The Transformation is Complete

I am completely out of my mind. I ordered a milling machine. I mean, a MILLING MACHINE. Like a cast-iron Tyrannosaurus with an electric mixer where its head should be. I may have to take the motor off to get it in the garage.

I think I did good. I got Taiwanese, with a Chinese DRO and an X power feed. I was going to get a step pulley head, but the distributor shafted my dealer by selling the last pulley machine while we were working on the deal, so they cut him a nice break on a vari-speed machine. It’s a little more expensive, but not much. And I didn’t have to get the coolant system, which I didn’t want, and which was part of the vari-speed package.

I decided not to go with the rigger my dad represents. For one thing, they procrastinated about getting back to him (I had him call), and for another, I don’t think it’s a great idea to have Teamsters who hate my father deliver an expensive object to my home, where they can take a long, leisurely look at my other tools and decide which ones would look better in their garages.

I found a guy who was very helpful on the phone, and who seems professional. He’ll take delivery and bring the mill here for a good price. He’s insured. He will check the mill for damage when it arrives, so I don’t have to. Great. I always make things harder than they have to be, so this is a nice change.

The motor may have to come off. The mill is very nearly the same height as the garage opening. I alerted the seller and the rigger. We’ll see what solution they propose. For all I know, the rigger has a giant machine that can turn a one-ton mill sideways.

What on earth is wrong with me? I guess once you embrace your own eccentricity, nothing is impossible.

On the up side, I really can’t imagine buying another expensive tool. Because now I have one of each. There will always be little tools I’ll want, but no more giant iron hulks.

Man. I have to get a vise, plus some cutters, collets, parallels, and maybe a clamping set. And an edgefinding set, I suppose.

Small strokes.

Tomorrow I’ll try to find time to see if the parting blades I ordered work. If so, it’s lathe party time.

Thanks, everyone who gave me advice.

Prayer Request

Reader Bradford Kleeman says he has a kidney stone about 4mm wide. That is a whopper by my standards. He put in a prayer request, so hop to it.

It Behooves You to Use the Right Thing

I have some lathe tooling on the way, so I’ll finally be able to work the aluminum I bought. Problem: Enco put the cutting oil in a separate package, and it won’t be here until next week. What to do? Nobody around here sells cutting oil.

Do I even have to say it?

Time to buy a can of lard.

Do Not Thank Karl Marx

Happy Shavuot.

If you don’t know what Shavuot is, just call it Pentecost. Same thing.

This is an interesting holiday for charismatic Christians (I hope Aaron doesn’t read this), because, like Passover, it ties the Old and New Testaments together.

To the ancient Jews, Shavuot was the festival of the first fruits, as well as the day God gave the Torah to Moses. When I was living on a kibbutz, I experienced a secular Shavuot celebration with a “first fruits” theme. They brought out young lambs, calves, and items of produce, as well as young girls. These were considered the first fruits of the harvest. By and large, the kibbutzniks were socialists who did not believe in God, but they celebrated their bounty anyway, presumably thanking Karl Marx in their hearts.

In Hebrew, “shavuot” means “weeks.” I think this denotes the seven-week period of counting the Omer, between Passover and Shavuot. “Pentecost” means “fiftieth day,” and Shavuot takes place on the fiftieth day after Passover.

I’m checking some of this via Wikipedia, so blame them if I’m wrong.

To Christians, Pentecost is the day when the baptism of the Holy Spirit first fell on the church. The Apostles were gathered together, presumably to celebrate Shavuot, and the Holy Spirit hit them, and they began speaking in tongues.

The Holy Spirit changed their character and increased their faith. The most obvious example is Peter, who denied Jesus three times before the crucifixion. After he received the baptism, he became a powerful evangelist and miracle-worker, and he bravely met a martyr’s death. Completely different person. Charismatics (more or less the same thing as “Pentecostals”) believe the baptism of the Holy Spirit made the difference, and that we are supposed to experience it today, and that the usual manifestation is the ability to pray in tongues.

People who oppose this viewpoint note that the tongues used by current believers in prayer usually don’t conform to known languages. The original Pentecost story says the disciples spoke in human languages they themselves did not know, and that this was confirmed by converted Jews from other nations, who happened to be in Jerusalem. But charismatics believe the prayer language is a separate gift, and for what it’s worth, there are many accounts of charismatics breaking into known languages while praying in tongues.

Skeptics claim that tongues only manifest themselves so they can be interpreted publicly, but the Bible doesn’t make that exclusion, and there is considerable scriptural support for the concept of a private prayer language. There is no reason both gifts can’t exist. People who claim private prayer language has been ruled out by the mention of public interpretation are making an obvious logical error. If I give you a cookie and a cupcake, and someone asks what I gave you, and you say I gave you a cookie, you’re right, but you haven’t denied that I gave you the cupcake. And the passages the anti-charismatics cite as proof that prayer in tongues is bogus don’t really prove it. Most Bible scholarship isn’t very good, by secular standards. To a lawyer, these things are obvious. I think the charismatics are probably right.

Anyway, many Christians believe the baptism was a big deal, because it put the seed of God’s character within us, where it grows and supplants our own nature, sort of like a bone marrow transplant. Moses received instruction from without, in the form of law. Christians believe the baptism of the spirit gives us instruction from within. The first Shavuot marked the handing down of God’s law, the Torah. If charismatics are right, Pentecost marked the embedding of God’s law in our hearts. It’s the same basic idea, manifested in a different way. And if you look at the psalms, you’ll see tons of prophetic references to people who have God’s law written in their hearts. “The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom, and his tongue talketh of judgment. The law of his God is in his heart. None of his steps shall slide.” Etcetera.

So really, what happened to the disciples can be considered the first fruits of the crucifixion, as well as the day God put the Torah inside men’s hearts. Too bad the church later gave up on the Holy Spirit; we might have been spared anti-Semitic embarrassments like replacement theology and the Crusades. For centuries, most Christians have tried to please God using their old natures and their own strength, and it hasn’t worked very well.

In any case, Shavuot and Pentecost dovetail very nicely, and it’s hard to explain, if God didn’t cause it. “All coincidence,” the naysayers will reply. Oh, well. You can lead a horse to living water.

The Jewish holidays have no end of significance to Christians. For example, some believe the Feast of Tabernacles presages the Messianic Age.

We would all know that, if we hadn’t thrown the Old Testament on the fire, along with the Holy Spirit.

Have a good holiday.

Poorly

Today I threaded my first screw. Kind of.

“Kind of” is a giant exaggeration. I learned how to make the longitudinal power feed and half-nuts work. In other words, the lathe was doing everything it was supposed to do in order to thread properly, but Gilligan was at the helm while the Skipper used the head.

I did, in fact, create threads of sort on a piece of steel. However they were extremely crude, and I managed to snap two corners off a three-cornered carbide insert. I snapped the first corner off by turning the drum shift the wrong way when I was trying to back the tool out of the threads. The tool continued on its way, ramming into the shoulder I had turned earlier. The second insert snapped when I reversed the direction of rotation. Something caught it from behind.

I decided to play with the quick change box, using one setting to erase the threads made using the previous setting. Probably not good practice, but fun.

It doesn’t matter. The point of all this was to learn how to make the lathe work properly. Making me work properly is a separate lesson.

The Clausing instructions aren’t very good. For example, there is a knob on the lathe mounted so the face is perpendicular to the floor, and the directions say it’s engaged when “vertical.” So I guess you snap it off the lathe and turn it on its side. I think “vertical” refers to the positions of the three letters on the front of the knob. If “A” is at the noon position, the “A” setting is engaged. And so on. Seems like it works that way.

I still don’t understand the 29.5-degree business for threading. I can’t say I’ve studied up on it. Since it didn’t matter today, I stuck a threading tool in the tool post, used a dead center in the tailstock to set it on the level of the center of the work, and fed it perpendicularly into the metal. I think it would have worked, had I shot for a coarser thread and avoided running the insert into things. It finally occurred to me to use the VFD potentiometer to control the movement.

The Moly-Dee seems totally wrong for turning. Not that I would know, of course. I was moving the shoulder farther down the work today, using the Moly-Dee as fluid, and it seemed like the AR tool refused to bite until the Moly-Dee burned away, indicating that it was lubricating really well but failing utterly as cutting fluid. WD-40 was even worse. People have recommended Ridgid pipe threading oil as a general cutting fluid, so I have some on the way.

Once the tool started to bite, it produced two types of chips. Tiny straw-colored chips or long blue ones. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe I’m supposed to be shooting for the least color change possible. The tool just sat there unless I applied considerable pressure, so I couldn’t make colorless chips.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to use the power feed when turning a piece to a smaller diameter. I figured it would be impossible to adjust. The manual cross feed seems jerky. I have seen the phrase “slip stick” used to describe machine tool motion, and I think that may be what I saw today. But I eventually overcame it.

I sat down and began an instruction manual for the lathe, in English a mere college graduate can understand. I wrote nine pages today, and I took it with me to the garage. Helpful.

It’s pretty sweet, sitting on my shop stool, making good use of the backrest, watching lathe videos and screwing with scrap in the newly air conditioned tool oasis.

I think I have the four-jaw chuck worked out. Once you start using it, you realize you have to do one axis at a time.

I have a list of things I need to do, to get to the point where I’m actually doing something. Might get there in a week.

Also: Swarf Disposal

I was about to go study machining and fool with the lathe when I realized I had questions. Answer if you can.

What’s the best way to clean up swarf? The shop-vac doesn’t seem to have the juice to suck oily steel up efficiently. Maybe I should get a dustpan and a hand broom. Funny how the books and videos don’t tell you what to do after you make the mess.

I ordered a boring bar. But it’s big. How small a hole should you expect to be able to bore with a lathe? Do you always use boring bars, or is there a certain point where you give up and use a drill followed by a reamer?

More

Someone wanted to see the little bit of turning I did yesterday.

Possible Lathe Project

First item: prayer request. Reader Ruth says Sarah M., the daughter of a friend, has breast cancer. She is not doing well. Her tests keep turning up bad results. The cancer has metastasized to her brain. She is in early middle age, and she has kids. They do not know the cancer has reached her brain. Her mother is a Christian, but Sarah is not. Her mother wants people to pray for healing and for her salvation.

Ruth has had cataract surgery, and she would appreciate prayer for a good outcome.

Mish now has a white blood cell count of 200 per ml. If it hits 500 for three consecutive days, it means the transplant was a success.

Back to obsessing on my all-important hobbies.

Last time I tried to find someone to move a machine in the Miami area, I got nowhere. I don’t know why. Ordinarily, I am the champion boolean Googler of the whole universe.

I have been trying to find someone to move a machine here from a freight terminal, so I could use a dealer who was helpful to me. The local dealer doesn’t need help to get the machine here. Yesterday, I decided to try Google again, and I found a bunch of movers right off the bat.

Weird thing: one of them is someone I already know. My dad has a client whose employees are Teamsters. I helped my dad when he negotiated a contract with them. The name of the client’s business popped up on Google.

The crazy thing about this is that I didn’t know what the business actually did. I knew they had big trucks. That was about it. I didn’t really have to know. But their entire business is moving heavy machinery. So I asked my old man to see what they could do for me.

I may go with the local dealer anyway. The other guy has sort of drifted off. I asked him to give me some quotes, and I don’t have them yet. Maybe I was more concerned about giving him my business than I should have been, but I don’t like letting a salesperson help me and then buying somewhere else.

In any case, funny coincidence. And it shows how little a lawyer may know about his client. That’s a good thing, I guess. You don’t want to pay a lawyer to find out things he doesn’t need to know.

I’m wondering if I should start looking for a follow rest or steady rest. Yesterday I chucked a piece of half-inch dowel in the lathe and screwed around with it. When I applied pressure with the cutting tool, I got some deflection. The metal bounced back and produced a serviceable cut (which might not impress, if the dial indicator were applied), but it seems like a stupid way to machine.

I guess the dowel was about 8″ long, and I had maybe 6″ sticking out of the chuck.

That was stupid, now that I think about it. I could have chucked the entire 30″ piece, with 2″ sticking out of the chuck. The spindle is hollow. I guess I don’t need a rest unless I have to machine most of the length of a thin or long workpiece, or I’m forced to work a long way from the chuck. I suppose I also have to figure out when turning between centers is the best idea.

Jim Dunmyer linked to something about the correct way to use a 4-jaw chuck (thanks, Jim). I better go copy it and put it in a Word document and put it in my notebook.

The Grizzly I stupidly chose not to buy has four brass screws in the left end of the spindle, facing inward. They’re there to steady the free ends of long items. That seems like a neat idea. Last night I was thinking a good project would be to make something like that. My lathe has an aluminum wheel at the left side of the spindle, held on with set screws. I could make a new version of that, with a collar sort of thing added, through which I could run four brass screws. I don’t know if I’ll ever need it, but it would be a good training exercise. Boring the holes would be tough without a drill press or mill, but there may be a way to do it.

I wonder how hard it is to make a steady rest, once you have milling capacity. Seems like it shouldn’t require much precision, since the bars or screws that support the work would be adjustable.

Or I could wait forty years for a used one to become available.

Shoulder!

Today I twiddled around with the lathe. I gave up on trying to part the fat aluminum cylinders I bought. I had a half-inch steel dowel from Home Depot, so I cut off a piece and stuck it in the chuck and fooled with it.

I assume Moly-Dee is not an ideal cutting fluid for steel. It seemed to lubricate and nearly prevent cutting. I have something on the way which is supposed to be more appropriate.

The carbide indexable tools are working fine. I cut a little off the end of the dowel and made a shoulder. That was about all I had time to do.

Now what do I do with an eight-inch dowel with a shoulder?

There is no Cheap Fun

First thing: can anyone tell me how to dissolve aluminum galling?

My dad has a helm seat on his boat. The pedestal is a stainless pipe. There is a footrest attached with an aluminum collar. The collar has galled to the pipe. I put Kroil on it last night, and I applied a 3-foot pipe wrench today. Nothing happened.

I think he needs a new footrest.

I was going to finish insulating the garage today, but the defective kit I received put an end to that plan. I’m trying to figure out to do about my desperate need for a milling machine.

A local company will put the mill I want on my driveway for $150. They sell the mill, and they arrange the shipping. If they damage it, they still own it, and I can use small claims court to force them to give me my money back. That’s a very good deal. And no headaches. My only challenge, if you can call it that, will be to rent an engine hoist and move the mill into the garage.

Here is the problem. I wasn’t able to get much information from these people about the machine itself. An out-of-state dealer volunteered to educate me. He has been extremely helpful. I’d rather buy from him, but he says he can’t match the liftgate delivery. He says a mill is too big for a liftgate, and that the other company is full of it.

I located a rigger and asked for a quote, to bring the mill from the terminal and put it in the garage. Haven’t heard from them yet.

Last night I saw a problem with this idea. I figured the riggers would not be responsible for damage, so I’d have to eat the cost if they destroyed the mill. That is too big a risk to take. But now people are telling me riggers have to carry insurance for this kind of thing.

Someone else recommended renting a forklift. But I’ve never used one, and shippers have a way of showing up several days late, after your rented forklift has been taken back to the lot and you have been charged for it. I don’t want to get screwed on the rental, and I am not eager to learn how to use a forklift by moving an expensive machine with it, at my own risk.

The forklift is not a good idea.

I’m kind of inclined to tell the out of state guy, “Sorry, but this is just too messy.” He sent me several long and helpful emails, and I would like to reward him with my business, but this is turning out to be a real pain.

Last night I started thinking about what a major undertaking this was, and I thought of the pretty and functional machining I had seen in mini-mill videos, and I asked myself once again if a real mill was a good idea. So I started checking out smaller toys, like Rong Fus. It’s ridiculous. The cost is maybe 65% of a real mill’s price. A big mill/drill is not cheap. And to get that 35% discount, you have to give up a huge amount of potential. There are things you won’t be able to do, or which will take a lot longer.

The Millrite is still possible, and it’s cheaper, but although it looks very clean, I would not really know if it was sound until I had used it for a while. By that time, it would be too late to return it, and getting anything major fixed would be an impossibility.

I guess a big mill is the better option. Maximum capacity and versatility, and the cost is not that far from the cost of a mill/drill. And there is virtually no possibility that I would ever want to upgrade.

Now, if I could just luck into about a thousand pounds of free tooling.

I’m in the Pink

Insulation WORKS. Somehow, I am surprised. I knew it was supposed to work, but it’s still weird to see it happening.

I stuck an air conditioner in the garage. It worked, but the garage doors are sheet steel, and they do not make for ideal cold retention. So I ordered a couple of kits from Home Depot. You can’t get this stuff down here. I guess no one in Miami uses garage insulation.

I installed the first kit. The second one was missing parts, so I had to send it back. Still, even with one door uninsulated, the temperature down to under 74 degrees in the middle of the garage. It wasn’t cold near the air conditioner and warmer near the doors, as it used to be. I guess things will get even better when the second door is done.

Now that I’ve seen what the kits consist of, I think I could have gotten the same results with a roll of insulation and some duct tape. I don’t know if it would have been cheaper. At over $60 a garage door, the kits seem expensive to me. You can also buy foam and stick it up there, but it isn’t as good.

I hope there isn’t a reason why no one else in Miami does this. I hope the fiberglass won’t trap water or anything. I blocked some vents, but I think I have enough of them already. It would be simple enough to alter the insulation and let the air out.

Sitting next to the insulated door, I feel much more “indoors” than I did before. A sheet of metal isn’t much of a sound barrier. There is something oddly comforting about the fiberglass. Which, aptly enough, resembles a comforter.

My new lathe challenge is parting. The lathe came with a parting tool, but it goes with a rocker post which doesn’t really work. I tried to fake it up using washers to support the tool post, but the work started barking at me, so I quit. I have some cheap parting blades on the way from Enco. That should fix the problem.

I have no idea what I’m trying to do. I stuck aluminum in the chuck and started playing. I don’t have an objective, except to get familiar with the lathe. I want to start by cutting one of these dangerous 8″ aluminum bars down to 4″. So parting is important.

I considered doing it on the dry cut saw, but that’s a good way to ruin the blade, and I think that blade runs about $140. I’ve read that some people part by holding a hacksaw over a piece of work while it turns. I don’t think they do this with 2″ T6. I gave it a shot, and all I managed to do was cut a shallow groove surrounded by random scratches.

I want to do some boring, just to say I did it. This is a can of worms. The manly way to bore is to find a piece of metal, make a boring tool to fit in the end of it, add a set screw, anneal the end of the tool so the screw will bite into it, and get to work. Something like that. I would rather do that than buy a boring bar right off the bat, because it would teach me something (maybe that buying boring bars is smart). But I don’t have any 1/4″ cobalt or HSS to turn into boring tools, nor do I have a way to create a slot for the tool, nor do I have any way to install a set screw. I don’t have a tap and die set. And I can’t part off a suitable piece of the scrap dowel I was hoping to use.

I ordered a few bits of cobalt, just to play with. Plus a cheap protractor, to help me grind tools.

I have learned how to harden tools. I watched W.R. Smith video. He does it with a piece of steel wire, some roach powder, and a torch. But I guess I don’t need to harden anything. Lathe tool blanks are hard to start with, aren’t they? I’ll have to check. I assume hardening is useful if you overheat a tool, isn’t it? Danged if I know.

I now have a workspace that could be considered functional. It’s a big step forward. Toward being a completely eccentric goof with a garage that rivals Bob Vila’s worst drunken fantasies.

I’m pooped. I had to cut and hang all that fiberglass, and I had to take off and reinstall a garage door part to make it work, and I had to clean up and then shower the fiberglass off. I’d say one door is a two-hour job.

Working on the milling issue. This will be the final piece of evidence they use at my competency hearing. I don’t care. I will mill or die trying.

Time for food.

Barns of Aggression

In case everyone has forgotten, let me remind you of something.

North Korea just exploded an atom bomb, their leader is crazier than a tree full of coons, and they are working on ballistic missiles that can hit Los Angeles. Iran just sent six warships out into the ocean for no apparent reason, their leader keeps telling audiences he plans to destroy Israel, he has missiles that can hit Jerusalem, and he is running a big nuclear program in order to amass material for bombs. Plus he looks like he got away from a guy who grinds an organ.

Those things are true, but keep this in mind.

This man is the real threat to peace, because he wants to let a few eccentric Jews build barns and chicken houses in the desert. A desert Israel only possesses as the result of a war of unprovoked Muslim aggression. It’s a good thing the Arabs quit attacking the Jews, because if they hadn’t, the Jews would own Amman, Mecca, Beirut, Kuwait City, Damascus, and parts of Detroit. Plus a good percentage of New York City’s taxis.

That miserable bastard. Who does he think he is? Putting highly provocative BARNS up, in the middle of that gorgeous expanse of valuable rocks and sand! I can’t believe we haven’t nuked him already! Why, this is just like what Hitler did!

I know how to solve the problem. We need to send him the guy who wrote the building code here in Coral Gables. Of course I am referring to Building and Zoning Department Obergruppenführer Emeritus, Karl Goebbels. I believe he retired to Argentina. And they are trying to send him back.

Karl Goebbels: I hear you plan to change a light bulb in an outhouse in the West Bank.

Netanhayu: It is “reasonable growth.”

Karl Goebbels: I assume you pulled all the proper permits?

Netanyahu: “Permits”?

Karl Goebbels: We’ll need the Board of Architects to look this over. Have an architect do an elevation of the outhouse, and hire a team of electrical engineers to do a report on the light bulb.

Netanyahu: Board? What is this “board”? We want to screw in a light bulb.

Karl Goebbels: We only allow fluorescents now, and they’re full of mercury, so you’ll have to hire a Gables-approved company to dispose of the bulb when it burns out.

Netanyahu: Can I have a list of the companies?

Karl Goebbels: We haven’t approved any yet. They don’t actually exist. But when they do, you can have a licensed contractor screw in that light bulb. Give it three years. Call us every day during our three business hours to check. Leave a voicemail, which we’ll delete immediately.

Netanyahu: Forget it. I’ll tell them to use a candle.

Karl Goebbels: You’ll have to come down and look at an approved chart of candle colors. You know, you could also build a nice shower room. Warm showers. Clean, fresh water. Nothing to be afraid of.

Netanyahu: I think I’ll go join a mosque.

Karl Goebbels: If you want a minaret, you’ll need a variance.

If Auschwitz had had a building and zoning department like the one here in Coral Gables, Hitler would never have gotten his concentration camp built, and there is a good chance he would have blown his brains out ten years earlier.

Hitler: I want to build a breakfast nook and add onto my liebensraum.

Karl Goebbels: It would be easier to annex the Sudetenland.

Always remember the true reason Israel gets the blame for everything in the Middle East: the Muslims are degenerates who cannot be reasoned with and who will set off bombs inside any country that stands up for Israel. Like I have always said, the UN is like a couple of parents who always beat their better child, because they don’t have the spine to deal with the one that actually causes the problems. You’ve seen these parents. One kid has horns and a tail, and the other is fairly normal, and when the rotten one tortures the good one, the parents say something stupid like, “I don’t care who started it,” i.e. “I am too selfish and lazy to teach my kids the concept of justice.” We know we can push Israel around, so that’s what we do. They won’t blow us up.

I guess it’s not acceptable to call people like the Saudis degenerates, but I think it’s better than flogging old ladies and beating women in the street for displaying their calves. Which is what mainstream Muslims in places like Saudi Arabia do.

Last night I was thinking about the way people claim God doesn’t exist and that the Bible is a load of nonsense. Then I thought about what’s going on in the world. Troops from the United States, way over in the Western Hemisphere, are fighting a war in BABYLON, and we succeeded in deposing the king of Babylon and getting him hanged, and we killed his sons. He’s a lot like Haman (another figure who went after the Jews).

Alll that is literally true. Iraq is the ancient kingdom of Babylon, and Saddam Hussein was the king, just like Nebuchadnezzar. He called himself a president, but that doesn’t change what he was.

We’re fighting in Babylon, and the main thing that causes unrest in the world is a dispute over parts of the tiny, resource-poor, cash-poor, militarily insignificant, geographically unimportant nation of Israel. But God is imaginary, right? It’s all coincidence. Keep aborting your babies and doing drugs. Have all the loose sex you want, don’t tithe, and forget charity. Everything is swell.

Man, those barns are still making me mad.

And Have Burt Ward Wax the Batmobile

I can’t believe how much I rock. Check this out.

That’s the lathe, with a new old light installed, plus a 4-jaw chuck. And I added a couple of new wrenches. I think when you have a lathe, your best bet is to buy a couple of wrenches that fit the things you turn most often and just leave them where you can reach them. It beats running back and forth from the tool chest.

That light is from my old desk; the one I used when I was getting my bachelor’s degree. It was in a storage hole over a closet. Came in handy.

The light is attached to a piece of scrap I bolted to the wall. I had a 4″ section of 2″ by 3/16″ angle iron lying on the floor, so I drilled three holes in it and fastened it to the wall. Then I clamped the lamp base to it.

I also replaced the fine wheel on my bench grinder. Baldor ships these with fairly crappy wheels. It’s not that they’re cheap, although maybe they are. The quality is not the issue. The problem is that they’re not right for grinding lathe tools. I got an 80-grit aluminum oxide wheel from Enco, and I trued it (I think) with a silicon carbide stick. I’ll get one of those star wheel things if I can ever find a place that sells them AND has them in stock.

The spray bottle is WD40, from a Home Depot gallon jug.

I have replaced the worthless gear selection lever the lathe came with, and that white thing on the headstock is Moly-Dee. It is conceivable that I could turn something, if I knew how.

The 4-jaw chuck is mysterious. I tried to true up that piece of aluminum in it, but the weight makes it difficult. If you loosen one jaw so you can tighten another and move the aluminum, the aluminum likes to flop downward at the end and make things worse. Getting it within three or four thousandths of straight seems relatively easy, but I believe you’re supposed to be able to eliminate measurable error with one of these chucks.

I have the electrical parts to pretty up the wiring and put it away. Maybe tomorrow. In the photo it looks like the wiring is near the spinning stuff, but it really isn’t.

This week the insulation for the garage doors arrives. It’s very nice in the garage already, but insulation will probably make it even better.

I have to move the compressor to make room for the mill. That means running conduit over the rafters, about 14 feet off the ground. I can hardly wait! Maybe I should wait until my medical insurance kicks in.

I Laid me Down and Slept

Is this a wonderful morning, or what?

I used to think there were NO wonderful mornings. I had problems sleeping, and it drove me crazy. I had a hard mattress and mysterious on-and-off nasal congestion, and–this is disgusting–hard stuff accumulated in my nose, at the narrowest points in the air passages. The only way to cope with that was to get up and remove it. I woke over and over during the night. Sometimes when I woke up, I felt as if a giant magnet were sucking me down into the mattress. That’s how tired I was. I would get up and literally stumble because my nervous system wasn’t working yet.

I started taking steps. I gave away a $2000 mattress that felt like cement and replaced it with the much nicer, cheaper one I use to use when I lived in Texas. I lifted the head of the bed six inches. I got synthetic pillows, because when I was a kid, a useless allergist told my mother to get them for me.

I got improvements, but not real success. I wondered if the problem was mold or dirty air conduits or pollen. I decided to treat the one thing I could be sure of beating: dust mites. I got a microfiber mattress cover. It doesn’t kill mites, but it prevents them from getting at their food: me. It cut back on congestion to the point where I didn’t need anything to help me sleep. I quit using nasal spray, including that worthless saline stuff.

I still had one improvement to make. When I got new pillows, I saw mite-proof covers on display at the store. I picked one up. What the hell. The pillows improved my sleep, but one of them worked better than the other. One was a memory foam pillow that came with its own cover, and the other was a fake down pillow, which I put inside the cover I bought. The fake down pillow remained problem-free, but after a while, I noticed that I could feel congestion starting whenever I rolled over onto the foam pillow. I realized what was happening. Mites can’t grow in a foam pillow (I am told), but they can grow in the materials covering it. Any new pillow will kill your allergies, but if mites can get through the cover, they’ll grow on the fabric, and the protection will fade. Yesterday, I invested in two more pillow covers. I put one on the foam pillow, and I cleaned one of my old down pillows and stuck the other cover on it.

Last night was perfect. I have no idea when I fell asleep. I remember absolutely nothing that happened during the night. When I awoke, I felt great. And I had a down pillow to help me cope with the fake ones, which really are not as good.

I can’t express the feeling of freedom. It’s like I’ve been cured of leprosy. Poor sleep affects your blood pressure, your weight, your memory, your concentration, your energy, your mood, and your body’s ability to heal and renew itself. It’s a very big deal. It looks like it’s behind me.

If you want to try one of these products, go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and get a Microguard mattress cover and pillow covers. Pay no attention to the way they feel in the store. You can’t feel the fabric’s creepy texture when you use it, and it breathes, so you will not sweat. The only thing I’ve noticed is that the fake down pillow tends to expand like a balloon, because air passes out of the cover slowly. The pillow blows up from its natural loft, and then when you put your head on it, it deflates like a tire with a pinhole. That isn’t a problem with the other pillows.

I can go back to down now, although I want to keep the foam pillow for variety. I want varied pillow materials on hand so I will have choices every night when I engineer my pillow structure.

Next health challenge: I have to resume counting calories. I think the pizza crisis is over, so I won’t be making it every day and ruining my diet. Last night I checked my blood pressure, and it scared me to death. I assume something I had done or eaten was affecting it, because it was behaving strangely. The diastolic number varied between 89 and 113. I got up today, and my pressure was 114 over 76. I don’t trust blood pressure measurements. As a scientist, I can’t believe a gauge as silly as the sphygmomanometer could ever be reliable. How can things like subcutaneous fat, muscularity, and arm position fail to affect it? But I want to be thinner, just in case. I ate unsweetened oatmeal for breakfast today. I guess I could have just boiled a newspaper.

Church was good but not fantastic last night. They had a guest preacher, and he was too much like a standup comedian for my tastes. He started joking about PMS and other things not relevant to Christianity. That’s not what I go to church for, and I don’t want to be encouraged in my own habit of ridiculing people and their weaknesses. He didn’t follow his notes, and his sermon was disjointed and way too long. One of the reasons I left my last church was that the services lasted three hours. Like I’ve said before, there is a thin line between a long church service and a hostage situation. At the end, he asked everybody to give the church a special gift, which annoyed me. They want a special gift next week, for Pentecost. This is too much. I think he knew it. You could see the certainty leave his face when he brought it up. I think he knew he was making a mistake. I guess he just got carried away and then decided to bull his way through. I gave a little something out of respect for his authority, but I felt used. Not a big deal. Good people make mistakes, and I won’t miss the token amount I gave.

I figured there had to be some good things in his message. I don’t think God lets people go to an effective church and leave with nothing, just because it’s an off week. And I picked up some things. I think my prayer life needs a shot in the arm. I have not restored my routine; it comes and goes. So in the morning, I am not always spending time in prayer. He also talked about temptation, and how we are sifted and pulled away from the church. That was a useful reminder.

It certainly beats what I would have gotten had I stayed home, i.e. nothing.

He said Christians screw up by pursuing marriage too doggedly. He claimed that when the Bible refers to “he who finds a wife,” the word “find” means to come across inadvertently. Try to serve God, and wait for someone to show up. That was the message. Maybe he’s right. That’s the way it works with other needs, to some extent. God provided mates for people in the Old Testament. I think of the stories of Isaac, Jacob, and Ruth. Human effort was involved, but it was guided from above.

Mancow and Hitchens Say So

I saw something interesting on the web last night. Looks like Eric “Mancow” Muller submitted to waterboarding and decided it was torture. After six seconds. That’s how long he lasted before giving up and asking to be released. And Christopher Hitchens, who was also waterboarded, agrees. Hitchens won’t even say how long he lasted. He’s embarrassed. Muller was trying to prove waterboarding is not torture. Now he is sure that it is. That proves his sincerity, when he says torture is the right word.

This is not a big surprise to me. What surprises me is that conservatives keep claiming it’s not torture. It is wrong to compare it to certain things our enemies have done, such as lowering live people into plastic-shredding machines, but that doesn’t mean it’s not torture.

A long time ago, I read that the CIA record for withstanding waterboarding was something like 20 seconds. I mean that a CIA employee who was voluntarily waterboarded lasted that long. After I saw that, I was content to agree that it was torture. Anything so unpleasant a serious government intelligence operative (no doubt trying to win a bet and impress his buddies) can’t stand it for half a minute is probably torture.

I’ve joked about how great it was that we were waterboarding the inbred idiots who were trying to destroy our cities, but I never said it in a serious way, because I thought waterboarding was a bad idea. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked about it, but hey, I’m human, and this isn’t the New York Times, and I’m no journalist. This is just a blog. I have joked about cancer and blindness and AIDS and God only knows what else, and so have most Americans. Doesn’t mean anything.

Now conservatives look silly, because people who mean well are using stupid phrases like “having a little water poured up your nose” to describe waterboarding. I can’t understand why waterboarding is so unpleasant. It doesn’t sound all that bad. But it’s clearly a terrible experience, and we ought to admit it.

I remember reading Jacobo Timerman’s books. He was an Argentinian Jew. He as kidnapped by his government, and they tortured him by applying electrodes to his bare skin and cranking up the voltage. I believe this is totally harmless, from a physical standpoint, because the amperage is tiny. Doesn’t sound all that bad, does it? But when he described his response, he said you don’t shout when they turn on the power. You howl. Apparently, the pain is so great, your self-control completely disappears instantaneously. So you don’t have to do anything invasive or disfiguring to torture a person. A little water may be more than sufficient.

I’ve thought about this a little, and it seems to me that the level of discourse on the subject is pretty low. People aren’t saying anything really intelligent. Just “torture bad” or “water up nose okay.”

I’m not sure I would back a total ban on torture. I would have to know more about it. I believe we should consider the possibility that the morality of torture depends on the circumstances. For example, I would not back torturing an enemy soldier to find out where his army planned to hit our troops, even if thousands of lives were at stake. But what about a terrorist who knows which Manhattan address is the location of a Muslim atom bomb? What if you had a few hours to get that kind of information? Would you seriously expect to rely on things like sleep deprivation and insults?

We should probably have one set of standards for uniformed enemies and another for terrorists who target civilians for no legitimate military purpose. We have long accepted the notion that ordinary soldier-to-soldier warfare has rules, even when a nation’s autonomy is at stake. But when an illiterate boob in a khaffiyah decides to roast several hundred thousand civilians alive, maybe he should be deemed to have given up his rights under the usual rules.

Think about this. Imagine you are attacked by a violent criminal, and you believe you’re in danger of serious injury, which, under the law, includes sexual assault. The law says you can do absolutely anything to that person, to incapacitate him and prevent the harm. You can push a knife through his eyeball. You can throw boiling oil in his face. You can set him on fire. You can park your car on him. Anything. His suffering isn’t even a legal consideration. Whatever means you have at hand, you are allowed to use, provided what you do is reasonable and not excessive under the circumstances. Maybe a person who tries to murder or maim a large number of noncombatants should have no more rights than a rapist or mugger.

But if that is true, even then, it is only true when no other methods will work.

Perhaps refraining from torture isn’t the way to maintain the moral high ground. Maybe the reasons we do it are what properly distinguish us from the backward savages who are trying to exterminate us.

You Can’t Lead Without Serving

I just realized this is the weekend when rappers descend on Miami Beach. If there ever was a good time to visit South Beach, this is not it. Unless you want to see fights and a lot of confused young black women in front of video cameras, shaking their bare rear ends to bad music. I wonder if we’ll ever give up the stupid notion that all music is inherently good. You can’t separate a musical genre from the sentiments expressed in its song lyrics or the culture of depravity embraced by its adherents. Let me know when classical music punks flock to a city and make fools of themselves for three days, and I’ll say I was wrong.

I wonder if I’ll hear about this weekend’s festivities when I go to church tonight. “Christian rap” is the only thing about that place about which I can complain. That, and the giant bread factory next door that makes the whole neighborhood smell and always makes me want to get food.

Has rap produced even one “artist” who can play a musical instrument? Jazz gave us Art Tatum and Charlie Christian. Who has rap produced? Far as I can tell, when rappers want music in their tracks, they find it and steal it.

My family is going through a rough spot, and I would appreciate prayer. It’s something I saw coming. I consider it a growth pain. I can’t be specific because I am so important, a malevolent individual who is too scared of me to confront me scrutinizes my blog daily for items that can be used to drive me and my sister apart.

Every family has problems, and one problem that is extremely common is a kinked-up chain of authority. Two symptoms are feminism and the arrogance of youth. God designed authority to run in this direction: God, pastor, man, wife, oldest son, other kids, dog, Satan. The family is like the human body, which has a dominant hand. The left hand is just as important as the right, but the body works better when the right hand leads. This should be obvious from human nature. For example, women expect men to tell them what to do from time to time. They like it and need it. I’ve had women thank me for it. If you refuse to lead, a woman will feel contempt for you, and she will resent you. Publicly, women claim this isn’t true, but privately, they admit it. On the other hand, a woman who dominates her husband will make him miserable and destroy the confidence he needs to satisfy her physical needs. She’ll drive him to women with whom he feels stronger. And kids are happier when their parents give them clear, strict rules. And few things can make your life more miserable than a untrained dog that believes it’s as good as a person.

A man who won’t submit to God and his pastor will rot inside, and he’ll leave his family starved for guidance. The error that made feminism possible was the insane notion that a position at the head of the family was purely a reward and a privilege. That’s idiotic. It’s a tremendous duty. It’s a burden. You’re supposed to put your wife and kids first, but a lot of men think being born male entitles them to give orders and lie on the couch watching TV for six hours a night. No wonder feminists found an opening.

A couple that isn’t led by the husband is like a man with a right hand that has lost its cunning. That is a metaphor with more than one level to it.

My mother is gone, but my dad is still around. In my daily prayers, I ask that he be restored to his proper position as our spiritual leader. I ask that my sister and I be helped to honor and even obey him, and that he be guided to give us good counsel. I ask that God restore the correct order in this family. Judging from the Bible, that order is supposed to persist even after a child becomes an adult. Think about it. Isaac was supposedly in his late thirties when he was bound up for sacrifice, and Jacob was in his sixties when he left his father to marry.

Authority issues have been a problem for us. My dad is not a Christian, so I used to think the proper thing was to behave as though he were out of commission as head of the family. I thought I should do as I saw fit, because I was enlightened and so on. But now I believe that’s a dangerous, fatuous oversimplification. I think a father is always a father, unless he is hopelessly corrupt, and the correct thing is for a child to work with his father and try to help him become a strong, unselfish, God-fearing family leader. I believe God will honor that kind of effort by changing the father and the rest of the family. Sooner or later, God’s wisdom will start to flow to the family through the father, as God intended from the start. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it.

My sister and I have both been too willful. It has been easier for me to change. She is having more trouble than I am, and that’s why we’re having problems right now.

We’re both single, even though we both believe in marriage. I think we may have sabotaged ourselves through our attitudes toward authority. My sister has never been willing to let a man lead, and I have not understood the importance of being a leader. I was corrupted by feminism. I bought into the poisonous total equality myth. If you really believe that nonsense, it can drive women away. They sense that you won’t give them what they truly want. A lot of men only pretend to believe it, so it isn’t a major problem for them. Women will usually give you what you want, if you’re willing to tell them comforting lies. It’s no way to live, but it works.

Again, I can’t go into what is actually happening, but a tangled chain of authority is at the root of it. A family is like a pipe through which God’s power and blessings flow. The members of the family are like the axe heads through which Odysseus fired his famous arrow. Everything has to line up reasonably well, or nothing can pass through. We are not aligned correctly at this moment. It will eventually pass, but I don’t know how long it will take.

By the way, according to Mish Weiss’s blog, cancer isn’t her biggest threat right now. On Mother’s Day, she got a bone marrow transplant from a far-off daughter she gave up over a decade ago, and it appears to be taking. But she is weak and has to be concerned about infection. That sounds like real progress, even if she is still extremely ill. I hope you’ll remember her in your prayers today.