Whew

More

Trying to rotate the head into position. The seller said to loosen the 4 nuts in the front, but when I do that, it only moves about 5 degrees and then runs into a hard stop.

Tomorrow?

I don’t know how AT&T does it, but I keep getting my voicemails and missed call notifications late. Sometimes days late.

This morning I kept my cell with me, and I checked it several times, because I was expecting a rigger to deliver my milling machine. Two hours after the scheduled arrival time, I noticed two missed calls and two voicemails. One was from last night, and the other came in at about 9:00 a.m. The morning call came from the rigger.

Guess what? NO MILLING MACHINE TODAY. Two of the rigger’s guys failed to show up. So it will be here tomorrow at 9:00. Unless they cancel again, and AT&T lets me know next week.

My garage is barely usable. When I park, I have to unroll the window to get out. Everything is moved around to accommodate the mill. I was going to do the rearranging after it arrived. Now I’m stuck for another day.

No Signs of Relief

My milling machine is now 87 minutes late.

While I sit here, I try to pass the time wisely. By surfing the web and occasionally looking out at the street to see if I failed to notice a giant tractor trailer in the front yard. I dropped by a weather site, and it reminded me of a cheerful fact: Global Warming is failing us yet again.

It’s nearly August, and we haven’t even had a tropical storm. I shouldn’t say anything, because gloating seems to steer hurricanes in my direction, but I can’t help being amused.

The midpoint of the season, from the standpoint of storm frequency, is September 10. If nothing happens by that date, the overwhelming likelihood is that very little will happen for the rest of the year. This will be very hard on the yammering climate hippies. They have struck out for three years running.

And again, I remind everyone: polar bears do not really drown. They are practically giant otters. Go to the zoo and see what polar bears do all day. It’s called “swimming.” Hello? Earth to hippies.

I don’t know why the hurricanes dried up. Maybe the government put Ward Brewer in a lead-lined bunker, where his hurricane-attracting powers are stifled.

I have been very bad today. I ate a Fat Boy brand ice cream sandwich for lunch. But I made up for it by cutting out a fattening and totally unwarranted tuna salad sandwich.

Where is that truck? Maybe a polar bear fell on it.

Mill Nearly Here

The milling machine is eight minutes late.

I can’t stand it. Oh, the suspense. And the dread. What if my measurements are wrong and I can’t park in the garage after this?

This morning I realized I should have bought T nuts to attach my vise to the machine. I have a clamping set, so I’ll be okay, but I should have some studs and nuts that are dedicated to the job.

Now it’s nine minutes late.

I wonder what the day holds for me. A lot of cleaning, I would think. This machine may be slathered in cosmoline. I hope there are no problems with it. If these people take seven weeks to ship a mill, imagine how long they take to fix one if it’s busted.

Ten minutes late.

I’ll have to tram it. That will be my first real challenge. After that, I install the vise. Then I may throw some metal in the vise and see if I can square it up.

I’m really pathetic. Last night, I went to the marina with my dad to try to get his GPS working. It turns out that Garmin GPSs are extremely finicky about power supplies, and a lot of people have problems because of it. The sloppy guy who installed this one has it on the same circuit as at least two other pieces of marine electronics. The Garmin tech said we should run a wire to the battery, just for the GPS. Right. That will only take five hours and forty feet of wire.

Here is the pathetic part. Someone had left a big tubular aluminum thing near the trash. Maybe an antenna. Naturally, I grabbed it. Hey, five pounds of free aluminum, and several feet are anodized. Black. Very pretty.

Fourteen minutes late.

Mike will be here tonight. Maybe I’ll fix a Costco prime rib eye for him. They’re very nice, but truthfully, the choice steaks I got last week were so good, I don’t think there is much point in buying prime for everyday dinners. The prime jobs are better, but not way, way, WAY better.

Fifteen minutes late. I better go out and look up and down the street. Just to be helpful.

Ready for the Forklift

I moved a bunch of crap around in the garage, and now there is room for my milling machine. I am freaking out for the second time in two days. Maybe I’ll freak out every day from now on.

If I use this thing five times and then sell it at a loss, it will still be fantastic. I have dreamed of this for ages. One way or the other, the story will finally have an ending.

I want to make my crab-cracking thing. I want to make the world’s first worthwhile garlic press. I have dreams about milling the heads on the Harley; supposedly the 2001 engines were manufactured so they didn’t get enough air, and you can fix it with a mill.

I watched the ATI lathe videos for a while today, while taking notes. It was fairly dull, but I paid for it, so I was determined to get my money’s worth. He ground a bunch of tools on his belt grinder. I have to give him credit. I have seen three video guys grind tools so far, and it’s always boring, but this guy seems to have the best approach. IF you don’t mind shelling out for a Burr King. That would be the hitch. You can spend like $1500 for a hotshot belt machine, or you can buy a bench grinder for under a hundred. Hmm…tough choice.

I’ll bore you with the lowdown on grinding. Rudy Kouhoupt has a video where he uses a bench grinder. He milled himself a special tool support with a sliding doodad with an arm on it which you can adjust with a protractor. You screw the doodad down and rest the tool on it as you grind. I think. It would take like a day for a skilled machinist to make his special grinding table, but when it’s done, you get tool angles that are accurate to within a degree. And your tools are probably way more accurate than they need to be.

Adrian Pendergast has a video where he walks up to a spinning grinder with no guards on it, jams a tool into it, and gives it hell. He guesses at the angles. Sparks fly all over the place. Seems to work.

Then there’s the ATI guy, who does about three times the amount of work Pendergast does, switching belts twice to get a high polish on his tools.

The Pendergast way looks pretty tempting.

Get ready for some interesting posts tomorrow.

MILL!!!

The rigger called! Looks like I will have a mill in my garage tomorrow!

Then I have to move the lathe and wire up the compressor and decide what to do with my workbench. And wire up the VFD. And clean the mill. And ask myself if I’m crazy.

I can’t believe this day is going to come.

Unusual Combination

I have to catch up on a few things.

Og’s friend Ken has cancer. It has invaded his femur. He stumbled the other day, and the femur broke. Send up some prayers.

A guy who refers to himself as “Gorak” just popped up on the Chaski forum. He says:

I live in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. Professionally, I work for a large consumer electronics company at an R&D facility managing all of the test laboratories. Outside of work, I am an avid sea kayaker, woodworker and wood turner and am in the planning stages of building an 18′ cedar strip sea kayak. My current hobby time however is severely limited as I also act as primary caregiver for my wife who is fighting an advanced terminal cancer.

Couldn’t hurt to pray.

Longtime reader Ruth has started a blog. You must begin reading it immediately.

Back to business. Sort of. Sondra has blogged my blogging of her excursion to church. So if you want, you can go over and leave a comment. I don’t know if she realized how many of her readers were Christians, but she definitely knows now.

I feel like I am partly responsible for helping Sondra decide to go to church. But who helped me? I have tended to think my own prayers made the difference in my life, but I now understand that that’s wrong. I was not the only one praying. Looking at Sondra’s blog comments, I have to wonder how many of my readers prayed for me all these years, trying to straighten me out. Keep it up. It obviously works. And thanks.

I think I’ve found the solution to my metric threading problem. I considered buying dies, but that would be a limited answer. I would have to buy a die for each thread I planned to cut, and I would have no choice about the diameters of the stock I threaded. I don’t know if there is any point in putting a thread on a rod of unusual diameter, but why give up the option? I also considered getting a 7 x 14 lathe and setting it up for metric threading. This would be great, but it’s one more machine. Someone on the Chaski forum suggested I look into a new idea: the electronic lead screw (ELS). I checked it out, and I think it’s the way to go.

Here’s how it works. You buy a stepper motor and a little digital controller, and you connect the motor to your lead screw. You also put a sensor on your spindle to tell the control box how fast the lathe is turning. Now you can move the carriage back and forth at any ratio you want. I assume there is some error, but it would be insignificant. This works so well, people who use ELS boxes commonly thread at 500 RPM. I have no idea why they would want to do this, but they do.

You can also wire it up to your cross slide to get a cheap version of CNC. This means you can cut tapers without a taper attachment. That’s a great thing. A used Clausing taper attachment would cost a grand. I can make one, but it would be a pain in the butt to store when not in use, and I’d have to put it on and take it off.

There are lots of other ways to get metric on my lathe. You can buy a 30-piece metric attachment, if you’re lucky enough to find one. They pop up about once a year. This lathe requires a metric quadrant and a bunch of other stuff, so you can’t just stick a gear in there and hope for the best. Getting a metric attachment is totally unrealistic. The ELS, on the other hand, goes on with a few bolts. And when you don’t need it, it disconnects. It won’t ruin the lathe, either. If I hate it, I can take it off and throw it in the trash.

It sounds very sweet, not to mention relatively cheap. I would have to find a way to couple the motor to the screw; that’s the only challenge. The screw on my lathe is completely covered at the right end, except for the end surface. I would have to machine into that surface to make a way to put a pulley on the screw. I guess it can be done. It’s supposed to be pretty hard to machine a square hole into a flat surface, so that probably won’t work. A tapped hole won’t work, because the screw needs to reverse, and that will make the threads come undone. Maybe I could bore a hole and put a set screw in from the side, with the screw sunk into the side of the screw, so it wouldn’t interfere with the thing the end of the screw spins in. Then I could make a shaft with a flat on one side and stick it in there. I have to make sure the screw hole would not have any ill effects on the lubrication. I suppose if it did, I could fill it with epoxy or something.

Funny, I had no idea how to do this, and then this idea came to me while I blogged it.

How do I bore a hole in the end of a lead screw with no lead screw in the lathe? Angle attachment on the mill? Arrghh.

Wait, I don’t need a lead screw. I use the ram on the tailstock.

I feel better now. That was a close one. I’ll bet the steel in that screw will eat drill bits like candy. But I have a carbide end mill I can use.

The milling machine should be at the rigger’s RIGHT NOW. Can you believe it? I feel faint. I am dying to crank that thing up.

Go visit Sondra. I mean it.

Patriotism no Cure for Stupidity

As a machining hobbyist, I find that I have one problem that is very difficult to overcome. Of course, I am referring to stupidity.

Today I was determined to do something with the lathe. I went out to the garage, and I saw a part on my Moto Guzzi which needed to be replaced. It’s a simple rod with threading at each end. It connects the shifter to the transmission. The original part is chrome-plated, and the chrome fell off. And I just happen to have a lot of stainless rod for machining. Stainless is obviously better than chrome.

I got all excited and decided to take a whack at it. It was just a matter of turning some stainless to the right size and threading both ends.

Then I remembered: I bought a standard lathe, and this is a metric bike. Arrgh.

I rooted around on the web, trying to find out what I could do. It turns out you can get metric gears for the Clausing 5936, but only if you can FIND them. And then you’re likely to get robbed. I found a partial set, but that was no good.

I felt dejected. I decided to quit. I started cursing myself (again) for not listening to Og when he told me to get a Grizzly lathe. I don’t know what I was thinking. That lathe came with a follow rest, steady rest, and metric gears. And a warranty. I still think I should get rid of the Clausing. Antiques are fun, but I am paying a big price for sticking with “old iron.”

Then I remembered something. I had stuff for metric threading! A while back, I bought drill and tap sets. Stupidity had prevented me from remembering.

I took the part off the bike and measured it. I laid it on the workbench and reached for the taps and drills. Then I realized…no dies. I can’t do external metric threading.

So while stupidity had gone into remission on one level, it was still hard at work on another.

Now I have to put the part back on and look around on the web for metric dies.

On top of that, I have no follow rest, because I bought a piece of ancient American history instead of a working tool. The rod I need to make is 0.272″ in diameter and about 7″ long. I’ll bet I can’t make that without a follow rest.

I should sell this thing. Problems like this are going to keep popping up, and the parts are impossible to find. I started searching for a steady rest and follow rest weeks ago, and nothing has turned up.

Whatever

The rigger just emailed. He says the company that is bringing my milling machine says the mill will be at the rigger’s place on Monday morning. That puts it here on Tuesday.

Truth, or more cruel machine-tool industry humor?

I Decipher the Lathe Chart

Time for the world’s worst machinist to pose a stupid question.

I have been complaining that my lathe doesn’t tell me how fast the power feed moves. It has a threading chart, and I assumed the little measurements on the chart, below the thread pitch numbers, indicated the distance the carriage moved per revolution when threading. However, I didn’t bother to see whether the measurements made sense. Yesterday I realized they did not. For example, at 4 threads per inch, the measurement is 0.0367″, which is not even close to the 0.25″ each thread would require.

Are these numbers power feed speeds? They have to be. The manual doesn’t say, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.

I got amazing news from my rigger today. He says the mill should arrive at his place by 1:00 p.m. This is like waiting for the Second Coming. There have been so many false labors, I find it hard to believe that it will ever get here.

I wish I had some metal on hand for a project. I have lots of round stock, plus a little thin rectangular bar, but my only meaningful piece of milling fodder is my 72-pound chunk of mild steel, which is the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread. I had the chance to get a Jet band saw at a great price, but I failed utterly, so I have no practical way of making smaller pieces from the loaf. I can use the mill, but that would take a century and waste a lot of metal. I guess I could part it in the lathe! That would be pretty terrifying.

I was kidding just now, but I suppose it’s possible. Mount it in the 4-jaw chuck, center-drill it, stick it on my poor beat-up dead center, and pray. I’d have to back the tailstock off every time I got close to the center of the work, because you’re not supposed to part using a center. I’d also have to drill over and over, because each slice would take a drill hole with it, and then I’d have slices with drill holes in them, so I’d have to face the material down to the point where the holes disappeared, wasting metal.

I wonder how slowly I’d have to run the lathe. Like 20 RPM, unless I wanted to dodge a 72-pound missile as it came off the chuck.

No, this is not a great idea. I may as well get a band saw or find someone to cut this thing. If I pay someone, I have to decide in advance exactly how big the pieces will be.

I parted my pathetic hammer handle project with one end in a chuck and one end on a dead center, but I pulled the dead center out before I got close to the end. I hope that’s not insanely dangerous. It seemed to make sense. The center kept things working through most of the cut, and at the end, it wasn’t necessary.

The VFD is pretty great. Combine it with the back gear, and you could probably turn slowly enough to roast a pig. Helpful when parting.

VFD…pig roasting…help! I’m having an awful idea! I have a crappy 3-phase motor I’ll never be able to sell. How cheap can I get a VFD for it? I’d be the bull goose pig roaster of all time.

Thank God, the VFD is too expensive. It’s $144. There is no way I would do that. Tempting idea, though. Low frequencies for slow cooking; crank it up to throw excess grease off the pig. I guess the motor would burn up at 1 RPM.

I never followed up with my pig roaster idea. A long time ago I planned to weld one up, out of fence posts. But the motor I ordered never arrived. They discontinued it or something. I should check Grainger. Fence posts cost virtually nothing, and I already have a couple. The motor is the only real expense.

Ebay Wins Again

I gave up and ordered myself a better knurling tool. I think part of my knurling problem was that I was using 304 stainless, which is not all that soft. You need to use a lot of pressure. My lathe is only a 12″ job; there is a limit to the pressure it can exert on a part held between centers. I decided to try a tool that applies pressure all by itself. I found a knockoff of the Eagle Rock scissors-type knurling tool, which has two knurls that apply pressure from opposite sides of the work. The tool I have now has two knurls on the same side, and the lathe does the pushing.

I could have gone with the real Eagle Rock tool, but these things look pretty simple, and I think I should be able to make a perfectly good one once I have a mill. I would at least like to try it before spending money needlessly.

Another problem is that 304 stainless hardens when you apply force to it, so I was clearly an idiot for trying to do multiple turns. On the first turn, you harden the work, and then you’re in trouble.

Some people make their own knurls. A guy named Frank Ford posts regularly on the Chaski forum, and he made his own rope knurl. This is a knurl that goes around the edges of things like cabinet door knobs, leaving a surface that looks a lot like rope.

I have been told that I should use my power feed to move knurls down a workpiece, but as far as I can tell, there is no way to know how fast my power feed moves. The threading chart has speeds listed in thousandths per turn, but that’s not the power feed. Maybe there’s something in the manual. I don’t see why I couldn’t use the threading feed instead.

Someone somewhere said you can move knurls down a workpiece by applying pressure with the handwheel. The knurls try to pull the carriage, but they can’t do it by themselves, so you give them a boost. I haven’t tried that.

I’ve also been told–by a very respected machinist–that when you make diamond knurling, you don’t have to worry about the diameter of the work. Uh…okay. I know he has to be right, but I will have to see it happen in front of me before I’ll get the idea.

I made a lot of notes while watching the ATI lathe videos today. One nice thing about that series is that the instructor uses a puny 10″ lathe, so I don’t have to worry that he might be teaching me things that I can’t do on my 12″ Clausing. The other DVDs I have feature a giant lathe, by my standards. I think it’s a 15″ Leblond, but I forget.

I need to get out in the garage and try to knurl something. The tool I have is probably not good for stainless, but I have other stuff. I would hate to waste good aluminum, which is expensive, but I can grab some crummy steel.

The mill is supposed to be within the city limits tomorrow. After waiting seven weeks, I think I should sell tickets.

DVDs Deceive

Man, I am irate. I have two sets of lathe DVDs, and neither one has the right information about knurling.

As I noted earlier, I did not understand how the machinists in the videos got the knurls to track in the same cuts, over and over as they turned the workpieces. When I do it, on successive turns of the workpiece, the knurls make new marks overlaying the marks made on the earlier turns. You don’t get a sharp diamond pattern this way. You get a mess. The guys in the videos say nothing about this. They just knurl away, and everything comes out perfect.

I just found an article which explains it. Apparently, you have to measure the distance between the ridges on the knurls and then turn your work to a circumference that is a multiple of that distance. Why don’t they mention this in the videos?

The more I read about this, the more I see that I don’t know anything. I’ll quit until tomorrow. But I’m pretty sure I should get a scissor-type tool.

I Nearly Threaded

It is a bit frustrating, having a weird lathe with no clutch or brake and no lead screw. Or is it feed screw? One of them is not there.

I am trying to figure threading out. I have two sources of instruction. First, my Lathe Learnin’ DVDs from Adrian Pendergast. Second, my rented ATI DVDs featuring Darrell Holland. I haven’t looked at the ATI stuff yet.

Pendergast threads without moving his compound slide. I do not know why you would want to move the compound slide, since I have never been taught that way, but it is my understanding that it’s the standard method. I’m sure I’ll find out about it when I see the ATI disks.

My lathe has a belt drive, a quick change gearbox, half-nuts, a sliding gear (?), a back gear, a VFD, and power feeds. Plus a lead screw direction lever. Since I have that lever, I guess I have a lead screw but no feed screw. Whatever the deal is, there is no screw to disengage when I thread. I’ll put it that way.

Forgot: I also have a selector knob that determines the lead screw speed. It has three positions labeled A, B, and C. And of course, B is the fastest. That makes perfect sense.

To get the thread pitch I want, I have to select the lead screw speed, threading gear, motor direction, and slide gear position. Am I forgetting anything? Maybe.

To make the machine thread, I turn it on, position the tool at the right depth, and engage the feed while watching the threading dial. I’m supposed to do a light scratching pass to see if I have the pitch right.

I have had to figure out which of the controls affect the pitch. Some do, and some don’t. It looks like the back gear isn’t relevant, but I decided to use it anyway. It may be a good idea, because it allows the motor to turn faster.

I looked at the machine’s threading chart today to find the pitch I wanted. I was trying to thread the hammer handle I started working on a while back. I needed 11 threads per inch.

I got everything set up more or less right and took a light pass. The threads were like a 64th of an inch apart. Totally wrong. I started adjusting things. I moved the sliding gear knob. I fooled with the lead screw speed. You name it. Finally, I made a brilliant observation. You can’t thread using the power feed lever. You have to use the half-nut lever. They do exactly the same thing, at different rates. I had them mixed up. I’m not sure why the machine needs two levers that are nearly redundant, but I guess there’s a reason. Maybe it’s impossible to gear it up so the same lever will give feed speeds that are good for both threading and power feeding.

I totally ruined the part while I was doing this experimentation, but I think I finally have it figured out. But because my machine has no clutch, I have to be really alert to keep from running the threading tool into the chuck. I have to hit the half-nut lever instantly, when the tool moves off the area I’m threading. If I just shut off the motor, the tool may keep going for a while.

Now I have to get knurling under control. I watched Darrell Holland do it, and it didn’t make much sense to me. I don’t understand how you get the knurls to go into the same marks over and over as the piece turns. You would think there would have to be a constant integral ratio between the diameters of the knurls and the work, but his knurling looked great. He set his lathe up to move the knurling tool .015″ per turn, to push it down the work. I can’t figure out how how you can make a knurl go sideways without jumping out of the marks it’s making. And how did he know .015″ was the right amount to move the knurling tool on each turn?

I’m sure I’m missing something obvious, because he didn’t worry about any of this stuff.

I think I’m going to take my handy Home Depot Chinese dowel and try to learn knurling on it. It’s cheap metal, so I don’t care what happens to it.

It’s fantastic having a TV and DVD player in the garage. I have the AC running, and I sit out there in a state of total bliss, watching my DVDs.

Maybe I can get that stupid dowel knurled. Then I guess I’ll have to cut some more 304 stainless and try making the hammer handle again.

I have to put all the stuff I’m learning into the instructions I’m writing. The lathe manual is pathetic. It’s not intended for pinheads who play with lathes in their garages. It’s for people who don’t need a manual at all.

If I create anything useful, I will announce it here in big bold type. Don’t hold your breath.

Newest Wild Guess

Here’s the latest news on the milling machine. It is officially, definitely, probably going to arrive in town on Friday.

Who wants to place a bet?

Pina Coladas Can be Considered Painkillers

It looks like Obamacare is dead. Thank God. In order for the plan to live, lots of Americans would have had to die. So the way I see it, it was aborted to save lives. That’s pro-choice, isn’t it? And if you believe, as I do, that Obama got elected by accepting money from China and Muslim nations, then the pregnancy was also the result of rape.

It’s odd, but I can’t remember anyone suggesting that caregivers just charge the poor and uninsured less. As it stands now, the poor get all the treatment they need, but then they get charged huge bills they can’t or won’t pay, and the rest of us (the ones who take bills seriously) end up subsidizing them. Why not just admit that we overtreat and overcharge people? Let’s give the poor and uninsured good but not excessive treatment, and let’s charge what the treatment is actually worth. Maybe some of them would actually pay, and that would bring prices down for the rest of us. And the poor would be more likely to go to doctors.

Whenever I think about health care prices, I think about my first kidney stone. Like all medical emergencies, it happened on a weekend night, so I had to go to the ER. They gave me a totally unnecessary scan that cost several thousand dollars. They doped me up and kept me on a Gurney all night, and then they sent me home on Saturday morning–still containing a stone–with enough Percocet to get me through one day. Because clearly, I was a drug-seeking patient, and I had magically generated a kidney stone in order to get enough pills to last until Monday.

In the end, they charged me around six grand. That includes a few hundred bucks for my urologist, who actually provided useful treatment.

What did I really need? I’m not a doctor, but I know what doctors have done with millions of other people with tiny kidney stones. They x-rayed their abdomens (or not), gave them painkillers, and waited for them to pee the stones out. You can do this, including drugs and a follow-up x-ray, for maybe six hundred bucks. Apart from the pointless scan, this is the treatment I received.

The second time I got a stone, I called my urologist’s office, and I got his unbelievably nasty receptionist, and I was so offended, I decided not to get treatment. And a couple of days later, I was fine. Total cost: $0.

Now I lay off the calcium antacids, and I go easy on tea. And I definitely don’t take calcium antacids WITH tea. No more stones.

Apologists can say, “You could have had cancer! You could have been on the verge of death! You should thank God you got that scan!” And my response is that you could say the same thing about someone who went in to get a pimple squeezed. You can mistake cancer for a pimple. Or for hemorrhoids, or for any of a huge number of other trivial ailments. The fact is, the odds that I had a serious problem were incredibly low, and if I had turned out to be seriously ill, it would have become obvious with or without a scan.

The purpose of the scan was to make money. And it worked.

Have you ever gotten sick overseas? It’s a very different experience. The care you get is likely to be nearly as good as the care you get here, but it costs much, much less, and it comes with fewer bells and whistles. For example, I knew a kibbutz volunteer whose appendix went crazy while he was visiting Jerusalem. The same day, he went to a charity hospital in the Old City, and they yanked his appendix out, and they sent him back to the kibbutz when he was ready to travel. Didn’t cost him a thing, because the Catholics paid for it. But if he had been charged, it would still have cost much less than American care, because they didn’t generate 3,000 pages of documentation and give him fifty things he didn’t need, and he didn’t get a private room with cable.

I sliced my finger open in the Bahamas. Did a real number on it. There was no doctor on the island, unless you count the vacationing Americans who were lying drunk on their yachts. I went to the local nurse, and she ran a giant needle up through my fingertip and out of the nail, and she tied it up and bandaged it and sent me home. I was fine. In an American ER, they would have given me a bone scan, an EKG, three caviar enemas, and a grief counselor. I didn’t pay her a dime, but even if she had charged, it would have been dirt cheap.

I’ll bet this would have been a $500 injury in the US. If you’ve paid to have a minor cut stitched, leave a comment and tell me what they charged.

The other big excuse is that lawyers force doctors to overtreat. Yes, I’m sure the added profit is no incentive at all. Because nobody ever went into medicine to make money. Everyone knows lawyers screw life up, but they’re not the whole explanation for our medical costs. Doctors proactively look for ways to charge more. My dentist now has a racket where he tries to charge you for an oral cancer exam, and if you don’t buy it, you have to sign a release. That’s so blatant, it’s nearly a scam. And the obvious inference is that if you don’t pay, and he sees a lesion anyway, he’s not going to tell you. I hope that isn’t the case.

I avoid doctors for the same reason I avoid mechanics. You can’t trust them. You go in for a trivial problem, and while you’re there, they look for other things that can make them money. And unless you’re Superman, they can always find something. Actually, that might not be enough to make you safe. “Hmm…I can’t get this needle into your Kryptonian vein. I better give you an expensive yet inconclusive test for scleroderma. And some type of scan, as soon as Steve gets out of the machine. He has a very ominous pimple.”

If I trusted doctors–if I had not been cheated so many times already–I would be more likely to visit them regularly. It’s that simple.

Here’s another idea. Why not fly the poor overseas for treatment? I know it sounds insane, but it isn’t. You can go to Central America, pay a pittance for top-quality surgery, stay in a resort hospital on a beach, pay for your airfare, and still come out way ahead. If you don’t like arepas, you can go to India and have curry. Or Singapore.

Let’s see. Here’s how it would work. Poor person shows up at hospital. They determine he can’t pay. They diagnose him with a condition requiring expensive surgery. They send him to Belize. He recovers and doesn’t pay. The benefit? Now the hospital can cover his small foreign bill out of money received from paying patients, instead of covering his huge American bill. Sounds nutty, I know, but if it saves money, why not?

I wonder if my medical insurance would cover treatment at a ritzy beach hospital. I would greatly prefer it, wouldn’t you? You’d think they would jump at it, if it saved them money. A 2008 Time article says insurance companies are starting to take the bait.

Speaking of great foreign deals, I still have no Chaiwanese milling machine. The rigger I’m working with just emailed, and he said the shipper called yesterday to ask if he could unload the machine from a box trailer. They were looking for a flatbed and couldn’t find one. This means that as of yesterday, the machine was in…CALIFORNIA. This is amazing. I just checked, and it appears that I ordered this thing seven weeks ago. I hadn’t realized so much time had passed. Twice, I’ve been told they shipped it, and twice it has turned out to be untrue.

The seller says he has a different brand of machine he can sell me; he’ll be getting them in a week and a half. I told him to go ahead and make the switch, if the other machine was still sitting 3000 miles away.

I’ve been waiting for lathe videos from Smartflix, and they arrived yesterday. These are from ATI. I highly recommend their stuff. It’s very methodical and thorough. I guess now that I know the milling machine isn’t going to be here in the near future, I should watch the lathe videos and try to get some things done. It’s tempting to stall when you think a new machine will arrive at any minute. A milling machine would make projects much easier, so I find myself wanting to wait until it gets here. I really don’t understand the guys who claim you can do all sorts of great things with just a lathe. It’s not true. You need to be able to make straight cuts, and you can’t do that with a lathe unless you spring for an expensive milling attachment. Here’s what you can do with just a lathe: you can make a machinist’s jack and a head for a hammer. And you can thread things and cut rods in two. That about sums it up. I’m exaggerating because I’m annoyed, but what I say is true in principle.

Let me close with something useful. Heather’s mom (an actual person) just had more surgery. Stents in her urinary tract. Please offer a prayer.

She probably should have gone to Costa Rica.