Forget the Palmer Worm

Since I wrote about my literature-reading habits today, I might as well follow up with some info on my technical reading.

It will sound stupid to a person who isn’t mathematically or technically inclined, but there is a special kind of pleasure associated with reading a well-written text or how-to book for STEM people. Believe it or not, there are texts which could actually be described as “beloved.” Herbert Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics and Morse and Feshbach’s Mathematical Methods of Theoretical Physics come to mind. It’s very hard to write a good STEM book, so when someone does it right, you almost feel like putting the book in bed next to you, like a little boy curling up with a new toy fire engine.

When I came to Miami from Texas, I had a lot of technical books, and I had to store them. I didn’t know carpenter ants ate paper. After several years, I checked on the books, and a lot of them were ruined. I had lost Richard Feynman’s autobiographical books, two neat quantum mechanics books by someone named Cohen-Tannoudji, Amit Goswami’s Quantum Mechanics, and a number of other books I liked. I lost my Japanese edition of Krazy Kat, which I treasured.

I had a copy of Mathematical Methods of Physics, by Mathews and Walker. I had bought it new. The bugs left most of it alone, but they ate a big hole in the spine, and it bothered me every time I looked at it. I felt so bad about it, I looked around online for a replacement, even though I didn’t need the book. If you check prices for new copies, you will understand why I didn’t buy one. They are not cheap.

This week I started Googling again. I found someone selling a new copy for well under the market price, and I decided to take a chance. It’s on the UPS truck right now, on its way here. I hope it’s really a new copy.

I also replaced some Schaum outlines. These things are priceless for STEM students. Textbooks tend to be pedantic, terse, and incomprehensible. Schaum’s authors know that if people can’t understand them, they won’t get paid.

I don’t know how much I’ll use these books. Honestly, I don’t think Mathews and Walker is a good text. It just bugged me. I can sell my chewed-up copy for about what the new one cost, so no loss.

There are also some books I’m glad I sold or lost. J.J. Jackson’s book on E&M is pretty horrible. I think I still have Fetter and Walecka’s abominable mechanics text. If so, I should start using the pages to locate end mills on workpieces.

Ants eat books. Believe it. Don’t take any chances when you store your library.

Avoid

I have a few minutes to kill, so I feel like writing about my Lit. Hum. project.

Literature Humanities is a mandatory course I pretty much blew off when I was at Columbia University, and I am going back over the reading to punish myself. So far, it has worked really well. I feel I have been punished greatly. I suffered through Plato’s bizarre tribute to homosexual predators, and I waded through the tedious, venal muck of Homer and Virgil. I am still buried in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and if memory serves, I will soon be tormented with Dostoevsky. I dread that like you can’t imagine.

I loved literature when I was young, and then I got over it. It looks like I’m not going to get a relapse any time soon. Literature is full of whining and self-pity. It’s unrealistic. It takes place in imaginary worlds where there is no loving God. It reinforces just about every type of evil urge a person can have. It tends to promote sexual sin, socialism, irresponsibility, and atheism. I’m starting to wonder how much of it a person can be exposed to without harm.

It kind of reminds me of rap music.

I liked Boccaccio when I started reading his book, but love has withered on the vine. His book goes on forever. It would have been much better had two-thirds of it been burned by his editor. It contains dozens of highly similar stories, and they’re not very imaginative. In terms of literary quality, I would rank it right up there with the Nancy Drew mysteries and John Grisham.

That’s not a compliment. John Grisham writes very badly, and his work doesn’t show much familiarity with the practice of law, which is odd, given his original profession. The wealthiest writers make up one set, and the best make up another. The intersection of these sets is small.

I think I can say with confidence that no one was ever moved or inspired by Boccaccio. There are no memorable quotes, either. You don’t put down the book and exclaim, “Wow! That’s brilliant!” He will never make anyone forget Joseph Heller or William Shakespeare.

Now that I’m farther into the book, I realize there’s a lot of filth in it. I mean real gutter porn, with no real literary value. It’s not even clever porn.

He reminds me of Cervantes. I haven’t read Cervantes since college (I took Columbia’s famous Don Quixote course, which was a farce and a waste of money). I don’t think Cervantes was much of a writer. He was just windy and irreverent. You can’t seriously commpare him to a French homologue such as Rabelais. He isn’t as erudite, nor is he as funny. If you want to read a brilliant, offensive book written several centuries ago in a place other than England, try Voltaire’s Candide. Don Quixote functions best as a doorstop.

Sometimes I think Cervantes gets air time simply because people are desperate to pretend Spain has a rich literary tradition that compares with northern Europe. Were that true, we would have found out about it by now.

I was going to read all of Boccaccio, even though the syllabus doesn’t demand it, but now that I see what a drag his book is, I am adhering to the schedule. I guess I’ll be done in a week. I would be moving faster, but I have other books on my plate, and they’re actually entertaining and/or full of useful knowledge, so they get priority.

I wish I had more good things to say about Boccaccio, because that would mean I was enjoying the book.

The moral, as always, is that you should read certain books in order to be educated, not in order to be entertained or impressed. And of course, they are useful to people who want to be punished.

Don’t Air Your Grievances; Give Them the Air

God keeps showing me good stuff and cleaning me up.

One of the needs I have been concerned about for the last few years is the need to love. A while back, God told me he created the universe for love, and that is consistent with my concerns. Love is important. Apparently, it’s one of the most important things there is. Also, on the occasions when Jesus visited me, the single sensation that impressed me the most was the warmth of the love that radiated from him. I also felt peace, protection, relief, and faith, but love stood out.

God can project his love through you, and that’s the kind of love he wants you to have. It’s hard to make yourself love without his help. We are fully of emotional scars. We feel cheated and wounded, because that’s what we are. Other people and malicious spirits prey on us, starting before we’re born. They get great pleasure from our suffering and humiliation. It’s as if they love bathing in our blood.

Years ago, while I was on my way to a church service, God’s love fell on me, and while it rested on me, I felt new love for other people. It didn’t matter who they were. I didn’t have to push it. The strength came from God. It was a great thing, but I wasn’t able to hold onto it. Ever since then, I’ve been aware that I needed it, and I wanted it back. Many times, I’ve asked God for this.

We live in a society of self-proclaimed victims, and I have been one of them. A person who thinks he’s a victim doesn’t feel obligated to love. On the contrary; victims feel entitled (their favorite word) to harm others. It’s not sin to them. It’s payback, karma, reparations, justice…there is always a name attached to it that makes it sound holy.

I had a warm personality when I was born, but according to my mother, that dried up during my first year of life. She thought it was because of an illness I contracted, but it may have had more to do with the presence of two abusive people in the house. My mother used to find my sister next to my crib, pinching me to make me scream.

In this world, we are taught to hold things against people and to feel cheated. I fell for it. Also, I got tired of opening up to people, only to have them mistreat me in return. People are truly sadistic. Many of them see openness as a welcome opportunity to violate and torment another person. It’s like a windfall to them. They pleasure of harming others is so pleasing to them, they can’t believe their good fortune when they get a chance to cause suffering. I found that I could protect myself by closing up and by using words to hurt back or to attack preemptively. I was rewarded for it, too, because I was funny. People admired me for it. They paid me with attention.

I became like the people from whom I wanted protection. I thought I was a good person because I wasn’t actively looking for opportunities to hurt people, but I was contributing to the atmosphere of defensiveness and malice. In Miami, everyone is familiar with this atmosphere, because people here are very antagonistic to each other. Everyone you see is a threat that has to be scared off or defeated. I believe this is largely due to the ways of the people who have made big cultural contributions here. Before Cubans arrived, the dominant culture was from New York, and after that, the aggressive ways of Cubans dominated our interactions.

I don’t want to be like that any more. I don’t care how other people treat me. I don’t want whatever petty victories they get to be augmented by the larger victory of depriving me of the ability to love.

Over the last few days, I’ve finally gotten relief. I feel like a passage inside me has reopened, and I’m able to let God’s love flow toward people. It’s extremely helpful. It cuts off tension and ugly thoughts before they get a chance to bloom. It’s relaxing. It’s healing to me.

I write about this because people need to know it’s available, and they need to know it’s essential. The Holy Spirit will give you a lot of great things, but without love, they’re very incomplete and ineffective. The propagation of love is the purpose of the universe, so if love doesn’t flow through you, whatever you’re doing in life is a waste of time and a failure.

One of the great things about this is that it helps you forgive nasty people. That’s important, because we swim in a sea of uncleanness and sadism these days. The Internet seems to be growing these things in us. Christians, especially, are subjected to constant provocation. We can’t sit back in self-righteousness, remain angry at unbelievers, and feel like we’re superior. We have to actively, deliberately focus love on them, even if we only do it internally. God is giving me the habit of doing this, and I can feel the pressure and tension inside me abating.

Love is not just a gift we give to others. It’s a gift we give ourselves. I say we give it, but in reality, we just let God run it through us. Love is power and internal healing. It will bring you victory, because God favors people who love, and he opposes people who are bitter and angry all the time.

It doesn’t matter what other people have done to you. To put it bluntly, whatever it is, they probably haven’t beaten you with a scourge and nailed you to a cross. You have to get over it and let it go, and only God can give you the ability to do these things.

I strongly suspect that a lack of love causes physical problems. In particular, I think it causes illnesses in which the body and mind attack themselves. Arthritis. Allergies. Psoriasis. Ulcers. High blood pressure. Heart disease. If you’re full of a desire to harm others all the time, and that desire can’t be fulfilled, surely you will end up harming yourself, simply because you’re available as a target.

My advice is to make love a priority. Quit thinking about what you “deserve.” Quit obsessing on “justice.” If we really got what we deserved, and if God gave us justice, it would be a lot worse than what we actually experience. We belong in hell, so maybe we should stop complaining about slights.

Think it over. I know it will help you.

In Summary, You Should Just Die

I’ve been looking at news sites on the Internet a lot this year, and I have some information for people who want to skip the effort and reap the benefit.

1. You are obligated to find fat women attractive. It is not a matter of choice. You DO find them attractive, even if they’re not. If you say you have a problem with this, people should use filthy, insulting language to help you get over it.

2. It’s a good thing when a woman exposes her breasts in a restaurant, because asking her to put a thin piece of cloth over them while she breastfeeds is oppression, sort of like…no, EXACTLY like…forced genital mutilation. Also, breasts have nothing to do with sex. That may surprise some women and result in the rewriting of a number of sex manuals.

3. Principals and teachers who correct girls who go to school dressed like sluts need to be “shut down,” and a really good mother will respond with an obnoxious Facebook tirade, preferably with a photo of herself dressed in slutwear. Corollary: even though every type of sexual sin is good, boys who look at girls dressed like sluts are oppressors and need to be shamed relentlessly.

4. If Donald Trump said or did it, it is very, very bad.

5. The proper term for a person who doubts the climate is changing due to human activity is the same term you use for someone who pretends Auschwitz didn’t happen: “denier.” It is not necessary to respond with facts. Deniers are close-minded, but people who insult them and refuse to listen to them are open-minded.

6. It was very, very important for electors to betray their states and vote against Trump, even though he would have won anyway, because the vote would have gone to the House of Representatives. Who are you to argue with an actor from M*A*S*H?

7. When an actress or model or reality TV bimbo wears something skimpy, it’s an important news story.

8. White people need to shut up while everyone else explains why we are the cause of every evil in the world, including evils that occur in places like China and Africa. “Whiteness” is like a form of criminal insanity, and it should be treated, but it can’t, so just suffer and hate yourself until you die. Corollary: every cruel thing people who are not white do or say to white people is good.

9. KARDASHIANS!!!! LOOK!!!! KARDASHIANS!!!

10. It’s great when a hunter gets death threats, dies, suffers a gruesome injury or gets cancer. No sane person questions this or sees anything wrong with celebrating.

11. Your sexual orientation is forced on you from before birth, but you can choose your actual sex at will, and it’s a great day for America when a male sex offender can walk into any locker room or rest room he wants and expose his genitals to young girls.

Saved you a lot of reading.

Joy Comes in Bags From China

This week I decided to bite the bullet and go through the projects that come with the Radio Shack Electronics Lab Learning Kit. I bought one when Radio Shack closed a bunch of its stores last year. It’s kind of a neat tool for learning about electronics. Cheap, too.

The lab is basically a breadboard (six columns) with various things you can connect to the components. Built into the lab, there are switches, an analog meter, a buzzer, and other things that can be useful.

I think the best way to do this is to keep a lab notebook and do reports. As a former physics teaching assistant, I should have no problem with that. I have to make up experiments, though, because the stuff in the Learning Lab books isn’t written for people who collect data and do analysis. The writer, a well-known electronics teacher named Forrest Mims III, just wants people to build stuff, see if it works, and move on.

I decided to do things like changing component values and writing small tables. Then I can compare the results with the mathematical formulas associated with the circuits. Short and easy, except when ineptitude gets in the way.

Writing things down is very important when you do anything technical. I say that as a person who doesn’t do it. I have suffered the consequences.

This isn’t the only thing I’ve done to amp up my electronics game. I bought a bunch of cheap components on Ebay. This was a genius idea I should have had ten years ago.

When you build circuits, you’re always in need of this resistor or that capacitor, and if you don’t have them on hand, you have to drive to Radio Shack, drive to a different store, or order the parts online. My local Radio Shack, where I used to shop for parts when I built current and temperature controllers for a professor’s laser diodes, bit the dust in 2015. We have an incredible electronics supermarket in Miami, but it’s expensive and far away. Ordering online is fine, but if you did it for every part in a simple circuit, your build would take six months, and buying one part at a time anywhere is way expensive.

I found some guy selling 1% tolerance 1/4-watt metal film resistors for $15. How many? Which values? Try 2800! All values! Nearly. You get like half a pound of resistors in a huge number of values. I also found great deals on film caps, Chinese ceramic caps, and a few potentiometers in common values. For the heck of it, I picked up some IC’s and sockets. Can’t hurt.

Here’s the rub: the resistors have thin leads. This doesn’t bother me, because I would much rather have a thin lead than wait ten days for a resistor.

The resistors arrived today, and I decided to check one. I was suspicious of the 1% claim. I don’t need 1%; 10% will be fine and dandy. But you want to know what you bought.

I hooked a resistor to a meter and heated it with a soldering iron. The value was 430 ohms. The resistor measured exactly 430, which was way beyond any level of precision I’ll ever need, and it didn’t move when I heated it. SOLD!

Even if the resistors aren’t great, they’ll allow me to build things without waiting, and if I have to, I can get better stuff to replace them in permanent projects.

Caveat: some guy on the web says he scraped the paint off his cheap “film” resistors and found carbon resistors inside. Not that a 1/2-cent carbon resistor that works is a bad deal.

The soldering iron is also news. Twenty years ago, when I got my Weller soldering station, I thought I was the coolest kid in school. I was used to pencil irons that weighed a pound and had to be placed in cereal bowls because they didn’t have stands. I started looking into different irons this year, and I found out my Weller was strictly low-budget.

It turns out you can pay a thousand dollars for a soldering station, and they come with lots of crazy attachments. Also, cheap stations don’t have enough power. They take too long to melt solder, and this can actually screw up your joints.

I thought about getting a Hakko. They’re very popular. But I kept looking, and I found myself a dream come true: the Ersa I-Con Pico. Yes, it has THREE names.

Ersa is a snooty German company (what a rarity), and they make high-end soldering stuff. The station I got is like their Maverick or Vega (remember those?). Still, it’s way better than my Weller or a Hakko. It has a digital display. It pumps out about 80 watts. It gets hot in ten seconds. Best of all, it has a tiny iron a little bigger than a pen.

The general rule with cheap irons is that they’re too long and too heavy. There’s no reason for it, as far as I know. It’s just a fact of life. It can be very hard controlling a soldering tip four inches from your hand. The Ersa’s tip is like two inches from your fingers. Beautiful!

I think this is an example of having a lame tool you didn’t know was lame until you replaced it with something good.

I haven’t soldered anything yet. The package just got here. On Sunday. Amazon is starting to scare me with their newfangled speedy deliveries. I half expect to wake up and hear Jeff Bezos singing in the shower.

In summary:

1. you need a pile of cheap electronic components from Ebay;
2. you need a better soldering iron; and
3. you should really try an organized approach to learning about electronics.

I preach to myself.

One more tidbit: if you have a cheap multimeter and you want to kill yourself because the Chinese probes won’t hold onto anything, spring for some Fluke spring-loaded probes. I finally did. What a difference. I had cheap Chinese ones, and the plastic flaked off until they refused to hold anything. I could have cobbled a solution together, but I bought new probes, and now life is sweet.

I think I may sever the Chinese probes, toss the ends, and attach alligator clips.

With my new soldering iron.

Hmm…I think that might be “cobbling a solution together.”

BTW, I found out how you’re supposed to make shrink tubing contract. They sell miniature heat guns for the purpose. You can buy a fancy “rework station” that includes a heat gun. I think that’s a stupid move, because one part of any all-in-one tool will always break before the rest, and often it can’t be fixed. So there you would be, with your fancy station, a heat gun that doesn’t work, and another heat gun sitting beside it taking up space.

And the new heat gun wouldn’t match the station, which kills the fun of the whole all-in-one ethos.

A company called NTE makes a small heat gun that gets good reviews. I may get one. It’s about $20. I’m tired of roasting my shrink tubing with a lighter.

Hope this is helpful to you. Probably not, though.

Paranoid, Vicious, and Irrational are the New and Future Normal

People think America is forever. I think they’re taking the little notations on the stamps seriously.

America is not stable. America is temporary. America can fail, and it already has. This country is like a weed that has been sprayed with Roundup. When you spray a weed, it looks green and healthy for quite some time before it yellows and dies. You can’t judge things by their current appearance. You have to be aware of what’s in the pipeline.

Empires develop, mature, rot, and die, just like people. Americans don’t understand that. We think we’re the master race, and that we’re just too darn smart to end up like the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, the English, and all the other people whose empires disappeared. We’re myopic. We can’t see things in perspective because we’re too conceited to think straight.

Christians are some of the worst offenders. Ever since Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, we have had it pretty good. God has given us half of the world. By and large, we have been more powerful than idolaters. We showed up in countries they occupied, and God drove them out before us. Now we seem to think God is going to conquer the entire world for us, and that we will usher in an age of peace and joy.

We’re insane.

The Bible makes it clear: we will fail, Satan’s people will conquer us, and we will have to be removed from the earth so Jesus can return and defeat Satan and his children. Robert Schuller and Rick Warren can’t change that. We are not merely likely to fail; it’s guaranteed.

Persecution is already here, and it will get worse. People who think we can’t be put in camps and executed live in a dream world. Among many Americans, the desire is already there, and the only thing holding them back is the knowledge that they don’t have sufficient numbers yet.

I saw something really disturbing yesterday, and it got me thinking about this.

A man named Kurt Eichenwald appeared on a show with conservative personality Tucker Carlson, and Carlson asked him about some explosive things he had said about Donald Trump. For one thing, Eichenwald said he believed Trump had been confined to a mental institution in the 1990’s. Carlson kept challenging him to discuss his remarks, and Eichenwald responded like a lunatic forced to defend his delusions.

Eichenwald refused to answer Carlson’s questions and tried to filibuster until time ran out. All the while, he kept trying to put Carlson on the defensive so the discussion would turn away from his own deeds. He held up a notebook that said “Tucker Carlson Falsehoods” on the front, and he threatened to start talking about its contents.

Obviously, this strange man had prepared himself carefully so he would be able to deflect attention from his own actions. What does that mean? It means he was frightened of Tucker Carlson. You don’t create a crazy notebook like that and wave it like Van Helsing waving a cross unless you’re afraid.

Why, then, did he choose to be interviewed? I suspect the answer is egotism. Many people have a bizarre, inexplicable desire to be on television, even when the attention is unfavorable. Even accused and convicted criminals will agree to interviews. Charles Manson loves to be interviewed. He is apparently so insane and so conceited, he thinks he can defeat any interviewer and convince the world he’s as wonderful as he thinks he is. I suspect Eichenwald is in the same boat. He probably adores attention and felt he was getting a chance to slay a conservative dragon and come away with hundreds of thousands of fervent admirers.

Just guessing, but that’s consistent with my knowledge of human nature.

Here is something scary: Eichenwald isn’t an isolated fringe nut. I think “fringe nut” is apt, but he’s a prizewinning journalist and a senior editor at Newsweek. This man is accepted and admired by his peers. They approve of him. He’s a leader. He’s not some crank who works in the mailroom.

Talk about having your worst fantasies confirmed. It’s shocking how the right’s negative perceptions about leftist journalists are proven true over and over.

Carlson never got a straight answer from Eichenwald. He clearly thought the man was mentally ill, and that was my impression, too.

After the interview, Eichenwald did what defeated political operatives often do these days. He tried to win, on Twitter, a battle in which he had been crushed in a serious national forum. He put out a flurry of disturbing tweets about the CIA and not being able to find his notes. He then deleted a bunch of it. Of course, conservatives screenshotted his ravings, so the coverup makes him look worse than the Tweets did.

Here’s something even scarier than the respect Eichenwald gets from his peers: I went to liberal websites to read about his self-immolation, and liberals were crowing about the way he “shut down” Carlson. I’m not kidding.

Tucker Carlson isn’t much of a pundit. He reminds me of Mary Katharine Ham; someone who gets attention without demonstrating any discernible gift. But next to Kurt Eichenwald, he looked like Winston Churchill. There was not much dignity in the interview, but what little there was belonged entirely to Carlson.

I don’t write much about politics, so why write about this? Because the comments reminded me of something: there is no limit to the absurdity of the things people can believe when they don’t have the Holy Spirit. The Germans and Austrians were nice, orderly people, but in a generation, it was possible to convince them it was a good idea to murder the Jewish race. The beliefs and intentions of a nation can change very quickly when people are detached from the anchor of God’s instruction. In four or five years, most Americans–think about this–have become convinced Bruce Jenner is a woman.

The wacky commentary I saw regarding Eichenwald reminded me just how much American leftists hate the rest of us, and how impervious they are to reason and common sense. You think they wouldn’t murder us if they could? That’s probably what Cubans thought of their neighbors in 1955. It’s what Cambodians thought before communists started rounding people up and shooting them.

Persecution isn’t “coming.” It’s here. Now. Today. We may win some battles here and there, as we did in the presidential election, but the tide is going out, and we are going to lose. We’re not preparing for that.

The hatred of the left is like a slingshot that has been drawn back. Once the restraint is removed, it will fire. There won’t be any hesitation or remorse.

We can’t beat the problem politically. We can’t beat it by moving to the country, storing canned goods, and buying guns. Those are stopgap solutions. The answer is to draw close to God and get his favor. You will still be on the losing side, but you will live in victory until the end. Whatever suffering will come will come, but you will be spared any suffering that isn’t necessary.

The devil and his people are throwing tantrums right now. They thought we were done. The polls looked good for them. They could almost taste our blood. Then their prize was pulled away. No wonder they use words like “grief” to describe their reaction. They thought they already owned us. Slavery was almost legalized, and we were the slaves.

Our defeat was postponed, and many of us are acting like we won the future (to steal a gaffe from Obama). We didn’t get a mandate. We didn’t even get a plurality. We got four to eight years of space, in which to prepare for harder times. The idiots who are strutting and ridiculing leftists are going to regret it when Trump’s socialist successor takes office. This is the age of the Internet. Names have been provided and recorded. Offenses have been recorded. Even trivial things like memes have been noted. Think you won’t be punished for things like that? Thailand jails people for insulting their king. Castro had bloggers beaten. You think Lawrence O’Donnell and Keith Ellison wouldn’t do things like that? Who are you trying to kid? What planet do you live on?

Trump’s election was a miraculous gift from God. It wasn’t proof the country had rejected liberalism. It was a brief reprieve. It’s shocking that conservatives are so stupid they can think otherwise. Clinton came out two million votes ahead! Wake up.

Buy guns. Get out of the cities. Can’t hurt. But if you want real help, you’re going to have to know how to get it from God. You’re not going to develop that ability overnight. You should have gotten started already. It may be too late. You should do whatever you can, starting now.

Our battles are supernatural, and you need supernatural weapons and armor. You can’t say you didn’t know. Excuses are not acceptable currency. They won’t buy you help.

I hope someone out there listens and puts this information to use. As for me, I plan to be on the ark even if everyone else on earth drowns.

Support Comes When You Need It

Here is my report on the latest supernatural events in my life.

Last night I woke up between 4 and 5 a.m. I assumed the construction crew across the street had started early again, but when I saw the clock, I realized they weren’t there.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I always start to pray. Very often, I’m aware that I didn’t pray enough the previous day, and besides, what else is there to do?

I felt rested, as though I had already slept all night.

As I was praying, I got a very strange sensation. I felt very strongly that I had been accepted by God. I don’t know if I can explain that. I felt like my application to join the team had been approved, and I was now part of the army or strike force or whatever.

I felt like I was part of something.

This is a feeling I haven’t had in a while. Maybe ever. I have always been an outsider, wherever I went. Maybe I reject people because of the way I was mistreated when I was a kid. I don’t know the answer. I’ve never been a real part of an inner circle anywhere. These days, my relatives in Kentucky don’t invite me or my dad to holiday meals. His relatives (we aren’t close enough for me to think of them as my family) have never included me in anything.

When I was a political blogger, I had some blogging friends, and I was on the right-wing side, sort of. But even then I was rejected. I told the truth about Pajamas Media, and I said Ann Coulter was a liability. I said Ted Nugent was an embarrassment. I was completely right, as time has proven, but no one ever came back and said they were wrong to shut me out. No one likes to admit fault, and besides, who knows what I might say in the future to alienate people?

At my last two churches, I had titles. I was an armorbearer at both churches, and I was a deacon at the second church. The first church came to see me as a threat to their disgraceful lies, and the pastors at the second church saw me as a loose cannon. I woke up one morning and found out the pastor’s wife had put on his pants and blocked me on Facebook.

One of the things I look forward to when I get to heaven is being part of an organization I can sink into. I want to have complete faith in my leader. I don’t want to be ruled by idiots and predators. I want to be able to trust my friends. I want to belong. You can’t get that here on earth. Even the church is screwed up. At best, you can have the sort of status prophets had. You can show up once in a while, say things that make everyone mad, and then go back home to be at God’s side.

Since last night, I’ve felt enrolled or enlisted. Whatever you want to call it.

It’s crucial to be part of God’s organization. For a long time, I’ve known that benefits are connected to membership. I remember the analogy I used to repeat. If a random person goes into a Fedex office and demands a jet to take him to another city, they’ll throw him out. If a Fedex executive does the same thing, they’ll click their heels, promise to get him a jet, make him coffee, and apologize for taking so long. Why? Because he’s united with the organization. He speaks with its authority.

Charismatic preachers teach people to beg God for nice things, but they don’t teach us to give ourselves to him completely. We want the jet, but we don’t want the job. Of course, God doesn’t listen. Why would he?

We don’t get much because we’re beggars. God gives us a lot of charity, but that’s because he’s kind. It’s not because he approves of us. We get table scraps. Sons sit at the table with the father and eat full meals.

It’s very unusual for me to give something to a bum. I know what they are. Almost all of them are rebellious addicts and criminals. The press doesn’t like to talk about that. They call them “homeless,” as if homelessness were something like earthquakes. As if people’s homes just disappeared for no reason. They don’t talk about the felonies, the drugs, and the alcohol. They don’t talk about the pride and stubbornness that put people on the street. To God, most of us are just like these people. If he blesses us too much, it’s enablement.

To enable someone is to push them into hell. It feels nice and makes you think you’re holy; it makes you think you’re better than everyone else, and it gives you grounds for insufferable self-righteousness. But it’s evil.

I used to try to get the help without offering myself in return. That’s insane. I was like a dirty bum who walked onto a military base, stood in a chow line, and demanded the same food the soldiers got. I was like an illegal alien, showing up to vote in an American election or demanding welfare. I had no standing. I couldn’t produce the correct ID, issued by the right authority.

If I want real help, I need to be enlisted. Soldiers get a salary, plus food, clothing, health care, and retirement benefits. Surely God is a better father and employer than Uncle Sam. Surely I can count on him when everyone else lets me down.

What we are eligible to receive is better than a salary. Salaries, like death (the wages of sin) are earned. We receive an inheritance. That’s something someone else worked for and built up. We don’t have to earn. In fact, trying to earn will cut off your blessings in God’s kingdom. It’s pride.

I feel like I moved up a level this morning. No, like I was moved up by another power.

It seems to me that while God works through miraculous ways, his help doesn’t necessarily arrive all at once. You can limit it through rebellion or unfaithfulness. Also, the crap you’ve piled on yourself before coming to him may take a long time to grind off. I stuck with God for years, and that was necessary because of the mess I had made of myself. He didn’t exactly reward me for long service. It just took a long time to prepare me for promotion.

It appears that a job in God’s kingdom is like a job anywhere else. Seniority matters. You will probably have to stick with him for quite some time to get things working right.

The unfortunate thing about this is that the people who need him most are the kind of people who hate waiting. They’re spoiled. They are screeching, entitlement-minded brats. Black Lives Matter. Occupy Wall Street. Bernie Sanders and his Bernout Army. The news that they will have to be patient and wait for God’s favor is exactly the kind of thing that will drive them away. They would rather live in their dirty diapers and take things by force.

You’re not entitled to anything except punishment and damnation. Who wants to admit that? People hate it when you say, “You’re not a victim.” They get very angry. Victimhood is like a pacifier they suck on all day. Pull it out and hear them scream.

I used to have the entitlement mindset. Meanwhile, the God who owed it to the universe to destroy me was working to save me. He had already allowed himself to be tortured to death for me, and I was blaming him for not doing better by me. I was blaming him for problems I had caused, and I was busy causing new ones!

I feel wonderful today. I am full of optimism for myself. I can’t say I feel it with regard to most people I know. That’s very sad, but I can’t go back to what I was. I won’t let their backward hearts draw me away from the only good path there is. I’m not going to give up “holy privilege” so I can avoid Christian guilt. The up side to getting on the ark is that you are lifted above the flood. The down side is that you watch your friends drown.

Keep moving forward. There is nothing behind you but death and torment, and what’s in front of you is better than you can imagine. That’s my advice for this Sunday.

Explain This if You Can

I welded something successfully today, and I can’t figure out why it worked.

I bought a motor on Ebay. It had a cast iron base. The seller packed it badly, and the possibly resentful USPS people who handled it broke a foot off of it. I got a full refund, but I didn’t have to surrender the motor, and I haven’t found anyone who wants to buy it.

I looked into ways to put the broken bit back on. Ordinarily, people braze cast iron. It’s considered very difficult to weld (adding steel filler to it with high heat), because cast iron expands and contracts differently than welding wire, and the welds tend to pop as the work cools. To braze, you have to heat the part to something like 400 degrees. Then you melt bronze (I think) into it with a torch, and you cover the whole mess with welding blankets while it cools.

No way could I braze this thing, because if you heat a motor to 400 degrees, the windings melt.

You can also TIG weld it, but I don’t have a TIG welder.

I found some guy on the web claiming you can MIG weld cast iron with only a slight preheat–about 100 degrees–using non-magnetic stainless wire. You then “peen” the welds with a hammer or needle scaler to somehow or other counteract the problem with the welds opening. Maybe it expands the weld material horizontally.

It sounded nuts, but I asked around and couldn’t find a better idea, so I decided to try it.

Today I cut shallow v-grooves in the places where the parts met (standard when welding thick parts), and I cleaned them with alcohol to make sure there was no loose graphite on them. Cast iron is full of graphite, and supposedly it contaminates weld filler and causes problems.

I clamped the parts together with a Bessey clamp knockoff and started welding. Naturally I forgot to turn on the gas. The first two tacks were giant blobs that looked like sponges. I ground them down to start over, but I didn’t get all the crap out. Oddly, the welds held, and I was able to remove the clamp.

Someone on the web suggested using high wire feed. That was bad advice. Even after I turned the gas on, the wire spewed into the welds and made more blobs. I turned the feed down, but I never got it low enough to be controllable.

I also had trouble with my mask. I don’t think it darkened at all on the first two welds. I had to adjust it to the darkest level in order to see anything.

I continued making very small welds, peening, and waiting. That’s part of the technique.

When cast iron welds fail, they make a sound like “tink.” I never heard that sound. That surprised me, because what I was doing was sort of a Hail Mary job. I didn’t think it would work.

I got it welded up, and then I spent about ten years cleaning it up with the angle grinder and a rotary tool. A bolt has to go through the motor base, and that means a washer has to sit flat on top of it. The base will sit on a platform, so it has to be flat on the bottom.

Everything went fine, apart from welding very clumsily and making a mess. When it was done, I beat the part with the hammer’s handle, and I tried to pull it loose with my hands. I couldn’t budge it. I think it’s actually welded. It’s probably a D on a scale of A to F, but it’s not going to be under much stress. Maybe it’s not good enough, but I can tell you this: there is no way in hell I’m going to redo it until it fails again.

Because the weld didn’t fail, I’m not sure if I learned anything about welding cast iron. If it had failed, I would have known the method didn’t work. Because it doesn’t appear to have failed, I’m not sure what’s happening. Sometimes really bad welds seem acceptable at first.

Here’s something weird that appears to be true: it seems like it’s possible to weld stainless directly to cast iron, and that would mean it’s possible to build up stainless weld on a cast part. If that’s true, you should be able to coat one side of a part with stainless weld, make a stainless replacement for the other piece, and weld it to the congealed filler. If my weld fails, I plan to try that. Can’t hurt. Hey, it’s a free motor.

I don’t know what to do with the motor. I now have three pretty good motors sitting around doing nothing. The one I fixed is really nice. Maybe I could try to build a 6×48 belt sander. I don’t really need one, but they’re great tools to have. It would be nice to build one and have a disk sander on the side.

I wish I had some cast iron scrap. I’d practice welding it to see if my results could be trusted.

Also, it would be nice to improve the appearance of my welds. When I weld, all I see is arc glare and red metal. It’s blind luck if I hit the joint.

Here’s a photo. It may not look like it, but the welded-on part is aligned perfectly.

Try to Contain Your Excitement

I keep learning things about tools. It’s astonishing how much there is to learn about using the few simple items I have in my garage. People who really know tools must have stores of knowledge comparable to engineers.

A week or two back I created a new handle for my blow gun. Then something happened that required me to switch a tool from one air compressor to the other, and I realized I had a male fitting on the end of one hose and a female fitting on the end of the other. I could not switch tools without switching the fittings on tools.

This one left me scratching my head. Surely there was a right way to do this. Everyone else uses male or female fittings, but not both.

I kept thinking about the pluses and minuses, and I realized female was the way to go. If you put a male fitting on the end of a hose, the compressor will discharge every time you remove a tool. A female fitting will have a valve in it that shuts the air off.

Here’s the question: why did I have a male fitting on one hose? I must have asked about the correct fitting a long time ago, when I got my first compressor. I must have had the right information. My best guess is that I installed a new hose, ran out of fittings, and used what I had. Then I forgot to get a new fitting.

Anyway, whatever the explanation is, here is the answer: put a female fitting with a swivel on the end of your air hose.

In researching this, I also got into the subject of different types of air fittings. I know of three types, offhand: automotive, industrial (I think it’s also called “mechanical”), and universal.

In the past, I never thought about the type of air fitting I was buying. I just assumed they were the same. Then I found out about the different types, and I had a new research project on my hands.

Which is the best kind? NO ONE KNOWS. People do whatever they want. Believe it or not, there are regional preferences. In some areas, you want automotive, because that’s what everyone else has. In other areas, you want industrial.

To make things worse, there are rarer types. Some are supposed to provide superior flow.

A guy on a forum provided a great solution to my problem: universal female coupler and industrial male couplers. A universal female coupler will work with all male couplers. I went to Home Depot last night and got me a universal female coupler.

The replacement hose I bought is a Flexzilla. I agonized about which brand to get, and finally I decided to give Flexzilla a try. It’s bright green, so if you step on it, it will be a choice and not a mistake. It has no memory (I can relate). It’s light. I like it. If I hadn’t gotten a Flexzilla, I would have gone with rubber. Poly is too stiff.

I found out that machining coolants are more complicated than I thought. When I started, I learned to use WD40 on aluminum and Ridgid threading oil on steel, and that was about it. The other day I picked up a fantastic indexable end mill from Shars (where low-budget machinists shop), and I found that the finish varied, so I started looking into the problem. That’s how I ended up reading about coolants.

First, let me say the cutter is great. The big gripe with indexable cutters (cutters with several carbide inserts in the end) is that they give poor finishes due to minor differences in the heights of the cutting surfaces. I cut a piece of mystery steel, and the first 75% of the performance gave me an astonishing silky surface. Better than I could ever get with an end mill. The problem is that the finish got worse after that.

I am not knocking the product. It proved it can do a great job. I recommend cheap Shars indexable end mills. I paid a little over $30 for a 2″ mill complete with three no-name inserts, and it works. Check prices on American indexable end mills and see why I’m so happy.

I was cutting with a light application of Ridgid oil, even though a lot of people don’t use oil with carbide and steel. I read up on it, and I found a couple of sites that said interesting things. First, coolants and lubricants may be counterproductive. Second, it may be possible to grind HSS tools for aluminum that require no lube at all. Two different subjects (aluminum and steel).

One site said that liquid coolants chill carbide edges as they land on them, causing tiny stress cracks. Then the edges break down prematurely. The site suggested that the wear you avoid by using coolant is outweighed by the damage the coolant does. It said something about commercial shops spending 16% of their machining budgets on cooling and only 3% on tooling, which suggests the coolants cost way too much.

I don’t know if it’s true. I plan to throw some steel on the mill and find out.

Another site said clearing chips was the most important part of preventing finish issues. That sounds likely to me. The part I was machining had little swirling scratches on it, and I know they weren’t caused by the inserts. I think they were caused by bits of metal caught under the inserts. If that’s true, then I can get a beautiful finish on steel simply by blowing air on parts as I cut. It will blast the chips out. I think the oil may have made the finish worse by making chips stick to the metal.

A company called Kool Mist makes little devices that blow a mist of air and coolant on parts as you cut. I’m thinking I may get one and omit the liquid. It would blow chips away from my cuts. I’m positive I don’t need anything other than a light squirt of WD40 for aluminum, and it may be that I don’t need any liquid at all on steel.

I read that stainless is too gummy to cut without coolant, so I guess you just have to accept that.

To get back to the HSS/aluminum thing, I find it hard to believe that it’s possible to machine aluminum dry. It’s impossible with carbide in a mill, because the aluminum welds itself to the cutter instantly. I’ve never tried HSS dry on a lathe, but you can get away with carbide, although the finish is bad if you don’t lubricate.

I’m wondering what kind of rake I need to machine aluminum dry with HSS. Maybe I can find the info online.

I don’t think I want to machine that way as a habit, because I love carbide. You don’t have to grind it. Grinding lathe cutters takes a long time. Carbide inserts last forever in aluminum, and you can get a very nice finish. If I start messing with additional HSS tools, I’ll want to get more tool holders, and they weigh about ten pounds each. I feel like HSS is an answer to a problem I don’t have.

Why did I get into this quest? Because I failed at fly-cutting. A machinist I respect told me to fly-cut with high RPM’s, so that’s what I did with my mystery block. The edge of the bit kept wearing down as I cut. I had forgotten this crucial information: he was referring to aluminum, not steel. When I finally did it right, I had to turn the mill at about 100 RPM, which is ridiculous, and the finish was not that great. The end mill flies through work, and the finish is superior. Done deal.

Remember the treadmill my neighbor threw out? Probably not. I have the motor out, and I may want to machine the shaft to take a new pulley. A forum guy warned me about a potential problem. He said that if you take the armature out of a permanent-magnet motor (like a treadmill motor), the magnets will instantly demagnetize, resulting in reduced performance. Like life wasn’t complicated enough. He said you have to put a piece of steel between the magnets when you take the armature out.

This led to more research, and I learned some stuff.

In the dank, dreary past, many magnets were made from an alloy called Alnico (aluminum, nickel, cobalt, iron). If you shake it too much, it loses magnetism. If you drop it, it loses magnetism. If you take an armature out of a motor with Alnico magnets, it loses magnetism. Engineers designed iron objects known as “keepers” to insert in motors to prevent demagnetization when motors (or similar devices) are disassembled.

I found a couple of sites that said that Alnico is history (unless you play the guitar). Now cheap magnets are made from barium-ferrite powder, which can be cast in useful shapes. Barium-ferrite is supposed to be way less snowflaky than Alnico. More than one website told me it does not require a keeper.

The motor I have almost certainly has barium-ferrite magnets, because the next step up is rare earth, and rare earth magnets cost a lot. So I should not need a keeper (not the magnet kind). But the forum guy claims he ruined three treadmill motors just by removing the armatures briefly. So now I’m thinking I should find a piece of pipe and make a keeper, just to avoid the issue.

My small belt grinder has an armature that has been removed, and it works fine. I asked some electronics nerds on a forum, and they claim no keeper is required.

My advice: if you take a treadmill motor apart, use a keeper. Maybe it’s unnecessary, but it definitely won’t hurt, and it will cost you nothing or about two bucks.

What else have I learned? Let’s see. Belt grinders are fine for grinding HSS bits, but the bench grinder is faster, and it’s probably cheaper. Belts wear out fast.

Deburring…I learned about deburring. This means the removal of sharp burrs from metal parts. I have a worn-out belt on my small belt grinder, and I’ve been using it for deburring. It’s fantastic. One or two five-second passes will put a beautiful soft edge on a part. Try it. Don’t even bother with files. They’re for losers.

That’s all the earth-shaking information I have at the moment. I’ll leave you with a video of a guy using an indexable end mill to make a giant steady rest.

Time to Commence Deportations

I had a good experience this morning, and I figured I should share it.

For a long time, I have been obsessed with getting correction from God. He showed me that he wasn’t my genie or butler. His primary job isn’t to fix all my problems and make me rich, contrary to what I had heard from every single prominent charismatic preacher I had listened to. God helped me understand that the earth is like a uterus, and we are supposed to develop here before entering a superior world. That only happens when we accept correction. If you reject correction, you reject growth.

God also showed me that Christians–even Spirit-filled Christians–have resident demons. We give them power through our backward actions and beliefs. Youth is a particularly dangerous time, because young people don’t know anything. Their doors are wide open. By the time you get saved, you may have done a gigantic number of damaging things that opened you to demonic influence.

Let’s see if I can think of some dangerous things we do. Drugs, erotic entertainment, fornication, cultivating self-confidence, gossiping, hurting people unnecessarily with our words, violence, covetousness, cruelty, cowardice, gluttony, and idolatry spring to mind.

This morning I felt a horrible sensation inside me while I was praying. I felt that something foreign was there, and it was disgusting. Whatever it was, it was full of anxiety that radiated outward into me. I hated it. I wanted it out. I started asking God to tell me what it was and to help me get rid of it.

I started thinking about my experiences with drugs. You probably think I’m going to say I was a stoner in high school. No, I’m thinking mainly about stimulants and prescription drugs, and I’m including caffeine.

A year or two back, God told me this: “Caffeine destroys peace.” That’s clearly true, as anyone who has used a lot of caffeine knows. It makes you feel cheerful and energetic at first, and then you metabolize it, and you feel grumpy, anxious, and irritable. You may get headaches. If you quit for several days, you may get what doctors describe as “flu-like symptoms.”

I’ve used caffeine a lot. When I was in law school, I drank a quart of coffee during my first class of the day in order to help me deal with the boredom. Law isn’t all that boring, but it’s not exciting, either. It’s not physics or math. I needed help to make it palatable.

I’ve also used caffeine to get rid of headaches. Stimulants are great for headaches.

After I started praying in tongues daily, my caffeine tolerance disappeared. The other day I drank a glass of iced tea, and nine hours later, it kept me awake. I never had that problem when I was young.

I used several drugs in college. I never liked dope, but I did smoke it a few times just to be sociable. I tried a couple of weird drugs just because friends showed up with something new, and we tried them together. I also used cocaine, a stimulant, on a number of occasions. I liked it a lot, but when you come down from cocaine, you feel tremendous anxiety and guilt. I used nitrous oxide a few times. For some reason, it was popular at Columbia.

I don’t think the recreational drugs I used in college caused terrible problems, although I’m sure they generated some negative results. I think prescription drugs and caffeine were more harmful.

When I was being treated for ADD, they put me on Ritalin, which is a type of speed similar to amphetamines. Ritalin was great. It killed my headaches. It made me feel extremely relaxed. It helped me concentrate. But I developed such a tolerance I could take over a hundred milligrams a day. The pills kicked in in five minutes (not the expected half-hour), and they sometimes quit working after an hour or two, very suddenly. When that happened, I had to chew one or two 20-mg. pills to get back on my feet. It happened during my Advanced Mechanics exam during grad school, and also during the LSAT.

They put me on some other drugs which were horrible. They gave me an oil-soluble stimulant that stayed in my body for days. It made me angry and assertive, and it gave me a sex drive that would shame Bill Clinton. They also gave me some antidepressants which were supposedly helpful with ADD. I hated them. They filled me with anxiety and caused other problems.

Anyway, I didn’t use these things occasionally or sparingly, like recreational drugs. I used them daily, and I used some in huge amounts. I had to tell my doctor I was done with them. I quit. I never got addicted, so when it was time to quit, it was just a matter of throwing them out.

The time I spent on those drugs was the most miserable time of my life. No sleep. Very little food. Constant anxiety. Anger. Crazy sexual desire I could not get rid of. The last drug they gave me kept affecting me for weeks after I quit. It was bad.

I feel like I let some things in, and maybe some are still here! I believe I have to shut some doors.

I’ve been avoiding caffeine, but every so often I’ll have a Coke or some tea because I’m tired of water, and I’ve been having hot chocolate with breakfast because I want to add calcium to my diet. Chocolate has small amounts of caffeine, plus a milder stimulant called theobromine. Today I drank a boring glass of cold milk before breakfast. I just bought two bags of little dark Hershey bars to make hot chocolate, and I guess I’ll have to throw them out.

I wonder if the problem with drugs is that they take the place of God and deny him his glory. If I had had the presence of God and a good prayer life, I wouldn’t have gone to doctors to help me study. God would have helped me.

I know that the presence of God is like the effect of a drug. He emanates peace, joy, love, and a sense of complete relief and safety. Those are the things we try to get from drugs. Even things like beer and coffee. Living close to God is like being on a pleasant drug most of the time. There is a sort of buzz to it.

All over the US, doctors are pumping kids full of stimulants and antidepressants. It’s a wonder they’re not all insane.

I don’t have much faith in psychiatric drugs. People develop tolerances. Their responses change. If you know anyone who is bipolar, you know that every so often they flip out, and sometimes it’s because the medicine doesn’t work any more. We do what we can to help ourselves because we can’t find God’s help, and our own help isn’t very good.

We call people who drink and smoke weed “self-medicating,” but really, the whole human race is self-medicating instead of finding God’s cures.

It reminds me of what the Bible says about money. If you get it the wrong way, it causes remorse. God brings blessings without remorse. There is no crash after a dose of God’s presence.

Chocolate is great, but if it’s opening the door to illegal immigrants in my heart and mind, I can live without it.

Communion is essential. It’s mandatory. Christianity does not work without it. We have to examine ourselves with God’s help and get his correction. When we don’t do this, we continue damaging ourselves. This is why Paul said poorly performed communion causes disease and death. This is why God has made correction so important to me. It’s a cure. It’s a key that opens prison doors.

If you don’t have wine and crackers, do whatever you can. Pray for correction. Be as honest as you can with God. Pray for honesty! You can do that. God doesn’t want you to do it on your own.

I’m sick of certain parts of my personality, and I don’t think they’re completely mine. I have unwanted supernatural guests that influence me. That has to change. I feel like I live in a house with pigs that run around defecating on everything. That must be what it’s like for the Holy Spirit, who has to inhabit this mess.

Keep asking God what you’re doing wrong. Keep praying in tongues. Never forget that you’re surrounded by spirits, or that you have to address this problem. That’s what I take away from this.

Christians don’t want to hear this. They’re too arrogant. They think they’re perfect, and that no spirit other than God has any claim to them. People like that will be stuck here when God’s servants are taken from the world. Then maybe they’ll learn.

The other day God gave me this: “Thank you for giving us redemption instead of denial.”

I look forward to improving, and I definitely look forward to feeling more of God’s presence.

Too Lazy to Post Photos

I have a few things going on in the shop. Figured I may as well write.

First of all, the woodturning tool rest is all finished. I haven’t used it yet, because I am thinking about dust collection, and I haven’t decided what to do about holding the tailstock end of the work.

When you turn wood in a lathe, you hold the left end in a chuck or some kind of spur, and the motor, which is at that end, turns the wood. The right end sometimes has to be supported, too. For that you are likely to use a live center. That’s a thing that has a point or some other grabby structure on the inboard end, to hold onto the wood.

To use my existing tailstock, I would have to extend the wood across the lathe’s carriage, and that would be a pain. I think I’ll make something that clamps in a tool holder. I’ll have to align it every time I use it, but how often will that be?

Dust collection is supposedly impossible with a lathe. You just reduce the mess as much as you can. I don’t have a dust collector. I have a shop-vac, which is made for a different job. A shop-vac makes air go fast in a small tube. A dust collector moves high volumes of air through a bigger tube. This is what I’m told.

Because there is no hope of good dust collection anyway, I think I’ll try the shop-vac. I plan to get a dust hood, which is a flat, rectangular piece of plastic shaped a little bit like a funnel. You aim it at your dust, and you hook a dust collector up to it. I think I’ll rest one of these upright on the lathe bed, with the hose going down through the openings. It should help a lot. At least it will get the big chunks.

I bought a two-tier welding cart, and I learned a lot about this type of product.

When you buy a Miller or Lincoln welder, you get a serious industrial product made in America, except maybe for the strange items Lincoln sells at Home Depot. I don’t know about those. If a cart comes with your welder, it will probably be a dubious item made in China, from Chinese sheet metal.

My welder came with such a cart. It works fine, but it’s not the greatest cart on earth. It’s a little short, so the tank bumps against the welder. Also, the sheet metal could be stronger where the tank sits. There are little locating tabs around the tank base, and they bend easily.

I also have a plasma cutter, which is similar to a welder in size and weight. It didn’t come with a cart. You can screw wheels to the bottom, but then you have a plasma cutter with no area for tool storage, and it’s way down on the ground.

I got an email from Eastwood, the company that sells reasonably good Chinese tools for working on cars. They advertised a two-tier cart. You can put a welder or plasma cutter on each tier, and it holds two tanks. The weight capacity is 350 pounds, I believe. It looked good, but it’s Chinese, so I looked at other products.

I found out that you can pretty much forget about finding a good US-made welding cart. Cornwell makes one (it may be Chinese, but it has Cornwell standing behind it), but they only sell them from Cornwell trucks. I’m not going to chase some guy in a truck. I ruled that out.

There are a zillion two-tier welding carts on the web, and almost all are the same model, made in China, rebadged. The weight capacity is not great, and they get mixed reviews. I decided to give up and go with Eastwood.

The cart arrived, and it took an hour to put together. It had one defective part, but I’m going to make them replace that. Basically, it’s a nice solid design. It has two shelves of fake diamond plate backed up by horizontal supports. The shelves aren’t bulletproof, but the supports are very strong, so the shelves are more than adequate. It has hooks for holding cords. It has tubes for TIG rods. It also has two trays to hold little items like consumables.

It will hold two large gas bottles, and it uses a wonderful system of sturdy steel hoops.

They must have had issues with the rear wheels and axle, because now it comes with a thick steel rod and two very heavy wheels with bearings.

I put my plasma cutter on the bottom and my welder on the top. Suddenly my garage seems twice as big. What a relief. I highly recommend this product. They say welders are supposed to build their own carts. I could not have made anything this nice, and the parts would have cost what I paid for the entire cart. Go ahead and make a cart if you want. I feel like I got a deal.

I would say the footprint of the cart is about 3′ by 2′, so it’s not small, but it will seem small once your welders, cords, and bottles are off of the floor.

In other news, a neighbor blessed me by throwing out a treadmill. I put it on my truck and hacked it apart. I came away with a 2HP motor and a linear actuator. There was also a lot of metal I might have used for welding, but I didn’t have any place to put it.

I am now working on a control apparatus for the motor. My first treadmill motor came with an MC-60 control board, and for that, all you need is a potentiometer. The current treadmill has an MC-2100 board. People on the Internet insist it requires a PWM (pulse wide modulation) input. I found a schematic for a simple add-on circuit, and I’m waiting for the parts to get here.

I’m thinking I’ll make a mandrel with a 1″ shaft and make myself a two-buff variable-speed buffer. Do I need one? OF COURSE. What don’t I need?

I did some research, and it looks like you want 5000-9000 SFM on a buffer, so I’ll want 8″ buffs and a fair amount of speed. The shaft has to be thick because buffers need long shafts, and long thin shafts wobble. With a long shaft, you have access to deeper areas on parts, and you can also mount sanding drums on the buffer.

Should be pretty cool. If I go through with it.

I also learned that you can use a 2×72 belt grinder to drive a buffing attachment. You buy a 2×72″ drive belt (not abrasive), and you make a buffing attachment that fits on the end of a tool arm. The belt drives the attachment. You can use it for anything that will work on a small arbor. It’s brilliant. Some day I want to try it. Depending on the VFD and the size of the pulley on the attachment, you can get a crazy-wide range of speeds.

Last thing: I’m turning a chunk of mystery steel into a bench block. I found it in an abandoned warehouse. It’s about 3″ x 2″ x 4″. I tried to fly-cut one side, and I learned this: fly-cutting is not for steel. With a 3″ fly cutter and an HSS bit, you have to do something like 90 RPM, and that takes forever. I burned up my cutting bit several times. With aluminum, you can run flat-out, but steel is not as friendly.

I suppose I could put a quality left-hand lathe tool in the cutter with a carbide insert, but for the moment, I’m going with an indexable 2″ end mill from Shars. I happen to have a box of TPMR inserts I bought by accident (no screw holes), and they will work with this end mill. It should be a lot better for steel, although the finish may not be fantastic.

A bench block is like a miniature anvil. You put it on your workbench and rest things on it while you work. You can put a groove in it to hold long things horizontally, and you can put vertical holes in it so you can drill things on the bench and go all the way through them. It’s a nifty item to have, and making it is good machining practice.

That’s about all I have at the moment. I may post photos later when I have more time.

More: Eastwood Rocks

The cart I bought from Eastwood had a minor defect, as I mentioned above. I got on the phone with them and told them about it. The cart has four tubular supports that hold the top shelf. Two are big tubes which are part of the cart’s frame. The other two are smaller tubes, maybe 5/8″ in diameter. On my cart, one of these tubes has crooked threads in the end, and it’s about 1/4″ too short. I had to shim it with washers to make it work.

Guess what Eastwood’s solution is? They’re sending me a new cart. They can’t pull the part and send it, and they don’t want the old cart back. Translation: free cart. I can fix the old one. It already works with the washer shims, but I can weld two ends in a piece of steel conduit and thread them, and it will be a perfect replacement for the defective support. I can even paint them black so the part looks OEM.

This is sweet. I don’t need two welding carts, but the cart doesn’t know it’s a welding cart. I can put my bench grinder on it, and I can put a buffer on the bottom shelf. I can put up to 350 pounds of stuff on it. I can even store extra gas bottles on it, if I choose to get into TIG or something that requires gases other than Argon/CO2.

Eastwood is kind of a neat company. They specialize in finding low-cost stuff that works reasonably well, and they are very aggressive about courting customers and making them happy. They’ve put a lot of self-help videos on Youtube.

I have a free 2HP motor, a free treadmill motor, a free linear actuator, and a free welding cart. What else do people want to give me?

Let Ronald do the Work

I have decided there is such a thing as food being too good. You don’t actually need to levitate every time you have dinner. Food that’s too good will tempt you constantly. It will be hard to leave alone. You’ll eat more than you should.

That being said, I have a great tip for people who love McDonald’s breakfast food.

I saved some gravy from Thanksgiving. Today before I made my weekly trip to Mickey D’s, I heated the gravy up. When I came home, I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I dipped Mickey D’s biscuits in gravy while I ate.

This is probably the worst thing you can eat, short of pure nuclear waste. But it was phenomenal. I give credit where credit is due; Mickey D’s makes excellent biscuits. Add gravy, and you have something truly wonderful.

I don’t plan to do this again, because it’s way fattening, but it was a great experience.

If you don’t know how to make gravy, I can help you out.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup whole milk
2 tbsp. grease
1 tbsp. flour
1 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. sage
dash of dry white wine
salt to taste

You will want a couple of tablespoons of grease from a Thanksgiving turkey or breakfast sausage or bacon. Something like that. If you use sausage, forget the sage. The white wine is optional.

Get your grease hot (about 4 out of 10 on a digital stove). Fry one level tablespoon of flour in it. You don’t need to burn it. Just get the raw taste out of it. Stir it and smoosh it with a spatula while you fry it.

Add the milk and seasonings. Keep stirring until the gravy bubbles. It will thicken. Add a small amount of wine and cook the gravy until the consistency looks good. Remove it from the pan immediately.

That’s all you need to know. If you like it thinner, use less flour.

This should be more than enough gravy for two people who aren’t trying to kill themselves.

Enjoy.

Five Bucks Buys You Nothing

I managed to make something in my shop today. Unfortunately, I was fixing something that broke, so technically, I came out behind. I spent time and materials on something that should have been working already.

I don’t care. I succeeded at something. This is the thing to focus on.

I bought a blow gun at Home Depot. It was cheap. It seemed like a great blow gun. The body of it was sturdy, and it appeared to be made well. Then I started using it. The first time I gave it any real use, the trigger broke off.

This was disturbing, because I had just made a major adjustment: I had decided to give in and use the blow gun on my machine tools.

People who use machine tools love to say you should never use blow guns around them, but of course, they all do it, just like everyone texts while driving. They say the air will blow crud into the machines’ workings and cause problems. That may be true, but guess what you get if you don’t use air? SPLINTERS. I have resisted using air, and I get metal splinters every single time I machine anything. I was tired of it. I decided to join the hypocrites.

The truth is that you can use air. You just can’t be stupid about it. Blow stuff away from gears and screws, not toward them.

I was machining something on the mill, and I used the blow gun to clear the chips before handling the part. I didn’t get a single splinter. I was able to get swarf out of places the shop-vac wouldn’t touch. The mill looked clean for once. It was great. Then the trigger ruined it all.

I took a look at the trigger. I was stunned by the cheapness. It’s literally like a plastic toy you would find in a cereal box. You could probably chew it in half in a few minutes. It’s flimsy plastic held on by a pin.

Yesterday I looked for a new blow gun. I hoped to find something decent locally, without driving all the way to Harbor Freight or Northern Tool, but my hopes were crushed. The only two major hardware stores in this area–Lowe’s and Home Depot–didn’t have anything I liked.

Today I decided to make a new trigger from aluminum. I had a square piece of aluminum about 4″ on a side and 1/2″ thick, and I figured I could cut a trigger out of it.

Sadly, my vertical band saw is not set up for metal. If you use a band saw for metal, you have to set special blades aside for it, because it dulls them, and after that you won’t want to use them on wood. That’s a hassle, so I don’t bother with it.

If the band saw had been available, I could have traced the outline of the trigger on the aluminum and used a 1/4″ blade to cut it out. Because I didn’t have a 1/4″ blade just for metal, I had to do the next best thing. I went around the tracing of the trigger with a big drill bit. The holes sort of approximated an outline of the part. I only did this on one side of the trigger, for reasons I now forget. Then I used a hack saw to join all the holes and free one side of the part.

To get the rest of the waste out, I mounted the part vertically in the mill and used a 1/2″ end mill to cut most of the crap out. After that, it was time for the belt grinder.

The belt grinder is a phenomenal addition to the shop, because I can shape metal freehand with it, very quickly, and I’m not limited to steel and iron. If you use a bench grinder on non-ferrous metal, you’re asking for an accident that could kill you.

I fired the belt grinder up and spent maybe an hour reducing the metal to the shape of the trigger.

When I was pretty close, I checked the thickness of the part. The opening in the gun was 0.440″ wide, and the part was 0.470″ thick. My answer was to mount the part vertically in the mill again and cut 0.025″ off the sides. I didn’t thin the entire part. Just the areas that had to swing into the gun handle.

After that, I put the old trigger on top of the new one and used a transfer punch to copy the pin hole location to the new trigger. I put a center drill in the drill press, measured the pin’s thickness, and used a #31 drill to make a hole through the new trigger. I used the center drill to deburr both ends of the hold so the pin would find its way in.

After that, it was just a matter of smoothing off the finger depressions, sanding down the marks left by the 60-grit grinder belt, and making the trigger look nice.

Now I’m done, and I have a perfectly good $5 tool that only took two hours and lots of work to fix. Somehow it seems like something there doesn’t add up, but hey, I won.

The gun still leaks air where the coupler screws in. I hope pipe dope will fix that. If not, I will have to take the blow gun outside and get medieval on it.

I have the tools for that.

Welcome to Wrinklevision”

It’s nice to be able to write about earthly things once in a while. I still live here, after all.

This week I underwent a passage of sorts. I got a real TV. What does “real TV” mean in late 2016? I admit, I’m not completely sure, but I can list a few things.

1. Flat panel
2. High definition (1080p or better)
3. Connects to Internet
4. Allows nerds to film you naked

Number four isn’t essential, but it appears to be a reality. Many TV’s have cameras in them (God only knows why), and nerds have found ways to activate them remotely. So if you’re going to walk around the house naked, wear a mask and work out. As for shutting down the microphone, you will probably have to go in a cut a wire.

If you still have a prehistoric TV with a picture tube, you’re in for a surprise when you upgrade. You’ll have to pay someone to haul your old $2000 Toshiba to the dump. No one wants a 200-pound TV with wheels, no matter how great it was back when you used it to watch [TRIGGER ALERT TRIGGER ALERT] Buffalo Bill shoot Indians. There are a few kooks out there who have uses for them, but you won’t find one. If you take it to Goodwill, they’ll tell you they don’t want it.

I was using what I thought was a huge TV to watch Youtube and a few cable shows. It has a 42″ screen, and it’s 1080p. I moved up to 55″, and the new TV has something called “Ultra 4K,” which is even more detailed than what we currently call “high definition.” It’s so detailed, you can pretty much forget about finding any programs shot in Ultra 4K. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why they sell these TV’s.

High-definition TV is already causing problems. Have you ever tuned into the HD version of your favorite news show? It’s shocking how the female newsreaders look. Remember that perfect skin? Where did it go? Actresses over the age of 30 must be losing their minds over HD. They should call it “Wrinklevision.”

The TV has Wi-Fi built in, but it doesn’t have a webcam, so I wear whatever I want, and I slouch. Why do you want Wi-Fi? Simple. It lets you connect your TV to the Internet and download video, without playing with cables.

The new TV has two remotes. Don’t ask me why. One is a tablet. It’s actually a very nice tablet. It has no cameras, so, again, I won’t be popping up on porn websites, and it has 16MB of memory. It’s bigger than my phone. It’s so big and bright, I use it to read Kindle books.

The tablet remote can be used to locate and stream Internet video. You push a little icon, and whatever you see on the remote goes to the TV.

To be honest, this feature has not been useful to me yet. I mainly watch Youtube, and if you watch Youtube, you really want a mouse. I have a cable running from the PC to the TV, and I use the TV as a monitor when I watch Youtube. Works great. But some people rely on services like Netflix, and as I understand it, the tablet is nice for that kind of video.

The main thing that makes the TV wonderful is its combination of size and resolution.

I don’t know a whole lot about shooting video, but I have come to realize that big TV’s and amateur videographers are changing our notions of how much stuff should appear on a screen at one time. I am guessing here, but presumably, when TV cameramen and directors shoot things, they have to think about the average TV screen, and they limit themselves to scenes that won’t drive viewers nuts. For example, you would not want to watch the chariot scene from Ben Hur on a 5″ screen. They must leave a lot of things out. Amateurs appear to be unaware of the limitations of viewing screens, so they pack enormous amounts of material into scenes.

When I watch a machining video, the uploader may show a huge percentage of his shop in each scene. There may be lots of things in the shot I need to see. If I stick with a 48″ screen, I’ll need to be within 8 feet of the TV to see all the good stuff well. With a 55″ screen, I can sit across the room, on the couch, and see everything clearly.

The bigger screen also increases the size of text, so if I want to go through Youtube videos and look for things I want to watch, I can read the titles. I don’t have to go to the TV and squint.

I think amateur videographers, who don’t know what they’re doing, are pushing us to bigger screens. At least those of us who watch their videos.

I said I was using the tablet to read Kindle books. Guess what? I can use the TV, too. It’s so big, I can sit on the couch with my feet up and read books comfortably. No reading glasses! I like Kindle for books I don’t care enough about to buy in paper form, and for books I can’t find anywhere else. The big screen makes reading them a pleasure. It also works for Scrib’d.

The tablet is a strange accessory, but I keep coming up with uses for it. I can check my email while I watch TV. If I see something interesting on TV, I can Google it on the tablet. Crazy.

The tablet’s Wi-Fi is much faster than the Wi-Fi on my phone and my old tablet. No idea why.

I watched a couple of high-definition movies on the TV, and while it’s considerable nicer than fuzzy low definition, it’s not overwhelming. Every once in a while, a little voice inside me says something like, “How did Ben Affleck get in my house?”, but it’s not a constant gee-whiz experience.

I haven’t tried running CAD on the big TV. I may need a new video card, because Ultra 4K sucks up a lot of processing power. I do look forward to it, though. Anything that allows me to sit a comfortable distance from my monitor is a blessing.

You’re thinking the TV cost an arm and a leg. Not really. I didn’t go for the $3000 jobs that probably have functions that would make a HAL 9000 envious. You can get Ultra 4K for way under a grand.

I’ve always thought people who had big TV’s were silly, because TV is a waste of time, but now there is finally a decent selection of worthwhile things to view, and there is a reason why a big screen makes sense, so I joined the club.

Sooner or later, as I have said for years, there won’t be phones and Internet and TV. There will just be the Internet, and it will do everything. The new TV brings me one step closer to that bizarre paradigm. In a way, it’s a disappointment, because I don’t really want cable TV premium channels, and when TV is fully integrated with the Internet, HBO and Showtime will be ubiquitous. I suppose the same will be true of the really dirty channels.

We’re all being united by a disturbing, invasive network of wires and radio waves, and privacy is a thing of the past. It’s very bad, but you can’t do anything to stop it without unplugging and basically sitting in the dark. I suppose I may want to do that eventually, but until it reaches that point, I intend to enjoy the new technology.

My TV is giving me traffic reports I didn’t ask for. Arggh. This just in: “Gloria Estefan Reacts to Castro’s Death.” Every time I pause it, it tells me things I don’t want to know, and half of it is advernews or possibly journotainment. “BREAKING NEWS: YOUR SEARCH HISTORY, CREDIT REPORT, FAMILY DOCTOR’S UNENCRYPTED FILES, CRIMINAL HISTORY, AND BANK ACCOUNT BALANCE INDICATE WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO GET YOU TO BUY THIS WRENCH!”

Oh well. You take the bad with the good.

To Make More Tools

I’m having some fun in the shop today. I managed to accomplish two things.

My new belt grinder is very nice for what it cost, but it’s not a high-dollar industrial job. The people who made it are starter-uppers, and they aim at hobbyists. There are little things here and there that could have been done better. The tracking pulley is an example. It has been running about 1/8″ too far to the right, relative to the other wheels, and this seems to put stress on one side of the belt. I was thinking about making a new mechanism, but today I got it aligned with shim washers, so I guess I won’t have the fun of machining something new.

After that, I made a wrench for the tool post on my lathe.

My lathe has a big Aloris-style tool post, and the nut on top is 1-1/2″ in diameter. Naturally, the manufacturer doesn’t supply a wrench. Whenever you want to turn the post, you have to find a tool. Like a lot of people, I’ve been using a crescent wrench. It works, but it’s bulky, it has to be adjusted every time, and it’s not the right tool. Adjustable wrenches are hard on nut corners. The nut on my lathe appears to be hardened, but still. Wrong tool.

I saw this neat video by Keith Fenner, and I realized he was onto something. He had a wrench he had bent in order to reach remote fasteners, and he added a second bend to it and turned it into a tool post wrench. The video below explains.

There are a few benefits. First, it’s the right type of tool to turn a nut you don’t want to ruin. Second, it can be left on the tool post most of the time, so you don’t have to put it down where it will be in the way. Third, because he shortened it, there isn’t much leverage, and that means he’s less likely to torque it too hard and crack his compound slide.

Obviously, you can go to Northern Tool and buy a ready-made combination wrench, but where is the fun in that?

I decided to try this. I have little experience with using a torch to bend stuff, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to do more of. It’s a very useful ability. Also, with the belt grinder running correctly, I had the right tool to round off the end of the wrench after shortening it, and I wanted to try that.

It’s not that easy to find 1-1/8″ box end wrenches. Northern Tool probably has them, but it’s not a standard item at normal hardware stores. It turns out Home Depot sells a Chinese job for $10. It’s made for trailer hitches. I figured I couldn’t lose, so I bought one.

I put it in my bench vise, after cutting two pieces of aluminum to put between the wrench and the jaws. I didn’t want to mar up the wrench. I have brass jaws for this. But I didn’t want to mar up the jaws.

I know that sounds crazy.

I put aluminum foil in the vise with the wrench to deflect heat and protect the vise’s paint. Then I got out a MAPP torch and started heating the wrench.

This experience reminded me how much I need acetylene. A MAPP torch takes maybe 15 minutes to get a wrench hot enough to bend, and I still had to use a breaker bar. What a pain. But it bent. After that, I put the wrench in the vise in a different position, and I bent it again to make the second angle.

With the offset created, I put the wrench in the band saw to cut off the unwanted end, and of course, my Chinese saw threw its blade. It does that just for attention. I did get the wrench cut, though, and I put it on the belt grinder and prettied up the end.

It’s slightly loose on the nut. Chinese wrench. I don’t care. It will be very handy, and it was a fun project. I like easy projects. I don’t screw them up as much as hard ones.

It’s going to be a conversation piece. When average people walk into a shop and see a wrench with two 90-degree bends in it, they will want to know what happened.

I thought about doing this with a smaller wrench and using it for my table router. You need an offset wrench to change the bits. I have an offset wrench made by some company or other, and it’s made from steel plate. I thought a wrench might have a smaller shaft (whatever its called), which would give me more clearance between the wrench and router table, but it turned out I was wrong, so I’ll stick with what I have. If you don’t have an offset wrench for your table router, you should get one. Makes life much easier.

The wrench I bent turned blue in places. I can’t get it off. I assume it’s some kind of metallurgical change that goes below the surface. I probably messed up the temper or something. Who cares? It’s never supposed to be pushed hard, so it doesn’t matter. It would actually be better if the wrench snapped before the compound. But I’ll never torque it that much.

It’s fun to have tools and get stuff done. It was also nice to have this idea handed to me. Keith Fenner is a blast to watch. If you can’t apprentice at a shipyard and spend 20 years learning to do things the right way, his videos will help you catch up a little.