Rasmussen Proves It

My Chinese (of course) carbide indexed cutting tools arrived yesterday. The price was great. But the lid on the little plastic case was smashed. The seller took the whole mess and shoved it in a Priority Mail envelope instead of a box, and naturally, something got crushed. He didn’t even sandwich it in bubble wrap.

I complained. Carbide tools are brittle, and you’re supposed to store them in a way that keeps them from touching other tools. One way to do that might be…a plastic case! It’s important. Granted, I can throw out the case lid and rig something up. But I shouldn’t have to.

What do you think? Am I being too picky? This guy could just as easily have used a box. Priority Mail boxes exist.

No response to my complaint yet. I can’t see giving someone a negative over this, but a neutral might be in order. If you’re going to ship people things, you should make some effort to pack them correctly.

Yesterday, unfortunately, I found something interesting on Craigslist. Another lathe. Wait! It’s not as bad as you think. It’s a little bitty lathe. Like Otisburg. The company that makes it goes as small as 4″ by 8″, and I think their biggest model has a 10″ swing. I’m not sure which model it is, but the description makes it sound really small. It’s a good lathe, too; not Chinese. And it has tooling. And the price is too good to pass up. Dang it.

It would be pretty cool to have a tiny lathe I could store in the closet, for very small parts. I could teach Marv to run it.

He’d make a lot of bells, I suppose. Bells are his bag.

Two disturbing items in the news today. First, only 53% of Americans told the Rasmussen pollsters that capitalism is better than socialism. And 30% of Democrats think socialism is better. Big surprise there.

It looks like the liberals have won the education battle. Socialism has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, and it has never produced a good standard of living anywhere, and it is the greatest evil mankind has ever encountered. But a fair number of Americans, especially those who were “educated” after our school system was destroyed by liberals, think socialism is…pretty rad. No work! Free beers! Che T-shirts! If you want to be a lazy, flabby slouch all your life, socialism is the bomb. A lot of people are content to live that way. Clip your own wings and belly up to the trough.

This is how the killing fields in Cambodia happened. People didn’t know, or ignored, the clear and obvious lessons of history. They thought they could take something that had never worked anywhere and somehow make it succeed. And they ended up rounding up educated people, lining them up beside big holes, and machine-gunning them to death.

Here is the lesson conservatives should have learned from the last three elections, especially after seeing the impact of swing voters. The stupid are incredibly dangerous. The stupid make totalitarianism possible. Our kids are stupid, and they’re getting more stupid every decade. Look out.

The poisonous harvest of our most toxic decade, the Sixties, is a bizarre notion that the young are smart. In truth, the young are generally fools. I certainly was. But back in the Sixties, the left managed to seize on one or two things the old had been wrong about–things like racism and reckless pollution–and convince the young that the old were wrong about EVERYTHING. Since then we have been producing insolent, unprincipled, overconfident, weak children who think their tiny brains hold the keys to a bright and happy future where everyone eats tofu and and smokes free dope and has sex with no consequences.

It’s amazing; a human being will generally get smarter with age. But our nation, composed entirely of human beings, has gotten dumber. And we’re going to pay. Stupidity is an extremely expensive luxury.

I wasn’t raised very well. To some extent, I am part of the problem. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to my parents, and I don’t blame them for my failings, but they made mistakes. When you have kids, you should give them the same kind of effort you put into your job, at the very least. There should be a plan. There should be discipline and oversight. I didn’t get everything I needed. Thank God, I am able to perceive the existence of the problem, so I can work to improve myself. But many people are not as lucky as I am. They think the neglect they experienced as kids was freedom. They’re grateful for it. They think it allowed them to grow up without the “backward” ideas that made their grandparents so silly. They don’t understand that restrictions can be great blessings. Rules aren’t like shackles, intended purely to deprive you of liberty. They’re like frames that guide tomato plants and help them produce more fruit.

Presumably, every book of the Bible has a purpose. I believe that one purpose of the book of Proverbs is to help people like me. There are lessons my parents failed to teach me. And I’ve absorbed a lot of counterproductive ideas throughout my life. Where do people like me go for guidance? Pastors don’t have the time to provide it. You can’t expect your friends to fill the need. You can’t just think it up on your own. The book of Proverbs can be very helpful. It’s like a frozen bone marrow transplant, waiting to be infused into lost generations, to heal them of the cancer of savagery. Wisdom is supposed to reside in human beings, but sometimes it misses generations, and it has to be stored somewhere so people raised without exposure to it can be reinoculated.

I went through this book systematically. I found that I already believed and applied a lot of it, so I deleted those portions. I put the rest in a Word file. Now I have it to use as a reference. The deletions left me with a targeted version that focuses on my specific gaps. I don’t look at it often enough, but I keep a printout handy. You might give this a try. Wisdom really is power, and it will take care of you.

Sometimes I look at that printout and alight on passages I wish I had read twenty years ago. I think of specific mistakes I have made, and the pain they have caused me, and I wince. That’s the kind of experience parents are trying to spare you when they tell you to pull up your pants, get a real haircut, stop watching MTV, and get your butt to church.

In case any kids are reading this, let me say this. Socialism is a horror, and it will bring only misery and death. And there is no such thing as safe sex. And piercings are generally disgusting.

The other thing that disturbed me today was a ridiculous essay by Juan Williams. Someone sent me a link to it. He comes out and admits he thinks gun ownership should be banned. Like it was in Washington D.C., that peaceful haven where crime is unknown. Unbelievable.

Here’s an incredible quotation:

In fact, in Nebraska there is a big argument in the legislature about guns. It is not about banning them. The debate is whether to allow security guards to bring guns into churches. To my mind the debate should be about how to keep all guns out of churches.

If Mr. Williams had had his way, Jean Assam would not have been able to shoot the man who murdered two people in the parking lot of New Life Church. If, on the other hand, Ted Nugent had had his way, that murderer would probably have been killed much earlier in the day, when he opened fire at another church. A churchgoer packing heat would have laid him out on the pavement. Whose way do you prefer? I prefer Ted’s. When I go to church, I keep a switchblade in my pocket and a pistol in my glove compartment. I’d carry inside, if I had the clothes for it.

Why is there any doubt about a church’s right to have armed guards? We don’t prevent stores and banks from using guns to assure security. Explain why churches should be different. Provide the basis for the state’s right to discriminate against any institution in this matter, based purely on that institution’s status as a religious entity. The disciples would not have been allowed inside a church run by Mr. Williams. They carried swords, on orders from Jesus himself. If Juan Williams ran the Vatican, the Swiss Guard would be ejected from the premises. They carry MACHINE GUNS. Not semi-automatic. Automatic. Most people in the Williams faction don’t know the difference. Their writings prove it every day.

Quite frankly, I find it odd that the Pope isn’t armed. If you require other people to bear arms for you, you are fully responsible for what they do, and you should be willing to do the same thing. If you’re not willing to do that, how are you different from Rosie O’Donnell, who preaches against guns yet pays armed bodyguards? If John Paul II had been armed when Mehmet Ali Agca attacked, he might have spared himself some surgery and prolonged his life.

Says Mr. Williams:

The roll call of death and suffering from guns continued earlier this month with the tragic mass shooting in Binghamton, N.Y. That followed one man killing ten people in Alabama before taking his own life. And that preceded the murders of eight people in a North Carolina nursing home, as well as one parolee shooting four policemen to death in Oakland, Calif.

Excuse me, but how is that “suffering from guns”? Isn’t it actually “suffering from criminals”? And which of these murderers would have obeyed a law banning gun ownership? The laws against murder, which have steeper penalties, didn’t bother them at all. And what do you think would have happened had the first three killers encountered armed civilians? Same thing that happened in New Life Church.

Reading this column, I learn two things. First, Juan Williams is never going to make it as a professional logician. Second, he’s a great target for violent crime. He chooses to be defenseless, and he makes good money. I think that if I were opposed to allowing civilians the means to defend themselves, I’d be smart enough to avoid bragging about it on national television, while working in a city known for street crime. It’s like begging to be mugged.

Williams says no change is in sight. I sure hope that’s true. Barack Obama and his awful Attorney General have done more to arm Americans in the last six months than the NRA could have done in ten years. I’d hate to see that wonderful progress reversed.

Proven Idiot Supposedly Deserves Chance Bush Never Got

I am sad to report a setback in the quest for the ultimate pillow. Night before last I tried a memory foam pillow and slept extremely well, and all day yesterday I felt almost as though I were on speed. It made a big difference. Yesterday I got a second pillow–a fake down product called Indulgence–and I thought my joy would be complete. But I had a little congestion anyway, and on top of that, I couldn’t get to sleep on time. It’s as if the extra energy from sleeping well made me more sensitive to caffeine. So today, no coffee, and I’m drinking my daily ration of revolting green tea as early as possible, to give the caffeine time to wear off.

I still feel much better than I used to.

I just skimmed Camille Paglia’s latest. I never read anything she has written in its entirety. She has not mastered the humane tool known as the paragraph, and she seems to write defensively, the way a lot of self-proclaimed intellectuals do. They’re used to hanging around with people who correct each other and whose big thrill in life is pretending to be much smarter than they really are. They always end up using bigger words than they need and giving unhelpful references to show you how much they’ve read. They do this to discourage other pretentious effetes from finding opportunities to show them up. Yes, Camille, we know you own four tons of books and actually made it through Ulysses. Just write like a human being, okay? Be like Billy Joel, who said he never wanted to work that hard. There’s a reference for you. I’m sorry it couldn’t be Krishnamurti or Ezra Pound.

Sooner or later, she’s going to snap and admit she’s conservative. She’s like Dennis Miller and Ron Silver. She keeps saying the same things about liberals that conservatives say. This is why a lot of liberals hate her. Eventually she’s going to break down and say, “Okay, I’m a lesbian, but I can’t take these hippies any more, and I am just not stupid enough to think socialism works.”

She’s secure enough to get herself in trouble by criticizing the left, but she’s not secure enough to abandon it. Which is all right, I guess, since we already seem to have enough conservatives who want nothing to do with God or morality. I refer to the actual God, not the one Joseph Smith made up.

Today she admits that Barack Obama is an embarassment. Hello? Where was she when he was using a childish gesture to give Hillary Clinton the finger on camera? Where was she when we learned that he belonged to an anti-Semitic church, and that the pastor was one of his closest associates? Where was she when we found out one of his buddies was a terrorist who belongs on death row?

Wake up, lady. Barack Obama has been an embarassment for a long time. And his wife is downright disgusting. You don’t grab the Queen of England with your big Amazon paws and wool her around like a puppy. You don’t go on TV and tell America you’ve been ashamed of it for virtually all of the four decades of your pampered life, which was made possible by America’s misguided generosity and bizarre notions of collective guilt.

Michelle Obama is like the relative you pray won’t show up at your wedding. And now she is the face our womanhood presents to the world.

Paglia says the “major” media has been remiss in not howling over Obama’s horrific bow the to the despotic ruler of Saudi Arabia. No duh. Thanks for pointing out the obvious and expecting people to applaud your remarkable insight. And where have you been, woman? How could you not expect this kind of thing, from a guy who spent most of his life as a glorified bagman for the chicago machine? He’s been kissing the rings of corrupt tyrants for decades; he probably bowed out of habit.

It’s revealing that Paglia admits that the mainstream press is unfair in Obama’s favor, but notice she won’t go the whole distance. She won’t call them “the liberal media.” She’s thinking it, people. This woman has only made it out of one closet. The other one is yet to burst open.

Too funny. Free thinking is good when it gets you attention and lands you book deals, but when it threatens your social life, suddenly it’s SCARY. Ann Coulter appears to be mentally ill, but give her credit. She isn’t afraid to say what she feels like saying, and as a result, she has probably lost more friends and eaten more gay-waiter boogers than anyone in history.

I will never be able to make the kind of clever references Camille Paglia makes, because I pretty much abandoned literature over twenty years ago. I realized that literature was unrealistic; it was written from the point of view of people who had great faith in despair and none in God. The world of literature is distorted, because God doesn’t exist there. Henry Miller said the first thing you scratch down when you start to write is “the cry of the wounded angel: pain.” How right he was. But here’s an equally accurate way to put it. To a large degree, literature is an elaborate form of whining. I don’t think that would have pleased Miller’s readers as much as the angel thing.

Ahab ends up tied to the whale, sort of like a big dead suction-cup Garfield on a white minivan. The savage hangs himself because he can’t find his place in man’s squeaky clean, genetically engineered world. The smelly old Italian guy who hangs out at the whorehouse says, “It’s better to live on your feet than die on your knees,” because there is no divine mathematician up there, balancing the moral equations. My world isn’t like that. Is yours? Why should I read books in which my views will be shaped by unfortunate fictional people who DON’T GET IT? If I want to be pelted with wrongness, I don’t need a book. I can turn on Air America. Assuming it still exists.

Did I get the references wrong? If so, good for me. It shows I haven’t been wasting my time.

Speaking of ways to spend time, I’ve been thinking about the amazing tools I saw over at Practical Machinist. I linked to a thread started by a guy who says he’s a starting machinist. He made his own quick-change tool post set, plus other helpful machining items you would ordinarily have to buy. It makes me wonder if I should try to make a few tools for myself. Example: a Criterion boring head costs hundreds of dollars. The metal used it in can probably be had for two figures. Some people make their own boring heads with little mills and lathes. Maybe I could do that.

I wish I could make a milling attachment for the lathe, but that appears to be a milling job, so like I said in an earlier post, I think you need a milling attachment in order to make a milling attachment.

Someone posted a question here about small lathes, like Sherlines and Taigs. I’d recommend looking at W.R. Smith’s video about tooling up for clockmaking. He says Sherline now provides so much milling paraphernalia for lathes, you can do a ton of stuff without springing for a second machine.

I bought some lathe DVDs. Smartflix is useful, but they’re very slow. I can’t wait two months. Besides, I like to support the people who create educational materials when I can. Some video sets, like the ones from ATI, are obscenely expensive. Others cost a little over twice as much as Smartflix charges to rent them. I can swing that.

I hope more junk arrives today. I can sit in the garage and fondle it until the lathe gets here.

Oh Rapture

I have a knurling tool!

Actually, I have a whole quick change toolpost set. It arrived today. But to me, the knurling tool is the coolest part. You mash it into a part as it turns, and you get checkering all the way around!

But I still have no lathe.

Come on, freight truck.

Me, I Buy

I don’t know what to make of the way the new pillow has affected me. I must have slept really well last night, because I’ve felt like Buddy Love all day. So energetic I’m almost obnoxious.

I ran over to Bed, Bath & Beyond and got a second synthetic pillow and a mite-proof cover. This pillow is pleasantly mushy, and it some kind of down substitute other than the dreaded polyester fill. I think the most disgusting thing I saw over there was a tag that read “recycled polyester.” Great. A pillow made from old couch cushions sick kids have peed all over. No thanks.

Hey, you know that expensive lathe I ordered, and the toolpost set I had to get? And you remember how I wanted to get a Bridgeport? Look what this guy did with a couple of crappy benchtop machine tools. CLICK. He made his own toolpost set, and it’s magnificent. He refers to a Japanese site where he got the plans. The Japanese site is also a major humiliation. Some guy over there has a mill and a lathe in a 25-square-foot closet, and he makes amazing things.

Maybe the Millrite is not such a bad idea. Maybe you don’t need a big mill to be a metalworking superhero.

Of course, the toolpost set has already arrived.

The obvious question is, why would any hobbyist buy a toolpost set if you can make better ones in your garage?

I think I’ll go feel insignificant for a while.

I do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell

I think I know what I want to make with my machine tools. Remember how I wrote about my sad efforts to create a crab-claw cracking tool that would wow the masses and replace things like hammers and pliers? I think I should go back and finish the job. Get a little closure. Perhaps literally.

I’m thinking stainless. Maybe tool steel; I don’t think it rusts much. And my requirements for the machine are that it has to crack anything a person can eat, except maybe coconuts, and it has to be fun to use, and people have to go “WOW” when they see it on your coffee table.

I already have an idea for a cam-action sort of thing, with the camming motion provided by a round cam with an off-center axis of rotation. And I want to put ball bearings in it so it will last forever.

It’s hard to describe because I haven’t actually designed it yet. But I’m positive it will work.

Why aren’t more people making cracking machines? This is a real problem. Nutcrackers, without exception, suck. They’re too small for walnuts. Half the time the nuts squirt out the side and shoot under the couch. They’re too small for crab claws. They’re worthless for Brazil nuts. Think how great it would be to have snazzy looking universal cracking machine, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I’m not totally sure how you go about designing things like this with no knowledge of drafting and zero CAD skills. I guess I can get a pencil and wing it.

By the way, and this is not really related to tools, did you read about how the French are giving someone a face and hands transplant? Drudge linked it today. They’re doing amazing things over there. What you may not realize is that they worked their way up from a simpler procedure. A lady in Marseilles had an armpit transplant. Apparently she could not face the world after a rare viral infection left her own armpits bald.

“Mon dieu,” she exclaimed, “my automobile has been eaten by rats!”

Wait, I’m confusing two different stories. Or obscure Seventies cartoons, as the case may be.

Here’s something interesting.

New Calipers!

I’m beside myself. My new dial caliper has arrived.

I guess it’s stupid. I already have two vernier calipers (is “vernier” supposed to be capitalized?) plus a Chicom dial caliper, but vernier calipers are a pain to read, and everyone says not to trust Chinese instruments for really precise work, so here I am with caliper #4.

I found a guy selling Mitutoyos for half price on Ebay, all fresh and new in the box. I already snatched it from the package and measured the only precisely made object within ten feet, which (because I was in the dining room) was a Cor-Bon .38 Super round. I got 0.356″, right on the button. As it should be. I guess I should compare the Chicom job and the vernier calipers.

Stuff I had to get in order to run a lathe is beginning to come in, and I am experiencing a form of glee I have not felt since I was finishing up my physics degree and I finally reached the point where I did not have to put any basket-weaving (liberal arts) courses on my schedule. I loaded up with quantum mechanics, optics, partial differential equations…I think that’s right. I can’t remember everything. I couldn’t believe I was free to do what I wanted, instead of babbling about whether we exist in philosophy class. I took five courses, and some were graduate courses, and others were top-level undergraduate courses. I found myself sitting in class beside the teaching assistant who taught my first year lab section.

I’ll never understand why physics didn’t work out. I just burned out, I think. You can’t do all that in three years, starting from scratch, without spraining your brains.

Now I’m about to start machining things! How on earth did I get here? How did this happen? I’ll bet I’m the only person in my law school class who is learning to use machine tools. If not, I’m the only one who is doing it by choice.

I love it. I feel like pouring assorted tools out on my bed and rolling around on them.

I’ll leave out the scribers and the scratch awl.

Yes, I have a scratch awl now. Sometimes I’ll be at a hardware store for something important, and I’ll look around, and I’ll say, “Oh, that looks useful.” And I’ll buy something. That’s how the scratch awl ended up in the car with me.

I need it! You don’t understand! My first machinist scribe is only steel–I’m pretty sure–and the other one, that goes in a shirt pocket, doesn’t have a cool wooden handle! I have to have all my bases covered. And it was only like six bucks.

Last night I watched the last ATI milling machine video. When Darrell Holland showed how the rotary table worked, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I have to have one of those things. Even if I never get a milling machine. I’ll put Marvin on it and rotate him to very precise angles, for no good reason at all. Chucking him may be a challenge, but there’s always duct tape.

I better go write up some notes on that video.

Decent Milling Machine in Miami?

I had assumed that my only machine tool buy for the first half of this year would be a lathe. Now I think I may have been wrong. Sometimes you see a deal that is so good you have no choice but to take it.

Last night I noticed a Bridgeport mill for sale locally. Nine hundred bucks. It doesn’t look great; it’s painted in one of the shades known to Internet forum users as “Ebay blue.” But it has a DRO, what may be a Kurt vise, a power feed, and a bunch of collets.

A used DRO is worth maybe 500 bucks. The vise is worth 250. The collets would run maybe a hundred. I could take the good stuff off of this, sell the rest for scrap, and break even. Or I could use it until something better showed up, take the good stuff off, put the good stuff on the better machine, and then sell this one for scrap.

Whoops! The same machine is on Ebay for $4500! What’s up with that? The bigger Ebay photos don’t look so hot. And it’s not local! It’s in Tampa!

Never mind. When you add $700 to get it here, it’s not so exciting.

Church was good today. They’ve been putting on an Easter show. It’s impressive. The acting is not Oscar-quality, and it would not be the end of the world if someone polished up the script, but most of the music was incredible. I don’t know where they find these people.

The best part came at the end. People who were at the scene of the crucifixion took the mike, and they gave their testimonies. One credited God with finding her a job. Another said God restored his business and his family after his wife died from cancer. And another said her daughter was healed of terminal cancer and has since gone on to have a recording career in Christian music.

I suspect that we focus too much on what God does for us, and not enough on what we’re supposed to do for him. But it’s extremely important for people to talk about the miracles in their lives. People who don’t believe point to “miracles” that have turned out to be false, and they make the bizarre claim that no one has ever been proven to have experienced a miracle. But answered prayers are all around us. People really do get healed of cancer from time to time. Folks have visions. Families are put back together. And you can find the witnesses. They’re real people, with names. Lots and lots of people pray for things they don’t receive, but they’re not the whole story.

I had a strange experience on Friday. Twice in my life I have literally felt the presence of God in the room with me, so powerfully that I could tell you its exact location. On other occasions, I’ve felt it in a more diffuse and general way, but that almost always happens in church, not when I’m alone. On Friday, I was sitting here in this chair, and I felt it descend on me. For no clear reason. Not in one location, but throughout the atmosphere of the room. If you know the sensation I’m talking about, you know it’s very, very pleasant. It’s something that doesn’t happen every day or on command, so when it happens, you stop what you’re doing and try to enjoy it and make it last. I sat here and concentrated on it and made the most of it.

I can’t figure out why it happened or what the point of it was. I wish it would happen more often.

Sometimes I’m suspicious of people who claim to have supernatural experiences and who say they know exactly what they meant or why they happened. In my experience, God is not obvious. He does things that seem to have no purpose, and he does them when you least expect them, and you are left grateful but also somewhat confused.

The thing that impressed me about it was that it appeared to have no connection whatsoever to anything I had done. I wasn’t fasting or writing a big check to help orphans or doing anything else that could be considered particularly righteous. In fact, I was feeling guilty about some bad things I had done. I always think slipping up will wreck my relationship with God and set me back, but it doesn’t always work that way. Maybe it never works that way and I just don’t realize it. In any case, I felt like I had received something of tremendous value. I’ll bet this doesn’t happen very often to people we all think of as lucky, like Bill Gates or Barack Obama. I think it’s better than the things they’ve received, and that I’m luckier than people like that. When those people die, the good things they’ve received disappear. Things that advance you spiritually can’t be taken away. I think this is why the Bible uses words like “vanity” and “leasing” to describe earthly blessings. They’re not permanent, and you don’t own them. I own the good things that have been given to me. Forever.

Here’s something I’ve thought about a lot. If civilization somehow disappeared, and a group of people survived on an island somewhere, and some of those people had been rich and powerful beforehand, those people would no longer be anything special. They’d have no advantage over anyone else. Donald Trump would be no better off than a guy who collected garbage for a living. They’d be equals. But people who knew God would still know him, and they would still have all the advantages they had before the disaster.

I think about that, and it makes me wonder what’s real and what isn’t.

I guess I’m rambling. Marv is squawking for attention, so I’ll stop here.

Can’t Buy What You Can’t Find

I think the last thing I need to make a lathe work is a set of turning tools. Og recommended starting with indexable carbide tools.

I went to Enco, and they have like 3 million varieties. Right-handed, left-handed, AL, BR, BL, AR, E…I don’t even know what these terms MEAN.

Jim Dunmyer suggests I grind my own tools. Great! Let’s see how many types of blanks Enco sells.

Ah, this is less confusing. I can’t FIND them. So…ZERO. For the time being.

Maybe I can just wedge a paring knife into the toolpost. I could at least use the lathe for making ornamental fruit-rind spirals.

Why Waste Time?

Way oil.

That is the latest thing I have become aware that I am required to own, in order to sit in my garage ruining lathe projects. Thank goodness. I was almost afraid I had spent enough money.

A metal lathe has a thing at one end that turns the thing you work on, and then it has rails that point away from the turning thing, and then it has a thing that sits on the rails and holds the tool that cuts the turning thing. The rails are called “ways.” Which requires no explanation.

I think it’s great how I’m mastering all these mechanical terms.

The ways of a lathe have to be really smooth and straight, or else, well, I’m not sure what. I have been told two conflicting things. 1. If the ways are worn out (from the motion of the sliding thing that holds the tool), it will be impossible to make anything good on the lathe. 2. If the ways are worn out, it will not matter, because a real machinist would just excrete a giant burst of testosterone and “work around” the wear and still make parts fit for use in critical areas of the Hubbell telescope.

This appears to be a common issue with all types of machine tools. I keep hearing that they have to be in new condition to work OR that a good machinist can manufacture a Swiss watch using a pair of dull scissors and a Globe meat slicer.

I’m not sure whether any of this is relevant to me, since, in the effort to make crude and defective parts, I will probably be able to overcome the high quality and inherent precision of any machine tool made by man.

To keep your ways happy (not that it matters if you’re a real machinist with swarf in his colon, one glass eye, and nine fingers), you have to oil them, and of course, you can’t just use any old oil that doesn’t cost ninety dollars a gallon and have to be ordered from Singapore. You have to use way oil.

It gets better. There are three grades of way oil, and I have no idea which one is right. The book I’m reading says to get “medium,” with no justification whatsoever. It’s obvious to me that the author has no idea, either, and that he decided to go down the middle and see what happened.

Here’s the thing that makes me suspicious. The book also says I have to degrease the machine, weekly. Isn’t oil greasy? Won’t I be removing all that precious way oil?

I think this guy owns a way oil distributorship, and he needs to come clean. Or at least be degreased.

Wait, I’m wrong. Imagine that. It says to avoid removing the oil when you degrease.

The lathe I’m buying came from a prison. Of all the things that may have been spilled on it, grease worries me the least. I’m considering hosing it down with veterinary penicillin. Or I could take the easy route and just smear it with ground beef. My sister tells me not to eat beef because it’s full of antibiotics and steroids. Explain the logic. If I eat this stuff, I’ll be a) healthy and b) ripped. What’s not to like?

I’ll bet I know who sells way oil. Enco. How do I know this? I know it because I just received an email saying my first Enco order had shipped. That means I can’t include way oil in the same package. So this would be the perfect time for fate to humiliate me by revealing that Enco is currently having a massive way oil blowout.

Maybe Obama just banned way oil because it’s made by competent people who don’t need bailouts, and, like certain types of ammunition, it will now be impossible to find.

I love that Obama. And his wife, too. Did you see where she fist-bumped Queen Elizabeth? Something like that. It was pretty rad. They used to put your head on a pole for things like that.

MICHELLE OBAMA: HIGH FIVE!

QUEEN: ?

MICHELLE OBAMA: Don’t leave me hangin’, girl.

I shudder to think what may be on that Ipod they gave her. But it can’t be any worse than John McCain’s favorite band. Abba. On the other hand, her majesty is probably already a fan of “Dancin’ Queen.”

Giving Britain’s elderly Queen an Ipod is like giving an older relative an entertainment center that requires two remotes. It’s almost cruel. Wars start over things like this.

I think there should be a law against giving another person’s older relative any type of electronic gadget without prior notarized consent from the other person.

In addition to way oil, I’m fairly sure I have to order telescoping gauges, center drills, and a second fire extinguisher. The lathe is going to be right next to the garage door, though. Wouldn’t it make more sense to run outside and rely on homeowner’s insurance?

I put a fire extinguisher on the wall when I got my welder, but nothing I couldn’t afford to replace has caught fire yet. Seems like a waste of money to me.

I wonder if that extinguisher still works. Might be a good idea to check once every five years or so.

In conclusion, here is something irrelevant:

Relic From the Archives

Can I tell you how great it is to dream of something for decades and then do it?

I am going to get up off my lazy rear end and take a photo of something for you.

That is my copy of The Metalworker’s Benchtop Reference Manual. I got it about 20 years ago. I’ll tell you why I bought it.

My mother had some stone crab claws. Stone crabs have very thick shells. They are not easy to bust. These days, most sellers crack them before they sell them. That was not the case in the 80s. At least, not at the place where my mother got these claws. She needed help with them.

The standard thing to do is to get a hammer and put the claws on a cutting board, one at a time, and go at it. But that makes shells and bits of crab fly around, and it’s easy to overdo it. My solution? Vise Grips.

It turns out that if you tighten Vise Grips on a crab claw using the screw in the handle, you can break a very tough crab claw by squeezing the handles without much force at all. It’s beautiful.

That inspired me. I thought I needed to make my own crab claw breakers. The Vise Grips worked okay, but it was time-consuming to adjust the screw before every squeeze. I had a couple of ideas for a set of pliers that used leverage.

I went to a local machine shop and paid a guy $35 to make some pliers I designed. They would have worked, but he used 1/8″ mild steel, so they weren’t strong enough.

I knew absolutely nothing about machining. I got a drill press, and then I went to a metal supply place and ordered a small amount of tool steel. You can probably imagine how well that went. The instant a spinning tool hits tool steel (at the wrong speed, with no lube or coolant), the tool steel hardens up until it’s about like a diamond. I managed to get part of the way through the project, and then I quit. It was at some point during this time that I got the manual. It was pretty much the only book I had seen anywhere that I thought might contain a clue about how to make the crab pliers. I saw it in a bookstore one day, and I bought it on a whim.

I never got any benefit from the book, nor did I succeed in creating the pliers. But it shows how long I have been interested in machining.

I am in the process of getting a metal lathe. Readers and people I’ve contacted via forums are giving me all sorts of advice. Everyone said the tooling was what would kill me, and I tried not to think about it until the lathe order was in the works. Now reality is in my face, and I am buying things like fishtail gauges, dial calipers (better than the Chicom jobs I already have), indexed carbide tools, and a tool post. Thank God for China and the used-tool market. Without these resources, there is no way the cost of this effort would be something I could make myself swallow.

Machining experts seem to agree that you should learn turning before you learn milling, so the lathe is probably a good move. But I would still like to make those crab pliers! I could do it on a lathe, if I could get a milling attachment. I’m pretty sure Clausing made about 3 of those attachments, and they have since been sold for scrap and turned into doorknobs. I suppose there’s a work-around. There always is.

I can’t wait to do this. I can’t wait to see the first chip squirting off the surface of a workpiece. FINALLY. This will be even better than the table saw, which, without a doubt, is a life-changing tool.

Maybe I’ll even get to use that book.

I’m convinced that good things like this come from turning back to God.

Discount

Home Depot just took $150 off the price of their 12″ sliding miter saw. Check it out.

I have one of these saws, and I can attest to its tremendous weight. As for quality, I haven’t tried all of its capabilities. Some lady on the web was complaining that one of the stops is off by a degree or something.

Caveat emptor.

Can’t Work a Calendar

Am I the only one who thought today was March 31?

Yesterday I learned about the Conficker virus, which was predicted to activate and cause misery on April 1. I have AVG, but it misses things, so I was worried. The site where I learned about the virus listed several antidotes, so I decided to give them a try.

First, I looked at Symantec. They have a tool for the job. When I downloaded it, it told me I had to close a bunch of programs and shut off my modem and so on, and I thought that was a pain, so I decided to check Microsoft. They have a page where you can get a free scan. I got that started, and it turned out it would take several hours. At first I thought that was okay, but then I realized it would be running after midnight, and I was afraid the virus would kick in and do something before the scan finished.

I shut it down, and before I left the PC for the day, I started the Symantec thing again, hoping it would work before midnight.

It’s very odd. At that point, I thought April 1 was a few hours away, but then I remembered the date on the machining notes I had made earlier in the day: March 30. And I felt relieved. I thought I had an extra day. And then I got up and realized the notes were wrong. So my extra day was gone, and I had to hope the Symantec tool had worked.

I don’t know if it worked or not; when I woke up, I stupidly tried to turn the computer on, which actually turned it off. I had left it on, after all.

Now I’m running the Microsoft scan. It turns out you can limit it to security issues, which dramatically decreases the time it takes. The estimate I got was 80 minutes.

In the meantime, I’m afraid to do anything on the computer. This virus is supposed to steal passwords and credit card numbers as you type them, so I don’t want to buy anything or type passwords manually. Maybe it can also steal passwords your computer remembers and sends on its own, in which case some jerk in China can probably edit my blog and read my email now.

This is a link to the Microsoft scan. You have to use Internet Explorer, naturally.

I’m frantically copying DVDs and watching them and taking notes this week. I found out Smartflix has late fees. I had assumed that was not the case, because I read something like “keep them as long as you want” on their site. You don’t get much time to watch the material and make use of it, so I have had to resort to making copies. I suppose this is technically infringement, but I’m going to throw out the copies after I watch them, so the guilt is pretty minimal. The cost of a blank DVD is 20 cents, and the late fee is 2.99 per week, and it takes several hours to watch a DVD and take good notes.

If you don’t take notes, the material is useless. There is no way you could remember all this information. If you don’t take notes, you have to rent the material over and over or buy it. I want to learn about machining, but I’m not ready to dump several thousand dollars on videos. Some of the courses aren’t too expensive, and I will probably buy some of them, because I don’t want to be a leech, but others run over a hundred dollars per DVD, with several DVDs per set. For that kind of cash, I expect to be able to send projects in and have them graded, and I want some kind of certificate I could show a machine shop owner in order to get a job.

I don’t want to be a professional machinist, but if I’m going to pay what amounts to tuition, I want the same benefits I would get from paying it to a school.

The Swarfrat guy charges reasonable prices, and there’s a lathe series called “Lathe Learnin'” which gets great reviews, and it’s a big pile of DVDs for $125. You’re actually better off renting from Swarfrat than Smartflix, because Swartrat applies the rental fees toward purchase. You can try before you buy.

His videos are really good, by the way. He doesn’t just grind weird shapes out to show you what the machine can do. He shows you very practical skills you can use to make useful things. He uses small tools, which is a plus in one way. You can do whatever he does without blowing a pile of money, and you should also be able to do it on bigger machines. Although he also has a TIG welder, and they’re not cheap. Some day maybe I’ll have to get one, unless I can find a cheaper way to weld small parts. The MIG would probably dissolve them.

One guy has a video in which he shows you how to build your own small milling machine, using a lathe. Seriously. I’d like to try that just as a project. His name is Jose Rodriguez. Look him up. I haven’t seen the video.

I guess this scan is going to take longer than I thought. I better get some things done.

A Lathe is Like a Cake With no Frosting

Before I chose my lathe, people told me the tooling would be the big expense. What they did not make clear was that it would also cause most of the headaches. It’s hard to figure out what I need.

I have to have measuring equipment. A VFD. Tool post holder set. Cutters. And knowing almost nothing, I am ill-equipped to choose things. Especially before the lathe arrives.

Og is giving me all sorts of advice, and I’m picking the brain of a 5914 owner at Practicalmachinist, and I’m getting good input at The Home Machinist. It looks like I may want to get a Phase 2 tool post set from Enco; they’re running a great monthly special on it. I don’t know which size I need, so I fired a question off to the Practicalmachinist guy.

Clausing gave me a manufacture date for the lathe: 1965. I’m hoping they didn’t work it too hard at the prison.

Clausing made a milling attachment for this thing, but I’ll bet it’s impossible to find one. It’s some sort of vertical thing you mount on it, and I suppose it moves workpieces across the bed, while you spin cutters mounted in the chuck.

I would imagine that it’s not hard to make a milling attachment. If you have a milling attachment.

If you want to know why they don’t make lathes in the United States any more, here’s a clue. The top brand of lathe tool post is Aloris. Made in the USA. I just found a place that has a new set for sale. Price? Only $625. Price for the Taiwan version mentioned above: $189.

This is why the carmaker bailout is a waste of time. Five years from now, you’ll see Chevy Malibus for $35,000, comparable cars from Taiwan for $25,000, and nearly comparable cars from China for $15,000. That’s when the US automaking industry will cease to exist. UAW members think the bailout is going to get them over a rough spot, so they can keep making several times what they’re worth. They don’t realize the Chinese are about to put an end to them and their gravy train.

Thanks again, Mr. Obama. Shrewd use of all that money. Which, oddly, is also Chinese.

We’re going to be using China-financed dollars to buy Chinese-made cars, while we struggle to earn enough money to pay the sky-high taxes required to pay China the interest on the money they subsidized. I’m assuming we’ll be able to afford cars. Maybe we won’t. We deserve it. We are idiots.

I have a new project. I rented a whole series of machining videos from Smartflix, and I know I’ll forget everything I see. So I got two notebooks and some three-hole pads. I’m going to use one notebook for lathe information and the other for milling. I’m taking notes as I watch the videos.

I could just copy the videos, which is what Smartflix probably expects me to do, but that’s stealing. I copied some awful CLE recordings, but that’s completely different, because I will only hear those ONCE, unless I am kidnapped and forced, at gunpoint, to listen a second time. Even then, I might choose the gun.

Creating these notes is very slow business. If I can manage one DVD per day, it will be a miracle. But at least I won’t be throwing the money down the toilet, which is what would be happening if I didn’t take notes.

Here’s a sad fact. The useful lathe videos won’t be coming my way for quite some time. So I’ll be sitting here collecting milling information while a lathe rots in my garage. Maybe I should break down and buy one video.

My problems could be much worse than these. I can’t wait to get this machine running. It’s going to be a blast, start to finish. Let the rest of the world worry about the Obama Depression. I’ll be in the garage, making chips.

Next Hurdle

I ended the weeks-long turmoil of trying to choose a metal lathe, and I thought life would be free from puzzles and dilemmas for a while. WRONG. Now I have to figure out what to do about the 3-phase motor, and I have to get a minimal amount of tooling.

I can get a phase converter for $100, but I don’t know much about it. I don’t want something that will harm the motor or cause it to produce less power than it would on a true 3-phase system.

The mechanical speed controls on these old lathes sometimes give up the ghost, and when that happens, I think it’s best to scrap the gears and go VFD all the way. If I had a VFD already, I would not have to worry about ordering a new one, and I would not have to toss a phase converter for which I have no use. A VFD containing a phase converter would work as a phase converter, but a phase converter with no VFD stuff would not control speed. See what I mean?

I’ve asked about this before, but I have the memory of a gerbil who just mistook a sack of coffee beans for sunflower seeds, so every time someone explains it, I forget and have to ask all over again.

People always tell me to build a rotary phase converter, but it seems silly to run one huge motor just to provide juice for another motor.

I’ll figure it out. I think the best thing is to have them ship the lathe as-is, and I can worry about the electrics on my own.

“The electrics” is how we he-man tool people describe motors and starters and so on.

I can get a single-phase motor cheap. That’s probably the easiest thing to do. But I am told they generate less torque than triple-phase, so I’m not sure what size to get. The original is 2 HP.

Arrgh.

Think of my Garage as a Halfway House

Someone asked for a photo of the new lathe. I’ll show you what I was sent.

It will come with a drill chuck, 3-jaw chuck, dog driver plate (whatever that is), tool post, tool holder, and a manual. The Grizzly would have had two 3-jaw chucks, I think.

I could have had a South Bend 13, but this has a bigger spindle bore, and it’s supposed to be a very popular lathe with gunsmiths.

I’m hoping it’s not too beat-up. It came from a prison, where it was presumably a teaching machine. That sure beats a machine that put in 24-hour days at a factory.

I was sweating the choice up until this afternoon, when I started to feel very calm about it, and I felt I was finally seeing the decision clearly. That’s what I had been waiting for.

I like the fact that it came from a prison. There is a metaphor in there somewhere. I see tools as part of a pattern of liberation in my life. And here I am, buying a tool which has, itself, been liberated. It began in the joylessness, despair, and stale air of a penitentiary, and it will end in a home workshop where there is only pleasure, contentment, peace, and fulfillment.

And not too much cussing, except when I hurt myself or can’t find something.

God has really blessed me when it comes to tools.

By the way, Mish’s fever has gone below 101. “Prayer Answered!”, the latest post begins.