No More Braille

I won’t say I had a good day. I would call today “spectacular.”

The first exciting event of the day, after prayer, was a trip to Svinga Brothers. They’re junk dealers. They have a big building with rows of weird salvaged junk, along with new metal. They didn’t have anything that called out to me, but it was nice to see the place. If I ever want an old brass fire extinguisher or a 45-RPM 3-phase motor, I’ll go back.

After that, I did some welding on my Offroad Swag finger brake kit.

As I believe I’ve already written, the kit requires you to push two inch-thick rods halfway into tight holes in 3/8″-thick channel and then weld them in place. I was hesitant to do this, because I’ve had a number of crummy welding experiences over the last several years. I have had problems seeing what I was doing, and it made me feel like I would have to give up welding.

I’ve been cleaning my mask often lately, to remove the yellow crud that accumulates from smoke, and I have a great new light. I also keep the shade turned down low. Today I was able to see very well, which took a big load off my mind.

I used my Harbor Freight Titanium Unlimited 200 welder. I chose to MIG. I could probably have used 7018 and done okay with stick, but I’m not good at it at all, and I didn’t want to gouge up my expensive kit.

Just interrupted my writing to walk out and close the valve on the C25 tank.

I wanted to do a good job with the welds, so I wanted to practice. Yesterday, I picked up some steel at my metal dealer’s house, and I mentioned the fact that I was going to use some of it for welding practice. Both of the employees there were ladies. One said, “Oh, you’re going to become one of THEM.”

They’re both welders. The business does fabrication and welding as well as selling metal. They gave me all sorts of tips on stick welding, and then they did something amazing: they gave me maybe 15 pounds of scrap steel to practice on!

Man, Ocala is better than Miami. In Miami, if you’re not Cuban, you’re an outsider, period. You don’t get the good prices when you buy things. You don’t get favors. Salespeople treat you like a stranger, even if you’re a regular. Metal cost me a lot more there. I didn’t know what metal was supposed to cost. All I knew was that it was a lot cheaper than Home Depot. Here, metal seems extremely cheap, so I can tell I was getting bad deals in Miami. I paid high prices, and the idea of getting something for nothing in Miami…impossible.

This is all on top of the general rudeness, which is not something you can blame on Cubans. Everyone is rude in Miami. It was like that before Cubans showed up. Then there’s the traffic.

If I sound bigoted, you should hear what Cubans say about Miami. A lot of them agree with me 100%.

I know a Cuban lady who insisted on transferring to another city because her non-Cuban husband was treated so badly. People used to say snotty things about him to each other in Spanish, in his presence, because they didn’t know his wife was Cuban. In restaurants, other people were moved ahead of them in line because he and his wife didn’t look Cuban and it was assumed that they wouldn’t understand what was being said. Horror stories.

Miami is just a bad place to live. The Cubans dislike blacks and often exclude whites. The blacks don’t like the Cubans. White people are generally just trying to get along with everyone without taking sides. White people keep leaving. Now the South and Central Americans are filling the place up, and Cubans are very disturbed. Many Cubans see themselves as whiter than South and Central Americans, so they look down on them. Also, South and Central American cultures have a lot of problems. There is a reason why their home countries are, nearly without exception, messed up.

I know you’re not supposed to talk about bigotry and bad behavior among non-white people. Tough. The truth matters.

One piece of metal the ladies gave me is so nice I don’t know if I can bear to practice on it. It’s a piece of 3/8″ plate around 7″ square. That’s a good piece of steel!

I would have expected to pay $20 for the extra metal in Miami. And you have to remember that metal dealers get paid for their scrap. If I hadn’t taken it, they would have included it in their recycling metal, and a dealer would have bought it.

Anyway, I ran a few beautiful beads on a piece of 1/4″ diamond plate scrap. That was encouraging. I was able to see what I was doing perfectly. That told me I would be able to hit the seams between the rods and the holes without bubbafying the whole project.

I deliberately set the welder a little hot, because the metal was very thick, and I didn’t want to have to cut out ineffective welds. Things went almost perfectly. I laid 4 solid globs of weld in each hole. I had to turn the welder down a little, and I melted a little metal off the rims of the holes, but when I was done, the guide rods were still straight to within a few thousandths.

The Titanium welder is excellent. I’ll just say it. I can’t tell you it will still be working next year, but it probably will, because Chinese stuff gets better all the time. The gun is nimble and easy to use. They give you plenty of cord. It welds smoothly with no surprises. I may never use my Lincoln again. I don’t have any reason to.

I guess I’ll put different wires in the machines, and I’ll use whichever one has the wire I want for a given job.

There is still a lot of welding to be done before the finger brake is functional, but now I feel better about the likelihood of not destroying it. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have time to practice MIG so I can do a better job.