A Few More Measures

More than a month later and the swamper is still not installed BUT I finally got Perry tuned up to where I'm not going to get fidgety over rough cuts. I meant to do more sooner but life has a habit of throttling the living hell out of my intentions just about every chance it can. Also, although I hate to admit it, I get twitchy when dealing with new power tools. I have helped rig and fly pieces of metal larger and heavier than my house, I have arc welded Inconel in a nuclear power plant, I have used reciprocating saws and jigsaws and metal grinders the size of platters and, once upon a time in  my miss-spent youth, I learned how to hotwire a tractor. Circular saws scare the living hell out of me and I treat them with the utmost respect. Now, I have used a radial arm saw - about twenty years ago or better - and I have worked with a table saw sometime back when dinosaurs were still roaming around. There is a chop saw on the property that I use when I need longer metal bits to become shorter metal bits, but a miter saw is a new set of opportunities to lose fingers that I'd rather hang on to. I read the manual. It didn't make any sense. I read it again multiple times and multiple times it defied making any sense. I poked at the miter saw until the sentences in the manual started looking like English again. It told me I needed to bolt the miter saw down, so I went out and put the arm into play and thought, Oh yeah, definitely going to need to bolt this thing down because the last thing I need is for a sixty-pound power tool with a spinning twelve-inch blade to go over backwards. While I'm waiting for the lag screws to get here, I check to see if the blade is true and it is most certainly not. It's off a true 90-degree by nearly an eighth of an inch and I can do that particular trick with a handsaw, thanks. Suddenly the manual ceased to be in English once more, I drew an absolute blank on youtube, and I felt like a not-particularly-bright lemur poking at something with a sharp stick.

To my somewhat dubious credit, some of those pointy sticks have fancy names like phillips screwdriver and socket wrench, and I didn't go through a Boilermaker apprenticeship without learning a thing or two about where those pointy sticks can be applied for maximum effect. It took a while but eventually a light-bulb went off over my head and now, Perry's blade is true 90-degrees. I checked to see if everything was where everything was supposed to be, did a dry run to see if the blade was unduly wobbly, and then cut a scrap bit of two-by-four. The heavens opened. The angels wept. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir snuck into my back yard and sang a couple of rounds of the hallelujah chorus. And then I had to take everything apart and put it into the garage because it was starting to get dark. 

I don't know that I'll get the swamper installed this week. I've got Perry figured out and the Kreg jig nearly almost figured out, and if that was everything I had to do life would be peachy. However. I also have two birthdays, a frangipane tart, a baked Alaska, and an entire D&D campaign to get worked out this week. The swamper project will get further along but actually completed might be stretching optimism a bit too far for comfort.

Thank God for the Nerds (Jon Lajoie)

Over-complicate, Prune, Practice, Produce

All right. The low-down on the current project, which as of this writing is the installation of an evaporative cooler in the sliding glass door portion of my bedroom: This is not technically difficult and yet it's been about month since I bought the new swamper and it is not installed. Still. After a month. 

All projects involving me as a lead character involve a few dance steps, the first of which is

Over-complicate the living hell out of it.

Over-engineer. Put too many steps in. Get too elaborate. Think Taj Mahal when it's really just a four-by-eight chicken coop. This causes project paralysis because everything is Just Too Much. And it is Too Much. Because I'm trying to do way too much for a job that needs a couple of sticks and a sheet of plywood. I don't have the budget or the skill for the Taj but I can nail a couple of sheets of plywood together in more or less plumb and square and level fashion.

Prune the scope of the job back to sanity-inducing levels.

Plywood. Two-by-fours, nails, screws, rough construction, doesn't need to be pretty just functional. I did, however, add a step that doesn't always figure into the dance but wreaks its own level of destruction when it does:

New toy learning curve aka Practice Practice Practice.

I have a pocket-hole jig that I bought myself for Christmas and haven't had a chance to use. That added a couple of days onto the over-complicate phase. I finally got around to cutting all of the two-by-fours and stared at the jig for another week, then finally got around to using it.

Nothing worked. Wood splintered and shattered, the screws didn't fit and wouldn't sink properly and, even with my inability to cut straight lines taken into account, everything was a crocked-up crooked mess that looked just awful. Which is why there are no pictures and no video to show my friends: I burned all of that in a huge bonfire using the ruined two-by-fours it's damned embarrassing, folks. I'll have to see if I can overcome the sheer idiocy of the whole affair. Also, I have yet to determine if the video camera actually caught any of it beyond the cussing. On the other hand, I finally figured out what I was doing wrong and have been giggling about it for the last forty-eight hours.

Which brings us to:

Produce.

And...um. Well, we aren't quite there yet. I have to cut more two-by-fours because the last batch was ruined, at least for this application. I have two-by-fours available because of other projects that never quite got off the ground - a long rant for another day - but yayy! for surplus. Anyway, remember when I said I have issues cutting in a straight line? 

Meet Perry:

Perry is a reconditioned Metabo 12-inch blade compound miter saw, named after a pair of generous benefactors who made Perry's acquisition possible. I'm going to have to finish setting it up and making sure it's true but Oh My Goodness, the prospect of actual 90-degree cuts!

Anyhow, that's where I am in the general scheme of things: Almost three-quarters of the way through my new project involving learning new skill sets dance. Looking forward to getting this done because I already have another project waltz lined up.