathe. The Clausing has to go. I stupidly bought a DRO for it. Oh, well. It still has to go. Working with the Big Dog has reminded me how great it is to work on metal instead of working on my lathe. It seems like every time I want to use the Clausing, I can’t do it, or I have to find some clever way to work around the lack of tooling. That’s no good. I want to walk into the garage, flip a switch, throw crap on the lathe, and start turning. I want it to be just like my mill or my table saw. Turn on, do work, turn off, clean up, have beer.

Some guy in Tampa is moderately interested in the Clausing. I think I turned him off, though. I told him everything. The Clausing is a good quality lathe, and it appears to be in good working condition. It’s just limited in what it can do, and in the availability of affordable tooling. It’s not a junkheap. I guess I’m a bad salesman. I wanted to make sure I overcame the temptation to describe the lathe in a flattering way that would get it out the door, so maybe I went too far.

I found some interesting machines. First, I found a Yam (no kidding) Taiwanese lathe that had belonged to a prototype builder who used it in his garage. Here’s a photo. I could have had this for $3500. It’s a very highly regarded lathe, in spite of the hilarious name. Sadly, someone nailed it while I was getting a shipping quote.

I found a Millport, locally. It looked wonderful. I wanted to inspect it in person, so I sent an email. I used to think Millport had to be a horrible brand, because the name was so stupid. It was like they weren’t even trying. But I found out they make excellent machinery. Taiwanese. But as soon as I inquired, I found out there was a deposit on it.

I just found a Famot. It looks like it has been run about three hours. This is supposed to be a fantastic Polish lathe, considerably better than Taiwanese. It’s expensive, but it has every piece of tooling imaginable, and it should last forever. I put in an inquiry. I’m waiting to find out who just bought it. Someone up the road has a Nardini MS 1440E which looks like it hasn’t been used too much. I have read that the green Nardinis are good machines, but the blue and white ones are horrible. This one is green. Hopefully not the result of spray-painting.

I considered a new Birmingham, but everyone says they stink. I also inquired about GMC, the company that made my mill. I emailed the guy who sold it to me, but he never answered, and neither did GMC’s headquarters. So I looked around for Taiwan stuff. I found Eisen lathes. They’re not expensive, but they’re supposed to be very good. Their 1440 appears to be the same as Webb’s, and Webb is a good company. The lathes are not real heavy, however (1364 pounds), so the rigidity is something to wonder about. Anyway, you can get a new one for $7500, which is not bad at all.

I found another brand of new equipment: Clark. This is not the Chinese “Clarke” lathe that costs about forty dollars to make. It’s different. They make a 2500-pound lathe with lots of features and tooling, and you can get one shipped to you for $6000. The big problem with Clark is that no one knows about them. I contacted three sellers. One said the machines were Taiwanese. One said they were Chinese. The third gave me the truth: they have Chinese castings, but the other stuff is Taiwanese. That’s actually pretty appealing. I don’t think it takes a lot of skill to make a lathe bed, but screws, slides, bearings, chucks…you want a competent manufacturer for that stuff. My mill is made from Taiwanese parts, but it was assembled in China. I can’t complain at all. The only problems I’ve had were mostly the result of my own stupidity.

I guess I better put the Clausing on Craigslist and Ebay and get serious about replacing it. I want to get something I will never need to upgrade. Never buy cheaper or smaller tools than you can afford. You will always regret it in the end, and it will cost you more money than buying right the first time.

I’ll tell you something funny. I think I get much clearer guidance from God than I did back in the Clausing days. Maybe that’s how I ended up with the wrong machine. I’ve mentioned this before: when I started looking at the Big Dog, I kept feeling something inside me saying, “Just buy it. Just buy it. Go buy it. Buy it now.” And it worked out great. Hopefully I’ll get the same helpful guidance the next time around.

Bits of Hog All Over the Place

Noche Buena is now a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

What a week it’s been. It took forever to get the pig rotisserie built and operational, and then I had to cook yuca, black beans, brownies, rice, and coconut flan. I had to get beverages, charcoal, napkins…it was an ordeal. But it was worth it.

I thought Val Prieto couldn’t make it this year, but he and his wife Maggie showed up before the feast, and he helped me get the lechon mounted on the spit. Then after they made an appearance at his parents’ house, they came back and ate with us. Maggie reminded me that this was our “anniversary.” The first time we met, it was Noche Buena 2003. Val was cooking at his parents’ house. It’s too bad we couldn’t get them to come over here this year.

The pig cooker works great. I was so busy I didn’t bother taking photos, but Val took a quick phone video, which I will embed.

The charcoal pan is a piece of Home Depot galvanized metal with a few bends in it to give it strength and provide places for the charcoal to be piled. I didn’t put it on dedicated supports. There are two turkey fryers under it.

I had read that it was a bad idea to let fat fall on the coals, so I bent the pan to keep the charcoal slightly outside the central axis of the pig. I now think this was pointless, and it reduced the heat that got to the meat. I believe I’ll flip it and use the other side, and I also need to make sure the coals go past the ends of the pig. These parts are the biggest concentrations of meat, and they cook slowest. You need heat coming at them from the ends as well as the middle.

I believe a caja china with a smoke port would work really well. Maybe next time.

The motor worked great, although it sounded like it was coming apart. I guess that must be normal. It never got hot or paused, and I know it was working well below its rated torque.

I decided not to build a complex framework to hold the pig. That was a mistake. One of the Tapcons in the pig’s spine came loose, and the pig threatened to fall off the spit. We had to turn the motor off and run it intermittently, turning the pig 90 degrees at a time. This slowed things down a lot. Next time I’ll have the spit modified to prevent this.

I chose not to use the longer spits I had available. The heat of the coals got to the motor and bearings, but that was no problem, because it was a simple matter to bend a couple of pieces of foil around them to shield them. Much easier than modifying a new spit, and I got the benefits of the short spit’s rigidity and ease of handling.

The pig went eight hours, and some bits still were not fully done. Nonetheless, it was a phenomenal success. The smoky flavor of the hickory and charcoal made it much better than a caja china pig, and the skin was pretty crispy in spite of the rotisserie, which can make pig skin limp.

Here’s a horrible confession. I was too lazy to juice bitter oranges, and I don’t like the canned naranja angria in stores, so I marinated it in mojo made with Sunny Delight! Don’t laugh. It was amazing. Bitter orange is actually pretty useless. Mix orange juice with lime juice, and the results are just as good. Maybe better.

Yesterday was my dad’s 80th birthday. My friend Liz insisted on making him an Appalachian dried-apple stack cake, as well as cookies with Dilbert and my dad’s name silkscreened on them. My dad loves Dilbert. I think he enjoyed that.

The food exceeded my expectations. Everything was wonderful.

I had guest problems, though. The whole point of this meal was to help me and my church friends learn about love and unity, but five people bailed out on us. I ended up with nine church friends, Val and Maggie, and my dad. We had a wonderful time, but we were buried in food. I begged people to take it home. I made two gallons of black beans! Overshot just a little.

You can’t love passively. It’s not just a feeling. You have to act on it. That’s what we’re learning. So we’re trying to spend time together outside of church.

The patio is still a mess. I’ve conquered most of it, but there is still work to be done. I skipped church today, and I didn’t get up until eleven! I think I would have died if I had gone to church AND cleaned up.

I hope everyone who still reads this blog had a wonderful night, and I hope today is even better. God will be good to you and restore your life, if you give him a chance and agree to do it his way. It’s working for me, and it will work for you.

Gypped!

I just picked my my lechon. It’s 46 pounds, cleaned and ready to go.

The good: it doesn’t have boar taint, so I won’t have to soak it with bicarb. The bad: it has no head! You can’t have a lechon with no head! Is that some new thing invented by metrosexual Cubans? I won’t stand for it!

Anyway, I stuck it in the cooler in brine. It’s supposed to be frozen, but it’s not, so I’m going to have to run out and get some bags of ice.

Yesterday I was looking at the rotisserie, and I realized the pole could be a problem. It’s about five feet long, so the charcoal will be within a foot of each end. I don’t know if I want the heat that close to the bearings. I thought, “Man, I’m going to have to go to Home Depot.” Then I went out and checked my scrap collection. Naturally, I had a seven-foot pole, just waiting to be drilled and used. And right beside it. . .an eight-foot pole.

My church friends are starting to bail on me. I should have seen that coming. Nobody up there follows through. One my friends was going to come down and help with the cooking, but he says his sister just flew into town unannounced, so he can’t make it. I’m looking at 12 people and a 46-pound pig.

I was going to stuff the pig, but that’s a lot of work, and I am going to have little if any help. Right now I’m planning on lechon, moros, yuca, and dessert. Anything beyond that, people will have to bring.

I was hoping Val Prieto would come by, but he’s doing a rotisserie of his own at his dad’s house.

A while back, I realized God was serious when he commanded us to love each other. It’s essential, because only love will unite us and drive us to fight for each other. Without it, we’ll be weak. So I tried to get the folks at church interested in gatherings outside of services. That’s what this event is all about. It’s fun to stuff yourself with pork, but that’s not really the point.

Things are looking good. Hope all of you are planning a big bash.