Plus New Old Tool

I may as well post an update on my illness.

As I wrote a while back, I managed to come down with pink eye. The symptoms appeared on the same day I finished major welding on my arbor press stand, so I thought I had burned my eye with the welder’s arc. In retrospect, that would have been a more favorable diagnosis. A welding flash burn goes away in a day or two. It has been two weeks, and I am still having symptoms.

This particular type of virus likes to take a tour of the body. It may start in an eye, but during its junket, it may make the rounds of other parts of the body, like a tourist trying to see every landmark in Europe in 5 days. The list of things it does to people is long and annoying. It can give you cold symptoms. It can make your bones hurt. It can give you pretty amazing diarrhea. It gives some people meningitis. It’s a very versatile microbe.

The first time I looked it up, I saw the phrase “3 to 5 days,” and I was pretty happy. I could stand awful things such as living in Chicago without a pistol for 5 days. Then later I read stuff that completely blew this rosy prediction out of the water. One said the incubation period alone can last 9 days, and another said the illness itself could last two weeks, which has proven true in my case.

Initially, the bug was in my eye. Then it got bored and moved to the general region behind my face. Then it moved into my nose, which is where it is today. Yesterday and the day before, I also had fatigue, and my mood was not great. These are typical pink eye (adenovirus) symptoms, believe it or not. It dabbles in everything.

Of course, I have been praying and so on. I’ve been asking God which doors I left open, to let this thing in.

Today I tried something that had worked well in the past. I simply told it to leave. I didn’t get total healing, but within an hour, I was much better, and that’s how things stand now.

Because I felt better, I decided to take some actions which were pretty aggressive. I decided to torture the invader with spicy food. I ate the better part of a theater-size box of Ferrara Red Hots, and I followed it up with some homemade kung pao chicken so hot it nearly glowed. I have a lot more energy now. Let’s just hope I don’t have to expend it on multiple trips to the bathroom later on tonight.

This virus is extremely contagious. I read a lot about it because I didn’t feel like doing anything else. It usually hits kids, and it spreads like crazy in schools because a) kids are filthy, and b) it makes infectious fluids pour out of practically every orifice in the body. I read that a person’s poo remains full of viruses days after the infection is over. What lucky researcher was assigned the job of looking into that?

In Japan, pink eye is known as “swimming pool fever” because–get this–you can get it from chlorinated pool water! Nice, right? I had no idea pool water could spread disease. Makes me wonder what chlorine is actually good for. Something inside me shrivels when I think of all the pools I’ve been in. Nobody showers before getting into a pool these days, and let’s face it, most kids don’t get out to pee. Think of all the used Band-Aids you’ve seen lying on the bottoms of pools. Imagine the things you didn’t see, yet which were there all the same.

If you can get pink eye, what else can you get? Something like a third of Americans have venereal disease, and I’ve been swimming with them.

It just proves I’m right when I say public pools are disgusting and foul. And hot tubs…who thought that was a good idea? A guy I knew led an all-male prayer group at his church, and one week, they met in his hot tub. So basically they sat in hot man soup and exchanged every possible type of bodily filth. Which they then took home to their families.

I must wash my hands 30 times a day, I use disinfectant wipes all the time, I leave the house about as often as Boo Radley and Howard Hughes, and somehow I got the filth disease! Where is the justice?

Anyway, I feel much better. I still have some chicken. Tomorrow I’m going to add even more heat to it and eat the rest of it.

In other news, my compressed air system should be working by Saturday night. All the parts have arrived. A couple hundred more trips up and down the ladder should get it done. It’s amazing how many complications set in to slow me down.

Here’s something I did not expect: I destroyed the swivel on one of my air hose reels. I didn’t know it had a swivel. Maybe this is why it got destroyed.

My reel has a little brass fitting attached to the hub. A horizontal thread goes out of it, to the compressor. There is a thread perpendicular to the horizontal thread, and it goes to the air hose. When the reel turns, a swivel between the threaded parts lets the reel rotate without twisting anything.

It looks like I failed to use Teflon tape or pipe dope when I installed the hose back in Miami. I used to do a lot of work on my dad’s boat, and it was full of brass and bronze. Someone taught me that it wasn’t necessary to use Teflon or dope, and I guess that’s why I didn’t put any in the hose reel. It was not great advice. When I installed the hose reel here the other day, I had to remove the hose, and when I did, I had to apply so much torque I screwed up the swivel.

It looks like other people do the same thing, because you can find these swivels online. Of course, the best one I found for a good price was backordered just when I needed it. Luckily Amazon had one somebody had returned, so I bought it and saved some money.

I had also bent the stud that held the swivel on. I measured it, and it was an M10-1.5 thread. I figured I was going to have to drive to a store, buy a bolt, cut the head off, and make this weird stud. I decided to look around the shop first, thinking there was no hope. Unbelievably, in an old box of fasteners a tenant had left in one of my dad’s warehouses, I found an M10-1.5 bolt just big enough for the job. I cut the head off with a hack saw and cut two screw slots in the ends. Now I don’t have to search online for a metric air hose reel stud.

Now that I have everything I need, I just have to install the swivel and hose, finish the air lines, fire up the compressor, and look for leaks. I really hope I don’t find any, because nearly all of the connections are 12 feet off the ground.

Once the air line job is done, I’ll be able to move on to other jobs that will improve order in the shop.

I really sabotaged the whole shop organization plan last week. I bought an old Gorton tool grinder on Ebay. Of course, it has turned out to have undisclosed problems, so now I’m buying tools to fix it. I had hoped to be working on a mobile base for it by now. I haven’t taken it off the pallet. I was afraid to take it off because I was thinking I should send it back. The spindle that holds the grinding wheel needs new bearings, and the motor blows my GFCI. The whole thing made me feel discouraged. Then I asked myself why I had so many tools if I was going to give up on a grinder rather than use them. Ouch.

Right now, I need a gear puller to get the arbor off the spindle. Once the arbor is off, I should be able to use an adjustable pin spanner, which arrived today, to get the spindle open. Once that’s done, I should be able to replace the bearings. I hope.

I might as well go ahead and make the mobile base. Now that I have my mill running, I can make pretty fancy cuts on steel tubing. I may cut a couple of pieces of rectangular tubing so I can weld them together in an efficient X configuration. That would make for a very simple base. I would have to have casters with swivels, because they wouldn’t be parallel. It’s not easy to mount parallel casters on a base shaped like an X. If you put 4 casters on a base, and they aren’t parallel (at least on two sides), it won’t move.

Why make an X-shaped base? Because it’s the simplest way to make a base wider than the machine. It will be more stable than a small base.

The grinder is sitting in the floor taking up a tremendous amount of space. It has to be dealt with.

This is my sitrep. I hope you enjoyed it. My advice, as it already was prior to my illness, is to avoid public pools and, when possible, human beings. I hope to cease shedding microbes soon, and then life will return to normal. Or what passes for normal around here.