Make it Stop

Okay, another VFD question.

I want to be able to run my belt grinder at 5000 fpm. I have two choices. I can get a 3450 RPM motor and a 6″ drive wheel and get roughly 5000 at 60 Hz, and I can slow it down for low speeds. OR I can get a 1725 RPM motor and speed it way up to get nearly 5000, and I can run it at lower speeds for normal use.

It looks like the KMG people use 1725 RPM motors, and they remove stock in a hurry. But they use pulleys that double the speed at the drive wheel. So I guess 3450 is the way to go.

This is Why Engineers Shoot up Their Offices

Once again, I am finding selecting tools harder than using them.

I want to make a belt grinder. I read up and found out that the biggest motor I could conceivably need would be 2 horsepower, so that’s what I’m trying to buy. I want 3-phase, so I can use a VFD. I thought a 1750-RPM motor would be good, because it would run cooler and last longer. And I figured I’d get something like 2500 fpm on it, which would be sufficient.

BUT WAIT!

Turns out speeds of up to 5000 fpm can be useful. That rules out a 1750-RPM motor. I’d need an 11″ drive wheel. I think. Hope I didn’t make any careless errors. Now I’m looking for 3450-RPM motors, and good ones aren’t that easy to find.

It gets worse. There is almost no hope that I will be able to find bearings that will work with a shaft bigger than 5/8″. And a lot of 2 HP motors come with bigger shafts. If you can’t have mounted bearings on your shaft, you might as well kill yourself.

So I have to put all these factors together. Now that I think about it, don’t I need a super-long shaft? Man, that didn’t even occur to me. It will have to go through two mounted bearings plus a thick drive wheel hub. Is there such a thing as a shaft extender for an electric motor?

Excuse me while I breathe into a paper bag.

More

I guess my brain was malfunctioning again. Apparently there is no reason why I can’t put a drive wheel directly on the motor shaft and stick the motor next to the frame. Other people don’t do this, because they have elaborate pulley systems to get around the lack of a VFD.

Whew.

They All Look Alike

Okay, tool people. I have lost my mind again. Even if I can’t make the wooden frame work, I am determined to build a belt grinder with a 2 HP motor and VFD. If for some reason I fail, I should be able to put the motor on my bandsaw, which would be highly amusing.

Tell me if this VFD will do the job: LINK. I want good torque at low speeds.

There are a whole bunch of TEFC Baldor 2 HP 3-phase 220V 1740-RPM motors on Ebay for a hundred bucks or so. They all look exactly alike, but I figure any one of them ought to work, as long as it doesn’t have a weird shaft or anything.

Grinder Frame

This is hilarious. You have to see this.

That’s the body of the frame for my belt grinder. It’s an old real estate sign sandwiched around two pieces of scrap exactly 1 1/2″ thick, which happens to be the thickness of a typical grinder toolbar.

Can you believe that? I used two tools. The bandsaw and the impact driver. Took me maybe 25 minutes, and I’m slow.

Everything but the screws is scrap. And I had way too many of those screws anyway.

I haven’t firmly attached the top member, because I’m not sure what shape it will have to be to take the stuff for the tracking mechanism, and I also want to be very sure of a good fit against the toolbar.

Come on, tell me that’s not funny, compared to welding and cutting and grinding all day. I seriously think this will work. Why wouldn’t it? It already has, for someone else. Even if it doesn’t, it’s great fun. I love that bandsaw. It’s slow, and the cuts are not quite as good as table saw cuts, but it produces one fourth as much dust, it’s extremely safe, it’s easy, and you don’t have to wear any protective gear. A mask might be a good idea, but very little dust flies up where you can breathe it. Okay, okay. I should wear goggles or something, because tools are crazy, and this thing will eventually find a way to get me. I’ll worry about it next time.

Wood is the Answer

I actually used my bandsaw yesterday. Unbelievable, isn’t it?

I didn’t really make anything with it. I drew lines on a piece of scrap and tried to follow them. I just wanted to see the silly thing work. It turns out a bandsaw requires a little skill, which is a bummer, because I don’t have any. But I’ll work it out.

I fixed one of my last major tool needs by ordering a pneumatic orbital sander that collects its own dust. That pretty much leaves a belt grinder and a milling machine to round out the workshop.

The belt grinder quest is frustrating. It looks like a nice new one costs maybe $900, and if you make one yourself, it costs $850. Another irritation: there are a number of free sets of plans out there, but as far as I know, they’re all “no weld” plans. What the hell? Who has a drill press, cutting tools, and the skill to assemble a grinder, but NO WELDER?

I would much rather weld than buy 400 pieces of thick metal, spend 300 hours drilling precision holes in them with a drill press which I don’t have yet, and then bolt them together.

One guy–he wrote a book on knifemaking–has a wonderful solution to the problem. It’s one of those solutions that are so simple and obvious, it’s amazing that no one else does it. He makes belt grinder frames out of wood.

Why not? Think about it. Metal grinder frames are horrendously overbuilt. Do you really need two half-inch-thick plates of steel to hold a grinder bearing? I very much doubt it. You could put a hook in a piece of steel like that and hang a pickup truck from it. A piece of a two-by-six should be more than sufficient. I have enough scrap in my garage right now to build a zero-cost frame and find out. The knife guy used maple, but I don’t see the need to spend that kind of money. Softwood is not weak. Two days ago I lifted a 367-pound saw on a hoist supported by a two-by-eight across three two-by-sixes, and I didn’t hear or see a single sign of stress.

A steel frame would be nice, but it would weigh twice as much, and I’d have to clean and paint it, and what’s the advantage, exactly? I can’t see one.

Yesterday I considered hitting Harbor Freight to buy one of their nearly-free cheap belt grinders, because to build a metal belt grinder, you need a belt grinder. Now I think I should just slap a frame together out of scrap and see what happens! Worst case scenario: I get rid of an annoying pile of wood.

Oh, man. This could be fun. I could make DADOES. I could make TENONS and MORTISES. Oh joy.

I almost broke down and bought a drill press yesterday. I still might. I think a bench model might be a good thing to have, even if I get a mill. It should be more convenient for most jobs. But the price! A decent one is $350. I have seen the Ridgid floor model for $224 at Home Depot. If it’s still available, maybe I should consider it. At the regular price, it would make my cheapness gene vibrate. I’ve been checking Craigslist, too.

I better go do an inventory of my scrap.

Prayer May Also be Helpful

Today I have fantastic news. Mish Weiss says her SOS or VOD or whatever you call it–the dangerous side effect she is suffering from the chemotherapy drug Mylotarg–is moderate, not severe. Whew.

Yesterday I got on the web and read up on this condition, and I found out a treatment had been discovered. A drug called defibrotide can be very helpful. So I mentioned it in Mish’s comments. Never be afraid to make a suggestion about someone’s medical treatment. By the time you reach middle age, you will have known a number of people who died because their doctors missed something that was obvious to lay people.

As you may know, Mish is a recovering vegan. Okay, I put “recovering” in there with no real basis in fact, but I have hopes for her. She finally agreed to drink Ensure, a dairy-based product that puts weight on people. Here’s what she says about defibrotide:

The irony of it being derived from cow lung or “other parts” was not lost on me. Still not eating a steak though. :p

I’m a good influence, even when I don’t realize it.

In her comments, I told her someone was clearly trying to tell her something. And I noted that Solomon’s Temple was basically a barbecue joint with priests. Think she’ll buy it? Maybe not.

Anyway, this is great news. The problem she is having can be very, very bad, so it’s a relief to hear that it’s not as severe as it might have been.

Mish has all sorts of people praying for her. When she beats this thing, it will be obvious that God did the work.

In other news, Heather’s mom begins radiation treatment for cervical cancer today; I figured you would want to know.

One more thing: Dennis the Peasant’s mother-in-law is going into a hospice, and the estimate is six months. Put that on your list.

Success!

The bandsaw WORKS.

I wheeled it out to where the cord would reach the new 220 socket and plugged it in. Nothing happened. I removed the disconnect between the socket and the breaker, and I started fiddling with the wiring. POOF, I smoked a Craftsman screwdriver. How can that happen when the disconnect is out? It can happen when you wired the circuit wrong from the disconnect to the socket.

Now I’m out one cheap Philips screwdriver. I suppose Sears would honor the warranty, but it’s not honest to return stuff you destroyed out of stupidity. Which is very clearly what happened here.

I shut off the breaker, fixed the wiring, and started again. The saw ran!

I turned it off and got out Mark Duginske’s book, and I started tuning the saw.

First, I took off the silly 3/4″ blade that came with it. I could not fold the stupid thing up, so I dumped it on the garage floor. I installed the new 1/4″ blade and got it adjusted. Then I checked the book’s instructions on folding bandsaw blades, and I sort of got it folded, but the loop was bigger than I wanted. Oh, well. Not everybody has the remarkable spatial aptitude required to understand a bandsaw blade. It’s like a Moebius strip with rabies.

I think I understand why the seller chose to sell this saw instead of his Grizzly. I am pretty sure nobody in his business had the slightest clue how to make a bandsaw work, so when this one acted up, they decided to get rid of it. Name an adjustment. They had it completely wrong or didn’t even try.

The thing that holds the upper guide bearings was out of place…by about HALF AN INCH. This is like missing a parking space by six feet. In case you’re a BMW driver and you do that all the time, I’ll clarify. It’s bad.

The thrust bearings weren’t even close to right. None of the bearings under the table were anywhere near where they were supposed to be. One was so far back, it had probably never been in contact with a blade.

The blade guide post wasn’t square to the table, either. I had lots of fun fixing that. I also had to grease the guide post rack, gears, and screw, and I had to get the fine dust out of the mechanism so it would move.

Why would anyone spend over $1300 on a tool and then fail to learn how to maintain it? This tool looks like it was used ten or twenty times. After that, they apparently gave up. All they had to do was buy Mark Duginske’s book.

I fired up the saw and tried it out. I ripped a piece of scrap to see if the rail gauge was correct. It was perfect. Right on. I finished up by applying a whetstone to the blade’s rear edge. I don’t have one of those cute little stones with a handle, so I grabbed something I used to use to sharpen fish hooks.

I like the bandsaw, although maybe I could have been more aggressive in my choice of blades. The 1/4″ blade I got will take tight turns, and it’s supposed to be a good compromise blade, but it’s pretty slow. I can see why people run to the bandsaw instead of the table saw. There’s no push stick. No ear protection. No kickback danger. Very little dust. And you can use your hands.

I don’t know if this is a particularly good saw; it’s Chinese, after all. But it seems to work fine, and it has a great capacity. And now, thanks to me, it’s PORTABLE. Can’t beat that. I think I got a better deal than I realized.

I’m really disturbed now. The table saw works. The bandsaw works. The planer sled is built. I may have to MAKE SOMETHING. I am running out of excuses. No, wait! I still need a sander! Yes…yes…a pneumatic sander! And a drill press! No, a milling machine! THEN maybe I can get crazy and make…a picture frame or something.

Oh, hey! I can make new inserts for the table saw! That would be fantastic! I’d actually be able to use my Microjig splitter!

Life is sweet.

Remember Mish Today

Please don’t forget about Mish Weiss. She is still fighting the life-threatening side effects of her treatment with Mylotarg. She needs your prayers more than ever.

I got an interesting email from a reader named John. He has been trying to change his life. He says:

Unfortunately, I have trouble improving my personal habits and they are slowing my progress to Christ. I would greatly appreciate it if you would ask your readers to pray that God gives me the grace and strength of will to change.

Consider it done.

“Renewal” Should Mean Something

I have been getting links from other blogs because I wrote some critical things about Pajamas Media and some of the people who are involved in it. I wrote one remark which has gotten a lot of attention; at the time I wrote it, I thought it was mild and relatively inoffensive, but re-reading it, I think it was unnecessarily harsh.

I’m taking down the posts I wrote. I’ve been trying to change my life, and I don’t want to let my faults drag me back into the pool of smoldering invective and gossip which is the political Blogosphere. I apologize to those I made fun of, not for their sake, but for my own.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out the problems with PJM, but it’s possible to do it in a more constructive way.

I also apologize for those things I wrote in the past which were really over the line.

I Did It

1. My mobile base does, in fact, hold up my saw.

2. My hoist can take 367 pounds of saw without even creaking.

3. I can’t believe I put those front wheels out in front instead of off to the sides.

4. I think I’ll redo this, with the rear wheels the same, shorter tabs and no brakes on the front, and two additional side tabs for screw-down stabilizing feet.

Nonetheless, I am the King of All Tools. So to speak.

R.I.P.

Andrea Harris’s cat Squeaky has passed away.

Go say something in her comments.

Finito

The bandsaw base is finished. I think.

Today I brushed the rust off of it, which was probably not necessary, and then I wiped it down with denatured alcohol, and I put it out on the grass and blasted it with canned truck bed paint. It’s drying now. I think this was a good choice, because the saw won’t hurt the paint easily, and the reverse is also true. This stuff will be like a layer of padding between the saw and the base.

I’m not sure how long it has to dry before I can put the saw on it. The can doesn’t say, believe it or not. A website for a similar product says 24 hours.

One problem with painting it is that if I have to weld extra metal in to support the swiveling casters, it will be hell getting the paint off.

Even though I painted outdoors in a breeze, I think I’m a little high.

Little Killer on Your Workbench

A while back I complained that my 6″ bench grinder was not big enough, and I wrote about getting a different machine. I considered buying another bench grinder, but I am now dead-set against it, and here’s why: those things are extremely dangerous.

I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. The wheels come apart, and guess where the pieces can end up? Inside your skull. Or where your teeth used to be.

Here’s more wonderful information: angle grinders are dangerous too. If you Google, you’ll find a story about one that came apart. The wheel fragments entered a man’s TORSO. You can wear a face shield to protect your head. How do you protect the rest of you? Think of all the things you’re exposing to the grinder when you work. That list contains a lot of stuff you really don’t want to have mutilated by flying debris.

You really have to be careful to keep the guard between you and the wheel. If not, you’re inviting truly hideous injuries.

The more I think about it, the more I think belt grinders are better. They’re faster. They’re a hundred times as versatile. They don’t get hot. They use cheaper, faster motors. And they are a lot less likely to maim you.

In fact, I’m even thinking I may get a little pneumatic belt grinder to replace my angle grinder. Why risk being perforated if you don’t have to? And a little grinder like that would probably do much better work.

Bench grinders are weird, because they seem so much safer than they are. It’s very obvious that a table saw can mess you up. Nobody with any brains would take chances with a lit torch or a nail gun. But grinders look perfectly harmless. Most people wear no safety equipment at all when they use them.

Glad I learned this before splurging on a big Death Grinder.

Pay Six Figures to Memorize Cliff’s Notes

I got an obscene comment today. Here’s the unbelievable part. It was from a liberal. No, it had to be a GOP fake. Liberals always take the high road, right? Darn that Karl Rove. For a minute, he fooled me.

The funniest thing about it was that it came from a university. Obviously, someone’s parents’ money has been well spent!

We live in a time where people gladly pay institutions over twenty thousand dollars per year to teach their kids to take drugs, fornicate, give up their belief in God, bring curses on themselves and their families, read Cliff’s Notes, and absorb creaky, discredited leftist notions that bring mankind only suffering. Don’t ever try to tell me God wasn’t right on the money when he described us as sheep. When it comes to judgment, just about any mammal you can name is superior to man. Find me another animal that would base jump or smoke cigarettes.

For the most part, universities are gigantic wastes of money. In two weeks, a smart person who doesn’t watch TV all day can absorb everything a school can offer in a liberal arts course, with none of the bias and BS. At a cost of maybe a hundred bucks, if he buys his own books. Gas money, if he uses a library.

Seriously, how much time did you have to put in to get a B+ in a literature or history course, or in a nonsense course like sociology or black studies? Be honest. Two or three days of cramming, at the end of each semester, unless you had to write a paper. I had to take anthropology to “balance” my physics and math courses when I was in school. I studied for about a day, and I got an A. Try that in multivariable calculus and see what happens. If you’re Norbert Wiener, you can do it. Otherwise, expect to fail. Most college courses are a tremendous ripoff. And strangely, we don’t care. All over the US, there are people who don’t mind paying several thousand dollars for a child to study a course like the history of comic books or–here’s a good real-life example–the textual appeal of Tupac Shakur.

Man, think about that. What does a course cost at a private college? About four grand, I’d say. Would you invite someone into your house and pay them four large to teach you about Tupac Shakur? If not, why would you pay it to a university?

If we really cared about educating kids, we’d have accredited tutors who visited them twice a week. “Here’s your assignment. I’ll be back in three days. Know it, or your parents will take away everything that makes your life bearable.” That would work for any course not requiring special equipment. It’s how kings used to educate their kids. These days, we just shove them into the pen with the rest of the livestock and send them checks.

A lot of people think one of the best things about college life is that it gets kids away from their parents. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contact with our elders is an essential source of strength, guidance, and knowledge. This is why drug abuse and fornication are so big on college campuses. Mom and Dad and their values are a thousand miles away. If we really wanted to have a society with strong values, we’d go back to living in extended families, like people in the Bible did.

For decades, professors have been telling us our parents are idiots. Guess what? Your parents are treasures. They know a lot of things that can help you, and unlike your professors, they care more about you than they do about themselves. Your professors, on the other hand, probably ARE idiots. How do you think they ended up in academia? It wasn’t because their mad skills had the private sector chasing after them. Tenure used to exist because academic pay was too low, and job security was supposed to make up for it. Now it exists in spite of astronomical pay and benefits, simply because many academics can’t survive without it. Put an English Literature Ph.D. on the street, take away his cradle-to-grave benefits, and see what happens to him. I can tell you what WON’T happen to him. Private firms won’t offer him big money to teach them about The Canterbury Tales.

Here’s another bit of bleak news for academics. Now that we have DVDs and the Internet, it is easier than ever to completely replace professional instructors. Do you really need to subsidize an old hippie’s artificially grandiose lifestyle in order to learn college material? I’d rather buy a couple of disks.

I often say that the only people who get their money’s worth from universities are those who study things like languages, science, math, and music. Things that can’t be taught via cramming. But truthfully, you can learn all these things without instructors (or at least without costly institutions). When I studied physics and math, very often I had bad teachers and bad books. I solved these problems by buying other books and reading on my own. While I was studying first-semester calculus, I had a good teacher, but I had no background, so I studied algebra at the same time, from a book which probably cost fifteen dollars. My first mechanics teacher was so arrogant and incompetent, he nearly qualified as mentally ill. I survived by dumping Fetter & Walecka (the execrable text he liked) and buying Schaum outlines. Now that I think about it, there were a number of times when my teachers and their chosen books did me no good whatsoever. What was I paying them for? The grades, I guess. Everything else, I got on my own.

We spend too much money on secondary education. Maybe we should be working to develop a better system. Many, many courses could be replaced by tests. Show up, prove you know differential geometry, get credit, move on. Cost: $150 for proctoring and grading. Wouldn’t that make more sense than spending four thousand dollars? We already have a lot of tests to help us avoid unnecessary study. Maybe we need more of them. It’s insane to make someone spend a big six-figure sum and waste four years, just to become a member of a cubicle farm. Do you really have to spend three hundred grand to produce the Pointy-Haired Boss? I don’t think so.

Now that I think about it, I still don’t know differential geometry. I got an A in graduate mechanics anyway, but I think that was because only four students survived to take the final exam. I would really like to go back over that stuff and learn it. It’s one of those mathematical disciplines that requires memorization as well as reasoning ability; I didn’t work hard enough at it to memorize the little details that make it work.

It would never be of any use to me, but it irritates me that I never got a grip on it. I wonder if my memory problems would permit me to learn it.

I added some filters to the comment system today, so hopefully, juvenile, unintelligent remarks like the one I received this morning will be filed appropriately before I have to deal with them.

Don’t Read Before Eating

I have about had it with protective glasses.

It seems like every time I wear my polycarbonate specs, crap flies in under them and goes directly into my eyes. I don’t understand it. They are completely worthless, yet–as far as I know–just about every tool expert in the US recommends them.

Yesterday I thought I had an eyelash in my eye. I put up with it for hours. Then I got out my reading glasses (man, I miss being able to see), and guess what the problem was? A splinter. In my EYE.

Talk about freaking out.

I’m pretty sure it was a piece of the wire brush I used to clean the metal.

I figured I was on my way to the emergency room, but I decided to rinse my eye and give the splinter a poke, and PRAY. And the silly thing came out.

Am I the only one who gets bad results with glasses? I am really fed up. I think I’m going to give up on them and use the face shield from now on. It’s the only thing that works.