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.