How Much Headroom is Enough?

Let’s say you have a plasma cutter which goes as high as 40 amps. And you have a beefy 60-amp circuit. And you have an air conditioner that draws 9 amps.

Would you put a socket for the AC on the plasma circuit and see what happens?

How Jeff Foxworthy Would Run a Lathe

I have an idea for making a base for my quick change tool post. The existing base is too wide. It’s a rectangular piece of metal about 3/8″ thick, maybe 2 1/2″ long, and 2″ wide. There is a rabbet (don’t know what else to call it) about 3/16″ deep down each long side. There is a 5/8″ bolt hole in the center.

I can replace this with a round base; rectangular is better, but round can be made to work. I’m thinking I might make one out of aluminum, since I have 2″ bars on hand.

Here’s the plan.

First–this is the part that will make everyone shriek–I’ll make a 5/8″ hole using a wood spade bit held in the tailstock.

Wait! It will work! I’m sure of it. I have no 5/8″ metal bits, and I’ve used spade bits in aluminum. If I go slow and use lots of WD40, it will work.

Okay, then I turn the bar down until it’s the same width as the tool post slot. Then I put a groove in it about 3/16″ wide, to simulate the rabbety thing in the existing base. Then I part the result off. I end up with a giant washer with a step in the side.

Crap, it has to be threaded on the inside. I’ll never be able to do that. Even if I could thread, the existing bolt is metric.

I guess I better go look at the parts again.

Saying That Makes Any Experience Seem More Meaningful

I posted something about needing a tachometer for my lathe, and I also mentioned it on the Chaski forum, and I got a lot of responses. It looks like many people have had this same idea, so there are all sorts of products. Most of them (maybe all; I haven’t checked carefully) require you to put some kind of marking on a spinning part. An optical sensor observes it and gives you the RPM figure.

This should make life considerably easier. Right now, using the middle setting on my pulleys, I get 900 RPM at 60 Hz. That means 1350 RPM at 90 Hz and 450 RPM at 30 Hz. I can figure that out by myself. But I’d rather know the exact number so I can calculate SFM without so much grief.

There’s a guy who sells a tachometer that automatically turns RPM into SFM. I don’t know how it works. I assume you have to tell it the diameter of the work and so on.

I’ll try to make an intelligent choice. My lathe has a handle sort of thing on the back end of the spindle, and it turns, so it might be a good place to mount whatever the sensor looks at.

Yesterday I chucked a 2″ by 8″ piece of T6 aluminum in the lathe and fiddled with it. I faced and chamfered the end, and I made a little shoulder. The runout was horrendous. I didn’t make much of an effort to chuck it accurately. I just wanted to see how the lathe ran with a big piece of metal in it. Seems fine. I can tell I’m too retentive to be a fan of 3-jaw chucks. The idea of putting something in a chuck crooked and turning it round will never sit well with me.

One VFD problem: I got an “E7” display twice. That means “voltage overload.” Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m working on it. Something about the motor producing back voltage, I think. Maybe the weight of the aluminum and the chuck makes it harder for the lathe to brake, and somehow it’s giving me an error message.

The garage AC project is going well. It turned out I didn’t have to cut the hole myself, so I’ll just handle the wiring. I can’t even explain how great this is. In Miami, in any month between May 31 and October 31, a garage turns into a steam bath. Work is unbearable. In fact, just sitting around is unpleasant. Sweat runs off of you and gets on things you’re working on. With an air conditioner, life will be very, very sweet.

I can’t believe I found an 18000-BTU air conditioner that fits in a two-foot-wide hole and accepts a remote, for $127. That is a dream come true. I wonder if I can make my new universal remote handle the AC. I guess it should work. After that, all I’ll need will be a recliner.

Even if this AC craps out early, this model is so cheap, I could replace it and still end up paying about what an expensive unit would have cost. This baby usually sells for under 300. God bless the Chinese.

These trivial and relatively inexpensive things make me so happy. It’s almost sick. I’m so glad I don’t need a yacht and a Bentley to enjoy life. I’m glad I happened on pleasures that are productive as well as enjoyable. I could have ended up with an expensive golf habit! Can you imagine anything more worthless? Walking around hitting a ball with an ill-designed stick, perpetually failing to live up to your own expectations. It’s like a vision of Hades.

Here is what Winston Churchill supposedly said about golf: “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” Playing golf is such a waste of time, it could reasonably be construed as a gesture of contempt for the value of your own existence.

Maybe my view is jaundiced because I was a golf orphan. At least when you fish, you bring home food.

On my sister’s suggestion, I got some oregano oil for my congestion. Can’t hurt. It’s supposed to do all sorts of good things for you. I just took my first dose, and it’s not unlike swilling Lestoil. I wonder if it’s good for gallstones. It has terpenes in it, I think. Gallstones hate terpenes. Which sound like they should be small tortoises.

Some day when the garage is totally subdued, I’ll post photos.

“Who’s That Working on That Lathe? It Looks Like Al Jolson!”

I stuck the old motor in the lathe and rigged it up so it would run. Man, I can’t believe how much caked-on grease is in that thing. I finally grabbed a can of brake part cleaner, hosed down the grease, and removed it with paper towels. Don’t worry; this wasn’t on moving parts. It was on the cabinet and so on. Places where it ended up because it flew there thirty years ago.

It stinks, too. When you hit the grease with the brake part cleaner, you get a disgusting compound that smells like fish.

I am really going through the hand cleaner.

I got the drum switch wired up and connected to the logic inputs. Now I have to program the VFD so it knows the switch exists. The braking works great. I won’t need a resistor. It stops in a second or two. I haven’t tried it with a chuck on it, but it’s my understanding that this is a pretty small braking load for this VFD.

The wires are all over the place, and if the lathe is grounded, it’s only through the bolts holding the VFD on. It’s all held together by those screw-on cap things that join wires. I made sure none of the wires could get near the gears or the chuck. When the new motor arrives, I’ll fix it up properly.

I’m trying to figure out how to measure the RPMs at the chuck. There is a belt setting that provides about 900 RPM. I guess I can use that setting, and then the lathe will run at 900 RPM at 60 Hz, so the RPM will always be about 15 times the frequency. That isn’t too hard to calculate. I’ll bet if I check around, I can find some kind of add-on doodad that will count RPMs electronically.

I think I’ll go work on the programming.

Rise of the Machine Tools

I’m the proud new owner of three chunks of T6 aluminum.

I kept hoping scrap metal would magically fall into my hands, the way my Genie Superlift did. But it was not to be. So today I rode over to C&R and asked if they had T6. I got three pieces, 2″ by 8″ in length. It cost almost fifty bucks! Unbelievable. It’s weird, how products made with metal cost less than the same amount of metal in bulk form. Somehow China is at the root of it. That much, I’m sure of.

They don’t sell leaded steel, so the aluminum was all I got. I have to find a place that sells the kind of steel I need. I love using the word “need” when I talk about this stuff. It’s like saying “I can’t” when what you really mean is “I can, but I won’t.” I don’t need metal. I need a diet and a haircut. Metal, I merely want.

Og and Virgil simultaneously informed me that I could use a file to fix the motor shaft. You run the motor and use the file to take the burrs off. That’s a good idea. I have lathe on the brain, so it never occurred to me to use ordinary doofus-grade tools. I guess the old motor is good enough to use to drive a belt grinder, so eventually I’ll take their advice and fix it up. Neither one of them had the presence of mind to mention the sine qua non of motor shaft filing: the Black and Decker Workmate. I guess they just assumed I’d read it in.

I don’t know why the motor quit making noise. Maybe there was a big hunk of rat crap on the windings, and it fell off.

I think I’ll go fire up the lathe and see what it does.

Motor Headed Back to Kansas

Mish Weiss is in a bad state, as should be expected after a bone marrow transplant. I’m hoping this one works better than the last one. You would think marrow from a daughter would be more likely to take hold than marrow from a stranger. It’s comforting to believe, whether or not it’s true. She appreciates all prayers and comments.

I hope some of you will do me a favor and remember my cousin Debbie today. Her cancer involves her brain as well as her lungs. It amazes me, how many people in my family smoke. I can understand the older ones getting caught up in it, because the link between smoking and cancer wasn’t recognized by the US government until 1964. But why did the younger ones start?

Human beings are not driven primarily by reason. If we were, Barack Obama wouldn’t be President, and it would be impossible to get anyone to buy heroin. You would think that intelligence would make us happier and healthier than other creatures, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Intelligence is overrated; I’ve always said so. An ounce of character is worth a ton of intelligence. I’m smart, and I’ve done so many stupid things, I could never hope to remember a tenth of them.

Maybe I shouldn’t write about my lathe problems after saying a thing like that, but I will.

UPS, in its wisdom, sent my damaged motor back to Kansas. They provided no explanation. I have no idea whether they’re paying the seller anything toward the damage. It will be at least a week before I get a replacement.

Yesterday the new VFD arrived. I wired it up and held my breath, wondering if I might accidentally come up with a new way to destroy VFDs. I connected it to the ancient motor the lathe seller sent me, and it ran. Thank God. Literally.

When this motor arrived, it made a bonking sound when the shaft rotated, but now it’s quieter. I don’t know why. The shaft is still a mess, so it’s not possible to align the pulleys well. But the motor works. I’m thinking I should shove it into the lathe cabinet and use it until the Baldor arrives. I could rig it up without conduit for now, in order to make the Baldor installation easier.

If I could get the shaft out, I could use the lathe to take off the shaft burrs that make the pulleys sit at an angle. But I’d need a working motor to do that. I have a single-phase motor I could use, but to do that, I’d need to connect the drum switch. That would be a giant pain. I’ve stripped and degreased the drum switch, in preparation for wiring it to the VFD logic inputs. Besides, I’m sure the motor’s shaft is permanently attached to the rotor or stator or whatever the big thing covered with windings is. You could never mount that in a lathe chuck, unless the lathe was the size of a house.

I suppose a real genius would mount the motor on something solid and use it as a lathe. The shaft would turn, so it would be possible to apply a tool to it. But you’d have to have something solid to mount the tool on, and I think you can see what a Rube Goldberg mess it would be. If I were stranded somewhere and I had to fix the shaft in order to save my life, I’d give it a try, but as it is, it looks like a very bad idea.

I think I have enough crap now–here and in shipment–to use the lathe. I went crazy and sprung for Moly-Dee instead of cheap cutting fluid. The machinery snobs at PM seem to think Tap Magic is only fit for amateurs; they like Accu-lube (nearly impossible to find) and Moly-Dee (expensive). How often am I going to buy fluid? Once a year? I think buying the good stuff is a reasonable expense. I’m also going to get a gallon can of WD-40 for cutting aluminum. They have it at Home Depot.

I Ebayed a used 1/2″ 4-flute center-cutting carbide end mill. I might be able to rig the lathe up so I can use this to trim down the base for my quick change tool post. If not, it’s still a good cutter to have, and I think the total cost is ten bucks. I figured out how to put Enco’s 80-grit aluminum oxide wheels on my half-inch grinder arbors, so I have one of those on the way. I also got a silicon carbide dressing stick. I was not able to get a star-type dresser from Enco, and I didn’t feel like looking elsewhere and paying a big shipping fee for a four-dollar item.

I need some metal to train on. I’ve been watching Craigslist for scrap, but the one promising ad I saw did not produce a return phone call or email. I may have to drive to a metal dealer and pay up. I think I’ll get a couple of feet of bronze, some T6 aluminum, and some leaded steel. With WD-40 on hand, I can work aluminum right now.

What will I do? Don’t know. I guess I’ll start by chucking some aluminum and trying each type of tool, to see how everything works. I have a Clausing manual, but like most manuals for professional tools, it doesn’t tell you how to use the tool. It just tells you where the controls are. I plan to do what I used to do in my old science labs. I’ll make sequential lists of the things I need to do, in order to perform various operations. Then I’ll laminate them and put them near the lathe. This approach is a godsend for absent-minded people. If I had done this when I wired up the first VFD, it would still be working. I ruined that thing simply because I did not accommodate my known failings. The lesson was worth the expense. If you make a dumb mistake while running a lathe, it can mess you up good. A big lathe can roll your arm up like a bedroll, snapping the bones as required. I don’t know if this one can do that, but it can fire a chuck at me at great speed. This lathe should be pretty powerful. I’m using the biggest motor Clausing recommends, and I don’t have the vari-speed drive to sink horsepower. It’s just two belts and a gear or two.

I should make a list of operations I’ll do in order to train myself. That will simplify things and give me direction.

Lists are powerful things, if you have the character to make them and use them. Guess I’m looping now, so I’ll close.

Mite Poop

I managed to take my fried VFD apart, sort of. It’s really something to see. They use screws to unite parts that are also soldered together, so you take the screws out and pull, and then you see the solder, and you wonder if it’s a cruel joke.

It’s still fried. I tested my electricity again (using my magically repaired Fluke “Our Gucci Meters Don’t Need no Steenking Battery Indicators” multimeter), and I rewired the power cord. No change.

There is no real schematic included with this VFD, and even if there were, there are very few parts a mere mortal could hope to replace. I can’t identify the part I fried, and if I could, I couldn’t do anything about it. At least I got the satisfaction of getting the cabinet open.

I’m still waiting for UPS to skulk in with the motor they probably refused a damage claim on. Once it arrives, I’ll be able to order a new conduit box, and that will be the end of my major lathe headaches. The seller has already agreed to cover the cost of the box.

I’m still on hold, lathe-wise, but at least I feel good. A few days ago I got myself a dust-mite-proof mattress cover. When I replaced my pillows, I noticed an improvement in my breathing, but it didn’t last. I figured I had to go whole-hog and cover the mattress. Looks like it worked. I don’t use addictive nasal spray any more, and I sleep all night with no interruptions.

The mattress cover didn’t look too great in the store. I was hoping for cotton. You can find bug-proof cotton covers online, but the one at BBB was made from polyester, and the packaging said it was waterproof, so I was afraid it was just a big plastic bag. I poked around until I found a description of the fabric, and I found something which seemed to suggest it was microfiber. I decided to take a chance; one of my pillow covers was made by the same company, and it works fine. I didn’t want to order a mattress cover online and then wait a week for it to arrive.

The fabric feels awful, but in practice, it presents no problems. It’s under a mattress pad and a sheet, so I can’t feel the revolting texture. And it breathes, so I’m not swimming in sweat all night. The best part is that you can throw it in the washer and dryer without worrying. Some of the covers I found online got complaints because they were fragile.

I wonder how long my sleep has been disturbed. I would guess that I started using this mattress again two years ago, after taking it out of storage.

Dust mites are really something. What I’ve read is that they literally crawl out of mattresses at night to eat dead skin and poop on people. I guess when you imprison them in a mattress cover, they can’t do that. You would think mite-poop vapor would come up through the cover and cause congestion, but it doesn’t.

From now on, every time I buy a mattress, one of these covers is going on it from the first day. Why give the mites a chance to establish a foothold? I keep reading horrifying factoids, like the one that says dust mites can double the weight of a mattress over time. I am not interested in maintaining a mite farm.

The fabric is called Microguard, in case you’re interested in trying it.

I feel a little silly, sleeping on a waterproof mattress cover at my age, but I guess now I’m free to take up bedwetting.

UPS: Wily and Elusive

I’m playing hide-and-seek with UPS today. They brought me a Baldor motor with a broken conduit box, and the seller made a damage claim. According to the UPS site, it’s “out for delivery” today, which tells me they denied the claim. I’m trying to find the part locally. In the meantime, I’m hoping to catch UPS as they arrive, so I can go out and watch the delivery. The first time it was delivered, the driver dropped it. I don’t think he’ll do that with me standing on the porch.

I guess delivery drivers drop things on purpose, because the alternative is to bend over carrying heavy objects, and over a career, that would almost certainly cause back problems. Actually, the alternative is to take five extra seconds and use a handtruck. I’m being charitable here.

The other day I talked about how I preferred Fedex to UPS, but Fedex dropped something on my porch this morning. They must be unionized now. I can’t imagine any other reason why they would be so slack.

I wonder if there is any delivery service that doesn’t punt and toss packages. I’ll bet the post office doesn’t. They don’t have the energy to do things like that.

I emailed the local Baldor dealer 9 minutes ago, and they have already gotten back to me three times. Looks like I won’t have any trouble getting the part. Now, will the seller reimburse me?

I don’t want to sound ruthless, but the awesome threat of negative Ebay feedback is in play here.

Tools Provided

I guess I’ve solved the 4-jaw chuck problem. I bought the Ebay Skinner chuck I mentioned yesterday. It’s expensive, but the cost is about the same as a Chinese chuck plus a Bison plate, and if I bought that combination, I’d have to do some machining to make it fit. I think. And in the end, it wouldn’t be as good. A new Bison with an L00 mount is about $660, and it’s not an American-made chuck like the one I got. Hopefully I did okay. I also got an 11″ faceplate with lots of slots. I guess I’ll need a drive dog. I think this will cover the basic tooling. Some day I guess I’ll need to be able to use collets and end mills, and I may need a taper attachment. But I think I have enough junk to make the lathe work.

I mean it will work once the motor is installed! Man, that’s frustrating. This week, UPS will be looking at the one that was shipped to me, to try to find a way to weasel out of paying for the broken conduit box. I was a fool to report the damage. For $35, I could have had a new box. I shouldn’t have to pay it, but sometimes the smart thing is to give up. I got a $750 motor for about 85% off. Another thirty-three bucks would not kill me.

I’m sure this is exactly what UPS is hoping customers will say after making their first damage claim. The point of the process, in all likelihood, is not to improve customer relations. It’s to punish customers for reporting damage, so they never do it again.

That’s probably the intended consequence, but here is what the actual result will be. I always use Fedex or the post office when I ship things. UPS’s damage policy has reinforced my preference.

I’ve had one problem with Fedex in all the times I’ve used them, and it was a minor one. I also had a damaged package. I don’t count that as a problem, because Fedex came to the door and took it back, and they brought a new package, and that was the end of it.

UPS has been unionized for a long time, and Fedex has a long, proud history of resisting unions. Maybe there’s a connection.

Church was pretty good last night. My sister wants a church where they talk more about ideas she considers advanced, but I find that I need plenty of help just mastering the fundamentals, so it doesn’t bother me at all when a sermon deals with basic things. I want a sturdy foundation before I worry about parapets and balconies. Maybe different people have different needs. I should also add that the old familiar sensation of God’s presence was there. At one point we were all standing, and I was trying to pray and so on, and the sensation became so strong, words stopped forming in my mind. I had to stop and feel it.

I had been feeling somewhat discouraged. I didn’t do much to promote the cookbook, because I changed so much during the time when it was rolling out, and while sales are not embarrassing, they are not what I hoped they would be. There were things in there that I wish I hadn’t written, so my drive to promote the book was not what it could have been. I have been looking for guidance about what I should do. I would like to use my writing in a positive way, but nothing has come to me so far. I don’t want to practice law; it’s a minefield of temptation. Lawyers spend half their time rationalizing their questionable actions, and when you’re surrounded by people who do that every day, you tend to absorb their mindset. I suppose I could do arbitration and mediation without sinking too deeply into the slime. I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I’ve turned into a parasitic fomenter of litigation.

Yesterday, the pastor and his wife talked about standing in faith. Holding on until you get what you’re supposed to. And although it was a simple message, it hit home. I needed to hear it. God promises us all sorts of stuff, but he also says you can’t expect to receive any of it unless you ask in faith and remain steadfast. I knew that already; I’ve had so many prayers answered after sticking to my guns, you would think it would be a habit by now.

I don’t have financial problems, and I don’t see much danger of problems any time soon. But I would like to be doing something productive. After the book came out and the promotion tapered off, I found myself without a project. Because of the things I heard last night in church, I won’t be worried about that any more. Something is going to happen.

In that vein (I guess it’s appropriate to use an anatomical term), Mish Weiss just had something happen. Her long-lost daughter insisted on donating bone marrow for a transplant. The procedure took place today. Mish is in very bad shape, which is normal under the circumstances. Over the next few weeks, the marrow will have to take root, so to speak, and grow in her body. I hope you’ll pray for Mish’s recovery, and that she will succeed in forming a strong and satisfying bond with God.

I think this may be her reward for carrying her daughter to term. It’s so much like the stories you see in the Bible. People planted seeds, and they came back to bless the world. Think of the births of Samuel, Jesus, John the Baptist, Moses, and Samson. My mother always told me that this was what the Bible meant when it said, “Cast your bread upon the water, for after many days ye shall find it again.”

Mike just called. He and his son are going to a church recommended to him by the pastor at my church. They’re walking in right now. That’s exciting. I’ve never gotten anyone else to go to church. I hope they find something they can hold onto and build on.

I am the Go-to Tool Guy

You’ll all be glad to know that I actually did something with my tools today. Val Prieto is getting ready for Miami’s Cuba Nostalgia convention, and he had a couple of broken welds on the steel frames he uses to make his booth. He brought them over, and he ground the crud off, and I welded the broken tabs back on.

His dad is a welder. He says he’s going to make fun of my welds. But Val is the one who ground them down after I was done, and let’s be honest. There is no such thing as bad welding. There is only bad grinding.

I’m still trying to get the lathe up and running. The new VFD will be here Monday, I guess. The new motor went back to UPS because of the broken conduit box. I can’t help thinking UPS might do better if they trained employees to stop throwing things. They really do that. The UPS guy in my neighborhood is very friendly, and I even showed him my Saiga 12 the other day, but from the sound the motor made when he delivered it, I would guess that he dropped it from waist height.

I remember ordering a hundred-plus-dollar Physics text (Morse & Feshbach) and eagerly waiting for it to arrive. On the day it came, I saw the UPS guy at my apartment complex dropping a box and then kicking it accidentally when he tried to pick it up. Naturally, my book was inside it. I don’t know how it survived.

I have to have a 4-jaw chuck. I don’t want to spend my life trying to find ways to cram stuff into a 3-jaw job. A guy on Ebay has an 8″ Skinner off an old South Bend, and the price is not bad. I saw some people on Practical Machinist claiming these chucks weren’t heavy-duty, because they’re hollow in back. I don’t know how much that matters. I don’t want to blow $250 on a piece of junk I’ll have to replace.

Chinese chucks cost the same amount of money, because you have to add back plates, and the back plate cost will get you up to $250, easily.

The Ebay guy also has a nice faceplate, but he’s selling it with a backplate I don’t want. Maybe I can get him to break them up. All of these items are new but old. They haven’t been used; they’ve been moldering in cabinets.

The milling machine search is going poorly. A dealer in Connecticut has some great-looking machines at what appear to be very good prices, but he is not answering my emails, so I’m about to give up on him. Maybe a spam filter is blocking me. A local outfit has a couple of machines for between $3000 and $4000, with DROs installed, but I’d have to go inspect them, and I have been fairly busy. Then there’s the restorer in Massachusetts who has great machines at very good prices. Problem: $1500 to ship. I’m so fed up I’m almost ready to scour the planet for cheaper shipping and just tell this guy to send me a machine. If I could get it down $500, I’d be willing to surrender.

I saw a neat idea for lathe milling. Some guy put an angle plate on his carriage and screwed his compound to it vertically. Then he added a small screwless vise mounted to the compound. Pretty slick, but by the time you get done, you’re out over a hundred bucks, and you can’t do very much milling.

I wonder if I could find a way to mount my tool post holder base on the compound so I could mill it. It’s too big. The work is very simple. Four straight cuts with an end mill would do it.

Someone suggested I take the old VFD apart and see if there is an obvious problem I can fix. It’s impossible to take apart, or so it seems. But I’m trying. It would be nice if I had a multimeter that worked, instead of a defective Fluke. I’ll never buy a Fluke meter again. Chinese stuff can’t be any worse, and it costs half as much.

Sooner or later I’ll machine something. Oh yes. It shall happen.

Never Trust an Internet Photo

A week or two ago, in my desperate search for affordable, functional underwear, I located a source of cheap Colombian drawers, and I bought a bunch. You can probably imagine how disturbingly flamboyant underwear made in Latin America can be. I bought the most boring style they had, although it turned out to be a bit fruitier than it looked on the website. This stuff is microfiber, which is the greatest possible fabric for the purpose, and from an engineering standpoint, it is absolutely perfect for the post-40 male who doesn’t want to end up like Saddam Hussein in that famous photo.

Maybe I made the wrong choice. The website, which I located via Google Shopping, is absolutely, unquestionably aimed at gays. In fact, after the underwear arrived, they sent me a catalog which I would have to classify as gay soft porn. Not the kind of thing you would want to see while sorting your mail over breakfast.

I had an argument about it with Moxie, who claims this stuff is lingerie. She said we should ask Sondra about it. I guess the famous thong photo makes her an authority on matters like this. I figured Sondra would be a true pal and tell me I was right, regardless of what the truth was, but no, she betrayed me without hesitation and said something about how a guy who wore things like those should be decorating her house.

And then she put the question to her readers. I’m so glad we managed to keep this confidential! I would be upset if more than two or three thousand close friends were in on the debate.

This has happened to me before, as longtime readers know. I bought underwear off a website, and when it arrived, it turned out to be a lot like a slingshot. I never knew what to do with those things. You can’t send them back, and you definitely can’t WEAR them. Except when you’re working out at home, in which case, they actually turn out to be highly functional, and hopefully, no one else ever sees them.

I’m trying to figure out how this happened to me again, and I have come to the tentative conclusion that gays just know more about how underwear works. They think about it more, so they do their best to get it right. The rest of us end up with inferior products, but that’s okay, because it beats having to listen to our friends’ amusing opinions about our foundation garments. Men are a little weird. We feel nervous about hugging each other, but most of us don’t even perceive the obvious gayness of making acerbic remarks about another man’s underwear when he undresses. I mean, come on. Why are you even looking at it? Stand down, Liberace. Find something else to giggle about. Zorro.

I plan to continue wearing this stuff until there is an intervention. Apart from the appearance, it is the most amazing underwear ever made, and given the nature of my life, no one will ever see it unless I’m in a car wreck. And if that happens, I am sure to get better treatment from the male nurses.

I wonder if I should email the Unico company and suggest they consider making underwear with heterosexual non-Hispanics in mind. Maybe they don’t even know their products are gay. When it comes to underwear, “gay” and “Hispanic-looking” are synonymous. When I was in college, a friend of mine worked in the ER at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, and he said they always looked forward to having male Puerto Ricans come in so they could have a good laugh at their extraordinary underwear.

Maybe I’ll eventually have a motorcycle accident and end up brightening some phlebotomist’s day.

In other news, someone on the Chaski forum has suggested I rip open my dead VFD and “repopulate” the circuit board. That term is new to me. I should have done this already, but I was really pooped and discouraged after talking to the Hitachi tech. His view was that these things are like disposable diapers. Once they go bad, you don’t try to make them work again. Of course, he has never paid for one.

I once bought a Pentium motherboard via the web, and when it arrived and I hooked it up, I shorted something against the inside of the computer case. I found a weird little fried item on the circuit board. Thinking it was a resistor, I tried to read the code, but it didn’t make any sense. I called Mouser Electronics, and we spent like half an hour on the phone trying to identify it. It turned out to be an inductor which looked like a resistor, and after all that effort, they made a sale which amounted to about twenty cents. Since then, I have always recommended Mouser Electronics to anyone who would listen. I put the inductor on the board, and the computer worked for another year or two. I should have thought about this when the VFD took a dump.

I think I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to open the box and see some big, really easy-to-replace component that has gone bad, and it will turn out I already have one just like it. Then the new VFD will arrive, and I’ll have to send it back and pay a restocking fee.

Here’s something which may actually be of use to you. Yesterday I fixed a canned ham, because I was getting tired of Costco chicken and discount Winn-Dixie pork chops. I used a modified version of a recipe from my book, and I know this will be good information for you to have, because most of you were too cheap to buy it. I have a recipe for a glazed hog stuffed with rice and bread-cube dressing, and I used the sauce with a ham, and it was fantastic.

INGREDIENTS

1 jug apricot nectar – probably two liters
3/4 cup quality Marsala
2 tsp. dry sage
2 cans pineapple rings
3 tbsp. butter
several squirts of Texas Pete
salt and pepper to taste

You can do this with a small ham, and it obviously doesn’t have to be canned, but that’s the right amount for a 5-pound ham a normal family might eat.

Put the nectar, Marsala, sage, butter, Texas Pete (or other hot sauce), salt, and pepper in a saucepan. Boil it until it’s thick. You might want to add the sage at the end.

Plop the ham in a baking dish. Score it in a criss-cross pattern if you want, to make it hold more sauce. Cover it with pineapple rings and throw the others in the dish. Pour the sauce over the ham and then pepper it. Bake according to the directions on the can, I guess. They usually have a suggestion. The ham I got said to go 1 1/2 hours at 325. I went more like two hours, and I cranked the heat up to 400 in the last half-hour to get some browning.

That’s about it. It’s amazing. I suppose you could put Maraschino cherries in the ring holes. Or you could try other fruit juices, like peach. Pork is pretty cooperative.

Buy the Best & Suffer Anyway

One wonderful thing about my VFD dying an ignominious death is that it taught me that my barely-used Fluke 16 multimeter was also dead. When I checked the garage voltage, the figure I got was 500. In the house, it was 250. I checked a 9-volt battery: 18.5 volts. See a pattern?

You could say it works, because all I have to do is divide the voltages by two. But who knows what else is wrong with it? And it did this once before and then returned to normal, which suggests I can’t rely on the double figures.

I called Fluke. They’ll give me a new Fluke 116…for $110. No warranty. Isn’t that lovely? They don’t repair these things.

Since I get charged either way, I’m considering going to Home Depot and getting an Ideal meter. I don’t know anything about Ideal meters, but they make great wire strippers. And they seem considerably cheaper than Fluke. If Flukes are this crappy, I see no reason to pay a premium. I got an Ideal for my dad’s boat, and it seemed just as nice as a Fluke.

Ebay has an Ideal 61-314 for $66. It can’t be any worse than this thing.

I’m so Glad I’m a Trusting Soul

I cannot believe this. I miswired my VFD and toasted it. I called Hitachi, and they explained that a VFD is just a big mysterious box, and that when it has a tummy ache, you have to throw it out and get another one, because nothing in there can be repaired by ordinary mortals.

I realize that this is mostly my fault, but I am still irritated with the guy who sold me the lathe. The first motor was 1-phase, contrary to contract. The second one was a mess. Rewiring to add the third one is what killed the VFD.

This man is like a disease that keeps recurring. I can’t believe how much aggravation and expense he has caused me, simply by shipping the wrong thing.

More

Can anyone explain why my Fluke voltmeter reads AC voltages as twice as high as they really are? I studied the instructions, and I still get 500V in the garage and 250+ in the house. I know that’s wrong. Everything would be on fire. I made sure I had the range right.

More

It is my sad duty to confirm something many people have long suspected. I am an idiot. Last night I realized the seller had nothing to do with this problem. It happened because I made a new cord for the VFD. I would have done that even if he had sent the right motor.

Heh. How about that?

Motor Troubles Continue, With Decreasing Severity

My new Baldor arrived, and danged if the conduit box isn’t shattered. I heard a thump when the UPS guy arrived. I guess I know what it was.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find this part. Baldor changes part numbers without notice, so you have to fumble around, calling and badgering people.

It broke cleanly into two big pot-metal pieces. They actually work, if you screw them to the motor. I wouldn’t have known it was broken had I not taken the box off.

We all know what the solution is. This is a job…for DUCT TAPE.

It will work fine until the new box arrives.

Right?

First things first.

Mish Weiss is feeling very weak because they are giving her increased radiation and chemotherapy, in preparation for her second bone marrow transplant. I wrote about this a few days ago. When Mish was in her teens, she gave a daughter up for adoption, and now that daughter insists on donating marrow. Please pray that Mish will be strengthened, and that the transplant will cure her leukemia.

I posted a prayer request about my cousin, who has been diagnosed with 4th-stage lung cancer. People wanted a name. I didn’t put it up at first, because I had concerns about revealing details of her life. But what I have written is pretty spare, so I guess it’s okay. Her name is Debbie. Thanks for helping. I need recommendations for soothing and uplifting Christian music to put in the MP3 player my sister and I bought for her.

I could use a little prayer myself. I have been having real trouble getting back to my routine of retiring and rising early, so I can give the first hour or so of the day to God. Things keep coming up, disrupting my schedule. Any help would be appreciated.

Some people say it doesn’t matter when you pray, but I think that’s wrong. The Bible is full of references to rising early, and the fifth psalm says, “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee and will look up.” The sixty-third psalm says, “O God, thou are my god. Early will I seek thee.” I think beginning the day with God is like prenatal care; it puts a good foundation under things. And it gives you a jump on your enemies. It’s a little like rolling up your car windows and locking your doors before you drive through a rough neighborhood.

This is an exciting day, by my peculiar standards. The new lathe motor should arrive soon, and I am just about ready to hook it up. The VFD is mounted on the lathe headstock. All I have to do is put the lathe in, attach the belt, and run some wires. It should run like a dream, with that shiny new Baldor.

On Monday I made a plate to hold the VFD, but I was not happy with it, because the paint I bought for it turned out to be so shiny you could actually mistake a painted surface for bare aluminum. I decided to get out my old standby: black truck bed paint. I used my bench grinder to fine-tune the plate so it would fit around the drum switch bracket on the back of the headstock, I scraped the paint away from the bolt holes to assure a good ground connection between the VFD and the lathe, and I sprayed it down. It looks okay, but I am wondering if I now have to worry about heat. The old paint was thin and conducted heat well. This new stuff is a layer of plastic, and the VFD heat sink is pressed right into it. Hopefully the fan and sink included with the VFD are sufficient. Otherwise I’m going to go get a piece of aluminum and make a new plate from that. It will conduct both heat and electricity, and it’s easy to work. I still have to attach conduit and so on, and that means drilling holes. Not fun, in a hard piece of sheet steel.

The old wiring was protected by some strange kind of smooth-surfaced flex conduit. I don’t know what it is. Maybe all plastic flex conduit looks like this. I never use it. How would I know? I don’t have anything like that, and I don’t want to buy a whole box just for this. I guess I’ll use the same metallic flex conduit I used for the compressor.

The lathe has a big push-button switch way down on one pillar (or whatever you call the two parts that make up the cabinet). I assume it’s supposed to be some sort of safety shutoff. It looks awful, and it doesn’t seem to do anything, and it’s in a bad spot. I think I’ll yank it and put it in the trash. I have an emergency disconnect on the wall already. I think the disconnect is probably useless. By the time you get to it, whatever will happen has happened. The VFD’s braking is probably a better answer. It’s too bad this machine has no mechanical brake.

I have been watching my Lathe Learnin’ DVDs. A day or two ago, I learned something interesting. You don’t always have to use a big 4-jaw chuck to get optimal accuracy. You can put a small 4-jaw chuck in your existing 3-jaw chuck. Pretty wild. I’m considering getting a relatively cheap 4-jaw chuck for this purpose. Even if I get a bigger one later, this would be very quick and easy, and it would probably hold 95% of the things I’ll want to work on.

I learned something good last night. You can use a milling machine to do layout. You ink your part, put it in your vise, and use edgefinders or whatever to get you situated. Then you use your DRO or handwheels to put marks where you need them. To make the marks, you put a drill chuck in the mill, and you insert a spring-loaded scribe. You lower the point to the work and move the table to make the scratches.

Clearly, this would justify me spending fifteen thousand dollars on a new Bridgeport.

Maybe not.

But it’s still neat.

The guy from Swarfrat says you can do layout on a PC, print it out, and glue the paper to your work using 3M somthing or other 77 spray adhesive. He says it will be accurate to within a thousandth. His videos are excellent. I feel guilty about renting them, even though it’s legal. I’m planning to buy some of his materials, to support what he does.

I have been trying to choose drill bits. Believe it or not, this is complicated. Apparently, there are about 115 bits in a complete 1/16″-1/2″ set. Some sets have 114 or 118, but 115 is the number I keep seeing. And you have to make a lot of choices.

First off, you have to choose the length. I think I’m going to get short screw machine (or “stub”) bits. They take up less room on your machines, and they’re rigid, and they are more than long enough for most jobs. But you can also get mechanic’s length (longer) or jobber length (longer still). What is a “jobber”? No idea.

Second, you have to choose the material. Cobalt is expensive, but it lasts longer than high speed steel, and you can cut harder stuff with it. You can sharpen it on a plain old grinder. But the gaps between the flutes are smaller, so it may not clear chips as well. High speed steel is cheap and good, but it will get dull quickly if you drill anything hard.

On top of that, there are different finishes. I bought some Hitachi bits coated with titanium nitride (TiN), and as far as I can tell, the finish is completely worthless. The drills dull almost instantly when used on hard metal. But others assure me that quality TiN-coated bits are more slippery than HSS, and that you can run them faster, and that TiN resists wear. I don’t see how it can resist wear once you’ve used the drill, because the finish comes off the tip in a hurry, and the tip is where the action is. But people pay for it, so there must be a reason for it. I wouldn’t buy it again. It may well be that my Hitachi bits are actually Chinese, so I would not judge TiN by their performance.

Third, there are different tip styles. You can get them in 118-degree or 135-degree styles, and you can get split points. I’ve seen photos of these, and I didn’t see anything that looked like a split, but okay, whatever. They’re supposed to walk less when you start holes.

Once you get past all that, you have to make a decision on how to sharpen them. The old-fashioned way is to use a grinder and a little gauge and eyeball them. I am trying to get out of the habit of doing things the hard way, so I considered getting a sharpening machine instead. The only one available at a price I am willing to pay is the Drill Doctor. Is it a good machine? It’s fantastic. Or it’s complete garbage. Everyone you ask tells a different story. Aargh. I guess the smart thing is to get a gauge and see what happens. I’ve sharpened drills in the past, but that was out of laziness and desperation, and I had no idea what I was doing. I don’t know if I want to keep doing it without a special tool.

Can you believe how hard it is to buy drill bits? I never imagined. And what if I need different lengths later on? I’ll have to repeat the entire expense.

I got a cobalt bit the other day, and I am really impressed. It seemed completely unintimidated by the steel plate I drilled. Maybe that just shows how sad my other bits are. I’m considering splurging on a set of US-made cobalt bits. Hard to decide. It’s about $100 for HSS and $300 for cobalt. Lots of money, either way.

The grinder is also a headache. It’s a wonderful machine; a 6″ Baldor that runs at 1800 RPM. But the wheels it came with are apparently intended to be a practical joke. They’re 36 and 60 grit, in silicon carbide. Not much good for anything other than shaping metal and sharpening coarse tools like hoes. I have to get aluminum oxide in 80 grit, and of course, most wheels fitting that description don’t fit my arbors. Enco’s wheel page says to use their “universal arbor adapter,” which is NOT IN THE CATALOG. However I’m pretty sure the items they sell under the heading “bushings” are actually adapters, so I’m buying one, as well as a wheel. A real man would turn an adapter in his lathe! Where are the real men when you need them?

I’ll need the grinder when I want to make HSS lathe tools. How do you do that? Well, you buy a $5000 milling machine and a face shield, remove the eye shields from your grinder, remove the highly risible tool supports, make a fancy-shmancy adjustable tool table that goes in front of the wheels (including an adjustable protractor), and you check the material you’re working, and you refer to a giant chart of appropriate angles, and you grind your tool. OR you stand in front of a bare grinder wheel and ram the blank into it, and you make every single angle either 10 or 15 degrees. The first method is the Rudy Kouhoupt method (from his DVD), and the second one is the Lathe Learnin’ method. The guy in the Lathe Learnin’ video says his tools work just fine for him. If he can get away with it, I guess I should try it, too. I really don’t want to turn this into precision machining if I don’t have to. I don’t want to turn the tool into the workpiece.

I think the more you study this stuff, the harder your life gets. If you just plug your machine in and get to work, you probably learn all the things you need to know reasonably fast, and I’m sure a lot of the things I’m learning have more to do with anal retention than practicality.

This is the story of my day so far.