Two Days of Favor

I didn’t blog yesterday. I started to, but I did not publish what I wrote. I will paste it here now and add today’s news.

09-25-19

I’m getting a ton of things done today. I had to quit and have some food so I didn’t get burned out.

I had to get rid of the L-shaped Corian counter in my workshop so I could have my machine tools moved here. Today was the day.

I didn’t know how to deal with Corian. I decided to try the sawzall. I cut several holes in the counter with a drill to make it easier to start a cut.

When I finally got the saw in there, I was surprised. Corian cuts very quickly even though it’s hard. I zipped through the counter in around 20 seconds. I had been under the impression that the counter was an inch and a half thick, but I learned that only the edges were that size. The rest of it was around half an inch.

While I was tearing the whole structure apart, I also took down the weird boards the previous owner had screwed into the shop walls. He put boards up, and he added strange horizontal strips of galvanized steel. There were little tabs that were bent outward into the shop, presumably for hanging tools. I never found them useful, and the boards were in the way.

Once I had the Corian out, I didn’t know what to do with it. It was too big to cut on the table saw with a miter gauge. I decided to fire up the band saw and eyeball it. I cut the ends off sort of square.

In the end, I made a sled from scrap, to force the Corian to go by the table saw blade in a straight line. I made a piece 18″ by 36″ in size, and I plan to turn it into a top for a wood lathe cart. The wood lathe used to be on the counter, so now I need a place to put it.

I may make a cutting board out of the third large piece of Corian. It seems like a good use for it, and cutting boards are ridiculously overpriced.

I got tired of woodworking, if you can call it that, so I decided to take on another project.

Long ago, I made a temporary extension table for my table saw, and of course, it worked so well I never replaced it. There was a problem with it, however. The legs on the end were not supported well. I used two small pieces of wood for struts, but they weren’t fastened reliably. I was concerned that one day someone might put something heavy on the table and the legs would kick out from under it.

I got myself a couple of strips of metal for additional struts. Today I bent them on the finger brake, drilled holes in them, and attached them to the saw table extension. I tried to arrange it so they were in tension, pulling the legs toward the saw.

The brake is not that easy to use. I made one bend that wasn’t right. There were two struts with four bent tabs, and one tab was longer than the others.

I tried to straighten it using the vise. I didn’t expect to do too well, and I was right. It had little bends in it when I was done.

I’ve been considering trying forging, and I’ve been anvil-shopping. I have a big piece of 1018 steel, and my plan has been to use it as an anvil until I get a real one I can trust. The steel is 4″ on a side and around 15″ long. Very heavy. Today I stuck it on a stump and used it to straighten the crooked steel.

I was pleasantly surprised. The hammer didn’t dent the 1018 block at all, and the bends came out of the steel in a hurry. I got everything bent the way I wanted it, and I used the “anvil” to fine-tune it.

I put some holes in the tabs, deburred them, and attached the struts. Now I know the table saw can’t collapse. I really will redo it some day, but this will prevent a disaster while I’m getting around to it.

09 26 19

I’ll tell you about my day, and you can decide whether I have God’s favor or not. I believe we are supposed to live in favor. The Bible says so in many places, so anyone who disagrees is wrong.

After I dismantled my Corian counter, I had a wood lathe sitting on the floor. I had to find something to put it on. I had been planning to make something out of the scrap lumber I removed from my workshop shelves, but I felt like it would take more time than I wanted to invest. I have a lot of things that need to get done before the shop will really function, and that makes it hard to justify spending two or three days on a lathe project. I considered getting a cart instead.

For quite a while, I’ve wanted a one-drawer Husky rolling cabinet from Home Depot. It’s an amazing bargain. For $69, you get a good-quality cabinet with casters, a locking ball-bearing drawer, locking doors, a pegboard back, and a power strip that has USB ports. You can’t beat that deal. I am on a crusade to put everything I own on wheels, and I thought this cabinet would be perfect for my 8″ bench grinder.

Yesterday I thought of the cabinet when I considered the lathe situation. I decided to go to Home Depot and see if the cabinet looked right. The lathe probably weighs 80 pounds, and the feet are about 30″ apart from side to side, so I didn’t know if the cabinet, which is 27″ wide, would work.

I walked in the store, looked to my left, and saw a product sitting by the customer service counter. It was the cabinet I wanted, with a $35 price tag on it. Someone had returned it.

I got a few things I needed. I bought casters for my heavy pedestal fan, along with some washers and nuts to use for installation. I bought a new hot glue gun. Something–I don’t recall what–had reminded me that I needed one.

A hot glue gun is a phenomenal tool. Imagine glue that sets in 5 seconds, provides a lasting hold, and can be loosened and removed from most things later with little or no damage. That’s hot glue. Now that I think about it, woodturners use it a lot. They fasten blanks to lathe plates with it so they don’t have to use screws.

I got my stuff and went to the customer service area to ask about the cart. The lady who helped me said the buyer had brought it back because there were no keys to the lock. She saw that I was not happy about that, so she added that they could take a little more off the price because of it. I thought about it. There had to be someone on Ebay selling replacement locks for $5. I decided to take a chance.

When I got home, I opened the cabinet and checked it over. Everything looked fine, except something was hanging from the rear of the drawer, inside the cabinet. It looked like fishing line. That looked familiar. The last time I had seen that in a tool cabinet, it had been attached to something. It had been attached to a set of keys.

I pulled the line loose, and a set of keys fell into my hand.

Not bad.

On the way home, I stopped by the grocery. I needed vegetables for breakfast. They had Ben & Jerry’s on sale for 50% off. Last time they did this, my favorite favor got cleaned out before I got there. Not this time! I bought two pints.

I went home to work on the lathe project.

The cabinet had to have a new, wider top in order to support the lathe, and I already had it. The 36″ slab of Corian was waiting for me.

I fired up the router table and put a 1/4″ radius on every upper edge of the Corian so it would be pleasant to lean on and so on. Then I tried to figure out how to attach it to the cabinet.

My big table saw is working now, because I have 250V power. I also had scrap wood. I decided to make several strips of wood of just the right thickness and attach them to the underside of the Corian. The upper surface of the cabinet is like a tray with a lip on three sides, so my plan was to situate three strips so they anchored the top against the tray and kept it exactly where it should be. I also intended to put a fourth strip on it under the front, where there was no metal lip.

How do you attach things to Corian? I got on the web and looked around. I considered wood screws, but Corian is brittle, so it sounded like a bad idea. I considered tapping it for metal screws, but that also sounded risky. Then I remembered something.

I had a brand-new hot glue gun.

I situated the top on the cabinet very accurately and sprayed the underside with Dykem metal blue. This showed me where the top touched the cabinet. When I took the top off and rolled it over, I had Dykem lines to use for measurements.

Using a caliper and the table saw, I cut four strips of wood very precisely, and I stuck them to the Corian. It worked great. I rolled it over, put it on the cabinet, and verified that it was correct. I used denatured alcohol to take the Dykem off the cart, and I was done.

The top and lathe are not attached to the cart. They just rest on it. They are confined on three sides by the cart’s upper lip, and I have faith that the lathe will not suddenly violate the laws of physics and jump in the 4th direction and into my lap. I can always glue or bolt the top in later.

Here is the cart. Not bad for $30. It holds the lathe and all my chisels. The big area in the bottom is large enough to hold a shop vacuum converted to collect dust. You can imagine what I’m thinking. Run a hose out of the cabinet to a dust scoop over the lathe. I already found the product. Rockler sells them.

I guess I’ll also put a cheap LED light on the lathe. I already have one. It’s a sewing light with a magnetic base. I used to use it for welding, but I got a better one. The cabinet’s power strip gives me a good place to plug it in.

Some people criticize little Chinese lathes, but the truth is that they’re very good tools. They’re just small. You can make a lot of very useful things on one. If you want a giant salad bowl, a baseball bat, or a bedpost, you need something bigger, but what percentage of your projects are that long?

I can make tool handles, mallets, and many other useful and ornamental things on this lathe. If I need more length, I can use my big metal lathe. I made a woodturning tool rest for it.

There are woodturners out there bragging about their $7000 lathes with 2-HP motors. Well, my metal lathe weighs 4000 pounds and has a 7.5-HP motor, and in terms of rigidity, it makes an expensive wood lathe look like a limp noodle.

I think I have the bases covered, if I ever decide to turn anything. Which I might, now that I don’t have to huddle in a filthy corner of the shop.

I’m very close to moving my machine tools here. I just need to clear out one side of the shop I might be able to finish by the end of the week. After that, all I need are a couple more outlets. That’s a quick job.

I might pour a little slab and put my compressor in its own tiny shed, just outside the workshop. That would kill most of the noise and save me some floor space.

I think I’ve had a remarkable day and that God is behind it. It’s not his job to be my genie and make everything cushy for me, but he is good to his children because that’s how good fathers are.

I expect to be back at the job of establishing my workshop tomorrow.

It’s Always Something

I am about 4 hours into the installation of improved electrical service in my workshop, and I have run into a terrible snag. The house has no water because the pump has no power.

You hire someone to do a job, you think you’ve thought of every problem that could pop up, and then you find yourself walking into the woods because you’ve had too much Powerade.

I can’t cook. I can’t do anything that might get me dirty. I had to brush my teeth with bottled water.

The installation has gone well, apart from the water crisis. They dug up two sprinkler pipes, but they repaired them, so that’s over with. Right now they’re taking a break because they have to come up with a clever way to get the new wires into my main panel.

I really should have done this job myself, but I was tired of being cheap with myself. I clear all the downed trees here. I do the yardwork. I do whatever repairs I can. I felt like it was time to watch someone else work.

It’s not like I can’t afford it. Still, I feel like God is watching over my shoulder, checking to see if I waste money.

Most people don’t do their own wiring. They pay people. It’s normal. I will concentrate on that. It’s not like I’m an NBA rookie and I just bought my three best friends their own strip clubs.

I think I’m doing it right. I didn’t go for a massive amperage increase, but because someone may build a second shop some day, I made sure the new conduit was big enough for heavier wire than the gauge they’re using today. It seems wrong to cheap out and cause problems for future owners.

The trench was the thing that put me off. Digging over 120 feet of trench, around roots, pipes, and wires, sounded like more work and trouble than I was willing to confront.

The old wire wasn’t in conduit. They just buried it. This is allowed under the code, but it’s not first-class. I wonder if it’s the reason so many bugs got into the box in the workshop. All they had to do was climb up the wires, into the little bit of conduit that goes from the workshop into the dirt.

I have been picking the electrician’s brains all day, in order to find out how to make changes to the circuitry on my own after he leaves. He doesn’t care. He seems happy to give me information.

It appears that running a whole bunch of circuits off the existing box will not be impossible. I just need to get some tandem and possibly quad breakers. The bottom line is that my workshop power problems are done, unless I decide to install a 3-ton air conditioner. I can have some more 125V boxes. That will be very helpful. Imagine, building a big workshop with only 4 indoor outlets. Plug in 16 things, and you’re done.

I can hear him drilling a giant hole in the side of my beautiful house right now. Arggh.

He’s finished.

No, he’s not.

I will be strong.

Crew Arrives Soon

I’m waiting for the electrical crew to arrive to double the amperage to my workshop. Today they’re going to tear up the yard, drill a hole in the side of my house, and give me a big bill. I can’t wait.

This morning, I went out and locked all my tool cabinets. I took photos of everything that was out in the open that a person might want to steal. I went through the garage, where the electrical panel is, and took pictures. I moved several thousand rounds of ammunition indoors. I guess I shouldn’t have had it out there!

I have no reason to think the electricians will steal, but good fences make good neighbors. There is no point in tempting people. Also, if I don’t take measures in advance, there will be problems in the future. Every time I can’t find something, I’ll think they stole it until I locate it.

A relatively expensive fishing rod vanished from my dad’s garage, and I noticed it after electricians did some work. I still suspect them. I didn’t eat it, and it didn’t evaporate.

I think I hear a truck.

False alarm. It was Federal Express.

After the wiring is finished, I’ll get some conduit and wire and fix the workshop up for my machine tools. Then I have to rearrange everything and decide where to put the big guns.

I have an L-shaped Corian counter in one corner, mounted to a wall. The previous owner left it. It has to go. I’ve been wondering if I could cut it and reuse the Corian. This morning I hit it with a sawzall, and it cut just fine. That means I can break it into two big pieces, and then I can trim them on the table saw.

My panel is on the north side of the shop, so in order to avoid running conduit and expensive wire long distances, I may put the lathe, the mill, the compressor, and the phase converter on or by the north wall. That will mean moving…actually, not that much stuff. I’ve been fervent about putting stuff on wheels, so the only thing I’ll have to drag is my workbench.

I’m hoping to put my wood stuff toward the east and south. I want a woodworking bench in that area. It doesn’t have to be fancy. There is a real fever out there for fancy woodworking benches, but I am determined to resist, because they’re unnecessary. Thousands of woodworking factories have come and gone in this country, and what did they use for the most part? Simple plywood tables. I plan to go fancier than that. I’ll want a vise and some dog holes. I’m not joining the fancy-bench religion, however.

I suppose I could make my bench top from Corian. Why not? Better than wood, and I won’t have to plane it flat.

I hate to do it, but I may sacrifice some tools. I have a jobsite table saw and a 12″ sliding miter saw on a stand. Nice tools, but I have a Powermatic 66 table saw with a 5-HP motor and an extension as long as a couch. I don’t see myself using the small tools in the future.

I’m really making this place my own. I used to use my dad’s initials for the name of this PC, because it belonged to him. I gave it that name for him when he bought it. Today I got rid of that. Totally new name. His influence is disappearing. The influence of the people who sold us the house is disappearing. Mine is increasing, along with God’s. It’s wonderful.

I can’t wait to get this over with. I can’t do anything until the electricians finish. Can’t even leave the house. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Money Out, New Wires in

Things continue to go well.

I had an electrician come out and look at my workshop. He gave me an estimate, and I’m having the wiring upgraded. I’ll be able to run a 7.5-HP compressor and a welder at the same time. I’ll be able to install my 10-HP phase converter. I’ll be able to move my machine tools up here at last.

I considered doing the work myself, and I suppose I could have, but I want it over with. I compromised. The pros will run the wires from the main panel to the workshop, and after they’re gone, I’ll wire up the receptacles on my own.

The people who built this house did a lot of great things, but they were not “tool queers,” as Youtube tool guru Keith Fenner likes to put it. They did not live for tools. Their biggest tools were things like a farm jack. Clearly, there was something wrong with them.

I’m going to have a mill, a lathe, a big compressor, a bunch of welders, and a plasma cutter, not to mention some 250V saws. Just a few things a guy needs in order to get by.

It’s hard to believe what it costs to put two wires in a hole and attach them to a couple of panels. It has to be done, however. I’m not going to continue to live without machine tools. It’s barbaric.

They should have the job done by tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll be able to get the tools moved up here next week. Between the completion of the wiring and the tool move, I’ll have to rearrange the shop. I need 8 or 9 feet of linear space for the lathe, about 7 feet for the mill, and a square yard for the compressor. Which I should leave in Miami. I should bite the bullet and get a bigger compressor.

I’ll have to run air lines up in the trusses. I’m not going to mess around with one air line I drag around the shop. I have to mount my big hose reel on the wall.

The shop has a big L-shaped Corian countertop which sits on a two-by-four frame screwed to the wall. It has to go. It’s a neat feature, but I don’t need it. It sucks up a lot of space, and it’s not flexible. You can’t move it. Maybe someone will buy it and take it away.

I could cut it up and save the Corian for other things. It’s a dynamite work surface. I just happen to have Corian blades for my table saw. I bought it from a guy who cut Corian.

Things are happening fast. It looks like God is preparing me for a pleasant time during the cool months.

My Tractor Completes Me

I had quite a day yesterday.

The people who built my house did a wonderful job in many respects, but they did some weird things, too. For example, their landscaping choices were not good at all. They also made some mistakes with the workshop, which they called “the barn.” They didn’t wire it up with much amperage, and they put a gigantic set of shelves in one corner.

The shelves are four-by-eight sheets of plywood, and there are four of them. That tells you how big and obnoxious the whole structure is. They put the long side against one wall, about three feet from a corner. That was not wise.

There were actually only three plywood sheets in place when I got started yesterday. I will explain that further down.

When you make shelves too deep, you waste a lot of their area. No one is going to reach 4 feet into a shelf to get something. Everything on a shelf that size will be piled up in the first three feet. You end up losing at least half of the storage space you thought you were creating. Things get lost back there. You find yourself doing without things instead of digging for them. It gets dirty in the back because cleaning is nearly impossible.

You should never put deep shelves against a wall. You might as well fill half of the area with concrete blocks. You will have no access to the back of the shelves. If you absolutely have to have deep shelves, you should put them out where a person can walk around them on three sides.

The shelves were an ergonomic disaster, and they also killed a corner of the garage. The little space between the shelves and the corner was so small, it was not useful.

Yesterday, I got fed up. I was either going to cut the shelves in half or turn the whole thing sideways.

I removed nearly all of the junk from the shelves. I moved the giant pile of random things that sat in front of them. I also removed maybe 200 pounds of junk lumber the seller left behind in place of the third shelf. This stuff is probably worth $150 new, but it’s not worth ruining a workshop just to keep it. I put it in a pile behind the shop, and I plan to burn most of it.

I’ll post photos in chronological order. It’s too bad I didn’t take one before I removed the junk that was around the shelves. They were buried.

Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and throw things out. I’m throwing out several rods of rebar, a bunch of lumber, and 5 new steel fence posts. Goodbye! I don’t care what it’s worth. It has to go. I can afford a new two-by-eight if I really need one.

What a mistake it was to keep this junk.

There was also a bunch of 5-gallon paint pails under the shelves, labeled for future use. The colors matched the interior of the house. Call me crazy, but I plan to paint some wood samples with the paint and then throw the pails out. I don’t need the paint. All I will ever need is something the paint people can use to match the colors. A little piece of wood in each color will do fine, and I will be able to put all of them in a drawer.

I looked things over and realized that cutting the shelves in half would mean dismantling the shelves in their entirety. That wasn’t a job I looked forward to. I decided against it.

I could not move them. I guess the whole thing weighs 300 pounds, and it’s flexible, so if you get one leg to move, the ones on the other end bend and dig into the concrete.

I had to think about it for a long time. I could tear them apart and start over. But then there was…the tractor.

I measured, and my tractor’s forks were long enough to go under the shelves. Done deal.

I removed the steel strap that attached the shelves to the wall, cleared a path for the tractor, went it, picked the shelves up, and maneuvered them nearly into position. I got them as close as I could, and then I was stumped again.

But wait! I have a Harbor Freight lift table. It lifts 500 pounds, and it has casters.

I removed the handle from the table for clearance, and then I shoved it under the shelves. By lifting one end, I was able to prevent the legs from gripping the floor. I shoved the shelves against the wall, right where I wanted them. More or less. It might be better to rearrange the whole garage and put them 12 feet farther down the wall, but forgoing that, I got what I wanted.

I strapped the shelves to the wall in two places, sucked the filth off of them with the shop vac, added a new sheet of plywood for a proper third shelf, and put my junk back in. It was amazing. I thought the shop was overflowing, but when I was done, I had a lot of room on the shelves to spare.

It goes to show that what I always say is right: before you build a new workshop, rearrange your old one.

I put things I will rarely or never use toward the back and top. I made an area for metals. One nice thing about such big shelves is that I can stack a lot of bars, angle iron, plate, and other metal items on them.

I stuck my fuel jugs under the bottom shelf in a nice row in the front. I won’t be tripping on them any more. I put the chainsaws and a gas blower under the bottom shelf on one side.

This is tremendous. It’s like the workshop just grew 200 square feet.

I had been considering buying a shed just for materials, but I see no point in it now.

Watching the shop open up as I stored things was a beautiful experience. Every time I put some annoying object in its place, it was as if I felt fresh air entering my lungs.

Because of my oak problem, leaves blow into the shop all the time. The area near the shelves was packed with them. To get at them, I would have had to crawl on my stomach with the shop vac. That was never a possibility. Now I can see the floor again. Magnificent.

There is nothing like a tractor. If you’re a man, a tractor is your best friend. Seems like there’s nothing a tractor can’t do.

Now I have four and a half feet of new wall space, and I can hang yard tools there.

I need to get to work on making more things mobile. There is no excuse for not doing it. The invention of the wheel was not something that happened recently.

Today is going very well. I got rid of my bicycle. There is no place to ride around here. It was cluttering the garage, and I needed room for my machine tools. I kept the bike I bought my dad. The one I sold is a road bike, and it was very uncomfortable to ride. The bike he left me is much easier on the anatomy, and it has spiffy red saddlebags. Maybe one day I’ll live in a place where it will be useful.

I also sold my John Deere Model 15 dump cart. This is a cart you pull behind a garden tractor. When I bought my tractors from the guy who sold us the house, he threw the cart in. I thought it was a great thing, but I soon found out it was useless. I had a golf cart and a pickup truck, not to mention a real tractor, so I never used the John Deere cart. It took up room and got in my way.

I don’t like John Deere. The company treats customers like dirt, and they overcharge for everything. The public responds by giving John Deere something resembling worship. They have the same crazy mindset you see in Apple and Snap-On customers. They don’t just like the products. They don’t just defend the price-gouging. They get very angry if you criticize the companies.

With that in mind, I priced the cart at $500 and put ads up referring to it as a collector’s item.

People laughed at me and sent obnoxious comments. “Did you mean $50?” I told them to make me offers.

I finally lowered the price to $350, and then I considered cutting the cart up and making a John Deere pork smoker on wheels. I thought that would be really funny. The steel was very sturdy, the hardware was first-class, and the smoker would have been bomb-proof. It would also be a good way to express my feelings for John Deere.

Someone contacted me. I told him I was thinking of cutting it up because people were not offering me enough to justify selling it. He said he wasn’t scared by the price.

Today he and his wife drove from Tallahassee and gave me $275 for it. I took his first offer. I think the cart is legitimately worth $250 on Ebay, and Ebay prices are higher than prices on other selling sites, so $275 was a fortune as far as I was concerned.

Now it’s gone, and I will never have to deal with it again.

I wonder what the people who thought my price was funny will think when they see that I sold it.

I feel like going out to the shop and just sitting there, enjoying all the empty air around me.

Plus Hot Metal

Yesterday was eventful and profitable.

I have moved my tractors out of the workshop. I put tarps on them to protect such parts as would react badly to rain. Now I have more room for important things, like plasma-cutting and watching Youtube.

Speaking of Youtube, I tried to come up with a plan to hardwire the shop for the Internet. I don’t want to dig up the yard. I was thinking about it when I remembered that there was a jack on the wall out there. Phone? Ethernet? I had always assumed it was a phone jack, but I had never checked.

I went out and looked. It was a phone jack. That didn’t stop me. I wanted to find out what kind of wire was behind it. I had a couple of things in mind. If it was skinny phone wire, it could act as a fish line to pull Cat 6 wire through for the Internet. If it was something better, maybe I could connect it directly.

It turned out to be Cat 5, which, while inferior to Cat 6 (or Cat 11), is far better than I need. Pretty exciting. I came up with a plan. I would put a Cat 5 port in the garage, and I would find the phone port nearest to the router and turn it into a Cat 5 port. I would disconnect the land line stuff, which is obsolete, and I would have the Internet, wired, in every room where I had a phone jack.

I got myself some tools and went to work. I changed two phone jacks. I went to the computer. I turned it on. No service.

I traced all the wires, and I learned a couple of things. I found out where all the wiring in my house is. I learned that all the Cat 5 wiring was only partially wired up. Cat 5 has 8 wires, and the phone jacks use 4. Even if the wires from the garage had gone straight to the phone box by the garage, only 4 wires would have connected that box to the jacks in the house.

While I was working on all this, I decided to trace the Cat 5 workshop wires as far as I could. I opened a little box outside the workshop. Guess what I found? Cut wires. The jack in the garage was connected to approximately 5 feet of wire which dead-ended right outside.

Now I have two ethernet jacks that go nowhere.

I’m not sure what to do, but it can be dealt with. I just have to decide whether I care enough to do it. It will mean working in the attic, where the fiberglass insulation and wiring are, and I don’t really want to do that until the temperature drops into the low sixties.

I can use the Internet out there already, by using my phone as a mobile hotspot. It’s just annoying.

I also did some welding. I cut some flat steel bar into short pieces and made T-welds (fillets) with TIG and stick.

My TIG welding still needs a lot of work. After I welded, I went inside and watched some videos, and I took note of some fundamentals I had forgotten. I am hoping to do better today.

Welding is not like other tool-related pursuits. You have to keep practicing. People who have welded for 30 years practice. You don’t have to do this with other tools. No one practices using a wrench.

Because the weather is so much better now, welding isn’t a chore. I don’t sit and drip sweat into my helmet now. That means I can practice as long as I want, provided I observe the duty cycles of the machines and I don’t overheat the TIG torch.

Welding is easier with the cat gone. Before he left, I christened him “Heisenberg.” He now resides with my friend Amanda. I think it was a big mistake for her to take him, but apart from the obvious problems of taking in an unneeded pet in a crowded household, he will do an exceptional job of whatever it is that cats do. I’m just glad I can back out of the driveway at full speed again. And when I want to weld, I don’t have to put any animals in cages.

She took him to the vet to see if he had an ID chip, and of course, he did not. I predicted it, because I knew it was very unlikely that anyone around here would buy a cat chip and then throw away the cat and not look for it.

People treat cats as though they’re disposable. No sane person has ever paid for a cat. They’re always free, so a lot of people feel that that makes it okay to dump them beside the road. That is surely what happened to Heisenberg. He has a wonderful personality, but he’s a cat, so he’s an at-will family member who can be discarded at any moment for any reason.

Whoever abandoned him should have either given him away or had him put down, but it was easier to have no spine and toss him out of a car.

If you want to irritate a cat person, say this: “Dogs cost money, but cats are free.” By and large, it’s true.

His picture is on the Internet on sites where people look for lost pets, but no one will ever claim him. If anyone cared about him, I would have received a response by now.

I wonder if his neediness, which I saw as a plus, is what got him fired. It’s unusual for a cat to be bursting with affection. Maybe someone didn’t want to be pestered. Before he left, he was doing things like jumping on me and wrapping all 4 legs around me. That could get old. In fact, it did. He interrupted me repeatedly while I was trying to work.

I talked to my friend Mike about it. He understands completely. He has two cats, and he keeps hoping they’ll die. He feels obligated to take care of them because no one will take them and he’s not willing to take them to a shelter, but they’re not real pets, like dogs. They don’t care about him. I would have taken them to the pound a long time ago. People are more important than animals. You shouldn’t disrupt your life so an unwanted cat can have food and shelter until it croaks. You have more value than that.

God showed me something interesting and very important. There is a correct order of authority in people’s lives, and if you’re not in God’s will, that order will be inverted. When an animal’s desires come before your needs, you have an inversion of authority. We’re supposed to be above animals. They live for us, not the other way around.

My sister is a sociopath and a sadist, but she loves animals. She used to cry and make loud moaning noises every time she saw a horse through a car window. She has a long history of spoiling aggravating little dogs and using them to control other people. She has never housetrained a dog. She forced her dogs’ company on people who hated them. She will sing songs to a dog after it poops on the floor, so it knows it’s a good idea to keep doing it. She has an inversion of authority.

Satan rules demons. Demons rule her pets. Her pets rule her. Through her, they rule other people. To deal with my sister is to accommodate her awful pets. This is why every other person in the family has killed at least one of her dogs. My dad turned one loose. My mother took two to be gassed. I took one to be gassed. I prayed for God to kill the last one because she claimed it was the reason she wouldn’t go to drug rehab.

I don’t know if she has pets now, or even if she’s alive. I’m glad I no longer have to be around animals that are so spoiled they climb on the furniture for the purpose of urinating on it. I’m glad I no longer have to be around my sister. Her main function in life is to take away the dignity of other human beings and destroy their joy. I keep praying for God to keep her out of my life forever. He told me I should not think about her, so I try not to.

When I was a kid, I had a dog. I saw him climb onto a couch and push my sister off so he could stretch out. He did this to an abusive, extremely aggressive person who pushed other human beings around and made them miserable. He knew her proper place. She was below him in the supernatural hierarchy. I didn’t understand this until long after he was gone.

Satan promotes something I call “the alternative righteousness.” It’s a pretend righteousness that has nothing to do with serving God. Sick devotion to animals is part of it. People who are obsessed with animals are not Spirit-led Christians. If you have pets, you will be exposed to these people when you need help, and you will see certain things often. Liberalism. Vegetarianism. Witchcraft. Feminism. These things are abnormal, but on the surface, they look nice. Leftists claim they love the poor because they give them things and reinforce their pathological flaws. Vegetarians think they’re better than the rest of us because they don’t kill their food, even though Jesus ate meat and created the sacrificial system of Judaism; the Torah HAD to be written on the skins of slaughtered animals. Witches always claim they only do good. Feminists…don’t get me started.

A warped adoration of animals is part of the alternative righteousness. It’s probably why Hitler loved dogs and gave up meat. The Nazis were heavily into vegetarianism, environmentalism, and nature worship. You can look it up.

I love my pets, but I bought them in ignorance, and I would not do it again. I wouldn’t buy another animal or accept one unless I had a good reason, such as that it was corn-fed, cut in thick slices, and on sale. I would let a barn cat live here (and stay here after I moved) in order to keep pests down. I would buy a protection dog if I had to. I’m not going to have any more pure pets if I can help it. I won’t even have fish.

Drudge likes to link to stories about people who are pulled out of trailers full of sick animals and feces. “HOUSE OF FILTH” is one of his favorite headlines. Those people are demonized. Demons run them, and the demons tell them to hoard animals. It doesn’t help the animals, who should be euthanized, and it certainly doesn’t help the hoarders or the people they cause to suffer.

The Bible says one person is worth more than many sparrows. That’s just how it is.

Have you noticed how nutcases are filling our stores, restaurants, and airplanes with “support animal” pets? That’s a sign that demons are increasing their power over us. People who are controlled by animals have a demonic desire to extend that control over others. Satan is a conqueror; he never stops looking for more territory.

It’s not enough to carry a pig in a bag and sing songs to it. You have to make other people sit next to it in restaurants while it breaks wind and eats off a plate you might get next week. Like the increasing power of illegal aliens, it’s a sign that America is losing God’s support.

If you’re not full of the Holy Spirit, you won’t understand these things. It’s all true, though.

It’s a smart system, in the short run. Not only do you get to coerce admiration out of other people through your virtue-signaling; you get to put them down and control them by saying they’re less righteous than you are. Most people are so simple, they will buy it. Satan is an extremely accomplished manipulator. He has done his homework.

The point of the alternative righteousness is to convince you that you can be a good person and have a fine afterlife while continuing to enjoy sin and reject God. It works really well. Many people you know are burning in agony and humiliation right now because they fell for it.

It’s remarkable how Satan can degrade you with animals, once God stops backing you up. There is a lady in Florida who forces other people to share airplanes with a horse. Those people don’t even know they’re supernaturally defeated. It’s not just a horse on a plane. It’s Satan, saying, “This is how low you are now, because you reject God. A horse is more important than you are.”

My sister, who is basically a demon apartment building with feet, was always ahead of the curve. She forced her dog into restaurants years before the other children of darkness got the idea. While she lived in filth in a house with walls that were caked with mold and floors that were varnished with urine and feces, the dog ate rib eye steak from Whole Foods. That’s the gospel truth. I am a witness.

If you have God’s favor, you should live like it. A man should have authority over his wife, his kids, and whatever animals live on their property. The wife should have authority over everyone except him. The kids should have authority over the animals. If an animal is running your life, you have a demon problem, and you’re not living up to the potential God REQUIRES you to fulfill. It’s a sign, and you need to take notice and repent.

Now that I think about it, Jewish legend says God withheld the flood until human beings began marrying animals. That suddenly makes more sense to me. It’s about as severe as an authority inversion can get. When you’re having sex with your dog and calling him your husband, you can’t get much lower. You’re signalling your true value, which is nil. If you declare yourself worthless, God may respect your assessment.

He has prepared a place for the worthless.

Fascinating stuff. It’s remarkable that this wisdom isn’t commonly held. After thousands of years, we should all know these things. One generation should teach the next.

I’m repeating myself, but God told me these things: “All strength comes from inheritance. There is no strength without inheritance. Satan hates inheritance.” We are so bad at giving new generations their inheritance of wisdom, we are re-learning things people knew 5000 years ago. Satan has done a great job of keeping us poor. We did all the work for him. He just lied and made us think it was the right thing to do.

Why fight your enemy when you can make him fight himself while you watch? When you kill an enemy, you gain nothing. When you make an enemy destroy himself, you gain a servant and a soldier.

If animals or worthless people are above you in life, you need to get some authority. Your situation is not normal, and it’s not permanent unless you want it to be.

I wish I had had someone to tell me these things when I was young, but my parents didn’t know anything. Maybe this material will help you, though. I certainly hope so.

Blue-Collar Decisions Require Graduate-Level Brains

I’m trying to get my hands on some gas containers for my new acetylene rig.

Propane is no problem. You go to the hardware store and buy a tank. Acetylene is way trickier.

Acetylene can’t be extracted from a bottle at just any old rate. The rule of thumb is that you can only remove 1/7 of the total acetylene from the tank per hour. In very hot places, you can use more than that. Depending on what you plan to do with your gas, a small tank may make your work impossible. Some tasks require a lot of acetylene.

I want to do two things with acetylene: flame-straightening and welding. Propane will be for cutting and general heating. I may want to heat things so I can bend them.

Heat-bending and flame-straightening are two different things, although my guess is that most welders don’t know it.

If I want to bend a wrench to make a special tool, I will heat the entire area of the new bend until it’s red-hot. Pretty simple. This is not flame-straightening, and it takes a lot of gas.

If I have a shaft with a bend in it, and I want to straighten it, I will heat a very small area on the outside of the bend. When the metal cools, all or some of the bend will be gone. This is flame-straightening. It takes very little gas. It doesn’t work well if you heat a big area. It depends on creating a small hot area confined between cold areas.

Some people seem determined to believe it’s the same thing as heat-bending.

I’m thinking I’ll get a 125 cu. ft. oxygen tank, because it’s the biggest tank I can move easily. I’m pretty sure I want a 75 cu. ft. acetylene tank. I think it’s on the large side for what I want to do, and when it comes to tools, you should usually go big when you’re in doubt.

If I get a bottle of acetylene, brand new, it will run me something like $350. That seems like a very bad idea. Oxygen is in the same general ballpark.

The nice thing about welding bottles is that people are always trying to get rid of them online. Very often, you can get perfectly good bottles, sometimes full, for 20% of the new cost.

The big problem with buying used bottles is that they may be stolen. If they are, your gas supplier will know it. They won’t refill or swap them for you. They may confiscate them. This is bad.

People commonly rent bottles. I believe this is a very stupid idea. You save money up front, I would guess, but then you’re shackled to one supplier for as long as you own the bottle. There are a lot of jerks in the business, so that can be a problem. Also, do you really want to load up all your bottles and take them back in if you move? You would lose all that valuable gas.

All my bottles belong to me. I want to keep it that way.

Rental bottles, and any bottles that belong to companies that want to keep track of them, are generally stamped or embossed on their necks. They’ll say something like “Airgas” on them. I don’t know if every bottle that isn’t stamped is free for the taking, but it appears to be the case.

In areas where stealing bottles is a big problem, many suppliers will flat-out refuse to sell you a big bottle. I don’t know what the rationale is. I don’t see how owning your bottle makes you more likely to steal. Seems to me it would make you less likely, since, hello, you own it. But that’s how it is. There must be some rationale. If you want a bottle big enough to be useful, and you live in one of these areas, you have to rent. You may also be unable to get your own big bottles filled, even if you already had them when you moved to the area. Some suppliers are such jerks they won’t fill any bottles that don’t belong to them.

The kink in the owner-bottle strategy is this: bottles don’t last forever. They have to be certified every 10 years. This costs something like $30 per bottle. If you own an old bottle, this can work out well for you. You can take an old bottle in and swap it for a full bottle with a later date. This buys you time. I, on the other hand, started out with a new, empty bottle, and my supplier swapped it for a bottle which was not new. So I lost time.

Apparently, you need to check your dates and try not to let your bottles stick around too long. If you empty one, you need to swap it ASAP.

I don’t know if gas suppliers let you ask for bottles with recent dates. They should, because some people don’t go through gas fast, and if they had to take bottles that were about to expire, they would end up paying twice as much for gas. You might pay $35 for C25 and $30 for an inspection. And your bottle might fail, so you would have to buy another one.

The odds that a bottle will die while you have it are slim, because they commonly last 70 years or more, but it’s possible.

I don’t know how old my bottles are, but I’m going to check today.

I would rather have the freedom of ownership and risk paying for inspections than have someone else’s property here for months or years.

I found some bottles online, and I flat-out asked the sellers if they were stolen. I’m not going to buy stolen goods if I can avoid it.

When you get into something like this, it’s always hard to tell whether you have the right information. I researched as well as I could, so now I’m going to act on what I think I know.

Plus Cat Pictures

Instead of talking about what a great day I had, I’ll just get right into details.

I have to get my tools together and functioning. I have waited way too long. I made an appointment with an electician, and I put a bunch of stuff online for sale to make room.

My acetylene equipment arrived today. That’s wonderful. It will allow me to do a lot of things you really have to be able to do in order to have a decent workshop. Heating, metal straightening, and cutting are the big things, although I could also do some acetylene welding.

I also got some welding practice in. I did both stick and TIG. Things went very well.

Regarding stick, I was working with 6011, which has always given me fits in the past. Today I tried fillet welds, and I turned the amperage down to 40, which was a big step from the 85 I had been working with before. I succeeded in doing two welds. They were not pretty, but then 6011 always makes ugly welds, and I am still not skilled at it. The main thing is that I pulled it off. I was able to keep the arc going, I didn’t long-arc too much, and I could see what I was doing. This is a huge step forward.

This is a great relief, because I had started to wonder if I was ever going to get it. I think I was welding badly because I had the hot-start set too low and the running amps set too high.

As for TIG, I used a Walter Abrasives flap disk to clean two pieces of metal before fillet-welding them. These disks are the only tools I know of that remove mill scale with acceptable ease and speed, without gouging the work badly. They are amazing, and they last a long time because you can peel the old layers off and reveal fresh ones.

I used my new Nova pedal. I just bought it to replace the original pedal. My welder, though Chinese, is perfectly good. The pedal that came with it is an abomination, however. I didn’t realize how bad it was until today. In the past, I created grey welds, I didn’t have good control of the amperage, and things generally went badly. Today I made welds that were either shiny or nearly so, especially after I turned on the gas. Oops. I thought the regulator was ready to go, so at first, I didn’t open the low-pressure side. Turned out it was closed. Oh, well.

This is huge. TIG is the most fantastic kind of welding there is. You can weld little-bitty things without ruining them. Lots of control. It leaves welds that are both pretty and strong.

In other news, I have a cat. Temporarily. A day or two ago, I saw a cat sitting on one of my porches, and I yelled at it, and it just sat there. Today while I was busy outside, I heard a pathetic sound, and I didn’t know if it was a stranded baby bird or what. I went looking for it, and there was the cat.

I figured that was the end of it, but the cat decided to make me the center of its universe. It started following me everywhere. It tried to get in the house. I went inside, figuring it would leave. When I came back out, it was a foot from the door, waiting for me to come out. It did that twice.

When I went out to weld, it followed me and jumped on my workbench, which was not good at all. I don’t want my things broken, and there were bits of sharp metal everywhere.

You can’t weld with an animal in your shop because the light will injure their eyes. This thing insisted on staying within a foot of me, so I didn’t know what to do. My friend Amanda said I could put it in a crate while I welded.

BINGO! I had two travel cages for the birds.

I crammed the cat in a crate, set it outside the shop, and went to work. Very nice.

I was planning to take the cat to the Humane Society, but Amanda says she’ll take it. If it’s still here tomorrow, off he goes. Actually, off he goes whether she takes him or not. He’s going somewhere, because he can’t stay here.

I know it sounds like one of those movies where some gruff old guy finds a puppy and ignores it at first and then falls in love with it, but my life isn’t a movie. The main reason it’s leaving is that I don’t want a cat. There are other issues, though. Cats make houses smell. Cat people always say their cats don’t smell, but they really mean they can’t smell it any more because they’re used to it. Also, cats don’t work with parrots. One scratch from a cat can kill a parrot. They go into shock and die. Some people say their cats and birds get along great. Yes, and you will probably be okay if you drive drunk every day as long as you’re careful, but it doesn’t mean you should do it. Final thing…cats live forever. A dog will usually die at around 11. Cats commonly make it into their late teens. Yow.

It’s too bad, because as cats go, this one is fantastic. It’s extremely affectionate, to the point of needing therapy. I have known it for about three hours, and it’s insanely devoted to me. If I wanted a cat, I would want this one, but I don’t.

It would be nice to have a feral cat that kept the yard clear of moles, but that’s as much cat as I need.

Whatever happens to it, I hope it does well in life. But I don’t intend to become a cat’s servant in order to see to it.

When it’s gone, I will miss it. For half an hour.

I’ll post some photos. I couldn’t resist.

Now that I can weld a little, I’m thinking I need a better welding table. I don’t want to buy one, though. I’m thinking it over. I should have my mill set up in three weeks. Once it’s here, I can buy strips of steel plate, mill them flat, and weld them to a homemade frame. I can use the mill to drill precise holes in them for clamps and so on. It would probably be as good as a thousand-dollar table, and I would expect to spend maybe $150 on steel.

Northern Tool has a crazy deal right now on a fairly good cheap table. It usually runs almost $400, but they’ve cut the price over 50%. It has a 9-gauge top which is reasonably flat, and it has clamps and holes for tools. I’m wondering if I should get one. It would take a few weeks to arrive, because they’re backordered. By then, I would expect to be able to make something myself.

The Harbor Freight table I’m using now works, and for the tiny price, it’s a great tool, but it wobbles, it’s hard to get your feet and the pedal under it comfortably, and there is always the possibility that it will collapse when you put something heavy on it.

I suspect that the super-fancy tables are overkill. People have made a lot of great stuff on plain old steel plate. But I don’t know for sure.

Tomorrow I should get some oxygen and acetylene, and maybe some goggles for the cat. He might come back to visit.

I guarantee you, he is in my garage right now, staring at the door to the house.

Time is Getting Short

Today’s blog post ought to be pretty interesting to Christians.

I believe God told me to leave Miami. I ended up near Ocala, and it has been a dream come true in most respects. I have dozens of acres. I have a big workshop. I’m far away from the coarse, ignorant, obnoxious people of Miami. I’m surrounded by southerners and Christians. Hard to beat.

At some point, I started to feel that God was telling me to move to Tennessee, even though I had not been in northern Florida long. I had no problem with this. As great as my present situation is, there are some down sides. There are basically only two kinds of trees here, and both are trash trees. You can’t have normal grass here. The soil here is just sand, so you can’t grow anything. It’s very hot in the summer, which wasn’t a big deal in Miami, where there was no incentive to go outside anyway. Here, outdoor life is very important, so it’s difficult when it’s 95 degrees every single day for three months. Also, I want more acreage, and I miss Appalachia.

Recently, I learned about a 2015 prophecy that came from Perry Stone. He said God was calling his children to the mountains. That startled me. Persecution of Christians is going to get worse and worse as Americans become more and more vile (and less American), so people like me will be better off in remote areas among their own kind.

In 2018, I felt driven to go to a meeting of the Last Reformation in Clearwater, where I was re-baptized correctly. I had started watching their videos. They are part of a wave of revival in the church. People who are caught up in it go around healing strangers and so on. They’re against the filthy money doctrine we are so used to seeing from Trinity Broadcasting. Their leader is a Dane named Torben Sondergaard. He was at the meeting in Clearwater.

I was baptized in December. In January, Torben and his family were driven out of Denmark by the Danish government. He was accused of abusing children and practicing quackery. In Denmark, where the government licenses churches, casting demons out of children is considered abuse.

Since January, Torben has been looking for a new home. The Sondergaards applied for asylum here. They started out in South Florida, which seemed like a big mistake to me, because of the unpleasant, arrogant, boneheaded ways of the people there.

Yesterday, he posted a Youtube video. He has a new headquarters in North Carolina. The sellers wanted $2.2 million, but because they believed God was with Torben, they cut the price to $1.2 million. Another $800,000 came to them suddenly from another source. Now they only need between $400,000 and $500,000 to pay the place off.

This all happened extremely quickly. They haven’t bought the place yet, but they have been allowed to move in and begin work anyway. I watched the video, and I thought, “Loans aren’t for Christians.” Instantly, Torben started saying he didn’t want a loan. He doesn’t believe in borrowing to glorify God, any more than I do!

I felt a little pain while I watched. I have not found a place in Tennessee yet. Big properties with houses are not that easy to find. North Carolina is less challenging, and it’s beautiful there. I have asked God repeatedly if he is sure it has to be Tennessee and not North Carolina, and I feel he is insisting on Tennessee.

Anyway, something is happening. If you’re among the individuals who think God wants you to live among the depraved because you’re going to save your community, you need to think again. It’s not going to happen. You can help a few people, but you can’t save a neighborhood. Eventually, they will turn on you. You need to ask God to move you.

Torben compares the new facility to Noah’s ark. That’s not just him being clever. It’s from God. The ark was provided to protect God’s loved ones from the children of darkness and their punishment. God is putting people who are especially close to him in safer areas. You need to get situated before it’s too late. You won’t be able to move in with people who listened to God while you were stubbornly clinging to places like Los Angeles and Baltimore. It won’t be that easy.

The video doesn’t show much of the property, but the words are what matter.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Hard Work isn’t Chic

I’ve started to feel obligated to report on my day after the sun goes down. I guess I’ll quit doing it.

But…

today was a very good day.

Because I managed to assemble my Offroad Swag finger brake, I decided to get an air-powered jack to replace the press’s hand-operated jack. When you’re doing one or two presses to fix something, pumping the handle isn’t a big chore, but when you’re working with metal and doing repeated bends, it’s a tremendous hindrance.

Harbor Freight sells an air jack for $80, post-coupon. I bought one today.

The jack is very nice. People rave about them. They lift trailers and houses with them. It’s an extraordinary tool. You can put a generator and a small compressor in the back of your truck, drive to someone else’s house, and help him level it.

Right now, all I have in my workshop is a 4.5-CFM compressor. It’s good enough for the jack. It slows down if you keep pumping long enough, but it’s adequate.

The jack does not come with screw holes in the base. The original jack had two holes, and there were two screws that went through the base into threaded holes in a plate on the press. The holes in the plate don’t line up well with areas in the new jack where screws can go without causing problems, so if I decide to put screws in it, the best thing will be to drill new holes in the plate, drill and tap blind holes in the bottom of the jack, and run the screws through the plate and into the jack from below.

You don’t really need to attach a jack to a hydraulic press at both ends, or so I’m told. The press holds the upper end of the jack in a steel cup, so that end can’t move, and the bottom of the jack is confined by pressure when you use it. But screws would be nice. A better design.

I decided to use my new front end loader brace today. I was so happy with it. It was all shiny and orange. It looked almost like a factory part. I tried to put it on the tractor, and I realized I had installed one end shield incorrectly. I don’t want to get into details, but I had to cut it off, shorten the brace, and weld it back on. I enjoyed the welding and grinding, but I wasn’t happy that I had to cut up a new project.

When I was done, the brace worked fine, except that it was shorter than I needed. I’m going to make another one. The steel will only cost around $20, and it will be good practice for me. The current brace will be useful when I’m working on the tractor, but I need a longer one to do it right.

I forgot something when I made the brace. It will hold the front end loader up, but it doesn’t restrain the other hydraulics on the front end. The bucket may still rotate. It has heavy forks on it, trying to pull it down. I left it up tonight to see what it would do.

It may not be safe to use the brace to park the tractor with the loader up, without something restraining the bucket. Oh, well. I was planning to move the tractor outside anyway, and the brace will be nice to have.

I used my new 6″ angle grinder to remove the end of the brace so I could redo it. That grinder is monstrous. Cuts metal much faster than a 4.5″ grinder. I’m glad I bought it.

I put leather pads on the ends of the brace to prevent it from marring the tractor, and today I learned that 5-minute epoxy does not work well for this purpose. It doesn’t bond leather and metal well. Time to look into some kind of rubber.

That’s all that’s happening today.

Two More Annoying Strongholds Fall

This day is going well.

This weekend, I tried to teach some boys how to run my pressure washer. Before we really got anywhere, the motor started acting up. Changing the gas did not help. I knew what the most likely culprit was: leftists. They forced ethanol gas on us, and it ruins carburetors, gas tanks, and other parts while providing no benefits whatsoever, unless you grow corn.

I ordered myself a new carb without blinking. There is usually no point in paying to get a small engine carb fixed, because you can generally buy new ones for between 10 and 20 dollars. I opted to treat myself to a genuine Honda carb for $19.95, but I’m sure the $13 carb with no name would have worked as well.

This afternoon I ripped the old carb off and installed the new one, along with a fuel filter. I didn’t see a filter when I worked on the pressure washer this weekend. I would guess that Honda went with some kind of annoying in-tank filter. Forget that. I added some fuel line and added a filter I can actually see.

The pressure washer runs great now, and I didn’t have to go to a small engine shop and wait a month for them to charge me a hundred bucks to fix a $13 part.

When I was done, I looked at the old carb, and I thought about it for a couple of seconds. Then I dropped it in the trash. It just doesn’t make sense to keep it when a) I know it doesn’t work, and b) a new one from China will cost nearly nothing and have no problems.

I also finished making the brace for my Kubota’s front end loader. I fixed up the paint and added leather pads to prevent the brace from gouging the tractor. I don’t know if the pads will work. They’re not really necessary, but why cut up a piece of machinery if you don’t need to?

I cut the pads out of leather and glued them to the brace with 5-minute epoxy. Which takes an hour to set. No joke. I kept waiting for it to set up, and I finally got tired of it, so I went online and searched. Five-minute epoxy takes around an hour to set, and it takes a day to fully cure.

I wonder if all the guys who lost on Forged in Fire because their handles fell apart know this.

I can’t figure out why they call it 5-minute epoxy. Warnings provided by various brands agree that an hour is about right. You should finish moving your project around in maybe 20 minutes, because the glue will have started to cure by then, but it will still be wet.

I plan to throw a little dye on the leather to hide the ballpoint pen marks I left after I measured it. Can’t hurt anything.

I hope it works. I’m not sure how the pointy end will act when it’s under pressure. It won’t break, but I’m hoping the force won’t destroy the leather and scratch my tractor’s paint up.

Doesn’t matter. I can keep working on it.

My acetylene outfit should arrive this week, so I need to get going on a tank cart. I have to decide what to do. I plan to use propane nearly all the time, but I also want to be able to use acetylene when I want. It would be nice to have all three tanks (oxygen, propane, and acetylene) on the same cart, but maybe it’s not realistic. I guess I should make a cart which will hold the oxygen and either of the other two tanks. I can find a way to store the acetylene safely when it’s not on the cart.

Finger Brake Finished

I had another great day today. I finished building my Offroad Swag finger press brake…finger brake press…whatever.

I’ve wanted one of these tools for a long time. It will allow me to bend thick metal and make things from it. This is a huge advantage for anyone who likes to work with tools. A lot of people end up with disappointing things made from plywood or from angle iron badly welded with Home Depot welders because they can’t bend metal.

The thing that deterred me from building this tool in the past was the welding involved. I had done a fair amount of simple MIG welding, but I didn’t really understand a lot of things about welding. For one thing, I thought my welder wasn’t big enough to do the job.

When you buy a MIG, it will probably come with specifications and a little chart, and it may say you can only weld metal up to a certain thickness. I took those figures too seriously. I thought a welder that was only rated for 1/4″ steel was not the right tool for jobs involving thicker steel. That’s not true. I still don’t know where they come up with the figures, or what they really mean, but you can weld thick metal with a small welder. You may have to make more passes, but it can be done.

This finger brake (I checked the terminology) has what appears to be 1/2″ plate in it, and you have to weld 1″ rods to it. You also have to weld a very thick piece of angle iron to it. I didn’t know if I could get it done. I found out I was concerned about nothing, so that obstacle disappeared.

I was also concerned about my vision. I was having a lot of trouble seeing what I was welding. I got a better welding light, I turned my helmet’s shade down all the way, and I cleaned the lens. Now I see well enough to weld without a lot of problems, so I’m not as nervous about taking projects on.

Once I got the kit and started putting it together, I found out the biggest part of it tended to warp badly when welding, so that slowed me down. I learned a lot about reducing welding distortion, I came up with a plan, and I went forward.

Today I welded the guide tubes to the upper part of the press, and then I welded the angle iron lower die to the base.

The guide tubes were scary because Offroad Swag’s instructions are vague. I had to weld two upright tubes to a long rectangle of metal, with very good alignment. I had to figure out how to get it aligned to begin with and how to avoid distortion. I used a machinist’s square to scribe lines halfway across the tops of the tubes. I used calipers to scribe lines halfway across the parts the tubes were supposed to align with. I set the parts up on my welding table, tacked them in place, checked to see if they were still aligned, and welded them up.

The welds aren’t too bad.

These particular parts see almost no strain, so there is no point in overwelding them. The more weld you add, the more you heat your parts, and the more distortion you can get. I tried to be economical. A lot of guys pour on the weld because they don’t know what they’re doing. It causes problems and wastes time and wire.

The only problems I had with the finished product were caused by Offroad Swag’s loose tolerances, and they didn’t affect the way the part functioned. I was thrilled to get such good results.

I decided to grit my teeth and weld the bottom die in place. The seams I had to weld were 19″ long, and there were two of them. Most people apply a ton of weld, in two continuous beads. There is no reason to do that. These welds don’t have to do much, so they don’t have to be huge.

I put soapstone marks on the seams one inch apart. I started welding with the middle inches. I welded one inch per side, put the torch down, and did something else while the parts cooled. Then I went back, skipped inches on both sides, and welded two more inches per side. This is called “intermittent welding,” and it prevents a lot of distortion-producing heat from accumulating in any area.

I didn’t finish the job for several hours, because I kept leaving to let the heat dissipate. I didn’t weld all 19 inches of either side. I welded about half of the seams’ lengths. I don’t see any point in doing more.

My guess is that a lot of people make big, thick, pretty, continuous beads on these things, and this is why there are so many complaints about warping. My brake won’t look as good, but on the other hand, it isn’t bent.

I assembled the brake and bent a piece of 2″ by 1/4″ flat bar. No problem. You can’t do that with a typical brake. This is why Offroad Swag’s product was so appealing to me. I see no point in spending a grand on a tool that won’t bend anything thicker than the lid of a barbecue.

That bend isn’t too sharp, but there are ways to do better and get a nicer product, so I’m not concerned.

I can’t bend anything wider than 19″, but that leaves the door open to a huge number of useful projects. If I had blown a thousand dollars on a factory-made brake, I would be very limited in what I could do.

The kit isn’t perfect. They made one bar of steel about a millimeter shorter than it should have been, and they supplied a bunch of half-inch bolts which must be Chinese, because they don’t like to go into standard 1/2″ threaded holes. I chased the threads in some of the holes, thinking they hadn’t been tapped correctly, but the threads were fine. The bolts are just fat.

They made the bar that clamps the fingers in place slightly longer than it needs to be. When you weld the guide tubes on, the welds are likely to interfere with the bar’s fit against the top bar of the press. The instructions recommend grinding the welds down. Forget that. I like those welds. I took the bar to my belt grinder and beveled the ends of it to clear them. Took two minutes. I would rather grind their bar than my welds. It’s faster, and besides, those welds are the nicest ones on the brake.

I also painted the brace I made for my tractor’s front end loader. Unfortunately, it fell in the dirt after I applied the second coat. A gust of wind hit it while it was standing upright on a box. Dirt got into the paint on one end, so I had to blow it off with a hose. Now I have to fix the paint. Day after tomorrow, I should be able to put the leather pads on the brace with 5-minute epoxy and finish it.

Now that I have a finger brake, I have no conceivable excuse for not using it, so I need to design some useful things. I’ll get on that as soon as I can.

The Harbor Freight Titanium welder is a blast to use. I wish I had gotten it sooner, but then I couldn’t. They didn’t start selling them until recently. It welds flawlessly. People say the gun is on the cheap side and that it may wear out early, but I don’t care. The light, handy gun is one of the welder’s best features. If a MIG gun is clumsy, your welds will ramble all over the place. I’m happy to sacrifice durability for function. I can always buy a new gun.

That’s enough fun for one day. I look forward to more projects.

Projects Yield to God’s Favor

I feel like I can’t go about my business at the end of the day without blogging because I have an obligation to let people know how well life is going. If you’ve learned a few things about God, and they start to work for you, it can be hard to make people understand that they need to seek the same things. If people see how well you’re doing, they might start asking themselves if they need to try to do what you’re doing.

That being said, today was a great day.

I got up and finished mowing the yard, and the John Deere didn’t have a fit or anything. That was pleasing to me. When I was done, I found myself sitting in the shop, looking at the Kubota brace I’ve been working on. I had intended to go in and take a shower (because I don’t bathe before doing yard work), but the steel was there, the welder was there, I was there…I did some welding.

Last night, I got the metal ready to be welded. Today I had to do the welding. I had a bunch of new welding magnets from Strong Hand Tools, and I was eager to use them. I took them out of their packaging and found that they didn’t work for the parts I was welding.

The shield I was welding was supposed to be joined to a piece of tubing cut at a 44-degree angle (yes, 44). The magnets weren’t right for that. I had to think.

I went in the house, where I had a stack of Chinese rare earth magnets stuck to the fridge. I brought 4 out and used them to hold the shield on the tubing. They worked perfectly. Tacking the shield was a breeze.

Welds always pull on the base metal. A gap opened up before I placed the last tack. I had to come up with a way to close it. I decided to use an Irwin woodworking clamp with rubber pads. One tack wasn’t going to heat the metal enough to melt the rubber.

When I was done, I got out the Dumore hand grinder and a carbide burr and cut the tacks down a little to prevent them from sticking up through the final welds. Then I welded. I didn’t do too bad. My welds were professional quality. Of course, most professionals don’t weld all that well. Like theirs, mine were good enough to do the job but not good enough to be on the cover of a welding magazine.

I own manufactured products with factory welds which are worse than my welds, so I can live with the welds I produce now. They’re going to get better. I’m learning the importance of 1) being able to see the puddle clearly, 2) being comfortable before I start welding, and 3) concentrating intensely while I weld.

I cleaned and primed the brace. The primer sagged in some places, so I had to do some of the priming over, but I got it done, and tomorrow I’ll pick up some new Kubota-orange paint (my old can dried up), and I’ll finish the painting. Then I’ll form leather around the ends, glue the leather to the brace, and see if it works.

I also fixed the small-wheel attachment for the belt grinder. It wasn’t tracking right. This attachment comes by itself, or you can get it with an additional attachment that adds two wheels to it to force the belt into a sharper bend. I bought the second attachment. When I installed everything, the belt tracked way off to one side.

I finally realized it did this because the additional attachment was attached beside the first one, pushing the first one out and forcing me to adjust the belt outward. The second attachment is around 0.400″ wide, so I needed to take that much metal off the side of the tooling arm it was mounted on. And I had no milling machine.

I used the table saw. You can cut aluminum just fine on a table saw, as long as you go slow and use WD-40 to lubricate it. I made about 48 parallel cuts on the tooling arm. The cuts joined each other, creating a 6″-long rabbet. I then used the router table to smooth off the surface the table saw had left. Then I deburred with the belt grinder and a file. The product was less refined than a machined part, but it will work just as well.

Cutting aluminum with the table saw is always an adventure. The blade threw hot, sharp pieces of aluminum at me the whole time. I got several cuts on my arms. Hey, that’s metalworking for you. It’s not for snowflakes. If you’re afraid of getting aluminum in your man bun or having hot metal burn little holes in the pink tights your mom borrows sometimes, find another hobby. And go get some testosterone shots.

I found something else wrong with the grinder’s alignment. It had been off for years. I fixed it today. The belt tracks perfectly now, and because I got a bunch of top-quality belts, I should be able to do great things.

I’ve been watching metalworking videos. Some featured Jesse James. This is the guy who may be remembered forever mainly as the man who cheated on Sandra Bullock. That’s unfortunate, because he makes magnificent vehicles. There are builders who do things that are more startling and perhaps more creative, but Jesse James vehicles are classics. His taste is impeccable. Everything he makes will look just as good 25 years from now as it does today.

He has a bunch of incredible machines. He likes to buy old metalworking tools. I’m not sure he really needs them, because there are people who do equally good work without them, but I can understand the attraction.

He has one machine that came from an aircraft carrier. He says a lot of them were shoved over the side after World War Two because they weren’t needed any more. He has a machine he got from an Air Force base. Airplanes that fly in combat need a lot of aluminum panels.

He’s an interesting guy. He has made a lot of bad decisions in life, and he has suffered because of it. He always talks about how much he has suffered and how hard he fights life’s obstacles. He seems happy about it. I don’t think he understands that we’re supposed to have blessed lives in which things don’t go wrong all the time. I saw him talking to some pastor about his life, and the pastor seemed equally in love with the drama and hard knocks. That’s crazy. I can understand why a bike builder would think life was supposed to be hard, but a pastor has no excuse for believing that. They’re supposed to know God’s word, and his word says his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

We love drama because of pride. Drama and suffering make us feel important, and they bring us attention.

Today I watched an old show featuring Indian Larry. He was also a bike builder. I had seen the show before. He died not long after it came out. I wrote about him on my old blog.

Like Jesse James, Indian Larry’s taste in machinery was faultless. He didn’t want to build slick-looking bikes that would have looked at home in front of a mansion in Dubai or in a pimp’s driveway. He built classic V-twin machines with all sorts of mechanical parts proudly displayed. He used laced wheels, not weird billet wheels that looked like they came from show cars.

In the show, Larry was up against a guy named Paul Yaffee, who was building the kind of bikes you would expect to see characters in Marvel movies ride. Way over the top. No soul.

Indian Larry died in an accident. He used to do motorcycle tricks. He would stand on his motorcycle’s seat while riding at high speed. The odds caught up with him while he was doing tricks for a crowd, and he fell and died from a head injury.

I wrote about him on my old blog, and strangers showed up to post comments. It was as though I had created a monument. Hundreds of comments appeared. Unfortunately, they came down when I started the new blog.

It was neat to watch Jesse James and Indian Larry shape metal to fit their visions. Woodworking is great, but there is something special about working metal. Metal is hard and unnatural. It doesn’t occur in nature. It resists being shaped. When you start working it, you find yourself dealing with a very stubborn material, but when you’re done, you’ve created things you could never create from wood. You can’t create a new wooden object. All you can do is join and bend existing shapes. You can distort metal. You can twist it. You can add to it. You can melt it, cast it, and forge it into something different. The main limit to what you can do with it is your patience.

I feel that I should get farther into metalworking. Wood is nice, but it’s limited. I’m not a worldly person, and I could never consider a person like Jesse James or Indian Larry a role model. Working with tools is never going to give me purpose. I have God for that. But it’s nice to have interesting things to do here on earth while you serve God.

I’m thinking I might get a tubing bender. That’s the main thing I’ll lack after I get the finger press brake working. I also want a lift table big enough for my John Deere garden tractor. I want to be able to lift big projects up where I can work on them without straining my back. I’m looking at products now. I may buy one. They’re not cheap, but it’s not like what I want is going to pop up on Craigslist. I need 1500 pounds of capacity, with removable panels so I can work on wide objects as well as narrow ones. Most people who buy lift tables get narrow ones that can only hold motorcycles. A wide one will hold anything short of a car.

I don’t have much interest in working on cars, which is good, because a good general work lift is no good for cars, and a car lift is no good for other projects.

I’m going to clear out the garage this week and see if I can get my lathe and mill moved up here. I think I’m going to sell my compressor and get a bigger one I’ll never need to upgrade. After I get these things done, along with the lift table, everything else should be small strokes. I’ll have machining, grinding, TIG, MIG, stick, a lift, lots of air, a finger brake…everything except talent, knowledge, and skill.

Now you know what happened today, so you can relax.

When You Get the Devil on the Canvas, Just Punch him Harder

This has been a wonderful day.

I got up and mowed the yard. The John Deere didn’t blow up, quit, run over its own grill, pump oil out onto the lawn, or refuse to start. For a John Deere product, that’s remarkable. As far as I can tell from my experience. I also ran the leaf blower, the weed eater, and the edger, and I poisoned some plants I didn’t like. Wonderful.

My friend Amanda came over with her sons, and I showed them some tools and taught them how to run the pressure washer. Which DID quit. But I know how to deal with that. I went to Amazon and bought a new carb for $20, plus a fuel filter, which the pressure washer appears to lack. Never pay anyone to fix a small engine carburetor. Just buy a new one. I could have gotten a fine carb for $13, delivered, but I decided to splurge and get a genuine Honda, which surely comes from the same Chinese factory. Probably. Anyway, it’s coming.

I fired up my tools and made another end shield for my tractor front end loader brace. I didn’t have to pay for the steel. My friends at the metal place gave me free scrap to practice welding on, and one piece was a nice sheet of 1/8″ plate. I cut a rectangle out of it with the dry-cut saw, made a hole with the drill press, cleaned it up with the belt grinder and drill press, and I was done. Bang. Like that.

I used the new 6″ Metabo grinder to cut a piece out of the shield to open it up for the belt grinder. The Metabo is dynamite. So glad I bought it. It will save me a lot of time.

The shield is beautiful. I won’t be modest. I love metalworking. This just proves I need more tools. Which I already knew.

The first end shield is 1/4″ steel, and I wondered if I should wait for a similar piece, but I chose not to. The 1/8″ piece is strong enough, and every time I see it, it will remind me of the pleasant experiences I’ve had at the metal dealer’s place FAR, FAR FROM MIAMI.

In three or four days, I’ll have the new carb, and the pressure washer will almost definitely run. The pump could be giving out, but I don’t think it is. If it is, I’ll buy a new $125 pump on Ebay for $70 and install it. It takes 5 minutes. There is probably no good reason for ever buying a new pressure washer until the engine dies and can’t be fixed.

That’s it. I’m about to go relax with my pets and a cold beverage. I will post photos of the metalwork later.

Oh, all right. I’ll post them now.

More Stuff!

Today was not spectacular. It was merely excellent.

I finally got myself an acetylene rig. I’ve been wanting one for years. Acetylene is not very useful for welding these days because there are better ways to weld, but gas is still great for cutting, heating, and flame-straightening. Many people are turning to propane/oxygen rigs because acetylene is so expensive, but propane isn’t as good for flame-straightening, so I bought an acetylene outfit and a few doodads that will allow me to use it with propane.

You may think you know what flame-straightening is, and maybe you do, but you’re probably wrong. It doesn’t mean heating up a part so it’s malleable and then bending it so it’s straight. It means heating a small area of a part very intensely and very quickly and then chilling it with water to make it contract. You can straighten a propeller shaft using this method. It’s amazing. You can also use it to straighten things that have warped during welding.

Propane doesn’t heat small areas as quickly and intensely as acetylene, so I definitely want to have acetylene in the shop. Most of the time, however, I would expect to use propane, which is fine for cutting, bending, and heating.

I’m thinking of cutting up my John Deere cart and making a welding cart. I’ve been trying to sell the cart, but it looks like it will only bring $50. I thought a cart from the same company that charges $800 for a lawnmower grill would go for hundreds, but it looks like even John Deere fans aren’t that crazy.

I also visited Northern Tool and got some new welding magnets. I’m pretty sure my old ones are in Miami, stuck to the side of my lathe. You can’t weld without magnets. Well…you can. But it’s more difficult.

Since I’m on the subject of magnets, I’m about to get a patient lift, which is an engine hoist for human beings. When I do, I plan to get a lifting magnet for it. I’m talking about a powerful magnet you can turn on and off. You can get magnets that lift a ton. I’d get a smaller one and use it for heavy steel objects.

On today’s trip, I visited my new friends the metal dealers and got two aluminum bars. They’re going to be tooling arms for my belt grinder. One of them already is. I drilled and tapped it today. When I showed up to buy more stuff, they treated me like they had always known me. The older lady said, “What are you making this time?”, like she was already familiar with my eccentricities.

To get two tooling arms from a company that sells them, I would expect to pay around a hundred bucks, including shipping. I’m talking about two 20″ bars, each with two tapped holes in it. Today I paid $38. That felt good.

I came home, ate a steak, and went to work.

First, I put the bars on the belt grinder. The ends had been cut with a band saw, so they were rough. I ground them smooth with three horsepower of pure overkill. My grinder is so strong, I can’t slow it down. I was jamming the bars into the belt to see what I could do, and I couldn’t change the speed at all.

I ran the grinder at 145 Hz for a while, just because I could. That was fun. Here’s a shout-out to all the people who said I couldn’t do that.

Once the bars were looking good, I marked one of them for holes using dial calipers and a Starrett punch. Then I drilled and tapped one. After that, I cleaned it off and installed my latest grinder tool: a small-wheel attachment. I’ll post photos. It allows you to make grinds in very tight places. Very useful.

My next grinder tool will be a big contact wheel. After that, I’m done for a while. I would like to modify the grinder so it turns sideways, but it would be difficult with a monster 84-pound motor. Maybe I’ll build a new grinder eventually.

I saw a guy on Youtube building a grinder, and I was startled. He runs a company called Fireball Tool. He knows a great deal about tools, and he manufactures tools for welders, but as I watched him, I realized I knew a lot of things he didn’t.

He took two go-kart wheels and used them as the basis for a grinder with a 6″ belt something like 60″ long. The wheels had tires on them, and they had offset hubs, which are weak and floppy compared to solid wheels and pulleys. You don’t want tires on a belt grinder. You want a small upper pulley, because a big one uses up a lot of belt. Why pay more for long belts if you’re going to waste two feet on your drive wheel and pulley?

The grinder only had one piece of plate on the side for support, and it was 1-1/8″ thick. He used a waterjet to cut it out, which means he had total design freedom, but he didn’t cut any holes in the plate to save weight. That was a bad decision. The grinder would have been very strong with 1/4″ plate, and he could have moved it on a handtruck. As it is, it weighed over 600 pounds before he even finished. And he was happy about that.

He welded the tool rest onto the frame, perpendicular to the belt, and he didn’t put a T-slot in it. What??? What good is a tool rest you can’t rotate to a desired angle? Why wouldn’t you want a tool rest for fixtures?

He made the grinder so he couldn’t rotate the belt into a horizontal position. Think of all the things he can’t do with it.

He used a single-phase 5-HP motor, which means he gave himself no way to vary the speed. I don’t know what to say about that. Variable speed is a huge improvement to a grinder. Obvious.

He made a huge hollow platen on the grinder, and he filled it with garnet powder to stifle vibration. If your belt grinder is vibrating so badly it affects the function, you built it wrong. My grinder doesn’t vibrate. He solved a problem that didn’t exist. How is a 600-pound grinder with only 5 HP going to vibrate? He only has 5/6 HP per inch of belt width, and I have 1.5, with no vibration.

His grinder is very poorly designed, and eventually, he’ll probably cut it up and give up on it. I’m not glad someone else put a bunch of mistakes on Youtube, but I’m glad I’ve reached the point where I can discern them. I felt good about that.

People in his comments were telling him how great it was. I was aghast. I guess none of them had ever used a 600-pound grinder with no casters, a fixed tool rest, belts that cost 50% more than they should, and a single-speed motor.

He makes some neat tools for setting up welding projects. I thought about buying one of his squares, but I don’t think it’s really necessary, and they cost $190. I think I would do better putting the money toward a real welding table.

Tomorrow I hope to get back to the Kubota front end loader brace. Hope your day was as good as mine.