Nobody Special

I would tend to think bad connection in the cord, switch, or less likely, the brushes getting a crap connection. Frosty may well be right, but I don't think any of mine have a cutoff for overheating, so I'm not experienced with it. The cord you can jiggle (carefully) to see if it cuts out, or test for resistance. Switch you pull out and test for resistance. Brushes you take out and look at them and while you're at it, make sure the commutator is clean and not scored. And if you've got them out, why not replace them. You can clean a commutator by sanding with a VERY fine grade of sandpaper, lightly, then cleaning out the grooves with a probe or thin screwdriver. I just had an old favorite, a Bostitch start making popping noises once in awhile, acting weak, and getting hot while using the cutting disc, so I'm guessing I've fried the brushes and it's arcing to the commutator (the bit of the armature that the brushes touch). Or maybe some of the carbon has got down in there and is arcing. I'd fix it, even if it costs more than new. I've had that thing for around a decade and love it. You kinda get attached to them. I've got three, one Bostitch, one Dewalt, and an $11 HF Chicago Elecric special that just will not die no matter what I throw at it. I've bought three of the latter over the years, almost more out of morbid curiosity than anything. One lasted about 30 minutes before the windings started smoking, one lasted maybe six months before the brushes went and I gave it away, and the other has been going for maybe eight years now, zero maintenance. It's the Nash Rambler of angle grinders, clunky, awkward, and people look at you funny when you use it, but it just will not die.

For the incandescence, I checked it with the lights off for a couple of seconds, poured at red, not incredibly dark, but not really sure yet if it wanted to go light red to orange. Say about 1400, and I know that's less than 1500...at least in steel, and I spent a long afternoon once hunting down articles on incandescence - what it looked like at the time is that most materials, and certainly metals glow once you get past about 1000 degrees, with about the same color at similar temperatures. Of course, I've slept since then, and I may have read it wrong, and I certainly wouldn't want to trust that as a method in the daylight, but my little laser pyrometer doesn't go nearly that high, and the texture/resistance also felt right.

Some updates - The baked cores for some reason expanded and wouldn't fit in the pattern. Who knew? I made a second attempt and screwed up the pour, which was maybe a bit too cold, and the sprue froze/clogged and I get a huge mess. Third attempt - my ramming has gotten much better, I used incandescence to judge the temperature (at night), I've taken to hand packing the cores into the pattern to avoid flipping it, and I added a touch of bentonite to the sand and tempered it a bit further, which helped tremendously...and then I shorted the crucible by maybe 20 ounces or so...bottom of number two, and the aftermath of number three in the pics below.

I don't know ALL the verses, but I can sing Which Side Are You On and the Union Maid drunk, blindfolded, and backwards...and for that matter the regular way. Also, thank you for that ear worm, my wife just asked why I was going around the house singing "Oh Christmas Tree". Sigh... You're right about the sand. Want a weirder fact? They're running out. Different kinds of sand have very different kinds of uses depending on the composition, size, and sharpness of the corners making it up. Sand found say in the desert is no good for construction and cement making because it's rounded off from centuries of exposure and erosion. I don't think this is the article I was looking for, but... The Story Of Sand In 'The World In A Grain' : NPR Or did ya mean the one by Connell to the other tune?

I've seen the gold fever. They get crazy. You can pan for it lots of places. I've found a few flecks embedded in rocks here (Whidbey Island) dropped by glaciers when I was hunting for jasper and agates. An Army buddy (the guy that taught me to make moonshine, before he got kicked out for...go figure, DUIs) had a brother that used to pan streams on their land up near Dahlonega, GA. It wasn't worth professionally mining, and he didn't make much, but he could work four hours a day and make a lot more than flipping burgers. Seems like a lot of the really good mines started by people fixated on gold, or sometimes silver. Come for the gold, stay for the tin, mercury, copper, antimony, bismuth, lead...Bisbee got started that way in the 1800s, and they were taking copper out of the ground until the 70s. They also had that whole thing where they rounded up a few thousand men supposedly for being Wobblies and tried to get the Army to put them in a detention camp, but that's this whole other story.

It was a beautiful failure about 1 lb and a hair shy of having enough metal, but I'm not unhappy about it. The mold rammed up beautifully, lines were lovely, less porosity, no cracks, some shrinkage on the top from it running out of metal. I'd added risers and made the runners and gates bigger, which worked great, but also took up more metal and I didn't allow for enough. It's over nine lbs of aluminum total and need closer to ten in the crucible to be sure. On the other hand I learned a lot more and a lot went right. Got a much better feel for a good temper, my ramming is getting better, venting went well and I've been playing with crossbars and gaggers to hold up the sand in the long stretches. And since I cast at night, I could tell the pouring temperature by the incandescence. I'm worn out now from moving dirt for my wife, but I'll put a pic in the gingery lathe post later.

Sure looks like slag of some type. Are you near a current railroad? You also tend to find thermite slag where they weld rail in, and it looks, well, a lot like that. I used to bring bits of it home from work once in awhile.

It took three times ramming the mold up and 4 hours of time, but after all that, but finally got another good mold and made an attempt at casting a lathe bed. And for all that sweat and tears, I have all this to show for it. Oooh...ah....and then you wait for two hours to open it and see if it came out right. Should know in another 15 minutes-ish. Isn't casting exciting? Now I remember why I switched to forging... I like the wheels, btw.

I think the welds fit in fine. I like the patina on the face especially.

Doing a little night casting.

Well, yes and no. Apparently, some of the copper ore they would pull out of the ground in Germanic deposits wouldn't reduce to metal no matter what they threw at it. Turns out it was mostly nickel and arsenic with a little copper for good measure. Supposedly some of them thought the ore to be cursed somehow by whatever you call the German version of tommyknockers. So both the ore, and the potential goblin were nickels and when they finally isolated the metal... The needle bit was cool too. Oddly enough, they're not made singleton, but two at a time. The rod is cut, ground on both ends, then stamped in the middle, punched, broken apart, cleaned up, tumbled, sometimes finished in other metals or anodized or dipped in gold to make the eye stand out. Pins are similar, but apply molten glass. Like I said, took me a long-time taking side trips to watch videos on the open-hearth process, lead creep, needle making, the use of platinum leads in older style light bulbs to avoid breakage through different coefficients of expansion...you get the idea.

I recently picked up a copy of Metals in the Service of Man (Alexander and Street, 1958). There are more recent versions, but I didn't have $111 to spend on it, so I read the 1958 version. It's dated and the plot is a bit slow, but it's a surprisingly good read for a version of a book that's almost seventy years old. I wouldn't recommend it as the final word on metallurgy - for example it hadn't quite figured out titanium and talked about the open hearth process of producing steel as one of the contemporary leading methods. But for all that, it had a nice beat and you could dance to it. The general descriptions of metallurgy worked, if they weren't quite complete, and there were lots of interesting tidbits on the physical properties of iron and alloys, plus occasional bits of trivia such as the influence of metal production on the German goals in WWII, or explaining how the metal nickel took its name from the word for devil (incidentally, pumpernickel literally means farting demon, because rye bread tends to lead to flatulence). I would love to read the 1998 version if the price ever comes down or I can get an inter-library loan, and it would well be worth a read to someone looking to learn about metallurgy in general, including iron and its alloys. P.S. You may find yourself on some interesting internet side-trips, such as one I took to look up the production of steel needles, which was a lot cooler than it sounds and matched the book's description almost perfectly. Alexander, W. & Street, A. (1958). Metals in the Service of Man. Pelican.

The aluminum gods did not smile, although they nearly cracked a sardonic grin. It looked gorgeous when I opened it up...and then not so much. The first attempt got minor washes and runs in the front...almost good enough, but a little bit of misfeeding. The top has one small inclusion and a shallow concavity about the size of a silver dollar from shrinkage in one spot. The back is a mess of hot tears though from it shrinking, but only on the one side. The interior also had rough sections on one end, probably trapped gas. On the plus side, I got a LOT of practice making molds and patterns and learned a good bit about handling it. I know how much metal it needs (just over a quart and a half), and I think I know what I screwed up...metal not hot enough and the risers needed to either sit behind or on top of the pattern. I was surprised that despite the cracks in the back the shrinkage was much less than I expected. The final piece was maybe a third of an inch shorter than the pattern, if that. If I try again and it fails, I may also make cores with a molasses binder and bake them hard. It would make things easier and I wouldn't have to roll the mold.

Finished the new pattern for the bed, rammed it up...and a quarter of it fell in. Did it again...same result, on the other side. Moved the risers, rammed it up...and it fell in again. (turns out the ribs that Gingery suggested for the cope (top part) make a weak point because they don't go all the way down). Then I got smart. Gingery originally has you put the cope on a board, right side up with the pattern in it, ram up the mold over the outside, then flip it over, put the drag (bottom part) on, and ram the sand in it AND the cores for the inside of the pattern, still in the cope. Then you roll it over one last time, take the cope off, and pull the pattern off of the cores before putting it back together. It's brilliant, but it kept falling in, no doubt from me varying from his sizes and putting risers on it. Then I got smart...I figured the whole reason for flipping it over so much was to create the cores...but when the top fell in, the cores were still inside the mold and perfectly good. So instead of starting from scratch, I rammed the top, which put less stress than ramming it over and flipping it twice...and part of the mold stuck to the pattern. (see attached pics). Dang it. Today, I cut the side of the ribs short, and only had the top fall in once before getting it right. I think if I'd added some kind of support at the bottom under the ribs, it would have survived flipping, but I got it when I left the bottom alone and re-rammed the top like last night. Poured 1.5 hours ago...waiting to break it open and see if the aluminum gods have smiled on us.

My one contribution is that unless you're forging all day most days, it's gonna take you a long minute to get enough scale. The last bloom I did took a lot of ore, I can't imagine collecting enough scale flakes to make anything more than a mini-bloom. You're in northern Georgia, right? If you want to make a bloom, there's a crap load of good goethite at and around Red Top Mountain, in huge fist size chunks that you can easily pull out of the red clay banks. I used to ruck it out in my ALICE pack. It was mined heavily there up through the Civil War. They still mine red ochre up there. Heck I've got some of it here in WA, not to mention a bit of mostly cooked bloom (unexpected GA thunderstorm and stupidly hot clay furnaces don't mix). If you're not near there, there's iron ore practically everywhere in North Georgia. I used to see limonite all over near Macon.

So, yeah, you can leave one on the main line, but you have to tie it down (i.e. put on a number of hand brakes and test it with nothing but before locking it up and leaving). The Canada rail industry and that line in particular were going through insane cost cutting measures and the rail and engine were in crap shape, plus they'd gone down to one-man crews, something which was supposed to be illegal but they got done under "emergency" provisions. They changed a lot of this being allowed after the fact. I've heard that the engineer was somebody shifted over from management as a replacement for short manpower, but I don't know if it's true. What is true is that he supposedly called in the problem with the engine and a manager (s?) claimed to have signed off on it but didn't or didn't know what he was doing. He also only left the engine brakes on and two cars worth then flubbed the brake check badly, maybe on purpose. Problem with leaving one on the main line is that if anything happens, there's no derail. They had a siding with a derail and chose not to put it there, possibly because of time. There's more, but it just gets worse the more you know. Graniteville is about as bad but killed less people. An NS crew left the main line switched into an industry, derails off when they went on the law (couldn't legally work longer) and left but reported it as good in dark (unsignaled) territory. A train went into the industry at 40 mph with loaded chlorine gas cars right behind the engine and hit three or four more in the industry track. Busted three of them open (about 60,000 gallons of gas) and killed 11 people, put about 10 or 11 hundred in the hospital, about 120 or so with what became chronic issues. Two of the dead were the engineer and conductor - the conductor made it to the highway and coughed his lungs up on the dash of the car that picked him up. When you find out what goes through your major cities and towns on iffy trains and tracks, much less where you live on a daily basis, it gets scary in a hurry. Imagine a Graniteville had happened in Chicago, or downtown Atlanta. The only reason it didn't kill half the factory workers in Graniteville was because it was a weekend.

Because putting it in the dirt usually saves damage to equipment and people. Imagine for example, some yahoo gets a switch wrong from the mainline into an industry (say Norfolk Southern in Graniteville). Still tear things up fiercely, but at least a 12,000 ton train doesn't hit a building full of workers at 40 mph. Most incidents though involve derailing an engine or a few cars, as George said, often at low speeds. It's annoying and expensive, but if the car doesn't come off the truck, or the truck off the axles, then a lot of the time you can just kinda pull it over a re-railing device or wooden blocks back onto the track. Let them roll out a long ways and a cut of cars can pick up speed and do real damage, like that cut of 40 or so cars from a bomb train that rolled out up in Le Magentic and burned down half a town. Some of them prevent cars from rolling out of industries, running through a switch the wrong way, and onto the main line.

Some of the most fervent beekeepers I know are violently allergic, crazy nutters. I have found that a lot of people that think they're allergic aren't though. Many call anything yellowish and flying as bees, such as sweat bees and yellowjackets. Wasp venom works on a very different mechanism, so being allergic to one often doesn't mean you are allergic to the other. I've tanged one or two swarms every year for the last five years. I'm sure that it doesn't hurt that when bees swarm, they do it twice, and the first time they don't generally go far before settling. Something good to know - a low pitched sound and slow beats tend to settle them low, high pitched and you'll need a fricking stepladder. My first time I used a table spoon and a saucepan and put them in the top of my neighbor's plum tree that hasn't been pruned in 15 or 20 years and it took three tries and some cutting to get the queen down. The last several I used a big stockpot and a wooden spoon and got them down to three feet or lower. Tonk tonk, not tink tink. And like I said, totally agree that it shouldn't work. It's been tested extensively and far better entomologists than me say it has to be malarkey. E pur si muove. It doesn't tick me off like dowsing though. I know in my heart of hearts dowsing can't work, so it drives me nuts every time that I've done it and it has. My dad not only could find water but electric lines and utilities.

Be careful mentioning the Tuatha da Dannan too much, it can draw their attention and bring bad luck. Bad as walking widdershins around a church. I collect a lot of stories, but the best unfamiliar tall tales and stories I know aren't repeatable on a family site. But here's a couple of long sayings for ya in response to "How's it going?" "Fine as frog fur split four ways and tapered on the ends, but I'll be over it by dinnertime." "It's a dog eat dog world and I've got on milkbone boxers". and my personal favorite, "As busy as a three-legged cat covering up scat on a frozen pond". If you're in a hurry, "fair to middlin'" which is a grade of cotton, not a type of weather. Actually, I don't know if you know about telling the bees or tanging them. When you keep bees, you're supposed to tell them about anything important that happens in the house. If you don't share, they either don't stay or don't produce. When the beekeeper or someone in his house dies, someone is appointed to go inform the bees. I've done it. Tanging is the practice of beating pots, pans, or other metal objects to get a swarm to settle. It drives me crazy for the same reason that dowsing does; it's a bunch of superstitious nonsense that shouldn't possibly work, except it does somehow. My grandfather could tang bees right into a box or a trash can. I usually am happy if I can get them to settle somewhere where I don't need a ladder.

I'm certainly not a good enough welder to suggest much, but most of the power hammers and cast iron power machinery that I've seen repaired were put back together by brazing, which is supposed to hold well and be a lot easier to do.

Anything all blue on the rails is maintenance and not allowed to be removed by anyone but maintenance. "If it's blue, it ain't you". They also use blue lights when occupying a track. You see it on flags, lights, and derails, many of which are portable.

Holy moly, look at the grains on that HF ASO. Forget grey cast iron, that's lipstick on a pig iron. I've forged on rocks with much smaller grains.

I didn't pay close enough attention to the eclipse online to see a color change, but normally the coronas exhibit white light only. But...that said, you may have seen colors from the chromosphere, which tend to look sort of pinkish during an eclipse.

Yes, although being in the rain shadow here is like ordering an extra dry water. We only had about 20 percent obscurement anyways and with the clouds out, it just got a little bit dimmer. Most of the year I prefer the weather to be bad. It keeps the tourists and the rich yahoos with second homes away.

Well, not to go full-UPL, but unless you're contributing to sanctioned Native Alaskan subsistence bowhead whaling, which seems unlikely in Ohio, you might consider trying under the special case considerations from 26 U.S.C Section 170, subsection f, i.e. materials for research purposes, foods, or if you're really feeling your Wheaties, the taxidermy exemption. Depends on how you frame it and what support documentation you can provide. Honestly, I'm surprised they still call it the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission; the name is offensive as hell.