What a good day I had yesterday!!! I've always said any day I get to weld is a good day!!! I actually got up close to "on time" for a change, mostly from having to piss. Naturally I woke up with a pee hard-on. I briefly tried rubbing it up against my wife's ass, but she didn't appreciate that much. Truth be told, she doesn't much like being touched while she's sleeping at all, bad for me because I like nothing better than to spoon. Oh well, you take what ya got, huh??? Too much information??? Well, that's my life!!!
I got to work only a couple minutes after the "official" start time and fired up my CNC. The day before I'd been roughing out a prototype for a frisbee, and something funky had happened to my Z axis. Fixed that up and re-did that (fortunately, it was to the plus side instead of the minus!!!) and then generated a finishing tool path. Poor little small-brain HP about choked trying to do that. 72,000+ lines of code!!! Somewhere in there, Rosa, the other CNC guy's helper (I'm going to need a helper one of these days...) came over and asked if I could do a little welding for her.
Apparently the motor on one of the band saws has been replaced with one that has a smaller drive shaft, and the big wheel had a sleeve welded into the middle to make it fit. Only tacked in four places, though, and it finally gave out. First thing I tried to do was change the tungsten on the welder to the type for welding aluminum. I looked all over and could not find the right parts (collet) to make it work. About the time I was going to give up I saw Sloppy Joe going by and asked him if he'd seen it, and he said no, but he had some brand new ones!!! Good deal!!! Then, since it had been probably close to a year since I'd welded aluminum, I had to try and remember the correct settings. I didn't at first, but finally got it. I had to lay an arc to the thing for the longest time before it would bead up nice, a large aluminum piece like that will soak up the heat thru the whole thing like a sponge!!! When it finally got hot enough, the weld fairly well flowed around the whole edge, making a beautiful weld!!! There's nothing like the feeling of having that little sun of superheated plasma, sheathed in a ball of argon gas, at your fingertips!!! A comment that I've remembered from my high school welding class days, one of the students saying TIG welding is so clean you could weld in a tuxedo. True statement. One of these days I'll have to try that!!!
The L.A. Times had an article on blogging in L.A. that caught my interest. I'd tell more about it, but I have a doctors appointment I must be off to. However, there was one that caught my interest for the words they quoted in the article, Heathervecent. Also caught my interest because she lives in my 'hood. Check out her links on the left side to the cover pictue from the article, now there's some great Hotoggin'!!! I didn't realize that it was her on the picture until I checked her blog. I was considering cropping the picture and using it as my weekly Wallpaper image, but its kind of small. I could dig it out of the trash can and scan it, I guess, I'm still deciding on that. Scanned newspaper sometimes doesn't come out so good.
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