Recreation Wears me Out

I have been away from the keyboard because my best friend Mike is in town. When Mike is around, it’s like standing outside in the middle of a tornado. He is constantly coming up with things to do.

On this trip, he wants to learn to weld. He also wants to shoot guns, barbecue, scout properties for a second home, and possibly buy a storage container or a prefab steel house from China. Mike discovered China a number of years ago, so he is often on the phone with manufacturers, trying to get things made cheap.

He’s in town for a funeral, and he had his hip replaced a few weeks back, so you would think he would be taking it easy. Not happening.

Right now he’s visiting his nephew, so I’m getting a break.

He’s an unusual guest. Before he showed up, I changed the anode in the upstairs water heater, made sure I had sheets for him, and turned on one of the upstairs thermostats. I made sure the breaker for the heater was on. This morning, he said he had frozen all night, and he hadn’t had a shower. The hot water didn’t work, and the batteries in the thermostat were dead. I asked him why he didn’t tell me. He said he didn’t want to disturb me.

I went upstairs to check things out. The hot water worked fine. He just didn’t wait long enough to get it going. He had slept on a bed with no sheets. Yesterday, he assured me there were sheets in the upstairs linen closet. I expressed doubt. No, he was positive. Okay.

I had words of comfort when told me about his night. I said I had slept really well in a warm room with a big bed with clean sheets and an electric blanket, and I told him there was plenty of hot water in my bathroom.

I gave him sheets and a pillowcase, and I’m going to put new batteries in the thermostat. We’ll see how tonight goes.

This isn’t the worst problem he has had at my house. He stayed with me a long time ago, and he got a mild sunburn. I had some cold cream in my bathroom, so he rubbed it on his face, including his eyelids. What he did not know was that I had mixed capsaicin, the hot ingredient in peppers, into it. He didn’t ask. I had found that capsaicin worked for getting rid of little skin growths, so I made the cold cream concoction for that purpose. It turned out to be unsuitable for rubbing into one’s eyelids, and it wasn’t all that great for soothing sunburns.

He lives in New Hampshire, and he has had about enough. He loves this area, so he is thinking of spending about $25,000 on a small lot and plopping a shipping container on it. It’s a total Mike move.

Even though Mike is here, I am managing to do a little work on my new kitchen cart. One side of the steel frame is done, and I’m attaching crossmembers to connect to the other side I haven’t figured out what to do for wooden shelves yet.

I still want to build a woodworking bench. I’m making myself unpopular on various sites by criticizing existing benches. People are obsessed with “beefy” construction. Why use one pound of steel when 15 pounds will do?

I criticized a bench made by inventor Andrew Klein. It’s built like the Hoover Dam. I checked a table for engineers, and it looks like each leg of his bench will support over 50 tons, positioned upright and loaded concentrically. Am I a bad person for calling that bad engineering?

I have three-ton jackstands, and if you put four together, the bases would contain less steel in cross section than one of his bench legs.

Somebody tried to tell me you have to have “beefy” construction in order to do planing, chiseling, and sawing. I have a Black & Decker Workmate I can carry in one hand, and you can do all of those things on it, so how can it be that I need a 700-pound bench?

Engineering works. Why not use it?

I want to have a base held up on four 2″-square legs. I plan to splay them outward slightly because trapezoids resist flexing better than rectangles. Most people who weld legs on things are afraid to try to make anything but 90° angles, but when you make a box with lots of right angles, you’re building floppiness into it. If your plan was to make a heavy structure that flexed in spite of its great mass, you would definitely want right angles.

When you try to flex a trapezoid by pushing sideways on it, you compress one leg and put tension on the other. The leg under compression provides some resistance. When you try to collapse a rectangle, you don’t put compression or tension on either leg. They are happy to remain the same length while your project folds up.

When you put weight on a trapezoidal table, the weight tries to push the legs apart at the base. That’s easy to resist with light pieces of steel.

I can tie the legs together toward the bottom with thin steel members. I just need them to stand up to a good hard pull. I don’t know how hard you have to pull on 1″ angle iron to stretch it. Let’s see. The tensile strength of steel is around 70K psi, and 1″ angle iron has a cross section somewhere near 1 square inch, so let’s be cautious and say a strut takes about 20 tons of tension without stretching. That SHOULD do the trick.

Klein’s bench has splayed legs, but they’re not tied together at the bottom.

If I put angle iron around the base, I can use it to hold a plywood shelf. Klein’s bench has no storage space under it, unless you want to put things on the floor.

I’ll post the latest photo of the kitchen cart. I have a number of completed welds on it, and I also have a lot of tacks. I’m trying to get as much of it built as possible before completing the rest of the welds. The more structure you have before you finish your welds, the more steel you have holding everything in place and resisting warpage.

Depending on how much time I have tomorrow, I should be able to finish the steel frame and maybe even prime it. Then I have to think about shelves and paint.

It’s pretty sweet, being able to weld up projects that look good enough to go indoors. Anyone can weld a muffler on, but making a nice cart or chair takes knowledge and care.

Maybe some day I’ll be able to build something really important. Like a recliner.