One More Thing I Barely Know how to Use

I hate to shock people, but here goes: I bought another tool.

Last week, I got all excited about tool and cutter grinders. I saw a Stefan Gotteswinter video in which he demonstrated the ways in which he used his Chinese single-lip grinder. He wasn’t just sharpening tools; he was modifying tools for new uses. It was startling. I started looking around for a grinder.

Here’s what I learned: for a certain amount of money, you can get a used Deckel single-lip grinder. These machines are made in Germany, and they work very well. Unfortunately, used ones don’t always look so hot. Buying any used grinder is scary because grinders throw abrasive dust into the air, and a lazy operator won’t take care to remove it before it damages things. For a little less money, you can get a Chinese grinder from Shars.com. These machines are based on the Deckel, and they work just fine. Shars is known for expensive shipping, however, and that makes their machinery less attractive. I was quoted $265 for a 100-pound machine. The up side is that Shars is a very reputable company that sells grinders that have proven themselves. If you don’t want a Shars grinder, you can buy the same basic machine on Ebay for a couple of hundred dollars less. The problem here is that you get a Chinese mystery seller who may or may not send you a decent product. Chinese mystery sellers can be very difficult. One guy on Youtube received a Chinese grinder via Fedex, and his seller was so obnoxious he wouldn’t even sign a Fedex damage claim.

If you take the Shars route, you will get a nice machine that does a lot of stuff. It won’t be a bargain, but it will function.

I considered the above alternatives, found them lacking, and kept looking. I learned that there are some other neat options. For example, you can get a K.O. Lee tool and cutter grinder. This is a pretty large machine that also does small surface grinding jobs. It’s very versatile. It’s also very big, it weighs a lot, used ones tend to be worn out, and it has a table design that lends itself to severe damage from ordinary jolts such as might occur during shipping.

I think a K.O. Lee grinder would be great, but what are the odds that a) I would find one in good shape, and b) my shipper wouldn’t ruin it? Freight companies are so untrustworthy, it’s almost as though they compete to see who can damage machinery the most. They’re also very dishonest about compensating people for losses.

I learned about another machine: the Gorton 375. This is a small grinder on a big cast iron pedestal. It will do everything a single-lip grinder will do, and more. It’s big, but not so big I’m scared to buy one. A Gorton 375 weighs around 450 pounds, and it’s the size of a chest-high filing cabinet. You can sharpen the ends of mills with it. You can also sharpen the flutes. You can sharpen small drill bits without losing your mind. It will accept cutters with shanks up to 1″ in diameter. I don’t know what size square bits it will take, but I’m sure there are ways to accommodate fairly large ones if you’re determined.

Gorton makes a small grinder–the 265–which is much less useful than the 375. People confuse them, so a lot of folks don’t know what the 375 can do.

You can see the Gorton 375 in the scan below.

The problem with the Gorton 375 is that many people think they’re worth a lot more than they really are. It used to be that machine shops and factories were full of machines that needed freshly-ground tools. This is not nearly as true as it used to be. A lot of present-day machining is done with disposable carbide inserts. That means many tool grinders, like shapers and metal planers, have been pushed out the side doors of businesses. Many of the people who sell them don’t realize this, so they put ridiculous prices on them. Some guy near me wants nearly $3000. That’s so insane, I’m not even willing to make an offer. That guy needs to spend a year trying to sell his machine. Then he’ll wise up.

I found someone with a nice Gorton at a price that was only moderately inflated, and I got him to come down to a number I was willing to pay. I bought the grinder, and now I’m waiting for him to ship it. I hope the freight people don’t destroy it.

Now I have to prepare. My understanding is that the 375 requires certain parts, including grinding wheels, that aren’t common today, so I will have to look into things like adaptors. I’ll need to find out if there are used parts I need to look for online. I also need a manual. I found one on Ebay. There are no free PDF’s on the web. The company that bought Gorton sells manuals, but I read that they charge an obscene amount. I’m also going to need to buy or build a mobile base.

I need to learn how to grind things. I guess that would help. I have a book which is supposedly very informative. I better start studying.

Once I’m sure the grinder is coming, I’ll order the manual. That should give me correct dimensions for a mobile base. When the grinder arrives, I should have the mobile base ready, and I’ll be able to lift the grinder and drop it in the base.

Hope this works out. Apart from a surface grinder and a small CNC mill, this is pretty much the only major tool I still “need.”

Thoughts on an Ineffective Life

Yesterday, I learned that Terry Jones had died.

Jones was a member of the Monty Python comedy team. He also wrote a large number of children’s books and scholarly publications. He was an authority on Geoffrey Chaucer, the medieval British author who is famous for writing poems and a collection of coarse stories which appears to have been derived from The Decameron. Jones directed The Life of Brian, which was the story of a man who was misidentified as the Messiah by a confused public.

If you don’t know which member of the team was Jones, I can help. Here are some of his well-known roles: the prince who refused to marry Princess Lucky, the naked organist, Brian’s mother, Mr. Creosote, and Sir Bedevere. If that doesn’t help, maybe it’s best to say he was the second-least prominent of the six actors, after Terry Gilliam, who focused mainly on animation during the group’s early years.

When asked what he would like to have inscribed on his tombstone, Jones said, “Maybe a description of me as a writer of children’s books or some of my academic stuff — maybe as the man who restored Richard II’s reputation. He was a terrible victim of 14th-century political spin, you know. I think those are my best bits.”

Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a big deal to me when I was a teenager. It figured prominently in my list of toxic influences, along with Henry Miller, Fritz Perls, the cast of Saturday Night Live, and the staff of the National Lampoon.

I remember the day the first VCR was advertised in the Miami Herald. My best friend at the time–another very toxic influence–called me on the phone. He had seen the ad, too. Sony had created a TV with a built-in Betamax. We were ecstatic to think we would be able to record every episode of Monty Python. We had already memorized every line we could.

I was such a fan, I even bought Monty Python books. I bought the script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film in which our loving God was depicted with the face of Karl Marx. I bought something called The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, which was a print rehash of a lot of the TV jokes. I even bought Dr. Fegg’s Nasty Book of Knowledge, which was written by Jones and Michael Palin. Finally, I had my own copy of A Liar’s Autobiography, which was written by Graham Chapman.

This week people are praising Terry Jones for his life’s work. All I can think is, “Thank God I didn’t end up like him.” He has a lot to answer for.

When I was young, I thought my gift for humor was a big deal. I didn’t get over this misconception until I was middle-aged. I thought I was put on earth to make easy money making people laugh. I thought irreverence and verbal cruelty were wonderful things. I thought humorists did a lot of good by attacking people who behaved badly. I didn’t understand how sanctimonious many humorists, including the Python crew, truly were. Humor is a great cover for self-righteousness and ruthlessness.

People like Terry Jones, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, George Carlin, Bill Murray, John Hughes, Doug Kenney, and P.J. O’Rourke poisoned my life, and the lives of many others, with their immature views. I’m sure they meant well, or as well as a person can, in that state of ignorance and corruption, but they did a great deal of damage. Young people like me identified with them and emulated them. This may work out well when you have a Hollywood support system behind you, but it’s not so smart when you’re a typical young person who needs the goodwill of others in order to succeed in life. It didn’t work out well for me. I didn’t do much to build a decent life for myself. I fell behind other people.

I thought it was possible for a person who wrote shock humor to be a good human being. If I was nice to people I liked, and I didn’t steal or kill people, I was a good person. I barely knew God. I knew almost nothing about him. I didn’t realize I was supposed to be full of the Holy Spirit or that my purpose was to help people to be like God. I didn’t know verbal cruelty was the same thing as murder in God’s eyes.

Satan is like a three-card monte dealer. Three-card monte is a game played by criminals. They set cardboard boxes up on city sidewalks and use them for tables until the cops come along. In three-card monte, there are two black cards and a red card. The dealer holds the cards face-down and moves them around the box, and then he invites people to pick the red card. It looks easy, and to make it easier, the dealer will always have a shill who appears out of nowhere, plays, and wins. The game is rigged, however, so there is no way to beat the dealer.

Satan tries to get us to do unprofitable things with our lives, and he allows a few people to appear to succeed so we will be encouraged to keep trying. Example: there are very few successful rock musicians compared to the number of people who never make it. Most people who try to make it in rock end up playing in local bars until they die or get real jobs. We admire people like Steven Tyler, who behave badly all their lives and still become rich and famous. We don’t feel quite the same way about our 50-year-old siblings who dress like teenagers, sleep on our couches, and pawn our silver because they’re still on the verge of making it.

Jones, whether he knew it or not, was a shill, just like the rest of his team. For every humorist who makes it, there are millions who screw up their lives and their relationships with God. Many of the shills, for that matter, have lives that go bad toward the end, and many go to hell. John Belushi overdosed. Doug Kenney fell off a cliff and died. Douglas Adams, a fierce atheist, died young. Sam Kinison, a shock comedian who abandoned a career as a Pentecostal minister, died in a car wreck on his way to a casino town. For Satan, a few shills are a very profitable investment.

Jones wrote children’s books which were full of occult material. One of his book features a friendly goblin who offers to take a little girl to the goblin city. A goblin, like a genie or fairy, is just a demon, and demons are real. Reading stories about supernatural creatures like goblins can open doors to demons. Through such stories, your children can become ill or have severe psychological problems. When you write such stories for children, you’re literally evangelizing for Satan. You’re doing tremendous harm to people God created you to help.

If you watch Mark Hemans on Youtube, you will see him tell a woman to throw out the fairy books she got for her daughter. He says they opened the girl up to demonic attack.

Some people defend the Tolkien books because Tolkien wrote them with the aim of promoting Christianity. That’s wrong. You can’t use stories of sorcery and demons to help people serve God. Consider the hundreds of millions of people who love Tolkien. What percentage are even aware of Tolkien’s intentions? Surely less than one percent. It’s the same bunch of nerds who sit in basements playing Dungeons and Dragons. They’re not attacted to Tolkien because they love Jesus. They’re attracted because they love sorcery and demons.

I read the Tolkien books, and I was a Christian at the time, and it never occurred to me that they had anything to do with Christianity. Tolkien fooled himself. His friend C.S. Lewis made the same mistake, writing about witches and a magical wardrobe. No one should have a Narnia book in his house.

Jones was proud that he had written dangerous books for kids, and he was also proud that he had written about Chaucer. That seems very strange to me. How can you think Chaucer matters? Whose life have you improved by writing about a long-dead storyteller? What problems have you solved? It’s like being proud of graffiti. It’s meaningless.

Jones never grew up. He was spiritually stunted, and so are his friends. Take a look at what John Cleese said at Graham Chapman’s funeral:

Graham Chapman, co-author of the parrot sketch, is no more. He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He’s kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the great head of light entertainment in the sky. And I guess we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only 48, before he had achieved many of the things of which he was capable and before he’d had enough fun. Well, I feel that I should say, “Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries.” And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn’t; if I threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf.

Cleese, a grown man with a law degree, then went on to toss out the F-word, to the general approval of those assembled.

It reminds me of the way Dan Aykroyd behaved at John Belushi’s funeral. He showed up in a ridiculous biker costume (picture Dan Aykroyd trying to fit in with real bikers), and when the mourners entered the church, Aykroyd made a show of stepping off the sidewalk and climbing over the church’s picket fence, as if to honor his dead friend’s contempt for authority. Meanwhile, somewhere else, Belushi had already learned the fate he had earned through his own contempt.

People like this led me away from God and his peace and into a life of humiliation, failure, guilt, and depression. Their kind is still at it today. When one generation dies and goes to hell, Satan raises up a new one, and we continue to lionize them while they feed us poisoned sweets.

I wish I had had someone to tell me the truth when I was young. I had a cornucopia of voices telling me all the wrong things, but there wasn’t one person who knew the Holy Spirit and wanted to introduce me to him. I had Henry Miller, John Cleese, Joseph Heller, and the rest, but there was no Derek Prince. There was no Mark Hemans. When I tried to find God, I ran into goaltenders like Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, who were actually put in my way to make sure I never found the path. I didn’t stand a chance.

Think of the contrast between Terry Jones and Mark Hemans. Jones made naughty, sophomoric jokes, like a mischievous schoolboy, and he led other people into iniquity. He wrote books about a dead man no one cares about. He made himself rich, he bathed himself in glory, and then he died. Mark Hemans shows up in churches, and he frees people from things like paralysis and autism. He delivers desperate believers from cancer. He helps people to know the Holy Spirit. He helps them and their families to live in peace, good health, victory, and the knowledge of eternal salvation.

Who is the real success?

When someone like Jones dies, Satan makes sure lots of people honor him. He wants the rest of us to want to go out the same way. I’m not fooled. In all likelihood, right now, Terry Jones would give absolutely anything–even his limbs–to be where I am at this moment, with one more chance to repent. If Graham Chapman could have spoken at his own funeral, he would have begged people not to follow him.

I’m just glad God helped me come around before I died, and I’m glad I didn’t have great success when I was pursuing the wrong things. Had I succeeded, I would be just as smug and confident as the many damned humorists who preceded me. Thank God Jones and his colleagues failed to ensnare me. I forgive them all.

Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Gilliam are still here. Maybe some of them will wake up while there is still time.

Mr. Technology Explains it all to You

This may sound incredible, but I usually have a subject in mind when I sit down to blog. No, seriously; I do. Today is different. I’m blogging to kill time because I’m not feeling all that well.

It’s nothing serious, so don’t worry. I should be fine by tonight. Feel free to pray if you want, however. I would love that. All I’m willing to say right now is a) my condition proves it’s very important to pay close attention to eye protection when you weld, and b) my condition does not involve my eyes.

I’m trying to think of something interesting to write about.

I got some more neat tools, and I’ll tell you why I bought some of them.

I carry the 9mm Glock I bought for my dad years ago. When I bought it, I sprang for night sights, which your carry piece really ought to have unless it has the other accessory I got for him later: a Crimson Trace laser sight.

I am not an laser sight expert, but I know a little bit, so I will provide some information which will be extremely helpful to anyone who carries and doesn’t already have a way to aim quickly in low light.

When I bought this sight, there were two well-known companies making laser accessories for pistols: Crimson Trace and Lasermax. I have a Lasermax on my 10mm. A Lasermax is really a replacement guide rod with a laser on the front. I thought it would be a great sight because it’s always parallel to the barrel. Pistol guide rods are mounted that way.

The original Crimson Trace is different. It’s a somewhat bulky gadget that wraps around the upper part of a gun’s grip. The laser is situated to the right of the slide. You can’t pick up a gun that has this type of Crimson Trace on it without turning the laser on. The obvious benefit is that when you need to draw your gun, you won’t have to ask your murderer, rapist, or overly enthused Antifa kid for a time out while you turn your laser on. Not that Antifa kids are using guns yet. Guns are so cisgender. I think they’re still throwing bottles of THC-enhanced urine.

The Lasermax on my gun has a little button sort of thing you push to turn it on. For many people, this can be a problem. If you don’t practice, you won’t remember to turn the laser on when the fun starts. Also, the bar the button belongs to can move around and become dislodged.

Somewhere I got the idea that the Crimson Trace was not adjustable for windage and elevation. I was totally wrong, but that’s what I thought. This is why I got the Lasermax for myself. I thought it would work for me because I’m sufficiently familiar with my gun to be able to operate it in a hurry. I wanted an accurate sight, because I shoot well, and I want to hit what I aim at.

Some time last year, I started feeling something sharp poking me when I handled the gun with the Crimson Trace. I found a little pin sort of thing protruding from the right side of the sight. I made a very weak effort to figure out what it was, and I did not succeed. I put off fixing it.

Eventually, the pin (actually a screw) made a hole in the pocket of a pair of Carhartt jeans, and I knew I had to act. By Googling for more than three minutes (because this was an urgent matter), I learned that the protruding screw was there to adjust the windage. I also learned that I needed a 0.028″ Allen wrench to adjust it. Of course, I had lost or misplaced the original tool Crimson Trace thoughtfully provided with the sight.

Let me digress. I would not buy another Lasermax, and I wholeheartedly recommend the Crimson Trace. I have had an important part of my Lasermax wear out, and the part is too soft, so it will wear out again. Changing the batteries is harder with a Lasermax, too, and the batteries don’t last long at all (“Excuse me, Mr. Mateen…could you put your rifle down while I change my batteries?”). Finally, it’s not automatic.

The best thing about the Lasermax is that it replaces the Glock guide rod. The original rods tend to fail. It has happened to me twice. Maybe I can keep the Lasermax and use it as a guide rod while relying on a Crimson Trace for targeting.

My Crimson Trace works perfectly, and I’m still on the batteries it had in it when it was new. The windage screw can walk out over time, so you need to watch it, and a pin that holds the sight in place can also drift, so you may have to push it back in at some point. These are the only problems I’ve had, and they’re trivial.

To get back to my repair saga, I took the Glock out, activated the laser, and sure enough, the dot was off by maybe three inches at 10 feet.

No problem! I have a ton of tools. Several tons, actually. I have multiple sets of Allen keys. I have multiple sets of tamper-proof driver bits. There was absolutely no doubt that I had a 0.028″ Allen wrench somewhere.

Except I didn’t.

I could not believe it. What a void in my tool arsenal. How could it have happened?

As expected, I found there was no hope of buying the wrench locally, so I went to Amazon. I found a set of Bondhus metric and SAE Allen wrenches in tiny sizes. I also found something even neater: a set of Wiha SAE Allen wrenches in precision screwdriver format. Instead of L-shaped bars, the set contained little screwdrivers with Allen hexes machined into the ends.

You know I had to have that.

Precision screwdrivers come with caps that rotate, so you can put the tip of a driver in a fastener and turn the screwdriver while holding onto the cap. This is a great thing, and it’s why I leapt at the chance to get Wiha precision Allen drivers.

Some people say there are better precision drivers than the ones Wiha makes. As far as I know, the ones that get all the praise are all German.

Here is some useful information. Many Allen wrenches on the market today *cough cough China* are made from soft “steel.” This is bad. Allen screws *cough cough more China cough* also tend to be pretty soft, and, well, the whole business stinks to high heaven.

Whenever you buy a Chinese tool with Allen screws, you should check the screws for hardness. If they’re not hard, replace them before they get stripped out and make your life miserable.

Do I do this? Yes. Of course!

I did it once, I mean.

I think.

When you buy Allen wrenches, you really need to avoid the cheap ones unless you have solid evidence that the set you’re buying isn’t garbage. An easy way to avoid getting burned is to stick with top brands. Bondhus is a top brand, and Wiha makes great…everything. It’s a German company. Need I say more? Yes, BMW’s and Porches break down a lot, and our faith in Germany received a powerful blow when we found out about Milli Vanilli, but German tools are very nice.

I’ll be even more helpful. Buy German screwdrivers. They’re not that expensive, and they’re fantastic. I have Wera screwdrivers which are so tough the manufacturer put steel caps on them to receive hammer blows and named them “Chiseldrivers.” That’s just nuts.

If you want American screwdrivers, check out Grace. They look sort of crude, but they’re excellent. They have square wooden handles. Yes, they will stain, but they won’t roll away, and there is no solvent in your garage that will dissolve unfinished wood or make it slippery.

Grace makes screwdrivers that are especially good for gunsmithing.

I have Klein screwdrivers, and they’re American. I should not have bought them. I’m sure they’re wonderful for electrical work (Klein specializes in electrician tools), but when you get gasoline on them, the rubber on the handles starts to dissolve. Eventually, you are likely to find yourself working on something that runs on gas, improbable as it sounds.

My love affair with Klein is not what it once was. I have two pairs of expensive Klein pliers with handles that started falling off in big chunks. They have a lifetime warranty, but you have to pay for shipping, so it’s worthless. The shipping cost is about the same as the cost of new handle covers, and if Klein gives you the same covers you had to begin with, they’ll just fall off again.

Here’s something weird: Klein makes a different type of cover. The product is called “Klein-Koat.” You can buy them and install them yourself. They look a lot better than the originals.

I also bought myself a decimal chart. This is a poster-sized chart that tells you how big drill bits and other cutting tools are, in decimal inches.

As you surely know, SAE drill bits come in three types of sizes: fractional inch, letter, and wire gauge. They don’t come in decimal inch size as far as I know, and that’s bizarre. Very often, when you work with drill bits, you’ll need a bit in a certain size range, like 0.310″-0.320″. If you have a chart on your wall, you can just look up and get the information you need. If not, you may have to open a book or get out a dial caliper.

The Starrett company mails out free decimal charts as well as free pocket charts. This is pretty sweet, but the wall charts are paper, and you can guess what will happen to yours if you don’t enclose it somehow. In the old days, many companies put their names on charts, and they made them from metal. They’re very collectible now, unfortunately. MSC Industrial sells a 24″-wide chart which is either plastic or laminated, and I believe it also has holes so you can hang it without damaging it. It only costs a few dollars, and mine is arriving today.

You would be surprised how useful these charts are. There are also metric charts. I don’t know what kind of information is on them. I don’t do a lot of metric. I wish I did. The metric system is far superior to SAE or Imperial or whatever you want to call it.

Also among my recent scores: two Noga magnetic bases. These babies are magnificent. They stick like glue, they’re very tough, they have little adjustment knobs that make indicating a pleasure, and they’re made by Jews in Israel. What more could you want? They cost a lot, but how often do you buy magnetic bases? I’ve been machining for 12 years, and I only have 4.

Jews are the best at science and technology. I’ll just say it. Has anyone else discovered relativity and developed the first atom and thermonuclear bombs? Didn’t think so. And I love knowing my money occasionally makes it to Israel without passing through the United States Department of the Treasury first.

Let’s see. I bought a small copy of The Engineers Black Book. This is a small, handy reference which serves the same purpose as Machinery’s Handbook except that it probably contains only the most useful 5% of that book’s staggering content. Unlike Machinery’s Handbook, which has flimsy paper pages, the Black Book has some sort of plastic pages you can wipe clean. That’s a huge thing in a metal shop.

The price of Machinery’s Handbook has gone through the roof lately. Because the information changes very slowly over the years, smart people buy used copies.

I bought a new copy.

Hey, it was years ago, before the jacked the price to Martin Shkreli levels.

Why is it so expensive now? Is it being printed by Snap-On?

A while back, I needed to chase the 1″-8 UNC threads on a tractor attachment, and I realized I did not have a suitable single-point indexed tool. A guy on a forum recommended one from Ebay, so I picked that up. It looks like it’s made very well. It came with a box of carbide inserts, and I got the whole shooting match for $18, shipped from…wait for it…China. I had already fixed the tractor part when the threading bar arrived, but it’s still an important tool to have.

Speaking of carbide, as in “indexed carbide tooling,” I heard a wild claim on Youtube today, and I’m really hoping it’s true. Two of the best-known Youtube tool guys are John Saunders (NYC CNC) and Stefan Gotteswinter, who, in spite of his Chinese-looking name, lives in Germany. Saunders visited…the other guy’s shop…(I am not typing that name again), and they agreed: HSS is obsolete! I should add that they didn’t mean it was obsolete for everything, but they believe it’s no good for end mills.

HSS, which means “High Speed Steel,” is a century-old invention used mainly for cutting tools that cut metal. It’s a wonderful material. In the distant past, carbon steel (or “plain old steel”…humorous initials not intended) was the best thing available. Carbon steel has a problem. When it gets hot, it gets soft fast, and it can permanently lose its hardness in an instant.

There are two reasons why steel that has these properties is inferior. First, when you sharpen steel, you are likely to get it hot enough to undo the hardening and tempering processes. Second, when you cut at high speeds, with a lot of pressure, or without generous lubricant, you can melt your cutting edges very quickly. This adds up to slower sharpening, more frequent sharpening, more discarded tools, and slower work. When you’re paying workers by the hour, you want a drill bit that can drill 20 holes a minute, not three holes, and you don’t want them wasting time on the sharpening machine.

HSS is a huge improvement over carbon steel, and it will always have lots of uses, but when it comes to end mills, it can’t compare to tungsten carbide, which is extremely hard and even more tolerant of heat.

A lot of noob machinists love carbide because it lasts a long time. They love it in lathe tools because you don’t have to shape carbide cutting edges yourself; you just buy new ones. Old codg…I mean “experienced machinists”…tend to look down on people who love carbide, because it takes much less skill to use it, and there are some things HSS does better. I have been taken to task for my love of carbide. I almost never grind my own HSS lathe tools.

There is also a widespread belief (which I held until an hour ago) that carbide can’t get as sharp as HSS. This matters when you want really nice finishes. Saunders and…the German guy…say this is not true. They say they sharpen carbide until you can shave with it, and they even say HSS does not have the sharpness potential of carbide.

That would be nice, if it were true. And because both of these guys are professional CNC machinists, my guess is that it is true.

Stefan–we are on a first-name basis because I don’t want to type “Gotteswinter”–had something else to say in the video. He says he sharpens carbide inserts. If true, this is a huge thing for home machinists. Carbide inserts often cost $10 or more per piece, and it’s not hard to screw them up. If you could touch them up (or just plain customize them) yourself, you could save a lot of cash, and you would be willing to try new things that had suddenly become easy and economical.

He also says you generally don’t need a chipbreaker on an insert in a home shop. A chipbreaker is a little groove that runs around the border of an insert. It would be nearly impossible to reproduce in a home shop. The purpose of a chipbreaker is to prevent chips (metal shavings) from getting so long they turn into dangerous, razor-sharp “birds’ nests.” Obviously, the smaller a job is, the smaller the nests will be, so they become inconsequential. I never thought about it until today.

I admit, it’s generally possible to find excellent inserts on Ebay for very little money. I don’t know why. Surplus, I guess. But finding sharp ones is not that easy. Most carbide inserts have rounded edges. Sometimes a sharp tool is better. It would be great to redeem worn inserts at home by adding sharp edges.

Even if you manage to find good inserts for a dollar apiece, the ability to renew and alter them would be a big plus.

Yesterday I blogged about the possibility of getting a Chinese tool grinder for my shop. Now that I have this new information about carbide, the grinder looks even more useful.

I’m feeling considerably better now, and it looks like I killed an hour or so. I’m having a great day in spite of the way I felt earlier. Hope you are, too.

More Shop Floor Space Liberated

I had a splendid workshop session today.

If memory serves, and it may well not, I started building an arbor press stand in November. I have a cheesy Asian arbor press, and the first stand I built for it was pretty bad, so I wanted something better. I threw the old stand out. This left me with a heavy iron object sitting on the workshop floor where it was always in the way. The shop is incredibly cluttered right now, and I needed to get wheels on the press so I could roll it around while I arranged things, so I have been working hard to get the stand together.

The press was pretty much welded together last year, but I wasn’t happy. There was some slight warpage on the bottom. I had already made one warped stand, and I didn’t want another one. I took the new stand apart, added bracing, added some weld beads to pull the warps out, and put it back together. It’s still very slightly warped, but supposedly, nearly every welded object is warped, so I don’t feel bad.

Once the structural welding was done, I wanted to spend some time on aesthetics. The stand is made from rectangular tubing, and the ends of the tubes were open. I didn’t like that. It creates places where critters can live, and it looks unfinished. I bought myself some flat steel bar, cut it in pieces, welded it over the ends of the tubes, and ground them to make them look like solid bars. I’ll post a photo.

I guess I put in three hours on that today. I really enjoyed it. It’s fun to take hard, sharp metal and make it look soft and smooth.

As you can see, I haven’t painted the stand. I will probably want to add some features, so it’s a little early to paint. One feature often found on arbor press stands is a bin for catching broaches. A broach is a long cutter than makes rectangular slots in things. An arbor press is the standard tool for broaching. After you push a broach through your workpiece, it falls, so you need some way of preventing it from hitting the floor and being destroyed. I’ve always grabbed it with my hand, but that’s not the preferred method.

I haven’t added a bin yet because it seems to me it will be in the way if I want to use the area under the press for a long workpiece. I want to create a bin that detaches.

I originally planned to have a shelf between the legs of the stand. I may still do that. Alternatively, I might put a couple of bins on the sides, about 4″ wide by 4″ deep by 12″ long.

The original design also called for struts in front to prevent the stand from tipping, but I can’t make it tip the way it is now, so I think I’m going to omit them. A truly foolish person could make it tip, but I don’t plan to invite random people to use the press, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

If I make a bin or a shelf, it will give me a chance to use my SWAG Offroad finger brake. That would be neat. I’ve barely used it, and it’s a great tool. I put an air hydraulic jack on my hydraulic press, and my big compressor is here now, so using the finger brake should be a blast.

I’m very happy to have made the press useful again, but I’m even more happy to have it off the floor. Now I can resume ordering the shop. The mess out there is highly annoying. I bought myself a Harbor Freight bin cart just to get junk out of the way, and I may buy a second Harbor Freight tool cart just for mill and lathe tooling.

The more stuff you put on wheels, the bigger your shop will seem, and the cleaner it will be.

I lifted the press onto the stand without help. Ordinarily, I avoid lifting heavy stuff, but I couldn’t help myself. Every so often, I worry that I’m getting feeble. I decided to see if lifting the press was still a possibility. I have managed to do it during the stand-building process, and I haven’t gone to the ER yet. The press supposedly weighs 135 pounds, so I feel somewhat less feeble than I did before I picked it up. I still want to get a small shop lift, however. It should be easier to resist my silly impulses when I have the correct tool at hand.

I’ve been thinking about adding a new power tool to the shop: a single-lip cutter grinder. This is a machine that will let you sharpen and alter cutting tools such as drill bits and end mills. I didn’t think these grinders were that interesting until I saw that they could be used to make custom cutters. You can take a 1/2″ end mill, cut a slot around it, and turn it into a slot cutter. You can also relieve the shafts of end mills so they don’t rub your work when you make cuts deeper than the flutes are long. Of course, you can also sharpen things, and that’s a big deal, given the cost of carbide end mills.

Single-lip grinders used to be extremely expensive. Then the Chinese got ahold of them. Now you can buy a serviceable Chinese grinder for a fraction of what grinders used to cost. It won’t be a Deckel, but it will do everything a Deckel does. You can also modify it and de-Chinafy it, correcting whatever deficiencies it arrived with.

There are plans out there for making grinders, but the consensus seems to be that these grinders stink. People who have made them defend them, but the truth is that they’ve spent maybe 60% of what a Chinese grinder costs, and they’ve put in maybe 150 hours of work per machine, and they still have grinders others refer to as “fiddly.”

I don’t want fiddly. I want a grinder that works without a lot of who-shot-John.

Of course, if I get a grinder, it will need a stand. Hmm.

Now that the press is on wheels, maybe I can get the shop together.

My Car is my Church

Obviously, I have not been blogging much over the last week. I think the reason is that I have been spending a lot of time ripping CD’s.

A while back, I found myself listening to audio Bible files on Youtube, and I realized how useful they were. I decided I should get myself an audio version of the King James Bible, turn it into MP3 files, and put the files in all my devices.

Finding a good Bible was not easy. There is no perfect translation, but there are definitely some bad ones. I don’t want a feminist/socialist/environmentalist/anti-male/hipster translation. I want the paternalistic/cisgender/heterosexual/privileged Bible. I want God to “mansplain” to me. I’m pretty happy with the King James and the New King James, and the King James is the only translation which is a great work of English literature as well as a solid reference book, so the King James is what I picked.

Once I had chosen a version, I had to look through different editions. I finally opted for the Zondervan dramatized audio Bible. It doesn’t add to the text, but it does use different actors for different voices. It uses a woman’s voice for the book of Esther, which is moderately annoying, but overall, it was the best audio Bible I found for a decent price. The Royal Shakespeare Company did one that is supposedly phenomenal, but it’s only available on used cassettes.

Ripping the disks (Why do so many people insist on “disc”?) is taking quite a while. The Bible is a very big book. I’m doing one chapter at a time and then combining the files into single-book files. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes me 10 more days.

Meanwhile, I have been watching a lot of Mark Hemans videos. It seems like the stuff I watch keeps increasing in quality. I watched a guy named Tom Fischer heal a lot of people, and it was great, but he got married and wandered off into talking about the health benefits of essential oils. I watched Tom Loud, Doug Collins, and The Last Reformation, and they were better. Mark Hemans is on the next step up.

Here’s what you usually see when charismatic preachers talk about healing. Some money-lover like Jerry Savelle will say someone he knows in Africa touched some person who was full of tumors, and that person was healed instantly and started running circles around the church. You won’t hear the preacher’s name or the name of the person who was healed. There won’t be any follow-up. Then the person you’re listening to will ask you for money.

Mark Hemans is not like that. He’ll say he healed someone of, for example, autism, and then he’ll say, “And you can find the video on Youtube.” Then you’ll find the video, and sure enough, there will be footage of some kid who used to be completely messed up, talking and behaving normally. You’ll see footage shot before the healing, proving the child had problems. You’ll hear the parents talk before and after the healing. You’ll see the kid doing things he couldn’t do before.

It seems like everyone is autistic these days. I have a small social circle, but I have four friends who have autistic kids! Four! And one of them has a parent who may well qualify. Autism is such a hot topic, I’ve had people try to tell me I have Asperger’s. People are blaming vaccines, pesticides, power lines, global warming…everything except demons. Why is that? We’re embarrassed to talk about demons. We think people will think we’re ignorant savages.

Here’s something interesting. Not only are demons involved in many, many conditions; they are involved in problems that seem to result from injury. You may think symptoms that follow injuries are purely physical. Mark Hemans healed a paralyzed boy whose are was injured during an emergency delivery, and he said a demon was the real reason for the paralysis. Go to Youtube and watch the video. You will see the boy raise his arm normally for the first time in his life. I know someone whose child has this problem. What if it could have been healed 25 years ago, simply by casting out a spirit?

Here’s something obvious which God showed me: even if you don’t believe diseases are caused by demons, it is definitely true that infectious diseases have spirits and that they live inside you. How do I know this? Every creature has a spirit. You can read Ecclesiastes if you don’t believe me; I know some Christians teach that animals have no spirit. Think about this: God puts life into inanimate matter by breathing his Spirit into them. There is no other way? How, then, can a living thing not have a spirit?

The Bible says there are horses in the supernatural realm. Remember the horsemen of the Apocalypse? If there are horse spirits in heaven, why would you think a horse here on earth can’t have a spirit?

If you have bacteria, fungi, viruses, mycoplasms, prions, parasites, or other types of living matter in you causing disease, you have spirits in you. All these creatures have spirits. I don’t know why this wasn’t obvious to me years ago. If the things that are in you causing disease have spirits, how can you not believe getting rid of spirits will improve your health? If you can make the spirit of a bacterium leave you, how can you not be healed of the disease it causes? It’s funny that no one ever teaches this.

Hemans healed a lady of bowel cancer, and then he forgot all about her. A year later, he returned to her area, and she showed up and surprised him. She brought a file of medical documents, including color photos. Whoever does the production work for Hemans dug up the footage of her initial meeting with him, and it’s part of the video in which she produces the documents.

This is not how healing preachers traditionally work. Generally, no one checks up on them. There is no documentation. There is no film, except for the film of the initial prayer and alleged healing.

These films are like those awful holiday newsletter cards some families send out. They always say Bobby got straight A’s again and George’s business opened three new locations. They never say Bobby turned gay and George got convicted of driving while intoxicated, even if everyone in town knows.

Many people have gone to meetings featuring Benny Hinn and Oral Roberts, to name two, claimed they were healed, and then either lost their healings or turned out not to be healed at all. This is what Christians are used to. We make no effort to check up on the healed. We don’t want to hear about those who didn’t get healed after all. They make us uncomfortable, so we ignore them.

It’s a new experience for the church when God confirms a healer’s work. We’re not used to that.

It’s important to note that Hemans doesn’t run around begging for money and threatening people with poverty if they don’t pay up. He’s very unlike the healing preachers Americans are used to.

Hemans is coming to America this year. He’ll be in the Eastern United States part of the time. I plan to go see him in action. I don’t worship men, and I don’t chase signs, but I need to see people doing things right, in person. Cessationists, who think God inexplicably turned selfish in about 200 A.D., criticize anyone who likes to see miracles, but how can you have Christianity without them? God is love, among other things. He loves healing his children. Miracles aren’t the foundation of Christianity, but Christianity without miracles is anomalous and crippled. It’s sick. God promised us signs and wonders would follow us. He promised we would heal the sick and cast out demons. If we’re not doing those things, something is amiss.

Cessationists amaze me. Miracles clearly take place today, and there is proof. How, then, can cessationism be correct?

I know some cessationists say all miracles and other manifestations of the Holy Spirit come from demons. That’s amazing. What lower form of blasphemy is there than calling God a demon?

God says people who call evil good and good evil will have serious problems, and he says he will not forgive those who speak against the Holy Spirit. Look it up for yourself. Even if you thought all miracles performed in the name of Jesus might be demonic, why would you say so if you weren’t sure? Like Gamaliel said to the Jewish leaders of his time, you might be fighting God himself.

A long time ago, God showed me that one of the curses on man is that we have to work very, very hard to get things he wants to give us simply for being his children. We struggle and suffer for millennia, trying to solve problems he can, and will, solve instantly.

What is technology? Like hard work, it’s a substitute for God’s help.

Consider cancer. We still can’t cure it. We have been building our medical knowledge ever since we were created, and there are many forms of cancer we can’t cure. Even if your cancer is curable, you may have to go through terrible things in order to be rid of it. Doctors may simply amputate things until you’re cancer-free. They cut off limbs. They cut of breasts. They cut out eyes. They cut off penises. Doctors castrated Bobby Riggs, and he died anyway. Now think about God’s way. Either he prevents you from getting cancer in the first place, or he drives it away and cuts the root instantly. No surgery. No drugs that make you vomit and lose your hair. No disfigurement. No loss of function.

I have known more than one man who had to wear diapers because of prostate surgery, and some also became impotent. All became sterile. After thousands of years of medical progress, that was the best human effort could do for them. I know a lady whose leg was removed at the hip. I would hate to guess how many women I know who are missing ovaries or their uteruses because of cancer or other problems man can’t fix.

God created us to be heirs, and heirs don’t earn. They simply receive. When man fell, he cut himself off from his inheritance. When Jesus came and made people well, he wasn’t giving them special favors. He was simply showing them what every human being was originally supposed to have, all the time.

We can’t cure a cold, the flu, arthritis, allergies, migraines, high blood pressure, diabetes…all sorts of common diseases. We can treat viral diseases, but we can’t really cure them. This is where we are after thousands of years. It’s pathetic, really. But God heals every type of problem, and he does it free of charge. Why aren’t we pursuing his help?

I’m going to pay about $8000 this year for medical insurance, even though I probably won’t see a doctor or receive any treatment. I don’t smoke. I barely drink. I’m not obese. I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have circulatory problems. I don’t take prescriptions. I still pay a fortune, because the government says I have to. That’s what man’s curse has done to me, and I’m much better off than most Americans my age. It’s remarkable that we pretend God won’t help us, considering what we spend and endure as a result.

Mark Hemans is the real deal. I’ll stick my neck out and say it. How much proof do you need? If he’s the real deal, I can be, too, and so can you. And we’re supposed to be.

One of the powerful things Hemans teaches is that you need to confess your faith. Very often, before he heals someone, he says, “Do you believe Jesus will heal you?” If the person won’t say yes, he won’t pray for them. He makes people sit down until they get their faith working, and he has people help them. They can’t weasel around, either. They can’t say, “I think he might.” They have to say they believe he will.

These days, when I pray, I say, “I believe you will do this,” and it makes my faith roar through me. Very good thing to know.

Here’s another useful practice: pray for people throughout the day. You may be busy, and you may be frustrated because you feel you can’t do anything for God. You don’t have to feel useless. Just pray for people. If you’re in a grocery store, pray that everyone on the property, and their families, will be saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. If you’re driving to work, pray for all the people in all the cars you can see. Make a point of praying for people who offend and mistreat you. Pray for obnoxious people. You may think it’s a sorry excuse for a ministry, but that’s an insult to God. Your prayers do more for people than your human effort could ever do. It’s better to pray all day, all by yourself, than it is to go to Africa on a mission and build a latrine or dig a well with your own strength. Elijah shut off the rain for several years by praying alone. Try and top that with your mission trip.

God’s power is like electricity. It needs a path. It has to have a destination. When you pray for people–especially people no one else wants to pray for–you open a channel for God’s power. When all you do is sit and beg God to help you with your problems, you’re like a wire that isn’t connected to anything. The current doesn’t want to flow.

I’ve found that praying for other people–anyone I can think of–during the day increases God’s faith and peace in me. It makes sense. Why would he make his power and virtue flow through someone who only wants to help one person?

Right now I’m working on ripping Isaiah. I look forward to having this job done. I want to be able to hear the Bible when I’m driving and here at the house. Once I’m done, I should be more communicative.

Crooked Pastors Dog my Dreams

I have a lot of dreams that seem to have no significance at all, but last night I had one which seems to have come from God.

I was living in my childhood home. My mother was there. She had an unconscious animal she thought was a rabbit. She had drugged it for some reason. She gave it to me. I put it on a little table, face-down with its limbs hanging off. It lay there oblivious, like a fat kid sleeping off Thanksgiving dinner.

I felt that I was supposed to shoot it, because that’s what you do with wild rabbits in your yard.

As I looked at it, I wondered how a rabbit could be so big. It looked more like a fat, neutered dog. I thought my mother ought to know what a rabbit looked like, but it certainly seemed like she was wrong.

I realized the animal was really a young coyote. Now I knew what to do with it. I went to get a gun. I walked toward my bedroom.

The coyote woke up and started menacing me and standing in front of me. I found myself wearing one of those protective outfits attack dog trainers wear. I held my arm out in front of me. I wasn’t really afraid of such a small animal, but I didn’t want to be bitten. The coyote showed its teeth and barked at me. It had very long jaws. When it barked, it actually said, “WOLF!”

To get to my bedroom, I had to go down a hall full of tool stations and big, stationary tools. I had to twist and turn to get past them. In the bedroom, my gun safe was full of disassembled pistols. I found a slide here and a body there, but I couldn’t put a gun together. I picked up the assault rifle I keep by my bed and tried to shoot the coyote. The trigger didn’t click, and nothing came out of the barrel. The gun was coming apart in the middle. I tried to pull the forestock toward me to put it back together, but I didn’t get anywhere.

A bunch of coyotes ran into the house from across the street. Some came in the bedroom window. I realized they weren’t pure coyotes. They were part dog. Such animals are called “coy-dogs.” I was surprised to see how many there were. I had thought there were only a couple in the area.

They really didn’t like me. They were united against me because I was a threat to their predation.

A big one that was really just an old sheepdog came in through the window and stood on the sill. It was not aggressive. It seemed tired of the coyote life. It wanted help. It had a collar and tags. I tried to read the tags so I could call the owner. I also saw a pure German shepherd walk through the room.

I never managed to shoot any of the coy-dogs. It was frustrating. I knew my neighbors hated them, and here I was with a chance to get rid of a whole pack.

I don’t know everything about the dream, but God told me a few things.

My mother, as usual, represented the church. The coy-dogs were pastors. The word “pastor” literally means “shepherd,” so it makes sense that the coy-dogs were pure herding breeds and crosses. The pastors were wolves, in the Biblical sense. They were hypocrites who only cared about eating the sheep and taking their money. They were like Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Steve Munsey, Joyce Meyer, Joel Osteen, T.D. Jakes, John Gray, and the rest of the usual suspects.

The old sheepdog was a pastor who wanted to go back to serving God. He was very unhappy with what he had done with his life, and he wanted to change. He was haunted by the knowledge of the waste.

The coy-dogs were not real wolves. They were smaller, except for the shepherd and sheepdog. They were not scary. They might have seen themselves as big, frightening, powerful predators, but you could injure and drive one off pretty easily with a good kick to the teeth.

The one that was mistaken for a rabbit reminds me of Richie Wilkerson, Kanye West’s young hipster pastor. He was frisky and bursting with confidence that he was a big, bad wolf, but he couldn’t back it up with any real strength.

I believe God was showing me that there are crooked pastors out there who are not to have their ministries completely destroyed. God will not help his children destroy them. They’re part wolf, but they’re also part shepherd, and God will not annihilate their ministries. They will come around eventually. My mother represented churches that enable such people. They fawn on them and give them money, and that puts them to sleep.

There are corrupt preachers who are completely irredeemable, but some preachers can be saved.

The pastors ganged up on me because I threatened their income and reputations. This has actually happened to me in real life, so no surprise there. Business as usual. It means nothing to me, because like the animals in the dream, these guys bark but aren’t man enough to bite. Preachers have lied about me and conspired against me, but they never had the guts to confront me. When you want everyone to think you’re a sheep, you can’t go on the attack in public. You have to sneak around at night, behind closed doors, like a cockroach or a termite.

I’m not sure why my mother thought the first coy-dog was a rabbit and not a sheep or sheepdog. It may be because rabbits are unclean by kosher standards yet very edible. A rabbit could symbolize a gentile.

It’s an interesting dream. The only real revelation in it–the only thing I didn’t already know–was that so many hypocrite pastors could be saved. That’s very good news, but I am tired of these people and their lies and slanders, so it also means I have to more patient than I want to.

Sifting Through Bad Advice Yields Results

I managed to get some workshop time in today. Very satisfying.

First, I worked on my arbor press stand. I believe I started on this in November. Four trips plus three holidays plus my general lack of competence interfered, but I’m back on it now.

I got myself a real welding table last year, and it came with a bunch of clamps. My hope was that clamping things down before welding them would prevent warpage. Turned out that was not the case. In reality, as far as I (now) know, warpage is prevented not by clamping things as they should be oriented, but by a) making the shortest welds you can get away with, b) skipping around as you weld so you don’t put too much heat into any one area, c) using thick material and adding supports when needed, d) clamping things so warpage will actually straighten them after they’re released, e) straightening crooked things with heat and force, f) adding and then grinding off additional welds that only serve to bend things back into the correct shapes, and g) using flame-straightening.

I clamped my parts to my welding table, and when I put the finished stand on the ground, it rocked. It wasn’t bad, but I wanted it to be better. I got fed up, cut it apart, and started over. I removed the top, but I left the base attached to the legs.

I made sure all the legs were the same length. Then I took 1″-square tubing and welded supports to the top of the legs so they would force the top straight when it was attached. I used a bunch of tacks to attach the supports, and I skipped around while completing the welds. In the end, I had something that was not noticeably warped.

When it came time to attach the top, I started with a lot of tacks. Then I added a bunch of short welds, skipping around as I welded. I did not make long pretty welds that covered all the seams. I know better. Long welds look great, but they cause warpage, they waste time, gas, wire, and money, they increase wear on your welder, and they’re just generally bad.

MIG wire welds have a tensile strength of 70,000 psi. In the past, I used to use over half a square inch of weld on joints that would probably never see 50 pounds of tension. I think it was a stupid idea. Fifty pounds of tension on half a square inch is 100 psi, or 1/700 of the weld’s ideal tensile strength. My guess is that I was overdoing it a little.

It seems obvious to me that you can’t look at your weld, estimate the tension it will experience, and use exactly enough weld material to match that figure. You would have tiny welds that would flex a lot. But I was probably using 5 or 6 times as much metal as I needed.

When I got my top attached, it appeared to be completely flat, but I still had some warpage on the bottom of the stand, which still had my original welds on it. The flat tubes on the bottom were bent upward at the ends. They weren’t bent much, but it bothered me. I flipped the table, put a bead of weld across each tube, and then ground the beads off. Three of the tubes are now straight. The remaining one has straightened somewhat, but it will need another bead before it’s perfect.

Because I didn’t use big, long welds, and because I don’t weld all that well to begin with, I had a lot of ugly joints. My solution was to grind the ugly off. It would be neat to have welds so pretty I wanted to leave them exposed, but that’s beyond my skills, and anyway, I believe it’s impossible when you use proper technique to prevent warping. I had to make multiple short welds instead of a few long ones, and joining short welds makes for ugly joints.

I’m going to keep adding weld and grinding it off until I’m happy with the way the stand looks.

Once the fourth tube is straight, I’ll have a nice arbor press stand which is ready for finishing touches, but because I didn’t use long welds, there will be a lot of areas that have gaps and so on. I have a solution for that. I plan to cram them full of JB Weld, which is an epoxy product which resembles metal.

Here is my theory: long, pretty welds only exist on Youtube, where people who make videos don’t actually have to make anything that’s straight, flat, or square. In real life, short welds are the way to go. You should make one short weld at a time and then let it cool. When necessary, you should join more short welds to them later to complete your joints, but much of the time, you should just leave them alone instead of overwelding. This means you will end up with gaps that have zero adverse effect on your project’s integrity yet which are unsightly and hard to paint over. Since you don’t need the structural strength of welded metal across those gaps, all you really need is a tough product which will fill them permanently without cracking or coming loose.

I’m going to grind my welds until nothing sticks out too much. I’m going to soften all the rough edges on the stand. Then I’ll take JB Weld or something and fill in all the gaps and gouges. Then I’ll paint the stand, and it will be wonderful.

Maybe this is a cheesy approach, but I’m going with it, because it seems smart. I don’t just think it will work; I know it will work.

After I was done with the work on the stand, I decided to do some machining. I have a bench grinder, and a long time ago, I machined a tool rest for it from aluminum. It works very well, but because the aluminum was too thick, it was impossible to orient it at a sharp angle to the wheel without opening a big gap between the rest and wheel. When you use a bench grinder, you never want a gap larger than 1/8″, because if you have a bigger gap, the skin of your finger can get sucked into it, and the grinder will then remove the skin from your finger like a sock from your foot. This is called “degloving,” and it’s pretty gruesome.

I have been dying to fix the rest, but the best tool for the job was a milling machine, and until recently, my mill was in Miami, far away where I could not use it. I tried to modify the rest with the belt sander and bench grinder, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so I stopped. Now my mill is here with me, so I can finally get on top of neglected projects.

I put two parallels in my mill vise to hold the rest level in the y-direction, I leveled it by eyeball in the x-direction, and I put a huge 2-flute HSS end mill in the spindle. I fired up the mill and cut a beautiful bevel in the rest. When I took it out of the vise, I saw that it needed some more cutting, so I inserted it in the vise again, leveled it by eyeball, and somehow managed to get it within a few thousandths of an inch of its previous orientation without measuring. I turned on the mill, cut a little more aluminum, and I was done. I would say the whole job took 10 minutes. Magnificent.

Now I need to get to work on spacers for the grinder wheels. I have CBN wheels. These are aluminum wheels with cubic boron nitride grit embedded in them. They are maybe 1.25″ wide at the hubs and rims, but in between, they’re thin, unlike ceramic wheels, which are of uniform thickness. The spacers on my grinder were made for ceramic wheels, so the outer rims of the spacers don’t reach the wheels to grip them. The only support is on the hubs.

The interior spacers are long tubes with disks on the ends. I could make new ones with deep rims to press on the wheels, or I could just make metal rings to fit between the original spacers and the wheels. The outer spacers are concave washers that also to be replaced or fitted with rings.

I’m wondering if I should get rid of my bench grinder guards. Their only purpose is to contain flying fragments when wheels explode, but CBN wheels can’t do that. The guards make grinding on the sides of the wheels difficult. People who don’t know any better grind on the sides of ceramic wheels, but it’s extremely dangerous, so grinder makers make guards that discourage it. Now that I don’t need the guards to contain fragments, I have some flexibility.

The guards support the grinder’s tool rests, so if I get rid of the guards, I’ll need to rig up new rest supports. I think it’s a good idea, though.

It’s neat to be able to use real tools again. I really missed them. I was helpless. A man without machine tools, a tractor, and several welders is basically a woman. I would go further. I would say that man is Elizabeth Warren.

I look forward to getting the arbor press stand fixed and putting casters on it. One less motionless object to get in my way in the shop.

Back to the Mire

The further along I get in Christianity, the more I find wrong with this world.

Human beings have a nearly endless capacity for getting used to things. I suppose this is why there is no part of the world, no matter how unpleasant, which we have not settled. People who live in deserts and in the frozen north adjust pretty well, even though the places where they live are, objectively, disagreeable. People in prison have good days. Because we can get used to nearly anything, we see the world as a beautiful place full of opportunity when, in reality, it’s a cursed planet packed with disease, cruelty, and disaster.

Here on earth, babies are born with AIDS and cancer, in addition to birth defects so horrifying just seeing them can give an adult nightmares. Everyone born here ages and dies. A big percentage of the species on earth survive by killing other creatures and eating their bodies. If you look at the earth with clear eyes, you can’t help but conclude that it’s a terrible place. You may be feeling okay right now, but all over the world, countless rapes and murders are taking place. Millions of people are screaming in agony. Innumerable creatures are being torn apart, alive, by other creatures. The fact that you’re used to it doesn’t make the earth a nice place.

Sin, which is the fundamental cause of all suffering, is one of the things we’re used to. We’re blind and deaf to it. Things we think are normal and acceptable are actually extremely evil and harmful.

Most Americans think sex outside of marriage is harmless. That’s amazing. Think of all the unwanted children it produces. Think of the diseases it spreads. Go look at photos of syphilis and AIDS patients and tell yourself fornication is okay. How many people are in prison right now for murder and battery because fornication made them jealous? Since Roe v. Wade, Americans have murdered so many babies, the number tops the American casualty count from the Vietnam War, and the vast majority of the murdered babies were conceived through fornication.

Many Americans think recreational drugs are harmless for most people. Astonishing. Every time you buy drugs, you subsidize murder. I had a friend who tried to tell me his dope was acceptable because he only smoked homegrown. Of course, he was a terrible liar. I personally overheard him trying to get weed through a dealer. He was also an alcoholic, he had terrible debt, and he had alienated many of the people who knew him because he was so self-centered and abusive. I’m one of those people. I removed him from my life because he was obnoxious to me, and I never heard from him unless he wanted something.

Drugs invite demons, and demons cause physical problems, mental illness, and increased sin. Furthermore, like fornication, drug use is explicitly condemned in the Bible, so it’s not really necessary to argue about the ill effects. If God says it’s wrong, we should not be doing it.

Lust is now something we don’t even try to fight. We see it as healthy. We’re even proud of it. We encourage and celebrate it. We enrich slutty entertainers and treat them as though they were Ashtaroth and Athena.

We love anger and cruelty. Look at the kind of humor we pay to be subjected to. Look at the gruesome, sick movies and shows we watch.

When I turned back to God, I didn’t understand how polluted my life was. I listened to jazz and the blues, and I thought it was fine with God. I watched violent movies with no moral qualms. I thought it was fine to stare at women and fantasize about them as long as I didn’t try to get them into bed. I thought self-confidence, which is pride, was desirable. I didn’t know the Bible said God fought the proud.

A decade or so ago, I became aware of the concept of sanctification, and I started asking God for it. I knew Christians had demons and iniquities–evil habits–and that we needed to be purged. My pastors had no interest in sanctification. They were sinners, and they were afraid they would lose money if the sinners who made up their congregation were confronted with the need to repent. I was shown that I was unwelcome at the last two churches I attended, and the reason wasn’t that I was an unrepentant sinner or that I didn’t try to be helpful. They ostracized me because I stood up for sanctification and told other people they needed it.

Sanctification has been a very slow process for me, probably because I had pastors opposing me instead of teaching and helping me. My pastors loved their sins and demons. They wanted to stay filthy, and they didn’t like it when anyone else tried to get clean. Nearly all the help I’ve received has come from God himself, through private revelation and deliverance. That’s sad.

Sometimes, when I questioned what I was doing, other Christians encouraged me to continue. Can you believe we’re that ignorant?

Last year, I gave up watching action movies and shows. I should just say “movies,” because TV shows are just short movies. I had enjoyed mindless movies like John Wick and the Tarantino films. God told me watching these things was no different from watching pornography. In fact, these films were pornography. Most pornography is sexual. I was watching violence and revenge porn.

We get very worked up about porn and porn addiction, but the other things we watch are just as bad or worse!

God also showed me I had to give up superhero movies and a lot of science fiction. Superheroes are really false gods. The things they do in movies are physically impossible, and many superheroes have occult roots. Thor is an ancient false god; how much more obvious can it be? Science fiction movies are full of occult ideas, and almost none of them acknowledge God. Star Wars and Avatar essentially promote new religions. There are probably millions of people in this world–some grown–who think the force is real and try to cultivate it.

Earlier this month, I went to a Last Reformation event in North Carolina, and I asked someone to cast spirits of worry, fear, and unbelief out of me. I had been having inexplicable anxiety, especially between midnight and dawn. It annoyed me, because unlike many people who worry, I do not like to worry. I see worry as a sin. I am not proud of it, the way many people are. I consider it disgraceful. It’s an insult to God. It’s faith in Satan.

After my trip, I felt much better. I wasn’t completely calm all the time, but I felt good. I stopped waking up and having problems falling asleep again. It was great.

Last night, I did something dumb. I was getting ready for bed, and I got hooked on videos from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I used to watch these shows. They’re about miserable, selfish people who descend into self-destruction as a result of their involvement in the methamphetamine business. These shows are full of violence, cruelty, and sick revenge. There are no godly characters. None of the characters care about other people. They never do anything kind.

After I watched the last video, I felt worry coming back to me. My heart throbbed. It was very unpleasant. I realized I had opened the door. I asked God if this was the case, and he confirmed it. I cast out the spirits behind the worry. I repented. I asked God to forgive me.

He allowed me to feel the worry for a while, to let the lesson soak in, and then it was gone. I understand that. Sometimes you need to suffer a little in order to learn. I was grateful for it.

Today I’m wondering what life is supposed to be like for modern Christians. How many things do I have to give up? I can’t have coffee or tea. I can’t watch most movies. I can’t listen to most music. There are many things I can’t let myself think about. There are many things I can’t let myself say. I can’t go into a bar. There are many places I shouldn’t even visit. What would my life be like if I were completely free of things God hates? I can’t imagine, because I’ve never lived that way. People who are born blind can’t imagine sight.

I’m not talking about rules or legalism. A legalist thinks God has given us a list of rules and that he grades us based on how many points we score. That’s wrong. In reality, God has simply shown us what is good and what is harmful. If you tell your 4-year-old son not to put his hand on the stove, you’re not a legalist. You’re just telling him to avoid something that causes serious problems.

Jews who are not Messianic think God has a scale and that he weighs our good deeds against our bad ones in order to decide who goes to heaven. Muslims believe the same thing. It’s wrong. Holiness isn’t a sport or a game show. It’s a way of being. We don’t get into heaven by doing good things. We get into heaven through the punishment of Jesus. He paid our bill. The point of being good isn’t to win admission to heaven; it’s to be like Jesus, increase God’s victory in our lives, help others to be saved, and avoid defeat and misery.

I don’t watch TV any more, except for Forged in Fire. I have no interest in movies. I watch Youtube for Christian material and videos which are relevant to my hobbies. Sometimes something counterproductive pops up on my feed, and I end up wandering off. That’s what happened last night.

I don’t want worry, disease, financial problems, loneliness, depression, subordination to obnoxious people, or any of the other ills that come from opening the wrong doors. I want to open the doors to heaven and close the doors of failure and oppression. Many of our problems persist because we give the enemy legal authority to afflict us. We wonder why we don’t get God’s promises, even while we’re inviting Satan to fulfill his. That’s amazing.

Sometimes when I sign into Youtube, before the system knows it’s me, the algorithm shows me a bunch of things other people are watching. It makes me want to throw up. Video games, the Kardashians, professional sports, vapid, unhappy celebrities, snotty late-night hosts, rappers with disgusting lives, martial arts events…it’s nauseating. How can people care about or even endure this garbage? It’s like looking at other people’s food in a grocery checkout line. When you see a mountain of Pop Tarts, chips, sugar cereals, light beer, Hot Pockets, sugar drinks for kids, and frozen entrees, you wonder how they can eat it and not die in a month.

We complain that God doesn’t do what the Bible says he will do, but we haven’t given him a chance. We swim neck-deep in the world, subjecting ourselves to its power. You have to wonder how good life can be for those who are willing to be set apart. It’s not like we can look around and see how they live. They are too few in number. I don’t know anyone like that.

Without God, life is utterly pointless. Everything we do that God doesn’t command will be destroyed in front of us. The things we do in obedience last forever. When you serve God, you walk in love, helping others in ways that are permanent. Compared to that, earthly accomplishments are like sandcastles made from infected manure. People love to think they’re creating legacies. We put our names on buildings. We try to accomplish as much as we can in our professions. We strive to become famous. It’s all filth. None of it will survive. Even the oldest ungodly public figures will be forgotten before long. The pharaohs will be forgotten, but a Burger King employee who serves God will do things that will be remembered in heaven forever.

I’m going to keep going forward. I know things will get better and better if I do. I don’t care what I have to give up. I’m going to be dead soon no matter what I do. A couple of decades of light self-denial won’t amount to diddly in the long run.

The Years I’ve Wasted!

Yesterday I had a discovery that left me with a mixture of joy and deep regret, as well as a sense that I had been cheated. I discovered that mustard greens are actually the best greens.

Here is the problem: I had never had properly prepared mustard greens. I had always had undercooked, bitter greens. I figured they always tasted that way. They were okay, but I saw no reason to go out of my way to cook them for myself. I thought my results would be no better.

This week I picked up what I thought was a package of collards. I was going to use them for salad. Collard greens make excellent salads. I mix them with grape tomatoes and feta cheese, among other things. They’re a little tough compared to lettuce, but that doesn’t scare me.

When I got the greens out to make salad, I was alarmed to see that I actually had mustard greens. I tried them, and I discovered they had a strong, sharp flavor. I guess the chemicals that make mustard pungent go all through the plant. There was no way to make a decent salad from them.

The next day, I decided to cook the greens, just to get them out of my life. I didn’t have any bacon grease; I had exhausted it while cooking for the holidays. I found a couple of old slices of country ham in the fridge, and I also had leftover scraps from the sugar-crusted ham I made for Christmas. I put this stuff in the pot with the greens and simmered them for over two hours. I also added powdered garlic (I was out of the real thing) and a little sugar.

I expected greens that were merely edible. I got something completely different. They were delicious. Best greens I’ve ever eaten. Better than kale, spinach, and collards. The sharp flavor was gone, and the taste of the wilted greens had mingled with the pork to create a whole new experience.

I got so excited, I made cornbread. I couldn’t help myself. I could not allow myself to eat greens this good without it.

I didn’t have buttermilk, but I had some whole-milk plain yogurt I needed to get rid of. I did something crazy. I used about a cup of yogurt, and I made up the rest of the liquid with whole milk. I also mixed about half a teaspoon of citric acid with the dry ingredients. Because I was out of bacon grease, I made a half-and-half mixture of lard and butter.

The cornbread was excellent. It would have been better with bacon grease, but it was still wonderful.

It seems to me that the reason I didn’t know how good mustard greens could be is that no one ever cooked them correctly for me in the past. Most people undercook their greens. There is a terrible prejudice in favor of undercooked vegetables these days. It works for some things, but greens need to be cooked to death. If you undercook them, they don’t develop any flavor. Greens should be cooked until they’re completely wilted but not dissolved.

I ordered myself a new country ham, as well as 6 country ham hocks. It will come out to around $5 per pound overall, which is not bad for a delicacy. The next time I want to make mustard greens, I’ll throw a hock in with them, and I may chop some sort of ham steak into them. Country ham can be overpowering in greens, so it’s okay to mix it with plain old grocery store ham.

Now that I think about it, this is a good development. I keep looking for vegetable-heavy, low-carb dishes for lunch and dinner. Mustard greens with ham will fill the bill. I should probably omit the cornbread, though. Greens are simple to cook, and they improve in the fridge, so you can eat them for several days after you prepare them.

I don’t have a lot of interest in cooking these days, but it seems like I still get pulled back into it by circumstances. I ate way too much over the holidays, because I was doing the cooking, and the food was tremendous. Now I want it all behind me ( instead of in front of me).

I had a wonderful dream last night. I keep asking God to invade my dreams. I don’t have bad dreams, but I have dreams that are sort of dismal. It seems like I almost never pray or think about God while I’m dreaming. It’s very strange, considering my waking mindset. Last night, I had dreams which seemed to reflect his presence in an indirect way.

I dreamed I was driving in the country, on a dirt road, in an area where there was at least one house. The area around the road had been cleared of trees. It was covered with deep grass and flowers. I couldn’t see any of this, because it was pitch black outside, and I didn’t have my headlights on.

As I drove, the grass and flowers in front of me, where my headlights should have shone, lit up as I approached. They filled up with shimmering gold, green, and red light. It was as though God was lighting up my path. I felt happy and peaceful as I watched. There was something very comforting about the nature of the light.

I had my window open, and my hand was outside. I felt something bite down on it. It was a firm bite, but not painful. Whatever was biting me had no teeth. It held on. For some reason, I had the idea that it was a big baby bird.

I drove out of the darkness into an area where the sun was bright, and I saw that a biracial baby girl was holding onto my hand with her gums.

I took her into the car and drove to the front steps of a school, which was also a courthouse and hospital. Friends of mine were situated around the steps. They were very happy to see me carrying the baby in. I was happy, too. I was very glad to be looking after her.

I don’t know what to make of the dream, but even after I woke up, I felt God’s love pouring through me like sunshine. I’m trying to hang onto that. Trying to love people with your own strength is better than nothing, but what you really want is to have God love through you.

Various people claiming to be witnesses say there are no shadows in heaven. They say everything is transparent, so the light that comes from God, and which contains his character, including love, pours through all. I believe we’re supposed to be like that. Yesterday I saw Mark Hemans preaching about how the word says we’re not supposed to have darkness in us. Every corner should be clean and illuminated.

I hope God gives me dreams in which he is less subtle. I don’t want to think like a Christian during the day and like an unbeliever while I sleep.

Workshop Floor Visible Again

I had a productive day.

The first productive thing I did was to close a Miami bank account I had been keeping open because of my dad’s estate. I had to close it because they refused to cancel a recurring transfer I set up a long time ago.

I had a house sitter, and he was being paid. I sold the house. The bank has a fairly primitive website, and for some reason, it did not permit me to cancel further transfers. I contacted the bank via secure email, and they were not helpful at all, advising me to contact Popmoney, the company that actually does the transfers. The responses I got were insulting to my intelligence and somewhat condescending. The lady I was corresponding with kept marking my problem “resolved” even though she hadn’t done anything except misunderstand me and give me useless advice.

I contacted Popmoney, and guess what they did? They connected me to the bank’s Internet department, where I got a guy who sincerely tried to cancel the transfers. Popmoney was more helpful than the people who actually work at the bank. Then I went out of town, came back, and found that the bank was emailing me to tell me another transfer was about to take place.

I went to their site and tried to move all of the money in the account to an account at another bank, but they have a $1500 daily limit, so that was out. Also, they don’t transfer money immediately, so I figured the transfer would go through before the account was emptied, and then I would have an overdraft when the final transfer to my other account went through.

I called them on the phone and told them to close the account. Suddenly, getting rid of the unwanted transfers was no problem. They did it right away. It was too late, though. I didn’t want to have to deal with them any more.

The lady on the phone asked me several intrusive security questions to establish my identity, and I answered all of them correctly. Then she told me I had answered them wrong, and she could not close the account over the phone. She said I was not allowed to try again. She said I would have to send a notarized letter directing them to close the account. I asked her to email me the address to send it to, along with whatever content the letter required. She said she could not email me.

I really try not to get angry at anyone these days, but I finally snapped. I asked her if the bank was living in the 19th century. I said I was sitting at the computer looking at an email from the bank, which seemed to prove the bank could, in fact, email me. They emailed me when they made the unwanted transfers. That was no problem at all.

I got off the phone, drafted a remarkably terse letter, went to my bank, which is a real bank, got the letter notarized, and dropped it off at the post office on the way home. Will it work? There is no way to know with these people.

I received another email from the bank, saying the transfers had been canceled. Okay.

I don’t want anger and unforgiveness in me, so I prayed and so on. I wonder what’s going to happen. It would be neat if they actually closed the account instead of doing more crazy things.

It’s funny; the people I dealt with at the local branch were great. It’s just the phone and Internet people who can’t get it together.

Miami is like a bad smell that won’t go away. I am still receiving emails from a city inspector over a code warning on the house I just sold. Today I had to send her a copy of the new deed to prove I’m not the owner. I’m not sure what the code people are thinking. They already knew I was selling the house, and you can’t fine someone for a code violation on a house he does not own. It wouldn’t help to put a lien on the house. It would land on the new owner.

With all that behind me, I finally got some time to work on the workshop. I moved my machine tools here three weeks ago, and the shop was still a mess this morning. I could barely walk across it. Things were piled everywhere. My main welding table was buried. Something had to be done, but the sale of the house, the holidays, and my trip to North Carolina got in the way.

Before the move, I drew up a diagram of my idea for arranging the shop, and I took a photo for my cell phone. Today I pulled up the photo and used it as a guide. I put my tool cabinets along the wall. I put the welding stuff in a corner past the machine tools. I put my belt grinders beside the mill. I put casters on my welding table. I even added a tiny remote switch to my phase converter so I wouldn’t have to plug it in every time I wanted to use a machine tool.

The shop is still not together, but it’s amazing how much better it is after a couple of hours’ work. I have a big area with my tool cabinets and most of my power tools for metal facing inward. I can see the floor. My welding table and main welder (God bless Harbor Freight) are next to each other in a convenient location. Everything except my big compressor is plugged in, and I can run a cord to the compressor if I need to use it before I run wiring to it.

I have much more room than I thought, so I’m very happy. I could even fit a surface grinder in there.

NO! I won’t think about that. I won’t.

I’ll try not to.

This is wonderful. I may actually be able to make some things now. I still have to finish my arbor press stand and the shop’s wiring, and I need to level the lathe, but I can work on projects before I get all that done.

It’s great knowing I’ll never have to worry about problems with a house in Miami again. Houses are much more stressful to own than other types of properties. I no longer have to think about problems with termites, mold, hurricane damage, vandalism, or burglary. I don’t have to pray trespassers don’t drown in the pool or trip in the yard. It’s a beautiful change. I’m hoping I’ll be able to think about the workshop and my other interests and obligations now.

I should weld something tomorrow just because I can.

I should have almost 5 months of acceptable workshop weather in front of me. I don’t know what I’ll do after that. It will get really hot in June. Perhaps a drywall ceiling and unit air conditioner are in order.

But I Do Believe I’ve Had Enough

I don’t blog my travels in real time, so I am writing this on January 4, in Hickory, North Carolina, and I will publish it when I get back to Florida.

Today I went to an open house held by The Last Reformation near Connelly Springs, North Carolina. This is their second open house. They are leasing a new headquarters in hopes of buying it. They kept quiet about the location for a long time, but now it’s no secret, so I will tell you about it. It’s a former resort in the hills. It used to be known as Pine Mountain Resort, and it’s located beside a golf course which belongs to a gated community called Pine Mountain Estates.

It’s not clear to me how much property they own. An Internet source says something about 50 acres. They have a big hotel and a three-story restaurant which is maybe 200 yards away. The hotel is like a circa-1960 Holiday Inn. It’s a long building made of concrete and corrugated steel with Spartan rooms opening onto verandas. There is an office/lounge/cafe area in the middle, and they have a pool out back.

The main building needs a roof very badly. It was raining for part of the day today, and water was pouring in through various areas. They had rigged sheets of plastic up to divert it away from the building. If they can get the roof together, my guess is that they will have a perfectly serviceable headquarters. I’m not sure they understand how important a roof is. It’s more important than walls or a floor. When your roof leaks, everything under it will eventually be destroyed.

I don’t understand how the roof ended up like this. I know roofs deteriorate, but this one is like a sieve.

The restaurant’s roof seems to be in much better shape. I did not see any obvious problems.

The land is very nice. It’s in a very hilly area. The woods have obviously been timbered in the not-too-distant past, so most of the trees are under a foot thick, but there is a variety of hardwoods, and there are tall white pines. There are also lots of mountain laurels.

I drove to a hotel in South Carolina yesterday, and today I finished the trip. When I started out this morning, I was not all that far from Savannah, which appears to be situated in a swamp. As I drove, the landscape developed a little altitude, and I started to see real trees. At some point, there was a transition that marked the beginning of real Appalachian scenery, and I felt like getting out and kissing the ground. Given that mindset, it was a real treat to see mountain laurels. I considered grabbing a leaf to take home with me.

I don’t know why Appalachia is suddenly so attractive to me. It has to be God. I felt a thrill of relief when I crossed the Florida line on the way north, and it disturbed me. I love Ocala. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for my home. It’s perfectly normal to be glad you’re north of Miami, but I’m surprised to see that I was happy to get away from northern Florida.

It was a real treat to drive on the twisty roads on the final approach to the resort. I learned to drive on roads like that in Kentucky, and that’s why I don’t drive like a tourist up here. My family had a cabin in North Carolina in the 1970’s, and there were a lot of Florida people up there. My mother used to make fun of them for riding their brakes and creeping around curves. They had no idea what they were doing. I’m grateful I know how to drive here. It would be really nice to have a manual transmission here. Automatics don’t really work well with hills.

When I got to the property, there were a lot of cars there. TRL has students, and they live on the property, so they accounted for some of the cars. There was also a bus belonging to a family of Mennonites. Yes, there are now Mennonites who speak in tongues. I have to wonder how that goes over with their relatives.

There were a lot of people there. Kids were everywhere. I introduced myself to some people, and a lady named Christina took us for a tour. She’s from Denmark, like Torben Sondergaard and a lot of the TRL early adaptors. She showed us the roof issues.

Torben and his family live in one end of the hotel building, which, I suppose, is now a dormitory. Other rooms contain students and visitors.

I spent quite a while talking to a lady from somewhere on the North Carolina coast. She’s a student at the school. We had a long conversation with a local Chinese lady who became a Christian in 2015. We tried to give her guidance. She belongs to an Assemblies of God church, but that denomination, while tolerant of the Holy Spirit, is not in great shape. It spawned a lot of the money preachers.

At around 4 p.m., Torben gave a talk. He brought up a young man who went through their Luke 10 school. They have more than one program. The Luke 10 people divide into groups and go out and evangelize, relying on God to provide them with things like food and shelter. The young man had a wild testimony about the things God did for his team. I’ll just link to a video in which he tells the same story. There is no point in rehashing it in print.

Torben said TLR was about to come to Florida for a long campaign. They’re looking for people to let them stay in their homes. I asked God if I should volunteer. I have a big house, multiple bedrooms, and a pool for baptism. I felt the answer was that I should not offer, but that I should agree if they asked. No one asked, so that’s how that went.

They put a portable hot tub on the deck at the restaurant, and a bunch of people got baptized. It was below 50 degrees outside. I was impressed with their determination. Everyone came out of the tub speaking in tongues.

They also prayed for people in the restaurant. I wanted prayer. I have been having pain in the joints at the bases of my thumbs, and I think whatever spirit gave my mother rheumatoid arthritis has been after me. I wanted help with that. I also wanted deliverance from spirits of fear, unbelief, and worry. Seems like they come for me every morning.

A young Dane named Matt prayed for me. As he prayed, the problems with my thumbs got so faint I could not be sure they were still there. Oddly, almost all of the joint soreness went away about two days ago for no clear reason, so it was not easy to find it today in order to give Matt feedback. Anyway, he was very helpful. I feel some soreness now, so I think more work has to be done.

I have asked God if there is some problem with my personality that gives joint problems a right to bother me, but I believe he has told me that it’s just an opportunistic spirit that has no right to be here. Not every illness or evil spirit comes to you because of something you’re doing wrong.

Out of the blue, Matt asked if I had lower back pain. I do not. At least not chronically. I have strained myself from time to time, causing temporary problems. I told him all this, and he had me sit with my back against a chair so he could check to see if my legs were the same length. Christian healers typically do this for people with back pain.

It turned out my left leg was slightly shorter, so he told it to grow out. My leg twitched a little, and before long, both heels were level. He told me to walk around, so I did. I couldn’t say I felt any different, though.

I’m not going to tell you I was healed, or even that there was anything wrong with me. Just that my leg did twitch, and it did seem to grow out. I can’t swear it wasn’t the power of suggestion.

While he was talking to me, I started to feel a little dizzy. He and a young lady told any spirit that was causing it to be gone. I think it was just the Holy Spirit, however. It was NOT the power of suggestion. It was real.

Here’s something odd: I started to feel a little pain in my lower back (also real). It was very slight. I don’t feel it now. I started to wonder what was going on. You don’t expect to receive prayer for healing and then find you have a problem you didn’t have before.

He said it might be taking me some time to get used to the change. Don’t ask me to explain. I’m just telling you what happened.

I did not see anyone else get a miraculous healing, but I didn’t go around looking to see what was happening, and I left before the testimonies started.

I heard a lady say she was “from this area.” I had been marveling at the lack of Southern accents among those present, so I asked if she was from North Carolina. She said she was from Louisville. I guess “this area” was intended broadly. She said she and her husband had sold everything they had and bought an Airstream trailer. They went to Denmark and studied at the original Jesus Center with Torben.

I guess he affects a lot of people that way. Actually, I hope it’s the Holy Spirit and not Torben.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m burdened with too many objects and too much real estate. Many people give up all their worldly ties so they can travel and serve God. I don’t think he wants this for me, though. I want to be rooted in one place. I feel that he keeps telling me to have a house and keep my tools.

Among charismatics, there may be a tendency to condemn people who won’t give everything up and travel around, but God probably doesn’t require this of everyone. We all have different desires. I would go nuts, living out of a Winnebago. I want to own some soil, and I don’t want to look over my hedge and see my neighbor standing around in a tank top with a beer in his hand.

It really seems like Christians admire people who spend their lives traveling, and that they look down on those who don’t. There are so many people near you who need evangelizing; can you really say you need to go to Africa or Mexico? Africa is full of African evangelists, by the way. A lot of people don’t know that.

After all the healing and baptisms, there was a long period where I didn’t seem to connect with anyone, so I took off and headed for Chick-fil-A and my hotel. I felt that whatever God wanted to happen to me at the Jesus Center had happened, and that there was no point in hanging around. I didn’t make new friends. The only thing I said to Torben was “hi,” when he welcomed me.

I am still not planning to join TLR. It’s a denomination now, whether they know it or not. When you have classes, a curriculum, a headquarters, and a name, you’re a denomination. I can’t have a board of directors or a handbook between me and God. I think what they’re doing right now is right for many people, but I can’t get too close. Don’t ask me why.

I don’t think they’re frauds. I don’t think TLR is a cult, although it may become one if they don’t watch it. I’m just sure God does not want me to join.

Many of the people who attended the open house were Europeans. I suppose they knew Torben in Denmark. It seemed like most of the others were not Southerners. That surprised me, because Southerners seem to own charismatic Christianity, and the Jesus Center is situated in North Carolina. They told me they hadn’t gotten too close to their neighbors yet.

They call this place “The Jesus Center” and “The Ark.” I don’t know if they’ve settled on an official name. For a long time, I’ve believed that God was moving people to rural areas to keep them safe, and TLR clearly has the same idea. I’m sure urban mobs will be traveling around killing Christians before long, and I think God wants the elect to be so far from lazy leftist handout-lovers, they won’t have the gumption to get in cars and come to us.

The Ark is certainly a good place to be in that scenario. It must be 15 miles from the nearest limited-access highway, and you have to take narrow, winding roads to get there. Once you’re there, you can’t use your phone to get home unless someone lets you use their wifi to get it started. Angry mobs from inner cities will have a very hard time reaching places like The Ark. They’ll exhaust themselves in the cities, suburbs, and relatively accessible rural areas. If you’re too lazy to work for a living or take care of your family, you’re not going to work hard to reach people so you can persecute them. Places like The Ark will not be attacked until the easy pickings are exhausted.

You can see this principle in action today. When there are riots, the perpetrators, who are invariably leftists, don’t even leave their own neighborhoods. They destroy the local stores they depend on for food and other necessities, and then they complain that big businesses won’t open locations in their areas.

I can see why God wants me in an area like the one where The Ark is located.

Here is what Psalm 91 says: “Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most high, thy habitation, there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.” It says, “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee; only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” People who have been moved out of cities will have to sit by and watch while the people they left behind are slaughtered. It’s very consistent with similar things that happened in the Bible.

Torben is a huge Trump fan. There are ignorant American charismatics who think Trump is God’s enemy and that Obama was a messiah figure, but Torben, a Dane, is aware that leftists are going to come after us, and he says Trump is our friend. He says persecution will fall on us after Trump leaves office, or at least after conservatives lose their political power. It’s amazing that he can see this while so many black, Hispanic, and coastal charismatics can’t. It’s strange to see a European from a left-leaning country see things so clearly.

Supposedly, charismatics in Europe are much more supportive of Trump. This is what I was told today. How can that be? I guess it’s because the charismatic church in Europe is already an underground movement used to rejection. Underground churches are supposedly stronger. It takes determination and sincerity to be a charismatic in Europe. Here, any lazy, worldly person can join a charismatic money church, listen to someone like John Gray or Richie Wilkerson, and continue to serve the devil.

I have no idea how to find the property God wants me to have, but I suppose locating it was never my job anyway. I’ll go back home and wait to see what he wants me to do.

I’m very glad I came to the open house. I hope one day I’ll have more strong Christian friends, and that I won’t have to take long drives to be among them, but until then, trips like this will be very helpful. Right now, there is no one near me who is really on the same frequency.

MORE

I am home. It’s January 6. I spent the night in Georgia, and I made it to my house this afternoon.

It’s great to be in my own house. I was getting a little too comfortable in hotel rooms. Before Christmas, I ordered myself some genuine Hampton Inn pillows, which are wonderful. If I keep traveling, I may find myself buying tiny bottles of shampoo and hangers that are permanently fastened to the rod.

Because I believe God has been telling me I’m going to move to Tennessee, I wanted to drive through some areas of the state after finishing up with TLR in North Carolina. One place that has caught my attention is Johnson County, where Mountain City is located. The elevation is high, which means nice summers, and unlike the higher areas farther south, it hasn’t attracted throngs of unpleasant people from Florida.

I was surprised to see that Mountain City was less than 60 miles from my hotel in North Carolina.

Yesterday morning I drove to Mountain City, passing through Blowing Rock, North Carolina, on the way. At first, the land was merely pleasantly hilly, but then I saw Blowing Rock clinging to the top of a big mountain in front of me. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. I had forgotten what a crazy place it is. You have to wind your way up a very steep highway, right up the side of the mountain, to get there.

When I left the hotel, it was 40 degrees. On the way to Blowing Rock, I saw a truck with snow on its hood and roof. When I got into town, it was 29 degrees, and before long, I saw the external temperature bottom out at 28.

One of the negatives of the Mountain City area is that in order to get the cool summers, you get cold nights a lot of the year, and the winters are several degrees cooler than they are at lower altitude. I didn’t know how big the difference was until this trip.

The impression I got was that once you get up to Blowing Rock, you find yourself on a sort of plateau, and it continues into Tennessee. The Mountain City area seemed relatively flat, and it’s 1100 feet lower than Blowing Rock, which is on the very top of a mountain.

There isn’t much in the town. Just a few stores, a couple of gas stations, a courthouse, and so on. I went into the grocery store and bought apples, just to find out what I would be dealing with if I moved there. I wouldn’t starve, but I wouldn’t be able to count on croissants and baguettes.

I had to stop at a gas station to put air in my tires. In the cold air, they shrank, and the drop in pressure set off my car’s sensors.

I drove from Mountain City to Asheville, through some towns that were considerably smaller than Mountain City. The distance was about 95 miles. I saw a lot of houses. I wondered what the people did for a living. I wondered where they got their food. Surely they didn’t drive to Mountain City every week. Maybe they do, though. My grandmother used to drive to Lexington, Kentucky, for groceries, and she lived over 60 miles away. There was an IGA grocery store in her town, but it wasn’t always enough.

I’m not sure what to make of what I saw. The places I drove through didn’t look as promising as the other side of the mountains, in areas like Blount County. I don’t want to be in a city, but I don’t know if I want to be 90 minutes from the nearest town with over 10,000 people. Ocala has a population of around 60,000, and it’s big enough so you can buy an appliance or get your garage door fixed without major problems. I don’t want to be so far out I have to do everything for myself.

If I lived on the other side, I could always go into Knoxville if I needed to, without mounting a major expedition.

On the way out, I drove past Asheville, not Knoxville, which was a mistake. It put me too far east. I was trying to avoid driving through southeastern Georgia on the way home. Going north, I had gone through the area between Ocala and Jacksonville, which is pretty bad, and then in Georgia, I had driven through an endless expanse of swamp. Savannah, for all the romance people attach to it, appears to be in a swamp. It’s oppressive and creepy.

After I got through Asheville, my GPS still wanted to send me through the muck, so I went out of my way to go farther west. I must have added two or three hours to my trip by the time I was done, but I didn’t care. Driving through Brunswick, Georgia, once is enough for anyone.

After about 11 hours on the road, I gave up and got a hotel room. Took off again this morning, after more Chick-fil-A. I eat there out of principle, in spite of the fact that they quit supporting the Salvation Army. Leftists still haven’t forgiven them, so I haven’t stopped supporting them. Also, the food is great, and the way they treat customers gives me a real boost.

I did not feel good about re-entering Florida. That made me a little sad. I asked God if he was making me feel that way so I would be willing to move to Tennessee, and I felt that the answer was “yes,” so I asked him if he could motivate me with the positives of Tennessee instead of making me feel bad about Ocala, which is a beloved refuge. I think he agreed.

If you’re wondering why I’m so focused on moving, I will tell you one reason. Torben says God told him to move to America a long time ago. He didn’t listen. Then Danish TV made a dishonest documentary about him, people started confusing him with a preacher who was abusing people sexually, and the Danish legislature passed a law because of him, making it illegal to cast out demons in front of kids and disabled people. There was talk about taking away his children because of his doctrine. He and his family had to move in the middle of the night, with 8 suitcases. I want to go when God says “go,” at a leisurely pace, with all of my great stuff.

I feel God has told me to quit asking him exactly where to go. As I understand it, I’m to wait until I hear from him. It’s a little difficult to sit back and do nothing, after spending so many hours looking at houses on the web, but on the other hand, do I really want to do the work myself? No. Not if he’s willing to take it off my back.

I feel that God showed me something this week: it’s wrong to feel sure of yourself. If you feel you can handle any challenge, you will jump in front of God, take things out of his hands, and mess everything up. That’s hard to swallow, but it must be true, because the word says we are not to lean unto our own understanding.

It’s hard to get used to taking my hands off things and refusing to plan, but where did planning ever get me in the past?

You know nearly as much about my future as I do right now. I know it will be better than the past, and I know that I don’t have to have a plan in order to make it happen, so I am content.

I WILL Prevail

I almost had a machining project today, but it looks like I may have to use hand tools instead.

I have a tractor. It has a bucket. There are brush forks on the bucket. They attach with turnbuckles that tighten chains around the bucket.

A turnbuckle (AKA “bottle screw” or “stretching screw”) is a tube with internal threads on each end. One thread is right-handed, and the other is left-handed. Screws go into both ends. When you turn the tube, both screws go in or out at the same time.

At some point in the past, someone with good intentions and not a lot of knowledge applied something like a Vise Grip to one end of one of my turnbuckles. There are matching gouges on two sides of it, showing where the tool was attached. I assume the purpose was to grab the tube and turn it. A pipe wrench would have been better (but still bad) because it wouldn’t have compressed the tube as much. I think. Anyway, it appears that the tube was narrowed slightly by the pressure, and this made it very difficult for the screw to go in and out. Because of this, I could not tighten the turnbuckle properly. I could only turn it so far, and then it became impossible.

I put off fixing this because I wanted to use the lathe. I wanted to grind a 60° threading tool, put it on a bar, run the bar into the turnbuckle, and follow the threads to remove material. This may not be the smartest way to fix the part; a tap would be faster. I wanted to use a machine tool, though. I’ve been deprived of machine tools for so long, I want to use them for everything.

Today I took the part off the tractor, mounted it in my bench vise, and used a breaker bar to remove the bound screw. That’s how tight it was. I had to push so hard, I had to be careful not to turn over my heavy workbench. When I got it apart, I was left with the turnbuckle body, which is the tube part. I chucked it in the lathe, and I found that the runout was something like 3 thousandths, which is fine. There was a lump on one side that went up to maybe 7 thousandths, but because it was only in one area, I assumed it was an anomaly I shouldn’t take into account.

Once I got the part chucked, I saw that it was very hard to see inside it. The part is black inside and out. It will be hard to put a cutting tool inside it and see well enough to register it in the existing thread.

I went to Ebay and ordered a used tap, just for the purpose of fixing the part. It will run me about $12. If I end up using it, the whole job should take under 15 minutes. The tap gives me a plan B. Once I’m done with it, I should never need it again, but $12 is a great price for fixing this part, and it never hurts to have extra cutting tools. I don’t know what a machine shop would charge to fix it, but I would have to drive all over and find someone who had the right tap, so I think going to a professional would be stupid even if it were free.

I may still use the lathe. It’s possible to line a tool up with an existing internal thread. I’ll just have to play around with it. Because it’s so dark inside the tube, I’m thinking of painting the inside. That would make it easier to see. One does not ordinarily paint things before machining them, but this is kind of a bubba job, so I don’t have to be persnickety about it. All I need to do is scrape maybe 10 thousandths out of the part, and it should function again.

I should be all set now. If I can’t make the lathe work, the tap will be here in a few days, and I’ll get the job done. It will be nice to have the fork attached properly for a change.

I Can Machine Stuff

The excitement around here never stops. Yesterday I got my milling machine connected to my phase converter, and today I mounted my milling vise and trammed the vise and mill head.

I thought hooking the mill to the phase converter would be a 45-minute job. I don’t know why I make prognostications like that. It’s like begging to be disappointed.

The job consisted of drilling a hole in the phase converter cabinet, running a power cord through it, connecting the wires inside the cabinet, and putting a plug and receptacle in the cords between the phase converter and mill. It should have been a snap. Of course, something amazing happened and caused a ridiculous delay. The receptacle I bought turned out to be defective. What are the odds of that happening?

Modern receptacles are pressed together when they’re made, so you can’t get inside them to fix them. To attach wires, you run them through holes in the receptacles, and they slide into little clamps consisting of screws and rectangular nuts. The screws are supposed to have upset metal at the ends so you can’t unscrew them completely. I think you can see where I’m going with this. I loosened a screw to make room for a wire, and the nut fell completely off the screw, inside the receptacle. Game over. The screw was defective, so it came right out of the nut.

Right away, I was looking at almost an hour of additional time. I had to go to Lowe’s, return the defective receptacle, buy a new one, and drive home.

I got the mill hooked up, and even though it was not aligned and ready to use, I fired it up just to hear it and know it was alive.

Today I used my precision angle plate to tram the head of the mill. It was a pleasure. Slap it on the mill table, push it against the quill, rotate the quill until it’s flush against the plate, and tighten. Literally a 5-minute job. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it this way. I can’t find anything wrong with this method.

I stuck the vise on the table and used an Indicol holder to hold a test indicator against it. I decided to use an indicator from CDCO, which is a company that sells cheap Chinese machine accessories. Big mistake.

CDCO is great for things like tool holders, and when I saw their price on test indicators, I decided to give them a try. I have used cheap dial indicators (less precise than test indicators), and they have never given me a problem, so I figured a test indicator was a safe bet.

Tonight, I found that I could not get the numbers on the indicator to settle down. It was as though the indicator was losing its zero. Very strange. I got out an old European Tesatest indicator and used it instead, and I was done in a few minutes. It worked perfectly. So much for cheap test indicators.

It could me that I banged the CDCO indicator on something in the past and messed it up. I don’t know. I can’t be sure it was useless straight from the factory. But I’ve beaten the Tesatest up pretty good, and it works perfectly.

The upshot, tribulations and hindrances aside, is that I now have a functioning machine shop again. I need to level my lathe, but that’s a minor thing. It doesn’t have to be adjusted properly for small work. I should also install a switch on my phase converter so I don’t have to plug it in every time I use the machines. That’s a half-hour job, though.

I mean, it SHOULD be a half-hour job.

I’m learning.

Now I have no excuse not to go to the shop and arrange everything so it’s orderly. It’s obvious what I need to do. I need to come up with another excuse.

I think my first machining project should be to chase the threads on a turnbuckle that holds a fork on my tractor’s bucket. I think someone made the rookie error of putting a Vise Grip on it, tightening the threads on the turnbuckle’s tube. It’s impossible to tighten past a certain point. I would have to find a way to hold the part in a 4-jaw chuck, and I’d need to create an internal threading tool big enough for the work. I also have to figure out what size thread I’m dealing with. The screw part of the turnbuckle looks like it’s over an inch thick.

I guess I could measure the thread and try to find a used tap that will fit. That would save me time. A new one would probably cost somewhere around a hundred dollars.

Anyway, my workshop, though disorderly, is finally stocked with adequate machinery. I feel as though life has resumed.

Adjustments Turn Conversation Pieces into Working Machines

My workshop is a disaster area right now, due to the recent arrival of my compressor, mill, and lathe. The lathe is up and running, although I have not leveled it yet. The other two tools are still waiting for my help. I need to get things squared away, because I moved about half of the stuff in the garage in order to get the additional tools in, and I can’t get to things I would like to use.

Last night I went to Lowe’s and picked up $75 worth of electrical stuff to hook up the mill. I could have gotten out of the store for $33, but I bought two extra parts: a plug and a receptacle, both for the mill.

I have been trying to decide whether to use a VFD on the mill, as I did in the past, or to connect it directly to my 3-phase power supply. The only benefit of the VFD is that it allows me to work without firing up the huge power supply. I have an uneasy, irrational feeling that the power supply (phase converter) is fragile, so I avoid putting unnecessary hours on it. It’s probably bulletproof. It came from a serious company that makes industrial products.

If I use a VFD, I’ll have to run a cord from a wall socket to the VFD, and then I’ll have to run wires to the mill. In Miami, this was an okay setup, because the mill was next to a wall. I was able to put the VFD on the wall, and when I wanted to turn it on and off, I simply reached over and pushed a button. This time, my mill is out on the shop floor, so there is no convenient place for mounting a VFD.

I decided to go with the phase converter, so I have to cut a hole in the cabinet, hook a cord up to the phase converter, and run the cord to the mill. In order to make life simpler in the future, I’m going to put a plug and receptacle on the cord so I can detach and reattach it at will in the future.

I’m going to run the cord over the roof trusses and let it drop down to the mill. This will keep it off the floor.

Once the cord is hooked up, the mill has to be adjusted.

Bridgeport-style knee mills have rotatable heads. They can nod in the xy-plane, and they can turn in the xz-plane. This is a great feature, provided you’re not afraid to use it. In order to use a mill in the vertical orientation, it has to be “trammed,” which means it has to be set up so it’s perfectly perpendicular to the table from every direction. Tramming a mill is a pain in the butt. Generally, people use indicators that measure to within a thousandth of an inch, and they sweep their tables holding the indicators in the spindle. If the reading on the indicator changes when you move the indicator, your head is not perpendicular.

I learned a neat trick for tramming a mill quickly. People get mad at me when I mention it, but it works very well. Even if they can argue that it’s not as precise as a test indicator, which is dubious, it’s a very quick way to get you within half a thousandth.

I have something known as an angle block. It’s a big piece of iron with a handle. It looks sort of like a clothes iron, except it’s rectangular. The sides are square to each other to a high degree of precision. To tram your mill, you put the angle block on the table, lower your quill, and rest the quill against the block. If any light can be seen between the block and quill, the quill is not square to the table, so you adjust it.

My quill is 6″ long. Using this method, I can get it square to the table within half a thousandth over that 6″ length. If you put a light behind an angle block and a quill when they’re pressed against each other, you will be able to detect light coming through when there is less than a half-thousandth gap.

That’s not too shabby for a job that probably takes less than 10 minutes for both axes.

Once you get below a thousandth, it becomes hard to improve things. You’ll get everything lined up perfectly, and then things will move while you’re tightening the mill’s adjustment bolts, and you’ll have to loosen them and start over. How hard you want to work on it depends on how accurate you want to be. The difference between half a thousandth and a quarter of a thousandth (or whatever tiny amount you can manage) is not going to have any measurable effect on your work. No one will ever look at a part you milled and say, “Your mill is off by three tenths of a thousandth.”

Tram problems show up when you use wide tools like fly cutters and face mills. These things put flat faces on parts, and the faces can be two or more inches wide. Let’s see. If your tramming is out by half a thousandth over 6″, it’s off by a twelfth of a thousandth an inch from the spindle’s center of rotation, where a 2″ cutter is going to be most affected by your laziness. Hmm. That’s even more accurate than I thought it was.

To machinists, a twelfth of a thousandth is the same thing as zero. It’s an incredible degree of precision. A machine that can hold a tenth is considered top notch. No one in his right mind tries to do better than that on ordinary machines. Once you drop down close to a tenth of a thousandth, you’re getting into the territory of precision grinders, and you’re leaving mills and lathes behind.

I have used the block to tram my mill and then produced a faced part that appeared to have a perfect finish, so the process seems pretty reliable to me.

According to the video I embedded above, anything within a few thousandths is good, so it looks like the angle plate method is the way to go. The man who made the video is a respected machinist.

I have been told that a real expert will tram his head so it’s not quite square in the xy-plane, to allow for deflection when the work is under pressure, but that’s too much aggravation for me.

Milling machines are usually used with vises, just like drill presses. You can use clamps instead, but they’re a lot of work. Most machinists leave their milling vises on their tables all the time, except for unusual jobs. The big problem with using a vise is that it, like the mill’s head, has to be trammed. You don’t want a vise which is angled to the table.

I don’t know of an easy way to tram a vise. You put your test indicator on your spindle, you rest the tip on the vise’s rear jaw, and you move the vise back and forth while watching the dial. You bop the vise with a soft hammer until the dial stops moving. It’s maybe a 10-minute job. Again, as in the case of the mill’s head, everything will try to move when you tighten the vise down, so sometimes there is a lot of repetition.

I guess it will take 45 minutes to wire the mill up, and I would budget half an hour to get everything trammed.

Once all this is done, I can feel like a machinist again, and I may even have the motivation to start arranging my welding area.

Introducing Beer Cheese

It may be that there are people out there who think Eastern Kentucky has not produced any delicacies. This is far from true. Eastern Kentucky produces the best molasses (actually sorghum) on earth. People there cure fantastic hams. The most popular soft drink in Eastern Kentucky is Ale-8, which is made in Winchester, and it’s wonderful. Finally, there is beer cheese, which was allegedly invented in the same city.

I guess the list is not impressive, but it’s something.

According to Wikipedia, the Kentucky legislature has declared Clark County (home of Winchester) the birthplace of beer cheese, and–get this–Queen Elizabeth loves it. She took some home with her after visiting Lexington. She probably puts on furry slippers, rocks back in her La-Z-Boy, pops a cold Busch, turns on Keeping up With the Kardashians, and packs the cheese away.

I don’t really know what beer cheese is, except that it’s a spicy cheddar cheese spread. It’s flavored with beer, obviously. Bon Appetit’s recipe, which is almost certainly bogus, calls for flat brown ale. I am pretty sure no one in Kentucky knows what ale is, unless it’s Ale-8. They drink the cheapest beer imaginable. Stroh’s is probably the top seller, although I have known a number of Natural Light fans. All the drunkenness with none of that pesky beer flavor.

I remember beer cheese from my youth. At some point in the Seventies, I would guess, my relatives started raving about it, and from then on, it was a staple.

Some believe beer cheese was invented at Johnnie Allman’s restaurant. I don’t know anything about this place, but my aunt apparently does, because when she came to visit me over Christmas, she brought two containers of hand-packed beer cheese from Allman’s. She also brought one container of “Kentucky Beer/Cheese” from Evans Gourmet Foods. I guess she thought beer cheese was so important, it was crucial to have alternatives from which to choose a favorite.

A lot of people my aunt knows have recipes, but she sneers at them. She really looks down on the people who use Velveeta. My mother, one aunt, and my grandmother were good cooks, but there are a lot of bad cooks in Eastern Kentucky. There are people who use Bisquick and margarine.

I just found the Allman family’s website, and it says Johnnie got the recipe from his brother, who lived in ARIZONA! I wonder if that’s true. It would be a big blow to Kentucky’s culinary legacy.

It’s hard to say which brand is better. I found myself gravitating toward the Evans product, so I suppose it probably wins.

Before my relatives arrived, I went shopping, and I picked up some crackers to go with the cheese I was planning to serve. My local Winn-Dixie was selling Ritz crackers two for one, so we were in good shape when it came time to open the beer cheese. I didn’t know beer cheese was coming when I bought the crackers. They’re the ideal beer cheese substrate, so it worked out well. Saltines aren’t nearly as good.

When it comes to beer cheese, my recommendation is to stay away. I would guess that it has 50 calories per dip, and you are not going to stop after the first cracker. Once you start eating, you will continue much longer than you originally intended, and by the time you manage to pull yourself away, you may be 2000 calories heavier.

Anyway, I enjoyed the beer cheese tremendously, and I wish my relatives had taken the leftover cheese with them, because now it’s taunting me from the fridge.

I’m sure I could come up with a better recipe than Evans Gourmet Foods or the Allmans, but I’m not going to try, because I don’t want to die trapped in a recliner surrounded by empty beer cheese containers.

I feel like I should throw the remaining cheese out, but it’s hard to throw out a delicacy someone brought in their car from over 600 miles away.

The food worked out very well this Christmas. Disturbingly well. I now find myself with pounds and pounds of irresistible leftovers. The prime rib was perfect. The scalloped potatoes were impossible to stop eating. The cheesecake was magnificent. The Texas trash could not have been much better.

The Caesar salad was not all that great. I’ll say that. The dressing recipe I use is not satisfactory, even though it’s supposedly the original. I need to fix that.

I thought I was making a reasonable amount of food, but I still have more than I know what to do with.

I still can’t figure out why I have a talent for cooking. Is it a gift from God or a curse from the enemy? I would be happy if the food I made were merely good, but it’s so good it’s impossible to stop eating it. I have to be careful what I cook, because I sometimes end up with food that is too good to leave alone. It sounds like a joke, but it does bother me. I try to fix things that are okay but not great, in order to avoid problems.

I must have a pound of scalloped potatoes on hand. I really need to throw those out.

I still have a quarter of a cheesecake.

Maybe I’ll muster the strength to put things in the trash.

This was my first Christmas without my dad. His birthday is nearly the same day as Christmas, so he always had a birthday celebration as well as Christmas itself. I used to take him out to expensive steakhouses for his birthday, but we reached a point where that was not practical because of his dementia.

Was it sad to have Christmas without him? No. I was too busy to think about it. I was very busy all month with a difficult real estate closing, and there are still one or two things to deal with, so I had a lot on my mind. I also had to get the house ready for my relatives, and once they were here, there was a certain amount of drama, so I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on my loss. Frankly, I am still enjoying the freedom of not being a caregiver, so that also factors into things. I didn’t have to follow my dad around and clean up after him. I didn’t have to cook for him. I didn’t have to observe him to keep him from defiling the holiday food. I didn’t have to drive him to any doctors or to the emergency room. I didn’t have to do his laundry or help him shower and dress. I was able to leave the house and run errands.

I don’t care how much you love your parents. If you take care of one for several years, and then he or she dies, you will feel relief, and you will love your new freedom. Even if you’re grieving at the same time, you will feel like you’ve dropped a huge weight, even if you’re too dishonest to admit it.

It’s not easy being chained to a disabled person or to live in a smelly house or to be blindsided over and over again with emergencies you could not have anticipated. When it’s over, you will savor your new freedom for a very long time.

Maybe things are different for people who have help from relatives, but I didn’t.

The house I sold was a gigantic burden to me. I have other properties down south, but they’re not houses. A house is a big obligation. The taxes are high. The maintenance is very expensive. You have to endure several hurricane scares every year; hurricanes are harder on houses than any other type of property. You also have to be concerned about opportunists harming themselves on the property and suing you. Other types of properties are much less difficult to handle. Commercial properties are a breeze compared to houses. You should never, ever own a house for investment purposes. You get all the same benefits from a commercial property, with many fewer headaches. Also, it’s easier to evict a commercial tenant.

Now that my dad is gone and I have no houses in Dade County, I should have a great deal more freedom than I used to. It just dawned on me yesterday that I can travel now. I can put the birds in a boarding facility and take off. I could leave for a month if I wanted to. I wouldn’t need to be in front of my computer, talking to my realtor, my house sitter, and tradesmen.

Sorry I can’t give you a good beer cheese recipe. You’re probably better off, though.