My Money is in Copper

I have returned from Home Depot. Guess what 6-3 Romex costs? A whopping $2.56 per foot. And I bought 30 feet. Plus some 3/4″ conduit and a 50-amp breaker. All this, just to beef up my compressor circuit by ten amps, so I can add the air conditioner.

At least I didn’t have to buy a 15-amp breaker for the unit itself. When I went out to look at the plug, to find out what kind of receptacle I needed, I saw that it had a breaker built into it. That saved me half an hour and maybe twenty bucks.

My plan is to yank the old 8-3 Romex, put the 6-3 in, upgrade the breaker to 50 amps, run conduit to the disconnect, run conduit from the disconnect to a location near the air conditioner, and install a socket. The 8-3 runs through a foot-long hole in solid concrete. I hope it’s big enough for 6-3. Otherwise…wait, this is no problem…otherwise, I’ll have to get out my mighty rotary hammer and spend TEN SECONDS reaming out the hole. Man, having the right tools is wonderful.

My new 4-jaw chuck arrived. It’s really nice. The grease in it is probably forty years old; it hasn’t been used. Or it has been used so little, you can’t tell. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to make myself use the 3-jaw chuck. Precision is addictive. The 3-jaw chuck says it was made in England, but I haven’t spotted a manufacturer’s name on it. I’m wondering if it’s a Cushman.

Before I got the new chuck, I was concerned about the hollowed-out backside. I had read complaints about this being a light-duty chuck. But now I can see that if it hadn’t been hollowed out, it would weigh seventy pounds. It probably weighs fifty as it is. It’s huge. Much bigger than the 3-jaw chuck. Eight inches, as contrasted with six.

The stuff from Enco arrived. Guess where my new aluminum oxide wheel was made. Israel. I love it.

The remote for the AC will be here soon. Once that arrives, I will be totally worthless. One remote for the AC, one for the stereo and TV and DVD player, and a VFD for the lathe. I’ll barely have to move. That is my life’s goal.

Eventually, I want to be like the baron, in Dune. I want to be carried around by an electronic hovercraft rig, with little anti-gravity things holding up my fat so it doesn’t drag on the floor and collect swarf. That’s for indoor locomotion. Outdoors, I’ll rely on my souped-up fat cart.

Tomorrow the new motor arrives and I can officially close and suture up the lathe. I can get rid of the rat’s nest of wires and put the missing panels back on. Then it will be very hard to come up with excuses for not making anything.

But I’ll bet I manage.

Am I spoiling myself like a hopeless degenerate, or is this what the Bible means when it says, “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart?”

I know what I prefer to believe!

It gets even worse. I finally decided to spring for health insurance, so I may start riding my motorcycles again. A big part of the reason I let them rot was that I kept putting off getting insurance, and I was afraid I would mangle myself and have to pay all the expenses. Now I can subject myself to all sorts of hideous physical risks with less trepidation.

I saved all sorts of money by being too cheap to insure myself, but at a certain age, you have to hand the dice off and get a policy before you crap out. Some diseases pretty much disqualify you from insurance, so you have to get hooked up before one of them hits you. Insurance companies hate people like me, because they need healthy young worrywarts to pay the cost of treating old insureds on their last legs. They need insureds who never take money out of the system. But if you can afford most medical problems, you don’t really have a lot of motivation to get insurance when you’re young.

I hope I stay ambulatory until the policy issues. That is the key to making my strategy pay off.