Silverback Garage

Spider Slayer

2011-08-19T15:34:00.001-04:00

This was originally posted to a mailing list in 6/17/04. The original was thought to be lost (a bunch of my friends and I all looked for it in our email archives), but versions of it showed up on some message boards since. A couple of weeks ago I found some what I thought were long lost email archives and found it. Here it is in its original form with a few minor edits for readability:

Last night Jill, a friend of mine who is really creeped out by spiders stopped by and by coincidence when she was about to leave there was a spider about 3" across hunting on the top stoop in front of my front door. I went after it but it ran off.

If any of my neighbors saw what happened later they probably thought I lost it.

After Jill left it was back on the steps, same spot, taunting me, insulting me, laughing at me.

I'm not sure spider could see me but it was reacting to my shadow being cast by the lights on either side of the front door, running over the side of the concrete landing every time I blocked the light. I kept trying to get the thing but it was FAST. I even had the million candlepower spot light out, you know, the one that everyone keeps by the front door in case you need to flag down a low flying aircraft, to make sure that I could follow it over the side of the steps.

After a few minutes of this my feeble little brain came up with a bright idea "hey, carb cleaner kills most bugs” (they breath through their "skin" and the stuff coats them and suffocates them. Even if you don't get them well enough usually it will kill them later on). Spiders are bugs, well, sort of bugs, well not really, they aren't bugs, but it should work, right?

Well, what is one step better? Think like a Mark, this is easy, or think like a great big retarded monkey. Either will get you to the same place.

BURNING carb cleaner... huh, problem… I can't hold the million candle power light if I've got a lighter in one hand and can of liquid death in the second. I won’t really be able to see the thing as it hides over the side of the steps. But wait, no problem. If I light the carb cleaner I'll see the pesky beast, right?

Ahh, I love it when a plan comes together.…

Obviously, this kind of reasoning has put me among the great thinkers of our times. I have all my problems solved: this is the pure, glowing, brilliant fireball of genius. I grabbed the BIG can of B12 Chemtool (think super, extra heavy duty carb cleaner, it even has the word “super” on the label, you know that makes it better, if only the big can also had the word magnum on it all would be right with the world).

Well, I got up on the steps, looking down I thought I could see the shadow of a lump that was the spider on the side of the landing, and knowing from previous empirical data based on YEARS of CAREFUL testing that carb cleaner will shoot a 4-5' jet of flame… I took careful aim from a safe (always remember, safety first) distance back where the SPIDER couldn't hurt me, well not easily.

I lit the lighter... steadied my aim… and hit the nozzle…

At that instant I learned, I absolutely understood, exactly what was SUPER HEAVY DUTY about this B12 stuff. Instead of the normal and quite effective 4 foot jet of flames that carb cleaner gives you I got about an 8' long, 3' wide cone of flame which stuck to everything in it's path setting it on fire.

When this moment of sublime enlightenment happened I was standing with the thing at about shoulder level on the top step and the first thing I noticed was the wet ground around the bushes was on fire.

I was so surprised that I didn't even see if I actually got the spider.

Crap. I need light, is the thing still alive? IT MIGHT BE STILL ALIVE, AND PISSED OFF... SHIT... I instinctively pull the trigger again... wait, dumb idea, that is what got me into this mess.

To late... instinct and training took over. My fingers, being the efficient killing machines that they are overrode every reasonable thought that I ever had in my little walnut of a brain. FIRE! That sucker was going to roast. Burn in hell!!!

At that point it all caught up to me. I can't do this, not in the front yard, this just isn't smart.

(I actually ran this around in my head from a few different angles trying to figure out how to make it smart, in the mean time the flames were getting bigger, I was still spraying burning death all over the front yard)

I finally let go of the trigger... boxwoods... on fire. Front steps... they look like the entrance to hell, there were flames shooing up and framing every landing... wait, my wife’s cute little raccoon boot scraper/mud brush things on the steps, I HAVE TO SAVE THEM! I try put them out with my feet... um, now that's a real problem... that actually made them worse since my shoes are on fire.

After what was probably a minute of doing what probably looked like the funky chicken with flames shooting from my toes I finally got most of the flames extinguished. The raccoons somehow kept bursting into flames which was impressive considering it was raining and they were soaked. When I finally got them out they were scattered in little bits around the steps. Upside down. Dead.

There was smoke everywhere. It looked like the aftermath scene in a war movie where they show the ruins of a town after getting firebombed, nothing but rubble, ashes and smoke.

Crap, the neighbors! I ran inside turned out the lights. Lets pretend that didn’t happen.

Do you think I got the spider?

Harwood 3” Cowl for “The Project”

2011-07-07T18:27:00.000-04:00

It turned up yesterday.

I’m not impressed with Old Dominion shipping. The driver was pretty cool, I just backed my truck to the back of the tractor trailer and he just slid it in (yea, my Cummins Dodge is BIG, it was only a few inches below the deck of the trailer) but the guys at the dock sucked, didn’t seem to want to do their jobs- they couldn’t seem to figure out how to call and arrange a delivery, after a few days of trying I finally got the dock number from one of the main centers and called the guy that was supposed to call me. For that matter, it was getting delivered to a business so they should have been able to delver anytime instead of letting it sit on a dock for a few days.

Anyway…

The back corners were banged up (actually poked through the box) and the space behind the passenger side headlight got smacked by something but otherwise it’s in good shape. Nothing that I can’t fix. I was surprised, I weighed it and it was 26-27#, where the stock ‘bird hood that I had on the car was 57-58#, and I know that a formula style hood is in the low 70’s.

I decided to test fit it on the project car around 3am last night, actually Christina helped me get it on the hinges around 10 when I ran out to the gym, I finished bolting it on later. I’m betting the neighbors appreciated the impact driver. I had about ½” gap in places, more at the front. It also sat about almost 1” high at the back and more than that in the front:

When I got home tonight I spent a few minutes moving stuff around while grilling some ribs and ended up with it pretty well aligned. I still need to move the headlights around, and the passenger side has roughly 1/32-1/16” more gap and sits slightly higher than the driver’s, the front bumper is crooked/needs to be fixed (the steel bumper support was partially crushed and twisted when I bought it, I have a nice aluminum one from my ’83 to replace it eventually), this is what I ended up with (need to find some weak struts for it). I’m pretty happy with how it looks:

The dinged up spots need a little body work, but the back corners have slightly the wrong angle anyway, so I would have had to sand most of the banged up areas off when I finish it. I’ve also aligned the headlights a little better but didn’t bother taking any additional pictures.

BTW, I think that these are the only real pictures I’ve posted of this one anywhere… My wife has named her Cherry, but I don’t know if she’s going to stay “Cherry Red,” we’ll see…

What’s Up With PowerBlockTV???

2011-04-16T13:04:00.001-04:00

Am I the only one that has a problem with this?

I know that most of the people visiting the garage are gearheads of some sort: how many of you TRY to watch some of PowerblockTV* on weekends? It’s one of the few things on TV that I at all go out of my way to watch. I won’t argue the accuracy of the information (I’ve sent them multiple emails about “issues” and never seen a response), but I do try to check them out, if for no other reason because there is some decent fabrication work on 3 of the shows.

So why do I say TRY?

Well, the middle of every week I get an update email from them: it lists what is on the shows, if it’s a new episode or a re-run, a bunch of sponsor stuff… great, right? Well, not really.

It tends to be accurate about the episodes but if I tune in that weekend, sometimes they’re on, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re on but a 23minutes off of their normal time. Sometimes they’re showing Star Wars episodes instead. Sometimes they’re on on Sunday but not Saturday, sometimes they’re on Saturday but not Sunday… ARRGGG.

Come on guys, this is not that hard. I don’t care if it’s Spike, PowerblockTV or Comcast, GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER. It’s not that hard, you say what you’re going to do, and then guess what, YOU DO IT. I suppose that there might rarely be some last minute change that might happen, but this is not 99.9% of the cases I’m talking about. I don’t know why re-running Star Wars would be an emergency last minute change.

Of course, Comcast (don’t get me started there, but they’re the only good choice here, and we waited something >6 years from when we built the house till we even had that choice) can’t show us listings for anything but the current day.

* - If you don’t know what the Powerblock is, check out their web page: http://www.powerblocktv.com/- Basically, 2 hours of car/truck/engine modification related shows played Saturday and Sunday mornings on SpikeTV.

Lathe Stand Part 3 – The Actual Structure

2010-12-06T19:29:00.000-05:00

When last we left our intrepid hero…

I’m sure I was doing something.

(I need to get some better CAD software, but even with SketchUp you have to love how easy it is to manipulate your drawings. I remember playing with a _really early version of AutoCAD in the early 80’s in my dad’s engineering consulting office on weekends, the PC AT with a HDD and 3 color screen… was just incredible. I was 10 or 12 at the time)

OK, so with the adjustable feet made, casters bought… I could figure out the remaining dimensions and actually build the thing.

Guess what? I found the 2 bolts that I lost in the last installment. They were under the hood of a car that I haven’t driven for roughly 10 months… HOW DID THEY GET THERE??? Damned Dwarves…

Lets get started.

First thing I did is measured out the 3” box section pieces for the uprights/legs, threw them on my 4x6 bandsaw and cut out the vertical pieces. While I was at it I also cut out the 2” box crosspieces.

I set the legs on end, lined up the base plates, pulled out my trusty Hobart Handler MIG and ran some beads in the space that I left for them:

Next I set the pieces for the front and back down on the flattest clear part of the floor, measured the difference between the bottoms of the legs and the bottom rail to get the spacing right for the caster mounts and then once I got the diagonals to match I zapped them together. To do the second side I set all the parts on top of the welded first side and used it as a pattern. Once I got it tacked I flipped it over to check how square they were:

They lined up dead on (yea, they look a little off in the picture, I tripped over the setup getting the camera).

Next I flipped them onto their tops and assembled the whole deal upside down. I set the ends on some straight 1” box to get them off the floor so any uneven spots in the concrete didn’t lift a piece off in the middle of it’s span, then clamped, bungeed, tacked (and used a few select words)… pretty much did anything necessary to hold things lined up till I got everything tacked:

You might notice that in this picture and the one before it some of the joints are tacked, some have multiple tacks, some have a partial bead and some have a full bead down one side of the joint. This is more than just a random “this is where I stopped and shot the picture” thing.

For those of you that don’t know, when you heat metal and let it cool, the spot that you heated shrinks. When you run a weld bead, the area that you weld shrinks and pulls itself tighter. I was wondering how to keep something like this perfectly square while you’re welding it and I decided I was going to use the shrinkage to my advantage. As I added each tack I measured diagonals and would add more weld where I needed things to pull tight. The thing is that as you get more pieces tacked together the whole structure gets stiffer so it takes more tacks or a bigger bead to get the same motion as you go.

FWIW, it seems like it worked well, every dimension I checked was within 1/16” or less of dead on once I got all the beads run. I was quite happy with that for this size structure and not having a dead flat surface to work on.

Here is the basic structure welded and turned upright. The only tube joints that weren’t fully welded were the top joints. This was done on purpose because I wanted a flat surface to attach the top to. I didn’t want the top resting on just a few high spots where the welds are.

This shot was the idiot check: before going any further making sure that the chip tray looks like it lines up about where I want it to. Notice that the base is _slightly_ smaller than the width of the chip tray, that is because the top will end up with 3/4” banding around it and will overhang about that much:

This is where I decided to deviate from the original plan.

Well, not exactly.

I had this thought from the very beginning but this was the point where I decided that it was necessary, and I could finally see clearly how things were lining up, so I didn’t put it in the drawings and even if I did try to I wasn’t sure what the right answer was till this point.

The debate was if a top made of 2 thicknesses of 3/4” sheet goods (plywood, mdf or particle board…) would bend under the weight of the lathe and if it would be a sturdy enough surface to attach it to.

What I decided was that I needed supports that would line up under the lathe’s feet, so while I had the chip tray centered up on the stand I marked the centerline of the lathe bolt down points on the crosspieces so I knew where I needed to add support.

I wanted something that would give me access to the back side (box tube crushes when you try to tighten a bolt through it so I only wanted a single layer), would be stiff enough and thick enough to tap. I ended up going through my pile of steel and decided on some 2x2” angle that I thought was supposed to be 1/4” thick when I bought it but it ended up very close to 3/8” thick. I cut to pieces to size, cleaned them up, tacked them in place and then flipped the whole thing over to weld it from underneath (again, no high spots to get in the way of the top laying as flat as possible).

Time to get started on the caster mounts:

The caster mounts were just some simple pieces of angle. Since I intended to use swivel casters on the tailstock end and non swivel ones on the headstock end and they required different size mounts, I made one set of mounts out of 1” angle, and the swivel end ones out of 1-1/2” angle since they had a wider bolt pattern.

In the picture above you can see that I clamped them and then used the fine adjustment tool sitting on the end to tap them into position, then I set the casters on there to make sure everything clears and lines up like expected. Finally below you can see where I welded it all together:

WOOOHOOO… this thing is starting to look like something. An upside down something, but like something…

Here the caster pads are drilled and tapped and I spent some time cleaning up the surface rust using a combination of wire wheels on an angle grinder, some 3M scotch bright and a phosphoric acid based metal prep called “Right Stuff De-Ruster Metal Conditioner and Rust Preventer”:

Comment on the Right Stuff.

I’ve used it before a few times, and have been generally happy with it, but have to an extent ignored the directions before now. It recommends brushing it on, leaving it and then painting over it, not fussing with it before painting. Specifically recommending that the sticky surface that it leaves will actually help protect the steel and help the paint adhere.

Previously, I’ve basically stopped and sanded before, after, during… any time I had a rough spot. If it looked like anything besides smooth steel it got sanded, sort of the sand and wipe down every step of the way approach and usually wipe down with something like a paint prep grease/wax/oil remover if there was any chance that I got some on it or got a hand print on it. The Right Stuff has taken care of any surface/flash rust and I never had any issues with sanding afterwards.

So this time I followed the directions. After the initial clean up I put it on (used a combination of a chip brush and a but of scotch brite dipped in it) and after it dried I painted right over the surface it left.

Well, that was a mistake. It dried with a bunch of brush marks and runs and the first coat of paint looked AWFUL. Like as in it looked like I let a blind monkey paint it by splashing it on with a mop and a bucket. I kept hoping all sorts of things were going to happen, none of them did. After letting it sit over night, giving it a good hard look and deciding that I’m not going to be able to stand leaving it that way no matter how many coats of paint I put on it I ended up sanding down most of it till it was smooth.

I put it up on stands for painting and put the first coat on with it upside down to make sure all the bottom surfaces were well coated, and the second with it right side up. For anyone wondering, that is grey Rust-Oleum Hammered:

Yep, the hockey puck feet are installed, and wrapped in plastic bags so that the thing can be supported by something that does not get painted.

Here you can see one of the casters bolted in. Before anyone says it, I know that that flange is probably a bit thin to hold those threads, but I didn’t seem to be having any problems with them and figured if I did it would be easy enough to add a nut on the back side.

Oh, and the Grade 8, cadmium plated, washer head hardware is totally excessive (and I had to drill the mounting holes on the casters oversize to fit the bolts), but I have something on the order of 30# or more of these 3/8” bolts left over from a tape robot/server room decommissioning that I was involved with making those cheaper than standard 5/16” bolts and washers

So, what do you think?

One last thing to do and the stand’s structure is done. Drilling and tapping the top cross members for the lathe hold down bolts:

Another idiot check to make sure that everything lines up:

Next installment – The Top.

Stay tuned, subscribe, tell your friends, pop some popcorn or grab a beer and hang out a while.

Smell Like A Monster

2010-12-06T18:50:00.002-05:00

Sorry, it made me laugh, what more can I really say?

Lathe Stand Part 2 – Adjustable Feet and Casters

2010-12-04T10:17:00.001-05:00

I know that there is someone out there that is wondering: Why start with the feet???

Well, normally I would agree - just build it a little shorter than you need, stick something on there and you’re good. The problem here was that:

These things are going to support a lot of weight, they have to be sturdy. Heck, the lathe is right round 400# all the steel going into the stand is going to probably end up a couple of hundred pounds, and eventually I hope to add a chest with tooling to I that will easily go 500-1000lbs
I want casters that are strong enough to not be an issue and the feet to be adjustable so they can get out of the way and still lift the stand off the casters for use. After I worked everything out I came to the conclusion that I actually needed everything to end up in a 1/8” or so range. I really didn’t want the feet being more than 3/16” off the ground with them screwed all the way up since I was worried about rigidity with it lifted excessively (the feet “unscrewed”) and if I need more clearance it’s easy enough to completely unscrew and remove the feet.
I didn’t know what (size, shape and function wise) I was going to end up with for the feet since I was using things that I have never tried doing this with before.
Of course, if you’ve been paying attention,you’ll expect that whatever I ended up making will support the full weight of this thing plus a baby elephant on each corner.

OK, so the easy part- the casters. I looked around online, the big box stores, and Harbor Freight (generally they have a good selection of decent casters), but no one seemed to have just exactly what I was looking for at a price that I was willing to pay (my “cheap gene” gets in the way of me doing a lot of sensible things, in this case I probably wasted more time and money trying to find something that I liked for a decent price than the difference between some of the expensive stuff and what I got), and almost nothing had the load rating that I was looking for.

Finally, I was at one of the bigger local Ace Hardwares in the area (Kendal’s in Clarksville, MD… good place, one of the bigger selections in the area, but a little out of the way and usually more expensive than other places so it’s not always the first place that I look) and found some nice, reasonably wide 3” steel casters rated at 1000# each.

As you can see, while I was there I went digging through the hardware section and found that they had up to 1” in bolts… perfect, I’ll use those for the feet. I came home with some 2” long, 1” bolts and some matching nuts.

Now, if I was normal I would have just welded the nuts to the bottom of the legs, put the bolts in them and had adjustable feet.

Oh, to be normal… wait, I am normal, the rest of you are broken... Damned dwarves! (I don’t exactly know what the dwarves did this time but it had to be their fault somehow)

So what did I do? Do you even have to ask (let me guess, some of you reading this consider yourself “normal,” huh?)?

Well, first I lost 2 sets of bolts and nuts. How do you lose a couple of pounds of shiny steel? How do you loose 2 out of the 4 if they’re all in the same bag? I don’t know. I did it. I’m talented.

I got some more at the hardware store, grabbed some washers also. I took a good look at them and decided “these are going to be some ugly feet. I have a lathe. We have the technology, we can make them stronger, and faster…” Wait, no that was something else, as my brother keeps saying, with the tools that I own by now my house should be capable of time travel.

So I stuck the bolts in the lath, faced the heads and then cut a shoulder in each one that matched the ID of the washers (they were all slightly different, but of course I took the time to match each one exactly). At that point I also decided that just leaving the nuts looking like nuts would look tacky. I turned the corners off of it, and then turned a shoulder down that would press into the bottom plate that will get welded into the bottom of the legs:

Yea, that thing on the left started out as a nut before I stuck it in the lathe.

To puck or not to puck… what’s the deal with the hockey puck in the picture? Well at some point one of the forums or lists suggested that hard rubber, regulation hockey pucks make nice feet for equipment. They’re hard enough to make steady feet for heavy stuff, but still deaden vibrations some. At this point I was debating if I was going to add hockey pucks to the feet. And how to attach them???

So this is how the parts fit together, like I said, they were machined to fit together:

Do I add a hockey puck?

Oh, if you’re wondering why I left the hex on the head end of the bolts if I didn’t on the nut? I figured when it’s all together, if something gets jammed up having a hex to put a wrench on might help. Ah, you see? I’m always thinking…

Up next, the plates for the ends of the legs.

I measured the exact outside and inside dimensions of the 3” box tube that I bought, and decided that the plates should be smaller than the outside, but _just barely_ larger than the inside, so there is room to put a nice bead around them without needing much cleanup or sticking out (you’ll see in a later installment), but so there is still a mechanical register to make sure they’re perfectly flat with the end of the box tube and are supported even without the weld.

So I threw some 1/4” plate on the 4x6 bandsaw and cut out some blanks, but after cutting them out I figured that I was going to use a boring bar on the mill to size the holes for the threaded nuts anyway, I might as well finish them there also. I stacked them in the mill vise and milled them within .005” of square… because I could. Sorry, no pictures of the sawing or machining – I was busy sawing and machining.

Funny how that works.

Anyway, this is how it all fit together:

Sorry, but in the next few shots a lot of things happened at once (again, no pictures of the actual welding and machining, I was welding and machining at the time. I guess I need to hire a photographer to document things better. I’m also not a big fan of getting dust, oil and swarf on/in the camera, so unless I’m going to stop and wash my hands… it’s unlikely you’re going to get _actual_ action shots).

I decided to puck them.

I assembled all the pieces, ran a bead on the back side of both the leg plate and the washer, cucked both pieces up on the lathe and faced them, cutting the welds flush with the surface. I also turned the outside edges of the washers down so they were all the same diameter.

Finally, I chucked up the hockey pucks and cut a pocket in the top of each one a few thousandths smaller in diameter and a few thousandths deeper than the washers. They literally press onto the ends of the feet and actually take quite a bit of force to put on, I have no intention of using any glue or anything.

BTW, if you’re wondering about cutting the rubber pucks on the lathe, I ran one of the cheap 1/4” brazed carbide lathe tools from harbor freight a few quick passes over a diamond hone and they sliced off the rubber in big, long ribbons.

Finally, a quick shot of the useful adjustment range for these things:

Yea, they’ll go a big further, but I’m sure of their strength in this range.

OK, after all that I know how tall the legs of the stand need to be, and how big a difference I need between the caster mounting surface and the bottom of the legs.

Tune in next time for something that is starting to look a lot like, well, a lathe stand. Same bat time, same bat station…

Lathe Stand Part 1 – Introduction

2010-11-30T00:57:00.000-05:00

This is another one of those “Yea, I’m getting to it” kinds of posts… actually, the whole project is a “Yea, I’m getting to it” kind of project, I guess for me it’s sometimes hard to get to making stuff for my tools, I really just want to use them.

Along those lines, I got a Grizzly G0602, 10x22 metal working lathe almost exactly a year ago now and I’m more than a bit embarrassed that I’ve taken the packing off, cleaned the packing grease off of it and been using it still mounted to the pallet sitting on a furniture dolly for most of the year:

(I will not show you a current picture of it, just imagine the same picture but surround it with a stack of tooling, boxes and a big pile of swarf and you’ve got it)

After completely and utterly overanalyzing the situation, and then spending some time looking at assorted tool carts, workbenches, and (gasp) even lathe stands I came to the conclusion that nothing was quite right. I decided that it needed something special. Or maybe it’s that I’m just too anal retentive to deal with plenty of stuff that would have worked just fine and started yet another project:

Height: I’m 6’4” and am prone to back issues, I didn’t want to be hunched over this thing. Most lathe stands are in the area of 29” tall (damned dwarves…), most work benches and carts are around 34” tall (it’s a conspiracy, the dwarves have taken over). After asking around I found all sorts of rules of thumb about what works well for a work surface and after pulling out the tape measure, calipers, calculator, and consulting the 2 psychics and the dog I came to the conclusion that I needed something around an inch or 2 over 40”. Since my adjustable height workbench ended up at 39.75” tall and I’m quite happy working at that on things clamped in the big vice or on a small anvil, both of which roughly simulated the raised work height of the lathe, that became the magic number. So I’m shooting for 39.75” tall.
Overall size: I’m short on shop space (yea, I know, who isn’t), so anything bigger than it has to be is a no go. Along those lines, I figured that keeping it around 48” wide would give just enough room to put the chip tray on it and allow me to use standard size sheet goods for the top (ended up not making a difference, you’ll see later). Depth- well, had to be deeper than the chip tray for stability, to give room to open the side cover (which swings back) and eventually I’d like to put a tool cabinet inside and that generally means more than 16”.
Structure: I’ve built some nice, sturdy setups out of wood, but there is something to be said for heavy, welded steel. Nothing to come loose, wiggle, squeak, groan, grunt…. I liked the idea of 3” box uprights and 2” box crosspieces, it just looked right in SketchUp. I started wanting 1/8” wall, but when I got to the steel yard it turned out that heavier wall was cheaper.
Casters? The machining world says it’s not a good idea to have mobile machining equipment, you’re just asking to knock it out of whack. My garage says that you need to be able to move this thing because you just don’t have the room.
Adjustable feet? Again, seems to be a conflict here. Many swear by leveling the machine before you use it.

The end result: the stand is going to be 47” wide, 19” deep, and 38-1/4” tall, with a top that ended up getting made of some left over laminate counter top material from remodeling our kitchen glued to a piece of 3/4” MDF, making it 1-1/2” thick with the dimensions of the top of the stand +3/4” maple banding making it 48-1/2” x 20-1/2”.

WRT the feet, of course I took the most complicated approach, and made/mounted adjustable, vibration isolating feet on the ends of the legs and casters inboard, in a fashion so that the feet can be adjusted to lift the stand off the casters and level it, or you can screw them in (or entirely remove them) and wheel the stand around on steel casters, kind of like they use on engine stands.

The next few installments will have build details and pictures.

What To Do With Leftover Turkey

2010-11-26T18:51:00.000-05:00

It happens to all of us this time of year, you make that 20some pound bird, people eat till they can’t breathe much less get up from under the table, you pack goodie bags to send home with everyone, the dog has eaten enough that she’s in a tryptophan coma and just sitting there, farting and burping (we won’t mention the rest of your “guests”) and no matter how good your turkey turned out (and let me tell you, when you get the grill thing working right you won’t do it any other way) you can’t imagine another turkey dinner for the next few days.

So, what do you do???

Well here’s a recipe that my wife found a few years back on Epicurious for Turkey and Noodles with Peanut Sauce that will have you lusting after that left over turkey as much or more than the original dinner. YES, I’M NOT KIDDING, IT’S THAT GOOD.

Just because I can’t promise that it will stay up forever at that link I’m going to reprint a copy here (and if you’re going to do it, follow the directions, don’t be one of those “well, I didn’t use this, and substituted that, and well, I wouldn’t make this recipe again, it was weird.” the one recommendation is that if you’re not in to spicy food take out some of the red pepper flakes, it’s as good mild as spicy):

Turkey and Noodles with Peanut Sauce

Yield: Makes 6 servings

Active time: 30 min Start to finish: 30 min (the prep takes all the time, it’s a piece of cake once you gather the turkey…)

Ingredients:

1 lb linguine

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes

2 teaspoons vegetable oil

3/4 cup chicken broth or water

2/3 cup smooth peanut butter

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon minced peeled ginger

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

1 lb shredded cooked turkey or chicken (4 cups)

4 celery ribs, thinly sliced

1 cup thinly sliced scallion greens

Preparation:

Cook noodles in a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling salted water until tender, about 12 minutes. Reserve 1 cup cooking water, then rinse noodles in a colander under cold water. Drain well.

While noodles are boiling, cook garlic and red pepper flakes in oil in a small heavy saucepan over moderate heat, stirring, until garlic is golden. Whisk in broth, peanut butter, soy sauce, sugar, and ginger and simmer, whisking, 2 minutes. Remove from heat and whisk in lemon juice.

Toss together turkey, celery, scallions, noodles, sauce, and (if necessary) some reserved cooking water to thin. Serve immediately.

Gotta Love Harbor Freight

2010-11-05T22:24:00.000-04:00

OK, before you assume it, I’m not all about cheap tools… AAMOF, I find cheap tools very frustrating, BUT, there are times that they are appropriate, there are times that I’m willing to put some time in to get just what I want (and what difference if I paid a buck for it at HF or $20 someplace else if I’m starting with similar junk before I modify it), and there are times that you can get the same thing for cheap.

So here’s the same thing for cheap:

Last week I was replacing the cords on a couple of Belkin metal housing surge protectors and found that they were riveted together… I started looking for my rivet gun and realized that I only had a few rivets and no real selection to speak of. I wanted more for “stock” so next time I have some choices.

Tonight I was at Harbor Freight (what I was looking for will turn up here as a project later on) and went through their “assortment” aisle looking for an assortment of rivets. I looked at the 100 piece assortments for $1.99-$3.00, the 500 piece for around $10, None of those seemed that badly priced, but I remembered that they had a couple of 1000 piece assortments on the clearance section. It was hard to tell what the price was, if it was originally $12.xx or if that was the clearance price. Either way, I didn’t need 1000, but if it was less than $13 it seemed to be the deal to go with, so I grabbed one.

FWIW, the same set is available all over the place online but apparently HF doesn’t list it anymore, the cheapest that Amazon lists them at right now is $29, it’s:

Rivet assortment includes:
250 piece: 1/8" x 1/4"
250 piece: 1/8" x 5/16"
250 piece: 1/8" x 3/8"
250 piece: 1/8" x 5/8" rivets

Anyway, I get to the checkout and he scans the bar code… $.17. Yep. That’s right. Seventeen whole cents. Ok, $.18 after tax.

They had 2 on the shelf, they BOTH came home.

Now, what do I do with 2000 rivets?

Press Brake (finally)

2010-05-26T00:13:00.000-04:00

NOTE: This has been a long, LONG time coming, I originally posted this the week of June 16-21, 2006 (yes, 4 years ago) on the Shop Floor Talk forums (http://www.shopfloortalk.com) and since the server that I hosted the pictures on went away I’ve promised people on and off for years that I’d put it all back together with the original pictures so they can see what I did. That said, I finally sat and did it, and actually I fixed the pictures to work correctly in the original post and am putting up a slightly edited version here.

A second thing to note is that since this was originally a forum post there was some conversation that I’m going to attempt to clean up here, which might make things disjointed since in some locations I posted pictures to answer questions. Also, this was 7 days of posts to the forum adding a little bit as the work progressed, so most of this was written not knowing how this will finally turn out which results in some vagueness in the beginning/middle.

If you want to see the original post it is here as long as they don’t move it.

I started putting together a pan/box press brake type thing (is there such a thing? There will be soon, the point being that the blade that does the bending can be replaced with one that is different lengths if I need to bend into a box or pan shape with sides). The flat plate here is going to be the base and I’ll have some 1.5” angle welded to one side for sharp bends in sheet metal and some round stuff (probably heavy wall tube actually with round stock in the middle 6” to reinforce the center when bending heavy stuff, I don’t have enough solid round stock sitting around for more then a few inches and this is going to be a “no buck” project) welded to the other side for use with radius dies, bigger bends…

The holes in the plate were punched by the “previous owner” (a local welding shop that occasionally lets me dig through his scrap pile, I showed up and asked if he had a small scrap of ½” big enough to cut a turbo flange out of and he gave me 2 22x12” plates like this off of his scrap pile. The base plate is 22x8 (the width between the posts on my press is just over 22", maximizing my bending capacity for sheet metal), and you can see that the punched holes bent the corners a little bit, I straightened those in the press later on.

The shoe is actually only 18” wide (I’ll take care of that later, I have a plan) because that is what was left of that side of the plate after cutting out that turbo flange and working my way around another row of holes. The part that fits over the foot of the press is a chunk of 1-3/4” roll bar tubing salvaged from a roll bar pulled out of a race car, the slots in the side were cut on my little 4x6 band saw and welded with my little HH135. Oh, I cut all the ½” plate with my Rigid angle grinder and taking my time only used up 2 cutting wheels.
Not bad for a small 110V welder, huh:

FWIW, I checked after I fit everything up (it actually fit tight enough that you could tap it into place and didn’t have to hold it) and after I got it welded and I got no measurable bit of the tube being out of line with the plate, and only about .002” offset to one side…

I’d say that is way more accurate then it needs to be.

There is a problem here that someone might be able to help me with, those dark spots near the weld are real, they are actually dark sooty spots. What was happening was that running the welder full bore with a lot of wire feed was necessary to get nice welds on the heavy stuff, but as I was doing it the wire would actually melt the tip and would quit feeding, where I would get one of those dark sooty spots, get pissed off, pull out the pliers, open the welder, get the thing unmeleted, file down the contact tip, play with the feed…

I wish I could figure out why I’m melting tips. I’ve had a similar problem running some hot, big, overlapping weaved welds with a friend’s Lincoln SP 135, but in that case instead of melting the tip and screwing up the wire feed I actually had the last 1/8” of the tip just melt and disappear into the weld bead. Yea, I am running these welders at wide open, but the contact tips are also used on bigger welders so there has to be something else going on.

I ground the top and bottom edges of the shoe flat by hand using the 9” disc sander on my HF combination belt/disk sander:

That’s actually dirt on the ground edge, it’s really nice and shiny, measuring it it’s dead on 90* to the plate and there is about .008” difference between the middle and both edges- good enough. The top of the shoe was dead on where the socket for the press foot went. The other sides were trued and then nicely rounded over with a flap wheel (yes, I know, I’m anal retentive).

This is where my plan starts coming in (sorry for the cell phone pics, easier the dragging out the digital camera every time).

Those two pieces are some rails that I salvaged from a massive tape robot I dismantled at Sally Mae (real life I’m a “computer guy” systems/network engineer that quit that job for the time being, works at a speed shop, does systems/network consulting work afternoons/evenings and takes on some occasional custom fabrication jobs “in my spare time”). They are cad plated and I’m thinking are probably hardened and predrilled, they used to be what the robotic arms rode on in the tape silo.

I cut 2 sections of them 22” long (see, I’m telling you, I have a plan) with the holes staggered (the hole in one lines up with the center of the space between 2 hole in the other). I’ve drilled and started tapping the shoe to match these holes a little like this:

Actually, when it’s done the 2 rails will hang down below the flat edge of the shoe about 1” and be bolted on (the reason for offsetting the holes, so the bolts for each side don’t run into each other), the end result is that I can loosen the 2 rails and use them to clamp in any blade or die I want, so I can make them for sharp bends, radius bends, and even short "fingers" like a pan brake would have so that I can bend enclosed boxes/pans.

So my second real question… holding the shoe over the press “foot”
Originally I had the thought that I’ll drill and tap 2 3/8 course thread holes in the top edge of the shoe, and then use some hardened 3/8” all thread that I have, thread that into the holes and then drill matching holes in the cross rail that the hydraulic ram sits on in the press, so I could bolt it on using 2 wing nuts when I want to use it (even setup some stop nuts so I can make sure that it stays 90* to the base plate).

A bit cumbersome but safe and should be effective.

But, after searching for something to make that pocket out of, that tube is conveniently EXACTLY the same id as the foot on the press, so much so that it’s actually a slight press fit onto it (it stays on if you get it more then ¼” over it, but amazingly it’s such a smooth fit that it doesn’t mess up the paint on the press foot). With that nice a fit I’m almost tempted to use a set screw (use the same head size as the bolts for holding the 2 rails so I can have one dedicated tool to do anything I need with the thing, or maybe even weld a T or knob to it) or drill the whole thing, press foot and tube for a pin.
Any thoughts what would work best?

I played with it and another project instead of going to sleep… More fuzzy cell phone pics (they come out better if there is more light), but I figure that if I lost anyone in the descriptions these should catch them up.

Here is the shoe drilled and tapped for the rails… I used the center hole to line up both sides so even if I was off a fraction the holes would still line up:

I just put it in the press to hold it while tapping the holes… man, I need sharper taps or softer steel…

And here are a couple of pictures of the 2 rails bolted on and everything lined up. At this point I just need to make the blades (quite likely I’ll do one or 2 and save the rest for when I need them, and add the angle iron to the top side of that plate and the round pieces to the bottom. There is enough room between the 2 rails that whatever side I’m not using can drop down in the gap so I can make the base plate reversible:

You can see here what I was talking about in the earlier post, that tube fits the foot of the press so well that it stays on there without moving. It’s actually tight enough that you can’t knock it off but you can sort of slowly twist it off without that much force. Again, I still haven’t decided which way I’m going to hold it on.

You can also see that it does fill the whole 22” of the press very nicely, there is just enough clearance on the sides that you can get it in without doing any real gymnastics, but that’s it. In the fourth picture I posted you can see a white sheet leaning against the side of the sawhorse, it’s a sheet of Teflon that I’m going to cut up and turn into pads for the side rails of the sled on the press, should just take up all the slop in it without allowing it to bind or rack.

Another thing I haven’t decided is that I’m probably going to make most (all?) of the blades for the thing out of ¼” plate… should be plenty with the rest of this holding it rigid, and it will make “tooling” for it cheaper. Since the gap between the bolt on rails is ½” I’m debating if I’m going to weld a strip of 1/8” to the inside of both of the rails and make the gap between them permanently ¼” or if I should do that to the blades and build them up to ½” where they slide in the pocket made by the rails.

I probably won’t have time to play with it today, but I should finish it over the weekend…

(A large part of this section was originally responses to questions asked by others on the forum, I cut out what I could without loosing information or making it unreadable)

So you guys are still out there… good to know I’m not alone…

Melting tips… yea, I’m running .023 wire, volts cranked and feed between 5-1/2 and 7-1/2 (out of 10, the only thing I’ve run faster on is with aluminum) depending on what is happening how it looks/feels (yea, I end up welding a lot of heavier stuff with my little welder).

Spatter, very little, I welded that wearing shorts sitting down with it over the edge of a trash can (read practically in my lap without getting burned) and the tip and guard/cup around it are staying relatively clean. I’ve got a tub of anti spatter gel but I’ve never used it since the one time I did with someone else’s welder I got the impression that the stuff dripped off into the weld and honestly I never really have much of a problem with build up. It seems like I can run miles of bead between cleaning tips and usually that isn’t because it’s too dirty and I’m having performance problems but because I’m anal retentive and just want it shiny.

Stick out… donno, I’ve been running pretty tight. Seems as I back off I loose power and penetration with the heavy stuff so I get in there, probably about ¼”. In this case the joint was basically a 90* angle/T joint so I couldn’t get all the way in, I doubt that I was closer then somewhere between ¼ and 3/8”. Really, in general I find that you have to keep things pretty tight with the little welders to lay a nice bead that doesn’t stick up too high.

Huh, I’m not sure what to try… my instinct is towards more wire speed (which should make for more spatter), or I think I have some .030” ER70S6 floating around (which I usually avoid since these little welders seem really tuned for the .023 stuff)

I think that I may have partially solved my problem. I found that ¾” black iron pipe is almost exactly 1” OD (seems like most of the press brakes that are sold use 1” round stock for the die), and that ½” almost fits inside it (sch 40 for both), like this:

(notice that I cut a little slit in the ½” to fit over the seam/weld on the inside of the ¾. I also ended up carefully cleaning up the outside of the ½” on my belt sander making it slightly smaller… would have been much easier if I had access to a lathe at the time)

This is actually what the thing looked like: I cut the ¾” the full length, 22”, and then cut pieces of the ½”, 12” long to reinforce the centers, then I cut a groove up the middle of the ½, freehand, first with a cutting wheel and then I widened it with the edge of a grinding wheel in my monster Rigid 4.5” angle grinder (If you’re used to most of the HF grinders or like the typical Makita or Dewalt and you pick one of these up you’ll know what I mean. It’s got a reasonably sized housing but the thing is much more powerful, you can actually hear it spinning stuff up to a higher speed… the only one that I’ve used that was close was the 8.5A Milwaukee which I actually returned because of awkward ergonomics. FWIW, this Rigid was actually made by Metabo):

Heh, not bad for freehand, I have a better picture of the groove, but this one shows the end better, you can almost make out that I put the groove right dead on the weld seam figuring the tube was a little thicker there and I could cut a much larger groove without cutting through (It wouldn’t support the outer tube as well if it had a cut that could be squeezed) if I cut into the weld bead.

Now since the OD of the ½” is just a little too tight a press fit for the ID of the ¾ (it would work if you only had a piece about ½” long, but there is no way that the press would press 12” of it through. I could only get about 3/8” in with a 3lb drilling hammer when I test fit it), I actually took and ground it to size on the belt sander. My anal retentiveness kicking in again I actually measured them in 4 places and made sure that they were dead on to the accuracy of the dial caliper, shooting for a .002” interference fit (If I can press it together I don’t have to make any plug welds). This is what they looked like:

They pressed together perfectly, and even well lubed, after sitting 5 min they took a tight enough set that I couldn’t move them at all with the press. Took me about a 45minutes of puttering around to do (sort of messing with other stuff and playing with the dog… at the same time) and I have just over 1” OD and right around ½” ID now, I don’t think I’ll crush these easily.

There was a request for a pic of what I was talking about earlier, here is what I was going to reinforce somehow:

Now I’m going to probably still weld that angle iron to the bottom of the die, not worry about reinforcing it and use that side for more precise bends in thinner sheet metal, and weld the round dies to the other side to use for heavier pieces. I measured and made sure and both will just fit between the rails horizontal rails of my press and I’ll probably add little tabs on the sides to automatically center it when I drop it in.

So it’s done… sort of (done in the sense that it’s useable as it sits and I have other stuff to do so it will probably get used and modified/finished/painted some more as it goes).

This one shows a whole mess of things at once:

You can see that I added some spacers on the inside of the jaws to close down on a smaller blade. They have a threaded hole and are held in (not that they really need it but to make bolting it together a simple operation rather then trying to line up 5 pieces…) with the one bolt in the middle of each of the side rails.

Also, the only stock I had that I felt like using for the blade was some 3/16”, so since there was a ½” gap between rails the closest spacers were also 3/16”, but since I wanted to grab the blade and make sure that the blade is straight I ended up having to shim the side/clamping rails out with that combination. After digging for a while for something like some washers right around .030” thick I found that the bandsaw blade that I ripped most of the teeth off of in the trash can measured right around .028” (it was supposed to be .020”, grr harbor freight…), so with a little cutting and drilling it was declared a winner, you can see what I ended up with in that picture. With the teeth facing up the combination clamps the 3/16” thick blade perfectly.

Here you can see what I ended up with for the die assembly, and you can also see the blade:

Each side of the blade is beveled at a 50* angle so the included angle ends up being 80*, after thinking about this for a bit I just rigged a jig on my belt sander with 2 vise grips and a chunk of steel, making the angle perfectly repeatable across the whole length of the blade. The back side is just rounded so I can reverse it and put a nice radius bend.

The die, well, the angle iron on the top side in that pic is spaced apart about 1/8” and I ran a grinder through that gap to clean it up and pretty much consistent the whole length, this lets me do really sharp bends in thin stock, the other side lets me pretty much do anything else. I ended up doing some math and came to the conclusion that 2.4” spacing for the tubes will let me bend anything to greater then a 90* angle so I measured 2.5” and then put a new grinding wheel in the angle grinder and ran it up the inside of that line, making a trench maybe 5/16” or so the length of the piece that the pipe sat in to be welded (think a trench for the tube to locate in till it’s firmly welded). It ended up just about dead on where I wanted it when it was welded together.

Here is the whole thing assembled:

You can see how the parts stack together:

Finally, this is the whole deal in the press, with the angle iron side up for fine work:

And with the round side up for everything else:

You can see that I still haven’t really decided on retention, and really, it’s such a nice fit for the time being it really doesn’t need it.

I putzed around bending everything I could find all last night and it showed no signs of coming loose. I’ll probably just drill it and pin it just for safety reasons, but as of right now it’s not necessary.

Most of these setups have some sort of springs and side guides; from using the thing they don’t appear to be necessary with this setup, it didn’t show any real tendency to try torque over or do anything weird. The only issue like that that I ran into is that the shoe assembly is really heavy, enough to stretch out the return springs on the press carriage so that it does not retract the last 1”.

I plan on taking the carriage apart and modifying it. I’m going to add pads to the side guides and make some kind of bushing to fit the head of the jack into the pocket in the top of the frame tighter, right now both have about 1/8”-1/4” slack that is just annoying. When I do that I’m going to shorten the links that hold the springs to hopefully get it to return the whole way (note, that never quite happened like that, I ended up converting the whole thing to air over hydraulic, which added another set of springs on the cylinder and took care of all these issues).

One of the welds on the base plate/die is sticking up enough that when I have the angle iron side down it doesn’t want to seat perfectly flat… I’ll have to grind that down.

While I’m on the subject of welds I think I figured out my tip melting issues. I tried a few things with the .023” wire and finally had best results with some of the antispatter gel and the wire feed around 85-90… REALLY flying. The problem is that I was getting some really (I mean REALLY) crappy looking welds (they were structurally fine, but I couldn’t get them to look nice to save my life) like that (the bad ones are all on the round die side, facing away from the pictures. I’m not showing them to anyone ;-) ).

I finally decided to give up on the “the little 110v welders are optimized for the .02x” wire” thing and tried some .030” ER70S6…

WHAT A CHANGE!

It was a slight adjustment to get nice welds with it (it’s much faster and much more heat), but after the 2nd or 3rd bead I got to a happy place and started zipping along. I was still on the hottest tap (4) and the wire feed was still at a fast, 55, but hell, it worked, that’s how I got the welds like the ones on the front of the tube/plate in the last picture. I was surprised that I never ran up against the duty cycle of the little welder, I did end up generating enough heat in the thing that I actually melted the top 1-1/2” of the trash can I use next to the bench in the garage, which surprised me since if the welding table is tied up I often cut and weld on top of it and have never melted it before…

Hewlett-Packard/arvato digital services llc- Can Customer Service Get Any Worse?

2010-03-22T19:30:00.000-04:00

Last spring I ran across a great deal for a i7 workstation from HP - they were offering a $350 discount off of their workstations, which were already at a decent price, which ended up working out to the machine costing roughly 1/2 of what the best I could do shopping the deal sites out there. Great.

Secondly, I was happily running the Windows 7 pre-release demo on a few other machines, so I carefully timed the purchase to happen on the first day that the free Windows 7 upgrade for new purchases was offered (June 26th), which was something like a day or 2 before the sale was ending. Great again…

IF I EVER GET THE WINDOWS 7 UPGRADE

Now, having to deal with computer hardware, software and related companies day in and day out at work I can give you absolute horror stories about a few of them and their absolutely abysmal service/support, but I’m I’m going to rank these guys as tied for first for the absolute worst, or at least most frustrating.

(I’ll save some of the others for later, I’m sure that a lot of IT people could probably name my top few easily, the funny thing is that the other absolute worst one sends you an email invite to fill out a survey after every time you contact them, and the never, I mean _never_ give you good support, follow up (other than the survey) or do what they say they will do).

Of course the whole upgrade procedure is more complicated then it really needs to be, I don’t understand why the couldn’t just keep a record of your sale and send it out when it was ready, but lets ignore that for now. Their procedure:

fill out online form, according to their website that makes the status: New = order placed; proof of purchase not yet received.
they verify it and require a confirmation/proof of purchase. That upgrades your status to: POP Received = proof of purchase received but not yet validated; processed within 7 business days of receipt
you supply a proof of purchase (there are a number of ways that you can do it, one of which is you can email them a scan or screen shot of your original sales receipt, which is what I did). Once that happens (mine happened on February 22nd) you go to: Accepted = proof of purchased validated, and you move on to: In Process = preparing order for shipment. Typically 3-5 business days.

and that’s it… I’ve never made it past that. I’ve called them 6 times now in the last month, the first few times was told that it should show up with a shipping number on their site within 24 hours and it never happened. Since then:

Thursday 3/11- was told that they are very sorry for the delay and they will expedite my shipment and FedEx it, I should have the tracking number within 24 hours… nothing…

Tuesday, 2/16- was told that they were very sorry, they don’t know what happened but they will expedite it and FedEx it out, that I should see it within 2 days but the tracking number on their site might not get updated before I get it. OK… these people answering the phones are worthless morons, but so far I’ve been nice to them… not sure why.

Thursday 3/18- No package. I call them. First I get some line about no records of the expedite, then I talk to the supervisor and get “our expedite department is busy, it could take 4-7 days for them to process the expedite (huh? that is longer than the total time expected from their normal service!!!), at which point I got pretty irritated with the idiot on the phone, got passed to another agent who told me that “they would like to expedite my order but their computers haven’t been working all afternoon so they can’t even see my order and will update it later when the computers are fixed” (how did the first 2 pull up my order if that was the case???). Finally I ended up talking to someone who identified himself as Peter Leonardo, the manager of the department who assured me that he was going to personally take care of it and I could expect to see a tracking number Friday or next Monday and my upgrade FedExed to me on Monday or Tuesday.

Monday, 3/22 (Today)- Surprise surprise… no tracking number. Maya and Alex assure me that they will process my order expedite. Nope… tried that already. Tried that THE LAST 3 TIMES. They keep acting like they don’t understand why that is problem. Finally Alex tells me that she will take care of this personally and I will have email from her with my shipping information in the next 2 hours. 5 minutes later I get:

Hello Mark,

Thank you for your continous patronage to HP and your interest for the Windows 7 Upgrade Program.

You are receiving this email as a follow up for your order.

We are now working on your expedited order. We'll be sending you another email notification once your order has been shipped. Rest assure that we have you on our priority list.

Best regards,

Alex

Windows 7 Upgrade Program

Alex, you have an hour and ten minutes left to do better than that.

10:50pm update- Nothing… what a surprise.

The Great Linux Experiment

2010-03-06T19:34:00.000-05:00

Ok, maybe it won’t be so “great” but I’m hoping that it will be useful to someone besides just me, in my case so far I’m rather surprised, but more on that later; most likely, later posts, I suspect that this is going to turn into multiple posts, if not an ongoing thing.

So, what’s the deal? Well, a lot of you probably know that the Windows 7 demo expired after last weekend, at the end of February. I few days before that I started looking around the house realizing that I’ve accumulated quite a few machines, all of which were happily buzzing along with the Windows 7 pre-release.

One was my work laptop, that one isn’t a problem, that got a corporate copy. Another is the i7 desktop, which was specifically ordered a few hours into the first day that a free Windows 7 when it comes out upgrade was offered (I will note I’m still waiting to get my upgrade for this machine… 3-5days has turned into 2 and a half weeks now)

My wife’s laptop… well I think that should get a memory upgrade and Windows 7… but my thoughts there are falling on deaf ears. I’m pretty much ignored there until the machine breaks, then get paid attention to for as long as it takes for me to come up with a way to recover the data on it. Oh well…

The rest of the machines aren’t so clear cut.

2 of them are just small, old laptops, function wise not much more than netbooks. One an X40 Thinkpad with 1gb ram, and the other a similar dell with 1.25GB ram (as 256mb mounted on the motherboard). They basically get dropped in random places around the house and are used to RDP into whatever actually has the ability to do what I want to do, or to check up on other machines.

There is one more laptop, again, roughly the same age, a T series Thinkpad with 2GB ram in it. That one lives in the family room because it’s the only machine I own with an S-video out, which is easy to hook up to a composite input on the TV (if I’m using the projector setup I can use SVGA…). Yea, it’s old tech but it’s just not _that_ important to me… eventually we’ll get a newer TV, but there is no rush there. So this machine really as no reason for existing beyond being a movie box.

Then there is one more that I care about, an old desktop with, are you ready for this, ok, here it comes, a P4 and 512MB (before anyone says anything, all of these machines went through XP, Vista and 7 iterations, and this machine was fine and quite useable for what it was). This one sort of replaced my old domain controller/file server as the “everything I don’t want to tie up a machine that I will actually work at” machine. I use it for torrents, it has a few external drives hanging off of it making it a file/media server, it runs some auction sniping software and assorted other noise. Oh, and this is my connection from the outside world, I route RDP connections in to this box so if I need something from home when I’m not here that is my way in.

(Next up: The Rules of Engagement)

Ch-cha-cha-changes…

2010-03-03T18:15:00.000-05:00

Ok, it’s time to make a change.

I’ve had all sorts of cool ideas about what to put up here and haven’t got it here because I just didn’t get along with the various blogging site software, making posting stuff up here just painful.

I’m hoping Microsoft’s Live Writer will be the end of that. Actually, that’s part of the reason for this post… I want to test how well it works.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with the blog post besides the fact that I’m testing what Live Writer will do well.

Have you ever seen icicles like this? These were from a couple of weeks ago after the series of storms that we had, that is a full length window, I’m guessing that longest icicle is probably 9-10’ long (it goes a couple of feet past the window, and the gutter is a few feet above it). The picture was shot in the dark with long exposure and tripod, the ice is catching light from the lamp hanging next to the back door on the deck below the window.

Secondly, I’ve been avoiding posting work (as in computer/IT) related stuff here. I think that is going to end.

For those of you that don’t know I’m an IT guy working for a government contractor (those of you that do know and are local are thinking, “Really, isn’t everyone around here?”). Anyway, my original thought there was “After 8, 10, 12… hours of being at work why the hell would I want to do anything even vaguely computer related when I don’t have to.

Well, my adventures from the last few days has changed my mind about that. I think that at least one of my faithful 2-1/2 readers might find my continuing adventures there interesting, and I’m hoping the rest of you will be willing to sort through them in exchange for more regular useful car, machining, things catching fire and shooting through walls posts.

I’m betting my blog crazy wife would suggest just starting a second blog for a different topic, but I’m not sure that it makes sense if I’m not posting something even close to regularly. For that matter, I’m just as capable of making a computer into a smoking pile of junk in the bottom of a crater as I am a car or the average chunk of steel… see, I even have a theme to follow.

Bare (bear, or beer as the case may be) with me I’ll figure this out eventually…

Rest in Peace Diana Cat (1994?-2009)

2009-08-19T23:37:00.008-04:00

We'll miss you.

Turning on a...

2009-02-17T20:19:00.006-05:00

Ok, this might be exciting if it was the first thing that I ever turned on a lathe, but it isn’t. I don’t own a lathe…

_It is_ the first thing that I’ve ever turned on the Bridgeport mill. Basically I set it up with an R-8 arbor mounted 4” lathe chuck, and then clamped a lathe carbide tool in the vice and used the quill downfeed to feed it past the lathe bit, the setup looks like this:

FWIW, that finish was the result of a .027” depth of cut. I intended to do another clean up cut, but when I measured the piece that it was supposed to press into I made the mistake of measuring a scrap of the pipe that was cut off next to a weld so it measured smaller than a new piece of the pipe (for those of you that don't know, welding ‘shrinks’ the piece), so I ended up with the fit that I wanted without the clean up cut that I thought I was going to make. Otherwise, it was done with the Bridgeport head pulleyed all the way up (2850rpm), but with the VFD set at 10hz, making it roughly 475rpm (the heavy cut was interesting because you noticed the torque management on the VFD kick in as it hit the heavy part of the cut to maintain the set speed).

What’s really neat about about this setup is that since the Bridgeport table has a DRO on it, I can quickly cut identical diameter parts just by zeroing the X axis and feeding the table over (effectively, feeding the cutter in) till the DRO shows .0000”. I can also cut any angle relative to it that I want by rocking the Bridgeport head over to the angle I want to cut and using the table Z axis feed to make the cut.

If anyone is wondering what it is, I couldn’t find black iron threaded caps big enough to cap the ends of some pipes, and the store couldn’t thread that pipe size either, so instead I found caps that almost fit inside the pipe and am going to press them into the end of the pipe with the press and then weld them in to seal them up. That will look a lot neater than threading on caps anyway. When they’re done they’ll get a couple of fittings welded to them and a valve added to the bottom and be used as moisture separators/drains for my air lines.

Effective Uses Of The Bridgeport Type Mill – Precision Measurement Supply

2008-12-27T02:05:00.005-05:00

I ran across this instructional video trying to find info about cylinder head milling fixtures online, and ended up renting it from Smartflix for $26… advertized as:

"This Three Volume Video Series Is Loaded With Tips On How To Get
The Most From Your Bridgeport Type Vertical Mill"

With a retail price of $80… you kind of expect something at least semi professional, ESPECIALLY since these guys have a whole series of instructional videos. WELL, that's not what you get. The rest of this post is a slightly edited version (mainly to remove/fix context specific stuff to make it make sense on it's own) of what I posted as a review on the smartflix site, which I somewhat suspect won't get posted because of being long and critical, we'll see:

On Smartflix site you can give a video 0-5 lightbulb, I gave it 3. I have to emphasize, for the most part this DVD set is such a hideous turd that there had to be something good here to get me to rate it anything above a 0, so I'll start there.

The good:

He does give some different and useful approaches to common automotive problems. Other reviews have called it "meatball machining," but I will argue that there are times that you do what works best, and if it's not the "correct" way of doing it, well you live with it.
He does give some OK advice on what accessories are good places to spend money for your mill.

The bad:

They're listed as 3 x 90 minute DVDs??? Did I get the right ones? They all have big long dead spaces at the beginning and especially end and I finally actually tried checking the time on the actual content and got under 50minutes for all of them, I think the shortest was just over 36minutes if I remember right. This should be a SINGLE DVD, and charged as a single DVD rental.
Probably close to 1/3 of the total content is an advertisement for PM's products. I mean common, "here's our headholding fixture…" "here's our flycutter…" "we're going to use our alignment tool again…"
Ok, I'm willing to overlook a lot for good technical information, I mean, put a guy in a shop with a DV cam and I'll watch it if the info is there, but this is a bit ridiculous. The sound level is roughly 35-50% of what it should have been set at (if you're watching this on a laptop with wimpy speakers it becomes a real problem), there's tons of noise, especially in the 3^rd dvd and the picture leaves almost as much to be desired as the audio. Again, I'll put up with all sorts of cruft to get good info, but at the price that they're charging for this thing selling a few DVD's would pay for equipment to produce _much_ better quality output. Along these lines, I can deal with a dog walking in and out of the picture, or our "host" stammering a bit and figuring out where he's going with what he's talking about, but, come on, you couldn't stop for a 30 seconds to let the ice cream truck pass so you're not trying to talk over the music???

So, did I learn something? Well, yea, I think I did, but most of what you see on YouTube or similar sites is better quality. It's really a shame, since it's obvious from watching the host of the video (I believe his name was Adrian Pendergrass or something similar from listening to the introduction) go through the his motions that he's quite familiar and comfortable with what he's doing and has some good information to share.

Mona A La Mode

2008-11-11T16:53:00.004-05:00

So someone sent me a link to megamonalisa which got me thinking… How do you make a recognized masterpiece better? (I guess if you’ve been paying attention till now you might say “FIRE!” or explosives… maybe… huh…)

I could only come up with one good answer… everything is better with ice cream, right? What do you think:

BTW, vote for it if you like it, I'm waiting for it to show up HERE and will add a link when it does

2300 Pounds of Good Karma

2008-11-03T16:56:00.005-05:00

I keep hearing it… “tools are good karma.” Ok, damnit, I need some good karma.

To that end, I brought home a whole big pile of karma yesterday. Actually I made a deal on it on October 22nd, but wasn’t able to get it moved till yesterday. Man was the waiting hard. All the while Deker reminding me that “with a mill you could be dangerous…” (note: I can be dangerous with a dull spoon, but I know what you mean).

Anyway, here she is sitting in her orginal home, a Bridgport J-head, with a DRO, power feed on the X and Z, and a bunch of little stuff added in:

The original owner, John seemed like a really decent guy that had a good thing going, those pictures are taken in his home shop, he’s a CNC machinist for a defense contractor but makes those brackets that hold street signs to the cables over the tops of intersections out of his home shop. I always thought that there was some big company somewhere that did that, but as far as I can tell he supplies most of the mid atlantic/east coast.

I was in a weird position trying to negotiate a deal. First he started at a really decent price, after a little bit of discussion he immediately came down $25, that was it, but the longer we talked the more little bits of tooling… he added to the pile (the stack of stuff on the table was where we started, he ended up adding a few things). He finally added a cool but worn, modular shell/face mill to the assembly and Deker sort of sealed the deal by saying something like “well even I’ll have to say that that’s worth more then whatever difference we were talking about.”

Anyway, when I showed up to pick it up, what I thought was John’s negotiating technique (instead of going down in price, adding goodies to sweeten the deal), well I’m not sure what it was. Part of it was clearly that his new CNC setup used a different collet size so he had no use for anything with a standard R8 collet, so he kept adding whatever R8 stuff that he found, including a few drill chuck collets and other goodies. Some of it was he was cleaning stuff out and figured he could get rid of it and I might find it useful (along those lines was a big, relatively heavy steel cabinet with shelves in it, similar but slightly heavier to one that I already had in the basement from when a friend of mine got me in to help liquidate some of the equipment from a bank’s server room), and some of it seemed to be him just helping out someone just getting into machining (a few things that he added like an indicator set and holders…).

The cool thing about it is all the goodies were that they were mostly good, old school, American made stuff by the major players, with the only exceptions being the Sandvik Modumill (the shell/face mill, they’re made in Sweeden), the enco hold down set, and the vice was a knockoff of a Kurt type vice.

Deker hooked me up with a friend of his, Tige, who is also a knifemaker/blacksmith that works as an equipment rigger, and we made arrangements for him to meet me with his truck and equipment (and wife, I could only guess that she was bored) to move it.

Loading it was basically the opposite of unloading it with the exception that John had a John Deere with a set of forks and had already gotten it out of the shop.

Anyway, here’s the mill in the truck with Tige. A couple of interesting things here, first, those little dolly’s/lifts are really cool, a 2 piece steel frame that slides over itself with a bottle jack that lifts the claw half of the frame. Once you strap the 2 of them on there you can roll it around fairly easily. The second thing is check out the strap holding the 2 together, as well as the rails in the side of the truck… all of his straps had some quick snaps that snapped into those long rectangular holes in the sides of the dollies and truck rails. I think that I’ve seen those in moving vans, but I’ve never seen the straps that match them:

Here’s me acting as a counter weight… my fairly steep driveway was actually the biggest problem we had. It doesn’t look like it, but I’m pulling pretty hard just to keep it in place on the liftgate. In the truck we tried muscling it around and with Tige pushing and me pulling we weren’t able to move it at all, but he could prevent it from rolling. With me pushing and him pulling we could move it a few inches at a time, but after getting it to move a few inches I couldn’t stop it from rolling back to take a break. Part of the problem was that one of the 2 dollies had a wonky caster that didn’t want to straighten out, but in the end we finally gave in and had Christina grab the come-a-long out of the truck and we hooked that to a strap around the mill and around the end of the tailgate. Once we got it moving we were able to yank it back onto the liftgate (you can see where I kicked the strap/cable puller over to the side/of the liftgate):

A note for anyone that gets stuck doing this sometime: A bridgport looks like it’s going to be back heavy with the big cast iron base on the back of it. Turns out it’s actually very front heavy since the base is hollow, but the knee, table and head are big, solid pieces all hanging off the front. Every time we shifted, lifted it, bumped it over something… it tried to flip over frontwards, and I’d bet that if it went more than a couple of inches before you caught it there’d be no catching 2300# or so of top and front heavy cast iron from flipping over. If you’re thinking “simple, crank the knee down and table back against the column, you can even crank the head back or flip it to lower the center of gravity…” Well, that would work if you were lifting it with some forks under the head assembly, but the dollies and levers we were using we had everything as far in those directions as we could get away with. The plumbing for the one shot oiler and the rails for the DRO were in the way.

A couple of pictures of it in place… since I’m putting a deck on the back of the house I gave up on trying to wedge it into the basement, not that it couldn’t go in there, but I don’t think that I could get it back out with a deck over the basement door. I also don’t think that the basement floor would support it. I kept having people tell me that the normal pour, roughly 4” slab down there would be fine… well, the slab in the garage is something on the order of 8-12”, reinforced with a fairly tight mesh of rebar and I swear you could hear it move and shake as we levered it off the wood that we set it on to get the dollies out. Finally setting it down felt a lot like what I imagine a shock from an earthquake would feel.

Another note for those out there moving/acquiring a bridgport… they list them somewhere north of 2200#, I’m guessing that with all the options this one is around 2300-2400#. The other thing is that they take up a lot of space, you need roughly 6x6’ worth of floor space and most sites list them at 82-83” tall… that is for the standard motor models… ones with a pancake motor like mine has is much shorter, right around 76-77”.

Anyway, anything this big probably needs a name, but I don't really have any good ideas yet...

Halloween: I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire…

2008-11-03T14:10:00.005-05:00

Who’d of thunk it (who was it that used to say that? With my luck it was probably someone annoying that I don’t want anything to do with)? If I knew that there were so many superheroes in my neighborhood I would have felt much safer. With the exception of the four foot tall banana (who I believe was a 3-1/2’ tall hot dog last year, really freaked my dog out), it was almost like the Justice League and the institute from the X-men had exploded and it was raining superhearos…

So what did I do?

What else, played with power tools and fire… FIRE GOOD! (creepy laugh…)

It all started with a rather crappy day at work, which should have been over much sooner than it was. All I have to say about that is there are some people that being able to pass out a few of these products would save me a hell of a lot of time and not result an much less getting accomplished by them:

Anyway, the end result was that instead of the couple or more hours that I thought I’d have to carve my pumpkin, I was left with something more on the order of minutes.

Time to improvise… I grabbed the pumpkin, headed down to the basement, grabbed the sawzall and the cheap jigsaw that I didn’t like and went at it.

Let me tell you, it was magic, I’ve never carved a pumpkin so fast. I’m not joking, I had the top off in less then 5 seconds, and the whole thing was done, washed out and 2 candles in it in about 20 minutes, including some minor fine tuning using a large carving knife.

What do you think? Here are the results (this was shot with the lights out and a long exposure on the camera):

The amazing thing was that it wasn’t even that messy… I just took the air hose and blew all the pumpkin guts out of the saw and scooped all the seeds and stuff into a big bowl for cleaning and roasting later.

Speaking of roasting, I couldn’t help myself… I waited an hour or more after the last Trick-Or-Treater passed… I had the idea planted in my head and it was going to happen. My wife saw it coming, and was thinking either nothing will happen (I have no idea where she got that idea, something _always_ happens, it’s just a question of how big the mess is to clean up), and had the good sense to move her innocent, unmolested pumkin out of the way, and even put the dog on the leash in case she got curious (Oh, I forgot to tell you guys about trying to rewire the heating element in my wife’s towel warmer. Well, you can guess how that went, bare wires and electricity. I was surprised that she barked at it…)

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. My jack-o-lantern was going to suffer a tragic accident… I mean come on, if you’re going to stick a candle in some pore sucker’s head and set him on fire you need to do it right, immolate the sucker, make black smoke shoot from his eyes, flames shoot 4’ into the sky, make the flames so bright that the lid of the pumpkin is glowing! (these were shot with all the lights on, after a few shots I sped up the exposure trying to catch the shapes in the flames making everything look artificially dark)

Ah, a flaming tribute to the great pumpkin! He was a good pumpkin...

I’ve got tons more pictures, a few really showing the shapes of the flames well (I've been looking for some good pictures for painting/drawing), but no, I’m not going to tell you how I did it, I don’t want to hear that someone was a dumbass and tried it and set their shorts or their house on fire (well, really, I do, and I’d probably laugh, but I’m not going to be the one that someone is going to say said it was a good idea…).

OTOH, I’m already hatching plans for next year… I think I can make it shoot green flames… huh, how about fireballs….
;-)

I’m Cursed to be a Car Guy

2008-09-08T00:46:00.002-04:00

Well, if you’re reading this I’m betting that you know where I’m coming from; it’s the basic curse of a tinkerer. Ever notice if you know how something works and can fix it it’s less likely that that something is to work? The car guy corollary to this is the more cars you have the less likely you have one that actually runs and could be driven, at some point you hit a critical mass where you have enough cars that nothing runs and you have to borrow something from a friend if you’re going to get to work.

So my dad has been teaching my 4y/o niece Alexandra:
Dad: “what does your mom drive?”
Alexandra: “Lincoln!”
“what does your dad drive?”
“Audi!”
“what do I drive?”
“Intrepid!”
“what does your grandma drive”
“Zaichik!” (Ukrainian for Rabbit)
“what does your aunt Christina drive?”
“Sunfire!”
“what does your unckie Mark drive?
“JUNK!”

Labor Day Weekend

2008-09-03T18:16:00.000-04:00

Well, last weekend was Labor Day weekend, sort of the last opportunity for people to get done what they haven’t done all summer. It (and the couple of days before it) also seemed to be a good time to find signs/labels that were somewhere between disconcerting and humorous, but at the very least fit the “what were they thinking” category.

In my own case I was blessed with a kidney stone the size of a Buick (somewhere between 1.1-1.5cm across) that I got broken up on the Friday before, so I spent a lot of time miserable and at the same time was bored enough that I felt like going anywhere to do anything. Let me tell you, if you manage to go through life without the opportunity to experience the pleasure of kidney stones you’re really missing out. There are certain bodily functions that you hope to get the same thing every time you perform them and when they become shrouded in mystery and punctuated with an assortment of excruciating pain... oh, and I can’t leave out that the wonderful surprise of being told that the “pain may radiate” which ends up resembling sticking your nether regions in a light socket while clamping them in a vice and indiscriminantly smacking them with a hammer and that is the GOOD part because you know that that bit of pain is almost over... well, let’s leave it at that.

Anyway, sorry for the bad celphone pictures, and as always, they're all clickable for a larger version:

This was at the local Lowes, now remember, I’m in MD, not in Mexico, not in Spain, you know, a few miles north of the Capitol Beltway... WHY THE HECK IS ALL THE WRITING ON THIS DISPLAY OF AMERICAN FLAGS IN SPANISH???

On a lighter note, a the same Lowes in the parking lot I think I found the perfect place to send my mom for her “golden years,” what do you think:

(just kidding mom)

Finally, for you British comedy lovers, this one is for you (mainly because I doubt that anyone normal would get this anyway), I found this one at Home Depot’s upscale decorating center:

I couldn't have said it better myself - That seems like a good note to end on.

TPI Tuning - Hot Rod June 2000

2008-08-20T16:00:00.001-04:00

This is a very popular and often asked for article on the f-body and corvette boards about tuning a TPI setup (like the L98 used in the f-bodies and corvette, and the LB9 in the f-bodys) and it is usually pretty hard to find a readable copy.

It was written by Ray T. Bohacz and originally published in the June 2000 issue of Hot Rod, and I’m sure has been republished a bunch of times since. This copy was originally scanned by Sean Oetting (black89ws6 on thirdgen), which I took, cleaned/straightened up and resized.

Enjoy!

Rebuilding a 9 Bolt, 7.75” Borg Warner Cone Style Posi

2008-03-12T00:19:00.019-04:00

This is basically a cleaned up version of a post that I made on thirdgen.org, the title links to the original thread. Like in other cases, I got a number of requests to put it back together with pictures, so here it is.

As always, the pictures are all clickable for a larger version.

Rebuilding the posi: There are pretty good, detailed instructions in the FSM and in the tech section on this site ( thirdgen.org ). Look them up, they’re a good start.

I’ll add a quick nutshell description and note where I did things differently/suggestions:

Disassemble: unbolt the axle retainers, pull the axles, pull the center section cover, remove the bearing caps (make sure that you remember what side everything came from so you can put it back like it came out), pop the carrier/ring gear assembly out of the housing. Note, this will require some prying and turning and make sure you save the side preload washers/shims so you can reinstall them like they came out. Be careful with them, they are machined out of a cast piece and can be brittle.

To perform the rebuild you need some kind of fixture to hold an axle. I took a chunk of wood, cut 2 shoulders to sit on top of my vice jaws, drilled a hole through the middle and then sliced it in half on the table saw to make some clamp/vise pads for the job:

Through the whole deal use the axles as alignment tools.

Before you disassemble it check this spot out:

It’s hard to see in that pic, but if the end of the cone is contacting the end of the case there your case is worn out of spec and you’ll either have to do some machining to it to make it work or get a new case.

With it sitting on the bottom axle, housing bolts up, unbolt the smaller, center bolts and pull the end of the housing/ring gear off.

When you do that you’ll see this (except you’ll have it in the case side, not the ring gear side like in this pic):

If you lift the spider/cross/preload spring assembly off you’ll get this:

If you lift that side gear out of the end of the case you’ll see the pocket in the side cone where you put the shims, there will be one on each side of the case between the side gear and the cone (unfortunately I don’t have a good picture). You can use any shims that are small enough to drop into the machined area between the 2 and still fit around the axle. I usually use 10bolt or ford 8.8” pinion shims. Actually, the last time I think I just stopped by the local machine shop and got a stack of whatever left over shims they had approximately the right diameter.

* This is where I differ from the instructions on the site or in the FSM, forget measuring clearances or anything else, just load both pockets with as much shim as you can get in there and still reassemble the case completely. I’ve never seen one of these get so tight it doesn’t work right (if anything you’ll want it tighter, no looser) and you’ll be kicking yourself if you do any less and start spinning one wheel again sooner then you had to. The shim packs will probably have to be the same thickness on both sides.

From there the reassembly is the opposite of the disassembly, just make sure that you have both axles installed and fully bottomed before torquing all the bolts, if you don’t line up the splines in the side gears and cones before then it’ll be next to impossible to do with it assembled.

Now if the case is worn out of spec, you can still usually get some life out it. What happens is that there are some rings machined into the end of the cones and the case to contact if the case is worn down too far, if you cut them down you can get some extra life out of it.

This is what it looks like if the cone and case ends are worn to the point where they’re grinding into each other, case side. The numbered parts were originally put in for something else, but they do point out the points that are contacting and wearing that aren't supposed to:

Cone side:

What I’ve done before is machine those down till they no longer contact (as a matter of fact, I think I machined them down till I had over .125” clearance). Again, case side:

Cone side:

FWIW, I did the inside of the case on a drill press with a surfacing disk and I did the cone side with an angle grinder by hand, just played with them till I got them within about .005 of flat… If I remember right I ended up cutting close to 1/4" total to make sure that everything fit (yes, this thing was way outside of spec, and yes, it still worked well after all this).

Eventually, after a few more rebuilds the cones/case will wear enough that they get too thin, and I started getting cracking around the opening that I mentioned to check above to see if it’s worn past spec. When that happened I pulled it all apart, bevel ground the sides of the cones, centered them up in the housing using the axles and welded them in, like this:

Bending Box Sections

2008-03-10T18:44:00.001-04:00

(as always, all the pictures are clickable)

So the Deker said onto me: “do you know of anyone that can bend box stock out of flat sheetmetal? Can you do it with your press brake?”

(pressbrake:

more on this later)

Without much thinking I responded something like “Sure, why not? Pressbrake, big steel 20ton crushy thing. Good tool of destruction and changing the shape of things that don’t like to change shape…” (I can be quite eloquent sometimes when I’m not mumbling something incoherently. I mostly do that at work because I they heard what I was mumbling…)

He went on to describe how when they’ve been making Damascus billets they’ve been putting the steel into a steel box, sealing it up to weld it together and if the box could be made of the same steel that they’re making the knife blade out of it would save them the hassle of cutting it off the blank after they forge weld/hammer it. Real metal fab/machine shops were mentioned…

Huh, this is starting to sound like a challenge. I end up doing a lot of things just because I can when someone else doesn’t think so or can’t…

So later when I got home I thought about it some more and I could think of a few ways to do it that seemed kind of ugly and brutish but wasn’t sure what would be the results. Of course, I have a way with ugly and brutish, (or is that dumb luck? I keep forgetting) and the first thing I tried that I really expected not to work too well came out quite acceptable:

All I did is mark 4 sections and threw it in the press brake, bent the two ends up first making a U twice as wide as it was high, then making the middle bend around the head of the press brake. The worst part about it is that I had to hammer the piece off of the head of the press brake when I was done.

That’s a 2.5” square, it looks like I could go as small as 1.5” or so with the dies that I have but with a smaller bottom die I could get sharper corners (those are roughly 3/16” radius). I have roughly 22.5” capacity, which is more than long enough.

Unfortunately in the process I broke my 4x6 horizontal/vertical band saw (more accurate, the blade guides that were threaded into the thinnest part of the casting stripped their threads out), so in the process of further modifying, redesigning and replacing bits of it (more on that later also) I ended up needing to test it so I cut some end pieces.

Next thing I know I found myself in the basement with this thing clamped down on the drill press and the wife shaking her head “you’re not actually…”

“Yep”

I even made patterns for it so I can reproduce it exactly ;)

The Dog Ate... WHAT? Part II

2008-02-28T17:50:00.002-05:00

Deker’s alternate title: My dog ate my......mail truck?

I said it last time, here it comes again… this is one of those, “you gotta see it to believe it” things…

In part one we had a brief introduction to Deker and Judge. Well, here is judge, isn’t he a handsome pup?

And here he is playing with deker’s other dog, Justice:

I’ll skip the picture of Deker, the dogs are more photogenic anyway, but how about a sample of their work (and there's 3 more just like it):

Yesterday I got a call from Deker about him leaving work, something about a mail truck stuck in his driveway. I just don’t know what else to say (every time I try I end up laughing)… just click on the link to see the whole story or I’ll copy the text here in case the link goes away:

Dogs hold mail carrier 'hostage'
By STEVE MARRONI
Evening Sun Reporter
Article Launched: 02/28/2008 10:36:52 AM EST

Maybe the theory comes from cartoons, but it's generally believed that dogs and mailmen are archenemies.
That theory was tested Wednesday in West Manheim Township.

Police responded to 960 Grand Valley Road after rural-route letter carrier Robin Barton called from her cell phone, telling police she was trapped in her vehicle.

Barton, who usually does not cover that route, drove up the long, steep driveway to the Dekelbaum residence to deliver a package. As she turned around at the top of the hill near the house, a Rottweiler and a pit-bull mix attacked her Jeep Cherokee.

"Yes, I was frightened," she said later.

Barking and growling, the dogs ran around in a fury and attacked her tires. They snipped, bit and snarled and flattened three of them. The owners were not home to round up their dogs, and Barton was trapped.

The dogs, Judge and Justice, stayed in the yard, not letting her go.

An underground electronic "fence" kept them from leaving the yard, owner Stephanie Dekelbaum said later.
When West Manheim Police pulled up the driveway, the dogs charged the cruiser, barking and striking at one of the tires. Police pulled back down to the road so as not to get stuck there with Barton.

Police Chief Tim Hippensteel said he had never seen anything like it before.

Two police cruisers were parked at the bottom of the hill. Judge and Justice stood watch over the Jeep. The canines had the high ground, but were stuck there because of the electronic fence.
It was a standoff, and they had a hostage.

Police couldn't reach the homeowners. The only way to save Barton now was to bring in an expert, Hippensteel said. They called animal control officer Terry Hemler.

The plan, he said, was for Hemler to shoot tranquilizers at Judge and Justice. With the dogs unconscious, they could bring in a tow truck to haul out Barton's jeep, rescuing her and ensuring the 10 houses left on her route would get their parcels that day.

Tranquilizers were not needed, though. Dekelbaum drove her yellow Mustang down the road, and was surprised to see two police cruisers, with flashing lights, and an animal control truck outside her house.
She pulled up the driveway, got out of her car, and the dogs turned instantly from Cujos into happy, bounding puppies.

"They're generally sweethearts," she said, blaming a recently acquired tire toy for the attack on Barton's vehicle.

The dogs followed her into the house, frolicking and playing, glad their owner was home.
And Barton was free.

Despite being trapped for nearly two hours, she still likes dogs. In fact, this letter carrier breaks the stereotype about dogs and letter carriers. She raises beagles.

Dekelbaum apologized, and Barton left with acting postmaster Bobbi Pfaff to finish her route.

Sawing Pork

2007-12-15T15:44:00.001-05:00

What do you do when you have a 6lb pork iceberg and really need 2, 3lb blocks? How about when you find that your razor sharp you can shave with it hatchet is not enough to go through some hunk of flesh? How do you make a fine, powdery swine snow that will make your rottie puppy think she’s in heaven? What is the correct blade for cutting frozen blocks of meat? How do you supply your neighbors with plenty of reasons to say “what the heck is he doing now?” How do you send your wife running for hot mits while covered in pork?

Well, for these and other questions that you don't dare to ask your mother…

YOU’VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE!

A Super Sawzall + 10” Craftsman, rough cut pruning blade will saw through that 6lb porksicle like buttah…

BTW, the hatchet probably would have worked but after a few swings I came to the conclusion that the swing that it would take to go through cleanly would have probably broken the counter. I wonder why they didn’t build that thing right in the first place…

Now where is that free-loading cat?

Making a Non-AC Heater Box for 3rd Gen F-Bodies

2007-12-14T05:39:00.002-05:00

ALL RIGHT ALL RIGHT ALREADY

You guys have my attention. Actually, you’ve had my attention, it’s just that I appear to have the only copy of Word that seems to properly save autorecover backups of documents (Might be a thing to note for anyone using the new SP1 for Office 2007 or the current RC for SP3 for XP, but this machine was getting cranky before I installed them).

There are at least 3 threads out there now with “where did your non AC heater box pics go” since the server that was hosting them crashed and burned… honestly I never expected anyone to miss them.

Anyway, lets discuss this for a second, put up some info on how I made it and some pics. I’ll have to apologize ahead of time: the whole thing might be a bit disjointed, especially the pictures, since I’m taking it from 3 different places. I’m also sadly missing the pictures of the actual fiber glassing since between the resin that sticks to everything and the very abrasive dust generated cutting and sanding ‘glass I probably would have destroyed a camera.

For those of you that aren’t coming from the assorted forums looking for this, some quick background. Basically, for a whole slew of reasons the 3^rd gen f-body guys have been getting rid of their air conditioning style heater boxes, “my AC doesn’t work and I don’t feel like converting to a new refrigerant,” just to clean up the engine bay to get rid of some clutter, make room for modifications or because it’s more of a race car and what does a race car need AC for? For those of you asking why does a race car need heat either I’ll say for a consistent drag car you need consistent engine temps, with a heater you have a ready built, small radiator and fan assembly to use for just that; that and to keep your hands warm on those mineshaft, incredible conditions "this thing will run the best times ever" nights- ask my brother, he removed his.

In my case I originally did it because:

It didn’t work
It was extra weight in a car that I owned for no better reason than to go faster
It took up tons of space in a place that I could use for a turbo down pipe.

To give you some idea, here are a few pics of my “new” project car with it’s complete AC box. Not only is it impressively large (it’s really about 2x what you see in the pictures, you can’t see the bottom half that extends almost all the way down to the frame rail, hell, you can’t see the frame rail, the firewall, and you can’t get to a large part of the engine on that side), but all the stuff around it is actually connected to it.

In contrast, here is my older car which has now become a parts car that has my box in it. There is actually more wiring harness around it because this car has been converted to use a different ECM, programming and 2barr MAP sensor (mounted on the firewall above the air box with the green plug), and you can see what an enormous difference it makes, you can see all of that side of the engine, the firewall, frame rail…

Now there is another solution. A few f-bodies came from the factory without AC, but this has it’s problems also. The non AC boxes were borrowed from the S10’s and were steel, unlike the FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastic) AC ones, and the steel ones just didn’t look right, they stuck out like a sore thumb. They also had a smaller fan housing, which used a smaller fan and motor which were setup for 3 speeds as opposed to the 4 that the rest of the setups have, meaning different wiring and dash pieces that you have to dig up somewhere. Lastly, this is the big one, they’re not that rare, but people have gone insane with their prices. You can find them pretty readily on ebay or assorted message board sale boards, but I’ve seen dented and rusted out ones going for $100-250.

So there’s a perfect reason to waste a bunch of my non-existent free time stinking up the house and killing a few of my dangerously lacking brain cells with fiberglass resin. Lets get dirty!

Actually, first a quick note about the design (sorry for the false start). This thing would have been much easier to make with some pleasant curves and nice lines, and usually somewhere in that universe you hit an elegant state of “form follows function,” but that was not one of the goals here. I wanted something hard and angular, with the occasional awkward curve, like the original box it was replacing. The idea was that it should fit in. I’ve had guys very familiar with these cars closely inspect around under the hood trying to figure out how I made so much space on that side never even noticing the “different” heater box. This is a case of “form follows GM.”

So here is what I started with:

There’s 2 significant things here that you might not immediately realize. First is that the AC fan box is the right size and fits the 4 speed fan that we want and has the shape that we want, so lets use part of it… I found a convenient place to cut it from the rest of the box. Second, I took a piece of cardboard and made a pattern for the base plate. One that covered all the necessary holes in the firewall…. Once I had a shape I liked the fan box got taped to the top of it (you might be able to see it better from this angle:

At this point I had to work out the rest of the shape, and cardboard was the perfect medium. I took a piece and scored it to make the hard, square corners, glued/taped it down to the cardboard base plate and added whatever shapes I needed to make the thing up. At this point I took and blended/sanded/ground the fan box edges so it’s shape flowed smoothly into the rest of it.

Now to use the whole thing as a plug mold, as you can see in the pictures it needed a shiny surface, it got wrapped in duct tape. Without a shiny surface the fiberglass would have never released from it. The whole assembly then got stapled to a big sheet of plywood which was wrapped in plastic wrap (again, the resin won’t stick to shiny smooth surfaces). If I really intended this thing to be reusable for multiple uses I would have given it a heavy coat of shiny paint or gel coat to make it shinier and less sticky to the resin.

Next the whole deal got slathered with a few heavy coats of car wax to act as a mold release. You can use proper mold release, but anything that gets a good layer of wax where you don’t want things to stick will work.

Now this is where the fun part started, basically I put on layers of resin and ‘glass cloth, carefully pressing them down to squeeze all the excess resin out and to make sure that the cloth was tightly following the lines. Since this thing had all these different shapes and cloth doesn’t stretch like mat does I used it in strips, kind of like paper mache.

The 2 layers of glass gave me a light, thin, and adequately strong part to work with. The more layers I’d put on top of the plug mold the more it would cover/obscure the shape of the part, so at this point I popped it off the mold… well, more accurately, since the mold was not totally smooth I pulled up on it and the mold came up with it, pulling the staples out of the wood. The mold stuck where the edges of the tape was, but I wasn’t really stressed about it, and broke it up and pulled it out (again, if I meant it to be reusable I would have given it a heavy coat of shiny paint).

At this point I went to turning it into a useful part. The base plate put a ridge around the lower inside of the part which was easy to follow to cut out and sand to shape. From there I gave the part it’s structure by applying multiple additional layers off ‘glass mat (it’s easier to form into intricate shapes) mixed with cloth (stronger, lighter, really not necessary for this, I ended up with a part that was super light but strong enough for me to stand on) to the INSIDE of the part.

I didn’t care at all about the finish on the inside of the part, but the outside I did. I gave the outside a single, thin layer of mat/resin since mat has a random pattern to it and doesn’t have the same tendency to “print through,” as cloth. Then I did what I consider “cheating” the final finish, saving me a good deal of the sanding and other finishing that I would need otherwise by taking some bondo body filler, mixing it with some ‘glass resin (both are polyester based products) and spreading that thinned out goop across the top surface of the part, letting it smooth itself out.

What was left was sanding, sanding and more sanding, some paint and finally cutting out and drilling the holes for the motor/fan assembly and the coil assembly (plate that screws to the top of the duct to cool the coils used for fan speed control). Slap it together and you’re ready to go.

This is what it ended up looking like (before cutting out the hole for the fan speed coils):

Here is a view from the inside assembled:

And finally, a view from the top assembled, with the motor cooling hose installed, all screwed together:

Dayton SA240 240W Subwoofer Amplifier Bass Boost Modification

2007-12-12T05:48:00.000-05:00

Well, it was time, I got tired of using a test rig to power a subwoofer I built years ago so I decided to go with something better.

For a lot of people Parts Express is pretty much the standard for DIY speaker building supplies and their Dayton subwoofer amps have become pretty much the standard for powering home built subs. I decided the biggest of their old school, original series amps, the SA240, 240W one was the way to go. It helped that it was on sale for $99.

Anyway, the amp is available in a couple of different versions, one that supposedly has a flat response curve and the more popular version that has a 6 dB bass boost at 30Hz. I probably would have just ordered the one with the bass boost considering I’m using a sub that has what amounts to a tiny driver (8”) in a huge room (if I remember right it’s something like 19’ x almost 30’), but as luck would have it, they were out of stock. What do you know, I plug it in and decide “Yup, I think I’ll need to play with the bass boost settings.”

Interestingly, Parts Express is quite willing to provide information about choosing component values to change settings, but at the same time a lot of people tend to complain that they are too difficult to modify. For those of you out there debating about the thing, I decided to take a few pictures and put up a quick description so you can decide yourself if this is something you want to get into. Since I’ve build a few speakers and am always changing things and “voicing” different combinations of driver, enclosure, source… combinations, that of course means that I need to over complicate the solution so I don’t have to rip the whole amp apart every time I want to change something.

So here’s a chart of the documented settings for the amp:

Simple enough, change 2 resistors and it does something different, so let’s have at it.

The resistors are located at the center of the pre amp board, the board that has the crossover frequency and gain knobs on it as well as the RCA jacks. To get it out you need to remove the 4 main case screws, disconnect 2 jumpers, one going to the line level jacks and the second going to the main amp board, and then remove the screw that holds it to the back of the face plate, a second screw that comes in through the front of the face plate in the middle of the RCA jacks, the 2 knobs and the nuts and washers holding the pots to the front face. This is all pretty straight forward and if you’re worried about that part than don’t even consider doing the rest. The worst part is that the output wire is glued to its hole in the back of the case limiting the amount of room you have to work around inside.

So once you have it out it looks like this:

I realized that I don’t really have anything that gives you a good sense of scale with these things, well to give you some idea the big monster looking resistors on the bottom left are your typical ½ watt resistors, usually you don’t see them much smaller than this unless you’re talking about surface mounts.

So here are the buggers we’re after, they’re almost right in the middle of the board:

And no, I don’t know who the rocket scientist was that decided to put the capacitor lead right over the top of one of them, and yea, it’s at least as much in the way as it looks in that picture, probably more.

Here is my solution to only having to disassemble this thing once and still be able to tinker with it. Instead of desoldering the resistors and replacing them with the new ones, instead I replaced them with sockets making them easily removable.

Actually, I should give credit to my brother, these were his idea. These are pins used to make IC sockets. I was originally going to use the pins that you use to make computer cable “DB” style ends, which are very similar but taller.

People will give you all sorts of suggestions about the best/neatest way to desolder stuff like this, and I’ll admit, I tried some desoldering braid to start with but got nowhere with it. Not being much of an electronics freak, I didn’t have the typical desoldering irons or even a proper soldering station, so I ended up just flipping the board over in a Tupperware (to give the board that sticks out off of it somewhere to go), grabbing a generic 30watt Weller soldering iron and just heating the pins and pushing them through their holes till the resistors fell out.

To put the pin sockets in I put the socket in the hole and while holding the board in my hand and using my forefinger to push a toothpick up against the socket holding it in position on the board and feeding in solder and the iron with whatever limbs I had left over.

The end result looked sort of like this from the back:

(look towards the center of the board and you’ll see a few solder joints with dark flux around them, the flux was eventually cleaned off before the board was put back in the amp).

From the top you can see the sockets, and you can also see the R35 and R36 labels on the board where the resistors have been removed. You can also see the lead from the previously motioned capacitor carefully bent around the bottom right socket:

And finally a picture with some 1/4watt, radio shack resistors installed (if you know what a normal, small resistor looks like this picture might give you some sense of scale, one set of the pins had to be bent back under the resistor to fit in the socket spacing. I purposely left the leads on the resistors a little longer to allow for easier insertion/removal during testing, and when I finally decide on what values I like I’ll probably put little tape over them or a dab of glue if I have any indication that they might vibrate out (I really doubt it).

How Tacky is That?

2007-11-27T16:25:00.001-05:00

ZDNet's all-in-one LCD PC

So what exactly is so special about this thing? 2 pieces of hardboard, 2 1x slats with some cheap computer hardware screwed to the back of an LCD, held together with what looks like drywall screws. Looks like something a high school kid would make as a "look at my cool custom PC" project or a slightly cleaned up version of the "pile of junk I was trying to fix" that you can find in every IT guy's office from time to time.

If he was going to publish this on such a well known site the least he could have done is maybe cut a ROUND fan hole (or any regular shape that the fan would fit in), made some straight cuts, maybe extended the sides to cover the gap between the back and the box so it really looks like it was meant to be one piece…

Though it does give me an idea. Skip the LCD, spend a little more on the video, make the case look like it was built by someone with more talent than a 3y/o using the claw end of a claw hammer (maybe bend a nice steel or aluminum cover with a plasma cut detail/plexy window or at least finish the wood nicely) and you have a nice, component sized multimedia PC to plug into your TV/stereo (I know, "home theater").

Removed

2007-10-24T11:36:00.002-04:00

(original content removed by request of the individual who it
was about)

In The Beginning

2007-10-24T00:31:00.000-04:00

There was nothing.

Isn’t it amazing how with all the sound and fury that appear to be part of life how it often amounts to heaping piles of nothing?

For a long time there was nothing, I setup this space a LONG time ago, but why, no car guys read blogs, people who play with metal don’t read blogs, I don’t read blogs. What will I put here, why bother? Hell, it didn’t even seem to make sense to sit down and consider what to put here.

Well, it wasn’t quite nothing, there was a little something, there were mumblings:
“You really should write some of this down and arrange it in one place”
“Man, you have some of the best stories”
“The cat has to go fast, really fast… do you think she needs a helmet?”
“What did you do and why is it on fire?”

(you’ll learn, my life involves fire, explosions and twisted little bits of metal… really I don’t understand why more people’s lives don’t, it just seems to happen naturally around here)

And then it happened, a week or so where I had something to comment on almost every day and worse, my wife is out of town. My coworkers are also. The dog… well she’s trying to pay attention, but she’s really just hoping that somehow this turns into a game, and the cat, well that freeloading beast, she’s actually snoring. Cat’s aren’t supposed to snore.

So that’s it. I’m here. Let’s see how this goes. For right now the plan is to blog about things as they happen, and then maybe pad those things with older stories, and even occasionally with notes on how something works, how to do something or how I did something if someone asks.

We start with a whimper…