No Motor, No Work

I feel like I’m stuck today. For reasons not worth going into, I may be farming out the work on the air conditioning hole in the garage, so I’m not installing the unit right now. And the motor for my lathe is still en route, so I’m not installing that. And since I can’t use the lathe, I’m not learning machining.

I guess I should get off my butt and rig the lathe up so it’s ready to run as soon as the motor arrives. But that would take character.

I made a nice support panel for the VFD yesterday. I had a strange piece of flat steel scrap on hand, so I cut it down with the plasma cutter and put some holes in it. There are two completely pointless bolts projecting from the back of the lathe headstock, plus an empty threaded hole, so I decided to use these to hold up the panel. I bought a nice cobalt 3/8″ drill bit and made a couple of holes for the large bolt, using Dykem and a carpenter’s square and a scribe in order to locate them. Unfortunately, I didn’t line the holes up quite as well as I could have, so the panel leans to the right by a few degrees. I also made four holes for the VFD itself.

I cleaned the panel off and painted it to match the lathe. Or so I thought. At the hardware store, I tried to find a nice flat grey spray enamel, and I found one with a likely looking color on the cap. When I used it, it turned out to be silvery. Oh well.

I can always make a new panel later. I have a lot of flat scrap. This would be much easier with a decent drilling machine, like a BRIDGEPORT. I think I’ll wait. Alternatively, I could open one of the holes up to let the panel swing into an upright position, and then I could make a third hole and put a bolt into the vacant headstock hole to line things up.

As it is, it will look a little funny, but it will work. The VFD will be at a very convenient height, and I’ll have the drum switch lever right below it, for forward and reverse.

I am greatly disappointed in the way the seller treated me, but the lathe’s moving parts appear to be in excellent shape, so once I have it running, it should give great service. I should not have had to buy a new motor, but I think I’m better off without the vari-speed drive I was expecting. The seller offered me a free headstock casting because of the two cast iron corners that are broken off of the old one, but my guess is that the breakage is due to a design flaw. After all, it happened in two nearly identical spots. I think a better answer is to make steel caps to fit over the gaps and run bolts through them into the casting. It will hide the damage, and I won’t have to worry about having this problem again. If it’s a design flaw, the new headstock could end up just like this one, so the aggravation of installing it would be wasted. Also, I wonder how easy it is to remove and reinstall a headstock. For all I know, there are critical measurements that have to be made, which I can’t make here at home.

Man, I wish that air conditioner was installed.

Match Made in Heaven

If you’ve been following Mish Weiss’s story, you know she had a daughter when she was a teenager. She made the right choice, letting her daughter live and giving her up for adoption. Recently, Mish found her.

Mish is in bad shape. Her leukemia is getting worse. But there is a glimmer of hope. There is a possibility that a bone marrow transplant will save her, and it turns out her daughter, Abby, is a match. Mish told her not to bother; she thought it would be a lot of pain for nothing. But this girl insisted. So on Sunday, Mish gets the transplant! There are no guarantees that it will work, but it’s a chance Mish would never have gotten, but for the existence of Abby.

How about that? Mish sacrificed to bring Abby into this world; now Abby is sacrificing to help Mish stay here. There is now way Mish could have known, all those years ago, that she was carrying someone who would return to save her. The only reward she expected was freedom from the sin of taking the life of her child.

Makes you wonder what miracles our abortion industry has prevented.

The Gloves are Off

I just read this unbelievable quotation in the Jerusalem Post, via Drudge:

Thwarting Iran’s nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, according to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

SINCE WHEN DID OPPOSING EVIL REQUIRE AN ADDITIONAL INCENTIVE?

Obama is so stupid and conceited he seriously believes the Iranians will bow to the synthetic Messiah. That’s the only explanation. That, and anti-Semitism. How can he not realize Iran is a threat to all humanity? Is he so determined to spite Israel that he’ll give Iran the tools to start a worldwide conflagration? Thank you, Jeremiah Wright. Job well done.

I have to ask it again: when will American Jews learn who their real friends are? When was the last time you heard a leftist pundit express concern about Israel’s security? It never happens. But conservatives voice their outrage every day!

Show Rahm what you think of him. Donate money to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, in his name. They’ll use it to do things that would make him retch up his tofu.

It’s a pity they only accept dollars. I’d like to send thirty pieces of silver.

Don’t even try to tell me this disgraceful President is not the manifestation of a curse.

Help us Out

My third cousin has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. I would appreciate it if people who read this site would pray for her physical health and also for her mental health. I don’t want to go into details, but this is a truly delightful person whose life had been utterly blighted even before this diagnosis. I just wish God would give her a blessing what would somehow make her whole and constitute a redemption.

First, Saw the Garage in Half

I have a bunch of important (to me) jobs facing me, and I have to prioritize.

I have to put the lathe back together, with the VFD wired up and the new motor installed. I guess it’s pointless to think about that until the new motor arrives. The ancient replacement motor I received isn’t very good; I finally realized that my inability to get the pulley stack on correctly means the shaft is so marred, it’s not acceptable for use. I had this idea that it was normal to have to use a non-marring hammer to drive one of these things onto a shaft, and that reducing the misalignment was a matter of skill, but that’s clearly BS. It should go on straight, without all this grief. The seller sent me a lemon. I can’t get it straight, so if I use it, the belt will always rub on the outside of the pulleys during part of each turn, and the lathe will vibrate, and the belt will eventually snap. When the new motor arrives, I’ll lubricate the shaft and slide it in, and everything will work the way it’s supposed to. This is the difference between the right way and the Fred Sanford way.

I have to put my Saiga shotgun together. All of the improved parts except for the light have arrived.

Finally, I have to install my new cheapo Chinese garage air conditioner. I guess that should come first, because it will make all the other projects bearable.

I was all bummed out because I thought I was going to have to spend $900 on a split unit or $600 on a conventional wall unit, and I figured the $600 job would mean cutting a giant hole in the wall and maybe running a circuit. Then I stumbled on a my 18000-BTU floor-model beauty at Brandsmart, and I took it home for $137 including tax. I still have to cut a hole, but that isn’t nearly as upsetting now that I’m getting a bargain.

What a difference this will make in my ability to use tools. Ordinarily, in any month which is not part of the November-April string, working in the garage is pretty bad. Every time I tilt my head, sweat pours into my safety glasses and makes puddles inside the lenses, making it impossible to see. My shirt sticks to me and digs into my skin. If I wear a respirator, it gets soggy. Sweat falls on anything I work on. I run two fans, but they don’t work all that well, and they blow papers around and keep sawdust in the air.

Now I should be able to cool the garage down to a reasonable temperature and relax. And I found a replacement remote for ten bucks, shipped. Sweet.

Og and Jim Dunmyer seem to think it’s a bad idea for me to make my new VFD explode–where is their sense of adventure?–so I looked the manual over last night and figured out how to connect my drum switch to the logic inputs. This will allow me to use the drum switch to reverse the motor without blowing anything up. It won’t allow me to stop the motor with the switch. I’m pretty sure. Depends on what the VFD is programmed to do when both contacts are open.

One nice thing about this is that it means I can quit trying to find a way to make the drum switch reverse the motor directly, and I can avoid fooling with the 12-gauge wires I bought for the purpose. I’ll be able to use 18 gauge, which is tiny and cooperative.

I learned something interesting. The VFD is programmed to take 10 seconds to get the motor running. That’s the default, and it’s no good. I think I’ll change it to one second. That sure beats the hard start I used to get, but it’s still fast enough to be convenient.

I may need to put a big fat resistor in there somewhere to help the VFD brake the motor. The one Hitachi sells is insanely expensive, so I’m going to conspire with forum denizens and find something cheaper. As I understand it, a VFD with no added resistor will provide a certain amount of braking, but it’s not clear that it will do the job for this application, and I don’t want to put it under any strain.

I think someone told me he used a stove burner as a resistor. That would be good. I could turn metal and fry eggs at the same time.

It would be great to be able to do a little milling with this machine (or any machine), but I have no milling attachment. I thought I’d have to buy an old Clausing attachment, but it looks like there is an aftermarket job that will fit any compound. That should be much cheaper.

I am really nervous about sawing up the garage wall.

Because I live in Karl Goebbels Coral Gables, home of the world’s worst zoning Nazis, I want to pretty up the outside of the unit with those wraparound louver things, but I can’t find them on the web. Does anyone know what they’re called?

I better start measuring for the saw.

Be Sure to Sport a Bro

I have truly lost it. Today I went to a local discount store, and they had a floor model 18000 BTU wall air conditioner for sale for $128. I was not going to pass that up. It’s Chinese; I don’t care. An American wall unit will last at least five years, and a lot of them last twenty. I’m sure I can squeeze at least three years out of this baby. That’s a bargain, and anything beyond that, I consider gravy.

Now I have to bang a big hole in the garage wall.

I checked with an expert, and I’ve been told that a hole this size in a cinderblock wall requires no support whatsoever. Hooray for me. I can cut the hole, add pressure-treated wood held in place with tapcons, shove the unit in, and relax in the now-air-conditioned disco garage.

I can’t believe that price. I didn’t get a remote control or a manual with it, but for $128, I can get off my butt and push the buttons by hand. I didn’t get the little brackets that hold the unit up, but fabricating some should take about fifteen minutes.

It’s way bigger than I need, BTU-wise, but it’s very compact, so it will fit in a small hole. It has no heating cycle, but I don’t need one! Perfect for my needs. Online, I kept seeing 15,000-BTU units for almost $600, delivered. Forget THAT.

I just wish I had room for a pool table out there.

Three Cheers for the Invincible Master Race

I have been thinking about the Chrysler mess for a couple of days, and two obvious questions come up.

1. Shouldn’t people be angry that Bush and Obama gave these incompetents billions of dollars, knowing it was a complete waste? I knew it, and I’m not even President. And so did tens of millions of other Americans. But the press’s reaction is barely audible.

2. Doesn’t this prove that conservatives were right when we said the failure of a Big Three company would not kill the economy, and if that is true, isn’t bailing the automakers out a stupid idea? Shouldn’t we cease all efforts to keep these parasitic, terminally ill companies going?

We were told (by Bush as well as Obama) that we had to keep the Big Three alive, because a failure would have ripple effects that would destroy our economy. Chrysler has failed, and the stock market is up, and nobody is rioting in the streets. Hmm…looks like the socialists were WRONG, doesn’t it? A lot of businessmen are actually happy that Chrysler is going bankrupt. It’s the normal, healthy thing for a failed company to do.

Why did Bush do this? McCain was already dead; it couldn’t help him. The bailout was approved after the election. What possible reason could Bush have had to become an eleventh-hour socialist? The man is not stupid. Surely he didn’t think this would work. Doesn’t he have any faith in the free market?

I guess there are no capitalists in foxholes. When times get rough, politicians pray to their true messiah. Karl Marx.

This is all foolishness. The incompetence and obsolescence of the Big Three are only one part of the problem, and they are far and away the lesser part. The Chinese are going to eat our car industry. Accept it. Let’s let the Big Three die in the cheapest possible way, because it’s foreordained. There are two possibilities. America will not make cars, or we will pay our auto workers so little we can compete with China. There is no third choice, and the second choice is pretty unlikely. Actually, the third choice is a never-ending subsidy that bleeds us dry, but I believe that even Obama is smart enough to see that that won’t fly. Besides, he has the heart of a tyrant, and he didn’t like the way the UAW refused to toe the line.

What we are doing right now is not investment. It’s welfare. We are not going to get our money back from the carmakers, because they’re not going to make a profit. We’re just enabling them. Keeping them alive a little longer. Delaying a constructive move toward redeployment of their work force in industries that have some hope of prospering.

I have a prediction about Obama’s choice to replace Ruth Ginsberg. It’s going to be someone so offensive to conservatives that we will utterly stunned, and whoever it is, she will be confirmed. We are going to have to drink our own bathwater one more time. But for the fact that a woman has to get the job, I’d predict Laurence Tribe or Alan Dershowitz. If Hillary Clinton were not busy already, I’d expect her to be on the list. Maybe it will be someone from the Ninth Circuit. They have three female judges. They’re all white, however, so maybe they aren’t strong candidates. I’m glad Rosie O’Donnell doesn’t have a law degree.

I feel certain it will be a God-hating idiot of such colossal stature that conservatives will vomit for at least a month. We are going to miss Ruth Ginsberg. America is rotting from within, like a cancer patient, and the new associate justice will be part of the rot. Just like the illegal aliens who are becoming more and more powerful, even obtaining the right to vote. Our enemies are crawling inside us to gestate and metastasize, because our walls are down.

Why do I say Obama is going to appoint someone awful? Because America has lost its blessing. Discarded it, in fact. Obama is a divine punishment, and so are his appointees.

I have this strange feeling that our judiciary is going to go to hell, but we will somehow retain our gun rights. So many Christians are getting into shooting; I think there has to be a reason for it, and it wouldn’t make sense, if we were going to lose our guns in the near future.

I also think the Chinese are going to gain such a military advantage over us that we will be helpless before them when we finally have a showdown. They’ve infiltrated our military technology, and they are already able to destroy our vital military satellites in a single day, and Obama has announced that he plans to kill weapons R&D as well as the missile shield. Even Carter was smarter than that.

I see it this way: America is in trouble; Christians within America are not. And Israel will survive without us, because her blessing, unlike ours, is eternal. We’re probably going to shrivel into insignificance and chaos, but Israel is going to survive and grow closer to God. I suspect that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons soon, and that Obama will prevent the Israelis from doing anything about it. And maybe Iran will use them. But in the end, whatever her trials may be, Israel will prevail.

People keep saying we’re going to pull out or our tailspin, because we’ve always recovered in the past. But the past was different. We were not as proud and decadent, and we didn’t have powerful, wealthy enemies whose strength was on the rise. The Nazis were creampuffs compared to China, India, and Russia. The Third Reich had no legs. Neither did the USSR or the 20th-century Chicoms. Our new enemies have capitalist engines driving them, and they have inexhaustible manpower and natural resources. All we have is an idiotic, offensive presumption that Americans are the master race. I guess the Jews felt the same way, right before the Babylonians crushed them. We didn’t make America great; human beings don’t have the power to do things like that. But we do have the power to destroy her.

I know I sound like a pessimist, but that only applies to my country. I’m extremely optimistic for myself and my family. Besides, the prophets were generally pessimists, so I’m in good company. It’s funny, but God never raises up a voice to tell a nation that everything they’re doing is just swell. If God were a parent in an SUV, and he had a rotten kid who was too lazy to get good grades and an honor roll bumper sticker, he wouldn’t have one of those ridiculous consolation-prize “Terrific Kid” stickers on his bumper, to pump up the little brat’s self-esteem. He tells it like it is, and I don’t think he really cares if we have low self-esteem. If anything, he is displeased when we have too much.

Fredo Fished in the Wrong Spot

I want to thank the enabler who mentioned the 200-lumen flashlights Home Depot is selling. On the way home from church, I bought one for me and one for my dad. I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

Church was really good. The pastor seemed completely lost at first. He was talking about the Beatles and celebrities and so on, and I figured, “He didn’t prepare this week, and he’s winging it.” But toward the end, he drew it together. The theme was people’s need to see Jesus, or at least be aware of his presence. That is something I strive for all the time, because, well, why wouldn’t you? Once you’ve had it, you want it again. That pretty much sums it up.

He ended up talking about Arthur Blessitt. This is a man who made himself a cross and spent his life carrying it around the world. I guess he’s still doing it. It’s an amazing story. He used to be on TBN all the time, back in the 80s. I don’t watch TBN any more, because so many of the people on the network seemed like liars and…I’m trying to think of a nice word for “pimps,” but it’s not coming. I thought they preached a very harmful brand of prosperity theology, and I believed it was intended to help them live obscene lifestyles, not to help people get closer to God.

I have seen a lot of people on TBN whom I would urge Christians to avoid following, but I have never heard anyone say a bad word about Arthur Blessitt.

Anyway, here is the story Arthur told Pastor Wilkerson. Arthur said that when he was about 20, he visited a church near Lake Tahoe, and while the pastor of that church was driving him some place, Jesus spoke to Arthur and told him to go down on the beach. The pastor didn’t want to go, so he got a subordinate to take him. So they went to the beach, and while they were walking, they looked out onto the water and saw Jesus standing on it. And they immediately turned away from him, because they were freaked out.

They turned back eventually, and they went into the freezing water and worshiped him. And after a time, they didn’t know what to do, so they started walking away. And Arthur went back once more, and Jesus was still standing there, and he had his back turned to Arthur. And Arthur called out to him, or something, and he turned back to Arthur, and Arthur asked for a blessing. And without speaking, Jesus communicated the following idea to Arthur: Arthur was never to be afraid of anything, because Jesus would always be beside him. And if I recall the story correctly, Jesus held his hands out toward Arthur, and somehow power went from Jesus to Arthur, through Jesus’s hands.

Now, I have heard a lot of nonsense on TBN. I have been told that I should send money to a preacher who drove a Rolls-Royce, for example. And I think Robert Tilton, who is a liar and also crazy as a tree full of coons, used to be on TBN. But maybe Arthur Blessitt really did see Jesus. Some people do. He’s real, after all.

I had a couple of experiences in which I was convinced that Jesus was with me. On one occasion, I felt an invisible beam of love, warmth, and power playing over my body as I tried to sleep, and I fell asleep and then awakened, and when I awakened, my hands were raised, and I felt energy pouring into the palms from up above. I never figured out what that meant, but it definitely happened, and Arthur’s story is similar, in that power moved through a pair of hands. In his case, it moved out of Jesus’s hands, and in my case, it moved into mine.

Don’t ask me what it means. If I were a televangelist in white shoes and an orange suit, I’m sure I’d be able to make something up and convince you to pay me for telling you. But I don’t lie nearly that well. I’m merely a lawyer. I guess I should say that ever since that day, I’ve been able to do something special with power from my hands. Healing the sick, or bending spoons, or taking really stubborn stains out of neckties. But that is not the case.

It was a great sermon, because it reminded me that we are to believe God is real, and that we can actually get away with doing the things he told us to, because he will help us. That’s extremely important. Like Pastor Wilkerson said tonight, it has nothing to do with your ticket to heaven. It has to do with what you achieve here.

After all the things I’ve seen, I should have faith like Arthur Blessitt’s, but I do not. I couldn’t be happy facing a firing squad, for example. He pulled that off. I do manage to come through once in a while, though.

My sister no longer goes to Trinity Church. She felt their message was a little basic. If you watch Perry Stone (one of her favorites), and then you go to Trinity, you will see that Perry Stone digs deeper into the mysteries of the Bible. No doubt about it. But every time I go to this church, I get something I need. It doesn’t seem to matter how simple the sermon is. So I’m still attending. Maybe I have a stronger interest in the fundamentals.

This blog entry made me think of the third psalm, so here it is.

1 Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that rise up against me.
2 Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God. Selah.
3 But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.
4 I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah.
5 I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me.
6 I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set themselves against me round about.
7 Arise, O Lord; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the ungodly.
8 Salvation belongeth unto the Lord: thy blessing is upon thy people. Selah.

I have managed to memorize 13 psalms so far, but I’m starting to lose some of them, so I guess I better start going back over them.

Lathe Gets Heart Transplant

I decided to do the predictable thing, give up, spend money, and get a new motor for the lathe. The motor the seller sent me runs, but it makes a bonking sound at low speed, and it just doesn’t look healthy. Also, the marred-up spindle appears to be incapable of holding the pulley stack so it spins true. I don’t think that will be good for the lower belt, and I’m sure it will make noise.

The smart thing would be to leave it in the lathe until it melted, but I just don’t have the patience to see if it gives good service. The lathe’s guts are in great shape. The ways look good. I think the compound and the other moving parts are okay. Mating all that to a junky motor just feels wrong. And like I said, somebody just happens to be Ebaying the exact type of motor I need, for less than 20% of list, including shipping. DONE. The peace is worth it.

Hopefully I will never have to interact with the seller again. He’s supposed to send me a replacement knob for the thread selection lever, and I think he’ll actually do it. I may sell the 1-phase motor back to him. I’ll try to find a use for the old 3-phase motor, or sell it. That’s the end. I guess I have to install the stupid thing and use it while I wait for the new one. That will help me get the bugs out of the wiring, I suppose.

I Think I Hear the Ice Cream Truck!

The lathe has absorbed my life. I rented a tool grinding video from Smartflix, and the disk was corrupted, so I could not copy it and return it right away. I have been spending whatever time I can find, sitting and making notes, but it’s taking forever. Sometimes it doesn’t play correctly, which is irritating. I received two other disks with it, and I decided to go ahead and send them back.

I now have two lathe motors, and neither is in a lathe. I have to put the “new” motor in and rig up the VFD. I was going to dump the drum switch and use the VFD for forward/reverse control, but I now think that would be stupid. The lever on the front of the lathe is super convenient, and the buttons on the VFD will never be as easy to use. I figure all I have to do is arrange the drum switch so it switches two wires on the motor’s input. I should be able to figure that out. I don’t see why the VFD would object. I don’t think it will know the difference.

I think the best thing is to dump both motors and install a Baldor. The perfect motor (nearly so, anyway) is available on Ebay very cheap. I’ll check the shaft size to be sure, but that’s the only variable that could give me trouble.

Being unable to learn from painful experience, I have contacted another dealer about a milling machine. He’s going to root around in his stock and tell me what he can offer. He has two nice-looking mills with DROs on his site, with all sorts of scrapy marks visible on the saddles and beds. The other possibility is to get a restored mill which is in better shape but costs more.

I told the guy with the DRO machines I wanted to use an escrow company or pay a mechanic look the machines over. That much, I have learned.

Og says virtually all machine tool dealers are jerks. The guy I’m dealing with now sent me a big long email packed with information, and he didn’t resent me flat-out stating that I was afraid he would screw me over. He must be a freak of nature.

If I ever create anything with the lathe (beyond the amazing 5/8″ bolt with no head), I will post it so you can admire it.

Chucks on Sale at Enco!

Here’s a clever tool question.

I clearly need a 4-jaw chuck for my lathe. I have been holding out for a used American chuck. But it has occurred to me that since the jaws are completely independent, this should be a relatively low-precision device compared to a 3-jaw chuck. The jaws don’t have to be in any particular relationship to each other. If that’s true, shouldn’t an import be just as good?

Programming a VFD is a Waste of my Giant Cranium

Today the new old motor for my lathe arrived. It looked like it came from Al Capone’s vault. The paint was in bad shape, and it was beaten up. But when I connected the VFD, it ran. Not smoothly, but it did run.

I had to get down on the garage floor to get the bolts out of the base of the old motor. Then I had to contort myself into the space behind the lathe to get the wiring hacked out of the conduit and boxes. Getting the pulley stack off the old shaft was a joy, believe me. Then I had to persuade the key to come out of the shaft keyway with a hammer and punch. I cleaned the pulleys with the last of my orange-based gun spray, and I put the pulleys on the “new” motor. I guess I’m ready to install it in the lathe. TOMORROW.

The motor I got today is nothing to write home about. People talk about how great old industrial motors are. I have my doubts. This thing makes a sound on every revolution, so my guess is that the bearings are not great, and the shaft looks like someone used it as a johnson bar.

When I put it on the VFD, it made a whistling sound so loud and shrill it was not acceptable. It would drive you crazy to use the lathe with that noise going on. I figured something was loose in the motor, but it turns out the signal to the motor has a pulse frequency, and that’s the problem. Apparently the waveform of each phase is made up of spiky digital pulses at a much higher frequency. I’m guessing here from a picture I saw. Somehow, if you let the pulses get too far apart, it makes your motor whistle. If you let them get too close together, it creates RF interference. On my VFD, you can vary it between 5 KHz and 14 KHz. I decided to ramp it right up to 14. To hell with the radio. Then I felt bad about my neighbors, and I decided to test it. The RF made Todd Schnitt’s show sound bad in the garage, but in my car, twenty feet away, he sounded fine. Who cares about radio interference that disappears after twenty feet? I ran it right back up to 14, and now the whistle is very quiet and sort of pleasant.

I found a really nice Baldor on Ebay for a small fraction of retail. I am considering buying it. The frame is the same. It should work fine. But I want to be sure the VFD won’t kill it. I know I can get an inverter-ready motor, but I’ll have to wait until one becomes available at a price I like. I’m not sure if it’s necessary.

I loves me some Baldor.

A thread on Practical Machinist says failure of a standard motor due to inverter use is nearly unheard-of, so maybe this is the thing to get. I can sell both of the motors the lathe seller gave me. Maybe I’ll get part of my investment back. I’ll say they APPEAR TO HAVE VERY LITTLE USE. That phrase worked on me. Maybe it will work on someone else.

A company called Orion makes add-on fans for motors running on VFDs. Neat.

I guess I haven’t learned my lesson, because I am corresponding with another machinery dealer. And it looks like I can get a Chinese split air conditioner for the same price as an American unit, without cutting giant holes in the wall. I don’t know if it will really cool 600 square feet, but I’d be happy if it even came close. It’s 12000 BTUs. I guess I could sit right next to it and pour ice down my pants.

If the garage gets too swanky, I’m afraid I’ll never leave.

I have been trying to find the best way to mount the VFD, and I think the answer is to get rid of the drum switch completely (using the VFD to reverse the motor), mount a piece of stiff sheet metal to the back of the headstock (over existing bolts) and mount the VFD to the metal. It would be right in my face, ready to use. Beautiful. Oddly, I happen to have a piece of sheet metal that would be perfect. This would be a good excuse to make a template and do some plasma cutting. Or I could make a plywood support instead, which would give me an excuse to run the mighty Powermatic.

This will be sweet. Some day I may even make something.

Thanks to You, I Stocked Up

Every morning, out of habit, I check the Classic Arms site. I got my C&R license quite some time ago, and I almost immediately lost all desire to use it, but I’m so used to looking at Classic Arms, I can’t stop.

All week, they’ve been writing about the ammunition crisis. I don’t understand it. I have all the ammunition a person could want, and I got it at great prices. I even have primers. If I were a truly accomplished right wing Christian potential possible terrorist, instead of a highly ineffective one, I could mount a really spectacular standoff and shoot up every cop car in Coral Gables.

That’s what leftist nutballs think bulk ammunition buys are for. But sane, intelligent people realize that the real motivation is stinginess. Why pay seventy-five cents each for 20 bullets when you can pay thirty cents each for a thousand? I don’t run around taking hostages and shouting about Ruby Ridge. I go to the range and shoot targets. That takes a lot of ammunition. Actual murderers generally spend very little on bullets. It’s probably pretty rare for 90-pound crackheads and career burglars to go to gun shops and load up on the latest frangible rounds. “How many Cor-Bons can I has for this Blaupunkt?”

Honestly, I don’t know what goes on in the heads of urban liberals. They seem to think that if you have one gun and one bullet, you’re armed as well as you could ever need to be. That’s because most of them have never fired a gun and know nothing about firearms. They don’t realize that people miss, or that criminals usually can’t be incapacitated with one shot, or that you need a lot of ammunition just to learn how to use your weapon safely, accurately, and responsibly.

You know what? Liberals who know nothing about guns should quit telling the rest of us what to do with them. Do I go to their houses and tell them how to work their bongs and bondage gear? Do I tell them how to apply their VD ointment or cook their heroin or beat their three-tooth-having common-law wives in front of their subsidized housing? Do I point at their buttcrack tattoos and say, “That’s not how you spell ‘Obama'”?

“I really think you have too many bullwhips and ball gags. I honestly believe you don’t need this much weed and smack. I think four guys in a men’s room stall is plenty. How many decks of tarot cards can one person use?” Imagine me, butting in to liberals’ lives to say these things. It’s like Dr. Phil telling people how to lose weight. Stick to what you KNOW.

I realized last night that I really need a pistol laser. Some strange person parked in the driveway while doing something that made their car make odd sounds. I went outside with a pistol to check the car out. I kept it concealed, but it was ready to fire. I realized the darkness was a real handicap. The car pulled away, but what if there had been a problem? A laser would have simplified things greatly. I better look into that.

I have long weapons with lasers (finally), but I am not quite ready to walk out onto the porch waving a shotgun every time someone comes near the house. That kind of thing doesn’t fly with the neighbors, and it’s a bit of an overreaction. I’ve paused in people’s driveways for perfectly legitimate reasons; I would have been highly disturbed had they come out brandishing long guns. But it’s proper and correct to have a gun handy when you investigate a problem on your property (after all, I carry mine when I shop for groceries), and you need to be confident of hitting your target.

I also realized that when you go onto another person’s property at night–a bad idea to begin with–you really need to be nice. This individual probably had no idea he was ten seconds and one mistake away from the Promised Land. I would do just about anything to avoid harming another person physically, but sometimes situations go bad in a hurry, and in a contest with some doofus who doesn’t train with his gun, I will prevail in a big way. And when the cops arrive, they will give me a high five (or as we call it in Miami, a “cinco alto”). This is Florida.

I got my rifle and shotgun lasers dirt cheap, but I doubt Hong Kong has caught up with Glock laser technology, so I’ll probably have to spend some coin to get ready. Maybe I should grit my teeth and move to a different caliber, too. The 9mm isn’t all that great for shooting through car doors, and last night I saw that such things can be legitimate concerns. I used to assume there would be no reason to shoot through a door, since a person in a car is not likely to be on your property. But what if you go out to check on a suspicious car, and they shoot? They can be completely off your property and still require a response. Maybe the best answer is to stick a laser on the .38 Super, which does a bang-up job on sheet metal, and use it in those situations. If you use the right caliber and load, a car is about as hard to penetrate as a styrofoam cooler.

One more reason to be nice when you drive.

Anyway, there is no ammunition crisis in my house. Unless you’re talking about closet space.

Be Sure to Bend Over Backwards to Please Businesses You Patronize

I have been working on the lathe. Now that I’m a master machinist, I’m pretty comfortable out there, dismantling and greasing and oiling. It may be hard for a lay person to understand.

I contacted the seller–PBUH–about the useless thread selector knob, and my best guess from his response is that he plans to replace it. He is expressing impatience and a desire to get this over with. Imagine how much quicker it would have gone, had he sent me the right lathe and spent, oh, seven minutes inspecting it before shoving it out the door. But you can’t ask for the world.

Seriously, think about it. Until yesterday, I had no idea how this thing worked. But he’s upset because I haven’t taken it completely apart, checked every function, and discovered every single way in which he failed to live up to the bargain. Dude, I would have checked the power feed, thread indicator dial, thread selector lever, back gear, sliding gear shifter handle, and a ton of other things, IF I HAD HAD ANY IDEA HOW TO LOCATE AND OPERATE THEM. Maybe with your 9,000 years of experience, you could have taken a tiny fraction of the time it takes me, looked the lathe over, and fixed it up.

While I was waiting for this thing, he said something about how it was going to be cleaned and checked over. I am not sure how you can clean something and leave a thick layer of ostensibly undisturbed crud all over it, but some people have gifts I lack. Maybe he means he hit it with the leaf blower, Carl Spackler style. As for checking it, the nonfunctioning thread selector knob would appear to indicate that the check consisted of driving by and glancing at it through a car window.

This is the same guy who sent me three “new” micrometers which were completely petrified. He didn’t even open the box and give the thimbles a turn. Just FOOMP! Into the box and onto the pallet. NEXT!

If there’s one thing a customer loves, it’s a vendor who causes terrible problems and then complains that the customer hasn’t fixed them fast enough.

In brighter news, I haven’t found anything else that really scares me. I got up my nerve and opened the headstock up. The lid on that thing is machined cast iron, even though stamped steel would do fine. It probably weighs 12 pounds. I took it off and looked in there and saw…1974. That’s the year the lathe was made. I traveled back in time. If I had been wearing long pants, they would have instantly gotten three inches wider at the ankle.

The inside of the cast metal headstock was brown; I suppose they get that way before they leave the factory. I may be wrong; cast iron rusts really fast. But the steel parts–the gears and shafts and pinions–looked almost as if they had just been made. They glistened and winked above a pool of fragrant oil, as if they had no idea it was 2009.

So it looks like there is nothing wrong with the guts of the machine. Only those parts that have been subjected to the ignorance of prisoners are beaten up.

I had the speed set pretty slow, so I figured it was safe to turn it on and see if it had splash lubrication. It did. And it splashes real good, even at low speeds. I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting a nice stripe of oil down the front of my clothes. The biggest gear caught it and sprayed it vertically into the air.

I tried to lubricate the lathe. I got out my new grease gun and loaded it up and went to work. And it looks like I shot grease into two fittings intended for oil. Oh, well. Two of the big gears outside the headstock had fittings, and I misunderstood the manual, and there you go. I couldn’t get them apart to the point where I could scrape the grease out, so I left it in there. Hopefully the lathe won’t explode right away.

I oiled all the other bits as well as I could, and I used solvent to get the crusty grease off the ways and other moving parts. You wouldn’t believe the difference it makes. The grime the seller left on this thing as about as slippery as cold peanut butter mixed with molasses, so when I tried to move the tailstock, for example, it required a good shove. Now everything slides all happy-like. And some of the noise has disappeared. I’m starting to see how this could turn out to be a good machine instead of a nightmare.

I may have to take the carriage off. There’s a little clamp that fell off, and even though a simple bolt holds it on, it’s a bear to hold in place while you attach the bolt. I’d like to apologize to the seller for letting that clamp fall off! I’m so sorry I didn’t see that he left it loose, causing it to drop as the lathe was put in place in the garage. That was irresponsible of me.

I sure hope there were no problems with my money, which has been in his bank account for over three weeks. I sure hope it wasn’t the wrong size, and that it wasn’t defective.

This gives me more confidence about buying a mill. It shouldn’t. But it does. This only worked out by God’s grace, and I was an idiot for trusting this guy. But somehow it gives me hope that I’ll be able to get this stuff done.

God Bless the Bureaucrats

I got absolutely nothing done today, with regard to the lathe. I had to go with my father to bring his boat home from the yard. The bridge Nazis have decided Miami’s Brickell Avenue bridge will now open and close based on random readings from a plethysmograph attached to the bridgetender’s goiter, so the big signs on the side of the bridge, which used to have some relationship to the bridge schedule, are now purely ornamental. The signs say the bridge stays down between 4:30 and 6:00 p.m., so it should open on demand before 4:30, but at 3:05, the genius in the tower told us she felt like having an opening at 3:30, so we had to wait. While she watched Oprah. I guess.

I sat there on the flybridge trying to figure out what the purpose of the bizarre new policy was. Then it hit me: I’ll bet it’s GREEN. It takes a lot of juice to open a drawbridge. I’ll bet some pea-brain in the city government decided to save forty dollars a week by holding up traffic.

Of course, you have to use your boat’s motors to fight the current and wind while you sit there waiting, and if you add up all the boats that get stuck, that takes more energy than the policy saves. And then there’s the obvious cost in lost man-hours. The Miami River is very important to commercial boat traffic, and they need to get in and out in a timely manner. So the green hypothesis doesn’t make any sense at all.

That’s why it’s probably true. None of this green crap is correct. “Recycled” newspapers go to the dump. There is no such thing as global warming. “Green” jobs kill regular jobs. It’s all a feel-good fantasy.

I guess I shouldn’t be this irritated about something I merely guessed at.

I’m rooting around on Google, and it looks like the Coast Guard is in charge of the bridges. That explains everything. The Coast Guard dances for the Obamessiah, so maybe some of his “progressive” foolishness has trickled down and infected the bridge schedule.

I took the side cover off the lathe and looked the gears over. I can’t see anything missing. The lathe was going “tonk tonk tonk” when it ran, and someone told me it could be a missing gear tooth, so I had to look. It turns out the lathe only makes this sound with the chuck attached. I’m thinking maybe some filth between the spindle and chuck kept it from seating tightly, so it rocks a little and makes noise. Or there could be a loose part in the chuck. Or I don’t know how to seat the chuck. I used the spanner wrench that came with the lathe, but I was only guessing.

The chuck spins on, so you have to wonder what happens when you use the lathe in the direction that unspins the chuck. It has to be fun when that hunk of steel flies off at 1800 RPM with a workpiece attached to it. It weighs maybe 30 pounds. My guess is that a smart lathe operator never operates the lathe in this mode unless held at gunpoint. Or because his federal-employee boss tells him Obama Almighty says counterclockwise is green and diverse.

Is this bad engineering at its worst, or is there some way to lock the chuck on the spindle? I’ll try to find out.

I think the bearings on the motor shafts may be giving out. Something down there doesn’t sound healthy. I assume they’re reasonably cheap, since they’re on the cheap side of the drive train. The precision stuff is up top. I’ll look them over when I replace the motor. I’ll bet it’s some kind of standard bearing you can buy from MSC.

While I was at the boatyard, I asked the owner if he knew of anyone up there who had bits of appetizing scrap suitable for scrounging by a metalworking hobbyist. He told me to leave my number with the receptionist. I don’t know what types of round stock they use, except for aluminum tubing. Propeller shops make a lot of custom shafts from stainless, so they have to end up with lots of short scraps, but this yard doesn’t do that type of work. I think Miami Propeller is the only place around here.

There are a lot of stainless “Aquamet” scraps on Ebay. I have a hunch that’s propeller-shaft material. It sure sounds like it. “Aqua.” I looked this stuff up on the web, and it sounds like fine metal. Maybe I could make interesting kitchen tools from it.

I once threw out a four-foot long, three-inch thick shaft stub. I feel pretty bad about that now. But you can’t keep crap like that lying around, on the assumption that one day you might go insane and buy a lathe.

I’m pooped and the birds are squawking. I better deal with them.