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.