Shop Growing Less Chaotic

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

Here is what I have so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parts of Shop Floor now Visible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Keep the Truth to Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Switzerland or Bust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, it’s not going to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something to think about for the future.

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

Not the Kind of Leak I had in Mind

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

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

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

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

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

I will put a new switch in anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guess how many Briggs Vacuity toilets I have. Four.

I see the future, and it is not good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost There…

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

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

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

The other photos were taken after the welding was done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting That Law Degree has Really Worked Out for Me

In 2020, I bought myself some steel and a Harbor Freight rolling tool chest and fabbed up a rolling welding cart. I got the idea from Youtube. A bunch of people were attaching bottle platforms and so on to tool chests, and it looked like a great idea.

A typical welding cart is a sad affair. It’s a few bits of steel tubing welded into a box with a platform on top and wheels on the bottom. The welder sits on the platform, at least two feet below eye level, out in the open. Debris falls on it. It’s inconvenient to look at while adjusting controls, changing wire spools, connecting bottles, or moving cables. It has, essentially, no storage. Sometimes they have steel hooks that allow you to hang unruly cables on, and they may have tubes to hold filler rod, but that’s about it. Want to store your clamps, wire spools, extra cables, TIG consumables, welding rods, bottle safety caps, brushes, anti-spatter, or anything else, and you’re SOL.

I’ll post a photo of a Miller cart that retails for $324. It’s awful. Look at the tiny storage container. It’s like a purse a woman takes to a disco when she knows she won’t have to pay for anything.

A tool chest with a bottle platform will hold two welders at the correct height, so you can see the dials and do all the other things welders have to do. It will hold hundreds of pounds of accessories. It gets your machines up out of the way of flying crud. It’s infinitely superior to a cart.

A company called ZTFab produces kits to turn chests into carts, and I saw them back in 2020. They make kits for Harbor Freight chests. You get a bunch of laser-cut parts you have to weld together and paint. The kits don’t provide any support for chests, and they subject them to new stresses they were not designed to handle. For this, I would have paid $310, including shipping but not tax, so call it $330. With a coupon, the Harbor Freight chest required to make it all work would run at least $260.

A bunch of Youtube tool guys were putting these kits together and singing their praises, and my BS alarm went off. The kits are extremely overpriced for what you get, and the designs aren’t very good. I think ZTFab gave these guys kits in exchange for assembling them in videos.

Youtube is full of people who are not used to making money from videos, so it’s not hard to take advantage of popular tubers. A guy who routinely gets 50,000 views is likely to think a company is doing him a favor by giving him $50 worth of steel in exchange for 30 minutes or two hours of video amounting to one or more long commercials. In reality, he’s selling out very cheap. It takes hours to assemble a ZTFab kit, so if you spend 6 hours putting one together and several more hours editing video, you’re working for almost nothing, and you end up with a cart you will probably regret wasting your time on in a couple of months. If you praise the kit unrealistically and ignore the obvious shortcomings, you damage your own credibility and the value of your channel.

I looked at the kits, realized they were pretty bad, and considered the price and the time it took to assemble them. I realized I could do way better. For about $325, TOTAL, I created my own design, and it was far better. Had I gone with ZTFab, I would have spent around $600 and ended up with something inferior.

My 2020 cart can hold 350 pounds of bottles, no problem. The wheels, which came with the Harbor Freight chest, will support 1000 pounds. The chest probably weighs 180 pounds, so if you put truly huge bottles on it, you still have the ability to pack 470 pounds of additional stuff on and in it. The frame I put under it is much stronger than the cart, and it attaches directly to the threaded holes where the chests wheels are supposed to go, so all the force on the chest is upward, exactly as it is in an unmodified chest. There are no funny torques trying to bend the chest’s frame or sides.

The cart is a little different now because the welders are turned the other way. That green bottle is oxygen, obviously, and it’s not on the cart now. I put it there in 2020 because I needed a second bottle in order to test the cart.

I love capitalism, but I thought what ZTFab was doing was underhanded and bad for people’s skills and wallets. I built my cart because I needed one, but I also felt I was avoiding becoming a sucker, and when I made a video about it, I hoped to encourage other people to avoid being taken.

My cart could use one improvement. I lengthened the wheelbase and raised the center of gravity when I added the frame and bottle platform, so I have concerns that the cart could be pushed over when it’s on sloping concrete. The wheels form a rectangle, and rectangles rock from side to side. I want to extend one pair of wheels outward so I have a trapezoid with two unequal sides. Trapezoids don’t like to rock at all, so they are less likely to fall over. This must be why so many factory-made carts are wider at one end than the other.

Anyway, a few weeks back, Harbor Freight released a really nice coupon, so I bought a second chest to hold my other welder and my plasma cutter. I started working on a new cart. When it’s done, I’ll get rid of the Eastwood cart these machines are sitting on now. I paid $50 for it, which was a steal. I bought it on sale for $100, complained to Eastwood about a defect, received a new cart for nothing, and was allowed to keep the old cart, which I fixed. It’s great for $50 or even $100, but it has all the shortcomings of a traditional cart.

It seems like every time I try to work on the new cart, something bad happens, and I end up working on something else. My tractor’s steering cylinder started gushing oil, so I fixed it myself, and in the process, I made a hole in the front gear case, so I decided to hire a mechanic, and I had to locate parts and fix the used gear case I found on Ebay. Today I went outside and saw my well’s pressure tank flooding the side yard. The PVC pipe exiting the bottom had snapped due to truly bad engineering, and the kid I called to fix it was reluctant to come out on a rainy day, so he gave me some tips, and I fixed it myself.

When I was done, I was determined to finish at least one new part for the cart. Today I finished the second rail for the frame.

My design has two extremely sturdy parallel rails under the chest. They attach to the chest’s wheel attachment points. To make this work, I have to weld two small spacers onto the tubes that form the rails. To do this, I have to cut 4″ pieces from 2″ by 3″ tubing with 1/8″ walls and drill 16 precisely located holes through 4 thicknesses of tubing. It’s not easy. I finished one rail earlier this week, and today I finished the second one. With this done, I will weld a bottle platform to them, and I will also put a crossmember on them at the end under the platform, to hold the front wheels.

I’m going to have a shorter wheelbase this time, in addition to making one set of wheels farther apart than the others. I don’t need to have my wheels all the way at the end of the platform, because the platform is incredibly strong, so I’m pulling the wheels back three inches.

When the cutting, welding, and grinding are done, I will have a sort of rolling platform to screw to the cart, which will sit inside and on top of it. I’ll put my other bottle on it, throw the machines on top, and cram all sorts of welding paraphernalia in the drawers. Then I’ll get rid of the Eastwood cart, and my workshop will be one step closer to orderly.

Because steel prices have gone nuts, I’ll have more like $400 than $325 invested, but that’s still a dream price compared to ZTFab. Harbor Freight chests are made in Taiwan, and they’re really excellent. My bolt-on rolling frame will be extremely tough and rigid, not to mention ergonomically superb.

After this, I’ll probably get a Harbor Freight Yukon rolling chest and mount my belt grinders on it. This will allow me to get rid of my sagging Northern Tool plastic cart, which turned out to be incapable of supporting anywhere near the weight claimed in the ads. I’ll probably get a dustproof VFD for the big grinder and abandon the fancy steel-enclosed VFD I put together to use on the plastic cart. I’ll put my grinding belts, tool arms, and other junk in the chest, and order will be one step closer. The dustproof VFD will cost a few hundred bucks, but not everything can be cheap.

After all this, I may weld up a good workbench. I have proven I have the skills to do that. I made a shooting bench which is basically the same thing, and you could literally drive a truck over it. Well, actually, I don’t think the cantilevered axles I created would like that, but it was made for shooting, not holding up trucks. The rest of the structure would be unfazed. A workbench would have ordinary heavy-duty wheels.

If I make a real bench, I can get rid of my extremely heavy and somewhat impractical homemade wooden bench. When you can’t fabricate well, you make a lot of things out of wood when you should use metal.

Once that’s done, I can make a rolling base for my giant table saw, to replace the feeble factory-made base it rides on now. It doesn’t really ride much, because it’s hard to move it. I can make a base that will zip around pretty easily, and unlike the existing base, it won’t make dust collection impossible.

I bought myself a DeWalt rolling table to match my planer, so I will be able to discard the dubious Harbor Freight rolling table I have been using so far. It’s great if you have a completely flat floor and you don’t mind adding welds to it to prevent it from shifting around. I tacked it up, but it still stops every time it runs into a minor imperfection in the concrete.

The DeWalt table costs a lot, but there are some things you just don’t want to fabricate. DeWalt’s table was made for my planer, and it’s designed very well. I guess I could do better, but it would be time-consuming, and the improvement would be negligible.

China builds empty cities full of apartment buildings no one will ever inhabit. It’s fascinating. This is what they do with the money they make from us. It’s incredible. They have reasons for doing it, but the whole enterprise will crash to the ground one day soon, because it makes no sense. It’s sort of like the tulip bulb craze. There are big vacant cities in China, and the buildings will eventually crumble because no one repairs them. The wealth the Chinese think they are building will vanish. I think this ridiculous investment scheme may be why building materials cost so much in America now.

Steel is expected to crash this year, and it has already started. If China’s real estate fantasies implode, steel will be as cheap as pool noodles. I hope it happens before I start my next project.

That’s the news from the compound. Stay safe and pray Jesus gets here before Rupaul is crowned emperor.

“Let us Big, Strong Men Tell You What to Buy”

I had a fascinating experience today.

One of my house’s AC systems went out because of a slow refrigerant leak. The system is 22 years old, so it’s a wonder it lasted so long.

Last year, it did the same thing, and a local company sent a guy out. He could probably have convinced me the unit was shot, but instead, he cleaned it up, shot refrigerant into it, and got it working. The cost was under $300, and a new AC system costs more than that when you divide the price by the lifespan, so it was a good deal at the time. He said we would see how things went. Now I know how that worked out. We gave it the old college try.

He was honest with me, so I made a note to remember the company. I will call it Sweatbusters.

I called Sweatbusters today and told them to come out, see if the unit was dead, and give me repair and replacement options. They took a long time, so I thought they weren’t serious, so I called another outfit which showed up in about 90 minutes.

The second outfit, which I will call Freezcorp, sent two guys. A technician and a salesman. Uh oh.

They said the system was kaput. They didn’t offer a repair option. They started throwing numbers like $15,000 around. Keep in mind, this is a 2-ton unit, and I replaced a 5-ton unit for $7000 in 2017.

They said Lennox made the best machines. I needed a Lennox. I also needed a new air handler cabinet, even though the old one looks fine. The salesman gave me the reason: the old one had had a big heavy machine sitting on it for 22 years. They said a new system would have a UV light to kill germs and mold and give me hospital-quality air. They would put one big filter on the air handler so I could stop putting filters in my numerous ceiling returns.

They said I could pay something like $180 per month for Freezcorp to come out and fix the system for nothing. Okay, not for nothing. For $180 per month. This would include changing filters. I have never had any problems changing air conditioner filters. They were willing to finance the job at 7.9%. I don’t blame them. I would like to lend people money at 7.9%, too.

I said I had heard Bryant was a good choice because their units were made by Carrier in Carrier factories. Carrier is supposed to be one of the two best American brands. They said Bryant was made from Chinese parts. I definitely didn’t want a Bryant. Bryant bad. I already have a 5-ton Bryant, so that didn’t sound good.

They finally wrote me an estimate. For $9200, which was a huge discount, Freezcorp would put the system in tomorrow. This was after I rejected the UV nonsense and all the smart idiocy that allows your neighbors’ children to hack your system and set your thermostat at 90° in August at 3 a.m.

I can’t believe anyone wants a smart home. Yes, I’m going to put cameras throughout my house so Russian hackers can film me on the toilet and curse at me while I’m trying to sleep. It’s totally worth it so I can change my toaster’s darkness setting while I’m traveling.

I told the salesman I was used to dealing with contractors because I have rental properties. I said I did not jerk people around. I was going to buy a unit, and it would be this week, but I wasn’t going to make the decision standing in my driveway. I said I would not show his bid to anyone else, and I would get back to him if I was interested.

Sweatbusters finally arrived. No, I did not need a new air handler box. No, I did not need UV lights sterilizing my air. I think he thought I was poor because I complained so much. He said I could have a 14-SEER Rheem system for something like $5600.

I was so ecstatic, I told him to look at 16-SEER and Carrier. He came up with about $7600. It sounded great to me. More efficient and, supposedly, better quality. I asked if $6500 would work, but all I could get out of him was 3%, which was nothing to sneeze at.

I know I said I wasn’t going to make a decision in my driveway, but I did. I said, “Let’s do it.”

He admitted the old unit might be repairable, which was more than anyone else would do. I didn’t care, because I think the world is ending, and if I squeeze several more years out of the old unit, God only knows what I’ll pay for a new one when it dies.

He flat-out admitted the new system won’t last 22 years. He said they’re all Chinese now. Some are assembled in America, but they’re all Chinese.

I probably could have done somewhat better, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the week haggling.

He went to his Sweatbusters truck, got his tools, and checked my refrigerant level. It was two pounds low. He got a jug of refrigerant and pumped it up. No charge. The new system won’t be installed until next week, so he wanted to make the old one run until then. Now the unit will work for another 10 months.

The jug of refrigerant cost his company $1500, up from $400 in the recent past. One Monday, he went to work, and the price had changed. And the supplier was selling old stock it had already paid low prices for.

Anyway, he gave me a week of cool nights for nothing and said they would do it again if the air got hot before the installation.

He told me why Freezcorp wanted me to buy a Lennox. Lennox owns Freezcorp. They can’t sell Carriers even if they want to, and they don’t want to.

I guess naming Lennox makes changing the name of the contracting company pointless.

It seems to me that this is how you do business. You don’t treat a customer like a mechanic treats a woman. Freezcorp treated me like a complete moron. I’ve probably had 8 air conditioning systems installed or given major repairs in the last decade. I’m not that stupid.

My dad got fooled into buying a UV light for his system. I think it cost $1500. It was a galvanized box with a light fixture inside it. Cost to manufacture probably $25. I Googled it. They do absolutely nothing, and even if they did, the tubes go bad fast. I have never known anyone who got sick because his air conditioner didn’t have UV lights. Have you? No. Of course not.

All I wanted was an upper-tier AC system without a bunch of garbage attached to it, and I would have bought it tomorrow from the first company had they given me the option. Instead, they insisted on trying to rip me off. They preferred insulting my intelligence and trying to cheat me to making a fast, honest, and substantial dollar. There are some people you just can’t do business with even if you try.

Mike told me I should have bought the system and installed it myself. Yeah, maybe in February. Not in June. This is not the time to become an instant HVAC tech.

Tonight I will have cool air, and next Wednesday, I will have lower power bills and less concern about the condition of my systems. Even if this system stinks, it shouldn’t start to show it until 2032.

Am I in a position to tell contractors they should do business like Sweatbusters? I don’t know. You can make a lot of money lying to people. Like P.T. Barnum said, there is one born every minute. I guess it’s completely possible to build a huge customer base composed entirely of extremely gullible people. If it weren’t, companies like Bose and Starbucks would not exist.

Why Does an American Hand Grinder Cost $345?

The other day I had to get a bolt out of a rusted nut, and the only way was to destroy it. There was no way to get good leverage to twist it, and it was in a place where I could not heat it. Enter the drill.

My plan was to drill straight down into it through the end. The drill bit would cut into the threads and loosen the remains of the bolt. In order to do this, I needed a way to make the bit center itself in the end of the bolt. Otherwise, it would walk around and give me an off-center hole.

I have a Dumore hand grinder. Tool people love these things. They are American-made tools similar to Dremels, but they’re bigger, and they only have one speed: maximum. My Dumore’s top speed is (was) 25,000 RPM.

I got my Dumore on Ebay. It was barely used. I thought it was a bargain. They sell for $345 new, and I think I paid something like $45. Anyway, it wasn’t much.

The Dumore ran, but it faltered a lot, and I had to spin the spindle by hand to get it started. I figured it had bad brushes or something, so I didn’t send it back.

I got it to run while I was working on the bolt. I used the Dumore to put a cup-shaped hollow in the end of it to keep the drill bit from wandering. After that, I decided it was time to fix it. I checked the commutator brushes, which looked new. On the advice of a forum guy, I filed a little bit off of their ends to make them conduct better. I also cleaned the commutator with Scotchbrite and De-Ox-Id, which is a product made for cleaning electrical contacts.

When I put the grinder back together, it wouldn’t do anything at all.

I thought I had to save it. I had a wonderful American-made industrial tool in great shape, apart from not working. It was worth working on. Surely.

I sought advice and did a bunch of things, and nothing worked. Finally, I looked at the armature wires under magnification. Most of them were detached from the commutator, so there was no hope at all that it would run. Current would not go through the commutator.

I believe this explains the grinder’s willingness to run after I spun it by hand. In order to run, it needed current to go through the armature windings, and that meant it needed them to be connected to the commutator bars. When I spun it, I moved the brushes from disconnected bars to connected bars, and the grinder ran. This is my theory.

I went to Dumore’s site and looked at their parts area. They had a diagram of a similar grinder. The commutator was available, but of course, it was part of an armature. The armature sold for the low, low price of about $128, plus shipping. I contacted Dumore, and they told me the armature didn’t fit my grinder. They didn’t make armatures for it any more. They recommended a guy named Larry, in Detroit. I called him, and he laughed. He said he hadn’t seen a grinder like mine in around 20 years. He did not have any armatures.

I started prying the tiny commutator bars open and soldering the wires back on with a magnifying visor, but then I thought about it. The soldering would take maybe 4 hours, and then I would have a tool which might be unbalanced because of the presence of the solder. The armature had been balanced at the factory, prior to my work, and you can’t balance an armature dynamically at home. An armature which is balanced when at rest may go nuts when it spins. This must be due to other problems in the inertial tensor, which only motion can reveal. My guess. You could make an object with perfect distribution of mass around an axis that still had uneven distribution relative to other references. Imagine a cylinder like a rolling pin with a pound of lead at one end and another pound at the other end, on the other side of the axle.

While I was doing all this, I was also thinking about new grinders. I am not poor. I can buy a $345 grinder. Maybe that was the answer. Bite the bullet. Get it over with. Move on. I would have a great grinder for the rest of my life, and I would never miss the money.

Then I did more studying.

My grinder is about 12″ long. It has a grand total of two bearings in it. It has a heavy plastic body. It has a crummy on-off switch held in place by the pressure of the rear plate, which screws onto the back of the grinder. It doesn’t seem all that great.

People claim Dumore grinders run forever, and what you pay for is the quality of the parts and assembly. They’re smooth. They’re balanced. Unlike other grinders.

Are these things really true?

No. At least it doesn’t look like it.

Guess what Dumore charges for the high-quality bearings in my grinder. They charge about $4.40 per bearing. I’ll tell you something I have learned as a tool person. Really precise bearings don’t sell for $4.40. They are very expensive. Conclusion: Dumore doesn’t use fantastic bearings that last longer or run smoother than regular bearings.

I looked at Makita. Their model GD0603 is about the size of my grinder. It has 25% more power. Guess how many bearings it has. Four. One is a lot bigger than the Dumore bearings, and big bearings distribute wear and heat much better. The Makita’s bearings cost more to replace.

The GD0603 has a nice quality on-off switch. It has a nominal speed 3000 RPM faster than the Dumore. It comes with a wire bail so you can hang it and put a flex shaft on it. It has a two-prong plug instead of three prongs because Makita insulated it properly.

Makita sells every part of the grinder, and it’s easy to take apart and repair.

Wait…Dumore is a high-end company. They put the money in the armature. It’s balanced better than the Makita, and it runs smoother.

Really?

Makita started as an electric motor company, and here is one of the things it was known for: balancing armatures. Makita still balances its armatures dynamically.

Ooof.

Makita also powder-coats its stators so they don’t short out when junk gets in and lands on them. Dumore…not so much.

The Makita sells on Amazon for $124. I looked at reviews. Some guy said he bought his first one in 1998, and he only replaced it recently. Did he have to replace it? I doubt it. Every part can be replaced. Even the armature, which, though BALANCED, costs under $20.

Here is what I can’t figure out: how can the Dumore possibly be worth three times the cost of a Makita? Not only do I not see how it can be better; I can’t see how it could be anywhere near as good. Yes, the Makita is made in China. So what? Makita is a Japanese company, so I very much doubt they make garbage in China, and anyway, grinders are very simple machines.

I got a Makita. I will probably throw the Dumore out. I may get a bigger Makita, too, since I can get both Makitas for a lot less than one Dumore.

Once again, I feel I got stung by the old iron bug. “Old iron” is what stubborn old coots call ancient American tools. They go to their graves making fun of Asian tools and shrieking that anyone who is too cheap to pay the extremely large premium for Caucasian-made tools is a fool. Sometimes they’re right, but the problem is that they can’t tell when they’re wrong, which also happens a lot.

I think the Sino-Japanese Makita is head and shoulders better than the American Dumore ever was. Maybe an engineer could explain why I’m wrong, but I don’t see a way for him to approach the Makita in order to attack. Cheaper. Better bearings. More bearings. Better switch. Insulation. Low noise rating for protection-free grinding. Lower cost. Balanced. Cheap parts readily available. Easily repaired. More powerful.

Why do old Dumores last so long in commercial shops? I think it’s because they have to, just like American cars that last 80 years in Cuba. No one wants to spend hundreds of dollars to replace a hand grinder. A $128 armature and 9 dollars’ worth of bearings make more sense than a new $345 grinder. On the other hand, throwing out a Makita that costs a third as much isn’t intimidating. If Makitas don’t last as long, I think it’s because people can afford to throw them out and replace them. They would probably last as long as Dumores or longer if people felt motivated to treat them well and repair them. I’ll bet if Makita made no changes other than raising the price to $1500, they would last 50 years. People would say, “I paid a lot for that Makita, but I’ve rebuilt it 10 times, and it runs like new.”

If I’m wrong, explain it to me. But you can’t mention the bearings, construction, materials, or balancing, because I’ve already considered those things. Good luck.

Has Kubota Actually Seen This Tractor?

I guess you can’t say you’re a real farmer until you’ve fixed your own hydraulics.

I have done some hydraulic work in the past. It consisted of replacing a rear hydraulic cylinder (“rockshaft cylinder”) on a garden tractor. John Deere welds its small cylinders shut, thoughtfully, so customers won’t be bothered with bad old rebuilding jobs. Instead, you can just buy a very overpriced new cylinder every 5 years and go through the torture of installing it but not the extremely easy and cheap task of rebuilding it.

This is the main reason why I would never buy a John Deere product other than a T-shirt, although there are other reasons which are also pretty good.

I also fixed a leaking fitting on my Kubota’s loader once. That was nice, because fluid used to drip from it constantly, and I got tired of refilling it.

Other than that, I was pretty fortunate until recently, when fluid started shooting out of the Kubota’s steering cylinder so fast, it was not practical to consider refilling it between sessions.

“No problem,” I thought, “Kubota isn’t John Deere. They will not make this unbearable for me.”

Of course, I was wrong about that.

I have a download of a Kubota workshop manual, and its terse, optimistic manuals are a lot like promotional videos tractor companies put out. I wrote about these the other day. They make removing loaders look about as hard as making a gin and tonic. In reality, you may need things like a sledgehammer, a collection of spud wrenches, and a second tractor with a front end loader, and your clothes will be filthy 5 minutes into the job, but they don’t go into that.

Anyway, the manual said I had to remove the radiator, and that meant removing the front end loader, which is nearly impossible on this model. I kept asking people for advice, and someone told me I could get access to the necessary parts without doing all that. This encouraged me to continue trying.

The steering cylinder’s rod has a bit of heavy tubing on the end, and that bit of tubing attaches it to the tractor’s frame. There are a couple of holes in the frame, and a big pin goes through them. The rod end goes between the holes, and the pin passes through it, too. This holds the rod in place.

The pin has a groove around the top, and there is a little piece of heavy plate that fits into that groove. The edge of the plate sits in it and prevents the pin from moving up and down. This keeps your rod in the frame, where it should be. The plate is held down by…well, we’ll get to that.

Kubota said I had to take the radiator out to get to the single (single) bolt holding the plate in. An Internet guy said I just had to turn the steering wheel, and the bolt would reveal itself.

The truth turned out to be unlike anything either of them said. I learned I could access the single bolt by taking out the battery and the platform it sat on. I didn’t need to fool with the radiator. Then I found out there were TWO bolts, not one, and the second one was covered by the plate the battery platform had been attached to.

So the manual said there was one bolt, there were really two, and the second one could only be gripped, badly, by a box wrench. And Kubota put it in way tighter than it had to be, so a box wrench would have rounded it before loosening it.

Amazing.

Did Kubota deliberately make things harder than necessary so they could make more money on labor for repairs? I don’t know. Kubota itself doesn’t do repairs; the dealers do. I would guess Kubota gets the same income, from parts alone, regardless of how long repairs take. And by making warranty repairs harder, Kubota would be sticking it to itself. Which, now that I think about it, is a very Japanese thing to do.

My solution? Making a big ol’ hole. I drilled a 7/8″ part in the plate covering the second bolt, so I could get a socket on it and use a breaker bar.

Making the hole was a joy. No, really. I’m serious.

I did everything right, or at least I tried. I measured to find the location, and I made a dimple with a punch. I used a small drill to make a pilot hole. I used a hole saw to open it up. I used oil and drilled at the proper speed. The pilot drill on the hole saw snapped, and the hole saw bit into the plate, losing several teeth. Okay.

From there, I went to a step bit. I opened the hole up to around 5/8″, but the steps on the bit were too shallow to make a clean, uniform hole, so I had to use two Silver & Deming bits in succession. Finally, I had the hole I wanted, plus several gouges from the hole saw accident.

Fortunately, the gouges will be invisible when the tractor is assembled.

I was able to get a socket on both bolts, and I removed the rod end pin. After that, I managed to detach both hydraulic hoses without breaking anything, and I got the Pitman arm cap off. Then I retracted the rod manually and wiggled the cylinder out. Joy.

One of the great things about hydraulic leaks on farms is that the oil they release traps black dirt, so when you try to fix your problems, you are inundated with filth and oil. I had cleaned the tractor’s relevant parts as well as I could with a pressure washer, but there was still a lot of crud in places I could not hit. It took me quite a while to get the cylinder clean enough to handle.

Now I have a somewhat less dirty cylinder, and I need to visit a hydraulics shop.

Kubota wants $165 for the parts to fix the cylinder. They should cost something like $35. They are very ordinary parts. Kubota doesn’t make its own seals, wipers, and O-rings. I am pretty sure I can pay a shop for labor and still come out way ahead. This is literally a 10-minute job.

There are people out there discouraging amateurs from fixing hydraulic cylinders, threatening all sorts of disastrous consequences. I have looked into it, and it’s all nonsense, probably intended to con people into paying too much. Replacing the parts is an extremely easy job you can do without special tools. It helps if you have a weird tool that compresses inner seals so you can get them inside pistons, but those tools cost $30 a set on Amazon, and a set will cover a wide range of cylinders.

I would fix my cylinder myself if I knew what to order, but the shrewd businessmen at Kubota do not reveal the sizes of their rebuild parts. I may open it up anyway to make sure the interior isn’t scarred up, and perhaps I’ll be able to figure out what I need.

As of this minute, the odds are about 90% that I’ll pay to get the job done.

What are the take-aways here?

1. Kubota writes really bad repair manuals.

2. John Deere is worse because they weld hydraulic cylinders closed.

3. Rebuilding hydraulic cylinders is really easy and relatively cheap.

I am deriving a little satisfaction from doing all this myself instead of paying a dealer $1500 for transportation and repairs and waiting a month to get the tractor back. I would be more satisfied, however, if my tractor hadn’t leaked in the first place. It only has 1200 hours on it.

Next World to Conquer: Hydraulics

A couple of days ago, I finished converting the old bucket on my Kubota to SSQA. It took several days, and I would have been happier buying a new bucket. I couldn’t get the bucket before late summer, so I did what I had to do. The result is in the photo below.

I primed and painted the areas on the back of the bucket that were involved in the project. A lot of paint burned off the inside of the bucket, too, but I don’t plan to do anything about that until I get the tractor working again.

The project looks solid. My only concern is that I may have gotten the geometry wrong somewhere, leading to problems I won’t notice until I use the bucket. There is no set of comprehensive guidelines for welding SSQA mounts to a bucket. Every job is a one-time deal, and you do the best you can. I set my plates so they’re about half an inch off the ground when the bucket is on its bottom.

If it turns out there is a problem, I fully intend to sell the bucket and buy a new one. I don’t want to do this project twice.

I tried to use plasma and propane to cut the old mounts off and cut up the mounting plate for installation, but I don’t have real propane skills, and I lacked the right cutting tip, and my plasma cutter isn’t great for thick steel.

I ended up using my 6″ Metabo angle grinder and cutoff wheels. It was a breeze. Actually better than plasma, unless you have CNC. The cuts were very accurate, and it only took a few minutes to cut an end off a 3/8″ plate 18″ wide. If you have to get in places where a grinder won’t go, plasma and torches are great, but for straight cuts in open places, they can’t compare to a grinder.

Welding was uneventful. I used 0.035″ Harbor Freight wire and my $500 Harbor Freight multiprocess welder. I think that’s what I paid. It may have been $600. That thing is great. I prefer it to my Lincoln MIG because it’s easier to use. It has a nice digital display, and the torch is not as bulky.

I used DNA and acetone to clean off most of the grime near the new plates, and then I taped everything else off. I hit the plates and their surroundings with Rust-Oleum primer from a spray can, and I followed up with some Rust-Oleum Kubota Orange implement spray paint I already had. Worked just fine.

Now I have to fix the leak which is draining my hydraulic fluid.

A few weeks back, I put wood on my burn pile, and I noticed the tractor’s wheels were straightening up during turns. I didn’t think much of it. For all I knew, it was normal. Now I think the leak caused it. Last week, things got much worse in a hurry. I saw little puddles of fluid under the front end. I knew something had to be done.

My tractor is an L3710 with an LA681 loader. It’s a nice 37-horse machine. Big enough for most jobs around the farm, although 60 horses would be nicer. Most people are using little tractors in the general region of 25 horses, so I feel blessed.

To find out where the leak was, I thought I had to remove the front end loader so I could remove the side panels and look into the engine compartment. I was wrong about this, but I didn’t know it. I tried to get advice. I saw a bunch of useless Youtube videos in which smiling men in clean clothes popped the loaders off their little Kubotas, and I figured I could do it, too.

They did this:

1. Raise loader and extend built-in support struts to hold it up when detached.

2. Lower loader until the struts and bucket touch the ground.

3. Manipulate bucket to loosen the two pins at the rear of the loader.

4. Pull pins out, holding them gently between one finger and your thumb.

5. Disconnect hydraulic hoses.

6. Back tractor away from loader.

7. Dismount tractor and button spotless white tuxedo jacket while calling for a martini.

I tried this method, and I found out it won’t work for the LA681. This loader has a built-in guard for the front of the tractor, and it’s made from 3/8″ steel. It’s very heavy. There are two additional pins that attach it to the front of the tractor.

On top of that, the rear pins were cemented in place by rust and friction. They had never been greased. I managed to bang them out and get them to slide easily with grease, but it took quite a while. I never took the front pins out, because I wanted to get confirmation that the skinny struts on the loader were strong enough to hold it up with the grill guard attached.

While I was fooling with this, some online people reminded me of something I had forgotten: it wasn’t necessary to remove the loader in order to get the panels off the tractor. They lifted straight up. I had done this before, to fix a shutdown apparatus that went off on its own, but I didn’t remember this when I got into the hydraulic problem.

I got the panels off and pressure-washed a lot of black oil and filth out of the tractor so I could see. Then I identified the source of the leaking fluid. When I turned the steering wheel, oil shot out of the rear of the steering cylinder.

Hydraulic cylinders are sort of like car cylinders, but they pump oil instead of air and fuel. Car pistons have rings to seal them against the cylinder walls. A hydraulic cylinder has a bunch of O-rings and seals to do the same thing. My cylinder probably has two seals in it. I looked up all the parts, and in total, there are 14. To fix the cylinder, I have to take it out of the tractor, open it up, install new seals and other junk, close it, and put it back in.

Fixing the cylinder itself looks pretty easy, although I may pay someone to do it because it’s possible to do it wrong, and then you’re stuck doing the job over. What’s difficult is getting the cylinder out.

The workshop manual says to remove the heavy steel bumper and the radiator. To do that, guess what else I have to remove. The loader, which is connected to the bumper.

I’m not positive I have to do all that. It may be that it’s possible to get the cylinder out without removing the loader, but the manual would naturally specify the easiest way for a tractor with no loader.

I really don’t want to pay a dealer. They will charge me to take the tractor in and bring it back. Then they will charge to remove and reattach the loader. They will charge to remove and reinstall the cylinder. They will charge to rebuild the cylinder. The labor and hauling charges would be pretty bad.

The rebuild alone will probably run over $200. The parts are expensive because Kubota likes money, and there would probably be half an hour of labor in it.

Optimally, I would like to get the cylinder out and reinstall it myself, relying on a mechanic only for the rebuild. Whether that will be possible remains to be seen.

By the way, a new cylinder runs almost $1100. For comparison, generic cylinders (which I can’t use) from dealers cost less than $200. Cylinders for other brands of tractors are in the same ballpark. One wonders why Kubota can’t come a little closer to that figure.

At least I can go ahead and order a Kubota seal kit for the cylinder, right? Wrong. Kubota doesn’t make one. You have to identify all the parts yourself from a parts manual and order them separately so they cost as much as possible.

I feel somewhat discouraged. I fixed the tractor’s inability to get up to speed in reverse, I installed an SSQA adaptor without help, and I made my own SSQA bucket. I thought I had beaten the dealers. Now the tractor’s first debilitating mechanical problem pops up, just when sailing should be smooth.

I should be making my own SSQA brush fork attachment right now instead of sweating over the pressure washer and struggling to get what should be simple answers.

Have I bitten off more than I should have? Am I doing things God would rather I didn’t get involved with? Am I piling needless burdens on myself? I am going to pray about that.

Sometimes You Just Want to BUY Something

The person who laid out this property situated my shop so the doors on each end face east and west. Was this incredibly stupid or a masterstroke?

As it is, the burning sun roasts the east side of the shop in the morning and the west side of the shop until about 8 p.m. in the summer. Unpleasant if you’re working on the west side, which I frequently am. If the shop were situated differently, the sun would hit both sides of the shop pretty much all the time, but it would hit them from different directions as the day passed, and it would be possible to plant shade trees close to it to make the afternoons and evenings less miserable.

I guess the way it is is okay.

Today I removed the ears from my tractor bucket, and I quit when the real roasting started.

I put a quick attach adaptor on the tractor’s loader, and I also wanted a bucket that would fit it, but the buckets are backed up several months. That is no good, so I had to order a huge, heavy mount plate in order to modify the bucket myself. To make the plate fit, the ears have to be totally gone, ground flat. They were (were) welded in place on 4 sides, so they were not made with the intention of assisting people who wanted to remove them in a hurry.

I figured I would use my gas welding outfit with a propane cutting tip. A couple of years back, I bought a very serious Victor acetylene outfit and fixed it up so it worked with propane. The acetylene regulator will work fine with propane, and I have the acetylene stuff in case I ever decide to try gas welding.

Until today, I had never used the outfit for anything but heating. I heated the 1/2″-thick ears on my 3-point subsoiler because they were bent from pulling stumps and needed to be straightened. Worked fine, but it didn’t teach me anything about propane cutting.

I have a plasma cutter, but I thought it would be too hard to get it into the corners on the bucket, so two days ago, I decided to become a propane cutting expert. It did not go well.

First of all, my bucket appears to be 1/4″ thick, and my cutting tips are the wrong size. I have size 1 tips. I should have 0 or 00. Second, I don’t know what I’m doing.

By watching a few videos and asking questions on the web, I got to the point where I could sort of cut steel, and today I gave it a shot. I was able to cut through the ears, but it was a pain. The torch kept going out, and the metal took forever to yield. I decided to try plasma, which turned out to better suited to the job than I had thought.

I tried to cut sideways into the welds holding the ears on so the jet would not cut into the bucket itself. The main problem I had was that I blew molten metal under the ears where it solidified into bad welds. I also had problems with the jet dying for no clear reason. I think the terrible ground clamp that came with my Hypertherm plasma cutter was letting me down.

I cut and recut and recut. I finally managed to remove the parts of the ears that were perpendicular to the bucket’s surface, but the parts that lay flat against it were stuck. I got out the big Metabo grinder and some Walter Zip Disks and cut the metal loose except for the parts that sat directly on welds. Those parts, I am slowly removing with the Metabo and a smaller grinder equipped with a 40-grit Walter flap wheel.

Walter makes really excellent abrasives. I have learned to avoid the cheap stuff. Cheap disks do a much poorer job and give out quicker.

I have bought a second Harbor Freight rolling tool chest for conversion into a welding cart, and it is sitting near the tractor bucket. This is why the box the chest came in caught fire today.

I was shooting gobs of molten steel all over the place, and one flew into the base of the box, causing it to go up like a match. I was very impressed at how fast it started to burn. My hair didn’t burn nearly that well the many times I set it on fire today.

My friend Mike is staying with me, and he had moved the shop’s front garden hose to the back for watering plants, so I thought it was best to grab my wall-mounted extinguisher and see if it worked. It worked just fine, leaving nasty yellow powder everywhere. I put it on the shop floor so it would be convenient in case I needed it again, and then when I sat down on my Homer bucket to continue cutting, I also sat on the extinguisher handle, shooting more powder on the floor.

After a lot of struggling, I got both ears off the bucket, and now I just have a few strips of leftover metal to grind flat.

In retrospect, I see I should have used the plasma cutter to trace around the bottoms of the ears, cutting through the bucket and removing them in 20 minutes instead of what will end up being two days. I could then have welded a couple of new pieces of plate in the holes in the bucket, and everything would have been dandy. Would the plate have been as strong as the original steel? I assume so, but it doesn’t matter, because the mount plate is very thick and will be welded over the areas where the ears went, making those areas very strong even with ear-sized rectangular holes in them, let alone new steel plate.

Oh, well.

When you fabricate, you have to be confident, or you will never finish a job. You have to be willing to say things like, “I am going to cut this whole part off and put something else in later, because it is wasting my time.” Steel is not like wood. Once you cut wood out, it’s just plain gone. When you cut steel out, you can put more steel in and make your project as good or better than it was before you started. You have to get used to welding and cutting without fear.

When I decided to go with plasma, I checked to see if there were longer tips for getting into tight places. There are. Hypertherm makes them. Guess whose cutter they don’t fit.

I think I got my cutter in 2007. Not sure. It was some kind of anniversary for Hypertherm, because the cutter was painted in limited-edition gold. In 2008, they quit making it. Now they have completely different torches.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll get an upgraded torch. That can’t cost much.”

No, it doesn’t cost much. Unless $500 is much.

I looked the price up, and I could not believe it. I know American companies charge more for stuff, but come on. It’s a hose, a couple of wires, and a plastic pistol grip.

Hypertherm no longer makes the torch that came with my machine, so if I drop mine, it’s $500 or no plasma cutting.

My cutter is a Powermax600, which seemed like a big stretch for me when I bought it. It’s a 40-amp cutter, and that figure is the current it puts into the work. I think I paid around $1600, and that hurt.

I can buy an Everlast 60-amp cutter for $1000. Yes, it’s Chinese, but it’s good enough for many professionals. An Everlast would have an inverter, so it would suck less current and weigh a lot less for what it does. It’s only 6 pounds heavier than my machine and produces 60% more current. The duty cycle is lower, but who runs a plasma cutter 100% of the time?

Hypertherm wants $500 for a torch, and they want $2000 (street price) for the cutter that fills the slot mine used to. The new one is 16 pounds lighter, probably because inverters replaced transformers about 10 seconds after I clicked “Submit Order” to buy my obsolete machine.

I looked into Everlast because I was mad at Hypertherm for charging $500 for a torch, and because I thought maybe Everlast or some other Chinese product would work with extended tips. I have not found any evidence they work with extended tips, so I guess there is no reason to flip out and buy one.

Anyway, I should just learn to use the propane cutter. I have smaller tips on the way.

Once the tractor bucket is modified and painted, which should be Monday or Tuesday, I can build the new welding cart and make a small modification to the one I already built. Then I can get rid of my old Eastwood welding cart and put all my welding stuff into my two Harbor Freight chest/carts.

I should be able to get the cart made in a couple of days because I have all the parts this time. The mod on the old one will be somewhat taxing because I have to take it apart and take all the tools out of it before I can do anything.

Once the carts are done, I jump into fabricating a fork attachment for my tractor, so I will probably have to get a second mount plate. I’m hoping I can use part of the plate I already have. Of course, I would have to cut it somehow…

Now I know why Mrs. Douglas wanted to stay in New York when her husband moved to Hooterville.

Mount Everest and Skydiving are for Losers

Today I converted my Kubota to SSQA, which means Skid Steer Quick Attach. This is a style of front end loader that allows you to drop attachments and pick up new ones in a couple of minutes. Before SSQA, which, I am guessing, was developed originally for skid steers, changing attachments was a colossal nightmare. You had to remove four stubborn pins from your bucket, pull up to another attachment, spend half the day trying to line it up with the pins in the attachment, and put the pins in. It was really bad. I know that because my new SSQA adaptor is an attachment itself, and I just installed it on my old pin front end loader.

Removing the old bucket was not bad. I intended to drop it face down in the workshop so I could cut it up and modify it later, but the Kubota would not rotate it enough to do this, so I set it down with the top on cinder blocks and the bottom on the floor. I had to remove four bolts in order to take the pins out. A lot of people get new pins when they do this job, and that tells me they don’t take care of their tractors. My pins are in good condition, not much worse than new. The guy who sold me this tractor obviously greased the fittings sufficiently often to prevent damage.

If you don’t grease that type of part, you ruin your pins and risk wallowing out the holes they go in. Then you need to have the ears on your bucket replaced. Amazingly, people let this job go on big machines like excavators. Then they have to find fabricators who can both weld heavy equipment and do line-boring, which is a difficult way of making holes line up in large parts.

Putting the adaptor on was pretty awful. There were no clouds in the sky, and I started just when the sun started hitting the outside of the workshop. I was broiling.

I decided it was smarter to move the part to the tractor than to try to line the tractor up with the part, so I put the adaptor on my amazing Harbor Freight lift table. It will raise 500 pounds to waist height. The adaptor supposedly weighs 76 pounds, but it felt like a lot more to me.

This lift table is an astounding tool. Once you have one, you understand how badly you needed it.

I got the adaptor on there and wiggled the table around to line up the adaptor with the hydraulic rods on the tractor. Big mistake. Once I had done that, I had to find a way to line the adaptor up with the holes in the rigid FEL arms. I didn’t know the pistons would move independently when not attached to anything, so one extended farther out than the other, making it impossible to line the adaptor up with the FEL. I ended up removing the pins on the ends of the hydraulic rods and installing the ones in the FEL arms. After that, I was able to move the hydraulics around enough to make the remaining pins go in. It was a very unpleasant job, but at least it was possible.

I bought a huge 3/8″-thick mount plate to attach to the bucket. This was not necessary. It turns out you just need two rectangles; one for each end of the adaptor. You weld one rectangle to each end of your bucket. The plate I bought must weigh over a hundred pounds, and most of it will be cut out and set aside. Live and learn. I thought it was better to take a chance on buying too much steel than too little, since I had no idea what I was doing.

I think I can use the scrap to make mounts for the brush fork attachment I’m going to make. My old chain-on brush forks are obsolete now, but they are made from good steel, so I think I can put them on an attachment that will be useful for moving brush and logs and also pallets.

I would go ahead and buy a brush attachment, but they don’t exist. You can get pallet forks or a grapple. I don’t want either.

Pallet fork attachments cost a lot, and they come with two forks, and two forks will do a sad job of moving logs and brush. Things will fall out between them. I can get four forks, but that seems like a stupid idea when I have four chain-on brush forks on hand, which I will never be able to sell to the cheap people around here. You couldn’t sell these people quarters for nickels. They are incredibly tight. Selling things on the web is such a waste of time, I give things to charity.

I think grapples are stupid. They are no good at all for moving brush, and I can move big logs just fine with brush forks, which will carry a tremendous amount of brush. I could carry a grand total of one big log with a grapple, but I can get about five on the forks. I suspect men buy grapples just because they’re cool. I think men like pretending their tractors are Truckasaurus.

Tomorrow I hope to cut the unnecessary, in-the-way stuff off my precious Kubota bucket and install the mounts. Then I have to apply some paint. The paint is more intimidating than the fabrication. I hate painting.

Once the bucket is restored, I will look at the scrap I have on hand and come up with a plan for the forks.

The forks were made by the Charles Mitchem company, which I had never heard of before I got the tractor. In the past, some mechanical wizard put a Vise Grip on one of the turnbuckles that tighten the chains, and he ruined it. He compressed it permanently so it was just about impossible to turn one of the screws inside it. Vise Grips are great, but they are also some of the tools ham-fisted “bubbas” use to destroy things.

I contacted the company and got an email that was terse and useless. I thought it was rude. They told me to call a retailer. I would have said, “Sorry you’re having trouble with our product, but unfortunately, we are not able to sell directly to the public. We suggest you contact your local dealer and see what they can do for you. Here is the part you need, so you can tell them the number.”

I ended up buying a huge tap and cleaning out the turnbuckle. Lost sale there, Chuck. It’s a bad idea to ignore customers who can do their own metalworking.

Since they were so useless, I don’t feel too bad about criticizing their product. The forks are strong and very useful, but putting them on a tractor bucket is at least an hour’s work. After that, they move around when you lift things, and they damage your bucket. They have to be tightened over and over, so you have to get off the tractor repeatedly while you work. I would never buy anything like them again.

Another useless company: Florida Coast Equipment. This is the local Kubota place. I called them in an effort to get an SSQA adaptor. They said they would call back in 15-20 minutes. Then they didn’t call. Two days later, I called, and they claimed it would take at least two days to do “research” to find out if such a part existed. And they didn’t call.

What equipment or vehicle dealer has to do research to find out if a part exists? John Deere is one of the most thoughtless, greedy arrogant companies on Earth, but I can go to their website and learn the status of every [overpriced] part on my ancient garden tractor in seconds. You would think a Kubota dealer could do better.

I know Kubota makes an adaptor which can be made to work with my FEL, but I can’t get it because the dealer is unprofessional, so here I am with an ATI Tach-All which costs more. At least it’s already Kubota orange.

Some people say the Kubota adaptor is better. I don’t care. I can weld. Now that I have something to work with, it doesn’t matter whether it has problems. I can fix anything. I don’t think the Tach-All is inferior, though. It appears to be very well made. Very nice welds. Not many products have those these days.

I am looking forward to having the ability to use my bucket without forks. I am looking forward to switching attachments in a few minutes. I am looking forward to new attachments. A tractor is no good unless you have multiple attachments you can swap quickly. I now have quick attach capability at both ends of the machine, so I should be in good shape.

I need to find a way to extend the bucket’s lower lip so I can load it with leaves. That way, I can rake leaves into it and dump them quickly. I don’t need an attachment worthy of the space program. Maybe a plywood box. I’ll come up with something. These leaves have to go.

Maybe I’ll get a citrus crate. They’re made of plastic, and they hold about a cubic meter. I used to fill three wooden ones per day with grapefruit back when I was a kibbutz volunteer. It should be easy to find a cheap crate now that plagues have hit the world and the citrus industry is vanishing.

Another tractor victory: I fixed my reverse problem.

When I got this tractor, I noticed it was incredibly slow in reverse. I mean slower than crawling on all fours. I thought it was a nanny/lawyer thing. I knew my grandfather’s old Massey Fergusons moved much faster, but they banned diving boards, they banned lawn darts, they put ridiculous backup beepers on consumer vehicles…forcing farmers to creep in reverse seemed like part of the plan.

Today I asked around, and I decided to look at the pedal linkage. This tractor has a pedal that behaves like an accelerator, and it also determines your direction. It’s not a throttle. It doesn’t affect the RPM’s. It’s somehow connected to the transmission.

I found out the nut that went on the bolt that attached the pedal to the link was gone. I had been creeping in reverse for almost 5 years for nothing.

The pedal still worked okay for forward, because it bottomed out on the link and pushed it. In reverse, it barely did anything.

I checked as well as I could, and it looked like the bolt took an M8-1.25 nut. The threads were messed up, though, because the previous owner kept using the pedal without a nut, and the pedal rested on the threads.

I thought I would take the link out and run a tap over it, but there was no way. Of course, Kubota had made it hard to work on. Removing the fasteners that held the link on was not possible because Kubota installed them so tightly the nuts would have rounded before turning.

I tried removing the pin that held the pedal on, but it was held on with a snap ring that had holes too small for my snap ring pliers. Metric snap rings? I have no idea.

I found a flange nut lying around, and I decided to force it on. If the threads got more mangled, it wouldn’t matter, because I would be where I ws to start with. Fortunately, the nut overcame the bad threads, and now my tractor zips around like it should. For the first time since 2017.

I bought a new Harbor Freight rolling tool chest yesterday, just like my old green one, only red, to match my Lincoln. I turned the green one into a fantastic welding cart complete with bottles, and I plan to do the same thing with the new one. This will enable me to get rid of my old Eastwood cart, which was great for $50 but has no storage and takes up a ton of room. Once I have the new cart up and running, I can empty my portable toolboxes that contain welding-related stuff and use them for other things.

I didn’t want to get another chest while I was working on the tractor, but Harbor Freight came out with an unusual 25%-off coupon which applied to good products, not just the usual junk, so I jumped at the chance. Tomorrow I should go buy the metal I’ll need.

I may get a Milwaukee chest and mount my belt grinders on it. My shop is a catastrophe, and Milwaukee makes a chest that would end my belt grinder mess. It’s a very unusual chest which happens to be perfect for belt grinders.

On top of all this, I’m contemplating building another outbuilding. I filled my shop with tools, and I’m tired of leaving my cart and tractors outside. I was reluctant to commit to this property because I was thinking of moving to Tennessee, but I am starting to think this is where God wants me and Rhodah. I called 811 and had them locate all the underground wiring, so now I have a better understanding of where I can build and plant.

I also ordered a hitch and harness for the Explorer, and I want to build or buy a utility trailer. My truck is fine, but now that Mike is staying here with his trailer, I see that a truck is no substitute. I got a hitch I can install myself. It bolts up.

That’s about all for today. I guess it’s enough.

Sicilian Pizza Recipe

I rarely check the email address associated with this blog, so I get behind on correspondence. I have to go to a different location and turn on a computer I don’t use much. Sorry about that.

A reader asked me for my current pizza recipe, and I don’t think I sent it, so I am trying to make up for it now.

This is for a Sicilian made in a 9″x13″ aluminum quarter sheet pan. I season my pans with olive oil, baking it on at 500° or so until it’s a nice, slick film. A lot of people love steel and iron, but the truth is that aluminum gives a better crust, and it’s light and easy to work with.

I used to use 1-1/3 times as much dough, for a taller crust. My friend Mike is staying with me, and he has blood sugar issues, so I decided to try a thinner crust. It’s still excellent. If you want a taller crust, do the multiplication.

Whatever you decide to do, you want about 2/3 as much water as flour, by weight. Don’t measure the flour and water by volume, because you will get inconsistent results. Be precise about this. A small variation can ruin your pizza. Don’t be an idiot and say you have to do everything by feel.

The big exception here is the sauce. You want 4 ounces by volume. It can be hard trying to figure out exactly what 4 ounces of sauce weigh, but the volume figure is what you’re shooting for.

SICILIAN PIZZA WITH 3/4-HEIGHT CRUST

300 g high-gluten flour, like All Trumps or GFS Primo Gusto
200 g water
1 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/8 tsp. instant yeast – This will take hours to rise, so multiply by 4 if you’re in a hurry.
1/2 tsp. pepper
1.5 tsp. gluten if using bread flour – You may want to add a little more water.

Mix everything but the water in a big food processor with a chopper blade. Add the water and process for up to a minute. Dry flour will fly up and stick to the sides of the bowl in the first few seconds. I like to stop the processor and scrape it back into the dough with a silicone spatula. Then I continue.

Pour olive oil into your sheet pan. When it spreads out, it should be a circle at least 5″ in diameter. Put a little oil on your hands. Take the dough out and turn it inside out a few times, stretching it to make it tighter so it gives a good oven spring. Flatten it out into sort of a crude rectangle about an inch thick. Put it in the pan, roll it in the oil, and cover the pan with plastic.

After at least 20 minutes, Try stretching it to fit the pan. If it won’t cooperate, do what you can and return after 20 more minutes. Once it’s stretched, put dents all over the top of the dough with your fingers. Then turn it over and fit it to the pan. The dents will form nice ripples and so on in the finished crust.

SAUCE INGREDIENTS

4 oz. volume or ~135 g weight Stanislaus Saporito sauce
4 oz. water

If you want a sauce that tastes more ripe, substitute around 1-1/2 oz. of the fruit juice of your choice for part of the water.

1 tsp. sugar
1 tbsp. oil
1-1/2 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. oregano

CHEESE

6 slices Publix brand provolone
Enough Boar’s Head mozzarella (whole milk, low moisture) to make up 12 oz.

I used to use Gordon Food Service provolone, but it seems kind of rubbery these days. Boar’s Head deli mozzarella works well, but it’s expensive, so try to find something else. You can also substitute other things, such as cheddar or munster. Swiss can be very nice.

Cut the mozzarella in cubes if you want to make things easy. Otherwise, thin slices will work. I tell the grocery people to make me 1/2″ slices so I can turn them into cubes easily.

Apply the sauce to the crust. If you want, you can parbake it first, but it doesn’t really improve it. Apply the provolone. Spread the mozzarella over it. Sprinkle the pie with oregano. Add toppings.

I like to put a few slivers of cheese on the outer edge of the crust so they melt and burn against the pan. You have to have a well-seasoned pan, though, or the cheese will stick.

Bake at 500° or more (my oven does 550°) on the lowest rack, until you get what you want. These days, I have been burning pizzas pretty good, at up to 17 minutes. I use a pizza steel now. I put it on the lowest rack and let it get good and hot. Then I put the pizza pan on it.

Take the pie out of the pan and put it on a wire rack if you are obsessed with crunchiness. If not, you can put it on a pizza tray.

You will probably have to play around to see how to handle your particular oven.

You can use just about any flour you want. They all work, but they give results that are good in different ways.

I suggest you make yourself a pizza peel like the one I made. You can find photos on this blog. You just cut it out of a pizza pan, bend it, and sand off the rough bits. You need something as wide as the quarter sheet is long in order to get all the way under the crust, break any sticky spots loose, and support the pizza.

The sauce comes in huge cans, so you should break every can into portions and freeze them in airtight bags. I divide my cans into 4 portions. When I want pizza, I take the frozen sauce out and slice off as much as I want, using a scale to measure it. Then I melt it in the microwave and add my other ingredients.

That’s about it. The results are extraordinary. Maybe you can improve on them.

Cut Big Wood for Small Money

Continuing the practice of blogging about inconsequential matters, I am about to divulge a couple of helpful tool-related things.

First, it looks like the lives of old car batteries all over the world may be extended in the future. Someone somewhere has invented a device that takes worn-out batteries and makes them usable again. It’s not a gimmick. It works.

I have done nearly nothing since the pandemic started, and I am only now coming out of my catatonia. I am trying to fix things I shouldn’t have allowed to have problems in the first place. I let the batteries in my truck, farm tractor, motorcycle, and garden tractor run down, and I had to do something.

The motorcycle and farm tractor responded to ordinary charging. The garden tractor did not. Putting a charger on it for a day would get it to the point where it started, but if I stopped the engine, I couldn’t start it again.

I got myself a NOCO Genius. This is a strange device that will charge various types of batteries and repair certain batteries that resist charging due to abuse. It’s about the size of a tender you would use on a car in storage. It has two leads with clamps. It will charge any kind of 12-volt battery, it will also charge 6-volt batteries, and it will often successfully repair 12-volt batteries.

The Genius did not work on my friend Mike’s AGM motorcycle battery. He had forgotten to attach the tender’s leads, and the battery had gone dead. We tried the Genius but got nowhere.

The Genius revived my garden tractor’s battery. I had to charge it conventionally in order to get the Genius to realize it was there, and after that, the Genius took over. The repair cycle lasted 4 hours, and after that, the tractor started repeatedly. Will it last? Not sure yet.

The Genius also worked on my truck’s batteries, although, to be honest, I didn’t try the conventional charger, so it might have worked, too. I didn’t feel like wasting my time. I gave the batteries a repair cycle, and then I left a conventional charger on them overnight. No problems yet.

Here’s what I wonder: should I use the Genius prophylactically? All of my batteries are getting old. Maybe I should give them a repair cycle once every few months, sort of like shipping Keith Richards to that clinic in Switzerland where he gets an annual total blood transfusion. I should do some research. If I can get 8 years out of a battery instead of 4, why not do it?

Here’s the other tip: whenever you install a light bulb with a threaded base, you should grease the threads lightly with Vaseline.

I have ceiling fans, and a couple are pretty cheap. Each of the cheap ones has 4 deep shades attached to it, and each shade contains one bulb. The bulbs on one started fizzling, and I decided to take a bulb out so I could identify it and replace it. When I started turning it, it turned and turned. The socket came loose from the shade, with the bulb stuck inside it.

I eventually managed to get the bulb out, but that left me with a lamp which was not in great shape. I didn’t know whether the wires had been broken by the twisting, and the socket flopped around loose in the shade. I was concerned that even if the wires worked, I would never be able to install another bulb.

Mike and I fixed the lamp. He removed the lamp unit from the fan, and I repaired it. I learned that the sockets in the fan were held in by right-hand threads, which is very stupid, because the bulbs also had right-hand threads. When I put torque on a bulb to remove it, I also put torque on the threads that held the socket in the shade. In a situation like this, when the bulb doesn’t want to come loose, you can end up unscrewing the socket instead, which is what I did.

Obviously, the shade should be attached to the fan with a left-hand thread. When installing bulbs, you don’t put enough clockwise torque on the socket to loosen a left-hand thread attaching the shade to the fan, but when you try to loosen a stubborn bulb, you may apply more than enough torque to remove the socket.

I Googled around, and I learned there are special greases for light bulb bases. They prevent bulbs from seizing in their sockets. I also learned Vaseline works just as well, and most American houses already contain Vaseline. From now on, I plan to use it.

I have some LED bulbs on the way from Amazon. Home Depot could not match the price.

Taking a fan lamp shade off the fan and reinstalling the socket is not fun at all, so my advice is to do anything you can to avoid loosening the socket. When I reinstalled the socket, I tightened it pretty good, and on one of our trips, my wife made me take a jar of Vaseline for dry skin, so I shouldn’t have to reinstall any more sockets. Assuming I can get the bulbs out of the other cheap fan when they fail.

I still have dry skin, and I’m not sure where the Vaseline is. Don’t tell the wife.

I might as well toss out one more tip. I learned there are Chinese companies making credible clones of high-end professional-grade Stihl chainsaws. Pro Stihl saws are great tools. You can’t get anything like them at Home Depot or Tractor Supply. A pro saw will make short work of things a homeowner saw will take a long time to cut.

No, I am not excited about buying more Chinese stuff, and it would be nice to support companies that invent things instead of imitators, but you need to hear me out.

1. I would never buy a $1300 Stihl chainsaw (or any other kind of Stihl chainsaw), so suggesting I go with the real thing is just plain dumb. It will never happen. Yes, I could get a used one, but it would take a long time to find it, and God only knows what would be wrong with it. Since I would not buy a real Stihl, I am not costing Stihl money by going Chinese. In fact, I would be making them money, because I would probably replace a few of the Chinese parts with OEM.

2. My biggest homeowner-grade saw is a 20″ Echo with a 59cc motor. It’s very nice, but I get some big, nasty downed trees here, so it can be quite slow. The Stihl clone would have 92 cc’s and a 28″ bar, and they scream through big logs. A larger saw would be a big help.

3. The patents on the original Stihl saws have expired, so I wouldn’t be supporting IP theft. If you want, you can go out tomorrow and start an American company making Stihl clones, and Stihl won’t be able to stop you. Expiration is a patent’s most important function, because the purpose of a patent is to get new inventions into the public domain. Using other people’s unprotected ideas is not immoral or illegal.

For about $360, you can get yourself a monster Stihl-like saw that will do a phenomenal job by homeowner or farmer standards, and all the parts are replaceable and easily sourced, so if you have a problem, you will be able to fix it. In fact, as noted above, you can replace iffy parts with Stihl parts.

You can spend more and get a Chinese saw with upgraded non-Chinese parts if you’re really worried about China quality.

You can also buy a parts kit and assemble your saw yourself, learning a lot in the process and saving maybe $80. If you build the saw, which supposedly takes less than a day, you will presumably develop the ability to repair it if it breaks, and that should calm your Chinese-warranty concerns.

The two Chinese companies I know of are Farmertec and Neo-Tec. Farmertec’s Stihl clones are called Holzfforma saws. I guess some Chinese guy thought that sounded German. People who have used both saws say neither is better than the other. Each one has pros and cons. Both are a whole lot better than Home Depot saws.

In some Youtube videos, the Chinese saws cut slower than Stihls, but a guy who did the intelligent thing and did tests using the same bars and chains found no significant difference. Testing using two different chains is ridiculous. Chains get dull fast, and when they do, cutting slows down.

I may build a saw. It sounds like fun, and given the problems my mid-grade saws have given me, I would like to know more about fixing saws. It would be great to have a saw that would cut a big oak log without me having to walk around and cut from both sides.

A Stihl would last me 50 years, because I’m not a pro. What if a Farmertec only lasted a quarter as long? Gee, that would be awful. I would still be dead long before the Stihl became cost-effective.

As long as I’m talking about chainsaws, I should let you know I have learned that premixed gas–the stuff that sells for $40 per gallon and promises no carb clogs–isn’t completely reliable. Sometimes it clogs saws. I thought I’d toss this information out for people who are trying to fix dead saws and who are convinced the gas isn’t the problem. Sometimes it is.

More inconsequential matters will be discussed here as they present themselves.