I Get It

I have more input on Starlink Junior, my new ISP.

I put the dish up last week, and I have been doing speed tests. I put the dish in my old Dish dish mount, and then I rigged up a dubious pole to raise the dish another 8 feet.

Sometimes my download speed goes up to around 60 megs. Usually, it’s closer to 10. It has tested as low as three. The high figures are way better than anything I get from AT&T, the company from which my old connection was bought. The low figures aren’t much worse than the performance AT&T provides when things aren’t going well. AT&T doesn’t seem to like heavy rain.

Uploads with Starlink are pretty bad. I have seen 15 Mbps, but I think three is more typical.

I still think I’ll hold onto Starlink. It should improve, and the more time I spend online, the more it seems smoother and more reliable than AT&T. The old upload speeds I got were pathetic, so Starlink uploading doesn’t seem like a downgrade.

Musk needs to provide more help with locating dishes. They should send people out to look around. I have to guess where to put the dish. The phone app that detects obstructions doesn’t really work.

Should I turn my dish a little to the right or left? I don’t know. Should I put it on the other side of the house? Should I buy a 50-foot tower?

The Starlink stuff is like the monoliths in 2001. You can’t ask it questions. It just sits there and does what it wants. No explanations. No manual.

I feel like I bought an Apple product or a German car. “SHUT UP! We do the thinking for you! It’s good enough for you!”

Starlink somehow relies on cell networks to do uploads. I can’t find good information on how this works. At first, I thought maybe it was downloading straight from satellites and uploading to local cell towers, but that can’t be right, because Speedtest tells me it’s uploading to places like Gainesville and Atlanta. It appears I am sending uploads to space, and from there they go to ground stations. If this is true, then why are uploads so slow?

Is my little dish too weak to shoot a good signal up to the motherships, or are the motherships slow when they shoot my data down to the ground stations? No idea.

Speaking of German cars, my friend Mike continues to have fun with the Mercedes lemon he bought.

This thing has been going into “limp mode” for something like a year, for no discernible reason. Mercedes dealerships can’t figure it out. He has spend a lot of money on parts. Right now, he’s visiting New Hampshire, and he has no car because the wiring caught fire.

They’re telling him he may need a new wiring harness, and the cost would be $20,000. For wires. The car only cost him $27,000. He doesn’t know the whole story, because the dealership that has the car won’t get to it until Tuesday. Is it possible to get a wiring harness during Biden’s reign of inflation and shortages? No idea. What if they have to keep the car a month?

He took a trailer with him. He was going to fill it with his belongings and bring it down here. If the work takes a month, what happens to the trailer? And where is he supposed to stay?

I do not like German cars. They are as overrated as Wonder Woman and The Black Panther. They are very unreliable, working on them is a nightmare, and parts are astoundingly expensive.

I don’t know why people think the Germans are good at engineering. They’re not. They do a very good job of making things that don’t work. Making things cute and clever and pretty is only part of engineering. The primary goal is to make them practical, so German engineers are not very good, regardless of how impressive their products are when they work.

This is not new. Porsche lost the contract for the Tiger tank. Another company built a competing prototype, and Porsche’s prototype–a hybrid (seriously)–broke down and got stuck during the trials. The competitor offered to use its tank to pull the Porsche free.

Oh, yeah. There is no substitute.

Daimler-Benz made the Panzer, and it helped lose the war for the Germans because it was always in the shop. I’m not kidding. Look it up. When Panzers broke down, they were a nightmare to fix, but a tank crew could replace a Sherman engine in the field in a few hours. Shermans ran. The disparity is one reason we were able to field more tanks. People say the Panzer was better than the Sherman, but Shermans obliterated a whole lot of Panzers, as did Soviet T-34’s. Allied tanks proved better in terms of winning wars.

Incidentally, it’s not true that Shermans burned easily. It’s a myth. And the crew of a burning Sherman could escape in less than 5 seconds. To get out of a burning Panzer, you had to fill out forms, have them stamped by the local burgermeister, mail them to Berlin…well, not really, but it took a very long time, so you were just about certain to be burned to death.

The Japanese do better than the Germans. The Germans will never be able to match Toyota engineering. A Porsche can go around the Nurburgring faster, but the Toyota will go around it 23,000 times with basic maintenance, and the Porsche will be lucky to complete 5 laps.

Mike’s battery died the other day, and I helped him replace it. Guess where they put it? Under the passenger seat. You can’t fully expose the battery hole without removing the seat. Mercedes didn’t put a strap on the battery to lift it out of the hole, so there was no way to grip it. We had to cut slits in the carpet to move it. No joke.

I replaced two batteries in my big Dodge in less time.

Maybe I’ve written about the Mercedes before. Can’t recall. I really do not like German cars.

Another friend of mine bought a used Mercedes, and she liked it because it was cheap. Then it needed a trivial repair, and she couldn’t afford it. The parts cost too much.

This, incidentally, is why you don’t buy a $5000 vintage Bentley.

Or any BMW Mini Cooper.

If German cars were any good, they would hold their value, and they don’t. Mike’s car had low miles when he bought it, and his $70,000 vehicle only cost $27,000. What does that tell you? I can get most of what I paid for my diesel Dodge, and I bought it in 2009, 13 years ago. It has three times the mileage it came with. Doesn’t matter.

It’s worth a lot more than Mike’s $70,000 2014 diesel Mercedes with lower mileage. Think about that.

Musk needs to communicate with customers. Oddly, by making Starlink a product that does everything itself, he has made it necessary for customers to do things they shouldn’t have to do.

I found out about splicing the Starlink cable. It’s just standard Cat5 data cable, covered in a rubber sheath and imprisoned in Musk’s cruel proprietary connectors.

It’s really dumb. If Musk had done things right, he would have used plain old Cat5 connectors and made things easier for everyone. No, in a quest for needless control, he made his own connectors, which are probably patented so no one can sell them cheaper except the Chinese.

Because of what he did, running a cable through a wall requires a 1″ hole instead of a 1/4″ hole.

Or does it?

Being a clever person, I am not afraid to cut Musk’s cable and splice it myself. You just sever it and put your own Cat5 connectors on the cut ends. You can’t connect it to the dish or router without modifying them, but you can run it right through a 1/4″ hole, and you can add all the length you want. You can even cut into existing cables already present in your house.

Take that, Tesla Boy.

If you want to know how to splice Starlink cable, go to Youtube and find out.

I already have the things I need to do my splicing, so I’m going to cut the cable and run it through my obsolete cable TV hole.

I don’t know of any way to hardwire the router to my existing Ethernet wiring, but I’ll be looking into it. Wireless everything is inferior to hardwired everything. Wireless connections are a downgrading concession to reality. If hardwiring were always practical, no one whose data and speed were important would have any interest in wireless.

If you could put a wire on your phone, your calls would never drop, and your speeds would be incredible.

I installed my first wireless printer yesterday, which is why I posted a crabby rant about new tech products. The installation should have taken 10 minutes, but Brother turned it into a painful ordeal lasting over an hour.

Anyway, one less cable to deal with, and now I can scan things without going to my office.

Brother put a ridiculous password on my printer, and I had to use it more than once. I had to turn the printer over, put on my reading glasses, read the tiny password label, and transcribe the password to a file so I wouldn’t have to turn the printer over any more.

Here is my printer password: password. Want to hack it? Knock yourselves out. I wanted to forgo a password or use “1,” but [Big] Brother wouldn’t let me.

If you can get close enough to my house to get a printer signal, you can print whatever you want, but don’t forget that wireless range is a lot smaller than rifle or pistol range, and you will be well within Florida’s open-season-on-trespassers radius.

I can bury you in 10 minutes. I have a tractor.

It’s time to go ahead and do the splice so I can shut my upstairs window and run the Starlink cable through a hole. Then I’ll probably find out I put the dish on the wrong side of the house.

Dishing on Starlink

I feel like updating my Starlink experience.

Today my dish arrived, and as I wrote earlier, I was not as thrilled as I hoped to be when I first gave Elon Musk my deposit. The price had gone up, the promised speed had gone way down, the arrival of faster speeds had been pushed way back, and the installation turned out to be a pain.

Since then, I have fired Starlink up, and I believe I will keep it. I’m not sure yet, but it looks like Starlink Junior, the version I have, is somewhat better than my old wireless system, and it’s cheaper.

When you open the Starlink box, you get two things that matter. The dish and the router. The dish has a cord 75 feet long, and it has molded-in plugs on both ends, so you can forget about splicing it. I think. You plug your router into the wall, plug the dish into the router, and wait.

The only instructions are 4 cartoons on the packaging material, so if you think I’m oversimplifying the instructions, you are wrong. When I say “cartoons,” I mean one-panel cartoons. And there is no text to speak of.

Before you choose a location for the dish, you’re supposed to start the phone app and use it to take video of the sky above. How this is supposed to tell Starlink anything useful, I don’t know. I moved the phone around a lot while I was doing it. I can’t imagine what Starlink thought. The purpose of the exercise is to determine whether you have too many obstructions for the signal to get through.

Using the phone takes a long time, and Starlink doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to hold the phone over your head without getting tired. It also doesn’t tell you how to know when you’re done without holding the phone over your head. The camera has to point at the sky, so you have to be under the phone to read the app, and the app is what tells you you’re finished.

I stuck the dish next to the pool. I had read that it would want a desert-like location with no features other than flat horizons. Figuring that was BS, I decided to try the worst but most convenient location first. If it worked well enough by the pool, I would leave it there.

Of course, it worked poorly, so I climbed out an upstairs window, removed my Dish dish with primitive tools, and hurled it down into the yard. I stuck the Starlink dish in the pole it had occupied, with no real attachment. If a bird sits on it, it will move.

When I went inside and turned on the PC to see if I had a new network showing up, Starlink sort of took over and sent me to a page that did what the phone app was supposed to do, except for the video stuff. I learned I had a new network named “Stinky.”

Really? Is that a good joke, coming from a man named Musk?

I changed the name of the network to something like Trump-o-rama and started trying to use the web.

Since then, I have used an Internet speed test a few times, and my downloads are ranging between 8 and 55 megs. That means they’re way better than my old system when they’re fast, and they’re about the same when they’re bad.

Uploads are not quite as exciting. Sometimes they’re a lot better than they used to be, but I have gotten figures as low as 0.25 megs. Maybe I’ll only be able to upload Youtubes when the wind is blowing the right way.

We are having wonderful dry weather, but fortunately, it rained today, and I was still able to use Starlink, so there’s one question answered.

I went to Ace Hardware and got eight feet of galvanized tubing. For some reason, tubing for fences costs $30 at Home Depot and $17 at Ace. I modified it so it could be attached to my old Dish dish mount, and I’m in the process of painting it with truck bed coating. That will look marginally better than bare zinc. I plan to add 8 feet to the height of the dish, and I’ll fasten it to the pole with hose clamps.

Elon, or as I call him, Stinky, decided not to make his cables spliceable, so it looks like running them into the house will require holes as big as the plugs. I haven’t found a way to cut a cable, thread it through a small hole, and reattach it. Right now, the plan is to try to use the old Dish hole. I haven’t seen it yet because I don’t want to lie on my back on the roof in the rain, but I’m hoping it’s big enough to take Stinky’s plug.

All in all, things look promising. If upload speeds can be improved by raising the dish, I will be all set.

What Stinky has done is extremely impressive, regardless of the little issues. A lot of people around the world can now open a box, run an app, and have acceptable or possibly excellent Internet coverage in an hour or two. This is now possible in places where Internet coverage didn’t exist before Stinky. If you don’t think it’s impressive, consider all the huge corporations that have utterly failed where he has succeeded. They didn’t even see the need for his kind of system.

He’s going to murder Hughes. Their systems don’t perform as well, and getting help from the their customer service has been compared to trying to text the pope.

He should make a better effort to communicate with customers. That would be helpful.

I’m not sure about the non-spliceability of the cables. I’m checking it out. If it turns out splicing is possible, the odds I will return my dish will go down like Stinky’s estimates of my download speeds.

If You Can See Your Floor, You’re Okay

Looks like today will be a day of waiting and preparation. Waiting for my burglar alarm company to show up and give me 4G. Waiting for the wife to call after some errands. I was also supposed to be waiting for Elon Musk to show up with a package from Starlink, his rural Internet company, but it looks like he will be dropping by tomorrow. I assume he drives the trucks personally.

Non-Tesla gasoline- and diesel-powered trucks, but let’s not go there.

While I’m sitting here, I’m admiring my new Doyle precision pliers and thinking about admitting I’m a tool collector.

I have a drawer full of pliers and other hinged tools. Side cutters. Scissors. A tool for making fishing leaders with heavy mono and cable. Stuff like that.

I have two shops. Obviously, there is the big one in the detached building. I also put a bench, a table, shelves, and a fair assortment of tools in my former dining room. Who wants to walk to the big shop every time something needs fixing?

I am forcing myself to confront the fact that the dining room needs to be reclaimed. As great as it is to have a dining room full of tools, I am duplicating things more than I should, and I have difficulty deciding which tool goes in which shop. I guess I should also mention the fact that my wife will probably want a dining room.

Should I put the second-tier stuff indoors, or should I put the good stuff there because it will never rust? Should I put all the electronics stuff indoors because doing electronics indoors just feels right, or should I put it in the big shop because sometimes electronics work involves tools I don’t want to put in the house?

I have to figure out what to do with my small pliers.

Around 28 years ago, I started buying a few tools, and I assumed Craftsman and Stanley had to be wonderful because I had heard the names so often. I got myself two pairs of Stanley needle nose pliers. I got a small pair and a tiny pair.

Tool people like me are always looking for the best manufacturers. It’s hard to resist becoming a snob. I now know that Stanley wasn’t always making great tools back when I got my pliers. I have looked for better ones. But the tiny Stanleys are wonderful. The jaws meet up correctly, I have never managed to damage them, they cut whatever I want to cut, and because the jaws are very long and skinny, they will do stuff a lot of pliers won’t do.

I wanted a similar pair so I could have the same great experience in both shops. I couldn’t get old Stanleys, and I don’t trust the new ones.

I found out it’s not simple buying needle nose precision pliers. A lot of them come without cutters or jaw serrations. Smooth jaws are supposed to avoid marring work. Needle nose pliers without cutters seem inadequate to me, but once I learned they existed, I figured they had to exist for a reason, therefore I needed them.

What did I end up buying? One pair of Pro American pliers. Three pairs of Harbor Freight Doyle pliers. Two pairs of Engineer pliers from Japan. So I have 6 new pairs of small pliers now. This does not include my larger Channellock, DeWalt, Icon, and Stanley long nose pliers. It doesn’t include my water pump pliers, my Knipex adjustable pliers, my Engineer and DeWalt dikes, my non-marring Japanese pliers…

Engineer makes Vampliers which are sold in America at inflated prices. The Japanese versions are exactly the same except for labeling and colors, and they cost a lot less.

Vampliers are made to pull and turn fasteners that are hard to grip. They have weird jaws full of edges and points, and they will grab nearly anything. You may have seen them in TV commercials. They really work, but there is no point in paying the American price.

I bought Engineer needle nose plies with smooth jaws as well as long nose pliers with cutters and serrations. The long nose pliers aren’t as needly.

I decided to try the Doyle pliers because Harbor Freight now makes some really excellent tools, and many are pretty cheap. I wanted to see if Doyle products were any good.

It’s not accurate to say Harbor Freight makes them. I don’t think they make anything. At least in some cases, when you buy Harbor Freight pliers with different names on them, you’re buying things made by different companies. In a way, then, Doyle may be a completely legitimate brand, as is Quinn, their next step down.

Harbor Freight sells Icon now, and Icon is supposed to be their answer to Snap-On. I decided to buy myself two big pairs of extended pliers to see what they were like. I’m not all that impressed. They seem sturdier than Chinese pliers from Home Depot, but the metal finishing is somewhat clumsy. Snap-On gets a lot of mileage out of the appearance of its tools, so to compete with Snap-On, you should make tools with nice finishes.

The Doyle pliers are a nice surprise. The fit and finish are very nice. They seem reasonably hard. The steel doesn’t scratch easily. They work smoothly. They have springs. The cutters close correctly.

One pair has one jaw that seems a little larger than the other, as though a grinding procedure wasn’t completed as well as it could have been, but it doesn’t affect the way the pliers work.

For 12 bucks or whatever, the set seems like a real bargain. One pair of Engineer pliers runs around 17 dollars. Engineer pliers are meticulously finished, but I don’t think they will work better.

I ordered an old pair of 5″ Pro-America pliers from Ebay just to see what they were like. Pro-America is supposedly a company that has done most of its business with the government, so most people don’t see their tools often. It’s also called Kal Tool. People say their tools are very nice. I thought a tool from a company like that would be an interesting curiosity.

I have quit trying to justify my pliers and other hand tool buys. The truth is, I just like having them. People collect a lot of stupid things, so why not collect tools, which are useful? I plan to keep buying whatever seems interesting, whether I really need it or not.

I can’t figure out what to do with my electronics stuff. If I move it to the workshop, I will have to find a way to store it. I have a power source, a powered breadboard, a couple of meters, two soldering irons, a bunch of leads, a ton of components, surgical clamps, two oscilloscopes, and probably other things I can’t think of right now.

This leads to an inevitable question: do I buy a SEVENTH rolling tool chest?

I’ve been watching shop organization videos, and I learned something interesting: storing things on walls or in the open is stupid.

This is heresy in tool circles. People love putting up pegboard and hanging their tools on it. They like drawing little tool outlines to show them where to put things. They like French cleats. I don’t care. It’s stupid.

If you hang things on your wall, you end up with several problems.

1. You take up many times as much space as you would if you used boxes.
2. You kill your wall space, so kiss shelves goodbye.
3. Your stuff gets dirty and rusty because it has no protection.
4. You have to do a lot of walking to get to things.
5. You can forget about moving your tools when you want to. You can’t roll a wall around.

My shop has two great big walls and 4 smaller ones. The doors eliminate a lot of wall space. If I were to take the stuff from one box and try to put it on the walls, I would lose an entire large wall. That’s dumb. Walls are the best places for shelves.

If I used the wall, A lot of my tools would be 20 feet or more away from my main bench. That makes no sense.

It’s also dumb to put things right where you can grab them, uncovered, unless you really need to. Dust and crud will fall on them. They may get damaged when things fly around the shop. They make the shop look disorderly. If you have 10 tools you use over and over, having them out all the time is great, but the rest should be in boxes.

Boxes and shelves are the skyscrapers of workshops. They multiply what you can do with limited square footage.

Right now, I have two boxes full of my most useful tools within 5 feet of my bench. If I need a tool, I turn around, open a drawer, and take it out. No walking. No getting on a stool to reach something 8 feet up on the wall. No reaching around the chests or freestanding tools to get at things behind them.

Resist the urge to cover your walls with tools. If you own more than 20 pounds of hand tools, you will regret putting them on the wall.

I have some things on my walls, and I have some other things hanging on the fronts of shelves, but I am determined to minimize that stuff.

Here’s another helpful suggestion: use drawer organizers, but don’t buy the ones they sell in stores. They cost a lot, they take up a lot of room, they weigh a lot, and they force you to do things their way.

I found a great video about organizing wrenches. Many wrenches come with special plastic trays that have little arms that hang onto them. The trays put the wrenches an inch or so apart, and you can’t put additional spots in the trays. Bad. The video showed how you can buy solid wire and turn it into wrench organizers that will take any configuration you like. I’ll post it.

I put 17 wrenches in a wire loop organizer I made, and suddenly, a drawer that had been full of wrenches was more like 1/3 full. The wrenches were arranged by size, making them easy to find, and unlike plastic organizers, the loops didn’t force me to yank wrenches loose. They come right out.

Wire is not cheap right now, but it’s not prohibitively expensive, either, and you can save money by buying romex, stripping it, and using the individual wires. I’ve spent $30, and I don’t think I’ll need to spend more soon.

Ever wondered why tool chest drawers can hold 100 pounds each? Now you know. If you organize, you can get a lot of mass into a drawer.

Now, what about tool chest drawer liners?

This is a sore spot with me.

Tool chests have to have liners. Period. Tools slide around on metal, and they remove the paint and cause rust. Then you have dirty rusty tools in your hands all day. You need liner material that provides cushioning, wears well, doesn’t accumulate debris, and won’t eat plastic.

Yes, some tool drawer liners eat plastic. One of the most popular liner materials is a foam product that looks sort of like a mat woven from 3/16″ black rubber cords. Like many rubbery products, it’s made with one or more solvent. When you put certain types of plastic on it, the solvent or solvents dissolves the surface of the plastic and leave a picture of the pattern of the liner material.

You should be able to line a typical 26″-wide chest for a few dollars, but companies that sell liner material jack the price up. They will take a material which is sold cheaply for other purposes and multiply the price by three or 4.

I found some solutions. Some people buy cheap yoga mats and cut them up. They’re actually better than many liners. One guy uses astro turf, which works very well. Treadmill and exercise mats work.

I turned a Harbor Freight chest into a welding cart a year or two back, and then I left a drawer open, not knowing how mice think. They moved in and starting eating drawer liners. Not knowing they were in there, I closed the drawer one day, causing them to die of thirst, rot, and stink up the chest and my tools. They also used the chest as a toilet, to a copious degree.

I bought myself a new roll of Harbor Freight liner, thinking that and some serious cleaning would fix the problem. Well, it didn’t. The drawers are about 20″ deep, and Harbor Freight’s rolls of liner are 16″ wide. I was not happy to find that out.

Here’s what I learned later: Lowe’s sells Kobalt liner rolls something like 20″ wide. Perfect. And they impregnate it with Zerust, a chemical which will discourage rust for a few years. The price isn’t bad, either. I got a big roll that solved my problem for $20. Actually, I bought two rolls, thinking they weren’t as big as they were.

You could also paint the inside of your drawers with truck bed coating.

To get back to electronics, I have to come up with the answer. I can’t just dump all my things on shelves and hope for the best. Maybe one more US General chest is needed.

Speaking of shelves, I am still contemplating welding some up. I was discouraged when I found out what 1″ steel tubing costs now, but it’s not like spending $500 on a permanent major shop improvement is extravagant. A couple of days ago I blew $600 on a washing machine for a tenant, and I thought nothing of it. Why feel bad about spending on my home?

I think shelves would open up more space, making me feel more comfortable with buying another chest.

When the physical improvements are done, I may make some improvements involving data. I may make an inventory so I’ll know what I have. It sounds awful, but I could do it in two days. I have all sorts of screws and washers. I never know what’s here. Sometimes I buy things and then find out I already have them. Also, I need an inventory for insurance.

If I could go to my computer and look things up instead of walking around confused, it would be tremendous.

I’m also using a Brother label maker now. I hope to be able to stop opening and closing things so much. Just scan the labels and reach.

Today I watched an Adam Savage video about shop organization. I think his ideas are bad, because his shop is a rat’s nest. Tons of things are out in the open. He has a whole wall of movie memorabilia in illuminated IKEA cases. Why would you fill your shop with space-killing things that have little or nothing to do with tools? He has at least one rack of nerdy costumes he has made for himself. He goes to nerd conventions dressed as comic and movie characters. Costumes are not tools.

His problem is that he’s like me. He’s not really building a shop. He’s building a neat place to hang out. And he loves the tools and the shop more than he loves getting things done.

Anyway, he said something he thought was brilliant. He said that when you choose a location for something, you should pick the place you thought it was in the first place. If you want your PVC cutter, and the first place you look is the third shelf to the left of your drill press, when you finally find the PVC cutter, you should put it on that shelf. You will instinctively look for it there.

This is good advice, but it’s not that original. I’ve been doing this for years. Not that it has helped much, what with all the counterproductive things I’ve also been doing. Anyway, I’ll toss it out there as a good tip.

These are my thoughts on shop organization at the moment. I hope they age well.

And another pair of Engineer pliers is arriving Saturday.

How Much of That Cheese is Real?

This morning, I watched Youtube with breakfast. As time passes, seems like there is less and less content I like. I decided to watch Adam Savage’s channel.

Savage is the nerdy store clerk from the old Charmin commercials. He and Mr. Whipple amused America with their clever banter. You probably know him as one of the hosts of the show Mythbusters.

He has some tool skills. He has worked in special effects, and he has built various things for movies and, I would guess, TV shows.

Wikipedia says:

Savage has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, television presenter, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. He worked as a model maker on the films Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, The Mummy, The Matrix Reloaded, and Space Cowboys, among others.

I’ll go out on a limb and opine that he wrote that himself. It looks like something you would put on a resume. The language is vague, and the writer is trying to puff him up.

If you, personally, design the CGI software used in a groundbreaking project like The Abyss, you will put that in your list of accomplishments. You will say, “I designed that.” You won’t say, “I worked in the production of the special effects for The Abyss.” If you are vague about what you did, it means you didn’t do all that much. Maybe you fetched doughnuts for the people who did the real work on a movie. Maybe they sent you to Radio Shack when they needed resistors. Maybe you held things while they welded them. Savage, or some other Wikiperson, says he has “worked as an animator, graphic designer,” et cetera, but he doesn’t tell you what he did.

I don’t know why I’m inconsistent with my use of Italics. I just am.

I can write a Wikipedia and call myself a patent attorney whose work has appeared before the federal courts, the Patent and Trademark Office, and the Library of Congress. I can call myself an experienced litigator. I can say I’m a fabricator, and that I have designed and created a number of useful and somewhat complicated weldments. I can say I’m a composer. A writer. But should I really say those things?

I don’t practice law any more, and I would want to brush up before handling new cases. I have litigated, but not in a long time. I really am a fabricator, but I can barely TIG, I don’t know much about sheet metal, and I’m not very good at stick welding. I have composed a bunch of tunes, but no one has paid me for them. I got some books and articles published, but I don’t live on writing income.

I could say I taught physics in one of the world’s leading university departments, but I was a teaching assistant, not a Ph.D.

Reading people’s lists of accomplishments is like reading grocery labels. For example, “Key West lime juice” means the juice of Persian limes, not key limes, but “key lime juice” means it’s the real thing.

Persian limes are the normal limes you are familiar with. People in South Florida call them Persian limes in order to set them apart from key limes, also known as Mexican limes.

Little tip for the yankees.

People who write food labels and copy are very deceptive. Guess what “made with 100% real cheese” means. It means, “Some of the cheese is real, but the rest is fake.” The real cheese is 100% real, but less than 100% of the cheese is real.

I enjoy Savage’s videos, because he’s a tool guy, and he tells interesting stories about showbiz. He makes a lot of stuff. On the other hand, I have noticed that he does a lot of bad and mediocre work. A person who has been doing his kind of work for three decades should be better.

He does projects he calls one-day builds. One project was a brass nut and bolt. The bolt was supposed to be around 1.5″ thick, so you can imagine how big the nut was supposed to be. These objects served no purpose except to give him something to do.

He made lots of mistakes. He butchered the bolt, which should have been a simple project. He made a blank for it and held the head in his lathe’s chuck, unsupported at the tail end, and he tried to thread it using a carbide tool pushed straight in. He pushed the bolt out of the chuck several times, resulting in a lot of damage.

No real machinist, and no decent amateur, would have done these things. You make your blank. You center-drill the small end. You chuck the head and put a live center in the cavity you just drilled. This keeps the bolt from flying away when you apply pressure.

You don’t push your cutting tool straight into the work to thread it unless you know you can get away with it. You push it in at an angle so only one side of the tool is cutting. This reduces the pressure and gives a cleaner result. Carbide is a bad idea unless it’s really sharp. Steel is easy to put a good edge on.

Savage ended up with a nut and bolt, but they were not what he originally planned. He had to cut out a lot of brass in order to remove his mistakes.

He made a little cabinet for metal tooling. I guess it was around 10″ deep. It had drawers. He didn’t use drawer slides. Just grooves that slid on strips of wood. Of course, it didn’t work well, and it should have been obvious the design was bad. He ended up buying drawer slides and doing it over.

His shop is miniscule, and there isn’t much stuff in it. Maybe it’s small because it’s in San Francisco where real estate is expensive. He has a mill about like mine, the same table saw I have, a cheap Chinese lathe that looks to be a 14″ job, a hipster woodworking table which is unnecessarily pretty and clever, and a billion small tools stored in storage doodads he made. He also has a gas welding rig.

I am pretty sure my amateur shop is better than his pro shop. I have plasma, TIG, MIG, stick, a hydraulic press with an air jack, a heavy-duty finger brake, a bunch of woodworking tools…if I had to do a project with tools, I would take my shop over his without hesitation.

I considered these things today, and it made me think about impostor syndrome. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: “a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.”

Many people have impostor syndrome. On the other hand, there is Dunning-Kruger syndrome, which convinces stupid or inept people they’re much more capable than the rest of us.

I guess there are shades in between these extremes.

A lot of successful people seem closer to the Dunning-Kruger end. They create wondrous resumes they can’t really live up to. I don’t think they’re true Dunning-Kruger types, because they know they’re exaggerating, whereas a true Dunning-Kruger really believes he’s a genius.

It looks like I can do anything Savage can do, plus a bunch of things he can’t. He must be better at some things than I am, but I doubt he can do anything of which I am completely incapable. So, do I have impostor syndrome because I would never hold myself out as a real tool guru?

If I’m better than a recognized Hollywood special effects technician, maybe I’m closer to the real thing than I admit to myself.

Hollywood is an interesting place. It’s full of self-promoters. People show up there and claim they can do this and that, and they get hired whether they’re telling the truth or not.

A law school friend of mine decided she didn’t like law, so she asked my advice about a career change. She wanted to become a talent agent in Hollywood. Not long after, she showed up at the offices of Endeavor, then called the Endeavor Talent Agency. They represented lots of big names. They took her on, and she succeeded. She ended up working at Fox as some kind of executive. She has worked as a producer on 4 TV shows. She had no training for any of this.

She told me something about Hollywood. She said she heard it from other people there. They said, “No one here knows what they’re doing.” To make it there, people simply arrived and showed their willingness to take on projects. People who needed projects taken on, and who knew nothing about completing them, hired them. Eventually, things got done, and I suppose skills developed.

I guess that’s how Adam Savage got where he is.

There are lots of people on Youtube who can do things he will never be able to do. They make all sorts of stunning projects. But they’re not in Hollywood, telling people how great they are, so he has a Hollywood business and a name, and they don’t.

Some of these people develop skills and businesses extremely quickly. Over maybe 5 years, they’ll go from tiny machine tools in apartments to big shops with CNC stations. Adam Savage has not done that. He is probably not much better today than he was in 2000. I don’t think he has a gift for what he does. Just tremendous enthusiasm.

It’s all very interesting to me.

I’m not knocking him. Just assessing his real place in the food chain. I like his work, even if his projects aren’t always good. I’m also thinking about myself. I’m not great, but maybe I’m better than I think I am.

Today I have go to out and get back to work on my tractor brush fork attachment. I feel a little better about it. If Adam Savage can get Hollywood studios to pay him, I should be able to design and assemble a tractor attachment.

I See no Math

Here is my final update on Hurricane Ian: absolutely nothing happened here. A couple of buckets blew across the yard. We have had a long spell of continuous light rain, nowhere near the one-foot-plus we were supposed to get. That’s it.

Because hurricanes spin counterclockwise, a storm that passes you on the east will bring you hot, wet air at first and then cool, dry air from the north. That’s happening here now. We are set to have a glorious week of cool, dry weather. Unusually good for early October. Apart from the fresh crop of post-hurricane mosquitoes, things could not be better.

I don’t have regular TV, because I hate it. That means I am not seeing what everyone else in our TV-addicted nation is seeing. I only see little bits of it as they pop up while I look at the web. It wasn’t until last night that I started to see a lot of video about the destruction Ian did in other parts of Florida. I haven’t seen much of anything about Cuba.

Now that the storm is over for me, I am looking at stories about other places. Lee County’s sheriff is claiming hundreds of deaths. Can that really be true? In 2022, it’s not that easy for an American to die in a hurricane. The government knocks itself out providing transportation and shelters, and hurricanes generally aren’t that dangerous to begin with. The winds kill very few people. The big threat is storm surge, which can drown people who don’t evacuate. The people in Lee County knew the water was predicted to rise high enough to kill them, so it’s hard for me to believe hundreds of them chose not to move to high ground.

When you live inland, there is no such thing as storm surge, so the main danger from hurricanes doesn’t exist.

I didn’t expect anyone in the US to experience the kind of catastrophe the sheriff is talking about. I thought there might be a lot of property damage and economic loss, but I didn’t think anyone would drown. We know how to prevent that. Now I’m hearing that while I was having a pretty good time, grilling burgers and eating junk food, other people may have been drowning or waiting on rooftops for rescue boats.

Truthfully, I think it’s a big mistake to live in any hurricane-prone area. From Texas to the Carolinas, coastal people know they will get hit sooner or later. The pleasure of being near the water is not worth the unending flow of tense pre-hurricane vigils or the pain of cleaning up when storms actually hit.

I have been through Betsy, Katrina, Wilma, Rita, and Irma in one way or another, and I have also spent a bunch of weeks watching other storms that didn’t reach me. All in all, I wish I had been in Tennessee or some other nice place where people aren’t afraid of the weather.

The place where I live is about as unsafe as I can stand. We haven’t had hurricane winds since 1885, but we sometimes get tropical storm winds that cause serious inconvenience, and that’s bad enough. I would never accept a higher level of risk again. I would never live close to a coast.

My wife and I were discussing our pleasant fate today, and I had an interesting thought. In the Bible, people who knew they were in danger fasted and prayed. They repented and humbled themselves. They knew this was how to get God’s help. America is full of Christians who think they know the Bible, but virtually no one calls for repentance, prayer, and fasting when we face a threat.

I fasted and prayed because of the storm, and I came out fine. That shouldn’t surprise me. Why hasn’t every Christian done it? Many times I, myself, have failed to do it. How can we make such an obvious mistake?

Look at our teachers. They are at fault. The Catholics teach us to pray to statues, dead people who have no power, and a mere woman, and they tell us God rarely helps anyone. Cessationists tell us we have to work hard and fix our own problems because while Satan is happy to continue doing supernatural works, God has quit. Prosperity preachers teach us we get eternal security by raising our hands once in church, and they tell us God will make us rich for buying them jets. Almost nobody is teaching anything helpful, and most preachers are teaching lies that cripple us.

I don’t feel guilty about sailing through Ian without a care. I am supposed to receive blessings. It’s not something to feel guilty about. We are supposed to strive to receive and share God’s blessings. Why else would we worship Him? What would be the point? Feeling bad about being blessed makes no sense. You’re just getting what you asked for. Other people should ask, too.

Jesus paid for my help with his body and blood and kingdom. It’s terrible that so many other people had devastating outcomes, but I’m not responsible. I want to continue being blessed and protected, even if everyone else on Earth is destroyed. I pray for people and help them, and I want to see them get the best things they can, but sinking with them won’t help anyone.

Now I will get back to making my tractor attachment and making travel plans. I should be done with hurricanes for one year.

New Storm Threatens to Ruin my Fall

Tropical storm preparations continue here at the compound.

Hurricane Ian’s path has wobbled this way and that over the last couple of days. It was headed for Tampa. Then it was headed for the east side of the panhandle, where there is not much to destroy. Then it turned farther east. Now it’s headed for Tampa again. If it hits Tampa and continues on the present path, the eye will come pretty close to me.

The good thing about this, from my limited perspective, is that the winds that hit here will have to go across a tremendous amount of land first. Land kills storm winds.

Hurricanes circulate counterclockwise, so when one passes near you, you know the directions the wind will take as it goes by. If it passes on the west, as Ian is expected to, the first winds will be from the east, and they will be weakened because they will have to cross Florida twice; first from the Gulf to the east and then from the east to me. After that, there would be southern winds, also weakened, because they will have to come up the middle of the state. Finally, there would be west winds. They would have less resistance, because they would only have to cross from the west coast.

I think the big questions are 1) how wide is the storm, and 2) how strong will it be, generally, when it makes its closest approach to me.

In 2017, Irma spent a lot of time over land before it came near me, but it was very strong when it came ashore, at over 140 mph. It had a hurricane-force wind swath about as wide as Florida until it was about 100 miles south of me, and the tropical-storm-force field was over 5 times the width of the state even after it passed me.

Ian (which Fox is calling a “monster”) looks like it will be much smaller. When Irma was at the stage where Ian is now, it was much, much wider. If Ian stays smaller, the tropical-storm-force band will be narrower and will also have speeds that drop off faster with distance from the eye.

Right now, Tampa’s forecast calls for 80 mph sustained winds, tops, making Ian a Category 1 storm when it hits the coast. That isn’t consistent with other claims I’ve seen. Some news sources say it will be a Category 4. It’s hard to know who is telling the truth because journalists and meteorologists lie about hurricanes so much.

The National Hurricane Center is fairly neutral, so I’m checking their site. They say Ian will DECREASE in intensity after it hits Cuba, so it appears the Cat 4 story is just another media lie. Here’s what they say:

The NHC intensity forecast calls for Ian to become a major hurricane before it reaches western Cuba early Tuesday. It is then forecast to reach its peak intensity over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico in 36 h. After that, southwesterly shear in association with a deep-layer trough over the eastern U.S. is forecast to significantly increase over the hurricane on Wednesday and Thursday, which will likely disrupt the vertical structure and import drier air into its circulation.

They think it will hit land with winds of about 85 mph, and the center of the probability cone is right around Tarpon Springs, about 15 miles north of Tampa.

If this is more or less what happens, things shouldn’t be too bad here. It sounds much better than what the professional liars are saying. I don’t want a Category 4 storm landing 100 miles away.

Anyway, I have propane, a big cooler, water, and as of this afternoon, a generator that sort of works. I should be able to have hot food and refrigeration for two or three days.

I have not finished my tractor fork project. I don’t know if I will get it done by the time the storm comes. I ordered myself a set of clamp-on forks just in case. I need them anyway because they will turn my tractor in to a fairly decent forklift. Brush forks can sometimes be used for forklift duty, but sometimes they won’t fit whatever you’re trying to lift.

Hope I don’t end up bathing in the pool again. Prayers for me and the other people in the cone would be appreciated.

Fabrication and Revelation

It’s hard to believe how far I’ve come. I remember joking about getting a Bridgeport mill. I thought it was a good example of a tool no normal man would have in his shop. Now I have a mill, three lathes, an arbor press, a plasma cutter, a hydraulic press, and three welding machines. I have two belt grinders and about 5 angle grinders, and I’m building my own tractor fork attachment from old parts and steel tubing.

Today was an intimidating day. I had to take two 56″ pieces of 2″ square tubing with 1/4″ walls and turn them into a frame to hold tractor forks. Then I had to weld them to plates I modified to attach them to my tractor.

I don’t know what a foot of 1/4″-wall tubing weighs, but my guess is around 4 pounds. Okay, the web says 5.41 pounds. It’s a little unpleasant moving a 56″ piece around on a welding table. When you weld it to another piece plus 4 pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls amounting to about 56″, it gets heavy. Then when you attach the whole business to two 3/8″ plates with areas of over a square foot, you can forget about manipulating it safely without machinery.

I had to rip the scale and rust off all the tubing, weld it into a frame without too much distortion, and then add the plates. It was quite a job.

When I got the frame put together, I had to figure out how to hold it in place against the mounting plates while I tacked it on. The answer, as it so often is: a Harbor Freight hydraulic cart. I put the plates on the tractor, put the frame on the cart, lifted it up to the plates, shimmed it so it was in the right place, and clamped everything together. Then I added some very big tacks and moved the tractor into the shop so I could finish welding.

I think things went well. Two of the tacks popped, but I clamped the frame back down as if nothing had happened, and I finished my beads.

Tomorrow I can add more weld to make this thing indestructible. Then I have to get started, cutting up the old fork tines and adapting them to this frame.

How will I hold everything in place while I weld? Beats me. If you had asked me yesterday how I would have done what I did today, I would have had no idea. Ideas will come. God will inspire me.

I used to see ads for welding tables that held half a ton or more. I wondered what kind of nut would need a table like that. Now I am that nut. A bigger table would have been a big help today.

I have been looking at tables online. I am positive I want to stick with fixturing tables. Solid tables require you to weld things to them in order to make them work, and that would drive me crazy. All of my work would have funny places where I had ground off tacks.

Fixturing is great. A fixturing table has dozens or hundreds of holes in it, and you use them to hold clamps that hold your work in place while you weld. This ensures that the work will not warp.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. No it doesn’t. You may think it will when you buy your table, but it won’t. Only two things prevent warping: skill and huge steel. The thicker steel is, the harder it is to warp it. If your steel isn’t all that thick, you have to develop the skill to lay welds down in a way that minimizes distortion.

Fixturing is still helpful, though. You really need to have your work held in place while you work.

If my table were stronger, I could put the fork attachment on it and weld the tines on. The manufacturer, Klutch, claims it will hold 600 pounds, but I am suspicious, and I don’t want to learn they were fudging by having the attachment fall on me after it passes 200 pounds. I put casters on the table, and they will supposedly hold 1600 pounds among the 4 of them. All I can say about that is this: China. That’s the home country of the company that made the 1600-pound claim. Maybe it’s true, and maybe it ain’t.

A company called Langmuir has come up with a table it calls Arcflat. It’s actually a system of cast iron boxes with fixturing holes. You can use one box as a table, or you can buy several boxes and clamp them together. They are supposed to be very precise and very tough, and the whole setup for three feet by four feet would run about $2000, tax included.

That’s a lot. On the other hand, what would a dubious-quality set of pallet forks cost me? Well over a grand. A grapple would run over three grand. And I think grapples are stupid. I’ve seen them in videos, and I have never seen one do anything my forks can’t do. I’ve seen my forks do many things a grapple can’t do.

Pallet forks are the only quick-attach forks available online, they are vastly inferior to the forks I already have when it comes to moving trees and brush, and they cost a fortune. By adapting my old forks, which I would never be able to sell for a decent price, I can get a dynamite setup for under $300. That means my little table, which cost $200 with tax, has paid for itself and then some. It also helped me fix my subsoiler, so there’s maybe another $150 saved. It helped me make a bunch of mobile tool bases, so I probably saved a couple of thousand there.

I would have been smart to buy a big table to begin with. But I didn’t think I had room, I was cheap, and I didn’t think I’d build big projects.

Tomorrow will be the point of no return. I will start chopping my old forks up for repurposing. I’m sure it will work out, because when it comes to fabrication, there is always a way to fix things.

I had a wonderful dream last night. Or maybe night before last. I was in my dad’s house, and my parents were there. My dad was suffering from dementia, as he did in life. He was standing at the kitchen sink, puttering around with things. Sometimes people with dementia look for things to do in order to give themselves purpose.

He picked up some kind of utensil which he thought was supposed to be covered. It was not. He said, “Somebody didn’t cover this. That’s okay. Still friends.”

He was forgiving someone. Covering for them. It was wonderful to hear. The tone of his voice was so sweet. Like it didn’t even occur to him to be angry. “Still friends.” No big deal. Everyone makes mistakes.

It made me think about a problem I’ve had since he died. I have tended to remember him as he was when he was young. He was extremely hard on people, and he was not the kind of person who would forgive quickly. Even after you apologized and made things right, he would keep hammering. In his last months, he changed completely. He was gentle. He loved prayer. Whenever I showed up to see him, he said, “Here comes my beautiful son.” He was like the Dad I saw in my dream.

Since his death, I have tried to remember him as he was when he died, but old habits have crept in and caused me to remember the old Dad who died months before the new one. The dream has helped me to remember the new Dad and forget the old Dad, just as God has.

It made me think about love and what a privilege it is to be a gentle and benevolent person. Love is the reason the universe was created. It’s not an incidental benefit. I have to remember to take pleasure in being like my dad was in my dream. The modern world taught me to be cynical and hard. I changed myself in order to feel safe. That was a mistake.

We are in a lot of danger now. An apocalyptic spirit of murder has been released, and we are nastier to each other than ever. This is especially true of the Internet. It’s a snake pit. Social media sites, in particular, are disgusting and perilous.

The dream was life-changing. From now on, when I feel angry about something someone has done, I’ll just say, “Still friends,” and let it go.

Hope I can get my forks working before the storm. It looks like we’ll miss the real wind, but some trees could still come down, so I want to be ready before the power goes out and I have to use the generator to weld things.

Tractor Forks Gradually Materializing

Looks like my tractor brush fork attachment may be usable by the time Hurricane Ian either gets here or misses us.

When I converted my tractor bucket to quick attachment, I bought a heavy mounting plate and cut the ends off for the bucket. I welded them to the bucket, and this left me with a big piece that could also be turned into a mount with some modification. I decided to use it to hold brush forks on. I have been cutting and welding, and now I have two plates which should be suitable for attachment to a heavy frame which will hold 4 brush fork tines.

I had to make these plates wider, and I also had to add metal to the bottoms. Before I did this, it would have been hard to attach a frame in a way that put it at least as low as the bottom edges of the plates.

Brush forks need to slide freely on the ground, especially if you want to use them as forklifts occasionally. You can’t have something protruding down behind them. In order to have the tines flat on the ground and have ample steel to weld the tines to, I needed to have the frame on the ground, too.

It’s a complicated problem, and my explanation probably doesn’t make it very clear. If I hadn’t added the additional steel, the mount plates would have extended 2.5″ down below the rear ends of the tines. The tines would not have slid easily on the ground, and the bottoms of the mount plates would have banged into things a lot.

It took me a couple of hours yesterday to cut out the steel pieces to add to the plates. I had to use the mill as well as a big angle grinder with a cutoff wheel. Today it took me another 90 minutes or so to weld everything together and grind off the lumps. It was not easy to weld these things and make them pretty because of their shapes, so I settled for ugly strong welds followed by a lot of grinding.

Tomorrow’s work should go by fast. I have two 56″ pieces of 2″ by 2″ tubing with 1/4″ walls, and I have 4 shorter pieces of 2″ by 3″ tubing with 3/16″ walls. I will turn all this into a sort of ladder structure which will be my attachment’s frame. The long pieces will run horizontally, and the short pieces will be welded between them at intervals of around 15″. I should be able to accomplish this in an hour or so. Then I have to weld the frame to the mounting plates.

I figure I should be done in three hours or less.

After all this the real fun starts. I have to cut the rear portions off my old forks so they can be welded to the frame. I have to weld them in place. This will give me 4 pieces of tubular steel around a foot long. I will have to cut these so they can be used as struts to keep the tines from bending when horizontal loads are applied to the tips. I figure one strut per tine will do it.

I think I may be able to get this work done in a day. Then it will take me another day to weld it all together. This will put me in position to use the forks if trees come down this week. If they don’t come down, I’ll have time to paint everything.

Once this project is done, I’ll have a quick-attach tractor and quick-attach forks. I’ll be this area’s king of cheap quick-attach tractor guys.

By using bits of the old mounting plate, I saved around $140. The whole project will cost me $198 for steel, plus whatever paint and consumables cost. And maybe 4 bolts. This estimate is based on the assumption that this will work. If I ruin my old forks and can’t make good new ones, I’ll be spending a lot correcting the problem.

I hope this thing will be as strong as I need it to be. I believe it will be. People tend to overbuild weldments and underestimate what they can take, and this generalization applies to me. If I’m only a little worried, it probably means the attachment will be considerably stronger than it has to be.

I am amazed how nice the shop is now. I get things done fast. I know where most things are. I don’t have to search much. Thank you, God, for making this dream come true.

Let’s Let Those Who Hate us Guard our Freedoms

A certain number of leftists are losing their minds because the Fifth Circuit upheld a law preventing big social media companies from performing certain types of censorship.

I’ll show you Wikipedia’s description of the law. A footnote is omitted, but you can find it on Wikipedia.

The law applies to social media companies with “more than 50 million active users” in the U.S. each month, that operate in Texas. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts with warnings or impeding “the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.” The law also has a “prohibition on discriminating against Texans based on their geographic location”.

Here is what Governor Abbott’s site says:

House Bill 20 prevents social media companies with more than 50 million monthly users banning users simply based on their political viewpoints. The law also requires several consumer protection disclosures and processes related to content management on the social media sites to which the bill applies. These sites must disclose their content management and moderation policies and implement a complaint and appeals process for content they remove, providing a reason for the removal and a review of their decision. They also must review and remove illegal content within 48 hours. House Bill 20 also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

The law itself is very long and boring. A lot of it is taken up with the wonderful, satisfying requirements that companies disclose just about everything they do as censors and that they provide real mechanisms for complaining and getting relief. Here is the money part which leftists hate:

Sec. 143A.002. CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media
platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s
ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

The state’s power to regulate Facebook, Twitter, et alia comes from the fact that social media companies are “common carriers.” This phrase is what lawyers call a “term of art,” which means it has a specific legal meaning which is not necessarily its plain meaning as laymen might use it. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explains this in its decision:

[T]he common carrier doctrine is a body of common law dating back long before our Founding. It vests States with the power to impose nondiscrimination obligations on communication and transportation providers that hold themselves out to serve all members of the public without individualized bargaining.

If you sell handmade pottery at a table on the sidewalk, you can discriminate against buyers for all sorts of silly reasons, because no one cares about your pottery or has concerns that anyone will be substantially hindered in their enjoyment of privileges common to all of us if they can’t buy it. On the other hand, if you open a motel on an interstate highway, you are appealing to a big customer base and offering an essential service, so you can’t turn customers away because they’re ugly or you suspect they don’t like the Beatles.

I am a retired lawyer and not a great legal scholar, but the common carrier argument makes complete sense to me. If thousands of socialists are allowed to buy airline tickets to go to a riot political event, and the airlines refuse to sell tickets to conservatives, it’s pretty clear that it’s a huge problem even though 1) the airlines are not government entities and, 2) it’s hard to find a constitutional problem with banning conservatives. Similarly, if the social giants work hard to amplify the voices of far-left nuts and annihilate or diminish the voices of conservatives, which they do every second of every day, in order to function as a sort of shadow government, it’s also a huge problem.

I have been muzzled so often, I now expect it, and I don’t think a lot about it. For example, Yahoo News keeps putting up lewd pictures of old, fat, and/or unattractive women, and I have said things like, “Why is Yahoo News trying to make men find unattractive women attractive? It doesn’t work that way. Old women and homely women will always be less attractive. Young women will always be less attractive than old ones.” These comments always got deleted. I remember saying simply, “Gross,” in response to a supposedly provocative story about poor old Madonna or the very elderly Jane Fonda, and Yahoo deleted me.

I think the kids at Yahoo seriously believe 1) the natural sexual inclinations of men are somehow an important problem, perhaps caused by greenhouse gases, and 2) these inclinations can be changed by Yahoo News stories. This is how insane leftists have become. They should run stories telling us liver tastes better than strawberry ice cream.

Old women are liver. Young women are strawberry ice cream. That’s just how it works. Being tall is better than being short. Dumb people are worse off than smart people. Having hair is better than being bald. Some things can’t be changed.

Were my comments hateful or dangerous? No. Were they subject to government censorship based on First Amendment case law? No. Were they libelous? No. They weren’t even untrue. They were just expressions of opinions held by perhaps 95% of normal males.

My friend Mike can’t share funny or critical content about Joe Biden and the hopeless dunce Kamala Harris. Facebook either deletes it or restricts republication so no one or virtually no one sees it. He’s not putting up deepfake videos of the Bidens being shot to death. He’s not making false claims. He’s just putting up critical posts. What happens when people post critical things about Trump and DeSantis? They go live and many people see them.

Youtube is somewhat different. It appears you can post a lot of controversial material there, and they will leave it up. But will they leave it up if a lot of people see it? Probably not. Will they recommend it to people the way they recommend things they approve of? I wonder.

Youtube takes down popular Christians who criticize the abomination of sodomy. That much is certain.

I think the complaint-procedure requirements will cause the giants more agony than anything else. They will have to hire a lot more employees, and they will have to hire a lot of lawyers. They will have to provide explanations for what they do, and if the Texas AG doesn’t like them, they will have to defend themselves in court.

Of course, unlike the faceless censors of Big Tech, the AG is accountable. Wonder if leftist see the irony. They’re suing him, but they don’t want users to have the power sue them. Why? Because they’re right! They’re leftists! This has already been decided.

As it stands now in most of the country, nameless giant employees with no accountability whatsoever can delete or shadowban all they like. They are accountable to no one. They can censor people for laughs. They can censor their ex-boyfriends or teachers who gave them bad grades.

There is no way to complain or get relief unless you have a gigantic number of followers, and even then, your groveling may not help you. Somehow, leftists think that’s okay and that it doesn’t cause abuse. Now the cockroaches will have to operate in the sunlight, and that won’t be pleasant for them. It’s not their natural environment.

They also have a problem because they will have to know which posters live in Texas. And people in Texas will be able to post just about anything they want, and it will be seen by other users all over the world. The law is from Texas, but it allows Texans to speak to people in every single nation where the giants operate.

Smart pundits will establish businesses in Texas. What will Facebook do then?

The remedies aren’t very good. I don’t see anything about damages for users or fines. That should be changed.

The giants and their supporters are complaining, saying the law opens the doors to things like Holocaust denial and racist propaganda. Know what I say? Good.

Right now, I can go to Amazon and buy books by Holocaust deniers who openly say they are denying the Holocaust. I can buy racist, lie-filled books written by leftists who hate whites. I can buy tons of sexist, lie-filled leftist screeds aimed at males. I can buy Mein Kampf. So what?

If the book and periodical industry is full of dishonest and inflammatory material, why shouldn’t the giants publish the same kind of things? Historically, the American remedy for disinformation and misinformation has been correct information. You don’t censor. You supplement. You counter. Do I really have to explain this in America?

Mein Kampf has probably been in print continuously since it was written around a century ago. It hasn’t led to a global Fourth Reich. Holocaust deniers have been in business since before the Holocaust ended. Nuts have published books claiming the CIA knocked down the World Trade Center. Very few people take these authors seriously. On the other hand, the danger of letting elite, untouchable, hidden leftists decide what we can say and read is very, very obvious.

Let’s go ahead and let racists post on Facebook. Let’s let people say what they want about coronavirus. Then those of us who disagree can have their say. That’s how we’ve always done things. It works. Have we forgotten Skokie?

The idea that the giants are private companies that should be left alone is ludicrous. Had they existed in the 1770’s, the Constitution would have language pretty much like that in the Texas law. In 2022, free speech that can’t be seen on the Internet has as much impact as talking to yourself at the bottom of a mineshaft. The Founding Fathers (not “non-birthing persons”) didn’t simply intend to allow us to speak; the Germans had that privilege under Hitler. They could go into their basements alone and say what they wanted. The Founding Fathers intended to make sure our speech could have an impact on other people; that it would reach them.

It’s amazing that this has to be explained, but Americans have become idiots. Mike Judge saw the future. Well, he saw the stupidity and coarseness, but he didn’t anticipate the censorship.

Political discrimination is actually much more harmful than racial or sexual discrimination, but somehow people don’t understand this.

We have laws that allow us to break up monopolies because private companies can have too much power. Leftists argue that inheritance taxes are important because they prevent oligarchs from getting too strong. Somehow, though, half of our population thinks it’s okay to have our speech censored by pimply pierced kids who think a man with a fake vagina is a woman.

I don’t know what will happen to laws like the one in Texas in the future. I believe they will be repealed and struck down, however, because Satan is very angry these days because his time is short. He really needs to control what we see and hear, and he controls the vast majority of Americans.

Look Where I Spend my Afternoons

When my wife and I pray, we always ask that God turn our homes into places of abundance, peace, and order. He is certainly doing that here at our house in Florida.

My workshop is a wonder to behold. Four months ago, you couldn’t walk across it without turning sideways, making a lot of turns, and stepping over things. I didn’t know where many things were. There were oak leaves all over the floor, along with metal filings.

I kept my tractors and my utility cart outdoors because I didn’t think I had room for them. I got an estimate for a second shop because of this.

Now you can walk through the shop. The filings are gone. The leaves and other debris are gone except for certain areas that are not easy to access. My belt grinders are on a gorgeous 46″ tool chest with a beautiful attachment that holds tooling arms and a VFD enclosure. My mini lathe is on another tool chest, and all of my mini lathe paraphernalia are in it.

The tractors and cart are in the shop, and there is still room to work.

On top of all these things, I replaced the carb in my big chainsaw and got a new part to fix the oil pump. The small saw is running correctly, I cleaned out the carb on the utility cart, I installed a new choke cable on the cart, and I pressure-washed the cart so I could work on it without getting filthy.

I have all the steel I need ($198) to turn my old chain-on brush forks into a quick attachment. My tractor is almost completely reassembled, and I fixed the pedal so it reverses at full speed instead of crawling.

I took some of the drawers out of my old Craftsman tool chest and fixed them so they stay closed again. That box is very high quality, and it’s stainless, so I’m glad it works again. I have been cleaning the drawers out and organizing them.

My workbench was buried in random junk. It’s all gone now. There are a few things I leave on it, but I can use it again. I took mineral spirits and turpentine and cleaned it so using it doesn’t make me filthy any more.

The old foam cart I that used to hold my belt grinders is now cleaned up and sitting next to the mill where I can keep my rotary table on it and use it to hold things while I machine.

I put a long drain hose on the big compressor, and I put a weight on the end of it. Now I don’t have to crawl to open the valve, and the hose can’t whip around and hit things.

My arbor press, hydraulic press, planishing hammer, dry saw, and metal band saw are all in one corner now, and that corner has its own air drop with three quick connectors so the hammer and hydraulic press can both be connected at once.

It’s beautiful. And the weather has changed, so now I can use the shop. It still hits 90 in the daytime, but it takes a lot longer to get there, it’s dryer than it was a week or so ago, and it cools off in the afternoon.

I find myself sitting in the shop at times when I would have been in the house in the past. My dream is to live in my shop and sleep in my house, and it seems to be coming true.

Here are photos from a week or two back. The shop looks even better now.

With all this new space, I’m tempted to get a bigger welding table. I’m crazy about my three-foot-long Northern Tool table, which was a tremendous bargain, but I’m about to start work on a 5-foot-long project which will probably weigh 250 pounds when the main weldment is done. I don’t think I can rationalize a table that long, but three feet by four feet would actually make sense.

I may put a new engine in the utility cart. The original engine is a 350cc Subaru Robin, and while it’s a very good engine, Subaru has abandoned it. New parts are hard to come by. A dubious Chinese rebuild kit costs about $400, and a rebuilt engine is over $600, not including the cost of sending my old engine to the rebuilders in trade. My engine smokes, and I’m not looking forward to the day when it poops out for good and I can’t find parts.

I found new surplus Subaru engines in a different configuration for $355, shipping included. Yes, they will be orphans too, but presumably, because they are newer, Subaru will provide parts for them a little longer. I can get an engine and a rebuild kit right now and save the kit until I need it. If Subaru runs off on the new engine, I will still be able to keep it going.

Honda makes nice engines, too, but I believe they need a lot of parts to make them work in carts.

I can get Harbor Freight Predator engines, but I think they would require a lot of fabrication or the purchase of an expensive installation kit. After all was said and done, I’d have a questionable Chinese engine instead of something made by a top Japanese manufacturer.

Some people put big Predators in carts and make them do wheelies. I think I can live without that kind of performance.

My goal is just to avoid buying a new cart. They are incredibly expensive for what you get, which is nearly nothing. A crummy little engine, a simple steel box, and a couple of axles. My cart is extremely useful, so I need to have it running, and I don’t want to drop over $10,000 on a new one.

It’s amazing how much carts cost when you compare them to tractors. A tractor will last 40 years and do all sorts of amazing things, it will have a wonderful diesel and hydraulics, it will have a PTO, and it will be extremely sturdy, and tractors aren’t that expensive. A cart, which is a flimsy piece of junk by comparison, will struggle to haul 700 pounds. And it will cost nearly half as much as the tractor.

Rhodah and I pray for things that are obviously important. We intercede for people who have problems. We always ask God to help them get right with him, because handouts without personal improvement are a waste of time. We ask God to help us to be improved. I think we know what’s important, and a big shop full of tools is not high on the list, but it’s still very pleasing to have him come through with regard to things that aren’t necessities.

Kubota Resurrected

The Mach V is running again. I got the tractor put back together. Nearly.

What a rotten experience this has been. I installed a quick attach adaptor without help, and then I did a lot of welding and cutting on the bucket so it would fit. I felt invincible. Then my steering blew out. Then I found out removing the cylinder for repacking was major surgery. Then I got the silly thing out and got it fixed, and when I put it back in, I cracked the engine’s front cover, resulting in over $2000 in repair costs plus months of life with no tractor.

Now I’m back where I hoped to be a couple of months ago. I thought I would begin working on a new set of quick attach brush forks back then, but I found myself plunged into the horror of cascading parts failures and extremely slow repairs.

Things are going incredibly well now that I have an organized and roomy shop. The weather is terrible; hot and humid with intermittent torrential rain. Because I can get the tractor into the shop, I was able to fix it anyway, in relative comfort.

You wouldn’t believe how fast work goes when you have 6 tool chests and you know what’s in every drawer. I think I got a lot less exercise than I usually do in the shop, because instead of walking around for hours looking for things, I went straight to the chests and got what I wanted.

This morning, I had a tractor with no sheet metal forward of the dash, no battery, no radiator, a gallon of dirty oil, and a two-gallon hydraulic fluid shortage. By around 5:30 p.m., everything was fixed but the sheet metal. No point in buttoning a project up until you see if it works.

When I fired the tractor up, it ran fine. After giving it time to circulate the hydraulic fluid, I used the steering and the loader, and everything worked. My bucket was lying in the driveway where it had been for a couple of days, and I was able to reattach it.

Tomorrow I should be able to get the sheet metal on, and then I’ll order a few screws to replace the ones a battery spill ruined before my time.

I plan to make the battery area better than Kubota did. I’m putting the battery in a plastic tray to catch leaks. I wire-wheeled the bar that goes across the top of the battery to hold it down, and after minimizing the rust, I painted it with a special rust-blocking paint. I put anti-seize on all the screws near the battery so they would’t corrode again.

The original battery tray is a pitted mess, so I replaced it, and I am not spending $60 on a third one. I am determined to keep the acid where it belongs.

I was going to replace the hydraulic fluid, but it seemed like a stupid idea, because I wasn’t sure the tractor was okay. I thought I should run it first. While I was thinking about this, I realized I needed two filters, not the one filter I originally thought I needed, so I didn’t even have the option of replacing the fluid.

I decided to take my two-gallon jug of Tractor Supply fluid, which many people say is bad for Kubotas, and top off the system to get everything running. I think it was a good move. I can’t say whether Tractor Supply fluid is really harmful, but it won’t hurt anything if I use a little to keep the tractor working while I check it out and wait for a second filter.

A fluid change for this machine is pretty cheap. Only around $500, depending on which fluid and filters you use. Chicken feed.

Glad I won’t have to do it again for 200 hours.

I can see why a lot of people never change their hydraulic fluid. If you use a machine for work, you could put in a thousand or more hours per year, so $2500 per year for a compact Kubota and much more for something like a backhoe.

I’m not thrilled with the dealership that fixed the tractor. It came back with an empty tank, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t empty when I sent it. They took a very long time to fix it, and they charged me for things that were not mentioned in the estimate. Could be worse, though. A local diesel place charged him almost $100 for a small hose Mercedes sells for $20, and then they charged him over $14 for hazardous waste disposal. Man, that hose must have been dangerous.

I had a fantastic day working on the tractor, but the joy is blunted by the knowledge that I can’t use it for anything until I make brush forks. The old ones are awful, and they don’t fit the quick attach adaptor. I have to get a new plate that fits the adaptor, and then I have to cut it up and weld the old forks to it. Another couple of hundred dollars. On the plus side, I’ll be doing it myself instead of relying on people who keep telling me it will be done by the end of the week. Every week.

One thing I hated about my old forks was that they moved around all the time. They could not be made to stay rigid, so impacts from things I hit turned them this way and that, and I had to get off the tractor over and over to line them back up. Now that I want to make a new attachment with forks, I’m concerned that rigid forks will send all that torque back to the bucket and cause problems with the hydraulic cylinders.

I guess that won’t happen. The bucket itself has hit a lot of things, and the cylinders are fine. I suppose I could rig up shear pins, but it’s probably unnecessary.

I looked into buying steel for new shop shelves. The quote was $350. That’s around $150 more than I hoped, but even though steel prices are dropping, steel is a lot higher than it used to be. Perhaps that will change now that the recession is picking up momentum. Once China’s real estate collapse finally breaks through the measures the CCP has taken to hide it, steel should be very cheap indeed. As should copper.

Seems like God is making things easier and easier for me. Things I couldn’t do before get done. Hope it continues and increases.

When China Fails, Cambodia Comes Through

Once again, Harbor Freight’s army of Chinese factory workers has come to my rescue. Or has it?

Some years back, I decided to turn a mini lathe into a CNC lathe. I bought a set of plans and went to work, and I got it to work, sort of.

I highly recommend not doing what I did. The plans I bought said to use a long piece of a peculiar type of threaded rod instead of a ball screw, and I ended up with a great deal of backlash. They say you can program it out, but I moved on to other things before I did that. I have considered putting a ball screw in it, but I haven’t done it.

It is possible to make one of these project lathes work, but it may not be worth the effort once you get done. Depends on what you want to do. Lathes are inferior to mills, regardless of what most hobby machinists believe, and this is the reason why CNC mills are much, much more popular than lathes. If you absolutely have to make your own CNC machine, it should be a mill.

Anyway, I brought the lathe up here from Miami either 5 years ago or 3 years ago, and I plopped it on the same Black & Decker Workmate it occupied in Miami. And as it did in Miami, it collected dust and sat in the way.

I considered building a wheeled cart for the lathe, but I never did it. I also considered selling it, but it seems like I always have a hard time drawing people who will pay reasonable prices for things. And I kept thinking the lathe might be worth keeping if I put a good screw in it and learned how to program it better.

Okay, I hate selling tools. There. Now I’m being honest. Happy?

I’m glad I didn’t build a cart, because I just put a new acquisition under it. I bought me a FOURTH Harbor Freight tool chest.

My first two chests are the small US General kind, and they’re Taiwanese. They are holding up my welders now while sitting on custom welded bases I made. The third chest is a bigger US General. It’s Chinese, even though it looks like it was made in the same factory as the other ones. Only the wheels are different. The one I bought today turned out to be from Cambodia, of all places.

I didn’t know the Cambodians made anything. Harbor Freight is certainly playing the field these days. I wonder if the Chinese know they sell Taiwanese products.

The line my new chest belongs to is called Yukon, and it’s supposed to be one tier lower than US General, which produces very, very good chests at excellent prices. I looked the new one over, and my verdict is that there is very little difference in quality, if any. I would say the sheet metal is slightly wavier in places, and the chest is only 18″ deep, whereas the US Generals are 22″ deep.

I wanted a chest that took up less room and consumed less cash than US General, so Yukon’s chest fit the bill perfectly.

The nice thing about Yukon chests is that they have solid hardwood tops, which US General doesn’t provide. It’s easy to screw stuff to hardwood, it’s more ridgid, and it’s easier to replace than steel.

The neat thing about this story is that I used another Harbor Freight tool to get the chest out of my car. Ordinarily, I would have drafted my friend Mike, but he’s out of town.

The employees at my local store assumed doubtful expressions when I told them I had an SUV with no trailer outside, but I had measured the car, so I thought I had a good chance. By way of encouragement, I told them they could just refund the money and take it back if it wouldn’t fit. That didn’t seem to excite them much.

Anyway, the Harbor Freight guy and I shoved the chest into my car, and when I got home, I removed it by pushing it onto my Harbor Freight Central Machinery hydraulic cart. This thing will lift 500 pounds from about 9″ from the ground to maybe 30″.

Everyone needs one of these. Or the bigger one, which lifts 1000 pounds. They are unbelievably handy. And they can be modified. You can put a big table top on one and use it for a workbench. You can attach ramps to one and push or drive mowers and so on onto it. I have repaired and installed wall ovens singlehandedly with one.

I got one end of the chest on the cart, and then I put a $17 Gorilla collapsible aluminum bench behind my bumper. I got the box out so one end was on the cart and the other was on the bench. Then I managed to lower one end onto the floor by myself. The box weighed about 170 pounds according to Harbor Freight’s site, so handling one end was not impossible.

Putting the casters on a heavy tool chest by yourself is an interesting experience, but I came up with tactics that worked, and I didn’t put a scratch or dent on anything.

Getting the lathe off the Workmate was a joy. I didn’t enjoy lifting it, because with the stepper motors, it probably weighs over 100 pounds, but I was glad to put it onto a wheeled platform so I could move it around instead of killing workshop space permanently with it. Also, a lot of junk and crud had accumulated in its part of the shop, and I got to clean it all out. The filth was amazing.

Now I have good access to the lathe, and I can put all my mini-lathe tooling and parts in handy, spacious drawers instead of using the ridiculous toolbox I bought years ago. Toolboxes tend to cling tenaciously to shelves and the floor and discourage the use of whatever is in them. Chests are warm and giving. They practically throw their contents into your arms. In other words, they’re convenient, and convenience is at least a third of getting any job done.

I now think I need to get a ball screw, and I should also think about putting Mach 3, the CNC program I used, on my ancient 2005 laptop. I have never been able to make myself throw this laptop out, and now I have a valid use for it which it is well able to perform.

The big controller box I made for the lathe fits in the chest’s bottom drawer, which is fantastic. It won’t be able to collect any more crud there.

I am now up to…let’s see…SIX tool chests. And I regret nothing. Storage is extremely important if you actually want to get anything done in a shop. Without it, things get damaged and lost, and the things that aren’t lost are impossible to find. Instead of working, you spend half your time walking in circles looking for what you need.

As the photo shows, the chest I bought is blue. I am making a real effort to add color to the shop.

I am now planning to put in a split unit for cooling, and I will have to add a ceiling and insulate the doors. Once these things are done, there will be nearly no reason for me to ever go in the house.

I credit God with my success. When you can’t get things done, there is usually a supernatural reason. Rhodah and I have started seeing things returned and restored.

Now I have to finish putting my tractor back together. That’s easy now that I managed to put it in my shop. It seems like we have torrential rain here every day now. Well…we DO, actually. But now that the tractor is indoors, it’s no big deal.

In other news, I got trolled after my last post. I wrote about the vision my wife had, in which God said the royals would have a funeral soon. The vision occurred on June 22, and I wrote about it a couple of days later. Some guy showed up and made fun of us, and he also ridiculed the gift of tongues and the vision, so he blasphemed the Holy Spirit Himself.

I decided to publish the comment because sometimes when someone does something they will later be embarrassed about, it’s best to see to it they get the exposure they wanted at the time. What he said will not age well.

It’s strange that he ridiculed a documented vision that clearly came true, but I guess he wasn’t concerned with being analytical. I can understand ridiculing people whose predictions fail, especially when they insist they didn’t fail. I’m thinking of the people who still predict a 2020 Trump win. I don’t understand ridiculing someone whose prediction came true, especially when that person’s husband revealed the prediction without making any claims about the source and without asking for money or a new jet.

Anyway, we have prayed for him. As I heard a preacher say recently, everyone will believe in God eventually. Here’s hoping my commenter comes to believe before it’s too late.

Little Shop of Horrors no More

While my wife and I wait to be permitted to see each other in Ireland, and while what we hope are the last days of our wait for a green card pass, I continue to work on my shop.

I finished my belt grinder cart. Photo below. It’s almost as great as it looks.

Is any project ever really finished? I still want to put some kind of arm on it to hold a shallow container of water below the 2″ by 72″ belt. It will catch sparks and keep crud out of the drawers.

Today I have been emptying boxes that have been on the floor since 2019, when I moved my big tools up here. I am also getting stuff ready to throw out. As I work, the shop gets bigger and bigger, and my ideas about building a new shop seem more and more ridiculous.

My next project will probably be shelves.

I have a huge 4-tier 4′ by 8′ set of shelves against one wall. I am not happy with it. It used to have the long side against the wall, making it very difficult to use because of the reach. Now both long sides are exposed. It’s still not great, because it juts out into the garage and takes up too much room.

I figure it has almost 128 square feet of storage, not including the floor. I would like to create a similar amount of shelving on the walls. This would open up the center of the shop.

I got an idea from Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters. You would think a person like me would be a big fan of the show, because it’s all about tools and a sort of engineering, but I’m not. I don’t have the attention span for it. It drags a lot while they’re building things and explaining. I’m always thinking, “Come on man. Blow something up.”

Also, the chemistry of the hosts is somewhat off-putting. Everyone knows they don’t like each other, and it shows. When I watch, I always feel like Hyneman is trying hard not to sock Adam Savage in the mouth, and while I can see how Savage would get on a person’s nerves, I think most people would get along with him better. Just a guess.

Anyway, Hyneman’s primary business is in a terrible building which is about 100 feet long and 12 feet wide. I assume he must have gotten a great price. To cope with the shape of the building, he created his own shelves. They cover one wall. He could have gone out and bought prefab shelves and attached them, but they would have been expensive, and I don’t know if anyone sells appropriate shelves. His ceiling is very high.

He got himself some 1″-square tubing and welded it into a system of shelf supports. It’s brilliant. He has vertical tubes which appear to be about three feet apart, and he welded horizontal tubes to them to hold the shelf material. I don’t know what the material is. Probably plywood.

As he pointed out, welding is extremely fast compared to drilling and screwing, and square tubes are very easy to weld together because they have a lot of flat surfaces. I don’t know what tubing costs right now, but steel prices have been dropping, so it may be possible to get 12 feet of tubing for around $10. If that’s true, I could put up a framework for maybe $120. Two shelf units 9 feet long with 4 shelves each would give me 108 square feet of shelf. It would be better to use 6 shelves per unit, because shelves that are too far apart are wasteful. This would give me 162 square feet.

Plywood is expensive, but not like it used to be, and I could cannibalize the plywood in my existing unit.

As part of the project, I would like to get a small shed for materials. Then I could keep more tubing and plate and so on. Grabbing stuff you already have is always better than driving to buy more.

The shop has gotten so much bigger, I am once again able to park my garden tractor and utility cart in it. The big tractor is too much to ask for, but with all the new space, I should be able to forgo a new shop and put up a smaller shelter for the tractor and a few implements.

Guess I better get back out there. Those dead roaches aren’t going to sweep themselves out into the yard.

Doing Your Best Doesn’t Always Help

Some people are impressed by surgeons. Some people are impressed by gymnasts. I am impressed by painters.

I don’t mean all painters. Painting a picture is easy. Painting a house is easy. People who can do these things are a dime a dozen. I’m impressed by people who can paint THINGS. Even a mailbox is hard to paint well. How people manage to paint cars and motorcycles is beyond me.

I made myself a nice tool arm rack for my belt grinder. I created it to fit on the side of a Harbor Freight tool chest. It wasn’t hard. Just cutting, welding, and grinding. Then I tried to paint it. What a nightmare.

I figured I would use Rust-Oleum farm implement paint in John Deere green. Truck bed paint is tougher, but it’s always black or a color which is repulsive. I got myself a can of primer and a can of paint, and I figured I was on my way.

First problem: it rains here every day now. Torrential rain. It starts in the afternoon and goes on for hours. Sometimes it starts again at night. I don’t have a shed where I can hang things to paint them, and painting them in the shop is a problem, so I ordinarily hang them from a limb of a magnolia tree I plan to cut down. Finding a time to hang this project was difficult. Seemed like every time I went outside, it started raining.

I finally got it primed, and I found a way to paint it in the shop. When I painted it, the paint was rough. This was a new problem. I have gotten better results with earlier projects.

It turned out to be a couple of things. First, spray paint is harder to apply smoothly than brush paint, which I have used in the past. Second, the primer I picked was a high-build primer. I thought it would cover imperfections. Instead, it provided imperfections of its own in the form of a sandy surface.

I took an angle grinder and removed all the paint and primer. I chose a new primer and started over. By this time, I had lost days.

I didn’t take chances. I sanded the new primer before spraying, and then I added the paint. The result was adequate. It could really use more sanding, but it will do, and I can always wet-sand the paint and add another coat.

I planned to put a sheet of 3/4″ plywood on top of the cart to distribute the weight of the grinders and give me something to screw them to. Yesterday I made the sheet. I cut, sanded, and primed it. I used a roller to prime it.

Before I could prime it, I had to deal with the primer that shot all over the table saw, the project, my drill, my apron, the floor, and me, among other things.

I had obtained a tool for stirring paint. It goes in a drill. I lowered it into the can and used the low gear to stir. No problem. Very controllable. I figured it was so easy, I could go ahead and use the high gear.

When I changed gears and pulled the trigger, half of the paint went up, out of the can for good, and onto everything around it. It happened instantly. No possibility of controlling it.

An hour later, after learning that turpentine is the only really good thing to use to clean up spilled latex paint, I took my 6″ mini roller and painted both sides of the plywood.

Then the bugs took notice.

A june bug flew in from my left, did a spiral, and corkscrewed into the fresh primer, where it lay kicking its legs. A swarm of little flies showed up shortly thereafter.

I fixed things by putting a fan next to the plywood to prevent bugs from landing.

Today I got another 6″ roller cover. Cleaning roller covers isn’t really possible. You can squeeze enough paint out to keep them usable for a couple of days, but you will never be able to clean a roller cover to the point where you can use it to paint a new color. I picked Home Depot’s best cover, supposedly. I didn’t want to take chances.

I stirred the paint successfully and started applying it. Then I saw a big cluster of fibers stuck to the board. I thought it fell from somewhere, but I was wrong. It came from the roller. All over the board, there were little hairs that came from my expensive “professional” roller cover.

Now the board is drying. It has one coat of paint on one side, and that coat has fibers in it. I can’t do anything to it until tomorrow, when I hope I can sand it and make the fibers vanish without destroying the primer and paint.

I can’t believe Home Depot sells this terrible product. It is also extremely irritating to try to do everything right and then be let down by a product which is not merely worthless but destructive. It’s bad enough when a product doesn’t work. When it destroys other things and ruins hours or days of work, it’s a catastrophic product.

It should take two days to paint a board well. I figure I am looking at 4, minimum. Sand and paint tomorrow. Paint the day after. Paint again the day after that.

Other than that, the project is going well. I attached the rack I made to the cart, and it fits perfectly. It will hold 4 tool arms very well. There is a holder for a 5th arm, but it has limited potential because the enclosure for the VFD is under it and prevents the holder from allowing a long arm to slide the whole way in. I put the holder in anyway because I may get a new VFD some day, and the holder might conceivably have a use for a shorter arm.

Adding the 5th holder at this point was easy. Adding it later would have required removing paint, welding, grinding, painting again…

If I get a different VFD that doesn’t require a platform, I’ll still need to do some of these things, but it will be a much simpler job.

After all this, I have to put my table saw on wheels. The base I have on it now is an add-on from Amazon or somewhere, and it’s about 1% as good as one I could make myself. I’ll go back to truck bed coating. It’s very easy to apply.

I’m wondering if I should keep my little Rockwell 1×42 grinder. It’s a nice tool, but I have a 2-HP motor and a spare VFD sitting around. That’s maybe $1000 worth of hardware. It’s the parts of a grinder that make up most of the cost. I could probably make the rest for $100. Two pulleys, a spring, and a body made from a small amount of welded tubing or plate. Couple of other things. A cord.

I could make a second 2×72 grinder that rotates so the belt is horizontal. Or I could just make a grinder which is fixed in a horizontal position. There is no reason to have a rotating grinder when you have them in two orientations.

At least I don’t think there is.

If you have two grinders, you can put different belts on them so you can go back and forth when you’re doing different jobs.

Anyway, I hope to see this project finished this week.

Shop Growing Less Chaotic

My newest metal fab project is taking shape. I’m making a cart for my belt grinders, and the basis is a Harbor Freight 44″ US General tool chest.

Here is what I have so far.

The more experience you get with fabricating, the faster things go. I think I got all the metal together around a week ago.

When you have a 2×72 grinder, you have long metal arms holding various types of tooling. As of now, I only have a flat platen and a small wheel holder. A platen is a flat thing that sits behind the belt so you can grind things straight, flat, and true. You can do a lot of other things with it. A small wheel holder holds several different wheels that allow you to grind small semicircular recesses into projects.

I should buy a large wheel and a medium-sized wheel as well. Each of these will need its own arm.

The two main features of the cart are the arm holder and the platform the grinders will sit on. The holder is done. The platform will be a piece of 3/4″ plywood, and both grinders will be screwed to it. It will sit on top of the cart.

I was considering buying a dustproof variable frequency drive (VFD) to replace my old VFD and the big shopmade enclosure I made for it. In the end, I thought I should avoid spending $430 for nearly nothing. When you can fabricate, you don’t have a lot of excuses for refusing to improvise and save money.

I had a piece of 11-gauge steel plate which was scrapped because I made some mistakes altering it for another project, so I cut a 6″ by 10.5″ piece out of it and made a little shelf for the enclosure to sit on. I welded it to the lower horizontal bar on the cart attachment. The box seemed floppy when I bolted it on, so I welded a little arm onto the vertical part of the attachment and ran a bolt through it into the enclosure. Now it’s rigid.

A $430 dustproof VFD would look better, but it wouldn’t do anything this one won’t do.

Wood prices are crazy. They went up, and then they crashed. Some things are getting cheap. Others are still expensive. I found I could buy excellent hardwood plywood, precut to 2′ by 4′, for not much more than low-grade plywood, so I bought it. I could have bought an entire sheet and saved a little, but I am tired of keeping large pieces of material around for no purpose, and bringing a big sheet here would have meant a certain amount of exertion.

If I had bought cheap plywood, I would have had to spend time filling in voids and sanding it to prevent splinters.

I usually paint my workshop creations with black truck bed coating, but this time I decided to go with tractor paint in John Deere green. Tractor paint is not as tough as truck bed coating, but it’s very tough by paint standards, and the cart will look nice with a green attachment. I may paint the wood green, too. And the enclosure.

Drab colors are customary for tools, but I am moving away from that. I guess it’s because I have three Harbor Freight tool chests, and they come in vivid colors. A little color makes a shop look less like an archvillain’s lair. Also, when you get old, color helps you see what you’re working on.

After this, I have to finish the rolling kitchen island I started. I also need to paint two tool stands and a mobile base, all fabricated by yours truly. Then I should put a real mobile base on the Powermatic 66 and get rid of the one I bought.

With those jobs behind me, I should get rid of the silly 4′ by 8′ shelves in the shop. The previous owner used them to hold materials and so on. Shelves that big are stupid. It’s hard to reach the middle, especially on higher shelves. They kill a quarter of the shop and don’t provide a good return. I think I may buy steel tubing and make cheap, strong shelves for the south wall. Jamie Hyneman, the Mythbusters guy, did this in his shop, and it works well.

I thought I needed to build a new shop, but the more I get this one in order, the more I think I should wait. This shop is now so efficiently arranged, I can get the lawn tractor and utility cart inside. I should probably get a cheap shed for materials and certain outdoor tools, since they don’t need to be in the shop, and then add a pole barn for the tractor and pickup.

The real dream is air conditioning. I already have enough power. I just need insulation on the doors and roof. One of my doors is a roll-up, and that’s a problem. It’s not possible to insulate an old roll-up. You have to buy a new one with insulation built in. That would run about $4000.

If I had air conditioning, I would never leave the shop.

Maybe later today I’ll put primer on the cart attachment and cut the plywood and prime it. Paint takes forever to dry properly, so I will be lucky if I can get this project truly over with in two days.

I feel like God is helping me get this place together. I’m making progress much faster than before.