Between 705 & 1200 SQ/FT From losing everything to being cash-poor and shop-rich in "only" five years!

[GeddyT]

Another post that's going to start with a long quote from a previous one, this one dating WAY back:

I don't remember the last time we got a full week straight without rain, and it's in the forecast for Thursday, so my goal for the start of the week is to cap the siding and caulk everything so it's ready for paint. Well, it's Tuesday evening now, and all I've managed to do is cap the siding, as things went a little pear shaped a few times.

Capping siding? Since the shop has a rainscreen wall, the siding is space out off the sheathing on furring strips, and there are bug screens between the furring strips, top and bottom of the wall. On the side walls, I needed to notch a board to overlap the top race of siding and cover the bug strips. To give you a better idea, this is the before shot:



The black plastic things are the bug screens. They're just expanded plastic with a plastic mesh embedded in the top part. Air can get through, but bugs can't. To make the cap board fit nicely, I had to borrow a technique from Project Binky and use CAD (cardboard aided design):



According to MGT, these wine spritzers weren't that great, but at least the box came in handy!

Using a slice of the primed FJ cedar to dial in the table saw:



And there it is:



I am 100% certain I've spent more on cedar trim than all the framing lumber put together. It's kind of sad.

I went out to the shop today to get the charger for the mower, and I noticed some weird plant debris on the door mat. What was weird about it is how dried up and woven it looked. The mat was clean the day before, so I didn't understand where clumps of something that old and dry would have come from.

Fast forward to later in the day, and I'm calling MGT over to point out some rabbits in the yard that the dog was oblivious to (because she was waiting patiently at the edge of the bushes on the other side of the yard for rabbits to come out), when she points to something herself: "There's a nest on the shop!"

Turns out we have a problem. My brilliant solution for covering the top edge of the siding while allowing a flow path of air from the rainscreen to escape has created the perfect covered ledge on which little birds can build nests. I've been noticing a little bird darting around the end of the shop gutter for a while, but I didn't really mind. I figured a few more weeks of it's efforts and I wouldn't have to clean the gutters out this year!...

It would appear she wasn't making a very long trip with her treasures:



I'm pretty sure this is all a very recent development. Weirdly, the debris was scattered across almost the entire length of the siding vent even though there was only one actual nest. This one:



This explains why I've found poop on the siding a few times. Depending on the circumstances, I might think it's cool to have nature taking advantage of a structure and leave it be, but--poop on siding aside--I can't have the ventilation channel blocked like that.

So up the ladder I went, clearing debris from every siding cavity cap along the east wall. After a while, Ms. Builder herself showed up to chew me out:



She kept flying between that downspout and her nest, buggering off for good when I got close enough. Luckily, there were no eggs or baby birds in the nest, so I didn't feel so bad about clearing it off.

Hopefully, this little bird doesn't see today's events as a some kind of a challenge. I have a feeling, though, that I'm going to have to think of some kind of ledge defense strategy.

 

[Zippercat]

I’ve had good luck with cheap bird spikes from Amazon.

 

[kj_mustang]

Not me. I have to go out everyday with a broom to sweep the nest making materials out of the spikes at the top of my porch columns until the birds give up and go elsewhere.

 

[GeddyT]

I'm going to sum up what it's like to be me in two brief conversations. Both happened Thursday, in the build-up to a short family getaway to the peninsula. The quick backstory is I took the kids to the MotoAmerica superbike races three years in a row a the track where I usually (used to?...) ride, but we missed it last year due to my daughter's soccer tournament. This year, not only were we going to go, but I was going to sweeten the pot to coax MGT into joining us, so I rented a house on a nearby lake for a few nights. Figured we'd soak up some sun and do some paddle boarding and swimming and fishing, then hit up the races Sunday on our way out of town.

The First conversation that completely sums up what it's like to be me was a text message exchange between myself and the owner of the house we would soon be departing for. I was on my way home from a hardware store mission to pick up some shoulder bolts for a project I've been working on for my son. I got a call from a number I didn't recognize, so I didn't answer. Then I got a text from the same number. When I got home, I checked the text message, and I'm going to paraphrase how that conversation went:

Homeowner: "Hey, this is So-And-So with the lake house. Did you find the house alright and are you enjoying everything there?"

Me: "Oh, we haven't even left Bellingham yet because I remember seeing something about check-in isn't until 3:00. We won't be there for at least another four hours."

Homeowner: "Just to be clear, your reservation started yesterday. Wednesday the 25th through Sunday the 29th."

[Reminder that this conversation is taking place on Thursday. June 26th Thursday.]

Me: "Huh. Well don't I feel stupid..."

The second conversation that really sums up what it's like to be me followed shortly after:

Me: "So you're never going to believe this..."

MGT: "What?"

Me: "Our reservation for this house actually started yesterday. I've just been assuming it was today for some reason."

MGT (who, now that I think about it, acts so not surprised that I probably should have felt insulted): "Didn't you tell me you got a check-in text yesterday morning?"

Me: "Yeah, I did."

MGT: "Didn't it say the start date!?"

Me: "Probably. I haven't read it."

MGT: "You haven't read it!?"

Me: "I opened it to see what it was, saw that it was about checking in, and saved it for later."

MGT: "Why wouldn't you read that!?"

Me: "Why would I read check-in information a day early? I figured I'd just look at it when we got there and needed the instructions."

MGT: "Oh. My. God."

So... yeah. This is what she deals with every day.

As for the three out of four days that we did get to spend there, it was really windy and gray the first two. On the third day, the wind calmed down a bit, so I got out on the lake. Where I accidentally dropped my favorite rod and reel combo in 60 feet of water. Then, right after I got back sans fishing gear, MGT badly injured her shoulder in a spectacularly failed dock-to-floaty transition. We skipped the races to get her home to a doctor ASAP. She's currently drugged up and down for the count.

"But what about the shop siding birds!?" is what you're all asking, so let me tell you about that! I really put the fear of God into those birds when I tore their nests apart right in front of their eyes. Those birds didn't come back for days, and I was confident that I had the problem solved. So confident, in fact, that I didn't bother installing the spike strips that MGT bought because I had other things to do. And it was drizzling and whatnot.

Well I got rid of the nests, alright. They've been replaced by what can only be described as "Birdtropolis." It's like a continuous nest that's 30 feet long. Procrastination strikes again...

In other news, I'm pretty flush with unfinished projects. I keep getting really interested in them until I'm not, then another shiny project swims by and I chase that instead. It started with my daughter's Mothers Day present idea that she idead the day before Mothers Day because clearly she's my daughter, and we've well-established what kind of DNA she inherited. I wasn't going to show any pictures of this until it's done, but I'm not sure the site's servers will last that long, so a progress report will have to do.

Her idea was a metal frame full of flowers cast in epoxy resin. I liked the idea! I had a lot of leftover resin, and I have a big metal-cutting robot that can do way better than a simple frame. A couple hours later, and we had this:



Not only this, but soft jaws in which to accurately clamp this after filling it with flowers and epoxy so that the back plate can be milled off. The finished product would be a heart-shaped frame with translucent resin full of flowers that my daughter picked. I think she got the idea from a YouTube short or something.

Did you know that epoxy resin instantly turns any flower it touches brown? Neither did we. Until about five minutes later:



This failed gift-turned-prototype also taught me that flowers float in epoxy. A multi-stage pour is the answer. I went ahead and machined the backside off of this one anyway and gave it to my daughter for sanding and polishing (Narrator: "She didn't") as a trial run. It was my daughter that did the research on how the YouTubers were making this actually work. Turns out you need to freeze-dry the flowers first.

A couple of years ago, when my in-laws dumped a vacuum dehydrator onto us, I grumbled about the shop space it would take up. It gathered dust under Joey's wood lathe in the back corner from that day until this one. She picked some new flowers and watched some instructional videos, then she set her flowers to drying.

Three days later, those flowers were PERFECT! But I didn't have time to do a pour, so I turned off the machine and left it for a few days until I had an evening off. Did you know that dehydrated flowers rehydrate and wilt and look crappy if left in a dehydrator for two days with it not turned on? Neither did we.

Good news: my daughter was on the case. She took it upon herself to pick yet more flowers and get the machine humming. I checked on it another couple of days later, and things were amiss. There was oil spitting out the vacuum pump exhaust vent. There was an "all of the oil in the pump" sized puddle of oil under the dehydrator as well. A quick scan of the situation revealed that she had neglected to close the dehydrator's drain valve, so the pump just pumped away for days, unable to achieve vacuum, and blew itself up.

So here's what the pump looks like now:



It was super gross inside. So gross that it laughed off the ultrasonic cleaner. An overnight soak in Evaporust didn't do the trick either. I bought a wire wheel with the aim of knocking most of it off before giving it a rebuild, but rebuilding a vacuum pump just isn't the kind of job that gets me up in the morning.

What does is repairing a track idler wheel for Andrew's mini excavator. The bearings seized and melted things so badly that I had to bore out welded circlips on the Dufour. In order to get things concentric and proper, though, I would need a tool I've been wanting for a long time: a coaxial indicator. And now I have one!



Step one was just cleaning all of the junk out of the bore with the boring head. Then it was doing some research to find a suitable oversized bearing and ordering them in. Then boring to size. All of that is now done, and all that's left is machining circlip grooves to hold the bearings in place.

I also had to make a new shaft, as that thing was destroyed. I turned it from 4130, and the bearing fit is really nice:



After I machine the snap ring grooves in the wheel, I'll get a final spacing measurement and machine the shaft shoulders to space the bearings apart perfectly.

This would all be done already, but I got distracted from that project by a request from my son to get his computer monitor stand off his desk so his keyboard fits better, mounting the heavy monitor to the wall instead. Excavator wheel be damned...

You can buy reasonably priced adjustable VESA wall mounts for monitors, but there are two problems with that:

1.) Not cool enough.
2.) The combination of stud spacing and unfortunate location of window casing behind the monitor is a bit of a nightmare scenario for getting something mounted up in a way that I'd trust.

So here's the model:



The base plate has three holes in it for 1/4" lags into the studs that are spaced 17" apart (who doesn't have 17" stud spacing!?...). The monitor sits at a height level with the arm as shown. Which is a problem, as a window casing exists right above the mounting hole on the lower left. So the base frame allows for three mounting screws and window casing avoidance whilst also allowing for about 4" of monitor height adjustment via the vertical slot. A machined backing plate with two M6 threaded holes rides in that slot and clamps to the backside of the base frame to tighten things up once at the desired height. Six shop-made bronze washers and M8 shoulder bolts allow for monitor side-to-side adjustment. Mostly, though, the design is such that you could hang a car from it, let alone even a fairly beefy monitor. Those arm links are 60 mm thick!

The extent of overkill in this design didn't become apparent until I started getting the stock ready. Afterward, the Dufour looked like the floor of the robot barber shop after a busy weekend:



The resultant pile of metal was... Well, let's just say I started to really doubt that I'd gotten my measurements right...



For scale, those are 12" calipers. The flat sheet there is 21.5" long. This is a project that never would have happened had I not picked up a truckload of aluminum for pennies on the dollar, so I'm really glad I did!

The whole project is six milled parts, three milled fixtures, six turned parts, and a turned fixture. The simplest of these parts is two setups, the most complex is six. I spent a lot of time before even touching the machine in figuring out the optimal order for operations so that the spindle could stay turning. As such, I only have four parts and the four fixtures fully complete, with the rest all in some partial state. The four parts that are complete are the two beefy link arms and a pair of bronze washers to put them together:



The mouse is there for a size comparison. This thing is going to be a tank!

Anyways, all of that machining was done during our alternate-universe first day at the lake house, so I'm not sure I'm super disappointed in being an idiot... It wasn't all perfect, though. The low notes so far:

1.) I broke another Haimer probe tip by forgetting to turn off rapid, so there was $60 in a blink. It was also a waste of 20 minutes to dial in the spare tip (that I have a spare tip tells you how well I trust myself).

2.) My ripper mill (two-insert 1" hogging mill) finally gave up the ghost. Or I finally admitted it. I crashed it a long time ago, gouging up one of the insert seats. I filed the high spots down and sent 'er back into action. It's put in a lot of cutting time since then, but it's just become super unreliable of late. I've lost five inserts to the screw backing out, insert shifting, and tip breaking. I've tried everything up to red Loctite on the screw, and I just can't keep it from backing out and tossing inserts. I can hear it when it happens, so I thankfully haven't destroyed a part in the process yet. I think there's just too much of the seat missing, so the insert is vibrating. I'm chalking it up as an expensive loss. I replaced it with the Haas version that looks like it may be the exact same thing rebranded, so we'll see how that goes. Either way, it'll be easier/cheaper to replace parts if it breaks again (the Korloy is cheaper to buy as a whole kit than just replace the body).

3.) I give up on trying to avoid part-lines when flipping a part for a second operation. If I don't have a tool with enough reach to profile the whole part, it's going to have a line. I've dialed in my probe, so it's not that. I'm starting to think my machine might just have a scary amount of backlash.

4.) Speaking of possible problems with the machine, I've started to notice a weird knocking noise from the spindle at full speed. It's super smooth at even 7,000 rpm, but get it up to 10,000, and there's this knock. I'm currently choosing to just assume it's fine, but I fear that's whistling past the graveyard. Spindle repair/replacement is one of those capital word Deal Breakers...

Alright, this post was how I spent the last minutes of my week of vacation, and I have to get to bed now. I hope you all have had a great start to your summers!

 

[zanyad]

Whew! A quick recovery to MrsGT! And good luck keeping your squirrel mind on track!

Relatable (for me, at least): https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

 

[Mr.zippy]

Thanks for the updates! I love reading them, as I can relate so well. I booked a RV park a few years ago, and not only got the wrong dates, but got the wrong week! They called me after the second no-show day. I totally get it. Hope the wife recovers quickly!
On a side note, I just used the battery extenders you made to tie a couple of batteries together on the RV. They worked great! Thank you again!

 

[GeddyT]

Whew! A quick recovery to MrsGT! And good luck keeping your squirrel mind on track!

Relatable (for me, at least): https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

I made sure to not procrastinate and read that right away! Thank you. What an interesting metaphor for the whole situation. My son saw the illustrations over my shoulder and said he had a guest presentation in one of his middle school classes that was that very essay, monkey illustrations and all.

Thanks for the updates! I love reading them, as I can relate so well. I booked a RV park a few years ago, and not only got the wrong dates, but got the wrong week! They called me after the second no-show day. I totally get it. Hope the wife recovers quickly!
On a side note, I just used the battery extenders you made to tie a couple of batteries together on the RV. They worked great! Thank you again!

That's awesome that you're getting use out of those! You're welcome again.

Your post reminds me that I never said anything about another project that I knocked out in a day for my friend Peter. I just dropped it in the mail for him, as he lives in the city, so similar situation. I didn't take a single picture of the project, but it was a cool one. Here's the model:



It's some kind of latch for a Thule roof storage container that he broke. He asked if I could 3D print him one, and I said, "Sure, if you want it to look like garbage, be warped, and instantly break." So I farmed that job out to my buddy John who has a way nicer printer.

In the meantime, I decided to throw down and see if I couldn't get him one in aluminum. It was quite the difficult part to program and machine, but it almost came out perfectly. "Almost" because I gambled on a really flimsy setup for drilling and boring the large hole in the arm. Picture a deck of cards mounted skinny ends into the vise, with the actual part dangling off to one side. I figured if I clamped the hell out of the vise, it wouldn't go anywhere. Oh, it went somewhere, the drill bit tipping the stock over a bit with every tap, gouging out the hole a little bit bigger in one corner and amazingly not snapping the carbide bit. I think the latch will still be totally functional, but that's just a hunch based off not actually knowing where this part goes and how it works.

In the meantime, John went a little nuts with the challenge, treating it as a test run for different filaments, part orientations, and support settings. I ended up the next day with a baggie with about 10 latches in it, all made differently for comparison. Some of them were quite nice, so it'll be interesting to see if Peter goes with gouged aluminum or flawless printed plastic.

Sometimes a quick project like that is a nice break: something I can get done in a single day and feel good about completing something. I think the thing that took the longest was converting the .stl file to a solid model in Fusion, as its tools for doing that automatically are complete garbage.

 

[GeddyT]

In an interesting coincidence, both of the kids ended up camping at different rivers with friends over the 4th of July weekend, so MGT and I had the house to ourselves. We're basically a pair of walking injuries, so not much adventure we could get up to. I chose shop day instead, finishing my son's monitor mount project just shy of 4:00 Saturday morning.

My son's room motif can best be described as "gamer dungeon," so you'll have to excuse the dark/blurry pictures...

Here's the base plate lagged onto and spanning the two nearest studs:



You can see why that pesky window casing would be a problem. The entirety of this project just screams overkill except for this base plate, which is perhaps the most important part. It's "only" 10 mm thick, but double that would have been better. Or maybe steel, but who wants to deal with that? I just don't have a piece of that big that's thicker than this one, so it is what it is. I also perhaps shouldn't have hogged out so much material, but I wanted it to look cool... It's because of the flimsiness of this part that you couldn't hang several hundred pounds from the whole assembly. It's a heavy monitor but still just a monitor, and yet its weight pulls that upper left corner away from the wall ever so slightly. Not enough that the whole thing doesn't work, it's just now a "don't lean on this" affair, which is unfortunate.

The VESA mount was a perfect fit, and I had exactly four M4 socket head screws in the right length floating around in my bin of random metric hardware:



The most obvious thing in this picture is that the arm assembly is only one link instead of two. After going through the trouble of machining two arm links and turning six bronze washers, the test fit of all of the parts revealed that the design itself was completely flawed. The links could only rotate just under 90 degrees relative to each other before binding up, and this left the monitor suspended twice as far from the wall as desired. Doing this correctly would have required a third piece in between the two links that would allow the two links to lay flat against each other, but I had no interest in machining that and a single link just happened to position the monitor in the perfect spot!

The whole assembly in action:



One aspect of the build that was completely accidentally awesome is that all adjustments can be made with a single hex key. The two screws that tighten the pivot to the base plate (vertical adjustment) are an M6 cap screw and an M8 button head cap screw, which happen to use the same tool. Turns out M8 shoulder bolts (the two pivots in the arm) also use a reduced size key relative to a cap screw, so all the same. Both shoulder bolts had to be heavily modified for purpose, turning down the smooth shaft from M10 to M8, turning down one of the heads to match the diameter of a normal cap screw, and raising the threads to match the span of the links. Turning stainless *****...

And here's the money shot:



This entire project started because he told me he didn't like how far forward the feet of the monitors stand stuck out, as they crowded the keyboard and gave him less wrist space. Nothing under that monitor, so mission accomplished! Let the records state that this was exactly how I found his desk, and there totally wasn't a month's worth of dirty dishes and half-eaten snacks on there...

I'll wrap this up by calling out the failures, as there were definitely plenty. For starters, finishing up at a little before 4:00 in the morning Saturday wasn't completely true. Sure, it was finished, but one of the pieces bothered me enough that I remade it yesterday. Unfortunately, it was the prettiest, most complicated part of the lot. Here's a picture of it next to the waste-of-time-and-metal second arm link that will from now on live on the failure display table:



On the one hand, the profiling on this part is just gorgeous. It's amazing what can be done with three axes and a ballnose end mill. This part tested the reach of all of my tools. I even had to drop the ballnose a bit further in the collet to gain another mm of clearance.

On the other hand, see the hole in the top? There's a rough spot beneath it where I started by spotting with a 1/2" end mill to flatten the stock before drilling. For some reason, the rest of the program missed that (correct) spot, and the pivot hole is a good cm closer to the front edge. Ugly, sure, but the part would still technically work and be strong enough, so I was going to just roll with it. What pushed me over the edge to make another one was that the gap for the arm link was 2 mm too big, as I referenced the wrong line when creating a sketch plane during modelling. I had a choice of either making thicker bronze washers or just remaking the part altogether. I chose to let the Hurco do the work...

I think the reason for the misplaced hole has something to do with my normal workflow. This workflow goes something like this:

1.) Model the part.
2.) Program the part (CAM) with a simple stock offset of something like 1 mm on each side.
3.) Knowing now what size stock to target, go into the shop and start digging through the mountain of aluminum for the piece that will require the least amount of work to get close to the desired size identified in step 2.
4.) Go back into Fusion, change the stock size to the piece that I found (or found, band-sawed, squared on the Dufour, etc.), and regenerate all of the toolpaths to match the actual stock size.
5.) Steal underpants.
6.) ?
7.) Profit.

With this particular part, I forgot to do step 4. So I had this piece of stock the size of a shoe box, the machine thought I had a nice, tidy piece of stock, so it went merrily along its way. The spotting op was so far off that I could see it with my scandalously naked eye, so I adjusted the stock value for the rest of the drilling program (incorrectly, apparently) but forgot to then carry on that stock adjustment to the rest of the operations. I found this out about 15 minutes later, when I simultaneously found out that this machine is capable of driving a 1/2" corn cob rougher right through a block of aluminum. Full-radial slot, 15 mm axial depth, 75 ipm. Didn't even know it was happening until it was all the way through. My first thought? "Time to stop being a pansy and triple the MMR on that tool moving forward!..."

Beyond those hilarious failures, I also broke both an expensive carbide drill and a cheap 1/4" end mill because the cap screws I was using to hold the base plate stock down to a fixture plate happened to be right in the path of a rapid move between countersunk holes. Just a dipshit miss on my part (very easy to adjust the clearance height). It seems like I have at least one such moment in every trip to the machine, which is frustrating.

Unfortunately, I think this project might be the last on the Hurco for a while. We'll see. I'm getting increasingly nervous about the health of this machine. New warning signs are popping up every time I use it. New to the list is a disturbing oil drip from the spindle assembly. I climbed up top to see what was going on, and dark oil is just pooled up in the low spots between the spindle motor and the spindle. I can't see where it's leaking from or how it's getting there. I need to get the upper sheet metal off and have a look before that ends up in a bill that totals the machine. There has always been a disturbing clunk in the Y-axis when changing direction back and forth. I've always just crossed my fingers that it's clunky way covers and pressed on, but it's getting pretty hard to ignore. Profiling that part shown above involved constant high speed reversals in the Y direction for a solid half hour, and the sound involved was not pretty. Something every "I bought an old VMC!" YouTuber does after purchasing their derelict machine is immediately take the way covers off to see what's going on down there, but I was too excited to get machining to bother with that. Really, this machine had a half-assed (but still all-day) cleanup, utilities hooked up, and that's about it as far as prep and inspection.

Unless a project too juicy to pass up arises first, I think I'm going to park this machine until I have time (ha!) to do a pretty thorough teardown to assess what I really have and where I want to go with it. It's possible the result of this inspection will just be that all I can afford to do is run it into the ground and accept generous finish tolerances, but maybe there are some fixes that are within reach. One thing for sure is that COVID is well in the rearview mirror and there aren't $5000 industrial VMCs sitting at nearby auctions anymore (hence my struggle finding a turning center even remotely in my price range of "about tree-fiddy"), so I really hope I can get a lot more years of enjoyment out of this one.

And I told myself this post wasn't going to devolve into word vomit...

 

[GeddyT]

Like I said, I replaced my ripper mill with a similar version from Haas (thanks again, @slodat). The problem with the Korloy is that the entire kit is far cheaper than just buying a new... whatever you call the main body part of the tool. I was going to just replace it with another full kit, but I couldn't find a good deal on one like I did before.

Enter Haas tooling. For $150, I could get a new cutter body if I beat up the seats again, so this is a way better long term plan. It showed up yesterday, and I started laughing the second I took it out of the box:



That is the exact same tool! Looks like they've added a chamfer to the flute edge since I bought mine, but there's zero chance that this isn't a Korloy end mill with Haas engraved on the side. The engraving is even in the same font and location! The inserts are identical, even with the same number 80 engraved on them. I googled the Haas part number for the inserts they sell, and the second link is to Travers, where you can buy the same inserts. Branded Korloy.

Long story short, this is awesome! The hope is that I never destroy this thing again, but it will be much cheaper to replace now if I do. I wish I had known that the inserts are the same, as I still had plenty of inserts left over from the Korloy kit, and those are just as expensive as the body.

In other news, I made it two days after declaring that I'd be parking the Hurco pending a major overhaul before reversing that decision and throwing another project at it. I hope to have time to work on it soon, but we'll see. It's going to be parked for an overhaul, just not yet!...

 

[Bob Heine]

Tom, I have to get to bed so I haven't finished reading the eventual amazing success part. You dredged up a long forgotten memory. Back in the '80s (sorry, the 1980s -- not to be confused with my current age), we went to one or two Club Med locations each year. They 'always' started on a Sunday and ended the following Saturday. One year we drove to the airport, parked the car in long term parking and headed for the Air France check-in counter. We opened the envelope we had received weeks before the trip and handed our two tickets over to the clerk. She politely pointed out our tickets were for Saturday with a Friday Return. I am not allowed to put ink marks on the Central Calendar so it never occurred to me to question SWMBO's assurance that we were leaving on Sunday. We got a partial refund and emptied our savings account to re-book for the following Saturday.

I started reading the linked Procrastination story but got distracted by a black spec flying across my monitor. I swatted at the spec but it turned out to be a floater in one of my eyes that made an untimely return. I will get back to the story and Procrastination link but probably not until your thread goes to page 1 with a NEW flag next to it. Then I can try to find my last 'Like' and continue my read.

 

[GeddyT]

I started reading the linked Procrastination story but got distracted by a black spec flying across my monitor. I swatted at the spec but it turned out to be a floater in one of my eyes that made an untimely return. I will get back to the story and Procrastination link but probably not until your thread goes to page 1 with a NEW flag next to it. Then I can try to find my last 'Like' and continue my read.

I had another vacation this last week, this time heading to the Washington coast. The weather was **** for the first couple of days, so I had time to sit down and catch up on things. My proudest achievement was getting caught up on Bob Heine's Auto Emporium! I think you probably work harder in retirement just keeping up with your thread than I do with my job! By all means, don't feel obligated to stay on top of this one too. At this point, this has largely just become a journal that can maybe save a few people from my mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes...

As just mentioned, I'm eating my breakfast before returning to working life after a 10-day whirlwind vacation. I had a single day home before leaving for the Washington coast for some surf perch fishing and exploring. After the 6-hour drive back, I had another single day home before leaving town for the weekend for my daughter's soccer tournament. In that day between events, I managed to get most of a "fun" project tackled.

The charger that came with my car kicked the bucket at the beginning of the week, so I ordered a new one. Things have changed a bit since I last looked, and you can now get well-reviewed import level 2 chargers for less than the OEM level 1 charger that came with the car. I have a welding receptacle in the shop already that's almost never used, so... why not!?

Problem: I found out immediately that the thicker cord doesn't fit under the garage door like the skinny level 1 cord.
Solution: Dismantle brand new charger for routing the cable through the shop wall.

The problem with a rain screen wall--Birdlandia aside--is that any wall penetrations must be planned in advance so that bucks can be installed and sided around at the time of siding installation. It sounds counterintuitive, but it makes the path of least resistance just drilling or coring the foundation wall and going through there. I wanted something a little more discrete than a 4" pass-through or an exterior outlet box (the charger isn't waterproof anyway, so it needs to live inside), so an off-the-shelf solution wasn't going to do.

I ordered a 1" SDS bit, the longest 21/32 drill bit I could get my hands on quickly, and some O-rings. They'd be waiting for me when I got back from the beach. In the meantime, I modeled and programmed some nuts. Deez nuts:



We got home from the beach late Wednesday afternoon, and I had these in hand before I went to bed that night. M25x1.0 thread (because I have a die that size and a good length of 1" round stock), deep o-ring grooves internal and external.

Also before going to bed that night, I blasted a 1" hole through the foundation wall with the SDS-plus drill. This would prove to be a huge mistake. I was looking for tight tolerances and clean sealing surfaces surrounding the hole on each side, but this style of drill returns neither. The exit wound in particular was ghastly. I also was unable to get a 1" test bar through the hole cleanly due to the bit wandering around aggregate in the wall. At least the hole wasn't so terrible that I was unable to pull a PERFECT measurement for wall thickness that would totally not let me down in the days to come. Luckily, I was able to have a 1" diamond core bit delivered the next day, so that ended day one of what was supposed to be an afternoon project.

Thursday, my only day home, started with making the pipe chase through the wall that the cord would go through and the nuts would thread onto on each side. The design premise is an o-ring on the inside of the nut would be compressed by the end of the threaded pipe, squeezing the cord and sealing it. An o-ring on the perimeter of the nut flange would simultaneously seal to the wall. To make this work, the length of this pipe was critical. Distance of o-ring squish is times two is the tolerance. The 21/32 drill bit I now had on hand was a perfect size to get the charging cord through the pipe with only a fraction of a millimieter's clearance, so I stared by drilling out the round stock on the lathe. Then parting to PERFECT length, then threading each end.

Then I went about figuring out how to take the new charger apart. It wasn't easy, several screws hiding under the warning label sticker on the back:



Here you can see the nice fit of the tightening nut on the cord, with the pipe through which everything will go in the background:



Right about then was when the 1" core bit showed up, which was when I found out that the 3/8" hex drive was in pretty heavy air quotes, so I had to turn an extension on the lathe. This ate up some time, but I was eventually able to put it to good use cleaning up the hole so that my 1" test bar fit nicely through the wall. After that, it was just a matter of patching up the nasty hole faces on each side of the wall with some mortar and waiting:



This is where I'd have to leave things until late in the evening last night, after getting home from the soccer tournament. You shouldn't work on projects like this when you're exhausted and in a huge hurry, but that's exactly what I stupidly did. I wanted to get everything hooked up and working so I could charge my car during the work week, so I decided to stumble through it. The hard work was done, right, so how hard could it be?

I think my first mistake was not taping the pipe threads before pushing the pipe through the wall. They're tiny threads in soft aluminum, and I'm pretty sure they got badly galled by the trip through the wall. This trip through the wall also promptly removed every bit of interior mortar I'd packed in over the weekend to cure the gaping exit wound on the inside wall of the shop. Guess it would have to only seal on the outside...

But then the deal-breaker: Either because the threads were too damaged or I measured wrong (impossible), the nuts tightened up on both sides and still left about a 6 mm gap from nut to wall. It was a complete failure. And because the nut was now seized to the threads pretty well, I'd have to completely start over if I wanted to fix the problem. I decided I didn't have time for that, and a two-piece plate I could slide under the interior nut would kill two birds with one stone, spacing things out properly and covering the concrete mess. This took a bit to make, but worked out alright:



That's the corner of the shop behind the Dufour, and it's pretty nasty, so I'll need to get in there and clean it up. I should also start taking bets on how many years both the "mounting" bucket and duct tape holding the spacing plate together will be in service...

In the end, all finished, right!?



WRONG!



It wasn't until everything was in place and wired up and I had the charger completely screwed back together again that I noticed the missing plastic flange on the end of the charger. Which is on the wrong side of the wall on the charging cord.

I can't make this stuff up.

 

[bdbecker]

...It wasn't until everything was in place and wired up and I had the charger completely screwed back together again that I noticed the missing plastic flange on the end of the charger. Which is on the wrong side of the wall on the charging cord...

Kinda like connecting 30+ wires in a PLC cabinet before realizing you forgot to slide half the cord grip on the cable before you started work.

 

[2001ZR2]

Just finished your thread or catching up...great writing and story. Hopefully I use your updates to get my projects back on track.

 

[GeddyT]

Just finished your thread or catching up...great writing and story. Hopefully I use your updates to get my projects back on track.

First off, thanks for the kind words! Unfortunately, I'm afraid I'm going to let you down for a while on that last bit.

You never know what's going to pop up, but I'm guessing this is going to be my last update here for at least a couple of months. For the past year or so, a snowball in my life has been rolling downhill and gaining size and momentum, and next month is when it crashes into me hard. We're shutting half of our plant down for maintenance, and I'm largely responsible for the critical unit in this event. As it comes closer and closer, I've been putting in more and more hours in a mad scramble to get things finished. On top of this, units become less and less reliable as they approach the end of their run, so we're also dealing with a seemingly endless string of major surprises that are pulling me away from what I should be doing. It's exhausting.

So exhausting that I've had a cool update locked and loaded for something like three weeks now, and I just haven't found the motivation to get online and share. Unfortunately, I find myself sitting here with some time on my hands (long story), so check out something cool:

I think I started to post about this quit a while back. I had three outstanding projects that I wanted to get wrapped up before I'm lost to endless work: My buddy's quad number plate and bar clamp, Andrew's excavator track idler wheel, and my daughter's Mothers Day present (almost on time...).

If you recall, that last one became a way bigger pain in the *** than anticipated. This was as far as "we" got before throwing in the towel:



Turns out epoxy turns plants instantly brown if they're not dried first. The plants also float in the epoxy, so you really have to do it in multiple pours, the first to glue the flowers down, the rest to top them off. I also used a piece of melted aluminum for stock, figuring it wasn't a structural part, but I didn't anticipate how many voids were in it that showed up after machining. It was a massive failure.

If you'll also recall, my daughter's idea was to use the vacuum dehydrator that my father-in-law left in my shop without asking if I wanted it. It worked great until the vacuum pump blew up. I took it apart, put all of the parts in the ultrasonic tank, took a wire wheel to the corrosion that remained, put it back together, and it seemed to pull vacuum really nicely! But the machine didn't seem to think so, erroring out for insufficient vacuum every time we tried to run a cycle.

By the time I got tired of messing with the vacuum pump, there were no more wild flowers to pick, so we had to go to the store and pick up a bouquet to experiment with further. The final Hail Mary was to buy a tub of silica gel and dry the flowers that way.

It worked GREAT!



The epoxy was laid down in three pours after degassing in a vacuum pot. I intentionally overfilled, then milled back down to just above the aluminum on the Dufour. After that, it was sand paper taped to the surface plate to get it down perfectly flat and level so it could be flipped into the Hurco to mill off the back side and chamfer.

Next, I taught my daughter how to sand and polish. From 400 grit to 2000 grit, then buffing with compound. MGT absolutely loved the finished product and forgave the tardiness:




Anyway, like I said, things are about to go from busy to crazy busy for me for a couple of months. I'll be lucky to have a half dozen days off between now and mid-November, and work days will all be at least 13 hours long. I apologize in advance for how scarce I'm going to be. Hopefully you all post some cool things for me to catch up on over the winter!

 

[Mr.zippy]

Gotta pay the bills! Stay safe and we will wait patiently for more "good stories"!

 

[Trapps]

Life happens! I've survived a few work induced sabbaticals; you will too!

 

[zanyad]

Nice job on the Mother's Day present, and good luck with the maintenance shutdown!

 

[GeddyT]

It's been a while. I could ramble on (and I might sometime soon), but I'm going to lead with my interesting morning. MGT heard the dog barking and sent me to investigate because I was closer. I went to the door thinking, "Great, what's she going to be derping on about this time?"

Opened the door, stepped onto the porch, and was greeted by this encounter:



Enhance...

Enhance...



We tried calling her back in, but she stood her ground. Like an idiot. Vicious attack poodle, this one. I think she was giving up at least 130 pounds to the new neighborhood stray cat. I think the combination of three people yelling and the dog barking was enough to convince this guy to move along, although he wasn't bothered enough to be in a hurry about it.

 

[M.Brane]

That's a big puddy tat. Glad it didn't escalate.

 

[SilverJimmy]

Good thing it was Fish Friday! We have had to keep our cat inside all winter because there’s a pack of coyotes that have moved into our hood. Three times now they’ve been on our deck or just off it looking for something to “enjoy”!

 

[hampster]

They've been pretty active up on Galbraith lately. Or rather, more visible than normal.

 

[GeddyT]

They've been pretty active up on Galbraith lately. Or rather, more visible than normal.

Yeah, it's funny: I was at my son's soccer tryout last night, and at least three different people brought up the neighborhood cougar without me prompting, to which I got to respond, "Do you want to see a blurry picture!?"

He's making quite the headlines. About three weeks ago, the other dad in my soccer practice carpool sent me a ring cam clip of this cat creeping past his front porch and around to his backyard in the middle of the night. He lives two blocks toward town from me, so I've actually been more cautious than usual walking to my car in the wee hours of the morning or letting the dog out late at night. I had actually just started to let my guard down ("Eh, it's been weeks...") when I found myself staring right at it! I was NOT expecting to see it out in the open in my yard in broad daylight.

Wish I could have gotten a better picture...

 

[Pluribus]

Guess I won't be planning any solo rides at Galbraith this spring! Haven't seen any of them here, but I did hear one just outside my bedroom window one night about 10 years ago. My cat jumped up, ears flat, and eyes wide at the sound. The dog rated it a big whatever. Not too long ago, I did see a video of three of them wandering through someone's driveway only a few miles away. Like where you are, it was closer to town.

Despite the fact that I know they're around, I've been getting a bit complacent coming in from building trails in the woods after dusk lately. Then again, maybe I'm completely safe, because they've all decided suburban life is way cushier...hmmm.

 

[GeddyT]

You ever had a friend that moved away, and you want to call and catch up, but they're out of sight and out of mind, so there's always something more pressing to do, pushing that call to catch up further and further out? Then, it gets pushed out so far that it starts to get awkward, so you're not only busy and distracted, but you're actively not looking forward to it because you feel bad about not calling sooner?

I hate to compare a forum thread to real life relationships, but my absence from this thread sort of mirrors the experience I've described above. Every weekend, I think, "Man, I've got some pretty cool shop/home related stuff going on here that might be interesting to some, so I should get back on the horse and update." Every time, though, I get distracted. And what's the difference between six months and six months plus one day, anyway?

In short, if you're somebody really interested in the "buying old machine tools" experience or "how not to build something yourself," sorry for ducking out for so long.

Like I said, I've had a lot going on in life, and some fraction of that might be interesting. My GJ sabbatical started with nearly two months of 80-hour weeks at work, managing a major maintenance outage that I'd been planning for nearly two years. A large part of what motivated me to switch jobs and join the company/salaried ranks was that we've never had a "successful" maintenance outage in my department, and I thought I could do it better.

In a lot of ways, I did. In even more ways--most out of my control but one or two not--it was a shitshow like always. So much so that the company deemed that my and my peers' compensation for what would end up being, for me, over 350 hours of overtime in two months would be... zero. I think maybe more than working so many hours for free, I got pretty depressed about not being able to achieve what I thought I could. Whatever combination of reasons, I can't say I've been the same since.

While all of that was going on, I got an early Christmas present: After 10 months of being bogged down in our insurance system, I FINALLY got the green light for a nerve kill in my lower back. I have two issues down there, and it was a 50/50 shot that this procedure would get me back to normal (physically...) for the first time in three years.

And it failed.

I definitely feel better than before when it comes to just not being in constant pain, but high-stress activities (and/or sneezing...) still cause a lot of pain. So that *****. I've decided to just get on with it. The solution to the remaining problem is exercise, anyway, so I'm just going to go about my life. Working on the house, working in the shop, maybe even finally getting back on the track if I can get fit enough in time.

Since this post has been nothing but 500 words of me whining, I want to end on a high note. A high note with pictures! My friend Andrew has appeared a lot in this thread. He's the trail-builder/motorcycle-builder/excavator-operator/metal-artist friend of mine that I collaborate with on projects from time to time. He decided that an imbalance had developed in the favors we've done for each other, and he needed to pay me back. He decided to do so in the form (no pun intended) of two awesome concrete projects. He knew that MGT has been asking for a back patio for over a decade, and he knew that I was planning to eventually pour a slab alongside the shop on which to park the shipping container that has been occupying my front yard for a decade now. He didn't want to stress me out while I was working 80 hour weeks, so he handled this all behind the scenes, asking MGT for the patio design.

The first step was removing a huge maple stump that would be in the way of the shipping container slab. He worked at this for three days, and I was lucky to have a rare day off from work for one of them:



Because he didn't want to spend a fortune renting a stump grinder, the job ended up being a lot of back and forth between saw cuts and whacking away at it with the single-point tool on the mini:



Then, one day, I came home from work to find a new slab!...





...And a new patio!...



Eventually, the angle in the foreground will continue until the patio meets up with the half of the driveway I've yet to replace. The "temporary" (now 10 years old) porch poking into the frame above will be demoed, more concrete poured beneath, then a new, smaller porch built atop to bring things to entryway height.

Hopefully, this will all be completed in fewer than 10 years this time. Who's taking bets?

Oh yeah, and just for fun, here's a shot of something you don't see every day: And excavator parked in the garage!

 

[GeddyT]

Since I was last updating this thread, I've also been busy on a house project, some shop stuff, and there's major (and expensive) Hurco news/activities. I've put that out there, so now I HAVE to post about it! Accountability... Out of time for this weekend, though.

 

[M.Brane]

Many of my friends have moved away. I will soon too. This place is circling the drain. Kinda ***** because I was born, and raised here. It is what it is.

Thanks for the update. A little progress is progress nonetheless.

 

[bdbecker]

You ever had a friend that moved away, and you want to call and catch up, but they're out of sight and out of mind, so there's always something more pressing to do, pushing that call to catch up further and further out? Then, it gets pushed out so far that it starts to get awkward, so you're not only busy and distracted, but you're actively not looking forward to it because you feel bad about not calling sooner?...

Never feel guilty about not posting. Speaking for myself (and I'm sure others agree), it's not that we don't want to hear from you, but we get it. We all have lives outside of this forum and understand that things get busy sometimes. Writing up a GJ post is not always going to make it to the top of the to-do list. Pop in when you can, but don't let it stress you out if you can't.

 

[zanyad]

Glad to hear from you! ***** on the work maintenance outage being a fiasco, bummer you had to donate so much of your time. Patio looks good.

Never feel guilty about not posting. Speaking for myself (and I'm sure others agree), it's not that we don't want to hear from you, but we get it. We all have lives outside of this forum and understand that things get busy sometimes. Writing up a GJ post is not always going to make it to the top of the to-do list. Pop in when you can, but don't let it stress you out if you can't.

 

[gearhead1960]

So much so that the company deemed that my and my peers' compensation for what would end up being, for me, over 350 hours of overtime in two months would be... zero.

If I were you I would be consulting with your state department of labor to see if this is legal....according to Google Ai:
AI Overview



In 2026, Washington state salaried employees are exempt from overtime only if they earn at least 2.25 times the state minimum wage ($80,168 annually in 2026) and pass a duties test. If they earn less than this threshold or fail the duties test, they are entitled to overtime pay (1.5x regular rate) for all hours worked over 40 per week.
Labor & Industries (L&I), Washington State (.gov) +2
Key Washington Overtime Rules for 2026:

• Salary Threshold: As of January 1, 2026, exempt employees must be paid at least $80,168 per year (based on 2.25 times the minimum wage), according to dza.cpa and University of Washington Human Resources.
• Job Duties Test:In addition to the salary requirement, employees must primarily perform executive, administrative, or professional duties as defined by Washington State Department of Labor & Industries (L&I).
• • Calculation: For non-exempt employees (those not meeting the salary/duties tests), overtime is paid at 1.5 times the regular hourly rate for all hours worked over 40 in a 7-day workweek.

 

[GeddyT]

If I were you I would be consulting with your state department of labor to see if this is legal....according to Google Ai:
AI Overview...

Awesome stuff, gearhead (thanks, sincerely), but trust me when I say I'm well studied on this subject. I'm fairly confident that most of the exempt staff where I work probably shouldn't be, and I'm not alone in that understanding. We're all above salary threshold, but Washington differs from federal law in that all of the other conditions must be met, not just one, making the threshold for exempt status for higher for employers. My guess is that the company doesn't even realize they're on the wrong side of the law, as they're headquartered out of Texas and have only owned the place for four years.

The problem is that the rules are a bit unclear. You have the written law (RCW), and my reading of it is that there are probably cracks the company lawyers could weasel through. Then you have LNI's guidance document (how they interpret), and it seems like a slam dunk for myself and several coworkers. Why nothing has happened yet, though, is that the LNI complaint form is not anonymous, and, although it would be illegal for them to do so, nobody wants to be the first to pull that trigger and face reprisal. Frankly, I've already said about as much on the subject on a public forum as I'm comfortable with.

Claims are valid for up to three years of missed pay. The company would be on the hook for millions. Relative to the potential damages, they would have an essentially limitless budget to lawyer up and fight it. I wouldn't want to be the person who kicked open that door and then lost.

 

[gearhead1960]

Awesome stuff, gearhead (thanks, sincerely), but trust me when I say I'm well studied on this subject. I'm fairly confident that most of the exempt staff where I work probably shouldn't be, and I'm not alone in that understanding. We're all above salary threshold, but Washington differs from federal law in that all of the other conditions must be met, not just one, making the threshold for exempt status for higher for employers. My guess is that the company doesn't even realize they're on the wrong side of the law, as they're headquartered out of Texas and have only owned the place for four years.

The problem is that the rules are a bit unclear. You have the written law (RCW), and my reading of it is that there are probably cracks the company lawyers could weasel through. Then you have LNI's guidance document (how they interpret), and it seems like a slam dunk for myself and several coworkers. Why nothing has happened yet, though, is that the LNI complaint form is not anonymous, and, although it would be illegal for them to do so, nobody wants to be the first to pull that trigger and face reprisal. Frankly, I've already said about as much on the subject on a public forum as I'm comfortable with.

Claims are valid for up to three years of missed pay. The company would be on the hook for millions. Relative to the potential damages, they would have an essentially limitless budget to lawyer up and fight it. I wouldn't want to be the person who kicked open that door and then lost.

I understand your reticence to kick the hornets nest....time to look for greener pastures?

 

[GeddyT]

I understand your reticence to kick the hornets nest....time to look for greener pastures?

"Greener" is really hard to find, unfortunately. I may complain about it, but there's not much around here that pays better for a college dropout like me. If that weren't the case, I would have no problem complaining to LNI, as I would have far less to lose. Maybe some day, after the kids are out and the house is paid off or way down (or at least fully built...).

In other news, though, I've got a morning cup of coffee to drink and a quick and easy update to get caught up on, so let's give it a try:

Keen observers may notice quite the nice concrete ramp leading up to the new shipping container slab. That exists because Andrew way overshot on his concrete estimate and just had them keep on pouring. He made it look nice, lining it with the little rock wall you can see, and it'll really help with pushing the container back once I get off my *** and actually move it.

You can also see that my trailer is parked right at the bottom of that little ramp. I wanted to park it up on the slab, figuring I might as well get something up and out of the way if I'm not yet ready to move the container. Well, that's as far back as I could get it, as my truck's tires just kept spinning on the wet grass. It was time to finally fix the damned 4WD.

This is the first (sort of) 4WD vehicle I've ever owned in my life, and either I just neglected to check to see if it worked during the test drive (which is embarrassing if that's the case) or it gummed up and failed because I went several months without trying to use it, but I haven't been able to get this truck into 4WD the whole time I've owned it. I made an all-day attempt to get it working once, a year or two ago, and gave up after my efforts failed. This time, I wasn't going to fail.

I'm not sure how other manufacturers activate their 4WD, but Toyota employed Rube Goldberg to design these actuators that combine a rack and pinion gear, limit switches and motor contacts all into one device that's way bigger and more complicated than necessary. There are two stacked back to back on the transmission, one to engage 4HI and one to engage 4LOW, and there is another on the front differential that locks it. Here's the one on the transfer case...



...which was completely seized, so I bought a replacement. This is the only of the three that can be easily replaced. The two on the transmission have shafts that are captive, so the only way to remove and replace one would be to split open the transmission. You have to take these apart in place, laying on your back under the truck, clean them out, free them up, and clock them perfectly or they won't work.

After replacing the front actuator and the problem not being solved, it was another full day on my back under the truck, making tiny adjustments to the other two actuators. But I now have 4WD for the first time in my life!

Still haven't shoved the trailer back...

 

[zimman]

I don't know where I've been all your life LOL but I'm glad I'm here.
Nice work. I'm scribed.
Zim

 

[GeddyT]

Okay, I have time to chip away at the list of updates a bit...

There's an interesting cultural phenomenon that's happening, at least in my area: Teenage boys are super into fishing. I would have never predicted that. I've loved fishing my whole life, and I've been taking my kids fishing since they were very little, but none of my friends are into fishing at all. I just assumed it would be something that we do as a family and nothing more.

But that's not the case. Over the past couple of years, my son spends most of his social time during the sunny half of the year on/at one of the various local bodies of waters with his friends fishing. And he's learning quickly that many of his soccer teammates fish as well, so his list of potential fishing buddies just keeps growing. If I had to guess, the increased passion for fishing in the youth ranks has something to do with the concurrent rise in popularity of all of the amazing fishing content on social media/YouTube/etc. (If you haven't seen Matt Wells get chased for miles off the coast of New Zealand by a great white that's way bigger than his kayak, you're missing out.)

Anyway, it makes Christmas/birthday shopping for my son pretty easy. All he asked for was fishing tackle and gear, and I had him covered. We have a rewards points system at work. You submit people for recognition, it gets approved by management, and you get to spend these points at an online catalog of various things that I'd mostly never buy if I were spending my own money (luggage, jewelry, watches, and golf clubs being the most popular categories). The catalog also has gift cards. This would be basically cash if there were gift cards for Home Depot/Lowes, Amazon, or Costco, but that would make things too easy, so they're not on the list. What is on the list is Cabela's, and Cabela's/Bass Pro Shop sells fishing tackle. My points had really accumulated because there's nothing in the catalog I wanted, so I was able to get my son a big Cabela's gift card and my daughter a big Macy's gift card.

But that makes for a pretty lame Christmas. So I decided to donate a sizeable chunk of my shop to the cause. You know what else is in the catalog? Pool tables.



It came a couple weeks before Christmas in that big cardboard box seen in the background (next to the pile of lumber and melamine that I'll talk about later). I taped over any descriptive labels on the box that would give it away and completely put the kids off the scent by telling them in secret that it was a closet organizer for MGT. It was a pretty fun night before Christmas, MGT and I in the shop enjoying a beverage or two and assembling and leveling a pool table.

You probably also noticed the other assault to my shop space, the ping pong table. This was a cheap Facebook Marketplace buy ahead of my son's birthday party. He was born on Christmas Eve, so we usually do his party a weekend or two before.



The ping pong table was a big hit, and the pool table more so. My daughter, in particular, can be seen out in the shop at least one night a week shooting by herself. She said it's the best Christmas present she's ever gotten. Not bad for being essentially free!



Up next is getting it up on wheels to make it portable, but that has turned into a complete fiasco.

 

[gearhead1960]

Our kids enjoyed a 7/8th size pool table that doubled as a base for a ping pong table (2 pieces) and flipped over for air hockey. In its later life doubled as a clothes drying table After kids left house, it was in the way and eventually left house in pieces into the dumpster used for our kitchen remodel.

 

[GeddyT]

Alright, this is probably going to be the biggest update from the last several months. The good news is there'll be plenty of pictures.

It started with the Christmas pool table. When I built the shop, the plan from the beginning was for it to be a shop. I pictured a situation like what I used to have, where you have to weave your way through tools and shelves and machines and whatnot, every inch of floor space occupied by something cool, only four times as big. Then the thing gets built, and suddenly there's this big open space there that I hadn't anticipated being so nice to have. Since then, I've focused on cramming any stationary/heavy object into the one side of the shop (the side with the heavier rebar) and left the side closest to the house open for common space. That's the party bay, car work bay, photo studio bay, random-project-on-foldout-tables bay, etc.

I want to keep it that way, so anything that lives in that half of the shop has to be on wheels, especially something as big and heavy as a pool table. So before the pool table was even assembled, I had ordered a few necessary accessories. A durable cover was not optional, as an unprotected pool table would be destroyed in mere days in my shop. Also not optional, thanks to the less than flat nature of my floor and desired table mobility, were leveling casters. I ordered some pretty heavy duty ones, and they were going to need some mounting standoffs, as we're not exactly giant people, so mounting the casters to the bottom of the legs would make for some awkward ergonomics while playing.

No big deal. I had a mountain of aluminum, a metal-cutting robot, and a few days until Christmas!

It was a full day spent in CAD/CAM and getting stock prepped for parts and fixtures...



...and then disaster struck.

I had just started warming up the machine, which involves the table moving diagonally from one end of its travel to the other to get the linear rails and screws good and oiled, when I noticed something dangling below the front apron of the saddle. Something that looked an awful lot like an oil line. This oil line:




That officially put an end to any hope of having casters mounted to the pool table before Christmas, so I turned my focus to just getting the shop cleaned up and ready and waited until we got back from our annual Christmas visit to the in-laws east of the mountains for machine tear-down.

Because there's definitely going to be machine tear-down after seeing a severed oil line dangling from the machine! That 4 mm nylon line leaves a tee fitting (that you can see most of below and to the left of the yellow zip tie), travels through the pictured drag chain at the front of the saddle, and supplies way oil to a distribution block above. This distribution block splits that oil to every lubrication point for the X-axis motion (four linear guide trucks and the ballscrew nut). The thing is, because the lubrication system as all connected off a single pump, a split in the line means that not only were every point in the X-axis not getting lubrication, but neither was any other point on the machine, as the path of least resistance would be the open-ended line. And who knows how long this had been going on!

At this point, here's what I knew: I had a cool machine that, up to the prior part made, was working "fine." In that it made loud noises, shredded metal, and provided me with parts that look awfully cool. No matter how long the machine had been operating without oil, I could at least replace the oil line and keep making parts with a similar outcome to what I'd been doing. But things aren't perfect. The spindle had started making a bit of a weird noise at max RPM. And, to this day, no matter how well I've dialed in my Haimer probe, I've been unable to eliminate parting lines from parts that have to be flipped and machined on two sides, indicating some amount of backlash/slop from the machine. I'm suspicious of how round it's making round features, too, as I've had to sneak up on bearing fits with multiple spring passes that always seem to remove more stock no matter how many I take.

In short, I've long suspected this machine at the very least needs a tuneup, and now I had a reason to suspect it might be seriously damaged as well, so I needed to get the covers off and have a look. Which ended up being two full days of very disgusting and painful work. Only four screw heads stripped out of the 10 million button head cap screws I had to remove, so that wasn't the end of the world. What took the most time was getting the left X-axis way cover off, as damage to the outer segment made the mounting screw impossible to reach. I had to make a hex key extension and then make space with a pry bar to the machine cabinet wall to get this makeshift tool in place, feel around, and remove the screw an eighth of a turn at a time. That piece is mangled!



What was also disturbing was just how messy things were below the covers. As more of them came off, I started to feel like Colonel Kurtz: "The horror... The horror..."







This was all after a quick once-over with the shop vac, too. It was amazing how much swarf was under the covers and all over the rails. With most of it vacuumed up, I was able to inspect things better, and this just made me increasingly worried. The X-axis guides were, as expected, bone dry. They at least felt pretty smooth, though. The Y-axis guides had scoring I could both feel with my finger and you can see in the picture above.

I had seen enough at this point, so I extracted all thousand metal splinters from my hands and then spent the rest of my end-of-year vacation celebrating MGT's birthday and researching replacement motion parts for this machine. I'm going to break this saga up here, but something I found interesting--and you might, too, if you're into old CNC machines--is that Hurco really went all out when sourcing components for this machine. It's a "cheaper" Taiwanese brand, yet the drives and motors are all Japanese Yaskawa and the linear guides are very fat and high end Bosch Rexroth. On the bright side, it's a well-kitted machine. On the downside, that means replacing a single one of those scratched Y-axis guides is over $1500 and an amount of labor I'd rather not think about.

So, yeah, more to come...

 

[Bob Heine]

So much so that the company deemed that my and my peers' compensation for what would end up being, for me, over 350 hours of overtime in two months would be... zero.

Tom, sounds like you and your peers got the all too common "We upped our income -- now up yours" award from your company.

 

[GeddyT]

So here's a question: What the hell is that!?...



It's what I asked myself as I examined the machine with the covers off. This is the exact same nylon tubing that feeds oil to the various bits and bobs on the machine, only it's coming out of the back of the saddle and going to... nothing. There's another similar and much longer run of tubing that parallels the Y-axis rails, riding in very from-the-factory-looking mounting clips, all the way out the back of the machine, up the cable tray, down toward the lube oil pump area, and open-ended. I thought about picking up a cheap bore scope to have a look around under the table to see what all of these oil lines are for and whether they've just been dripping oil haplessly around, but I changed my mind and decided I'd seen enough. Between the known broken oil line that was supposed to be feeding a third of the machine, random oil lines coming from who-knows-where and going to nothing, and the fact that--well, let's just avoid the world's longest run-on sentence: As I removed and disassembled all of the way covers, I learned that 100% of the rubber lip seals, bumpers, and plastic guides were... not there. The only places the way covers were sealed were where enough chips had packed in to form a barrier. It was no wonder the machine was such a horror show beneath.

So, with all of that in mind, I decided I wasn't going to waste any more time on the machine until I knew whether it was worth wasting time on. I called the local (Seattleish) Hurco dealer/service center to explain the situation and get some advice. I knew service would be expensive, so I was hoping to feel them out on whether it would be even worth it. "This machine is old, it has these problems, so would you spend a ton of money looking it over or would you just assume it's a five-ton paperweight?"

Predictably, they weren't interested in making that call over the phone, without seeing the machine. In the end, I saw it this way: Either I was spending a ton of money (service/travel/per diem would total nearly $2500) to learn that I need to cut bait and part the thing out (hopefully earning enough to break even on the service and rigging to the scrap yard) or, by some miracle, the tech would work some magic, dial the machine in, and it would be totally worth it. Either way, I'd know where I stood.

So I had about a month to prepare for a very expensive birthday present to myself. (They wanted to come sooner, but ain't nobody got time for that...)

Did I schedule the service call for the day after Super Bowl Sunday and take a day off work so I could be there to assist? Yes. Did I make sure everything was completely ready before the game so I wouldn't be scrambling at the last minute like always? Of course not. Did I dig myself an even deeper hole by shooting pool with the kids after the game instead of getting right to work? Well... Yeah. Of course.

So I was already metabolizing the last of my gameday beer before I even started to prep the shop and machine for the tech's arrival at 9:00 in the morning. First step was a much more thorough cleaning of the machine. After that, I needed to make sure the oiling system was in one piece, as the tech would need to jog the machine around. This is when I learned (I know this seems like it should be obvious, but I may have been dropped on my head as a baby) that compression fitting ferrules are not reusable. And you're not going to find 4 mm ferrules locally at 11:00 on a Sunday night. I decided that I had nothing to lose by trying to make the old ferrules work. Either I fix them or I destroy them and hope the tech has some replacements in his kit. I have a drill bit that's the perfect size to barely bore them out so they fit over the hose, but there was no way to hold onto the ferrule for drilling without crushing it. Unless you have a drill chuck or two laying around to hold them concentrically. "World's Cleverest Man!" I lied to myself as I tightened the assembly back up.

Even with the detour into Ferrule Land, the sliced hose repair was quicker than priming the system with oil and checking for leaks. There were none, so the drilled-out ferrules worked! This also confirmed that the open-ended oil lines were for some kind of accessory that's no longer attached to the machine and not to be worried about.



After that, all that was left was getting the vises off the table (for the first time since I've owned the machine) and cleaning the table up really well:





I'm going to try (and fail) to avoid the rest of the post becoming a wall of text, but I didn't take any pictures of the actual service out of respect for the tech. Nice guy, and really good at what he did. It was a long, interesting day, and I have no regrets at this point.

He started by getting the machine "square." I leveled the machine when I parked it using a very precise Starrett machinist's level, but apparently that's not what you're supposed to do. It's far less important for the machine to be level than it is for the machine to be square. He dialed this in with a big granite reference block on the table and a dial indicator mounted to the spindle housing. There are six leveling legs under the machine, not four, and there's a process of using the corner leg adjustment to take out the twist and the middle legs to take out the tilt. Or something like that. His block only covered a fraction of the table, yet I was shocked to see how much runout I had over its length in all directions. In the end, he was able to dial the machine into factory spec, which is something like two C-hairs per telephone pole if I remember correctly. And I surely do.

After squaring the machine, he turned his focus to dialing out backlash with controller compensation. It took him a while to get to this, though, because he was annoyed by some things in the controller and wanted to fix some parameters. The good news for me: I can finally jog full speed in the Z direction! This alone may have been worth the house call... He did eventually get to the backlash, and it was pretty bad, especially in Y. I don't remember the actual tolerance Hurco is shooting for, but it's something like less than half a thou. My machine was at least five times that off in X and Y, and now it's spot-on. It's possible my nasty part lines are a thing of the past!

His take on the spindle noise was also really encouraging. He heard it, sure, but he'd heard worse. And He didn't think it was from the spindle. For starters, the spindle was good and cool. He at first thought it might have been the motor (still really expensive, but way less so than a spindle), but he took the belt cover off and wondered if it might even just be a slight imbalance in the pulley. His recommendation was to just run it until something breaks, as why spend a ton of money when you're not sure which component is failing?

In the end, I asked him what he thought of the machine and whether it was worth it for me to sink a lot more time and money into it, and I was really surprised when he told me that of all of the machines like mine and of that vintage he's worked on, mine is in the best shape. Crazy! I was picturing needing new thrust bearings, guides, screws, etc., but this machine, to him, was in the "dial it in with the controller" range of worn out. So super good news, and I'm REALLY excited to see how the machine performs once I get the covers put back together and screwed back on.

Which is going to take a LONG time. The saga of the way covers is one for another post. I'm still in the very early stages of those things being repaired and installed, yet it's already been quite the multinational ordeal! I'll keep you posted.

 

[zanyad]

@GeddyT, hope you're well. How's that machine coming?

 

[GeddyT]

@GeddyT, hope you're well. How's that machine coming?

Sorry. Left you hanging again, didn't I? I'm decently well, I guess. Been sick a lot this year, plus work has been really crazy. Maybe those two things are related...

Unfortunately, you're still pretty caught up on getting the Hurco back together, although there's a bit of backstory left to tell. When I first started disassembling the way covers, I had a rare sunny day in January, so I got most of the pieces cleaned up with a pressure washer:



That's both of X-axis covers and the front Y-axis cover. The other two (Z and back Y) I did the same to later. Cleaned up like this, they're at least able to be handled and worked without receiving a million cuts on my hands, but I haven't yet gotten around to the hours and hours of straightening and repairing that will be required. I need to wrap my head around just what all soft pieces are missing so I can fabricate new ones (impossible to purchase). I can make new nylon rollers for the Y-axis pieces that ride on the linear rails, but I need to figure out the purpose of the L-shaped plastic pieces that fit onto some of the covers so that I can make new ones and figure out how to attach them. There are also rubber bumpers that cushion the pieces from each other when fully closed, and about 95% are missing completely.

The main thing missing, and what I chased after immediately, is the rubber lip seal that's just completely missing from every piece of every cover. To give you a better idea of what I was looking for, here's a picture:



On every forward-facing lip of each segment of way cover, a steel profile (1) is tack-welded in place. You pry open the lip on the left in the above diagram, stuff in your polyurethane rubber lip seal strip (2), tap the lifted lip back closed to pinch it in place, and you have your sealing assembly (3) that seals the gap to the next segment of way cover below and keeps chips and coolant off your very expensive linear guides.

The obvious source for this lip seal material is Hurco, so I could just pick up exactly what's meant to be used. Unfortunately, you can't order or discuss parts directly from Hurco anymore, so I had to inquire with the same local dealer that came out to service the machine. Back of the napkin math suggested I would need about 16 meters of lip seal to leave me with enough of a fudge factor, so that's what I asked for. In response, I got two pictures of a finger and thumb, in each a different rubber profile held. "Which one?"

Only one of the two looked even remotely close, so I asked for 16 meters of it. The quote was $65, but the "quantity" field on the invoice was a little suspect, with the quantity listed as merely "1." I asked the shop, "One what?" They didn't know. Stupidly, I just figured I asked for 16 meters, so that's what I would be getting, so I pushed the order through.

A bit over a week later, I received a suspiciously tiny box in the mail from Hurco North America. Inside was exactly one meter of rubber profile. A very wrong profile. So that was a total bust. Doing the 65 x 16 math, Hurco was right out as a supplier anyway, so I started searching the web for a profile that would actually look like it would fit in my covers' channels. Did some measuring as well, even going so far as to take a clay pattern and slice it and measure.

In the end, I managed to find only a single U.S. manufacture of way cover lip seals that sells a system that looks anything like what I have. The catalog page attached above is theirs. Their quote for 16 meters of skinny extruded polyurethane rubber was $400.

So I spent a week going back and forth with a Chinese manufacturer on Alibaba. They have a profile that looks to be an exact fit. About two dollars per meter. Shipping cost twice as much as the product. The downside is that it's been nearly a month of waiting now, and still no sign of it. Worth the wait if it works.

This wait for materials is no excuse for the project not being further along. There is so much work to do in getting the covers even ready for the seals that it shouldn't have been a delay at all. Unfortunately, I've gotten myself into another house project quagmire that has taken precedence, so the Hurco has been on the back burner. I'll catch up on that quagmire (lots of pictures!) in another post. Hopefully soon.