Mouse Poop Rearranged

Went to church today and helped the team REVOLUTIONIZE the kitchen. Stuff was moved. Crap was discarded. We only nearly set the place on fire once.

I have an entire room for pizza production now. Sort of. Part of it is dedicated to storage. But basically, it’s my own pizza empire.

Found out they sold one of my cheesecakes today. Every last slice. They have one left for tomorrow. And now we have a beautiful refrigerated display case for my desserts.

God is great. Food is pretty good. Using big tools to pulverize entropy in a disorganized church kitchen is the bomb.

And they sent a busted handtruck home for me to weld together. I love it.

Cheesecake Assault

I had an incredible weekend.

First, I made three blueberry cheesecakes for church. I stuck two in the walk-in cooler, and we sold the third. People were oohing and ahhing. If I could only get the women to quit dieting…

It’s no wonder they want to diet. They refuse to drink diet soda. Must be an island thing. We don’t even have diet soda in the fountain. I guess all those Pepsis add up, and then you can’t have cheesecake.

Second thing: I got a key to the church kitchen. FINALLY. I was driving the guy who passes out keys crazy. I even went to his Facebook page and posted “Isaiah 22:22!” Now I can get in there and DO things. Today a bunch of us plan to tear through the kitchen and utterly abolish the disorder. I’m going to take some tools so I can hang a clock.

Third thing: I was feeling frustrated and sort of unappreciated because I could not get a key to the kitchen, and it seemed like the Armorbearers were in a rut. I couldn’t help them get them to communicate so we could organize to do things. But I got the key, and then the Armorbearers had a fantastic meeting after church. We managed to get a couple of things worked out. We’re planning to bring a guy in to give us krav maga lessons, and we’re gearing up for paintball. One of the younger guys suggested it. He said it builds unity. I don’t know about that, but it sure builds welts.

I had dinner with some Messianic Jews on Friday. They want to form an AB squad for their synagogue, and they want to go to the range with us and get CCW permits. Hopefully, we can work that out.

I talked with one of my chefs yesterday, and we made some tentative plans about equipment and food. I’m checking stuff out at Instawares. I plan to take some of my beautiful Chinese cookware with me today so people can check it out and see if we should order some, and I think I’m going to donate some of my useless, overpriced Japanese knives. They have gathered dust for three years, at least. I don’t like giving cast-off stuff to the church, but these are too good to throw out, and I refuse to use them here.

Life is sweet, thanks to God.

More

This is from a friend named Celeste. Found it on Facebook.

I cry out with my whole heart; hear me, O Lord! Psalm 119:145
Family, PLEASE I am asking for urgent prayers for my brother Jim who is in the hospital. They are running tests and we are praying for a miracle. Thank you. xo

Not by Sight

I should finish writing about my trip to Washington, DC, for the National Day of Prayer. I left you at the National Holocaust Memorial.

After our tour, Mike and I were stuck in the city. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews had a dinner scheduled, and we did not have enough time to go home and shower. We made our way to the Crowne Plaza on K Street and headed downstairs to the banquet room.

They had a table set up, with little gift bags for everyone. I got a package of Dead Sea girly stuff. Mud pack or something. We also received Rabbi Eckstein’s latest CD. He sings.

We met a number of donors and IFCJ staffers. One of the staffers is a food critic. She said she would like to see my cookbook. I didn’t know what to say about that. It’s not the kind of material Christians ordinarily read.

The Rabbi showed up, and each of us got to pose for a photo with him. Very nice guy. Not stand-offish at all. No entourage. No hovering assistants to keep donors away. He even posed with Mike, who, as I have noted before, isn’t even a donor!

We sat at our tables in the banquet room, and food started coming out, and speakers appeared. I was amazed that prayer in the name of Jesus was tolerated.

I shouldn’t even have to point out that almost all of the donors were Christians.

The Rabbi spoke. He said he did not want to talk politics, but he referred, in a general way, to the problems Israel was having with the current U.S. administration. Barack Obama is not a conservative Christian, and he does not have the pro-Israel attitude conservatives expect when they nominate a candidate. He sees Israel and the Jews as spoiled by previous administrations, and he is determined to bring about “even-handedness” in our dealings in the Middle East.

“Even-handedness.” There are about 15 million Jews on earth. They have one tiny country they can flee to when persecuted. They have 1.2 billion Muslim counterparts, many of whom are determined to destroy Israel, and many of whom hope to exterminate the Jewish people. But our President wants “even-handedness.”

I can’t tell you how good it felt, watching an Orthodox rabbi tell us he was frustrated by a liberal administration and pleased to have the support of conservative Christians.

He gave us a song or two, using a beautiful guitar a supporter made. And we heard from some other speakers, and then we had conversation.

My table was wonderful. We started talking about weapons and tools and so on. We had a Pentagon employee (Army, I think) and a retired military guy and his wife, and most of us were on exactly the same frequency. Linda (the IFCJ rep who invited me) told everyone about my cookbook and my guns and tools, and we started exchanging information and opinions.

I think Mike was a little weirded out. We were sitting with total strangers, yet there was an instant rapport. We were talking about prophecy and how America was declining, and one of the guys started quoting Perry Stone, whom I have mentioned to Mike many times. Everyone wanted to know about concealed carry and reloading and so on, and I told them what I knew.

There was one couple–Baptists, probably–who seemed almost taken aback by the passion and conviction we all displayed. But the rest of us were completely caught up, like no other group at the dinner. I told Mike that when you start walking by faith, this kind of thing happens all the time. I said, “It’s going to keep happening for the rest of your life.”

By the end, we were talking like old friends.

The next morning, Mike and I got up and headed for DC again, to hear the Israeli ambassador. His name is Michael Oren, and we were scheduled to hear him at the Ninth Annual Israel Solidarity Event, at the Israeli Embassy!

I spent four months on a kibbutz in 1984, and for a long time, I’ve longed to return to Israel. The embassy is considered part of Israel, so it was a pretty good substitute.

We met some of our new friends outside the security building, and we made our way through the metal detector. It was odd to hear the peculiar, brusque Israeli accent again as the guards and staffers worked to get us checked in.

Before we began, a pianist and singer performed Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel. Funny thing, it’s based on the same folk melody as Smetana’s Die Moldau, which was one of my mother’s favorite pieces of music. When Hatikvah was banned by the British Mandate, some radio stations played Die Moldau in order to get around the prohibition.

The Star-Spangled Banner followed.

Christian speakers including Gary Bauer preceded the ambassador. They talked about the worldwide increase in anti-Semitism and the need to stand by Israel’s side in these strange times. Once again, prayer in the name of Jesus was permitted. Amazing.

I believe the only Israeli speakers were Noam Katz (Minister for Public Diplomacy) and Michael Oren. If memory serves, Mr. Katz openly admitted that American conservative Christians were the best friends Israel had. It may have been Ambassador Oren, but I don’t remember it that way. In any case, it was stirring. What a change in the Jewish perspective.

Ambassador Oren was wonderful. He’s a historian (born in the US and schooled at Princeton and Columbia), and he told about American’s long association with Israel and the Jews. He told us that one of the Founding Fathers proposed putting Moses and the Hebrews on our national seal, as a metaphor for our crossing the Atlantic and leaving the British behind. The British were our Egyptians. Ambassador Oren also pointed out that a surprising number of early Americans were schooled in the Hebrew language, and many believed it to be the language of heaven.

When the Israelis spoke, a serious-looking young man stood to the side of the podium, staring out over the crowd. I took him to be a Mossad bodyguard. An armorbearer! Just like me, except he actually knew what he was doing.

I found myself seated next to a donor I hadn’t met before. We found ourselves talking a great deal. She and her husband had been at the dinner, and a group had prayed for him, and his ear had been healed. She complained that now he could hear her muttering about him!

She asked about my church, and I told her about Trinity, and that we belonged to the Assemblies of God. The woman I was talking to said she thought it was a sign that she should check out a local AG church she had wanted to visit. A lady in front of us turned around and said she was AG, too. I seem to have made a much better impression on people than I had any right to.

I told her what I could about charismatic Christianity. I believe prayer in the Spirit builds us up (as the Bible claims), and that it gives us faith and changes us from within.

Naturally, I also talked to her about food. I took her email address and told her she could have any recipe she wanted. Since then, we have corresponded. Her husband’s ear, which had been screwed up for years, is still fine.

I was glad I had managed to be of some use. When you walk by faith, God chooses the people you meet.

I touched the stones of the courtyard on the way out, saying goodbye to Israel once again.

I can’t tell you everything that happened on Saturday; it’s fairly private. We went to the air and space museum at the Smithsonian. I felt like God was showing me the wonders he had done for this country before it turned away from him. I wondered what was in store, as our rebellion continued.

On Sunday, Mike and I went to church. His wife wanted to take their son fishing, so they didn’t go. But Mike was very gung-ho. I got him to go to Trinity Assembly of God in Lanham, Maryland. I found it on the web a while back, and it looked promising. And how about that name? Same as my church in Miami Gardens.

We got to the church, and I told Mike to pick seats for us. I was confident that God would do something weird with his choice. We ended up near the back on the right.

The music was very good, and I even knew some of the songs. I guess charismatics tend to gravitate toward the same hymns.

Mike has been having some difficulties with his family. I don’t want to say more than that. Guess what day God picked to get us in church together? Mother’s Day. The whole service was about wives and mothers. Very appropriate.

Before things really got going, we heard some testimony from a lady whose prayer for a baby had been answered. When I heard her voice, it was another great surprise. Many of the people in the church were black, but until she spoke, I didn’t know they were island people. Just like Trinity in Miami Gardens! How did that happen? We were in Maryland, not Florida. They had Hispanics, too. The pastor’s name is Tino. The only other Tino I know goes to Trinity.

The pastor had us pray sort of randomly early on. This is not unusual at a charismatic church. Mike and I went at it, and as we did, each of us felt a big hand land on his shoulder. An older man in the row behind us was praying for us, asking God to take us in hand and change us and make us his instruments. It was wonderful. I turned and thanked him.

When the prayer was done, the pastor sent a Mother’s Day bouquet to his own mother, who was attending. The person with the flowers walked right toward us and then past us. To a lady in the row behind us. Standing next to the man who prayed. Evidently, Mike chose seats directly in front of the pastor’s dad.

The pastor’s wife gave the sermon. She talked about great female figures in the Bible. Ruth, Esther, Deborah, and so on. But toward the end, she became agitated and kept saying she felt like she had to talk about restoring marriages and families. She started talking about all the things the church had to offer. Counseling and prayer and so on. And she kept repeating, “You have to do the work. You have to do the work!” This is exactly what I tell Mike all the time. You can’t wait to get your life in order before you turn to God, because he’s the one who fixes your life. You have to make time and go.

She became so agitated, she began speaking in tongues, which Mike found a little alarming. But that’s part of the package.

He has gone back to the church since our visit, and I’m hoping he’ll join. How many “coincidences” do you need to witness before you give up and get on board?

I accidentally left my IFCJ gift bag in Mike’s car. Now he’ll have everything he needs, if he decides to do a Dead Sea mud pack.

There wasn’t much more to the trip than that. We went to Five Guys again, and then I got on a plane.

If you read all three installments of the story, it should be obvious to you that I was guided on this trip, and so were the people around me. This is what my life is like these days. I am not perfect in obedience or faith, but I am on the path, and I am seeing God’s power in my life. The Bible says he lifts us out of the miry clay and sets our feet upon a rock and establishes our goings. It is absolutely true.

I wish I had time to write up all the things I’ve seen. I can understand why the Gospels say the world could not contain enough books to hold the complete story of Jesus’s ministry. I’m a nobody, and I can’t even cover what happens to me.

Oxymoron of Oxymorons

Greenie: a person who throws a spastic fit over discarding a plastic bag that weighs four grams, without worrying about the fifteen pounds of garbage inside it.

Jubilee Continues

I keep saying I think this is my “year of God’s favor.” Today I got news that seems to confirm it.

I got sued twice this year over real estate I owned in common with some relatives. We sold land we should have held onto, and we ended up with two frivolous lawsuits because the deals weren’t handled well. A few weeks ago, I found out one of the suits had been dismissed. The court issued an order requiring us to pay a tiny amount to another party. It’s going to cost me about a hundred and thirty bucks. The court didn’t even tell our lawyer. My aunt found out after visiting the courthouse to try to find out what was happening.

The other deal is more interesting. A businessman bought part of a big commercial plot from us, and he tried to get an option on the rest of the property. He failed to pay the entire option fee, so he had nothing when he tried to exercise the option. He had a lawyer send us some BS about suing, and on advice from me and my father, everyone ignored it.

Today we found out he sold part of the land we sold him, and he has been parking cars on our land, next door. I don’t know exactly what he does, but apparently, he has to park a lot of vehicles in order to do business. He sold the land he should be parking stuff on, and he seems to have decided it was okay to park on our land instead. I am assuming the story told to me is correct.

My aunt’s husband taped off the property and notified the sheriff. The businessman’s wife flipped out. I guess this is going to kill their business. Their lawyer now admits they have no option on the rest of the land, so they are completely out of luck. That’s unfortunate for them, but we are under no legal or moral obligation to do anything to help squatters fix a problem they created.

Now, instead of pushing us around with his lawyer, he’s looking at a trespassing suit, and he has no way to do business on the land he bought. We can’t figure out what he was thinking when he sold land that was vital to his business. He may have to quit. If he does, we should be able to buy the land back for less than he paid us.

That’s great for us, because we regret selling the land, and we would like to develop it. We own the parcel next door, and together, they form a large and unique commercial property, in an area where flat land is hard to find.

On top of that, the state condemned another piece of the property a while back, and they have to start moving dirt off of it. We need fill to make our land level; it will increase the value dramatically. It will make the difference between being able to put a convenience store on it and being able to put a Wal-Mart on it. The state’s guy says they’ll be happy to give us 7,000 yards of fill. And when they’re done, the area will get a lot more traffic, and we’ll be at a major intersection, complete with a newly created island of property just perfect for a gas station.

If we can’t get the businessman to sell, we can charge him a lot of money to park his cars until we develop the land.

Crazy. We did our best to screw this up, and God pulled our bacon out of the fire.

My dad asked me if I had any idea what this guy was thinking when he did all these crazy things. I always say that when people do things that are utterly inexplicable, there is probably a supernatural cause. I think God worked it out so the dumb things we did would not harm us as badly as they should have.

Two lawsuits are completely destroyed. We stand a good chance of getting our property back. The state is going to fill our lot. The guy who was trying to turn us into victims is going to have to pay through the nose. That’s how it looks.

Isn’t this the kind of thing that happened to Jacob?

I don’t deserve it, but I’ll take it. This sure beats living under a curse.

Escalation

I’m making the jump to 10mm. I decided it was worth it to spend the money and tolerate a slightly larger carry piece.

After reading all the BS, I have come to the tentative conclusion that you need speed to make a handgun bullet expand, and you need a big bullet with lots of penetration if expansion doesn’t occur, and that adds up to “not 9mm.”

The argument never ends, and it is impossible to draw a firm conclusion. Six months from now, I may think I made a big mistake. But you have to make the most of the information you have.

At the gun shop, I talked to a guy who has fired the AK-47 pistol. He says it will do exactly what I want, i.e. provide excellent accuracy and stopping power at short distances. With a laser, it should be the ultimate non-registration vehicle weapon. I may be wrong; I need to take my Vz 58 outside, fold it, and see how it behaves in the truck. If it handles okay, it would be considerably better than the AK, because of the option of using the buttstock.

I would need to be able to secure the rifle when I’m not in the truck. I think a bicycle lock might be the simplest way. I can carry it legally in a nylon bag, but that won’t keep thieves from grabbing it. When I park in an iffy area, the bike lock would add enough security to defeat most of the goofs who are likely to try to steal the gun. There is no way to keep it away from skilled people who really want it.

It’s legal to carry a long gun in a vehicle in Florida, but you have to have it “securely encased,” which means almost nothing. Same rule for pistols. If you put a pistol in the center console of your car, it’s securely encased under my reading of the law. It should be legal to have an AK pistol in a box or zippered bag.

Our gun laws are pretty stupid. Ted Nugent says the Second Amendment is his carry permit, and he’s right. It says we can “keep and bear” arms, and “keep” means “own,” and “bear” means “carry on your person.” The Constitution says we have the right to “own arms and carry them with us.” Unfortunately, the courts and some state legislatures have screwed it up. Imagine living in a state where you can’t have a gun rack in the window of your pickup. It’s un-American.

I can carry the nastiest pistol made just about anywhere I go, as long as I conceal it, but if I let people see it (so they have a chance to react appropriately), I can be charged with a crime. I can’t leave it out on my car seat, even though that’s better concealment than a long shirt. I can’t carry it onto school property, so if I see a young coed being gang-raped, all I can do is wave and say, “How’s it going, guys?” None of it makes any sense. Anyway, I can put an AK pistol in my truck, and I may very well do it. Ordinary pistols just don’t cut it; they’re desperation weapons, for times when you can’t get to a long gun.

One nice thing about 10mm is that it appears I can make handloads which will work beautifully for self-defense. The Speer Gold Dot hollow point has great performance, and they are readily available as components. The .45 HPs I got from Hornady are said to be lame because they don’t expand; I just use them for practice. I found good recipes for 10mm, so I shouldn’t have to do anything but load and shoot. I got a Chrony a long time ago; maybe I could set it up and test the ammo.

Guess I’ll sell the 9mm. Or keep it in case the new gun pops a spring or something.

Shopmade Primer Feed Cap

I made a cap for the primer feed on my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Pretty exciting. By my standards.

I took a piece of aluminum bar stock and turned it down to 0.875″, within a thousandth or two. I used the lathe to drill a 0.316″ hole down the length of the stock. I parted 2″ off and put it in my rotab. I used a 1/4″ mill to bore it out to 0.625″ inside, to a depth of about 3/8″. Then I stuck it back on the lathe, faced it down to size, and put a nice bevelly surface on the top. After that I stuck it on the drill press and used the slide table to put two holes in it for set screws. Now I have to tap the holes and get two screws.

Problem: my tap handle won’t deal with taps as small as the one I need to use, so I have to go to the hardware store and see if they have a cheapo I can get.

This should be pretty sweet. The set screws are a little bit of a risk, since one of them could deform the primer tube, but I think that’s incredibly unlikely. It’s pretty sturdy, and the screws don’t have to be very tight.

If this works, it should solve a lot of the problems caused by Hornady’s cheap plastic primer feed cap and the lack of any meaningful attachment at the lower end of the tube.

Photos eventually.

More

Here’s a photo of the part I made. The blue thing is a coat hanger segment I put in there to keep track of the number of primers in the tube (and to supply the force to push primers into the slide–another thing Hornady didn’t provide for).

If you make one of these for yourself, make the outer diameter about 0.850″. This one is 0.875″, and it almost touches the powder measure on the way up.

The hex screws are not a problem, and they never will be. The amount of force needed to hold this part in place is tiny, so it will never be necessary to tighten the screws to the point where they damage anything.

This thing is infinitely superior to the one that came with the press. It even has more area up top so you can easily feed primers by hand when you need to.

Half of Success is Being Willing to Do Other People’s Jobs

I think I’m going to go out in the garage and start fixing the problems with my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Stabilizing the primer feed tube should be pretty easy; Hornady supplied a very flimsy piece of plastic–about as sturdy as those tiny tables that hold pizza boxes off the cheese–to do the job, but I should be able to produce a more realistic part on the lathe or my rotab. I may open up the slot the primer slide rides in. It’s so tight, a few tiny grains of No. 7 can shut it down, causing even more powder to spill.

The press comes with one primer-feed assembly with two interchangeable feed tubes in different sizes. I think it would have been smarter to make two separate assemblies. They would have been more rigid, and there would be no flimsy plastic involved.

It’s too bad there is no easy way to determine whether a case is primed before sending it to be filled with powder. You can stop the press, lift the case, examine it, and put it back, but that takes a long time, and if you’re making 200 rounds, it takes 200 times a long time.

I am wondering if I should remove the wood I used to shore up the bench under the press and replace it with 5/16″ angle iron. Anything that reduces flex will help. And it would be great to have a lever handle that works, so I can take the existing plastic ball to the gun range and punish it for making me suffer. Some guy makes an ergonomic handle, but I think I can manage to make one for myself.

I don’t know why the dies spin in their sockets. I’m going to look the press over. I hope I didn’t misplace an O-ring or some other part that stabilizes the dies. The set screws are tight, so they’re not the problem. It’s not that the dies turn on their threads. The whole mess turns in the press.

It’s strange that .38 Super causes so many problems, while .45 ACP works pretty well. One problem is that the powder is much finer. I use Unique for .45, and the grains are so big, they take longer to get into the works and cause jams. And the shape of the cases and the level of the powder are such that powder is harder to spill. I use fine-grained No. 7 for .38 Super, and the cases are tall, and the powder fills them pretty far, so spills are much more likely.

Maybe I should start using case lube. It’s supposed to be unnecessary with carbide dies, but “supposed to be” isn’t “is.” I wanted to be able to dye my .38 Super brass, and case lube will make that hard to do, but I should be using a brass catcher instead of relying on paint.

It would be nice to have a steel hub in the press to replace the existing hub, which appears to be pot metal. I’m not positive it’s pot metal, but whatever it is, it’s weak. My first hub broke like cheese, the same way pot metal does. I think the hub will be okay, though. The loss of the first one appears to have been a fluke. I don’t remember what caused it. Maybe a round caught on the old ejection wire and stopped the plate.

The way the plates attach to the press is very primitive. There is a screw which goes down through the plate into the hub, and the plate rests directly on the press table. The amount of pressure between the table and plate depends solely on the torque you put on the screw, and users are advised not to tighten the screw too much, because when the pressure is high, the plate and bed will act like a disk brake. If the screw isn’t tight enough, it can back out. There is nothing to prevent it. There are better ways to do this. In fact, the way Hornady did it is the crudest way possible, apart from relying on gravity and happy thoughts to hold the plate down. It would be nice to have a bearing under the plate and some sort of attachment which can’t be tightened or loosened by the action of the press.

I don’t know if the retainer spring is as good as it should be. They tend to snap after a few hundred rounds, unless you get lucky and get a press that doesn’t pinch the spring too much. I’m wondering why a nitrile O-ring wasn’t used. Maybe they break even more easily. But the existing spring is maybe five thousandths of an inch in diameter (across the wire, not the coil), so there isn’t much metal there to resist wear.

I’m going to look at the press as a fixer-upper, not a failed purchase. I don’t think the problems are fatal. It’s like buying a Harbor Freight lathe; you don’t expect it to work right out of the box. You take it apart, replace the bad stuff, put it back together, adjust it, and THEN it works.

You know what? Grizzly needs to start making ammo presses. Shiraz Balolia is a match shooter, and he developed their gunsmith lathes. I’ll bet they could come up with a superior product for a lot less than what the US makers charge. I’ll bet he already considered it and decided there was no money in it.

I know of no way to fix the wear under the primer-insertion piston. It’s in a location a drill won’t reach, without some sort of exotic 90° adapter. Maybe I can mount the press sideways in my mill and use a Woodruff cutter to gouge out a hole so I can put a sacrificial shim in there. I have to wonder what Hornady’s plan was. I guess you just throw out the press once the hole gets too deep. It’s not a problem yet, but someday it will be.

Spend the Savings on Tagamet and Band-Aids

I just made a bunch of .38 Super rounds on my Hornady Lock-N-Load progressive ammo press.

I have concluded that “progressive” ammo presses are a myth, much like “progressive” politics. If you want the LNL to work, you pretty much have to prime the cases in a separate operation, which takes the “progressive” out of the job. A progressive press should size, deprime, prime, and reload cases, all in one circuit. If you try to do that with the LNL, you will suffer.

The press’s functionality seems to depend largely on the brass and caliber. I do okay with .45 ACP and old brass. Today, sadly, I’m using new Starline .38 Super brass. I don’t know if the primer pockets are tight or what, but you have to smack the lever pretty good to get the primers seated. That causes all sorts of problems. The dies move. Powder spills. The flimsy primer feed apparatus gets shaken out of whack.

When power starts spilling, it creates a cascade of issues. It lodges in the little thing that inserts primers, causing it to stick in the extended position and block the primer-feed slide. It obstructs the slide directly, by getting in the too-tight groove in which it rides. It gets in the threads of every screw, making them hard to remove and insert, and you WILL be removing and inserting them often, as the powder problems escalate.

When powder screws up the primer-feed system, guess what happens? Primers fail to seat. Then you get cases that are open at the bottom when they’re filled with powder. What happens then? More powder gets on the press. It’s a vicious cycle.

I learned some new things about the press’s deficiencies today. Guess how the little piston that inserts primers is activated? The rear end of it–hardened steel–bangs into the cast-iron frame of the press every time you make a round. They made it this way intentionally, if you can believe it. This means a hole gradually opens up in the frame, so the piston doesn’t get pushed as far up as it used to. And how do you fill the hole? Beats me. There is no way to get it under a drill press or mill, so I have no idea how I would open it up enough to put a sacrificial insert in it.

The primer-feed tube has an aluminum inner tube held in by…wait for it…friction. I’m completely serious. A set screw would have been the obvious move. When the press bangs around, an aging primer tube which is looser than it used to be (due to wear on the parts that press together) comes loose at the bottom, creating a cavity where primers pile up. Guess what happens then? Primers don’t seat…and POWDER POURS ONTO THE PRESS.

If someone drew a comprehensive flow chart describing every problem this press can have, I think every path would eventually lead to a box labeled “POWDER POURS ONTO THE PRESS.”

People have told me my press needs to be mounted more securely. It’s on a workbench made from two-by-sixes and two-by-eights. It’s held in by big lag bolts seated in lead retainers. I reinforced the wood directly under the press. You could literally rest a car on this bench without stressing it. The only things that would be sturdier would be concrete, stone, or solid metal. The mounting is not the problem. If the press needs to be mounted more rigidly than this, it’s not fit for consumer use.

Here’s another fun issue: it looks like the spring that lifts the press’s table back into position after every round is too short. It probably got that way after being whacked so hard, thousands of times, to seat primers. When the table doesn’t rise high enough, the primer insertion piston remains raised, obstructing the primer feed slide. Guess what this does? It prevents primers from feeding. No primer, powder in case: POWDER POURS ONTO THE PRESS.

I took the spring out and stretched it a sixteenth of an inch. May be helping a little, but there are so many other problems, it doesn’t matter. I tried putting a washer under it before stretching it, but the table wouldn’t lower enough to seat the primers. The washer raised it too high.

I removed every die except the sizing die, and I tried to run the cases through just to size and prime them. Didn’t work. I had to adjust it over and over. I should have been able to process one case every two seconds, but I got a failure rate of maybe 40%, resulting in many minutes lost while I sorted out the unprimed cases and fiddled with the machine.

Once you get past the nightmare of case priming, the other operations go pretty smoothly, although the press still spills a little powder.

People defend this thing as if their kids made it in shop class for Mother’s Day, but it’s pretty crude. Let’s just admit it; it’s not an insult. There is no shame in making a somewhat less-than-slick product, when you’re a small company in a niche market.

I have lots of Chinese machinery which is made to much higher standards. My Northern Tool band saw is the cheesiest machine I own, and it’s considerably more reliable than the Lock-N-Load. Once the press is set up, I should be able to make fifteen cartridges a minute. I’m lucky if I can make one .38 Super round in that amount of time, although .45 is not nearly as bad.

I think I can fix it. I’m going to put a set screw in the primer feed system, the way Hornady should have. If I don’t do that, I’m going to make a better device at the top of the feed tube, to replace the cheap plastic deal Hornady put up there. One way or the other, I’m going to make that tube stay in place. I’m going to polish the primer slide groove so the slide won’t freeze when three grains of Accurate No. 7 fall behind it. I may even put Loc-Tite on the dies so they quit rotating on me. I’m also going to make a T-handle to replace the horrible ball at the top of the lever. The ball screws on, so every time you pull the lever, you have to be careful not to apply counterclockwise torque, or it starts to come off. The necessary effort can actually cause blisters. I’ve had enough of that. I should go ahead and WELD a handle on it. I’m also going to make a weighted rod to rest on top of the primers in the tube. They don’t move reliably under their own weight, and my old reliable coat-hanger segment is not doing the job.

This thing is just not engineered well. There are too many obvious flaws. I know nothing about engineering, but I am easily able to spot the weak points of the press. A good engineer would have seen these things and fixed them before putting the press on the market.

The new EZ-Ject system works great; I’ll say that. I have had no problems with it. And I think the press is a fine platform to start with, PROVIDED you have a lot of spare time and a garage full of machine tools and scrap metal.

I should make new parts and patent them. But how big is the market? Probably wouldn’t cover the cost of the patents.

I wonder if I could make my own press. I guess it’s a viable project. I have no end of scrap metal. I could not cast the frame the way Hornady does, but with all the metal I have, I ought to be able to build a rigid frame without casting anything. Then I could stick the Hornady parts in it and make it work. Maybe I could machine it from aluminum and then add steel parts in areas where wear is an issue.

I had what I think is a clever idea today. I don’t have a brass catcher, and I’m tired of losing .38 Super brass, so today I sprayed 100 bullets with Dykem. Now I should be able to spot my blue cases a mile away. I was worried that it might cause feeding issues, but then I realized, Dykem is so thin it doesn’t worry machinists, who have to worry about tiny tolerances. If it’s okay for them, it should be okay for me.

We’ll see. Worst-case scenario, I have to wipe it off with rubbing alcohol.

Some day I have to get a brass catcher.

Israel’s Enemies Poison Their Own Harvest

Busy day yesterday. Laid out 6 dozen garlic rolls, baked 4 dozen, and had to discard the rest. Made lots of pizza. Put brownies out in clear boxes for the customers to see. Fortunately, I had some help. The 11-year-old son of our church’s head servant leader showed up and worked with me. This kid is going to be a CEO some day. Show him something twice, and the third time, he’ll start without you.

Needs to realize that cleaning up is part of the job, however.

The guy who runs the church’s cafe during the week says the building’s business tenants go nuts over the brownies. The congregation isn’t as crazy about them. I decided to bake tons of brownies and store them in the walk-in cooler, so the weekday team can get them out as needed. Brownies keep for eternity, so I should be able to bake 6 half-sheets a month and cover our needs pretty efficiently.

The Armorbearers ended up talking in the parking lot. Unfortunately, one of the younger guys brought up paintball. So now I may have to participate in that. They say those paintballs sting pretty good. I may have to hide a sheet of MDF in my Depends.

We also talked about the need for martial arts training. I suggested krav maga. One of the top instructors lives in Miami. It would be pretty cool, defending God’s house with a system developed by God’s people, in God’s country. And you don’t have to be in great shape to do it, which is a plus for me. I contacted the instructor, and he’s available.

Speaking of God’s people, Israel is in the news. A “peace flotilla” including one ship full of armed hooligans approached her coast, and the IDF boarded the problem vessel, and Israel’s soldiers were attacked. Naturally, Israel’s enemies are portraying her as the aggressor. Pray that God will humiliate and abase the liars, and that Israel will emerge unscathed.

The Bible uses the terms “flood” and “waters” to describe the waves of slander and lies the enemy uses to afflict God’s people. You can see it over and over in the Psalms. False witness is a great evil, and it brings suffering on those who utter it. The Psalms tell us God protects the righteous from it.

The Old Testament uses the term “leprosy” (“tzara’at”) to describe the curse that comes from slander. It doesn’t mean the disease we think of as leprosy; that illness probably did not exist in the Middle East in the time of Moses. It refers to other disfiguring illnesses, as well as a type of rot that attacks a person’s house. God used to make the walls of the homes of liars rot, in order to publicly expose them as people who lied in private. If you routinely lie about people, and your home is falling apart, and your plans always seem to come to nothing, you might want to ask yourself if you’re causing your own problems.

I know a person who spews a never-ending flow of slander and accusation, and this person is a complete failure and outcast (like a leper) and lives in a home which is literally rotting. I know another who behaves the same way, and that person has a miserable life which has amounted to nothing. I believe tzara’at, in one form or another, is still with us. It reminds me of what Wiccans believe: if you try to curse a righteous person, the curse comes back to you. They’re probably right. Some slanderers have supernatural protection from the enemy, but that protection goes away when the righteous attack it in prayer or the enemy no longer finds the slanderers useful. My guess is that the delayed payback carries interest.

Since learning about tzara’at, I’ve been much more careful about what I say. Israel’s enemies could benefit from the same lesson. God spoke the world into existence, and he spoke the eternal blessing on his people into existence, and he speaks curses into existence, and everything he speaks eventually comes to pass, except for punishments which he decides to withhold. Our words have power, too.

I think that when a believer prays in tongues, he speaks God’s blessings and power into his life and the lives of those around him. That’s like having a fountain that waters your crops and drowns your rats and bugs (like a flood) every day. The words come from the Holy Spirit, which is God, so what you say is God’s word, as much as the Bible. Pouring that “living water” into the world has to be a good thing.

It’s surprising how much power words have, even in the natural sense. Think about it. Our laws are words, so when a criminal is imprisoned or put to death, in actuality, he is jailed or killed by words. When you spend a dollar, you are relying on the words printed on it, which say our government backs it up. The words, not the paper, buy the goods you need. A declaration of war is words. A marriage is made by pronouncing words. All contracts are made of words. When you face foreclosure, words take away your house. The Bible even tells us God dispatches his angels using words, and we know that one angel killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night.

When Edward Bulwer-Lytton said the pen was mightier than the sword, he was not kidding. A hydrogen bomb is useless without someone to write the words allowing its deployment.

Even computers are powered by words. How do you tell a computer what to do? How do you create an application? You use a programming “language.”

Understanding the power of words should help us grasp the importance of prayer. It is literally more powerful than anything you do with your mind or your hands. Everything is established in prayer, or in blessings and curses. The work we do in the natural is just execution.

Israel will never go under. God’s flood is deeper than Satan’s. It’s sad that her soldiers were hurt, but in the end, Israel will be buoyed up like the Ark.

Flavor 7, Presentation 1

Mike gave me a secret suggestion for improving commercial cake mix. I tried it, and the texture is very good. Problem: it still tastes artificial, even though I substituted butter for vegetable oil. That part is not Mike’s fault, however.

Why does commercial cake mix taste like chemicals? Maybe they’ve managed to stick canola or dried milk or something in there, to make it taste bad. I guess I need to work out a scratch recipe. If “need” is the right word.

I also tried a frosting recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. I would call it “okay.” It needs more salt and maybe more vanilla, and so far, the texture is goopy. Not like real frosting. Maybe it needs to cool.

I decided to fool with this after trying some Misha’s cupcakes. This is a Miami company some lady started a while back. I saw a Misha’s store, and then I saw Misha’s cupcakes in a grocery store, and I started wondering how a cupcake could be so good you would make a special effort to get it. Let’s face it. Cupcakes are generally dry and boring.

Misha’s cupcakes are very good. For one thing, they’re short, so you don’t end up with a mile of cake and a tiny layer of icing. Also, the cake is moist, without that fake taste commercial mixes have. I guess anyone could have done what this lady did, if they had just applied common sense. It makes you wonder why 99% of the cupcakes you see at bakeries are dry and worthless.

I will probably never have another Misha’s cupcake, simply because I don’t care about cupcakes. But if I were a cupcake guy, I’d be there every day.

The sad part of discovering Misha’s cupcakes is that it has made me realize that making a decent cake is hard. The one I just made had some structural failures while I was assembling it, and then I realized I had forgotten the layer of icing that goes in the middle.

Tastes pretty good, if you close your eyes while you eat it.

10mm Looking Better All the Time

Here is some possibly useless news.

1. Midway USA has all sorts of pistol primers. I just got a cascade of product-arrival emails. Stock up, I guess.

2. Charlie Crist has suspended the fishing license requirement for the State of Florida, through the long weekend. Hooray for all concerned.

I may run by the gun shop today to talk about 10mm and an AK47 pistol. My big concern about the AK is that it may be impossible to find a place where I can shoot it. Trail Glades doesn’t allow people to shoot rifles with the stocks folded, and this is essentially the same thing. I better call.

A 10mm Glock looks like a really good defense choice. You can get ammunition that expands to about 1″ in diameter. That’s not bad for a pistol round. And it penetrates way better than a 9mm.

I keep reading up on this stuff. It’s very confusing. Back when I chose my first Glock, in .40 S&W, my understanding was that heavy rounds could work against you, because of conservation of momentum. I won’t go into the physics, but it works like this: the heavier a bullet is, the farther it can penetrate. There is more to it than that, and I am not going to publish distracting wise-guy comments about sectional density. Type them if you want, just for the finger exercise. Comments like that lead to boring comment threads that annoy everyone and don’t shed any light on anything. People who are interested in splitting hairs can always go to Stoppingpower.net.

Anyway, the theory was this: a round that penetrates too far before expanding won’t achieve much. You get a tunnel about the same diameter as the bullet, plus two small entry and exit wounds.

Now I’m reading stuff claiming that you want the deepest penetration possible, because handgun bullets don’t expand reliably, and that tunnel is all you can count on. If the bullet doesn’t expand, you want it to go all the way through the perp, to do as much harm as possible.

I’m also reading that there are 10mm rounds out there that reliably expand to about 1″ in diameter.

Putting all the BS together in a bag and shaking it, I tentatively conclude that 10mm is a very good choice, when you are limited to a sad little pistol instead of a long gun. If it doesn’t expand, you get good penetration, and if it does, you get lots of damage from the expansion. And it should do a nice job penetrating car doors and such.

I know I can shoot this round very well, because I shoot the .50 AE very well. I am not going to faint because of a little recoil. I shot the .50 AE well while the shells were coming back and hitting me in the middle of the forehead hard enough to cause bleeding, so I think I can deal with a gun that has half as much muzzle energy.

If you think you’ve done things at the range that made you feel stupid, wait until you find out you’ve been shooting yourself in the head over and over with spent cartridges. You don’t feel it until you quit shooting, and by then, you’re already bleeding.

I am convinced that worries about bullets exiting perps and hitting babies and Boy Scouts and visiting Popes and so on are the stuff of Internet-forum hysteria, and the FBI, in an internal document, has taken pretty much the same position. The odds of hitting an innocent person with a spent round are incredibly slim, while the odds of being killed by someone who wasn’t hurt badly enough by your wimpy pistol ammunition are very high. And if you shoot at a criminal and kill someone else, guess who gets charged with the crime? The criminal. It’s called felony murder. Look it up. I got confused and called it “capital murder” the other day. Hey, I’m not a criminal lawyer, plus I’m old. I’m sure there are exceptions for negligence and so on, but the solution is simple: don’t be negligent.

Felony murder is wonderful. Criminals can be charged with the murders of the accomplices the cops shoot. I think.

The idea that there is a wonderful bullet out there, which goes into a perp exactly the right distance, does exactly the right things, and stops without hitting your kids seems facially farcical to me. It’s a lot to ask from a mindless piece of metal. I say power up, shoot to kill, and use common sense. One of the cardinal rules of shooting is, “Be sure of your backstop.” I don’t care how nerve-wracking a shooting situation is; you ought to be able to make some minimal effort not to shoot toward a crowded playground or a session of Congress. If you can’t, then the perp has taken that option away, and he, not you, bears the legal responsibility.

I am not giving legal advice here; I’m just blathering on a blog. If it turns out the laws in your state are different, it’s your problem, not mine. I don’t see the “I read it on a blog” defense as highly viable. Even Tim Geithner had a better excuse than that.

The idea that all calibers are equally effective is also silly. Some do more damage than others, and more damage means a better chance of your survival, especially if your shot placement isn’t perfect. If a 10mm is 10% better than a 9mm, it seems like a smart move to me.

You could say that the extra bullet you get by staying at 9mm gives you at least a 10% advantage. But how likely are you to get to the point where you use that bullet? Besides, extra Glock magazines are small and light.

The stuff about expansion and penetration makes me wonder if I’ve underestimated the .50 AE as a defensive round. The big problems with it are the high likelihood of misfeeds, the low magazine capacity, and the distinct possibility that a stray round will enter your garage and kill one of your vehicles. And then there’s that bleeding-forehead thing.

There is no perfect solution, but trying to work it out is too much fun to quit.

Little Plastic Boxes Filling Up

I finally got my ammunition press going. Last night I produced 100 rounds of .38 Super.

Every time I start the press, I find a new way for it to screw up. Last night I had to remove debris from inside the little spring-loaded primer-insertion doodad. It was sticking up about half a millimeter, blocking the primer slide. What a pain. It’s almost as if Hornady worked on finding ways to make this press break down. I guess there is a limit to the R&D a small company can do.

I’m down to two shell plate retainer springs. This is a weird item. They break all the time, so you have to keep spares on hand. Midway sells them for $2 each or…$6.69 for three.

Buy in volume and lose money! What a concept!

Hornady advises people to smooth out the rough edges the spring contacts. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you this until you call them up and ask them why the spring keeps breaking. I don’t know of a good tool for removing a knife edge from a curved slot. Is a deburring tool the right thing? I don’t know. Hornady says to use sandpaper. If I had a tiny ball end mill, I could mount this thing in the rotary table and have at it.

In order to get 100 rounds of .38 Super, I had to run 105 cases through. Five times, the primer system failed, leaving the primer pockets open so powder escaped onto the press. I also had to guide the rounds into the sizing die. That may be a pawl-adjustment issue, but I don’t think so. I think the plate doesn’t grip the brass well enough to align it reliably. Maybe Hornady made the shell pocket too wide. As I recall, the .45 plate and die work much better.

I plan to make as much .38 Super as I can stand to produce. I think I have about 400 bullets left, and maybe 300 cases. Might as well crank it all out now so I don’t have to set the press up more often than necessary.

I may get a Hornady Powder Cop die, to make sure the charges are uniform. Seems like cheap insurance against death and mayhem.

I was upset because my powder measure, which has an expensive pistol micrometer thing on it, was throwing charges that were off by up to 0.2 grains. I started looking for a better powder measure. I read that the Lyman #55 was better, and I considered ordering one. Then I read that the accuracy I was getting was actually about as good as I could hope for without using a trickler, so I decided to forget about it. Now I’d like to do some super-accurate charges and see if it affects my shooting. If it did, I would be the king of the gun range. Then, of course, I would be obligated to lie and say I was reloading the same way everyone else does.

I did some research on 7.62x39mm ammunition last night. I learned something interesting. Most of the cheap Russian hollowpoints don’t expand too well. I have read that they do fall apart and yaw, and that’s good, but expansion is what you hope for when you buy hollowpoints. It turns out two brands expand: Wolf Military Classic and Silver Bear match ammunition. So if you, like me, like cheap Russian ammunition, this may be helpful to you. Now I have to shoot all my second-rate ammunition and make room for the good stuff!

Hornady makes V-Max bullets in this size (for reloading), and they’re supposed to be great, but the bullets alone run like 20 cents each, so the cost is not low.

Increasingly, I am drawn to the idea of getting an AK pistol for the truck. A truck allows for bigger weapons than concealed carry, but it’s not as big and roomy as a house, so there is good reason to look for a short gun. The AK pistol should give much better accuracy in real-world situations than a pistol, plus higher capacity and infinitely better ballistics. And you can even put a laser on it. I mean a real laser, not a dinky red one you can barely see ten feet away.

The more I think about the shortcomings of pistols, the more convinced I am that I should avoid depending on one. They are absolutely pathetic compared to long guns. Not even in the same ball park. I feel like Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under. “Never had much use for one.” I’m a very good pistol shot and just an okay rifle shot, but an okay rifle shot is still many times more lethal than a world-class pistol shot.

I had another fun tool experience. My Sears Craftsman mechanic’s stool busted. It has two tubes under it which receive the supports for the backrest. One of the tubes popped off. It had been welded in place, but two welds were bad, and the third was mostly imaginary.

I considered calling Sears to see if their tool warranty applied, but their site says it only applies to hand tools. I decided to try to fix it. I got out my little Proxxon grinder and cleaned up the metal, and then I fastened the tube in place as well as possible with magnets. I fired up the welder and either welded or glued the part in place. I was working in a tiny area, and I can’t tell whether I achieved a real weld, but I stuffed lots of melted steel in there, so if it’s not a weld, it’s acting like glue, and that should be good enough. The part turned a little on its axis while I welded, but it’s straight. The little knob that goes into the tube to fasten the backrest in place now goes in at a slight angle, but no one will ever notice. This sure beats paying $80 for a new stool.

I wonder why Lincoln doesn’t make a skinny nozzle for tight places. Maybe they do. I would love to have a tiny TIG or MIG welder that only goes up to 20 gauge steel.

Tools are life. A man with no tools is wretched, indeed.

Time for 9mm to Go?

I wanted to write the third installment in the story of my trip to Washington for the National Day of Prayer, but I’m not feeling it right now. I got my reloading press working last night, I have piles of brass and powder and primers, and I want to crank out some .38 Super ammunition.

Yesterday while giving the birds some out time, I watched one of those reality shows featuring security videos and such. They showed a nutcase shooting up a tow yard office with an AK and a 9mm pistol. Learned a few things.

First of all, outer walls are really bad cover. I knew that already, from people yammering at me about it in comments, but it was really something to see it proven on video.

The tow yard was in a place called Lake City. I can’t find a Lake City Towing in Florida, using the web. There’s one in Wisconsin. If it’s the one in Florida, the walls are probably concrete. In any case, the rounds went through with no problem, nailing a lady in the rear end.

They had some kind of clear barrier between the office and the waiting area, and I guess it blocked bullets. But the wall below it was worthless. They probably didn’t think about reinforcing it when they added the plastic barrier. And the nut was able to shoot through the little hole where they passed papers and money back and forth.

If this character had been a good shot, he would have killed several people.

When the cops came, one pretty much emptied a pistol into him, but he kept making trouble until an employee came out and shot him some more. The shooter still lived to be jailed.

I’ve seen more than one video like this. Some criminal forces the cops to shoot, and it takes seconds or minutes for him to go down, even with multiple hits. During that time, the criminal can kill.

It makes me wonder if 9mm is a good idea. I like my Glock because it’s portable, super-accurate, and reliable, and it holds 11 rounds. But will it save me in a pinch?

I carry nice Cor-Bon ammunition, which is supposed to cause all sorts of damage inside perps, even in 9mm. If you can make someone bleed internally to a degree that it causes them to lose consciousness, you can put them down in a hurry. That’s the theory. But does it work? I feel like I ought to go hog-hunting and find out.

I have considered carrying a 1911, in either .38 Super or .45. The .38 Super is nearly as deadly as .357 Magnum, and the .45 is also excellent. But a big 1911 is a little showy for church, and the rest of the time, it’s just plain heavy. Maybe a compact Glock in .45 is where I need to be. Or the dreaded and disrespected .40, which is definitely better than the 9mm and has a similar capacity. I wonder if Glock does 10mm. That would be just about perfect. People moan about the recoil and controllability, but I have not had any problems handling high-recoil pistols.

Should I keep a shotgun in the truck? A short gun loaded with 00 buckshot would be much better than a pistol, if I got caught in one of Miami’s famous traffic-accident altercations.

An AK pistol would be hard to beat. Cheap and effective. Short, legal barrel. Lots of rounds. And if you lose it to a thief, you won’t lie awake weeping.

I’m also rethinking my ideas on pistol-grip shotguns. I have read that they’re impossible to control, but if you check out Youtube, you’ll see people firing them with very good accuracy, for short-range purposes. A reasonably talented shooter should be able to hit a perp reliably at fifty feet or less, over and over, unless the videos are rigged. With a shotgun, you don’t necessarily have to put the center of the pattern in a vital place. The pellets will go in different directions in the body, so presumably, you can expect probability to be on your side. If nine pellets enter and separate, one or two are likely to hit something important. At least you would think so. And the entry wound should be huge and bloody compared to the entry would made by a pistol round, which tends to make a little tear that closes up on its own.

Pistols are easier to control in theory, but that doesn’t seem to pan out in actual encounters caught on video. I can shoot a man in the eye at 7 yards, over and over, IF he’s not moving and the light is good. In a problem situation, I’ll be shooting 6″ groups, at best. With a shotgun, that might open up to 12″, but again, you have more lead, bigger wounds, and more trajectories, so aren’t you still way ahead?

So maybe a pistol-grip shotgun is a good thing to have in a vehicle. It’s compact, it’s lethal, it’s as accurate in practice as a pistol…what’s not to love? The Box o’ Truth says 00 will penetrate cars, so it sounds like it ought to go through any cover you are likely to have to worry about on the street.

I need to take the Saiga to a range and shoot it without using the buttstock so I can find out. If it works, forget pistols.

I have to get over the idea that pistols are okay for self-defense. They’re a whole lot better than nothing, but most pistol shots miss, and the ballistics are generally pathetic. I have to make myself think of pistols as what they are: something to keep me alive until I can get to a long gun (paraphrasing Col. Jeff Cooper).

How About That Amazing German Engineering?

I hate it when something bad happens, which I could not predict. But then I also hate it when something bad happens that I should have seen coming, because then I kick myself for months for not preventing it. So I don’t know which is worse.

Today I was straightening up the garage so I can actually use it. I was sucking swarf off my workbench, which held the chargers for my impact driver and Bosch hammer drill. I picked up the impact driver charger to vacuum under it, and it touched the Bosch charger, and there was a flash and a popping sound. Afterward, the Bosch charger didn’t work.

This one is new to me. I have no idea why letting one battery charger touch another will cause an explosion.

I am a little tired of silly things going wrong. I decided to march in the house, go on the web, and order a new charger. I didn’t need the aggravation of trying to fix the old one.

But then I looked at all my tools. Sitting there, all lonely and whatever.

I cleared some space and got out a Philips screwdriver, from my stainless rolling chest/cart combination. I moved my magnifying fluorescent lamp over the workbench. I took the stupid charger apart and checked it out.

Here’s something amusing. It has a fuse on the circuit board…which is soldered in place.

I know times are hard, but the logic evades me. I would rather have Bosch spend an extra four cents on a fuse holder and pass the cost on to me.

I put my variable-heat Weller soldering station on the bench and turned it on. I opened up my blister-packaged soldering tool set. I removed the fuse.

I looked for new fuses. I had 4-amp and 2-amp fuses. Why? Search me. This kind of crap just accumulates. I needed 5 amps. Because I have a physics degree, I am just barely savvy enough to know that I can get 6 amps by paralleling a 4 and a 2. That’s pretty close to 5. So I knew I could fix this thing reasonably well without leaving the garage.

I felt tremendous satisfaction. It’s wonderful to be able to DO something with all this junk once in a while.

I obtained a 5-amp fuse anyway, and I’m going to solder it in there whichever way I can. It will not look cute, but then, no one will ever see it. With any luck, the fuse was the only thing damaged, and I’ll be in the clear. If not…INTERNET.

And I’ll be able to say I tried.