Lewis's Life

Finally moving forward on the railing. I got lots of drilling and tapping done today. All of the pickets for the flat section of railing and one of the staircases. Tomorrow afternoon I will twist one third of the pickets (about 30 total and only 1/2 inch square), followed by a little wire brushing and these parts will be ready to paint. I can squeeze the painting in between art car events this weekend and then the dry time on the paint will not be holding up any work. I like it when things come together.

I need to double check my measurements on the second staircase. I usually measure a couple of different ways to ensure accuracy and I am missing one measurement. Then it will just be a quick day to have those pieces ready for paint as well.

This groovy little fixture worked out the first time. It holds the pickets at the correct angle for drilling and is adjustable for different staircases. It is definitely a keeper. I also like anything with lots of screws. Screws make things look official.

I have to twist about 30 half inch bars. I was thinking about how to do it in the lathe without overheating anything important but the whole time I had this nagging feeling that I owned some thing lathe-like that would be far superior. This morning as I was getting started on the tooling I remembered that there was a pipe-threader tucked away in the storage room. Perfect! It has more torque, slower speeds, and a big through hole so I can put a piece of pipe in as a heat shield.

I spent the several hours digging it out and cleaning it up. It is a nice old machine but I would not be surprised to hear it hadn't been used in 25 years. I cut a couple of pieces of pipe for my fixture and it works fine. There is a box of dies with it that includes machine threads as well as pipe dies, so I am set for anything up to 2-1/2 inches.

I spent another couple of hours making a really cool clamping fixture to hold one end of the half inch square bar. I was almost done with the socket to go into the machine itself when I saw the problem. These machines are set up so that any length of pipe can be fed in from the back but pipe threading rarely requires more than a couple of inches of movement. The longest twist that I am gonna be able to make with that machine will be 6" long.

If I had started twisting this morning I probably would have been finished already.

The good news is that I own a nice pipe threader. Maybe in the future I will mount it to another table so that I can use it as a twisting machine. Someday when I get some of this time stuff I have been hearing about.

The steel rack in my shop sucks. It has sucked ever since I moved into my new place. The original design was attached to the wall in my first shop and never really intended to be free standing. I had meant to reinforce it for several years but dropped that plan because I was gonna reorganize everything after I bought the shop. So I continued on with my crappy rack until today.

I have a couple of big jobs that are supposed to get me through the summer and help pay for Burning Man. In the ordinary course of my life this amount of work would be finished about mid-September but I gots stuff to do! Today they brought the steel for these jobs. The packing list says that this was 657.344 pounds of steel. Apparently that extra third of a pound was just too much for the rack.

The driver and I unloaded it all by hand and stacked it on rack. I had just signed the slip and turned around when it happened. The far end of the rack started to bend and steel started sliding off of it. I took one step back to be out of the danger zone and watched it happen. I believe I may have said "**** me running" but I am not sure. The very last thing to finish sliding down was the huge bundle of 1/2" square we had just put on the rack. It piled against my leg. I pulled my leg out and turned to the driver...

"I guess I know what I'll be doing today."

After I took stock of the situation I called Marz (my son) and explained the situation. He came over and pitched in and we got it all moved around to the old steel rack in the back in a couple of hours. He is not working right now but he has spent the last year on his own. (He took a year off before starting college.) It actually was a very pleasant afternoon. Hot and sweaty but we chatted about music and kept up a decent patter while working. The working experience has really been good for Marz. It felt like working with another adult instead of the battle that work has been in the past.

He offered to come back and help for the rest of the summer and he invited me over to smoke some hookah. Yes, I am paying him to work but that has never been sufficient incentive to get him to the shop before. It certainly helps that I am feeling a lot better about things and that I called and asked for help. (I don't think that I have really done that with Marz before.) I also noticed that he was interested in getting stuff done and looking at the best way to do the job. He was really engaged in the work in a way I have not seen before.

So I finally got rid of the crappy steel rack and I am closer with my son. Not bad for day's work.