I Will not go Quietly Into the Day Room

I am grateful for all the supportive comments I’m getting about my sister’s condition. It’s unfortunate that she doesn’t blog, because I’m getting all the kind words, and I’m not the one who is ill. I’m a peripheral figure in this story. It’s unseemly and disturbing when a blogger takes someone else’s misfortune and uses it to make himself the star of his own soap opera. I’m not going to do that.

Reader Ruth suggested I hop in an RV with my sister and dad and tour the country. It’s a wonderful sentiment. But while I am going to be as helpful as possible during my sister’s illness, there are some sacrifices I am not quite ready to make. I don’t want to sound insensitive, but I think anyone who has made a long car trip with these two (and my sister’s dog) would understand. Illness changes a lot of things, but it doesn’t change everything! If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. You are welcome to my bone marrow, but if you want to go RVing, send me a postcard.

I did promise I would go a couple of places with her. She wants to visit Israel, and there is a famous evangelist she wants to see when he appears in Sanford, Florida.

I hope that if I’m ever seriously ill, I’ll live up to the examples my mother and my aunt and my uncle set. They didn’t moan and complain. They didn’t pull out the cancer card when they wanted things. They didn’t lay guilt trips on people. Some patients do those things. When my mother’s surgery turned out to be a failure, she continued treatment primarily to please the rest of us, and she felt terrible guilt about the smoking that caused her disease. She did not want her illness to be our illness, any more than it had to be. She spared us the pain of remembering getting angry with a cancer patient.

My mother always said manners were extremely important, and I thought she was crazy. She was right. I thought she was too concerned about things like keeping your elbows off the dinner table, but she was also trying to tell me to be considerate. When you consider other people’s feelings, you can make a big difference in the way they feel. Sometimes it lasts a day, and sometimes it lasts much longer. We have developed a revolting reverence for assertiveness and aggression, and it’s very sad. If you travel from a place like Miami or New York to a place where the culture is kinder, you will probably notice that you feel better all the time. Spend a month in Texas or Alabama, if you want to see what I mean.

Consideration continues to be important when you’re seriously ill. It probably becomes more important, because the things you do during such times carry a great deal of weight and are not forgotten. If my mother had lashed out at me or my dad during her sickness about mistakes we had made, we would still be in pain from it. People tend to open their hearts to you when you’re sick, so they are especially vulnerable.

My big machining task for today is adjusting my Parlec vise. When I put parts in it, they rise off the parallels. That’s bad. It’s exactly what the vise is designed to not do. It’s why it costs four times as much as a normal vise.

A lot of people reflexively scream “KURT” when you say you want a milling vise. There are lots of vises out there, but almost none of them are really good, and you take a chance unless you buy a Kurt. I was reluctant to get a Parlec (Taiwanese) for this very reason, and some people told me not to do it, but after researching it, I thought it was safe. Now the parts are rising, and naturally, it makes me nervous. If it can’t be fixed, it’s $400 down the crapper. I have been told that the rise is okay, if it measures out small enough.

Last night I found out a few things. It’s awful, but I had to go to the Kurt website and download one of their manuals to get the lowdown. Apparently, you can’t clamp things off-center and expect the vise to work. The part has to extend to the midpoint of the vise on the x-axis. Also, you should try to keep parts low in the jaws. That, of course, is impossible. Much of the time, you have to rest things on 123 blocks or parallels. It’s not clear to me whether the y-axis pressure has to be exerted low in the jaws, or whether the thing that actually matters is the z-axis pressure, which would presumably be translated to the ways by the parallels. If the latter alternative is right, then the parallels don’t matter.

Anyway, today I’ll put an indicator on the vise, measure the rise, and see if I can adjust it. It has a set screw that helps keep the moving jaw down.

I am going to have to grit my teeth and start machining methodically. So far, I’ve been so excited about having the mill, I’ve been winging it, just to see the chips fly. But that’s no good in the long run. You have to calculate feeds and speeds. And you have to plan your cuts, in order. It’s like doing a science lab in college. I used to write chronological lists before my labs, and they got me out a lot faster and saved me mistakes.

Sometimes doing one operation before another can make life really hard, or it may make the rest of the job impossible. And when you use an edge finder which takes a collet which won’t hold your cutting tool, and which uses a way different z setting, forgetting to take all the right measurements at the right times can cause you real agony. Loosen nut. Tap nut. Collet out. Chuck in. Tighten nut. Raise knee. Realize you need another measurement. Lower knee. Loosen nut. Tap nut. Chuck out. Collet in. Do this three or four times in half an hour, and you will develop a real enthusiasm for checklists. And trying to remember four-digit DRO measurements will give you a serious hankering to master your DRO’s memory functions.

I also have to learn to use some kind of design software for layout. This may well be the task that results in my being fitted for adult diapers and a jacket that buckles in the back. All software is written BY nerdy engineer types. That’s bad. What is infinitely worse is software written FOR nerdy engineering types. They don’t even try to make it usable. People discussing these applications like to throw the phrase “learning curve” around, to help you understand just how screwed you are. That’s where I am now. At the base of a learning curve resembling Mount Crumpet in the original Grinch cartoon.

“Click to see tutorial.” Okay, but what do I click to get a tutorial to help me understand the tutorial? At times like these, I wish I lived near the Mexican border so I could drive across and buy Thorazine. But a month or two from now, I’ll be very glad I got adjusted and attacked these hurdles. I was a great lab student because I surrendered, acknowledged my severe mental deficiencies, and took appropriate steps. Machining should be no different.