A Bad Day Can’t Begin With a Good McMuffin
December 13th, 2008Optimistic
Is this a beautiful morning, or what? It’s 56 degrees outside, dry as a bone, the sun is shining, and McDonald’s got my breakfast order right. There is order in the universe. Things make sense.
I guess dry weather isn’t exciting to most people, but when you live in Miami, you look forward to it. And since I’ve started taking better care of the property and working with tools, I realize that cool, non-sweaty weather is a godsend. When you spend the whole day indoors, it’s 75 degrees all the time. When you start working outside, you develop a new appreciation for temperature and humidity.
This was my first McDonald’s breakfast in two or three weeks. I could not indulge after Thanksgiving. I can’t remember what got in the way last week. My Saturday Mickey D’s feast is a sacred tradition, so I am glad to get back to it.
Yesterday I wrote about the Big Three mess, and I referred to figures various sources have quoted as the effective hourly rate paid to UAW workers. You can find it all over the place. It’s on the web. It’s on TV. It’s in newspapers and magazines. It’s on the radio. I cited the Heritage Foundation, but that’s not the only source. And it varies. I have seen figures varying from 69 to 75 dollars per hour.
A reader took issue, claiming that figure included money going to workers who had already retired. The UAW has an obscene pension and insurance package, and it’s very expensive. The Heritage Foundation claims the figure includes money for the retirement of current workers, but not people who are retired at present.
I took a few minutes last night and looked around some more, and I found some fairly credible claims that the figures DO include money for people who are currently retired. On the other hand, some sites claiming to “debunk” the high figures are clearly left-wing nut sites.
Now I don’t know what to think. One thing is for certain: Big Three labor costs are completely out of line with costs incurred by employers using people of similar skill. And we should all be angry that the UAW expects the rest of us to subsidize failure while refusing to accept a fair and realistic wage. We should be angry that they want a bailout, period, but expecting us to pay for their unjustifiable lifestyle is beyond the pale. The effective hourly figure is a rabbit trail; regardless of what it turns out to be, there is no doubt that it’s way too high. And even if it were not, subsidizing incompetence is socialism, and we should not be doing it. Those jobs will not disappear if the Big Three go bankrupt. They will be preserved; we will still need and buy cars, and someone will have to make them. The big difference will be that the companies will be under new and presumably better management, which will be better for everyone concerned.
Maybe it will be Japanese management. If that makes you feel bad, buy stock in the companies that buy the factories. Japanese companies are owned in large part by Americans. We say the Big Three are American, but who owns their stock?
If the high figures are right, we have auto workers bringing home $150,000 per year in one form or another. If they are wrong, it’s more like $80,000, which is still ridiculous, in a country where you can get a master’s degree and expect to earn $40,000 per year, including benefits. An average nurse makes less than an auto worker. Don’t even try to tell me that’s acceptable. Uneducated people with limited skills are not supposed to be affluent. That’s a simple fact of life.
I should be fair and criticize management as much as I criticize labor. Management agreed to the collective bargaining agreements that have crippled the Big Three, and management failed to put together design teams that produced credible products. Some American vehicles are great, but on the whole, they are stodgy and cheap-looking and not fun to drive. Let’s face it; generally, they look like crap. And the engineering, while much closer to foreign standards than it used to be, is still second-rate. As is the quality control.
I bought an American car because the model I chose was enjoyable to drive and had a unique style. I didn’t need to be practical. But if I were looking for something practical to put a wife and kids in, I would have a hard time justifying an American offering. The full-size pickups seem pretty good. Maybe that’s because the basic designs are ancient.
In other news, I am absolutely determined to get a fence put on the router table today. I don’t care if it’s a yardstick held on by rubber bands. It has to be done. And I want some kind of dust collection design.
I used the huge sliding miter saw yesterday, and dust went everywhere, even with a vacuum attached to the port. The throat plate is not even close to zero-clearance, and a pile of dust accumulates under it every time the saw is used. How am I supposed to fix that? I’m thinking maybe I should rout out a hole under the saw, put some mesh over it, and attach a vacuum hose under it.
The impression I get is that effective dust collection is not possible, unless you spend five or six thousand dollars. If I put a hose on the saw and a hose in the table, dust will still go everywhere. I don’t know how the professional tool guys who make videos and write books keep their shops so clean. They probably cheat. They probably make lackeys sanitize their shops before they turn on the cameras. I guess I will always have dust in the garage, no matter what I do.
I wish I had a better respirator. I don’t know what to get. I’ve tried various masks, but I always find that I end up breathing heavily after a while, because of the air resistance.
As for the fence, I think the best possible solution is cast iron, milled flat. You can put magnetic accessories on it, and it shouldn’t warp. Problem: it cannot be had. I can’t get a piece of cast iron that big without cutting up a piano frame, and I can’t mill it, and I am not willing to pay to have it milled. Maybe I could cannibalize an old jointer. Which I don’t have and can’t get.
Back to wood, I guess. Maybe I’ll give up and head for the lumber yard and make them plane down a piece of hardwood for me. I’m not sure which wood is best. Something relatively cheap to start. Then when I get to be a big router expert, I can make myself a fence from ipe! It’s supposed to be like cement.
It would be nice to have a ferrous front surface on it, because then I could use magnetic featherboards. I am sorry to say, I am not all that impressed by the Grr-ripper, which is supposed to be a featherboard substitute. I don’t like running my hands directly over a table saw blade, and these things don’t grip and hold workpieces the way featherboards do. And they’re a pain to set up. While I was trying to resaw my two-by-six, I had to cut a piece of scrap, drill holes in it, and screw it to the Grr-ripper to make it work. A featherboard would have taken ten seconds to set up, and it would have been safer and more effective.
I wonder if I could put a steel surface on the router table. This is a terrible thing for a former physics student to admit, but I have no idea whether magnetic attraction increases in proportion to the depth of a metal. I assume it doesn’t; magnets hold onto thin pieces of metal very well. I’m thinking I could put a sheet of thin steel over the table, screw it down, and use magnetic featherboards from there on out. They wouldn’t work past the edge of the aluminum router plate, but I don’t think they’d need to.
I will make this stuff work if it kills me. And then maybe some day I will make something with it.
December 13th, 2008 at 9:42 AM
The dust pretty much goes everywhere, even with professional dust collection systems. You can mitigate it, but you can never completely eliminate it. Problem is you have to literlly have the dust collection in the kerf of whatever machine you’re using, and that’s nearly impossible.
A small jet or Dustek dust collector will help,
http://www.woodcraft.com/product.aspx?ProductID=829423&FamilyID=60015
but you have to plumb it. It’s easy for stationary tools. Don’t use PVC. Flexible hose with wire or steel ductwork is the best. Dust blowing through PVC will cause static buildup, and the resulting sparks will cause splosions, which are less than optimal.
December 13th, 2008 at 9:45 AM
So for the low, low price of 500 bucks, I can have a glorified vacuum cleaner that bolts to the wall.
Being handy is expensive.
December 13th, 2008 at 10:46 AM
If you want to play you have to pay. I use a broom. $5.75.
December 13th, 2008 at 11:07 AM
I’m an engineer heavily involved in laser welding two different thickness of sheet metal blanks butted together into one larger dual thickness blank to be stamped into car parts of varying thickness for vehicle weight control. We shove the two sheets together and clamp then in position with electromagnets. I can peel up the thin blank by hand, but not the thick.
December 13th, 2008 at 11:25 AM
I’ve been trying to imagine what you’re trying to set up. Can you use angle iron as a fence?
My dad had a shop we called the doghouse when he retired. It’s where his wife sent him to get him out of the house. Recliner, TV, stereo, radial arm saw, table saw, router table. He lived next door to a metal fab shop. He hooked up an old furnace blower on the wall that exhausted through the wall into the neighbors yard. He had a hose set up that allowed him to divert the blower inlet to whatever tool he was using.
You could collect the dust in a cyclonic collector you could make yourself out of a circular garbage can. Attach a cheap furnace filter over a hole in the lid. Oh, you don’t have furnaces. Which reminds me:
It’s 17 degrees outside. Humidity would be welcome. I just repaired the furnace humidifier last night.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:10 PM
As for the type of wood to use for your fence, look at charts of hardwood flooring materials:
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http://www.lumberliquidators.com/custserv/aboutus.jsp?pageName=Flooring101&WT.ad=HOME_NAV_Floor101
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Oak is pobably the best material for the money. I very much doubt you would want to shell out for purpleheart, mohogany, or bloodwood.
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Don’t knock MDF for the fence face. It has a smoth finish and can be replaced easily should something happen. Just make sure that you attach it to a nice, straight piece of oak. That should keep it from warping in your humidity. I just used MDF, but I don’t have quite the moisture you do.
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Good luck and post pictures when you are done.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:24 PM
If you are only using one machine at a time, you can get away with a much smaller dust collector. Cheapest way is to roll it around from machine to machine. Use the flex hose w. wire. Attach the wire to the machine with an alligator clip to ground it.
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And upgrade to a 1 micron or better bag. The 30 micron bags get the big messy stuff but blow the dangerous smaller particulates into the air and your lungs.
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I used this method for years until I got off my wallet and got a full-fledged cyclone system.
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And I looked for that Dust Collector book for you to no avail. I must have thrown it out or given it away. But if you are going to get serious about dust collection, it’s well worth the few bucks to buy it.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:38 PM
Oh yeah, like og said, you are never going to get it all. Even with a cyclone system, we have a long hose connected to a blast gate which we use for clean up at the end of the day.
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For our miter saw, I built a sort of square-funnel that has the collector pipe attached to the top of it. It sucks the dust from the exhaust port and under the saw. Sort of like this guy’s:http://www.studio1304.com/silca/cyclone/images/Miter%20Saw%20Hook-up.JPG but mine is made from wood. However, you need some decent CFM for it to work properly.
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The table saw is always going to throw some dust out from the top of the spinning blade. There are companies that make an attachment that connects to your guard that supposedly helps with that problem. I can’t stand using a guard, so I have never tried these.
December 13th, 2008 at 2:35 PM
“But if I were looking for something practical to put a wife and kids in, I would have a hard time justifying an American offering. The full-size pickups seem pretty good. Maybe that’s because the basic designs are ancient.”
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I think your analysis is pretty much on the money. I’d only add that the CAFE standards have a rmajor ole to play in this. Because the bg three are heavily biased by their pickup sales (the Ford F-150 is still the top selling vehicle overall), their CAFE standards are pulled to the low side. To compensate, (so they won’t be open to penalties), they build cheap, loss-leader cars (with high MPS).
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The big three would do a lot better if they could concentrate on what sells best for them (Trucks, High-end Cars, larger Vehicles) rather than just make cheap copies of foriegn econo-boxes in an attempt to satisfy CAFE Standards.
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To me it never made sense to apply CAFE broadly (as is done now). Instead it would seem to be a better idea to apply CAFE standards in categories (trucks can have lower MPGs than Sedans), or better yet, do away with CAFE altogether…it was an idea best left in the seventies.
December 13th, 2008 at 2:36 PM
Sorry, should be:
they build cheap, loss-leader cars (with high MPG).
December 13th, 2008 at 3:17 PM
The inherent competitive disadvantage of the absurdly high wages and benfots package is like an open artery. Until it is closed, all the bailout out money is just a transfusion to delay the inevitable bleed out.
December 13th, 2008 at 3:43 PM
As far as adding big, heavy, chunks of iron, there are junkyards, and there are junkyards. The former are full of old cars. The latter frequently have the words “and recycling” in their names, and have used metal in them. Angle iron from small to huge, sheet metal in any thickness you can imagine, pipe in all sizes and thicknesses, etc. In FL you probably don’t want to buy decking for your saws that doesn’t have at least some rust on it. It will likely be stainless, and thus non-magnetic.
December 13th, 2008 at 5:20 PM
Buy your metal here: http://www.crmetals.net/index.htm
Nice people and they cut to size.
Simmon’s Metals on 72 avenue is good too.
December 13th, 2008 at 6:15 PM
I’ve been meaning to mention, the thing you’re making is called a ‘shaper’. I don’t know why, it’s just what they’re called in cabinet shops.
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Now for the fence: All the ones I’ve ever seen were made of two pieces of formica-laminated particle board about 4″ by whatever the length of your table. One is screwed to the other to form a 90 degree “L”. Countersink the screws a little and bondo/sand to make smooth. This smooth side that the workpiece slides against is also cut/routed out in the middle with a sort of upside down “U” so it actually sits over the spinning bit, leaving just a minimal part exposed. It’s much neater and safer that way, and your vacuum sucks the dust from the bottom real neat like. I hope this makes sense. If not, I’ll draw a picture, which I should have done to start with but I was too lazy.
December 13th, 2008 at 6:17 PM
Send me a note with your mailing address and I will send you some ferrite beads and a larger one that goes on the actual power cord to your clock radio. I suspect your radio is either very old or a low priced item that does not have proper noise supression. The other thing that occurs to me is that the socket you are using is not grounded or may be faulty. If it is two prong (no ground) and you don’t have a keyed plug, try flipping the A/C plug and see what happens. reach me at ejpomeroy at gmail dot com
December 13th, 2008 at 7:50 PM
As for breathing — what you want is a painter’s air-fed mask. It connects to the air compressor via a good filter and oil trap, and completely isolates your breathing from the ambient atmosphere.
Like this. Your local car-painting outfit can probably turn you on to a source. There are half-masks (as shown, with nothing over the eyes) and full masks with plastic lenses. If dust really bothers you, there’s no good substitute for these things. As a bonus, you can wear it while spraying for bugs or plant diseases and keep the chemicals out of your lungs.
Regards,
Ric
December 13th, 2008 at 8:22 PM
“magnetic attraction increases in proportion to the depth of a metal”
Finally something I’ve learned from Mythbusters! According to the episode where someone tried to use magnet handholds to sneak into a building through the air ducts, the thinner sheet metal limited the magnetic attraction from the magnets. not sure why, but if it was on TV it must be true. 😉
December 13th, 2008 at 8:25 PM
One funny thing about physics is that you can learn a whole bunch of laws and equations that apply to a thing, yet still have a pretty poor idea how it works in real life.
December 13th, 2008 at 9:03 PM
Here’s a nice fence which is all DIY. And it’s built into a table made for a portable table saw!
http://www.binkyswoodworking.com/RouterTableImprove.html
December 13th, 2008 at 9:08 PM
Look at getting a powered air purifying respirator (papr), they work quite well.
December 13th, 2008 at 11:58 PM
Generally when companies figure the pay of the average worker with benefits, that means the cost of the benefits for the actual employee, not the cost to the company’s pension plan for those already retired. It usually includes workers’ compensation, the employer’s portion of FICA, unemployment tax, disability insurance, current health benefits, as well as pension benefits (sometimes also including a legal fund component) and retirement health benefits. I haven’t seen where these numbers come from, however, so I don’t know how they were calculated, but you can see how it could get up to $75 even without including the benefits of current retirees.
On that same topic, you might be interested in this post about the UAW contract: http://laborpains.org/2008/12/12/22-pounds-uaw-rules-and-regulations/ .
December 14th, 2008 at 2:08 AM
Dust collection around me and my tools equals aiming the larger flying pieces coming directly off the tool bit away from important stuff in the surroundings, then when the “dust settles” using a corn straw BROOM and a giant metal dust pan to pick up the larger piles and chips, then get out the shop vac and tidy things up.
Wait until you cut a bunch of particle board or MDF and get dust and “smoke” and start hacking…wait…you’re in Miami and don’t have to close the doors and windows in the winter…
December 14th, 2008 at 8:59 AM
The TV station demos look so clean because just off camera they have those blowers used in wind tunnel testing to to get rid of te dust between takes.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:35 PM
Your comment about nurse’s salaries rings true close to home. My wife is an RN, BSN with a MS in Abnornal Psych. She has 37 yrs experience and has been Dir of Nursing at several hospitals and nursed at some of the largest hospitals in the nation–Charity in N.O.; Los Angles County Gen; Martin Luther King in La, Univ Penn in Philadelphia, Old Louisville General and new Univ Hosp–and about 26 others at various times. Plus we once owned our own Nursing Agency and provided own health, ret., etc. As a travel nurse now she makes 42-60/hr depending–after 37yrs. And the 60/hr is only arrived at by doing pvt duty catering to Hollywood types here in LA, otherwise 40+/hr is the HIGH end at hospitals (plus no benefits). A present value calculator says she should have quit at end of HS and gotten a job on the line at one of the big three.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:37 PM
PS: Plus the hours and working conditions would have been a helluva lot better……
December 15th, 2008 at 9:55 AM
The quality control is even or better. That’s been proved over and again. Your annecdotal experience notwithstanding.
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I don’t know the answer either. But the Japanese companies are suffering the same massive loss of sales. They had more cash from more years of profit. The sales loss isn’t management. The profitabillity? Fingers point everywhere.
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as for styling – Japanese cars are more stylish? on what planet?
December 15th, 2008 at 10:11 AM
STEVE H: I don’t know if you go back and read the late additions to comments, but as a lawyer you must also appreciate the legal liabilities that Nurses, unlike auto workers, have hanging over their heads. Prime example being Katrina where the “no good deed ere goes long unpunished” aphorism was in full swing. The slightest mistake can cost a Nurse her license AND her lively-hood–let alone jail time. The same can hardly be said for HS educated auto-workers.