{"id":2310,"date":"2008-12-13T09:29:26","date_gmt":"2008-12-13T14:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hogonice.com\/?p=2310"},"modified":"2008-12-13T09:29:26","modified_gmt":"2008-12-13T14:29:26","slug":"a-bad-day-cant-begin-with-a-good-mcmuffin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/?p=2310","title":{"rendered":"A Bad Day Can’t Begin With a Good McMuffin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Optimistic<\/em><\/p>\n

Is this a beautiful morning, or what? It’s 56 degrees outside, dry as a bone, the sun is shining, and McDonald’s got my breakfast order right. There is order in the universe. Things make sense.<\/p>\n

I guess dry weather isn’t exciting to most people, but when you live in Miami, you look forward to it. And since I’ve started taking better care of the property and working with tools, I realize that cool, non-sweaty weather is a godsend. When you spend the whole day indoors, it’s 75 degrees all the time. When you start working outside, you develop a new appreciation for temperature and humidity.<\/p>\n

This was my first McDonald’s breakfast in two or three weeks. I could not indulge after Thanksgiving. I can’t remember what got in the way last week. My Saturday Mickey D’s feast is a sacred tradition, so I am glad to get back to it.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I wrote about the Big Three mess, and I referred to figures various sources have quoted as the effective hourly rate paid to UAW workers. You can find it all over the place. It’s on the web. It’s on TV. It’s in newspapers and magazines. It’s on the radio. I cited the Heritage Foundation, but that’s not the only source. And it varies. I have seen figures varying from 69 to 75 dollars per hour.<\/p>\n

A reader took issue, claiming that figure included money going to workers who had already retired. The UAW has an obscene pension and insurance package, and it’s very expensive. The Heritage Foundation claims the figure includes money for the retirement of current workers, but not people who are retired at present.<\/p>\n

I took a few minutes last night and looked around some more, and I found some fairly credible claims that the figures DO include money for people who are currently retired. On the other hand, some sites claiming to “debunk” the high figures are clearly left-wing nut sites.<\/p>\n

Now I don’t know what to think. One thing is for certain: Big Three labor costs are completely out of line with costs incurred by employers using people of similar skill. And we should all be angry that the UAW expects the rest of us to subsidize failure while refusing to accept a fair and realistic wage. We should be angry that they want a bailout, period, but expecting us to pay for their unjustifiable lifestyle is beyond the pale. The effective hourly figure is a rabbit trail; regardless of what it turns out to be, there is no doubt that it’s way too high. And even if it were not, subsidizing incompetence is socialism, and we should not be doing it. Those jobs will not disappear if the Big Three go bankrupt. They will be preserved; we will still need and buy cars, and someone will have to make them. The big difference will be that the companies will be under new and presumably better management, which will be better for everyone concerned.<\/p>\n

Maybe it will be Japanese management. If that makes you feel bad, buy stock in the companies that buy the factories. Japanese companies are owned in large part by Americans. We say the Big Three are American, but who owns their stock?<\/p>\n

If the high figures are right, we have auto workers bringing home $150,000 per year in one form or another. If they are wrong, it’s more like $80,000, which is still ridiculous, in a country where you can get a master’s degree and expect to earn $40,000 per year, including benefits. An average nurse makes less than an auto worker. Don’t even try to tell me that’s acceptable. Uneducated people with limited skills are not supposed to be affluent. That’s a simple fact of life.<\/p>\n

I should be fair and criticize management as much as I criticize labor. Management agreed to the collective bargaining agreements that have crippled the Big Three, and management failed to put together design teams that produced credible products. Some American vehicles are great, but on the whole, they are stodgy and cheap-looking and not fun to drive. Let’s face it; generally, they look like crap. And the engineering, while much closer to foreign standards than it used to be, is still second-rate. As is the quality control.<\/p>\n

I bought an American car because the model I chose was enjoyable to drive and had a unique style. I didn’t need to be practical. But if I were looking for something practical to put a wife and kids in, I would have a hard time justifying an American offering. The full-size pickups seem pretty good. Maybe that’s because the basic designs are ancient.<\/p>\n

In other news, I am absolutely determined to get a fence put on the router table today. I don’t care if it’s a yardstick held on by rubber bands. It has to be done. And I want some kind of dust collection design.<\/p>\n

I used the huge sliding miter saw yesterday, and dust went everywhere, even with a vacuum attached to the port. The throat plate is not even close to zero-clearance, and a pile of dust accumulates under it every time the saw is used. How am I supposed to fix that? I’m thinking maybe I should rout out a hole under the saw, put some mesh over it, and attach a vacuum hose under it.<\/p>\n

The impression I get is that effective dust collection is not possible, unless you spend five or six thousand dollars. If I put a hose on the saw and a hose in the table, dust will still go everywhere. I don’t know how the professional tool guys who make videos and write books keep their shops so clean. They probably cheat. They probably make lackeys sanitize their shops before they turn on the cameras. I guess I will always have dust in the garage, no matter what I do.<\/p>\n

I wish I had a better respirator. I don’t know what to get. I’ve tried various masks, but I always find that I end up breathing heavily after a while, because of the air resistance.<\/p>\n

As for the fence, I think the best possible solution is cast iron, milled flat. You can put magnetic accessories on it, and it shouldn’t warp. Problem: it cannot be had. I can’t get a piece of cast iron that big without cutting up a piano frame, and I can’t mill it, and I am not willing to pay to have it milled. Maybe I could cannibalize an old jointer. Which I don’t have and can’t get.<\/p>\n

Back to wood, I guess. Maybe I’ll give up and head for the lumber yard and make them plane down a piece of hardwood for me. I’m not sure which wood is best. Something relatively cheap to start. Then when I get to be a big router expert, I can make myself a fence from ipe! It’s supposed to be like cement.<\/p>\n

It would be nice to have a ferrous front surface on it, because then I could use magnetic featherboards. I am sorry to say, I am not all that impressed by the Grr-ripper, which is supposed to be a featherboard substitute. I don’t like running my hands directly over a table saw blade, and these things don’t grip and hold workpieces the way featherboards do. And they’re a pain to set up. While I was trying to resaw my two-by-six, I had to cut a piece of scrap, drill holes in it, and screw it to the Grr-ripper to make it work. A featherboard would have taken ten seconds to set up, and it would have been safer and more effective.<\/p>\n

I wonder if I could put a steel surface on the router table. This is a terrible thing for a former physics student to admit, but I have no idea whether magnetic attraction increases in proportion to the depth of a metal. I assume it doesn’t; magnets hold onto thin pieces of metal very well. I’m thinking I could put a sheet of thin steel over the table, screw it down, and use magnetic featherboards from there on out. They wouldn’t work past the edge of the aluminum router plate, but I don’t think they’d need to.<\/p>\n

I will make this stuff work if it kills me. And then maybe some day I will make something with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Optimistic Is this a beautiful morning, or what? It’s 56 degrees outside, dry as a bone, the sun is shining, and McDonald’s got my breakfast order right. There is order in the universe. Things make sense. I guess dry weather isn’t exciting to most people, but when you live in Miami, you look forward to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toolsofrenewal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}