Curb Your White Knight Privilege

It has been a trying month, but things have gotten a lot better.

It looks like I accidentally poisoned Marv, my African grey. He appeared to be at death’s door twice. He spent two nights in the hospital. Over the last week or so, he has consistently gotten stronger and feistier, however.

Yesterday, I heard him fall off the perch. This is not all that unusual for greys even when they are well. They get overly ambitious when they climb. Marv became very weak and wobbly after he was poisoned, however, and it is wearing off slowly. I think this made him fall.

It’s not a big deal when a parrot falls off a perch. Because volume and weight increase with the cube of linear measurements, and strength increases with the square, small animals weigh a lot less for their size than animals with greater linear dimensions. For example, a horse that is two times the size of a pony will weigh eight times as much. Weight is most of what determines how dangerous a fall is, so small animals can fall from great heights without harm. You can throw a mouse off a tall building without hurting it, and a man can survive a fall that would kill a horse. A short fall won’t usually mean much to a parrot.

Still, a parrot can get banged up in a fall if he does it just right. I have seen Marv with little bruises and even black eyes over the years.

During the afternoon, I saw a bulge on Marv’s neck, and I had no idea what it was. I Googled, and my best guess was that it was an air sac rupture. Air sacs are weird cavities in birds’ bodies that connect to their lungs. An air sac rupture is not always a serious injury, and they usually heal on their own, but web sources suggested it was worth a vet visit, so we left the house at about 7:30 p.m. and got back at about 2:30.

Bottom line: it’s probably no big deal. They gave us an anti-inflammatory which I don’t plan to give Marv because it’s dangerous, and they sent us home.

Of course, the vet who saw him didn’t know much about birds. This is the big problem with parrot medical issues. Generally, if you have an emergency, you will end up with someone who isn’t trained to fix the problem. She was able to call other vets, though, so I think we are okay.

Interesting thing: the standard remedy for a ruptured air sac has changed. A rupture causes air to be released under the skin, so your bird blows up in the area of the injury. A small hole in the skin will deflate the bubble. They used to tell bird owners to poke their birds carefully with needles, but now they say to leave the bubble alone, because if you pop it, air continues to come out through the rupture, interfering with healing.

Marv already looks better, but he is still wobbly. He will be seeing a real vet later this week. Best I could do.

I lay hands on him and declare his healing, and I praise God, who said that if we lay hands on the sick, the SHALL recover. Not “might.” God is true to his word, because he is his word, and he is the truth.

I have also been slaving away, fixing the used mower I bought. As noted earlier, the deck has 4 one-inch pipes that hold anti-scalp wheels, and all of these pipes galled to the parts inside them. The seller or the old guy who originally owned the mower used heat to get the stuck parts out of the forward pipes, but it came to me with the rear wheel shafts lodged firmly. I found out when I tried to adjust them.

I tried everything anyone could possibly suggest, other than cutting the pipes off the mower and mounting them in my hydraulic press. That is coming.

Kubota’s design is really, really stupid. There is no room between the shafts and the bores, and everything is made from carbon steel. In a humid climate with temperature swings, water condenses on metal over and over during the year, and on a vertical shaft, it’s going to run downward. That puts it inside the pipe holding the shaft, where even a thin film of rust will unite the parts as though they were welded.

At first, I thought an air hammer would be overkill. I used a sledge, heat, and cold, and then I tried the air hammer, which did nothing. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench. Of course, this was after letting penetrating oil soak in for days.

I ended up drilling the left shaft out, killing my cordless drill in the process. I was using about a 1″ bit.

The drill left me with a pipe inside a pipe. I used a carbide burr, hacksaw, and sawzall to cut the pipe from inside. I ended up putting a punch between the inner and outer pipes, and I hammered to peel the inner one off. Eventually, I heard a clanging noise and saw something brown on the ground. It took me a second to realize it was the shaft. I was so used to feeling like it would never come out, it was hard for me to accept what had happened.

The miserable thing was barely rusted. Just enough to turn the shaft brown. It felt smooth. That was enough to lock it into the mower. It was covered with oil, showing that penetrating oil doesn’t do any good in some circumstances. Most, I would say.

This process involved work done over several days in the blazing sun. I strained my back in the process.

I was hoping to avoid cutting the other pipe support off the mower, but now I am committed to it. I can slice it off, put the whole business on the press, mash the shaft out, and weld the support back on in a day. That looked like a lot of work before I tackled the first one. Not any more.

I have lots of tools, and I can do lots of things, but sometimes it’s hard to take the leap and do what I can do. I know I can cut this part off my mower and put it back, better than before. It still feels wrong, somehow, but I have to do it. Sometimes I tell myself, “If you’re not willing to use your tools, sell them.”

The seller seemed like a very earnest guy, but it looks like he committed fraud. People are disappointing.

The final (!) parts for the mower arrive tomorrow, so there is hope I’ll have it together for the weekend. I hope so. I really do not want to revive the old John Deere.

People on forums are angry with me for saying Kubota’s anti-scalp-wheel engineering is stupid. It’s amazing how people white knight for big companies that don’t care about them, while persecuting fellow consumers they abuse or let down.

Brand loyalty is like a mental illness. If I say Kubota’s engineering is stupid, and you have a good counterargument, it’s fine to present it. Getting angry with me because you love Kubota makes no sense. Kubota isn’t your mother. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a faceless company that has no feelings. It doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

I tend to think inappropriate emotional investment in businesses is a sign of both immaturity and low intelligence. You won’t see many septuagenarian mathematicians getting in fistfights in bars because one roots for the Gators (a business) and the other roots for the ‘Noles. It’s the kind of guys who drive lowered pickups with tinted windows, loud pipes, and everything blacked out. The kind of guys who let their rottweilers run loose and get tattoos advertising Harley-Davidson.

That last thing has to be difficult to bear now that Harley-Davidson has become a major promoter of sodomy and cross-dressing.

Here’s something I find weird: people get in fights over the college teams they root for, even though no one in their families has gone to college. I have two University of Miami degrees, and I see a lot of people who clearly didn’t go to college, displaying UM paraphernalia. I have no interest in that stuff, so why should they? I have never been to a UM game, except once when I was in high school. My ultimate Frisbee team played theirs, and they killed us, although they were smoking weed on the field.

UM is a private school, which makes it even weirder. You can say you root for UF because it’s your state’s school and your tax dollars support it, and this would almost make sense to some people, but why root for a private university that doesn’t represent a city, county, state, or nation?

If you bleed green and orange, drive down to UM and ask for free season’s tickets. See how UM feels about you.

If you refuse to talk to your brother-in-law because he drives an F250, there is something wrong with you. You failed to develop to full adulthood. If it makes you mad when someone says Dodge diesel pickups have weak transmissions, you have a lot of growing up to do, but it probably won’t happen.

Getting angry at companies is perfectly reasonable. It’s normal to get angry at anyone who mistreats you. It makes me angry when companies let bad engineering a child can correct slide, causing it to fall on my head. There is no excuse. It also bothers me when a product flaw causes many people suffering and expense, and the company lies and says it’s not a known issue.

Praising companies doesn’t do much good at all, but criticizing them makes them better. They’re not like people, who draw strength from encouragement. Praising companies breeds an entitlement mindset and causes them to take consumers for granted.

People have tried to tell me a consumer should follow the manual and grease the rear shafts on my mower’s deck. Wrong. It’s not in the manual or the shop manual.

They’ve tried to tell me it’s just common sense to grease the shafts, so a person who doesn’t figure it out on his own is to blame when his mower locks up. That is SEVERELY wrong. The engineer is to blame.

1. Good engineers foresee obvious problems and take reasonable steps to prevent them from arising. Kubota didn’t do this. They made their shafts too tight. Other mower companies don’t do this, and their decks last for decades. A tight fit isn’t necessary or helpful.

2. Grease isn’t intended to prevent corrosion. It’s for lubricating moving parts. Anti-seize is the correct thing for galling prevention.

The rear shafts on my deck aren’t moving parts. For lubrication purposes, a part that moves rarely is not a moving part. The shafts have no zerks or journals. If you put grease on one, it would have to be coated by hand, end to end. Grease doesn’t distribute itself on stationary parts.

The shafts only move when you need to change the height of your deck, which could be once a year or never. The shafts lock in place after an amount of corrosion that could easily take place in one off-season.

Some guy claimed a mower would cost $40,000 if Kubota did the things I suggested. I asked him how much it would cost to change a few lines of code on a CNC machine to make the shafts slightly thinner.

He came back with an appeal to authority; his own. I didn’t understand how industry worked, but he did because he had seen it, so I had no right to speak. Removing 0.050″ from the diameter of one part would call for meetings and all sorts of other corporate turmoil. It would cost Kubota hundreds of thousands.

I told him Kubota had designed and built an entire new model after mine, full of changes much bigger than making a shaft thinner, and I asked him why it didn’t cost $40,000.

He got mad and insulted me. I’m not the one who made him walk into a door.

Imagine if the world of industry worked the way he claimed it did. “We’re thinking of replacing the 2026 Dodge Ram with a 2027 model.” “NOOOO! We’ll have to charge $200,000!” Somehow car companies manage to make changes every year. Bigger changes than thinning down one shaft.

My mower’s model comes in two versions. One before a certain serial number, and one after. The price of the mower didn’t change.

People argue with me, not because I’m wrong or rude, but because I gored their sacred ox. Kubota good, therefore anyone who criticize it very bad enemy. Must take down. Sing Kubota company song over dead body.

Another guy got mad at me, saying I was bashing all engineers. I got him to admit he was an engineer.

Engineers are wonderful. Bad engineers and bad engineering are not. I wish I had gotten an ME and an EE instead of a physics degree. I love what engineers do. I admire their accomplishments, but because I said they often did stupid things, which is so obviously true it’s almost a tautology, he felt threatened.

I took my mower’s starting system, which causes many people horrible problems, and I did and published what is probably the only thorough analysis on the web. Thanks to me, people with bad control modules can Google and make their motors run in 10 minutes. I revealed the simple answer to the deck’s galling problem, which other people have dealt with. I found a cheap source for the nylon push rivets Kubota dealers charge $2.60 for, and I revealed it on a forum. Cost: $.03 each. But I’m the bad guy because I won’t run into battle behind the Kubota flag with my chest painted orange.

I don’t care if Kubota goes bankrupt. I just want good machinery for everyone. Kubota can make it, or a company that destroys Kubota with better products can make it. I am not Kubota’s keeper.

I love Kubota products. I should stress that. My tractor is great. My zero-turn is utterly superior to my John Deere garden tractor. But nearly every complex product has flaws, and in many cases, they are stupid flaws, even when the companies that make the products are generally exemplary.

The flail mower I ordered has arrived, and it’s sitting in the driveway. Tomorrow I have to put it together and try it out. I look forward to seeing it run, because the bush hog is crude and difficult to work with.

Meanwhile, the house is a mess. I took the kitchen apart in order to paint, and then Marv got worse, so I stopped. I was in the process of fixing the pool, but I found myself driving back and forth to the animal hospital. The mower problem took up my time. The weather was unbearable for a couple of weeks. I am really hoping I can come back to life now.