Valerie Dawnstar wrote:Dave Jacke & Mark Krawczyk are currently writing a book on that very topic. Please see http://www.coppiceagroforestry.com/
I just 'spoke' with an arborist friend of mine who said coppicing won't work to keep the EAB away as it is very small itself and attacks small branches. So forget it for that reason. But maybe it would make it easier to spot... ?
But you cut off and burn those smaller branches... sounds a lot like host denial cycles like Salatin talks about...
When I boil deer skulls I add Arm and Hammer Washing Soda to the water. Makes short work of flesh. However if you boil to long it will eat smaller bones and cartilage.
Add about a cup to a good size kettle of water.
Mike Centex wrote:Looks like they found a full time farmer based on the updatedwebsite. https://millicanreserve.com/
FWIW- I have a food forest project going in an hour north of Millican/BCS this fall. Will be hiring some part/time weekend help. Prefer a person with food forest experience/knowledge, and if you own a pickup, even better!
I'm an electrician by trade & training. I have been shocked many times by many forms of electricity.
What your experience sounds like, to me, is an unbalanced neutral burn. An AC current shock doesn't feel like a cut; it feels similar to how your cell phone feels in your pocket when it rings on vibrate, but with pain. What an unbalanced neutral burn means is that the white/return wire in your apartment is broken somewhere, and the unbalanced voltage is finding it's "home" via a grounded surface (the oven cover) through your body. However, if this happened when you touched a cool electric stove-top burner, that implies that the stove top burner is either 120 volts (which is possible, even with a 240 volt oven) or one of the two breakers for the oven was still on. Either way, it's a major public safety issue and a code violation. 240 volt devices, such as an electric oven, are required to have a double breaker that trips both "hot" wires at the same time. And a broken neutral is, at a minimum, a huge fire hazard; because current finds a way.
Call your city's code enforcement, or renters advocacy department. There's a high chance you will need to move soon.
EDIT: An electrical burn is mostly an internal thing, but there will be an entrance and exit wound. So your thumb will be sore until it recovers from being partially cooked on the inside. Somewhere else, probably somewhere on the same hand will be an entrance burn, but that could be spread across much more surface area. When I was an electrical apprentice, we used to cook hot dogs this way. It took about 6 seconds to fully cook a hot dog.
I was am thinking to build the normal corner brace with two H-braces 90 degrees to each other.
One H-brace is done today with a 12" round log buried 42inches for the corner post.
So then the other side of the corner brace would have half of the arched gate post incorporated into it and
the usual brace piece and diagonal wire.
I have not cut the post yet but might tomorrow. It will be 12" round at the bottom and pinned to the other
half of the arch with rebar or bolts and some sort of lap joint. Seems like enough mass to hold things up, but maybe
some thing in the mix throws the corner off. If it is on the donor tree a wye shaped piece of tree might help.
Glen, mulling it over the gate post closer to the corner might want to pull up out of the ground. Thinking about a wye
shaped horizontal brace piece pointed towards the gate with a tenon type joint to to the gate post on the wye end of the
horizontal brace.
I like the idea of planting more osage, but probably should not where it will reach out to the neighbors side
The hedge row across the way from me is better than 100 years old-it takes time to
grow sizable posts. better start soon.
Joshua Myrvaagnes wrote:Thanks, hadn't thought of that. Maybe rainwater would be best?
I love that I got a reply to this from someone named "Sharpe"!!
Of course, thanks for bringing up an interesting question! Rainwater might work. Not sure what the stone is made of. I've definitely seen slightly acidic water eat rocks.
Ha, I didn't even think of that. Pretty amusing, for sure!
Do your stones look kind of like the ones pictured below? My brother gave me these, they are from China also. But instructions are in English! So I included a pic of those, in case this is a similar stone to what you have. They suggest washing the stone off and storing in a ventilated place to dry when done.
Brian Sayers wrote:Where can a person buy holding hoops for making wooden buckets that you use while making the bucket before replacing them with
The permanent hoops that you make
Brian-- The heraldic "arms" of the European cooper's guilds usually included the three main tools of the trade: the short-handled broadax to hew staves, the croze to cut the groove for the head, and the set-up hoops. That is, a graduated set of hoops in all sizes, stout enough to pound on for years, is a main tool. When I worked in the cooper shop at the Ozark Folk Center, there was already a partial set there, made by the blacksmiths of mild steel bar stock, about 1/2 inch wide by 1/8 or 3/16 thick, arc welded solid and ground smooth. These were then rounded and splayed (tapered) by hammering down on a mandrel (a heavy steel cone) to stretch the lower edge. The thickness gave good purchase for the wooden hoop drivers we used. (My teacher was from Appalachia, and his were of laurel-- I made mine of persimmon, with a few of dogwood.) But the splay was never sufficient on many of them, and I had to hammer them out and re-round them.
The set was pretty much every half inch diameter between 6 and 16, with some gaps and a few quarter inches. (I found it useful to stamp the number on them.) But for smaller and larger stuff (from tankards to washtubs) I ended up making my own out of old barrel hoops. This cut well with large tin snips, splayed well if not already splayed appropriately, and punched well with my dad's (a sheet metal worker) punch. I ballpeen rivetted (cold) with copper often, iron not infrequently, and cut-off nails in emergencies (but nail heads are too thick). A wire brush wheel does wonders for old steel. These thinner steel set-up hoops needed a steel hoop driver, though. A cold chisel ground to a square flat end works well, or any scrap piece of steel that has or can be given an appropriate grip and square end.
And a set of giant rubber bands, cut from old inner tubes and simply square knotted, completes the set. Kilby shows brewery coopers pounding wooden "truss hoops" (of ash) to draw the the hot staves together, but they must be steam bent laminations mysteriously fastened. I've had little luck with wooden set-up hoops, not for lack of trying.
The picture shows three of my old (now rusty) set-up hoops cut from barrel hoops. The two smaller ones are rivetted with copper, and the larger one with iron. The largest, rusty hoop I actually found in our back yard. This is an old cooperage town, and I suspect kids used to roll hoops around, even though the splay makes them roll in a circle. It closely approximates the bar stock hoops we had at the Center, except it's 7/8 wide. The oval white oak hoop with a plain single-lap join, is still on the block I made to shape it. It's a remnant from an oval cedar wastebasket I did. But they weren't stout enough to pound on repeatedly for set-up.
This doesn't really answer your question, except to say, make them yourself, or commission a local blacksmith.
This isn't exactly the answer to the question, but a line in a song I always remember when doing permaculture things:
'see you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself'
It was in a song in my youth (1970s) called Garden Party, I don't remember the singer
Gerry Parent wrote:No current bricolage projects to show at the moment but it did remind me of a product that any modern day MacGyver would want to have instead of duct tape.
Product report: Fiber Fix seems to ROCK so far! I used it on some tools that for weird reasons are always taped, OH MY! I don't think I'll ever need to tape them again. Wish it was cheaper, I'd love to have a case of the stuff!!
Thank you for showing it to me!
Perfect timing! We have need of a welder, to put the new the blower on John's forge!
I followed through on the suggestion above for using electrolysis for rust removal. It worked amazingly well on the first small test we did.
Setup was a tub of water, with some baking soda mixed in.
The power source was an old laptop charger brick. 19V DC, 3.5A. I cut the ends of the DC wire, stripped it back and used a multimeter to test polarity. +ve terminal gets attatched to the sacrificial metal, the -ve to the piece you are cleaning. The pieces are hung in the tub of water and turned on. We had bubbles in seconds and after about two hours the water was filthy brown with rust.
Our first test piece was the ruler part of an old steel set square that my dad has owned for 30 years or more, but the markings haven't been readable for at least 10 years. A quick scrub with a wire brush, followed by two minutes with wire-wool, and the metal was bright and clean again. Every scribe mark on the ruler was perfectly visible.
We have a bunch more tools to work on over the next week or so. I'll start a new thread for those at some point soon, with some photos.
Jordan Holland wrote:From my experience, I have noticed a quick hot fire in a cold system kind of shocks the system, and as the stovepipe/liner expands from the heat, the deposits break loose and fall free.
Lots of breweries sell that stuff for animal feed. If you have goats or cows, they seem to be OK with it as a supplement to their normal winter diet. Since I home brew, I can tell you a bit about it. You will definitely want to get some poo in there to speed up the decomposition as nitrogen is required by the bacteria that break down the husks. I used to get my husband to just go pee on the compost heap to help it along, Once its going pretty good, it will get hot so watch your heap so you know when to turn it and when to water it as it will lose a lot of moisture from steaming. If you have anything that you want to cook in your compost heap (e.g. clippings from a weedy part of the yard), throw them into the middle of the heap.
Will it need all the extra nitrogen if the grain is cracked? This stuff starts warming in about 24 hours...really quick to cook. It looks like several of the micro brews here give the stuff away. The big bourbon distillers seem to have more commercial pathways for their spent mash as the quantities are much larger. But, I didn't want corn as an input so I skipped trying those sources.
The moonshiners around here apparently get 10 50 lb sacks of barley for production.
Janet, thanks for sharing about NC BBQ. We lived a short time in NC near Fayetteville. I remember people talking about which area had the best BBQ.
We rarely eat so I never got to taste NC BBQ.
Stacey, We eat the pulled pork for a few days, then when we run out of buns I freeze the pulled pork.
I freeze my buns in small portions since there are only two of us.
Bruce, I know it tastes better smoked. We have a smoker but DH doesn't feel like using it anymore. Especially now that he got off the pain meds due to covid.
Thanks everyone for helping make this a fun thread!
I'm trying to do rough, rough math on what would be the cheapest insulation to put in myself, in the future, while also evaluating the pros and cons of the insulation itself.
I'm eyeing hempcrete, cellulose, and just traditional fiberglass. I can't say which is better at the moment, but I'll try and post when I've made a decision and bounce it off of you guys.
There's just so much to look into, so little time.
Has anyone considered how simple the moon shot was? It was not much more complicated than drawing the lead for a duck shoot. The early analysis for the whole program was done on slide rules in the beginning. The hardest part is how do you keep 3 men alive for a week or more and not have the equipment weigh so much that the rocket would not leave the launch pad.
In the spirit of the post --
... still can't keep slugs out of the garden. (Even WITH ducks.)
Once, while distracted and stupid, I put the char in without cooling it overnight and went back to what I was doing.
Yes, let's not do that! Normally, the pot get's carried out of the house on an old metal cookie tray, then we quench it with enough water to get good steam cooling happening without drowning it, and then leave it on a concrete pad which at this time of the year is reliably wet. We cheated a little for the measurements I wanted - watering the outside of the pot and leaving water in the tray until it was cool enough to transfer. The trouble was that to get some idea in real life of our "gasoline offset", I needed dry biochar and a matching bucket to tear off the bucket mass on our scale.
I have another friend with essentially the same stove as us, and I'm trying to convince him that it's worth the trouble to at least start on a small scale to learn what works, rather than immediately thinking "ginormous project that we don't have time to tackle so it will take 5 years". His wife drives to town at least once/week, and further afield every Saturday to run errands and visit her brother. She also drives a larger vehicle. If they did a pot of similar size once/day, they might off-set at least 50% of her gasoline use, and their heavy clay soil would love the byproduct after it's been composted with the horse shit they collect. Stacking functions! So far he's resistent - but I'm going to weigh a second pot of it to see how consistent it is and then send him the data and see if I can get some movement there! He's got easy access to raw material, although it hasn't been tested yet to see how easy it is to work with. I think that's going to land on my plate, but since I'll keep any char that I produce, I'm good with that. Yes, I'd love a large scale biochar/electricity producing burner that can heat the greenhouse I also don't have - but I'll settle for a pot in my wood-stove!
Next to the point where the cord goes into the motor should be a small plate, the terminals 1-5 should be in there, Attach the wires as directed by the label.
L1 and L2 will be where you connect you wires from the panel for 115 L2 would be the neutral (white) wire, for 208-240 the other color besides black or green if white is used a red marker should be used to delineate it, at both ends of the cord......if you wish to do thing correctly.
Black is always L1 and Green is always the chassis ground ...unless your working out of the U.S. or on imported equipment, then Google the wiring color conventions for your locale.
Terminals 1-5 change the internal connections of the motor.
For all practical purposes 220-230 are effectively the same voltage, if its 208 then you will draw a fractional difference in amperage and the motor speed will be marginally off.
208 voltage is the product of having a transformer wired to a wye spec which causes voltage to be a multiplier of 1.73 times any single line to ground voltage. (usually found in three phase). or exceedingly rarely it is the hi leg of a open delta wiring of the transformers.
220, 230, and 240 are the result of wiring a transformer in a delta configuration resulting in additive voltage of any single line to ground.
What all this means 220, 230, 240 wiring will all be the same, for 208, a dedicated motor is the proper solution but it will run on 220- etc.
You may need your spectacles and a magnifying glass to see the delineation on the terminals often they are just proud spots on the plastic insulator and hard to make out.
As to the cord ends ensure you have the proper cord end for the voltage you are working on!! you may have to change the receptacle to get it right but simply rewiring with the cord ends for a different voltage is a recipe for disaster. 115 equipment will not survive a test run at 220, and 220 left plugged into a 115 outlet will die over a few minutes, or repeatedly pop the breaker.
A pagefile is like slower RAM, and it can be limited due to your hard drive speed, so a faster USB pagefile can help reduce rendering time.
I have tested this out on a high-end desktop (around $3-5k) of a good friend of mine, that was purchased 1-2 years ago and is used strictly-ish for video editing. It reduced his rendering time by roughly 30%.
I have a degree in computer forensics, have been doing IT for 15+ years, and run my own IT business... This trick can save $...
There is a guy who does dowsing all over Washington state. He also was on the Discovery channel with the Alasken Bush people tc show . Here is a link to his web page www.wellwitching.com
I would absolutely use your brambles in the compost heap but it would be pretty prickly for cover in your composting toilet. No matter how hard you try you will end up with cover falling out of your scoop before it makes it into the bucket.
I would suggest shredding or chipping them. I have a wood chipper which I admit, is overkill for brambles (I know because we are awash in wild raspberry brambles), but you could get away with using a weedwacker in a metal garbage can as a shredder. It works great.
We've been doing the bucket method of Humanure composting for 4 years. I have evolved my processes sometimes, always going back to Jenkins Humanure book because he really worked it all out with his family's 30 years of practice. Why reinvent the wheel?
My only upgrade I want to somehow make is to include a way to rotate the bucket in the toilet receptacle without it having it be such a hands on process (I'm pondering a lazy susan idea). The reason is, no one but me seems to rotate it and so the biggest contributions to the bucket end up at the back. The bucket becomes 'full' when it's really not. Plus, a male urinating on the pile uncovers that large pile too readily, causing odour and need for extra cover material.
I know some people vote for "the lesser evil" between the two leading parties, when they would rather elect someone else. They believe that since most people will vote for one of the two major parties, that's where all the electoral votes will go, and that if you vote for anyone else, your vote is just thrown away. I wonder how many would change that thinking, if we just went by the popular vote. I bet the two biggest parties would still get the majority, but I wonder if other parties or independants would be taken more seriously. Maybe people would start to vote how they want because "okay, maybe they DO have a chance now". Just a thought. I don't really know if we can even guess unless we try not having the electoral vote.
Here is a cutting board I've recently redone to include the bevels. They just had a second oil drink. These bevels are 44 degrees which allowed me to leave about 1/8 inch off the top surface. They make use far easier.
I had no idea about the limestone cove, I will certainly look into that, thank you.
As for selling our production that isnt part of our plan at this time.
We would like to build one or two hunting camps and charge for people to stay and hunt our land. This of course would be on a very limited basis. Also my husband is a gunsmith, much of that work is done through the mail.
Well, there is Slab, Stem (pony) Wall, Rubble trench, pier and beam, Basement, and Gabbion; or any combination there of. Take your pick. Not all of them require loads of concrete. What it really boils down to is what is your soil, how much weight does the foundation need to support, and where is the freeze line?
I would first identify my soil type and depth. The deeper the soil to bedrock the more Potential there is for movement. The less sand in the soil as general rule, the more resistant it is to weight displacement. Is there expansive clay? Does the moisture content remain fairly stable or does it heave a lot through the seasons?
Next would be to calculate the load of the entire structure, including contents and occupants. Does it require a deep or wide foundation? Does it need to be reinforced to address stresses?
How deep does the frostline dictate the perimeter be?
Where are you building? How big do you want the structure to be?
I've had a 56 volt Ego string trimmer for a couple of years now and I've never found it lacking in power. My only complaint was that string doesn't do a very good job of cutting stiff stemmed weeds and forget cutting small trees or branches.
I modified it for a bush blade and am quite happy with it after a year of use and testing.
https://permies.com/t/100046/Brush-blade-Ego-string-trimmer
Don't forget that a quick rinse from the backside of the radiator to the front will clear a lot of that in the field. It will at least keep your moving until you get back to the barn and can blow it up properly. Shut down the engine (power off the fan if electric) and spray inside the engine compartment towards the bumper.
Lifelong hobby of mountain biking. I love it, and moved to southern Utah just because of it. I'm old school, ride a hard tail steel bike, and have just the basics on the bike. World class mountain bike trails, a ten minute ride from the front door here. I don't ride as much as I used to, and it's always just been for the fun of it. Never been competitive......well, except for a few years on Strava, but that was just cyber world competitive.
I also have an addiction/hobby for old Jeeps. My first car was a 77 CJ5 (which I still own), and my daily driver is an 80 CJ5. Fun little cars that are work to drive. My 80 has zero power anything. Everything is manual, and it takes all my attention to keep the Jeep driving down the road in a straight line. Easy to work on, and like Tereza and her car, Jeepers flock to one another when they see old iron. I've owned a few Willys wagons, and one truck. One of these days I'll get a little WWII flatfender and make it my daily driver. So simple and elegant to my eye.
Gardening has become a huge hobby in the last few years. I'm making yards of compost on site annually, and my entire back yard has become a big garden. I produced at least 50% of my calories this year from my garden, and next year will be even better.
and drinking. lol Drinking beer is also a hobby of mine. It cuts into the other hobbies a bit, so I've got to allocate less time to it, and more time to the others!
Ethanol is remarkably corrosive, to mitigate its effects, a top oil such as Marvel Mystery Oil can be added but for best bang for your buck....run the damn thing dry, leave no fuel in the carburetor, and empty the tank.
Fuel evaporates, and gets thicker, even with a top oil given time it will turn into a sludge that blocks jets and air passages, injectors and eventually delivery lines.
The down side to this is gaskets dry out, (3 - 5 years) the solution for that is to rub any cork gasket with lip balm, or Vaseline rubber gaskets usually last longer if given the rubdown too, as the normal enemy of rubber gaskets is tearing due to their bonding to metal.
Even with the minimal hours put on a yard machine, an oil change every couple of years is in order, my favorite time is before spring start up. after the first oil change a synthetic is good for longevity.
If your a political person campaigning for the removal of ethanol is a worthy cause, while its a boon to farmers it drives food and booze and animal feed costs up, contributes to the early retirement of equipment. It evaporates faster than petrol, and has far less btu,s per pound.....so what doesn't evaporate into thin air in summer heat, cost more as you travel less miles per gallon.
This really depends on your needs and wants. There are 6 major steel projects I use on a regular basis and 1 other major one in the dream world. So lets start with those. 1. large T frame hoist. 2. heavy duty cherry picker, 3. press. 4. Heavy duty rolling table, 5. heavy duty welding table. 6. Main bolted to the wall work bench. and in the dream world I want to build my own vise and my own multi-use power unit. As I am tired of breaking commercial vises and dealing with all of their flaws. As a farm equipment mechanic that grew up around farm shop and I have used these tools in various peoples shops for 35 years of my adult life plus major blocks of childhood too.
Every shop eventually needs some sort of heavy duty hoist. Basically there are 5 core choices. Cherry picker, A frame hoist, T frame hoist, pivoting beam post hoist and an overhead gantry system. Since the overhead gantry is out of most peoples budgets and needs lets eliminate that. Now I will also eliminate a post hoist simply because I have never seen one heavy enough the user didn't wreck it thru overload. In some ways they are great and in others a pain. But eventually they get bent and become dangerous to use. Now I grew up with a T frame hoist and we build a better one in my late 20's. So it would be my personal choice. Properly build A frames have the major advantage of being able to set material down outside the legs of the hoist. But the bottle necks they make in the ability to work around them and maneuver them offset that. And the final answer of course a cherry picker.
Now if your needs are really small a cheap import cherry picker will cover them. But they have so many flaws I would choose to build my own. This would probably be #1 on my build list. I have worked around 4 of them that combining the best features of each would build my dream one. As the details for that one are long I won't share unless someone wants it.
#2 on the list assuming I was working in a bigger building would be a T frame hoist. Most people cheap out on the casters for these or mount them on rails so they only move one way limiting their versatility. The current big one is one 1500# rated 10" casters and at that is still overloaded if really used at capacity. This is a serious lifting machine and the most important part is to get 4 big heavy duty casters. Suggesting aim for 2000 or 2500# a piece casters. The gusets should go to the outside as shelves etc mean you don't need to get close to the walls typically anyway. This also means you can move the trolley the full width of the throat of the hoist. The casters should be tall enough that the legs of your cherry picker can go under and your floor jack can go under the legs. The current big one is made entirely out of I beam and that is a mistake as I beam has great bending moment strength but poorer torsional strength. The horizontal for the leg needs to be some sort of box. under heavy load the caster move out of vertical as the horizontal part of the leg twists. The main chain host is 3 ton 10 foot lift and still occasionally get to much weight for it. As the hoist is 15 feet tall that means the base of the chain host is about 12 to 13 feet off the ground. That means the hook won't reach the floor with at times gets me in trouble. The ideal hoist would have about 3 more feet of fall. Now I find that mine with the single load line works in tight quarters better a hoist with a single load line would also be on my goals list. Be aware in modern affordable hoists that limits you to a 2 ton hoist as all 3 tons and above seem to be double load lines.
Choosing the next most important is tough. While I use the rolling table more the press probably saves me more aggravation and time.
The rolling table lets you get move your work are close to where you are working. Carry stuff around the shop and many other advantages. My current table is roughly 3 foot by 5 foot.(just a bit over both ways) It started out as a wood frame on salvaged dumpster casters with a piece of flattened about 1/4" oil feed tank as its top over a rough sawn 2X top. It is about hip high. That makes it low enough to work on bigger things but bearable to work on smaller stuff too. End on its caster just fit between the legs of the cherry picker and sideways the legs of the cherry picker will go under it. Saves space in the shop when not in use plus adds to the versatility when used together. The dumpster casters failed from to much load so eventually it got 1800# casters. The necessitated building a metal base although the 6x8 posts that make up its corners and 2X box top under the steel plate remain unchanged. The tiny bit of dome to the top means spilled oil does not stay on the top. Which is good except it is always running off in an undesirable location. So some sort of shallow groove around the surface perimeter would be on my dream list. The current table does not have a lower shelf but that is on the goals list. A tapered fixture for temporarily mounting a vice or specialty fixtures to the table is also on the goal list. Ideally I would like to replace the wood parts with metal simply because the wood is a fire hazard. But it has worked as is for nearly 40 years beyond the replacement of its base with metal to mount the new casters to about 20 years ago.
The press is the tool that probably saves more frustration than any other tool in the shop. It is used for straightening, bending, broaching, and all sorts of assembly and disassembly tasks. It is a standard looking flat iron side straps with channel iron head stock and bed. Just on a bigger scale. It is nearly 10 feet high with the cylinder on a rolling carriage so it can be moved nearly the full width of the press. The bed is roughly a 12 inch gap and the throat is just over 38 inches between the side straps. The ram travel is nearly 17 inches and with cold oil will do roughly 28 tons. with that much travel the bed virtually never needs to be lowered. The ram is driven by an old combine hydraulic pump and a 1 1/2 horse electric motor in an armored box below the bed. If the bed needs to be lowered the box and pump can be set out on the floor to clear that space. I would never build another press without that rolling headstock. It is simply amazing. We got a whole lot of things right in this design and screwed a few things up. Slowly getting some of them fixed. the bed extends 6 inches past the side straps. I can bend a 3 in x 3 in cultivator tool bar back to straight by blocking outside the side straps. 3 in x 1 in cultivator shanks straigtened the hard direction etc. Sill working on accessories for it. The ram is center drilled and tapped so using a simple chain adapter the press itself can raise and lower the bed. Of all the metal work I have done in the shop this is my favorite tool built.
Next on the list is the welding table. I have used many. Your work habits and needs play heavily into this one. mine is a center post type with a 1 inch thick plate for a top. It is roughly 3 feet square with a vice mounted on one side and roughly 24 inches high. It is so heavy that it takes heavy lifting equipment for one man to move it. Because the base is round it is possible for 2 strong guys to tip it partially up and roll it around. Having used tables with edge legs and boxed tops etc I would never build one. I find I really like the fact that I can clamp to all the edges. Remember this top is probably the most abused piece of steel in the shop with the possible exception of hammers. You will temporarily weld stuff to it while fixturing, you will bend and clamp stuff over it. You will cut over it. Get it hot. Use the various holes in the top for shaping, punching and bending stuff. You will do all this and more.
The final major shop feature built is a bolt in place work bench with the main vice mounted on it. Its primary work area in the whole shop. There is a whole host of criteria for this one. As you need this area strong enough to horse on hard this needs to be really solidly bolted to the walls and/or floor. This is one of the poorest designed areas in my shop. Mine is tough but has a bunch of flaws beyond. First the bench top needs to blend into a back splash on the back so you can't possible lose any small parts down behind. Everything should be nearly flat but very slightly slope towards some central drain point. Slightly raised edge so stuff doesn't run off or roll off. Liquids collection drawer immediately below the area it drains too. Probably under the vice for location. Places to mount support pipes, pipe vises, or rollers for long stuff in the main vice. Also ideally straight in the door so it is easy to get pipes, sprayer booms, sickle bars etc in to work on.
So in the dream world a long stroke vice with a self lubricating screw and thrust bearings in on the list built so it is virtually unbreakable.
The other major dream goal is a power unit using a treadmill motor built as a pottery wheel, chicken plucker, honey extractor, large wetstone sharpener when used in the horizontal position. Stand it up and turn it a bowl lathe, metal spinning tool for large pans and bowls and add some cross bars, tool rest and tail stock and it becomes a wood lathe. I have been thinking how many it could be made to do in a typical homestead/farm/ranch situation with very few mods.
A good starting place might be shelf brackets. If you take 1 up to 1 1/2 inch by roughly 1/8" angle iron and cut notch in one side at a 45 from each way so you end up with a 90 notch now heat and bend the angle iron so the notch closes and then weld the now closed 45's together. This makes incredibly strong shelf brackets fairly quickly.
Another good one might be light extensions for some of your swing arm lights. Start by building the wall bracket to take the post of your light. Now to add the extension build a pin to go in your bracket at one end. Then a piece of bar stock heavy enough to be rigid. Then another piece of pipe bored to be another socket. Weld the pin to the barstock to the socket and now because of the added length your swing arm light reaches farther.
A bit more complicated would be to build a good over arm light. A really heavy brake drum or worn out tractor flywheel for the base, a flat piece of plate to fill much of the gap in the center your base, a piece of heavier pipe(say roughly schedule 40 1 1/4 or 1 1/2) roughly 5 feet long, 2 circles of light flat plate to be your pivoting height adjustment with a build in center bolt and a bunch of holes in the perimeter for different positions, and a piece of 1/2" pipe about 4 to 5 feet threaded on one end to be your arm. Weld the base to its plate and the heavy pipe to the being sure you left a path to feed a cord into the drum and a hole to feed it up into the pipe. At the top weld one of the circles to the pipe and weld a double gang electrical box on the backs side next to the pipe. The box will hold the switch for the light and an outlet. weld the other disk to your arm pipe. Add a quartz halogen light and assemble. Now you have light that you can put in under a hood, reach out over your work table or put clear up to shine into a cab of a tractor. Now add a small wheel on the base pointed in the same direction as the arm. When the base if flat the wheel just missed the floor. But if you tip the base it comes up on the wheel and you roll the light to the next location.
Then beyond that you do all sorts of things. hinges, self closing/ self latching gates, shelf brackets, light extension arms, hose holders, heavy duty shelves and thousands of other things. What do you need today that needs to be durable and strong? Maybe you got tired of changing the chimney pipe for the coal stoker every few years. So instead you have a piece of 1/4" wall pipe the right size laying around to you build a chimney that shows no visible signs of change 30 years later. It is about goals.
Others on my welding goals list. Self starting ram pump, wind water agitator/aerator for the pond to hopefully cleaning the pond by stirring up muck and running that muddy water into a wall form to settle out building a wavy wall down the property line to be a fruit wall, oil burning furnace that avoids most of the complexity of many of the designs
To many projects, too little time and energy. But many of them are well thought out. And a few even have all the materials gathered to do them. Just keep nibbling away at the list. The press in the shop my father started gathering materials for when I was about age 5. We moved twice and I was in my late 20's when I got the press built. The design had changed many times in the mean time. So remember it doesn't have to happen all at once.
Greg Martin wrote:I SWEAR I woke up in the middle of the night last night to see black hair reaching downward towards me from the gaps in the ceiling boards over my head. I looked away then back up and it was gone.
That was me. Just checking in! Sorry I spooked ya.
Dang it Rob!!! You really freaked me out!!! 😜 (and btw....you really need a hair cut!)
