A/C Help

Help me out again. I asked about this a long time ago, but now I’m serious. I want to put an air conditioner in a cinderblock garage wall. The garage has become an even better refuge than Frank Costanza’s “The Place to Be,” but it won’t be much of a refuge when it’s 90 degrees in there with 80% humidity.

I have determined that a 115-V unit 18″ high by 24″ wide, pumping out 15,000 BTUs, should do the trick. The space is 565 square feet. It’s not insulated, and I suppose I could go above 15,000 BTUs to be sure, but I hate to cut a bigger hole, and I’d really like to stay at 115 volts so I can avoid running a third circuit.

I need help with the hole. I believe it will have to be 26″ by 20″, which is not much. I can put a special blade in my ancient circular saw and make the hole. But what do I do to finish it? The unit has to sit on something, and I would want something across the top of the hole to support the cinderblocks above it.

I assume there must be a product made for this. I suppose I could fake it with pressure-treated wood, but that would make me nervous.

Scrap is Gold

I love my bandsaw.

I decided to make a new zero-clearance throat plate for the Powermatic 66 today. I had half-inch MDF, and I had read that half-inch sheet goods were the thing to use. I used the old worn-out throat plate as a guide. I used it to set the table saw to the right depth to cut an MDF strip for throat plates, and then I put it on the MDF and traced its outline, to use as a pattern.

I stuck it on the bandsaw and cut off the ends, making the plate semicircular on each end. I did it very badly and was still well within a millimeter at every point. I didn’t feel like turning on the compressor and the Dynabrade, so I used the bandsaw to “sand” the sides of the plate until it popped into the table saw hole.

Problem: everyone who said half-inch material was the right choice is crazy. The hole for the throatplate is maybe 13/32″ deep. Now I had an MDF throat plate that was too thick to use.

By the way, I used my outfeed gadget to cut the MDF. It works like a dream.

I didn’t want to put MDF in my planer. It’s not wood, and planer knives are no fun to replace if you screw them up by planing the wrong material. So I was stuck. I could resaw the plate on the table saw, but I pictured kickback sending it whizzing into my face at a hundred miles an hour, propelled by my freakish 5-HP Baldor. No, for once I would be mature and not risk death.

I don’t have a resaw fence on the bandsaw. Yet. I figured it would be impossible to resaw this thing to size, even though it was only 4″ tall when stood on its side. I thought it would be too hard to keep aligned with the blade. But the choice was to pack up the tools and give up, so I gave it a shot. I moved the fence up to the 1/4″ blade, stood the MDF against it, and checked for squareness. Unbelievably, the tuning job I had done on the saw had worked. The blade was perfectly parallel to the MDF.

I started shaving little bits off. The blade didn’t seem to like that. It seemed to drift toward my right, onto the surface of the MDF. I thought I was hogging MDF too fast. The saw was whining a little (I don’t know what a happy bandsaw sounds like), and the cut was not good. But after I got the depth right, I found I actually needed to push the MDF much faster. It squirted right through! I looked at the MDF. The quality of the cut was amazing. Very flat.

I have crammed the plate into the table saw, and I have raised the blade to make a slot. This is what the experts tell you to do. What they don’t tell you is that the Powermatic 66 will not let you lower the blade enough to clear the plate. At least mine won’t. I had to run the saw with the plate halfway into the hole. But it worked.

Now I’m trying to find my Microjig splitter. I finally have a chance to use it. I’m not sure it’s any good, but I want to try it. I think they invented it because it’s an incredible pain in the butt to use their other product–the Gripper–with a regular splitter. Later I’ll go to Home Depot and get Allen screws to use as levelers.

My throat plate isn’t perfect, but to learn that, you’d have to go right up to it and check it pretty carefully. And it’s more than good enough. I plan to baste it with Danish oil. After that, I figure I’ll be done.

I cleaned the cast iron with Break-Free, Sheila Shine, and mineral spirits. I used a Scotchbrite pad, as a reader advised. Then I used car wax on the metal. It’s not really clean, but it sure is better.

I have to make a crosscut sled, before I turn my fingers into seviche. I have been going back to my books and DVDs and refreshing my table saw safety knowledge, and it looks like I’ve been committing a few really horrendous blunders. Example: crosscutting with the miter gauge, using the fence as a stop. Oh well. I’m alive.

That bandsaw is a dream come true. I have to agree with professional woodworkers who say it’s more important than a table saw. If you have a big bandsaw and a circular saw with a guide system, you can survive without a table saw for a very long time. But nothing replaces the bandsaw. And it’s so quiet and safe and handy, and there’s so much less dust. It rocks.

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This shows what a bandsaw can do. You’re looking at the throat plate and the layer I shaved off of it.

Send the Wife and Kids Out of the Room

I know nothing whatsoever about Sterling Machinery, but I have to congratulate them on this Youtube video.

That’s what a milling machine is and what it does.

The earth moved while I watched that.

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I bought plans for a mobile base for a Bridgeport. I was worrying about rearranging the garage, but then I realized that with a mobile base, there was no point. Shove it behind the Powermatic 66, and you’re all set.

I don’t like the plans, though. I have a neurotic fear that the mill will tip. The plans are for a base that raises it up, and the base is only slightly wider than the mill.

I had an idea, based on a couple of brilliant dollies a guy made. You get 4″ by 6″ angle iron half an inch thick. I know this stuff exists. You cut it so it’s longer than the side of a Bridgeport base. You drill two holes in it, and you thread them for big bolts. You lift each side of the mill high enough to scoot the angle iron under it, and you run bolts down through the base of the mill (pre-drilled holes already exist) into the iron.

Then you take short pieces of the same angle iron, and you weld them to the sides of the angle iron you attached to the mill, so the flat 6″ parts extend horizontally to the sides of the mill, high enough for casters to fit under them. Actually, you might be better off using long pieces of angle iron, since the length won’t hurt anything, and it will make the thing more rigid.

You drill holes in the horizontal tabs and attach swiveling casters. If you can find places to weld in gussets, do it. You probably can’t use casters with brakes, because they’re too big to swivel under the 6″ tabs. So you add tabs close to the floor, threaded for bolts that screw down and anchor the machine.

This should work. The pull on the bolts won’t be much, because of the small moment arm against which the mill presses. The casters can be a foot in front of the mill, which adds up to stability. The anchor things should keep wobble to a minimum. And you don’t have to lift a one-ton mill six inches to get it onto the base. You can do it with a crowbar and some scrap wood or small pipes.

Tell me why it will be a disaster.

Weight

Help me out here.

I want to build a revolving table. On one side, I’ll have my 12″ sliding miter saw. It weighs about 85 pounds. On the other, I’ll have my dry-cut saw and bench grinder. Between the two of them, it’s probably 130 pounds. I want the grinder and dry-cut saw on one surface, and the miter saw on the other. If you don’t know what I mean, I’m talking about a table that revolves on an axle. When one set of tools is upside-down, the other is ready for work.

I was thinking I’d make the table part from two pieces of thick plywood sandwiched around maybe four pieces of lumber going across the plywood. What should I use for the axle?

I have a piece of galvanized fence post about 1 1/2″ in diameter. It would cost me some rigidity, as the big 1 1/2″ hole would go through the crossmembers. But I think it’s strong enough to support the tools.

Outfeed

If you’re wondering whether I ever finished the gadget I made to receive outfeed from my wood machines, the answer is yes. Today I mounted it on my sawhorses.

Here’s the result:

I was too lazy to actually plane something to test the gadget, but I ran my planing sled over it, and it’s very obvious that it’s going to work. I need to replace the spacers with something harder than softwood, but they’re okay for now.

Sweet.

Did I Just Feel a Sprinkle?

Am I the only person who has noticed these two inconsistent facts? 1. Since taking office, Barack Obama has consistently made stupid and obvious mistakes with regard to both major and minor issues, and one thing he has done may turn out to have catastrophic results. 2. Obama worshipers are more convinced than ever that he is The One.

Odd.

I thought I would expand a little on yesterday’s post about the real estate deal. Without bogging down in details, it goes like this. I inherited an interest in a little piece of commercial property. Some relatives with shares in the land need money; some don’t. Some really like to sell property; some don’t. There have always been conflicts regarding the disposition of pieces of property we own in common. There has never been any possibility that we would keep all the land and manage it and profit from it; it’s not even worth discussing. It would clearly be the intelligent thing to do, but you can’t herd cats.

When talk of selling this piece started, I was disturbed. It generates a little income. It’s in a great location. It’s in a place where flat land is rare and valuable, so it’ s not like there are a lot of properties like it. And I was concerned about the motivations and judgment of family members who wanted to get rid of it.

Nonetheless, I think the US is headed for a depression or deep recession, followed by a permanently lowered standard of living. We have never had the problems we face today. We have never had hungry, capable competitors like China and India, with their own vast internal markets and an endless supply of cheap, well-educated, grateful, eager labor. There is no reason why we should continue to lead the world economically. And we have aborted millions of babies, and we are getting into all sorts of disgusting religions, and we are proud and downright gross, and we are helping cut up Israel, so unless the Bible is nonsense, we should expect serious economic problems.

So while I like the idea of holding onto good land, I think unemployment is going to shoot up, businesses are going to close, commercial properties are going to be vacant, and we may continue to experience deflation. It’s hard to say, because the Fed needs to print money to cover the insane Bush/Obama Incompetence and Laziness Encouragement Plan. On the whole, however, I think cash is going to be a great thing to have over the next few years, and it’s probably a good time to sell commercial real estate, unless you have it leased to someone solvent.

There was disagreement about how to handle the sale. I thought it would be smart to divide the property. There are no comparable sales to speak of in the area where the property lies, so you can inflate the price of a piece of land by selling one part at a high price and then using the high price as leverage when you negotiate the prices of remaining pieces. But no one else in the family thought this was a good idea. They wanted to sell, period.

I was afraid that if I pushed my viewpoint, I would cause such conflict that relationships would be damaged. As a Christian, I realized this would be wrong. When you are confronted with obstinance and bad thinking, you may have to give way and trust God to fix it. For example, say your daughter wasn’t elected captain of the cheerleading squad, and the girl who got the position is a fat skeeze with no talent, not that you are judgmental or envious. You can’t firebomb the other girl’s house. You have to accept what happened and attack with prayer and faith.

So I restrained myself and did not push. I was afraid the other partners would jump at a crummy offer, just to get the cash, but I resolved to trust God rather than get in their faces. And I reminded myself that I might be wrong, and they might be right.

Well, the negotiations have taken place. We wanted X as a minimum price for the whole thing. The buyers can’t pay X. But they can pay a nice sum for part of the land, and they want an option on the rest, and if they buy it all, we’ll get about 1.6X. That’s just crazy. The most logical expectation was a miserable offer for the whole package. But the buyers are happy, and we’re happy, and unless there is some catch I don’t know about, I’m all for the deal.

So look what appears to be happening. I managed to control myself, and in the end, aren’t we getting the result I wanted in the first place?

Here’s another thing. One thing I prayed for was that my interest would be separated from everyone else’s. Why? For the same reason I would not date a non-Christian. Because partnering with people who don’t believe is a bad idea. They lead you into acts that are contrary to God’s will. They interfere with your blessings. So a sale is a good thing, because it separates my money, so I will be free to dispose of it as I see fit. I don’t have to worry about my relatives voting to rent the property to a whorehouse or something.

We’ll see if it works out. I’m assuming I understand the facts correctly.

Incidentally, some people think my gloomy assessment of the future of our country is unjustified. Some guy linked to my blog, called me “asshat,” and suggested I move to China. And his intelligent argument for the continued prosperity of America was the well-known title of a song made famous in a South Park movie featuring puppets. It’s always good to hear an opposing view which is clearly based on logic.

Some people think I’m unpatriotic for pointing out that God may be judging our nation, and that we may well be on our way to Second World status. They think pumping their fists and yelling “USA! USA!” will somehow put us back on top. But that’s exactly the attitude that put our economy in the toilet. When people said UAW workers were paid too much, and that the auto industry would fail, the autoworkers said, “USA! USA!” Now they’re saying “SOS! SOS!” and “OMG! OMG!” And soon they’ll be saying these things at the welfare office. The handouts are not going to save them. When your rowboat has a hole in it the size of a basketball, you don’t bail. You take it out of the water and patch the hole. The Big Three still have all the problems they had before two of them chose to become charity recipients, and they will continue to fail. Why would anyone expect them to succeed?

It’s just like Pajamas Media. I said it was a stupid idea, and people said I was a jerk, and they said I was too dumb to appreciate the genius of the PJs, and they quit talking to me, and they quit linking to my blog. Then PJM failed, exactly as I and the other non-sheep predicted, and Roger Simon sent all the member bloggers an email telling them they were off what he later described as “the dole”! Yes, yes, I was the enemy of conservatism. I was “the evil in the periphery”; that’s the funniest thing I was called. But who was right? Me or the cheerleaders?

Anyway, to get back to the economy…let’s get it through our heads. We didn’t become rich and powerful because we’re the master race. We are not better than foreigners. If we were, they wouldn’t come here penniless, out-compete us, and end up owning our businesses. There is nothing special about Americans. Absolutely nothing. Our educational system is second-rate. We are not the world’s hardest workers. The Bell Curve guys claim Asians are smarter than we are. We only did well because God helped us, and when he stops, we will stop doing well. That’s not unpatriotic. It’s truth. And once again, as it was in the PJ story, people like me are not the problem, any more than spots on an X-ray are the problem when you have cancer. Touch up the spots; the problem remains.

In the Bible, there were prophets who always said Israel and Judah were going to prosper. The kings and the people did all sorts of horrible things, and then the true prophets told them they were in deep trouble. So they called on the false prophets–the “patriots”–and the false prophets beat up the real prophets and said everything was going to be fine. It was after an episode like this that the king of Babylon took the king of Judah captive, murdered his sons while he watched, had him held down while his eyes were gouged out, and took him and a bunch of other Jews to Babylon in chains.

I’ll bet there were Jews listening to the false prophets, pumping their fists and yelling “JU-DAH! JU-DAH!”

As for moving to China, I don’t think it will be necessary. China is coming here. About half of it is in my garage. And I’m typing on some of it right now, while I read the words on yet another piece of it.

I wrote that without checking, and then I turned over my keyboard and looked. Sure enough: “Made in China.”

While I’m walking down this path, I’ll mention one other thing. A commenter scolded me for thinking the success of my gardening efforts was connected to my behavior as a Christian. I can’t figure that out. Open a Bible. See what it says about people who behave. Your crops will do well. Grapes, wheat, corn, whatever. “Running over.” “Abundance.” “Plenty.” It’s not figurative language, either. Not exclusively. It really does refer to things you plant. And you can look at Joel or Numbers 28 to see what happens to the things you plant, when you aren’t living right.

I bring this up because I checked on my yard today. For a long time, I could not get anywhere with fruit, and it didn’t seem to matter what I did to help things grow. Today I was shocked by what I saw. A ponkan tree which I thought I had wiped out sprouted blossoms unexpectedly, and I’m going to have tangerines. My older tangerine tree, which I nearly killed, has little fruit on it. My key limes are sprouting blossoms which I did not foresee. My cara cara has so many tiny fruit on it, I’m afraid I’ll have to cut a bunch off to keep them from killing it. My lychee is covered in blossoms. Even my pathetic tangelo tree is getting ready to bear. And get this: I found fruit on a MALE papaya tree. Is that even possible? I think my tree is gay. The other trees have produced one papaya after another, and this one has just generated doomed blossoms, but now it has fruit on it. And I have all sorts of little Persian limes on the way. My sole surviving tomato plant has no blossoms, but suddenly it’s very healthy, which is a near-impossibility here.

My lantana bushes, which I bought because they reminded me of Israel, are exploding with flowers. Even the weakest one, which I was worried about. I think it’s going to do well from now on. And my mango trees are lush and healthy, and there are a lot of little mangoes on them.

I think when you say God doesn’t affect little things like this, in effect, you’re saying God doesn’t do anything at all, which is what most Christians really believe. But if God is God, he does things, right? Isn’t that common sense? I think people develop a weird, hands-off picture of God because it enables them to keep believing in him when their prayers consistently go unanswered. You pray and pray, and nothing happens, and you say, “That’s okay, because God is really more of a big-picture guy, and he’s very busy running the world. It’s only natural that he would have no interest in my problems.”

Whatever. When I pray, I want to see some action.

Incidentally, I would be interested in knowing whether I’m the only one who has the impression that a lot of Christians are getting interested in guns, tools, and growing things. It’s crazy, but I keep running into people who have these interests. I have to wonder if we’re being prepared for something. Maybe when times get really bad, it will be good to have a bunch of tools, plenty of firearms and ammunition, and food growing on your land.

Here’s something crazy: my grandfather left me a big heavy bag of silver. He was a judge, and there was a toll road through the counties he served, and when we went off silver coins, he used his clout to get the toll collectors to save silver for him, and he bought it. Very odd thing to do; he was not a big metals investor. And now here I am, with bad times probably on the way, sitting on a hefty pile of silver coins. Is there a reason for it?

That’s all for this morning. I have to buy some steel and some welding gas, and I have a bunch of ideas for mounting tools on roller carts. Time is wasting.

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Must…Have…Bridgeport

Today I was thinking about the cool new gadget I made for my planer outfeed. And I realized I am starting to encounter situations in which machine tools could be really useful.

Look at what I did. It will work; no reason to doubt it. But it could be so much better. I could have used the dry-cut saw and a drill press or mill to put the casters on a piece of angle iron instead of wood, and that would have saved me an inch and a quarter in wasted vertical material. I could have used two pieces of angle iron for the upright parts with slots, had I been able to make slots in metal. I’m going to have to make wooden wedges for spacers, and they will eventually wear and may split. I could have machined them out of aluminum; they’d last forever.

I bought a 2″ square piece of poplar for my router fence. It does the job. But it would be much better to have one made from steel or cast iron. I could find me a piece of surplus metal, put T-tracks in it, mill one side smooth (not sure if a mill will do a job this big, but maybe), cut out a cavity for the router bit, make some nice horizontal bits and weld them to the back so they’d rest on the table, and I’d be all set. Or I could make a fence from aluminum, but then I could forget about using magnetic accessories.

I would imagine a mill would be much faster and better for preparing parts to be welded. When I made the mobile base for my bandsaw, most of the work was grinding and shaping. I had to rough out the parts with the dry cut saw and plasma cutter. After that, it was grind, grind, grind. With a mill, you could make the stuff the correct size to begin with.

I am beginning to see just how useful machine tools would be, and how much use I’d get from them.

“Time is an Illusion; Lunchtime, Doubly So.”

I want to thank everyone with regard to the post I put up the other day about the property sale my family is negotiating. I asked for prayer. I come from a family in which people don’t do a very good job of structuring their estates. This is a tremendous evil to thrust on your kids. I have a cousin who was cut out of his father’s will in favor of his brother. He cornered his brother in the front seat of his truck and blew his guts out with a deer rifle and one or two other weapons. You really need to set your estate up, if you have anyone to leave money to.

It looks like the deal is working out much better than expected, and if it goes through, it will get a big source of conflict out of our lives. This, more than the money, is what concerned me. I give credit to God. I have to; it’s not like we’ve done anything shrewd or even competent in managing what was left to us.

I learned something amazing tonight. I have always said my family was cursed. Today I found out that someone in my line of descent–the last person you would imagine, if you knew my family–used an occult method to plan investments. No wonder we have had problems with the property. I can’t tell you how shocked I am.

I keep thinking about machine tools. I know you will think I’m nuts, and you probably do, regardless, but I keep feeling as though big tools are part of God’s plan for my life. I wish I also felt that way about Pop Tarts.

The Millrite I looked at was very nice, and I am tempted to jump on it. But I keep reading about the various ways in which it is inferior to a Bridgeport. And you have to see what someone mentioned to me. Click this link.

That is the business of a man who “scrapes” machine tools. Don’t even ask me to explain. Science will allow you to build a nice machine tool, but to make it accurate, you have to resort to art. Scraping is a bizarre process that prepares metal surfaces to work properly together, and people do it with hand tools.

Anyway, he takes old mills apart, scrapes them down, and rebuilds them. They are gorgeous. And the prices are very good. I’m so tempted.

This guy has a great reputation, for ethics as well as skill. I picked that up from reading the forums. That makes the deals harder to resist.

I contacted Plaza Machinery about a lathe. People say great things about this company. The owner says he’s in the hospital. Has a lathe I might want to buy, but it may take time.

Speaking of time, it has been on Mish Weiss’s mind. Her doctors seem to be debating about how much time she has left. The truth is, they don’t know. I hope she realizes that. And even if doctors were able to make predictions with any accuracy, in the end, God is in charge.

Please keep praying for Mish, and while you’re at it, throw in the guy from Plaza Machinery. Can’t hurt.

Feast Your Unworthy Eyes

This has been a day of triumph mixed with slapstick.

I wanted to make a rack for my saw blades, so I went to Home Depot and bought a steel dowel to use to go through the arbors. I realize how ridiculous this is. I have started eyeing trash heaps very carefully as I drive, but I still have to buy metal all the time.

I cut pieces of the dowel to length, filed off the burrs, cleaned off the scale, polished up two pieces of scrap I intended to use for the bodies of two racks, turned on the gas for the welder, and realized…the valve had been open for about a week. I knew I would do this eventually. I need a checklist, and I probably need to have it tattooed on the back of my hand.

Okay, no welding today. This week I go to Airgas.

I moved on to another project. Luckily, I had picked up the materials while I was at Home Depot.

By way of background, I give you the sad tale of the planer sled. I bought a beautiful reconditioned Dewalt planer which turned out to be new. I made myself a planer sled so I would be able to put off buying a jointer. I ran wood through the planer on the sled. I discovered I got four inches of snipe, because it was very hard to support the outfeed well.

I went to Sawmill Creek and asked around, and I was referred to a device sold by a company called Lee Valley. It’s like a roller stand, but instead of one roller, which can steer the outfeed and make you crazy, it had a bunch of swiveled casters. They can’t steer the work. Brilliant. And I would have been thrilled to pay for one. But from the pictures, it looked like it would be impossible to get it close to the planer.

I realized I could make something similar, myself. That’s what I did today. It was a festival of testosterone, swearing, and tools. I got to use the bandsaw, table saw, impact driver, drill, and even the ROUTER!

I am just amazing. I don’t know how to bear it.

Here’s the router. This is really the first time I’ve used it since I put it in the table. I’ve screwed around with it a little, but until today I didn’t really accomplish anything. I needed a nice clean slot in this board, for a bolt to go through. I used stop blocks and plunge-routed the opening. That router plate is part of a lift, and the crank goes in the little hole with the small red dial around it. You crank to move the router up and down. I routed and cranked, moving the bit upward a tiny bit with every couple of passes. It’s amazing; when you get to the end, you can actually see the router bit and the new slot through the last layers of wood.

Here is the finished frame for the gadget. Now I can explain the idea. I wanted to put this on top of my sawhorses, and I wanted the height to be infinitely adjustable. Problem: the cross supports on the sawhorses are wide at the bottom and thin at the top. This means you can’t have a gadget with parallel sides that slides up and down on the support so you can clamp it at any height you like. The answer was to measure the angles of the support sides and make a frame that would rest flat against them. So I took the table saw and cut a slice off a two-by-four at 18 degrees. The slice will go behind the supports. The big part of the two-by-four will be part of the gadget’s frame. I’ll drill two holes in the support, and I’ll run a bolt through each slot and and the support. On the back side, I’ll have the slice, with holes for the bolts. Washers and wingnuts will go on the bolts. The slice will keep the washers flat against the wood surface.

Here are the casters. I can’t finish the gadget until I get the bolts, nuts, and washers. But it’s fairly clear that it will work. When I got the casters screwed it, I took the boards off the front, added Titebond III, and put them back together. I did that because I wanted to use three screws per board, but the slots make it likely that they would split the wood, which is softwood scrap.

The Lee Valley gadget has a metal plate on the “in” side, to steer stuff up onto the rollers. I’m sure I can fix something up that will do the same thing. They really need to make a version like the one I made. I would have bought it in a heartbeat.

The bandsaw is an amazing tool. If you can just remember to use it, it can do things that will surprise you. I’ll bet a metal bandsaw would be fantastic, if I were fabricating a lot of stuff. The plasma cutter is great for a lot of things, but it’s no bandsaw.

I can’t believe I made this thing, and that it was so easy. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? A router will probably do more than any other tool to make your woodworking look professional. If you think about it, most of the crappy details that set an amateurish piece of woodworking apart can be blamed on the lack of a router.

Let’s not talk about the welding gas, okay? We’ll just let it be our secret.

Reason not the Need

People keep asking me why I’m not building anything with my tools. Or they ask me what it is that I plan to build. They don’t get it. I’ll provide the answer. I am building a SHOP.

Here’s what I want. When I get an idea about something I want to build or do, I want to be able to walk out into the garage and see that I have the tools I need to do it. You can never really reach this point, but you can get very close to it, unless you plan to build your own space station or make your own surface-mount circuit boards or silicon chips.

This is why I don’t know what to say when people tell me I have to have a job in mind before I can choose a tool. What I have in mind isn’t a particular job. I want to be able to handle a reasonable range of jobs. “What do you plan to do with the tool?” isn’t a smart question. What you should ask is, “What do you think you might want to do over the next thirty years?”

You can reach a point where you can make a smoker, a door, a metal fence, a table, a humidor, a steel rack for your yard tools–or any number of other handy things–without leaving the house. You can fix it so you can raise your own car and put a new exhaust system on it or replace your brake pads. I don’t think that’s much to ask from life. You can blow twenty thousand dollars, total, and be set for life, except for odds and ends. Is that really too much to spend? Let’s see what a decent fishing boat costs. Haven’t I done this before?

Okay, I pulled up a boat on Boat Trader’s site. It’s a Boston Whaler. I wouldn’t have a Boston Whaler; they ride rough. The design is obsolete, and they’re very ugly. But it’s a quality boat, and the price is representative of the class. The one I’m looking at is a 2001, and it’s 26 feet long, which is really the minimum size for fishing in Miami. Asking price? About forty thousand. Let’s check the fuel capacity. It’s 200 gallons, or $500 per fill-up (unless you find a marina that doesn’t overcharge). The electronics suck. If you don’t have a fishfinder that works reliably to 2000 feet, you bought a toy. You don’t need radar here, but you need a real (i.e. $2000) GPS and a good radio and an EPIRB. Figure four thousand to put all that together. Figure, conservatively, ten thousand for decent rods and reels and tackle. And let’s not even talk about maintenance and repairs.

You also have to store the boat. If you trailer it in your yard, you’ll never use it, and you’ll have to buy a pickup and trailering stuff. The only realistic way is to find an in-water marina. At worst, a marina with racks and a forklift. That will cost you.

Compared to fishing, tools are a bargain. And when you fish, you get nothing of concrete value in return. And the skills you learn are completely worthless. You’re not going to fish in the open ocean to feed your family; there is absolutely no way to come out ahead. You can fish from shore and catch things like grunts and snook, but on the whole, you’d be better off raising chickens. But no one ever looks at a little 26-foot open fisherman and says, “You must be CRAZY, spending all that money!”

I have a project in mind right now. I have to sort through my table saw blades. I have no idea what I have. I have to make two cuts with each, to see what the kerfs look like and check the finish they leave, and then I have to mark them and make a list of their characteristics. Then I have to get them off the Rubbermaid stool where they now live. So I plan to make a steel thing I can hang on the wall, on which I can hang the blades like weights at a gym. I figure I’ll need three or four spindles on a piece of square steel tubing. I already have the tubing. I haven’t checked the size of the arbor holes on the blades, but I may be able to use my surplus electrical conduit to make spindles. It’s more than strong enough.

Imagine trying to do this in a house with no tools. Forget it. It’s a simple task which should take two hours with my limited skills, but if you don’t have a welder and a dry cut saw or some other decent cutting tool, it would be impossible. For me, it’s a pleasant two hours. For you, if you don’t have tools, it might as well be the construction of the pyramids. You can’t do it.

People keep saying, “Gee, you can buy the thing you want to make.” Sure, and I can eat at McDonald’s three times a day instead of cooking my own food. The point isn’t to get stuff, or even to save money. The point is to be able to make stuff.

If I wanted to play golf (thank God, I don’t), would you tell me I could watch golf on TV instead? Would you tell me to pay someone else to play golf for me? Of course not. And you wouldn’t tell Tiger Woods to walk to the hole and drop his ball in the cup, just because it’s faster and cheaper. The process, not the result, is the destination.

I Want Sprinkles on That

I went and looked at some milling machines today. Here is my report.

The place I went to had several Series I Bridgeports, two Wells Indexes (“Indices”?), and a Powermatic Millrite. Their other machines were of no interest.

The Millrite needed to be put together; there were bits here and there. Most of it was in place. Just about every machine there had at least one piece that needed to be reinstalled.

I think I finally understand how backlash works. I keep reading about machines having this much or that much backlash, measured in thousandths of an inch. I always wondered how they arrived at the figures. I pictured someone crawling all over the machines with a feeler gauge.

Today I tried the dials or cranks or whatever they’re called on a bunch of machines. I mean the things that make the tables move. On all but two of the machines, the handles went through pretty large arcs before the tables started moving. And there are little graduations around the handles. I assume the free movement is backlash, and the graduations are thousandths, so it’s easy to measure the backlash accurately. I should have looked to be sure, I guess. I’m sure people will be glad to correct me.

The Millrite appeared very solid. The paint was grey, and it looked like original paint, although I have seen Powermatic-green Millrites. Maybe I’m wrong. I could see no real problems with the table. Most of the machines had nicks and chips and so on. I didn’t see anything like that on the Millrite. And when I turned the handles, the table moved instantly. I lowered the quill, and it worked fine. I really don’t see any problems with it. Judging by the prices I’ve seen on Millrites, this thing is probably worth $1500. Unfortunately, they want $1950.

I was surprised to see how compact it was. I knew it would be smaller than a Bridgeport, but the difference is greater than I thought. I would say it takes up 50% more room than a 17″ drill press. It’s longer from back to front. And it’s not that tall; everything is right down where you can see it.

The Bridgeports were not so big they would not work well in my garage. The only one they had that looked like it was in good shape was a machine that had an old DRO and power feeds. Like the Millrite, it had a table that moved instantly when you turned the handles.

Here are some Millrite cellphone photos. Oddly, the metal looks better in photos than in real life, while the paint looks worse.

Here is the Bridgeport. It had chromed ways, and the scrapy marks were clearly visible. I thought this meant it was in better shape than the other mills, on which I could not see this stuff, but the guy who showed me the machines seemed to indicate that he felt the ways were worn. He said the power feeds and so on worked. The paint was horrible. It looks like someone applied house paint with a brush. One nice thing: variable speed.

They want $4750 for this thing. That is not going to work. I assume they would part with it for $4K, but that’s still pretty bad, unless I am seriously deceived by the mills I’ve seen online. I realize it has a lot of stuff on it, but that DRO appears to be Flintstone-era, and I am not very confident that it will last another month.

The mill’s serial number was 240xxx. I should look that up. I have read that some people make the mistake of checking the number on the head. I checked the number on the knee, which is the correct one.

The Millrite is really nice. It’s probably much newer, in terms of wear, than the Bridgeports. People don’t use Millrites for production, the way they do Bridgeports. But it’s small. And now that I’ve seen these things up close, I realize a Bridgeport is a viable option for me.

Of course, if I can get them to deal on the Millrite, and I can clean it up and make it beautiful, I should be able to resell it eventually for about what I’d pay. And I have to say, it looks like a sweet machine. Fits in a garage nicely, and the size makes it easy to reach everything. The pulleys are a bummer. A VFD would reduce the misery, but I’d have to shell out maybe two-fifty for a little one plus a motor.

A Wells Index would be a smart buy. I should go back and look them over more carefully. They run cheaper than Bridgeports, and they’re just as good, and the company is alive and eager to give good service. But it’s a bigger machine.

Delivery is not a problem. They have a guy who does it for 80 bucks an hour, so figure $240 with the obligatory super-slow pace of a savvy hourly worker. If he’s honest, $120.

I also looked at their Clausing lathe. They have a 12″ 1982 job that would fit beside a wall of my garage. Not very pretty, however, and I have read some unflattering things about Clausing lathes.

This was a fun trip. I have to figure out what to do now. The white Bridgeport is probably a good machine, but look what I can have in my garage for $1857 plus a grand for shipping: CLICK. Granted, it’s not a variable speed machine, and it doesn’t have a DRO, but it appears to be in much better condition, and those other things can be snapped up as deals become available.

It will be nice to have milling and drilling capability, and it will be even nicer to be able to turn things. Once I have a mill and a lathe, I should be able to consider my shop fundamentally complete. Other stuff will come later, to be sure, but I can’t think of any other big items I’ll need. I’ll be able to cut, shape and join wood and metal in enough ways to get just about any job done.

Fun sign at M&M Discount Liquors, which I saw on the way home: “OBAMA’S SECRET PLAN TO FIX ECONOMIC CRACKS / MAKE HIS NOMINEES PAY THEIR BACK TAXES.”

I Sort of Made Something

I had a magnificent day with my saws.

I took my amazing new board–which I created using a planer sled–and I turned it into a box. Sort of. It’s the worst box ever made, and I haven’t figured out how to do the top, but it is, in fact, a box.

I was hoping to use the router and the bandsaw a lot, but the table saw is a jealous mistress. It seems like it’s almost always easier to think up a table saw method than a bandsaw method, and I think I have a phobia about the router. I have never been able to make one work well.

I cut myself four box sides, and I managed to miter them with a jig consisting of a strip of scrap screwed to the miter fence. Then I used the table saw to make dadoes for the bottom of the box to fit into. After that, I hooked up the new Dynabrade orbital sander to polish up the pieces, and I glued them together using packing tape instead of clamps. This is what Doug Stowe does, and it’s genius.

Unfortunately, I had some problems. First of all, I really have to clean up my table saw top. Grime is getting on the wood. Also, my throat plate is crap. I have aligned it as well as possible, but the reality is, it’s worn out. It has to be replaced. I was cutting soft wood today, and it made the problems with the throat plate obvious. It scores wood as the wood goes over it, because the wear has made it irregular.

I also need a real splitter. The one I have works fine, but it’s a pain to take out when I use my Gripper push thing. Maybe the answer is to make myself a new throat plate from scrap MDF and install my Microjig splitter, which I have never used.

The Dynabrade is pretty cool. At first, it didn’t turn all that fast; I must have screwed the air connection up somehow. I didn’t know anything was wrong. It seemed to work okay, but it wasn’t impressive. Then I unhooked it for a minute to add machine oil, and when I hooked it up again, it took off! That thing is fierce!

I should have watched Doug Stowe’s box-making DVD again before trying to make a box, but I was just fooling around, so I didn’t bother. I’m sure it would have answered some questions for me. For example, he puts splines and miter keys in his boxes, using his table saw to cut the dadoes. So far, all the blades I’ve tried leave a kerf that has a top that isn’t flat. I don’t know how he gets around that.

Today I pulled a Festool blade out of the pile of blades that came with my saw. Seems very nice, but it didn’t give me a kerf with a flat top.

I wanted to do splines or miter keys, but cutting the dadoes was difficult for two reasons. First, the kerf problem. Second, the difficulty of putting splines in 1/4″-thick wood. I didn’t even try the table saw. I tried the bandsaw, but the blade likes to turn a little if you cut into a tall piece of wood. I keep adjusting the bearings; they seem to need more work now that I run the saw occasionally.

I can’t recall, but I am pretty sure Doug Stowe used much thicker wood when he made splines in the video.

I guess I should butch up and buy a piece of hardwood. I’ll need to make a resaw fence first.

Even though I didn’t really achieve anything, I learned a lot. Not just about technique, but about safety. It’s wonderful, having tools.

Perfect Fit

I think I’ve found the ideal lathe. Logan made a bunch of 12″ cabinet lathes back in the Sixties. A couple are on Ebay now. One is a Model 2557, and the other is a Model 2957. I think. They go 35″ between centers, and they are reasonably compact.

It looks like you have to pop for quite a bit of change to get one, but the up side is that if you get a reasonable deal, you don’t eat it too badly on resale. And we don’t make many lathes in America any more, so it’s not like they’re going to crank out new ones and saturate the market.

I’m Awesome

I made a board. Wait, it’s more exciting than it sounds. I bought a planer a while back, and I made myself a planer sled so I could use it as a face jointer. Today I put the final parts in (screws to hold some shims in place), and I tried out the planer. It works! I took a three-foot piece of scrap spruce that was 3/4″ thick, and I turned it into a three-foot piece of scrap spruce that is 1/4″ thick and very flat.

I’m so proud of it, I plan to turn it into something. Probably a box. I see no point in splurging on real wood when I can learn from crap I have lying around the garage. I have scrap coming out of my butt, and I need to get rid of it. Maybe I’ll find a way to use 3/16″ angle iron in a welded base for a 5″ box.

I love the planer, but boy, does it make shavings. For some reason the dust thing on it doesn’t want to connect to my shop-vac, so I let it fly, right out into the yard. Mulch, you know. When it was over, it looked like it had been snowing. I actually had to vacuum the yard.

I can tell I need to get some kind of outfeed support. The sawhorses work great for the table saw, but for the planer, I need something that is has less friction and can be adjusted very accurately so it’s at exactly the same height as the planer’s feed area. Rollers, I suppose.

I got like four inches of snipe, because I could not control the sled and wood on the way out of the planer. But when I took the board off the sled and flipped it and began thicknessing it, the snipe completely disappeared. I can’t find it now. Very odd. I suppose for light, short pieces of wood, the planer acts like a guide.

I still have to learn edge jointing. I bought some crap to make a jig for the table saw.

I’m going to sit down and draw up plans for a box. It will have to be small. I have 36″ by 8″ to work with, total. I don’t care. It’s a start.

Now that I see how the planer corrects short pieces of wood, I’m thinking I might be able to skip the sled sometimes.

I love this piece of wood. I keep carrying it around with me so I can fondle it.

I just talked to Great Aunt Gladys up in Frostproof. It’s her 93rd birthday. She says I should come up there and let her give me some woodworking lessons. I better do that.

This is for me:

I was Robbed

I know you’re all dying to hear a status report on my search for a lathe.

When I started looking around, a mammoth Sheldon lathe with a six-foot bed was available for $550. But some vulture got it before I could. Some miserable, evil, slimy person. Anyone who gets a good buy before I do fits that description.

Right now, I have two interesting options. One is an old South Bend Model A 9″ lathe with a bunch of tooling, for $650. It belonged to an old inventor who used it in his business. The obvious question is how hard he used it. Hopefully, his business was really bad and he rarely turned it on. The other option is a Logan Model 820 10″ lathe, which has a big pan and feet on it. It has some tooling, too.

The thing I noticed right away is that 10 is bigger than 9. This is the kind of thing my keen eye can sometimes be counted on to pick up.

I am tempted to get the Logan, because it’s twenty minutes away, and it’s bigger than the other lathe, and it has a stand. But I keep thinking about it, and I am worried that it will be too danged small.

This isn’t such a big problem with the South Bend. Unless it’s a complete bag of garbage, I can get my $650 back when I sell it. But the Logan guy wants $1100. And if that were a good price, he would have sold it by now. He has been advertising it since Christmas, at least. If I get a crappy price, I’ll feel like I have to hang onto the lathe, because the resale will be an exercise in something lathes are good at: reaming.

While either of these machines would probably make me happy, I live in horror of buying tools that are too small. And these things measure under 20″ between the centers. A lot of lathes go 36″. Maybe I would be smarter to wait for, say, an 11″ lathe with a longer bed. Otherwise, you know what will happen. The first thing I make with the lathe will be no problem, and the second one will have to be 20.1″ long, and I’ll have to kill myself, because it won’t fit on the lathe.

I can go to a dealer and get anything I want. For three times the Craigslist price. A dealer probably nailed that big Sheldon. I’ll probably see it for sale for $9000.

I guess the smart thing is to sit around until some more lathes pop up. The economy is tanking, and people are selling their business tools as well as their home-shop toys. Bargains will be easier to find in a month. President Obama and Speaker Pelosi are going to see to that.