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George, Wow, what a test of your ability! I can imagine how questions could really disrupt the flow, leaving loose ends and little time to address them. I once worked for a guy who would interrupt management meeting reports with what sounded like offhand or even off topic questions. He was like a shark smelling blood whenever the response wasn't complete, composed, and authoritative. This rattled a lot of my co-workers, which only made it worse for them. You could have a situation where there was no mistake and there was nothing going wrong, and this guy would rattle off all the reasons that your answers led him to question your competence. I would imagine judges pressed for time are similarly hard to impress.

Good grief! Millennials are the children of Baby Boomers! Gen X's parents were the silent generation. There were precious few of them left to reproduce because most of the silent generation were born during world conflicts when male populations were very low. Silent generation kids had to survive pestilence, and poverty. Many didn't, so you have a small generation giving birth to another small generation. The Baby Boomers were the largest generation in world history for their time. Their parents were "The greatest generation" whose adult lives were touched by two world wars, the Spanish Flu, and the Great Depression. Boomers were the first generation where most of the kids survived to adulthood. Average family size dropped after that. Yes the adult baby boomers had birth control, but they clearly decided to reproduce above replacement rate because their children are Millennials, the largest generation in world history to that point.

I saw an article the other day trying to make the case that all these Millennial generation workers are leaving the workforce to pursue their unemployed passions. Down in the details, they eventually mentioned some figures for retiring baby boomers. If you did the math, you'd notice that the huge number of retiring boomers pretty well answered for people leaving the labor market. It leads me to wonder if maybe the real issue is that Generation X is so much smaller than the Baby Boomer generation that we're seeing an inevitable demographic shift in the working world. I've seen articles which suggest that as many as 10,000 Baby boomers retire every single day in the U.S. alone. Every year, more Baby Boomers retire in the U.S. than the entire population of Chicago (2.7 Million) which is the third largest city in the U.S. What do you think?

According to the steel price index on the Trading Economics website, Steel rebar went down $97 per ton over the year. Pricing hit it's highest points in May and October. It was cheapest in February. Right now, it's below average. That tracks more or less with what I've seen for pricing fluctuations in steel electrical parts over the last year. That being said, none of this is directly meaningful to the going rate for low volume sales. I would hazard a guess that the higher going rate for just about everything is hugely dependent on the economic struggles of the past couple of years. Lost sales, higher wage demand, and mounting overhead combine to create a situation where a given business has little option but to raise their prices for what they have. Of course that doesn't mean that customers can, or will pay. So a whole lot of businesses will fail. Those that don't fail, will have less competition. As with any economic crisis, customers that can afford to wait, will sit on the sidelines. I saw well over 75% of my annual revenue get put on hold for six months or more. Clients are just now checking prices and planning to move forward in the Spring. Over half of them are seeking to "lock in" prices and orders to avoid escalation, delay, etc. Most of the postponements happened round about October because everyone was freaking out over material costs. Same thing happened when lockdowns started. Nobody would consider doing a remodel of their building during lockdowns, even though it was cheaper, and less disruptive to their tenants. Public school projects were the same way. They could have completed huge amounts of contracted work when everything was shut down, but chose not to. Everyone was so fixated on material prices that they overlooked how starving contractors were reducing labor costs on their bids. Now, we're heading into a 1st quarter labor shortage, so most of the material savings are bound to be consumed in labor increases.

Today I attended a local business networking meeting as a guest of a colleague. The aim of the group is to generate business referrals that actually end in sales for members of the group. "Giving is getting" was a central theme of their efforts. Neat stuff, they seemed to be doing good work, and there was a great atmosphere of helping one another. The meeting was very structured, with timed agenda items to keep everything on track. I got to see a lot of diverse business people talking about what they do, what the group does, where things are headed, etc. It didn't take long for me to realize how the time limits effectively revealed more about the speaker, than what the speaker actually said. Now this was a group of 30 or so people, and the majority were obviously not entertainers basking in the spotlight. The collegial atmosphere was supportive enough that it was clear most of the members got plenty of practice honing their 40 second business pitch because they do this at every meeting. The majority of the members conveyed who they are, what they do, and what separates them from competitors within 40 seconds. About half of the remainder struggled through everything except for what separates them from their competition. Then there were a few that obviously lacked clarity of purpose. There were a few interesting things about them. First off, they all had plenty of experience in their line of work. Second, public speaking skills/comfort had nothing to do with it. These people appeared to be perfectly comfortable as they spoke. And third, they were only excited to One was a life coach who spoke about teaching her clients about enforcing personal limits as a way to manage stress. She spent her 40 seconds giving away her salable product, without saying her business name, or articulating what her business actually does. Another was some kind of HMO insurance agent who was given a full seven minutes to give a deeper presentation on his business. What followed was a tirade on social security, Medicaid, and his prediction of an inexorable collapsing hope that retirees will ever afford medical treatment. He repeated "There is no free lunch" at least a half dozen times as justification for his firms constantly increasing premiums. His pitch seemed to suggest that everyone should lower their expectations, but only fools question rate increases. There were actually several who went off into a 40 second sales pitch which were obviously condensed versions of their current marketing stuff, holiday gift deals being the most common. Those pitches were so unfocused that I really don't have much to refer them for. More to the point, I'd be concerned about embarrassing myself by sending a friend to some incompetent joker. I'm glad I went because the whole thing got me thinking about refining my perspective, and my pitch.

Steve, Wow, that's a 12.5% failure rate on those cans! If the rest of the lights follow suit, you'll have at least three more fixtures that need replacing. Plus recessed cans are often engineered to barely survive the stress of a single installation. It can be tough to replace the broken stuff without parts of the brackets or housing collapsing under their own weight.

Steve, I can feel your frustration, you want to do a good job in a tough situation with opposition coming from all quarters. Speaking of can lights, we had a job recently where they used recessed LED lights where the "trim" gets mudded in so there is zero profile. The result is a nominal 2" diameter hole for the light to shine out of. Nobody outside of the electricians was upset that there's no way to readily service the light with a hole that small. "Just do what you're told". Well, the client moved in and despite all the photometric studies, charts, and graphs, those little pinholes of light don't "feel like enough" when every surface is painted some sad shade of black. Orders came down to replace the light engines and their drivers in situ. I forced the manufacturer to actually explain how that was supposed to happen. Turns out, they planned on sending us a little suction cup with which to pull the light engine down out of the housing. I asked if they'd tested it. They said yes... but it doesn't work consistently. They ultimately told us to run a screw directly into the light engine, grab the screw with needle nose pliers, and jerk it free. Now we knew what circuits to shut down so as to ensure safety there. The screw approach worked, but that's a seriously risky protocol for anybody sent to service one of these terrible things after the fact. I think the public wrongly believes that LED technology means you've got a maintenance, and heat free product. That's simply not true. Nearly all of our LED warranty claims are for fixtures that quit working shortly after installation. Some jobs the infant mortality will run near 10%. I can't even imagine telling my guys not to test the lights. Half the satisfaction of doing the job is seeing your systems working.

Anvil, I take your point and agree that we shouldn't get into the political side of it. That being said, I see this as an expansion of the kind of selective shortages in years past. Whenever there was a run on something, and the supply/manufacturing chain couldn't keep up, I'd hear people telling me that nobody in that chain could afford to invest in infrastructure when the demand would inevitably dry up as soon as shelves were stocked again. That entire argument assumes a closed economic episode within a generally static consumer trend. It ignores opportunity to shift the market in favor of the firms that are most responsive to its needs. Assuming that everything customers do will always be either hoarding or static consumption ignores the very real possibility that making things reliably cheap and plentiful will often increase your market share. This is pretty obviously the way that most of the largest firms went about building their empires at their start. Lots of negative things can be truthfully said about online retailing giants. However, in the midst of a two year period of constantly increasing delays and pricing for construction materials, the majority of products sold by those online retailing giants are arriving within two weeks. That's much longer than the two days it used to be, but then again, I have firsthand knowledge that three massive distribution centers were built by one of those online retailing giants in my area. Two of them went up during the supply crisis. The local retailers who can't or won't find a way to be useful will lose business to firms that do what's necessary to deliver. But honestly, and sincerely, I could absolutely live with the prices and the delays if these firms would at least be honest. Everyone is pretending that "the situation is constantly changing" yet the outcome is incredibly consistent. After two years of this, it's difficult to believe that efforts across the markets are being coordinated to fix the problems. It often looks like the supply chain is happy to raise the price, lower the expectations, and deliver when they get around to it. I literally get angry responses from factories when I offer to pay extra for faster domestic shipping. Before all this stuff hit, we could expect at least 10% of the light fixtures we ordered to be massively delayed by an unaccountable manufacturer. Back then, we chalked it up to Architects preferring the sort of bleak and depressing minimalist nonsense that only the most unstable "artisans" will make in their underground concrete bunkers. One assumes that it's difficult to get much production on light fixtures when the maker insists on working in the dark. Sometimes I wonder if there are warehouses full of cheerful building finishes going unused simply because the design trends are stuck on sad looking cubes.

I hear you on the just in time thing. I definitely hear you about warehousing thing as well. Personally, I think they should stop taking new orders until and unless they can actually provide guarantees of delivery. It's been two years of this, which is why it's difficult for me to believe that the manufacturing and supply chain can't be more honest/ accurate/ accountable about what's going on.

Quotes for material pricing and lead times are double to triple where they were a year ago. I can't place an order without a few manufacturers doubling their lead time at the last moment. During my apprenticeship I was on a project where we built a factory from the ground up in less time than these firms currently need to make a few mundane light fixtures. Heck, I can't even get a quote from some manufacturers in a reasonable amount of time. I'd just love to know about honest efforts to clear the backlog.

I agree with Frosty, the square faced jaw looks like it's designed to index off a surface to leave a precise length of rod for riveting. I wonder if the notch on the cutting blade is there to restrict the depth of cut to force the user to work their way around a piece of round stock which would leave a clean shear line about the perimeter which is better for riveting. Alternately, I wonder if they're made for nibbling and snapping scored lines in brittle material like glass or tile.

I thought of a few things that haven't been posted yet. #1 It may not seem like it, but it's a lot easier for a beginner to get smoother results by using a hammer that has a crowned face. I don't think I've ever seen a hammer at a hardware shop with a properly crowned face for blacksmithing. Hammers that aren't crowned well, tend to leave corner dings in the work until you're really good at striking flat. That's harder to do when you're forging angles like the bevels in your work. If you know anybody with a decent farrier's rounding hammer, ask them to borrow it. The "round" side will leave dings, but they're generally shallower than what the corner of a "flat" face will give you. #2. Patiently fixing problems when they first appear is often the fastest way to success. Clean the stock, if it won't come clean, cut the scale off before pounding it in further. You can use the flat end of a file to scrape scale off hot metal. #2 If you have a sturdy vice and a coarse file, you can hot rasp the work back to flat very quickly. Thin stock tends to bend away from the rasp unless it's properly supported when hot. Hot rasping is very heat, speed, and pressure sensitive. #3. If you have an angle grinder, look into picking up a backing pad for abrasive discs. The backing pad keeps the cut flat, even when the abrasive is wearing down. The discs are commonly available in low grits that work quickly. They're much cheaper than stone or flap wheels. If you decide to buy a lot of discs, make sure to lay them flat with something heavy on top, otherwise they tend to cup which makes them really difficult to mount. #4. Some people with gas forges put a small section of square or rectangular tube stock in the forge such that the flame hits the tube, not their stock. This helps to minimize scaling on the workpiece.

I read about a scam where the incoming call sounds like a bad connection where you can only catch bits and phrases. The caller pretends that they can't hear what you're saying either. They record your side of the call in hopes of catching you stating your name, and generic words like "yes". I gather that they use this recording to falsify your acceptance to a subscription service or some such.

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe” -Muhammed Ali There are many aspects of estimating/business/management that lend themselves to a pattern, process, or routine. The focus on consistency is largely driven by an assumption that diligent repetition will cause success. In this context, it’s understandable that so many professionals seek to improve their process throughput. This perspective may conceal opportunities to make small changes with large benefits. Survival manuals recommend picking a point in the distance and walking towards it. This is because minor differences in our bodies can result in one stride being longer than the other resulting in a tendency to walk in circles. This is especially common in situations where featureless expanses must be traversed. By focusing on a specific point, or feature, we can make minor corrections to arrive at our destination. Many readers will reach this point thinking about process-oriented solutions like error checks, and scope reviews. Consider walking through a featureless expanse, focusing on your selected destination. There’s plenty of time to observe and think as you walk. You notice your progress drifting to one side, and correct course. Now you think about why you’re drifting. Before long, you start experimenting with changes in posture, or compensating efforts to stop drifting. This effort to equalize your stride will eventually reveal your weakest link. Continued effort will strengthen your weakest link. It’s here that we can be surprised by how much harder it feels to strengthen the weakest link, than it felt to compensate for it. It often requires a greater effort to correct a limp, than to continue limping. When time is of the essence and there’s much to be done, will you stop to fix your stride, or learn to limp faster? A lot of smart people would say it depends on how much time you’ve got. This overlooks a very obvious possibility. What if there’s a pebble in your shoe? Obviously, you’d take a moment to remove the pebble so you could be on your way unimpeded. Astute readers might be expecting me to provide a list of “pebbles”. Unfortunately, that’s missing the larger point. See once you find a “pebble”, you’ll know exactly what to do. The bigger problem, the true weakest link, is investing too much into process-oriented corrections, rather than looking for simple reasons why we drift from where we want to be. This shift in perspective reveals a whole lot of “pebbles”. Once they’re gone, all the compensatory hitches in your stride become obvious. Every improvement you make reduces your work and increases your output.

Thomas, I think your ideas could be pushed in another direction. For example, any small business in 2021 would greatly benefit from being able to sell online. There are lots of technology companies that make it relatively convenient to get set up with a website, all the sales transaction stuff, taxes, shipping etc. However, the vast majority of these website-making companies completely fail to address warranty, returns, back orders, and custom service requests. As a result, most websites force the client through some iteration of an annoying registration, or email scenario where they have no assurance that their concerns will be answered. Many small websites won't calculate the tax or shipping costs until some tedious order form is completed. Those that do, typically have an outrageously high "shipping and handling" fee. The ubiquitous technology makes it very convenient to ignore the things that make a person to person sale different. Beyond all of that, many to most of the "website in a box" software systems suggest aesthetic schemes that are conveniently uniform. Everybody ends up with the same look. Unique, memorable, meaningful, and searchable keywords are an incredibly important part of getting found online. Many of the most popular terms for blacksmithing will simply bury a business. My point, is that a customer relies on what they find online to determine how viable a given business is. A site built to take warranties as seriously as new orders, puts them at a higher level of service and trust. Similarly, sites which present the complete cost of tax, shipping, handling, etc. on the items before demanding client information, are communicating their respect for the client's time.

By now, we've all probably heard stories about unfortunate souls who followed navigation directions into a lake. From a bystanders perspective, it seems so obvious that the driver should have exercised better judgement. The other day my work computer had some kind of update and now many to most of my programs are offering to complete my sentences for me. While I'm impressed at the progress of technology, I frequently find myself in situations where it's a lot more work to just type what I want to communicate. While always an issue, I'm not talking about auto-correct for spelling and grammar here. What I'm seeing is a comprehensive effort to add convenient features to technology, which function to force the user into uniform courses of action. I've heard marketing people refer to inconvenient aspects of a given thing as "pain points". I've also heard engineers respond "that's not a bug, it's a feature". Twenty years ago, I would have laughed at the suggestion that people would happily scan and bag their own groceries. Ten years ago, I avoided it unless I was exclusively buying items with a bar code on them. Now, I look back and realize that putting code stickers on produce was all it took to make self-checkout less frustrating than waiting for cashiers. To that end, I wonder how many people are getting trained by convenience to deliver the uniformity which will allow computers to replace people? If we don't express judgement, personality, and critical thinking in our output, what benefit do we offer beyond the systems we run? More to the point, if our customers can't see any difference, why should they hire you?

JHCC, thanks for the answer about peanut allergies. I was thinking more on the lard thing, and it seems likely to me that lard is mostly fat containing water which is why it doesn't explode when water is added.

JHCC, Thank you for posting that. I wonder if used cooking oils have different smoke, flash, and fire points. I'm also curious if people with peanut allergies would be affected by burnt peanut oil residue on ironwork. Finally, I wanted to mention something weird about lard. Traditional Pork Carnita's recipies call for basically deep frying the meat in lard. Once browned, many recipes call for adding a can or two of cola, orange juice, and other spices. I was shocked the first time I watched a video of the preparation, because the boiling lard didn't react like boiling oil would when the cola was added. The cook made a big point of saying "don't try this with anything other than lard". I thought maybe this cook was unique, so I looked into it more, and discovered that it's very traditional.

I love trees, especially the way that aspen leaves will quake in a breeze. It's like a shimmer moving through the foliage. Hummingbirds are almost magic. One of my fondest memories is of a lonely motorcycle ride late on a summer evening. I was on the highway and the headlight seemed so feeble against the dark. Out in the distance there was a glowing cloud, which became glowing spots, which became individual meteors of light zipping by me as I rode. Lightning bugs. Couldn't have lasted more than 15 seconds, but wow, what an experience.

There's a youtube channel where the host makes clock parts, including small springs, screws, etc. Many of the steel parts are tempered to blue in a bed of brass chips, set into an appropriate vessel over a burner. The consistency and vibrancy of the blue coloring this method achieves is pretty remarkable.

The LED vs. Fluorescent discussion reminds me of some hard lessons I've learned as an electrical contractor. First off, the technologies are often discussed as though all the products on the market are consistent. They aren't. It's critical to understand that there will always be an intersection point between acceptable performance minimums, and maximum marketability. With some exceptions, fixtures marketed for "back of house" purposes like residential garages/shops will be "value engineered" to meet the needs of that budget-conscious market. By now, most people know how fluorescents can misbehave. However, it's been my experience that the same is not true for LED fixtures. One of the sneakier problems LED fixtures can have pertains to inrush current. Lots of people are familiar with how some electrical devices like AC motors can draw up to 125% of their running current while starting. An array of poorly-engineered LED fixtures can draw 600% of their running current while starting. All of this happens in the span of a few milliseconds, which is plenty of time to trip a circuit breaker. My company installed LED lights in an indoor riding arena at a residential address. The calculated load of thirty odd LED fixtures was roughly 8 amps. HOWEVER, the combined inrush current on these fixtures was over 50 amps! This meant that we have to run a 60A circuit to a fuse block, equipped with 15A fuses, which tied to the installed lighting circuits. This is because fuses take longer to blow than the inrush current lasts. While this solution worked for the riding arena, it could have resulted in an unworkable situation for a shop where equipment is running when the lights get switched on. Moreover, most electricians don't have test equipment capable of taking accurate readings on a millisecond basis. The manufacturers don't reliably present this information either, so an electrician will get blamed for screwing something up. Another misconception about LED fixtures is that they last a long time. It's been my experience that LED fixtures suffer a higher infant mortality rate than other lamp types, regardless of price point. Failures seem to be evenly split between drivers and lamp arrays. On larger jobs, roughly 2% of my fixture package will need replacement before everything works properly. Warranty replacements within one year will average another 1% or so. Back when fluorescent was the dominant light type, infant mortality was exceedingly rare. Warranty replacements were about the same at 1% or so. That being said, I doubt the root cause of this is all due to the technology. "Just in time" shipping has become the logistics standard for virtually all light manufacturers. At first, this meant a shift away from large warehouses full of finished lights. Now, this often means even the largest manufacturers won't even buy parts to build the lights until they're actually ready to make the customer's order. The overseas makers of the parts, do the same thing. The end result, is that everything is always late, so time-consuming Quality Control stuff like "burn in" get's skipped. "Burn in" is just a test running the device (or a sample of devices) for a period of time sufficient to reveal obvious failures. In today's market, I suspect that fluorescent fixtures would have a slightly better infant mortality rate than LED, because unbroken new tubes tend to work perfectly out of the box.

That's more frisky than I want to be around! Got me thinking though. 1/4" mild steel bolts are typically rated for 60,000 PSI tensile strength. That works out to something over 3,000 lbs of instantaneous load to pull just one bolt to breaking. Four bolts were pulled apart, but I don't know that they were equally tensioned, so they may have failed sequentially. Either way, I sure as shooting don't want to be in the way of 3,000 lbs on it's way to freedom!

Opening the ash dump on an idle bottom blast forge serves another safety purpose as well. I was at the anvil when I heard a thump. As I turned to see what happened, I noticed my coal fire landing in the fire pot! Everything seemed OK, so I kept at it. As I was cleaning up at the end of the day, I noticed a crack in my fire pot. Then I noticed that all the bolt heads holding my tuyere to the pot were stretched to where they broke. Best guess, is that coal gas piled up in the tuyere pipe until it pushed it's way out of the idle hand-crank blower's intake. From there, an unlucky breeze took the coal gas over the fire whereupon it caught fire, which carried it's way down the pipe, blowing the pot off the tuyere in the process.

There are a few pitfalls in this methodology. Simple stuff like taxes, licenses, and fees. can dramatically affect the cost of doing "the same" business in one location versus another. While I can appreciate the desire to simplify things, it's really important to know what is getting simplified, and how that will affect the answer you get by taking that shortcut. JHCC pointed out that overhead costs could be factored into the material cost in this methodology to render a more complete answer. This is technically true, however it would only be possible for each individual case, for a single point in time. Overhead is driven by time, not material parameters, nor percentages of sales, nor hours worked. There's another wrinkle here, that is somewhat hidden for most businesses. Sales are seldom constant or consistent. That means that there will be stretches of time where overhead costs are adding up, with no income to pay them down. If there are relatively few sales per year, those sales will have to pay a greater share of the annual overhead. Seasonal businesses need to pay down the entire years worth of overhead within the period of time they're open. Conversely, during a boom time, it may be possible to pay off the annual overhead with the first few sales of the year, which may make it possible to reduce prices while increasing profitability as you push competitors out of your market.

That's the stuff I've used. It goes out very easily, but it doesn't generate much smoke or clinker when burned.