Load Dropped

I feel like I got my life back today.

My family has been sued. It has to do with a small lot sold by an LLC related to my family. The buyers sued the realtor, and now they’re suing the LLC and all the members. The plaintiffs attempted (unsuccessfully) to serve me this week. Really annoying. It seems fairly clear that the case will die a quick death, and even if we lose, no one will have a large loss, but it has to be tended to, and it has caused no end of strife and division. My dad offered to handle it for nothing, with me as his dashing sidekick, but the family turned that down. I thought I would still have to represent myself as an individual defendant, but yesterday I learned that the family had voted to hire someone, and I decided to cast my lot with the new guy.

Today I had to prepare a document and fax crap to the lawyer, and I’m finished, so I feel like I can relax. There is still some anger and dissatisfaction, to put it mildly, but the person experiencing that is not me. Finally, I can get back to studying machining, fixing up my woodworking stuff, and preparing for the lathe to arrive.

While Mike was here, he got all excited about a mahogany board I had made from scratch, and he wanted to check out the tools. We BSed our way through a mahogany mousepad for his desk. The piece of wood we used was really garbage; it was warped, and the sides were far from parallel. I had saved it, figuring I might be able to use a small piece of it. We put it on the planing sled and took it down from over an inch in thickness to about 0.33″. That’s how much wood had to be removed to get two flat, parallel sides. Mike sanded it with the Dynabrade, and then he used the table saw to bevel the upper edges. He did the sawing while I was in the house, with no safety training. Scary. He put both Danish oil and stain on it. Weird. I suggested he get five rubber feet for it, with adhesive backing. That will keep it from sliding around his desk.

We tried to use the router, but it became obvious that my lack of a real router fence was an impenetrable obstacle. So I am making a router fence. I figure I’ll make a long bottomless box about six inches wide and clamp it to the back side of the table saw fence. I’ll be able to use the table saw measuring scale (or a table saw DRO) for both the table saw and the router. I’ll put a hole in it for the shop-vac.

I’ll need about eight feet of wood, a little over an inch in thickness and five inches in width. I’m not sure what to use. Something stable. I’ll have to buy it. Scrap has its limits.

Day before yesterday I saw a gorgeous pile of logs, beckoning to me from the side of the road. If they still exist, I may get them tonight. Some of them. How am I supposed to resist? The local mahogany seems wonderful. It’s too bad the tree people cut it in such short pieces.

I have to get a few router bits. The collection I have is sad.

It’s wonderful, knowing I won’t have to do this litigation, and it’s great having the fighting over with, even if not everyone is happy. You can’t always please people. When you please everyone, it often means you’ve done something you’ll really regret. Sometimes you have to settle for the knowledge that if you trust God, you’ll get peace eventually.

I do Not Have Graphs, and I Will Not Point at Them

According to Yellow Freight, my metal lathe is on its way to Charlotte, North Carolina. It hasn’t gone very far since leaving Vermont on Monday. They estimate a Friday arrival, but I have my doubts.

I can’t believe it’s almost here. I’m still trying to come up with things to make with it.

You know what occurred to me last night? I should design a garlic press. There are NO good ones. The Good Grips cheap one snaps if you squeeze too hard. The aluminum Zyliss jobs shed grey aluminum oxide into your garlic. The Good Grips expensive ones have handles that eventually slip off. Frustrating. Is tool steel food safe? I should be able to make something that will last forever and pulverize garlic effortlessly. And I think I should make a stainless mallet to use in the kitchen. It would be swell for peeling garlic cloves. I hate reaching into the garlic press to pull out the peels.

I also realized I am not limited to metal. I find myself looking around at round or nearly round objects made from plastic, wondering what warped things I can do to them. I need to get some end cutters and come up with a way to do some milling. I have to make the most of this tool.

I saw something really depressing today. I was changing the birds’ newspapers, and I saw an article about hopeful kids training to do “green” jobs. Can you believe that? None of that nonsense is going anywhere. Sooner or later everyone is going to get out of denial and admit global warming is a fantasy, and the harder times get, the less people care about the environment. Meanwhile these poor deluded children are being trained to be fecal recovery technicians and hygiene discouragement activists. It’s like it’s 1980 and people are choosing to dedicate their lives to disco music. The Environmental Boogie Nights aren’t going to last.

I’ve enjoyed global warming tremendously this winter and spring. Last night it got down to 67 degrees, in late April! That’s magnificent. Summer will be much easier to tolerate this year, because winter and spring were so cool and pleasant. Thanks, Uncle Al. I know a lot of semi-aquatic polar bears–animals which spend half of their lives swimming–have been drowning for my benefit, but I didn’t sweat much this winter, so it was worth it. Keep on drowning, guys. And grow nice and fat so the rugs we make out of you will cover large areas.

I wonder what other semi-aquatic or fully aquatic species will start drowning as things get worse. Penguins, maybe. Walruses. Fish. You may think fish can’t drown, but remember, Uncle Al uses computer animation to make phony videos of animals drowning, so the fact that it never actually happens is no obstacle. I’ll bet he also had his stooges make up a video of him winning the 2000 election. Zaphod Beeblebrox meets World of Warcraft meets Vanilla Sky.

His Nobel Prize win seemed fictional but oddly, wasn’t. His whining about a nonexistent crisis beat out a lady who risked her life saving actual, non-CGI Jewish kids from Hitler. You know what? She should have saved polar bears. That would have been gold. Or maybe Coca-Cola should make warm fuzzy CGI videos of Polish Jews sharing a Coke and a smile on a big iceberg. Then the Nobel Committee might have thought they were cute and therefore worth saving.

Actually, Uncle Al doesn’t make CGI polar bear videos. According to news accounts, he just steals them without authorization and passes them off as his own. If he hadn’t chosen his videos carefully, his audience might have seen polar bears drowning one minute and having a Coke the next.

Coke is a great beverage for polar bears, because it goes great with their favorite meal: raw human being. A polar bear will actually spend a day trying to bash its way into your house to eat you. My guess? They know we cause global warming, so they’re trying to get a square meal and do Mother Gaia a solid, all in one shot.

Here is wisdom for you. Given the choice, avoid green vocational training and learn to drive the big rigs. You’ll be choosing a field which has the benefit of not being based on an imaginary demand.

VFD

I’m still scrounging around, trying to get things ready for the lathe’s arrival. I didn’t want to order a VFD until I knew the lathe was on the way and that all systems were “go,” so I had to do my shopping today.

The issue of VFDs and motor derating is complicated. VFDs are rated in horsepower; this refers to the horsepower of the motors they are intended to drive. For motors over 5 HP with single-phase input–check this yourself, because I may be wrong, and I am almost certainly missing some of the nuances–you have to double the rated horsepower. So for a 5 HP motor, you need a 10 HP VFD. I’m not exactly sure how this works; it may only apply when the VFD is made for three-phase input and you are forced to use single-phase. For smaller motors, there may be no derating at all. I called Hitachi (914-333-2900), and they told me that I didn’t need a giant VFD for a 2 HP motor. I got a 3 HP job; that’s what they recommended.

Had to pay a little extra to get it here on time, but I think that was better than taking a chance on shipping it back and paying a restocking fee. The lathe had not been thoroughly checked out when I ordered it, so there was no guarantee that it would be okay to ship. It would be no fun at all to have a VFD here in a box, with no lathe on the way.

I considered getting a Chinese VFD, and maybe I should have, but this is my first VFD, and everyone says the Hitachis are easier to work with. The instructions are better, and the tech support is very good. I’m going to have enough headaches without having to decipher instructions that still contain literal translations of Mandarin idioms, as well as odd cultural references. “Esteemed customer are to find these VFD having all of Chairman Mao’s Thirteen Industrial Virtues. Death to the Gang of Four.” No, thanks.

I may have screwed myself out of a hundred bucks, but I’m a little fatigued from dealing with tech puzzles. Especially those which commence on Fridays; if you’ve been there, you know what I mean. I’m fairly sure all integrated chips are programmed to fail between Friday afternoon and Sunday night. When you can’t get support. The lathe will probably be here Friday, so I am trying to prepare wisely and avoid being bitten in the rear end by George Santayana.

One great thing about a VFD is that it will stop a machine tool quickly. You don’t have to sit there and wait for the tool to spin down. Bridgeport mills have brakes on them, but not all tools do. It’s my understanding that for heavy braking, you have to get additional resistors or circuit boards, and boy, are they expensive. Luckily for me, the Hitachi folks recommend seeing how the VFD does without the extra stuff, before making the added investment. I think braking would be a great convenience and a nice safety feature. It’s always tempting to grab a moving tool while it takes forever to stop. And a lathe can roll up an operator’s arm like an old sock. You can find photos of this on the web, but I recommend you avoid it.

Pray that Yellow Freight doesn’t mash my prize.

Fulfill Them, Hippies, or You Will Rue the Day

As a potential possibly likely could-be right-wing terrorist, I felt it was necessary to come up with some demands. Here they are.

1. From now on, Nancy Pelosi has to wear a mask or ring a bell before she approaches a camera.

2. I want to be able to deduct the money I spend on ice cream on my tax returns.

3. I want Glenn Beck to do a special show where he cries just for me.

4. O’Reilly and Olbermann have to settle things the old-fashioned way. Mud wrestling. With the Fox girls of my choice as cheerleaders. Color commentators: J.R. and Jerry “The King” Lawler. Either them or Danny Bonaduce and Johnny Fairplay (or his remains). Wait…is J.R. still alive?

5. Glenn Reynolds has to take a photography class.

6. NO MORE LOLCATS.

I only had about four minutes to come up with these, but that’s okay, because I reserve the right to alter them capriciously, retroactively, and without notice, much as if I had given 800 billion dollars of someone else’s money to a bunch of banks and then attached the strings later. “Hello? Citibank? Today the Anointed One says Wednesday is All Pink Shirts Day.”

My lathe has shipped. Now I get to spend at least a week on my knees, praying no forklift drivers will decide to use it as a puck in a game of forklift hockey. I worry most about what will happen on the in-town leg. Miami is a place where things get done fast, but it’s also a place where things get done in a very sloppy way, by morons who only care about getting your money as fast as possible and can’t be bothered with things like training.

I haven’t decided on which acts of terrorism I should do first. I was thinking I might mail a letter with the stamp attached UPSIDE-DOWN. Would that be crazy or what? That would drive “The Man” nuts! To warm up, I keep calling Senator Burris’s office, burping into the receiver, and hanging up. He probably thinks it’s Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Notice his Hostility Toward Government Employees!

Today Mike and I got to help my dad run his boat up the Miami River to the yard. It was a pleasant ride, tarnished–as usual–by the people who open and close the bridges. The fine person who has the incredibly demanding job of raising and lowering the South Miami Avenue bridge–working a total of perhaps forty minutes per shift–refused to even answer our hail. While I wait for these characters to get it in gear, I often think of the old story about Ted Turner, climbing his own mast just to punch a bridgetender in the face. I don’t know if it’s true. But I would certainly understand.

When we got to the Brickell Avenue bridge, which had a prominent sign saying morning openings were only restricted before 9 a.m., we were told we had to wait until 11. And we had arrived at 10:45. The bridgetender seemed very nice on the radio; maybe the insane unannounced restrictions weren’t her idea.

Anyway, we made it to the yard without incident.

Tonight Mike and I made pizza. I mean we BOTH made pizza. I picked up cheese and sauce during our Gordon Food Service mission yesterday, and tonight we put on a tour de force. I made a pie, and Mike made a second pie plus garlic rolls swimming in Costco olive oil. The cheese was GFS mozzarella/provolone blend. It was excellent. The pizzas were slightly different, but each was sublime in its own way. I felt pretty good about it, because Mike had had to attend a funeral during the afternoon, so I had to make all the dough on my own.

I bought an interesting product this week. Sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour. I created a bigger batch of starter from it, and today I put it in the dough. I only had about three hours for the pizza dough and one hour for the roll dough. It made the pizza dough noticeably better. From now on, it will be standard. I have read that it makes dough’s texture better, and that seems to be true.

I was relieved, because the last two pizzas I made were a little off. I still got it. You can’t touch this stuff at any Miami pizzeria I’ve been to. They’re nowhere near as good. Now that I think about it, even though I lived in New York, the best pizzerias I’ve known were in the northern half of this city. Weird. But I lived near Columbia University, and there were only two pizzerias in my area. I’m sure there were better offerings all over town. And on average, New York wins, hands down.

Mike and I will be going to church either tomorrow or Sunday. I’m all excited. As much as I’ve gotten from my renewed relationship with God, I have been utterly unable to pass that success on to anyone else. Maybe to some extent through my blog, and maybe through prayer, but not directly. Now I have someone who is completely open to it and eager to take a closer look.

I have the funniest idea about my machine tools. Remember how I developed an interesting in machining because I wanted to make a device to crack stone crab claws? I’m thinking I may manufacture a bunch of different cracking devices. All sorts of different designs. They run through my head at night. Electric ones. Ones with gears. Some with cams. I may do it. Although putting them on the web might make it impossible to patent them. I might come up with something that was so much fun to use, it would have commercial value. Let’s face it. Virtually all nutcrackers are garbage. I’m sure it’s fun building weird one-cylinder engines, which seems to be what every home machinist does, but that doesn’t appeal to me.

What am I going to do with that gallon can of hot fudge sauce?

Great Day

Mike and I spent the day running around. The mother of one of his employees died, and she’s Jewish, so you know what that means. A very prompt funeral. We had to run up to Delray to get Mike’s suit. We visited the Fort Lauderdale Gordon Food Supply, which beats the daylights out of the one here on Flagler Street. I took photos of some interesting goodies, and I’ll upload them eventually. After that we hit Sonny’s barbecue.

We talked a lot about our dysfunctional families, and I told him something that occurred to me this morning in the shower. As far as I can tell, families do not work without God, period. You may have some pieces of the puzzle: wealth, fame, looks, or maybe brains. Your kids may be healthy, and they may be achievers. Your marriage may last. But it won’t really work as a whole. There will be significant failure somewhere in the picture. There will be important problems you absolutely have no chance of fixing. I think the reason for this is the same reason we have physical pain. When you have physical pain, it tells you something is wrong. It tells you that you need to fix something. It can prevent you from making a problem worse. Maybe you need to have a tumor removed or a bone set. Without pain, you might not do what you need to do. The failures we experience here on earth tell us we need to turn to God. They tell us our lives do not work properly without him. And as you turn to him, the pain abates or disappears entirely or, very often, turns to joy and peace.

What kind of God would let you and your spouse and your kids and your siblings have peaceful, prosperous lives without him? It would be a disservice. It would prove he didn’t care.

Mike had a lot of insights into my family’s troubles, and I was glad to have his input. He seemed to benefit from what I had to say, too. We’re going to try to attend the Saturday evening service at my church. I told him God has been fixing my family, and I’m hoping he can see the same kind of healing in his own life.

In other news, the guy who sold me my lathe emailed. He’s been looking it over and running and cleaning it and getting it ready for shipping. He says it appears it has “seen very little use.” That’s exciting. I was puzzled at first, because it had sat in a prison for over forty years. I had assumed it had been used a lot in vocational training. Then I realized it might be difficult to get backward, hardheaded criminals to take advantage of a great opportunity to learn a lucrative trade. So maybe their stubbornness will cause me to receive a substantial benefit intended for them. The Bible says “the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.” The lathe sale would be a pretty blatant example of unteachable people ignoring a blessing, leaving it to pass into the hands of someone more open to God’s instruction. Not that I am calling myself just. I do think I’m trying harder than most convicts.

I bought a gallon can of hot fudge today, just because I could. Sometimes I think I have a very big screw loose.

Look Out

Mike is in town, so the overeating started last night. Someone please intervene.

Today we have a number of options. Costco. Gordon Food Supply. And he was so impressed with my trash pile mahogany boards, he wants to make one. Go figure. He also wants to bust out the motorcycles.

I’m trying to get him to hang out long enough to visit church.

With a reader’s help, I think I figured out what I need to do about my router fence. All I need is something that extends out from the back side of the Biesemeyer. The parallelism is outstanding, and the precision is hard to beat. I could add a DRO to the Biesemeyer system, too, or I could must mount a dial indicator and some sort of screw adjustment on the router part. Anyway, this should be very easy compared to the harder solutions I found, and it should be much cheaper than the expensive ones.

I also have 3,000 pistol primers on the way! Do you care? Probably not. But I’m ecstatic. These things have been hard to find. And these are Federals, which may solve the problems I’ve had with .357 ammunition failing to fire properly. Federals are soft, and the new spring in my 27-2 is weak, so this should be a good combination. I also broke down and got a chronograph. There is just no way to avoid it. I can’t keep putzing around, taking a face shield to the range and praying the first shot doesn’t blow my 1911 apart. That is not the right way to work up a load. And I would very much like to create loads for Wolf primers, because they’re dirt, DIRT cheap.

Mike wants to make a video teaching people how to make 10-minute pizza. We ought to do it. I’d pay ten bucks for something like that, wouldn’t you?

Life is sweet

The Router is Going DOWN

I have seen the bacon AK-47 and the heavy girl on American Idol. Thanks for sending the links.

I think I have the router problem beat. Yesterday someone at Sawmill Creek suggested a fence made by Pinnacle. It’s mounted on a ram that sits on a platform you clamp to the table. The ram is moved by a screw. You can make an adjustment of 0.001″, and the depth adjusts by up to a foot.

Hard to top that.

Because I’m getting into both woodworking and machining, I have noticed that there are a lot of machining ideas that woodworkers ought to try. The gadget mentioned above is similar to the y-travel on a milling machine table. It seems very obvious when you’ve seen a mill. Day before yesterday, I put a DRO on my planer. I can’t even describe how great it is. I never even glance at the old tape-measure scale; I can’t, because it’s covered up now. The DRO gives me thousandths, and an adjustment of 0.002″-0.003″ is no problem. I was doing it without thinking, the first time I used the DRO.

It turns out Wixey makes a DRO for my router lift. Gee, do you think that might be better than making crappy “gauges” out of scrap and counting turns on the router lift crank? It just might.

Mike will be in town tonight. I must prepare to grapple with my appetite. He’s in the mood for Cuban food. This is very bad.

Board I made from garbage pile mahogany:

It is now dead flat.

I am Considering an Exorcism

I got my box parts all ready to go today, and then I turned to the most dreaded machine in the garage. The router. This thing is possessed. And I knew I had to make it behave, in order to produce a decent box and avoid ruining all the preceding work.

I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned that anyone who tells you a stick with a screw through one end and a clamp on the other is a good router fence has been smoking too much pressure-treated sawdust.

One of the things that sets great tools apart from good tools is the ability to do repetitious jobs without driving you insane. The stick with a clamp is a good tool. To make ONE router cut. If you have to make the same cut over and over, at different intervals in the same piece of work, you might as well kill yourself. When you move the stick, the angle to the table changes, and if you’re using stop blocks, each one MOVES relative to the router bit.

If you’ve used a router, you know exactly what I mean. If not, go look at Lolcats.

The best kind of router fence moves at both ends, and it remains parallel to the front of the table when you move it. And you can adjust it with screws and dials, not rulers and tape measures and bits of wood that you use to bang it into place.

There’s a guy named Pat Warner who makes incredible router fences. He can adjust cuts to within a few thousandths, I think. I used to think he was nuts. Maybe he is, but he can do things with a router that I can’t, and there are things that would take me half an hour that he can do in three minutes.

I made LOTS of mistakes routing the compartments for the lathe tools. I can sort of cover them up in the final assembly, but the truth is, it’s time to man up and look for a decent router fence. This fumbling around is just idiotic. And I need to get a Harbor Freight digital caliper and cut it up and turn it into a depth gauge.

Today I wondered why they don’t make milling machines for wood. A router is just a crappy version of a milling machine. Why not go whole hog and hang it from a ram over a table? Then I realized…nobody wants a five-thousand-dollar router. Except maybe Pat Warner.

They make something similar to a milling machine. I think it’s called an overhand router. You can find it on the Grizzly site.

The table saw is the greatest invention in history. It does exactly what I want, and it does it easily. The router is vicious and unpredictable, and the only way I’m going to subdue it is through superior technology. The clamp and stick are not working out.

My Skills Scare Me

I got ready to make the parts for my trivial 5″ x 7″ x 2″ tool box, and I felt I didn’t have a nice enough piece for a lid, so I took a really oddly shaped piece of mahogany and jointed and planed it down to 3/8″! There is no stopping me! Although I’m kind of starting to realize why people buy jointers instead of using sleds.

The table saw continues to be an amazement. Anything you want to cut, you just cut. Any angle. Any measurement. As long as it fits, the saw will do it with very little skill required.

The piece of mahogany I decided to try to use for a lid had a lot of little curly knots in it, like eddies in a pink mahogany stream. But it turned out a different piece was actually better suited for the top, so I turned the curly piece into a lid and two sides. I think it’s going to look incredibly good for something I just slapped together.

I needed a piece of 3/4″ mahogany for the inside of the box. I don’t have the technology to make dividers right now; I’d need a 1/8″ router bit for that. So I’m routing out cavities for the tools. That means the wood has to be thicker than the cavities are deep, and the cavities will run to a depth of 5/8″.

I didn’t feel like thicknessing a third board, so I took a piece of curly mahogany and glued it to a piece that’s sort of spalted, like the top. I’m hoping they’ll hold together. I guess I could cheat and run a few screws into it. The curly piece will be the box bottom. That will look pretty good.

I slotted the sides of the box so the bottom will fit into them. I got some burning in the bottoms of the slots. No idea what causes that. I thought it was from cutting too slow, but I’ve been trying to squirt pieces through the saw quickly. The burned bits won’t be visible, but it would be nice to know how I created them.

I was way too lazy to make appropriate jigs. Luckily the saw is so precise, I can get away with that. But if I want miter keys, I’ll have to give in and build something to hold the box as I run it over the saw. That might take ten whole minutes.

Now I have to get up and head-butt Maynard a few times. It’s intended purely as violence, but he mistakes it for affection, so everyone is happy.

Plus Uncle Ted, the Water Dog Whisperer

The mahogany I cut to size yesterday continues its mysterious dance. Sometimes it bows this way. Sometimes it bows that way. This morning when I got up, one piece was flat.

Here’s another interesting thing it does. This wood appears dry, but it still has some water in it, and it migrates to the lower side over time. Today I found discoloration on the bottom side of the wood. I turned it over, and in forty-five minutes or so, the discoloration was gone.

I don’t think any of this matters. The box I plan to make will be seven inches long, so the warping over the length of the box will amount to about a third of a millimeter. Close enough for government work.

Speaking of government work, are you as amused as I am by Obama’s stated intention to go easy on tax delinquents? Apparently, his plan is to find them and appoint them all to his cabinet. That’s what he’s done so far. Give this man credit; he may be presiding over the disintegration of the greatest nation on earth, but he is immensely entertaining.

Readers have pointed out that Obama’s dog–a Portuguese water dog–was a gift from Edward Kennedy. This is the kind of thing The Half Hour News Hour team would have made up, but for the fact that they had absolutely no talent. You can almost picture Ted, sitting on a dock with a Scotch in his hand (or both hands), trying to teach his special dog to retrieve a dummy from a submerged Oldsmobile.

Speaking of conservative disasters, I see that the GOP has shriveled to the point where Bob Shrum now feels entitled to make fun of it. Can you imagine anything worse? This man’s name has literally become a verb, synonymous with both “fail” and “cause to fail.” “My souffle looked good in the oven, but then it Shrummed.” “Ned Rice and Sandy Frank Shrummed the hopes of conservative humor.”

You know what this reminds me of? The Star Wars scene where Han Solo is about to be fed to the giant underground worm, and Jabba’s rat-like pet is talking smack to him. The rat is an incredibly pathetic creature in its own right, but it has Jabba backing it up, and Han Solo is such a mess, the rat can probably take him. So the rat feels entitled to ridicule. If Shrum is the rat, maybe Robert Gibbs is Jabba. I’m not sure.

Geez, what happened to us? Well, I know what happened. Big-tent, amoral secularism. We used to rout the enemy, and now they rout us. Man, I wish I could find a new country to move to. A place where religious conservatives are in charge. This is the difference between me and a liberal; they always want to stay where they are and ruin the countries they live in, instead of moving to leftist cesspools like France. Me, I’d rather just get out. I wish Texas would secede so I could apply for a homestead.

Yeah, that secular conservatism…that stuff is working out real good. Let’s keep it up! We’re on a roll! The last thing we want is to turn back to God and go back to the misery and failure of THE REAGAN YEARS.

The Bible says not to worry, because evil comes of it. Too bad the GOP never learned that. We got a little worried, and we decided the item we needed to get rid of was God. Now look at us.

Hey, you know that business about letting illegal aliens vote? It’s going to continue and expand. How do I know? One of the signs that a nation is cursed is that aliens within its borders will increase and gain power over it. Look it up.

Today at our weekly breakfast, I told my dad we should just send the welfare money directly to Mexico. Why make them move? It’s cheaper for everyone to just pay them where they are.

I need to join a new party. I cannot be part of an organization so degraded it can legitimately be ridiculed by the likes of Shrum.

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When I wrote this, I didn’t know Rick Perry was flipping out and trying to declare Texas a sovereign nation. Where do I apply to join the militia? I can smoke pigs like nobody’s business, and I will bring a fine assortment of deadly firearms.

I Made Lumber!

I guess I must be the greatest tool expert who ever lived. I don’t see how there can be any doubt, because today I installed a WIXEY DIGITAL READOUT on my planer, and I used the planer to joint and thickness a mahogany board!

Bask in the light of my greatness, tiny unimportant people.

I ordered a set of indexable lathe tools. The case they came in was mashed. I had a bunch of mahogany I had rescued from a trash heap. I decided to make a new case. To do that, I had to have finished wood. To get that, I needed to install the readout that had been sitting on the dining room table since the Bush administration.

It’s pretty cool. I like digits better than the tape-measure-type scale that came with the planer.

I really enjoyed myself. I installed the readout, and then I planed a short board to 0.930″ (that was the thickness when it finally got flat on both sides). I squared one end of the board on the table saw, made a makeshift jig, and jointed the edges of the board. Then I squared the other end and resawed the board on the bandsaw. After that, I planed the results. Now I have two bookmatched mahogany boards. They’re gorgeous, too.

Problem: the wood is not really seasoned. It bowed a little when I resawed it. I don’t really care; I’m cutting it to such short lengths, the bowing will probably be too slight to amount to anything, and it’s just a crappy box to hold some tools.

I stuck it on a table with some junk mail under it and books on the ends of each board. Hopefully that will reduce the bowing.

Tomorrow I get to cut the pieces, rout out holes for the tools, and turn the results into a box. It should be a blast.

Things worked out well. You have to plane a board in order to install the DRO, and a DRO is a nice thing to have when you thickness a resawn piece of wood, so one project fed into the other.

That mahogany is going to be amazing. Some day. When it’s really ready.

No pictures. Too lazy.

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One reason wood warps when you resaw it is water. Wet wood likes to be big. Dry wood likes to be small. The wood I resawed today was not very far into the seasoning process. Presumably, the inner parts were wetter than the outer. That would explain why it bowed away from the saw cut. The wet sides expanded when the saw released them, and that made them longer than the dry sides, so they took on a curve toward the dry.

I hoped that when I took it into the air conditioning, the wet sides would dry and contract, and the wood would start to straighten. And that is exactly what’s happening. One board is nearly straight now.

The question of the moment is, will it stop when it’s straight, or will it keep going until it bows in the other direction?

Disco Garage

I got the stereo shelf up. I had a couple of little shelves for the speakers, but it turned out there was room on the TV shelf. I realize this is not the best position for good sound, but these speakers reek. And they don’t seem to bother the TV.

It turns out the stereo’s tuner is on the part I destroyed and threw out, so it looks like I’ll be buying a cheap receiver. I can’t complain. So far I have about thirty bucks invested in this.

Stereo!

Things are getting worse in the garage, AKA the site of my future intervention.

Yesterday I installed a TV on a shelf. But it had no working remote, and it wasn’t hooked up to cable or a DVD player, and I needed to add a radio tuner. So today I was forced to go to Home Depot and get a universal remote (eight dollars more than I budgeted, but it looked cooler than the cheap one), six shelf brackets, and a bunch of screws. I’m going to take my mom’s old JVC shelf system (what remains after I gutted the CD part in order to rescue Mahalia Jackson), stick it on the wall, and add my much-loathed Panasonic DVD changer.

I looked at stereo receivers online, figuring I should be able to find something I could get delivered for fifty bucks, but the cheapest new ones were all at or above a hundred bucks. Then I realized I hadn’t checked the old modular shelf system for inputs. Praise be, it has RCA sockets for a VCR. I am cooking with gas.

I dread the installation. I have to cut and install three shelves in a very congested area, and I get to breathe lots of concrete and wood dust, for which I’ll pay the price later. Respirators may keep you from overloading your lungs, but they’ll let you get enough crap into your body to make you congested.

I also scored two jugs of kosher Coke from the grocery beside Home Depot. So I have that going for me.

Life will suck for the remainder of the day, but at least I’ll get that miserable DVD changer out of my bedroom and get the old stereo off the garage floor. I don’t know who designed that changer, but the remote is one hundred percent counterintuitive, and you actually have to keep the manual nearby in order to use it. It’s a horror for regular use, but it will be acceptable in the garage.

The Coke is chilling. It’s time to go out there and suffer.

Another Piece of Mediocre Carpentry Finished

I have a few pointers for people who want to challenge my greatness by putting TVs on shelves in their garages.

1. Do not assume your garage walls are square to each other or even close to it.

2. When you have to use a hole saw to drill UP through plywood, the time you spend looking for the face shield will not be regretted.

3. When Home Depot puts $5.00 brackets on sale for half price, there is probably an excellent reason.

4. Never mount a television 80″ above the floor in a crowded corner if the remote “ON” button has gone dead.

More advice as it dawns on me.

Also, Glenn Beckside has a vital Twitter update.