Stuff is Happening

I made my pineapple upside-down banana nut cake, and I wasn’t that happy with it. A lot of the pineapple sauce leaked out, so it needed more, and I was out of pineapple stuff, so I was stuck. Also, I was not totally pleased with the way it went with rum raisin ice cream.

I thought it would be fantastic served hot, and when it wasn’t quite fantastic, I figured the sauce was the problem. Then I stuck it in the fridge, and later, I tried a cold slice. It was magnificent! Very odd. You would think hot would be better, but this cake definitely has to be served cold.

I didn’t get a chance to try it cold with ice cream. It was too good to keep. I had to throw it out. I could have given it to friends at church (in fact, I got hollered at for failing to do so), but I don’t know if I could have avoided eating it before I got a chance to deliver it.

I used a 9″ springform pan. That was a mistake. I can’t remember why I used a springform pan in the past. It’s not a bad idea, but the cake is too tall, and 9″ is the wrong diameter, because you can only fit 4 pineapple slices in it. And you have to have extra-wide foil to keep the sauce in the pan. Next time I think I’ll go to 10″ and use wider foil.

In other news, I changed my oil today. “Big deal,” right? Well, it IS. First of all, it looks like vehicle dealers have universally adopted a strategy of jamming oil plugs so they’re impossible to remove. I think they do it to force you to come back for help. I had this problem with the Harley, and today I had a tough time getting the plug out of the Dodge. An impact driver had no effect. I finally put a half-inch socket wrench on it and basically military-pressed it open. I would guess I put over a hundred pounds of force on the wrench. There is no reason for an oil plug to be that tight.

I had a lot of fun dealing with almost 3 gallons of dirty oil and removing the air inlet hose to get to the filter. The truck is so tall, I have to stand on a box to work under the hood. On the up side, there’s tons of room under it.

Anyway, by the time I was done, my arms were pretty much black from the fingers halfway to my elbow, and I had blood on my shirt from a cut I still haven’t found. It ought to be worth it, however, because I can go 37,500 miles before my next oil change.

I used Amsoil and an Amsoil filter, for the best possible performance. That meant changing the oil myself, because I couldn’t find anyone around here who would do the change and just charge for labor.

I also had fun moving my spare tire back to the storage doodad under the truck bed. I got up on the side of the truck and started to shove the tire toward the back, and I felt a horrible sensation in my side. I still don’t know what it was. Now I have a sore spot between my ribs. And to make things even more pleasant, this happened before I did the oil change, so I got to enjoy feeling the soreness increase while I was struggling to drag myself around under the truck.

Once you get past a certain age, you can hurt yourself badly enough to justify an ER visit, just by breaking wind without warming up.

I’m trying to get the garage fixed up. I threw out some of my beloved scrap items. A big box of Cat 5 wire, spools of copper wire, the steel frame from a desk, and so on. I know I’ll need all of it ten minutes after the garbage truck comes by, but I have to de-clutter. If only I had a shed…no, TWO sheds…and a barn…with a lean-to…and a blimp hangar…

I have been going nuts trying to build a Telecaster-type guitar from six slabs of walnut, and I finally decided to accept reality and order a jointer. I got my planing sled to work, and I even put feed tables on my wonderful DeWalt planer, but you know what? It still sucks. I pretty much solved the planer jointing problem, but I just don’t care. It sucks.

I watched a woodworking video last night, and the old guy doing the work grabbed a piece of wood and tossed it on the jointer, and BANG, he was done. In about seven seconds. I wanted to strangle him.

I started thinking about the horror of mounting wood on the planing sled, lifting the planer onto a table, using duct tape to cobble together a dust collection scheme, and then fighting snipe, and for a time, I went insane. I found out it was possible to use credit card points to get the price of a jointer down so low they almost paid me to take it, so I gave up and pulled the trigger.

This is one reason I need room.

I decided on a Rikon 10″ jointer/planer combo. Wait! Shut up! Don’t lecture me! I know it’s not a classic 8″ Powermatic, and I will even admit that some nutcase just sold a like-new Powermatic for $500 on the local Craigslist. But I needed something small, and I wanted to be able to joint wide stuff. The Rikon is a blatant copy of an old machine made by Inca, and people still love the Inca machines and pay high prices for them. I feel sure it will work for my needs, and it has a neat stand with wheels, and it doesn’t weigh three tons or whatever the Powermatic weighs, and it doesn’t have a forty-foot wingspan.

Sometimes you have to compromise.

Jet makes combo machines for much less, but nearly everyone who reviews them says leprosy is more fun than getting a Jet to work, so I couldn’t make myself face the risk. Seriously, the reviews are like little treatments for brief horror films.

I made myself a router fence so I could do edge-jointing on the router, but I started thinking of the geometry-based ramifications my project would involve, and I realized it would be a torment straight from hell’s pit, so there’s another reason to throw in the towel.

Making the router fence was surprisingly hard. The table saw is the tool from paradise. It does everything with microscopic precision and drug-fantasy ease, and it made the parts in no time at all. But putting them together…not fun. It turns out you can’t screw into the side of 1/2″ MDF, even with pilot holes. I had to go with all-glue construction, and I had to make the fence parts perfectly square. I don’t know if glue is strong enough to hold this thing together under stress, but there is no other way to do it. We will see.

I have an idea for combining angle iron and scrap wood to make a dynamite router fence that will slide on my Biesemeyer rails. That would be beautiful. I could just order a short Biesemeyer fence, but that would cost a pile. It’s impossible to buy a pro fence, by itself, used.

I now have a spiffy restored vintage Stanley No. 6 plane (cheap!), but I have to learn how to use it, and I don’t think I’ll regret getting the jointer. It has become clear to me that I need to learn to use a bench plane and a shoulder or rabbet plane, in order to have any type of respect for myself as a man. There are too many problems they solve quickly. You can’t witness them in action and then not lust for them mindlessly.

I may still be inept, but I continue to strive. Success, or at least the comforting illusion of success, comes incrementally. It’s sort of like socialism in the USSR before it all went down the toilet and the whole country got a reality check from the back of Reagan’s hand.

Now if I could only find my tape measure…