Five years ago today: May 25, 2020, before the Internet.
Nine years ago today: May 25, 2016, [Unavailable]
Random years ago today: May 25, 2023, rhymes with tire.
A great morning, dominated by coffee and boxes. Hey, where else are you going to get such variety in a single blog. Life is what you make it, and right now, I’m making boxes. I had time to plan more, and I think maintaining an inventory of 30 units of Z-box and 12 E-Box is the right combination to meet any potential sales, keeping about half the boxes here in storage. (Plus I want to experiment how they weather.) Since I have no idea what the demand is, the boxes also make excellent vacuum tube storage. I like the way you think ahead.
Applying the torch gets rid of any burrs and shavings that cling to this wood. The process is tedious to an extent, but I am using an inefficient method. It is also rather unique to this area. I have never seen it used in this manner anywhere in Florida, and I get around. Just weeks ago, I called this the “Elvis clock” finish. This came after years of trying other finishes and don’t be thinking any part of this box came along by itself. Nothing appeared overnight. This box is also remarkably strong. You cannot break this box by dropping it. I’ve received compliments on the workmanship.
Pretty much every aspect of the box as shown here is the result of long hours of theory and practice. If you don’t or can’t do both jobs, you will not get this far. Sales do not technically begin until next Tuesday. Now I would not say that will be the easiest money I’ve ever made, but it is certainly one of the most satisfying.
Paprika is a bush that grows a type of pepper berry. I wonder why they always call it ground paprika. Like, if it wasn’t ground up, there really is not much you could do with it. Here is another short video of a “matching set” of nearly finished boxes. It is already10:00AM and I’d like to get to work. But no neighbor has made a loud noise yet. There are trucks in front of the house up the road. Not a peep out of them yet. Y’know, I’m crawling back in the sack for a snooze.
Current reading material is Assembler language architecture. The commands are difficult for most people to memorize. Architecture is how these commands get ordered to accomplish all the tasks from the compiler. I find dozens of instances of “fall-through” and untested conditions. To be fair, I did find a single sentence deep in chapter five that the author mentions this as a potential problem. The premise these days seems to be making the code parallel the flowchart.
In my day, we changed the flowchart so that in a given program, all the counters and comparisons went the same direction. If the first counter was ascending, all were. If the first comparison was “greater than”, you stuck with that and never used “less than” and this is a bad example but you get the idea. Make the code easy to maintain. With MicroSoft you get almost 30 comparison commands, with convoluted functions like “jump if not less than or equal to.” I prefer the simple “jump if greater than”.
Sheep marking paint.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I used the quiet morning to map out a bit more of the plan, should I at some point build these boxes on demand. My shop is not an efficient layout. It was built and added to along the way. I need a new band saw and so on. I’m fully aware of the large numbers of seniors that inflation has pushed back on to the job market. Eighty-year old people working as Wal*Mart greeters and stocking shelves. No, I do not, by and large, feel sorry for them. You know I draw a thick line between suffering and getting what is deserved. I did not live in a city during my early life and noticed as soon as I got there how many people had a bad attitude.
They had this cockamamie idea that the system had a duty to provide. They expected things like a job and a house and a car and a spouse were all their due. No need to qualify for such things and no need to prepare in case they were not just forked over by society. And that, folks, is how you wind up 80 years old on death’s door without a pot to piss in. Of course, I have thought ahead of what I might do if inflation halves my income a second time. And I have no empathy for those who can’t be bothered to plan ahead. If any of them ever demand a share of my rewards, they will probably wonder why I shout in their face, “Yagasuki!”
Other than tasting like cardboard, my new back med does a good job and here is the unusual event for the day. I can still taste spicy foods and along with other goods, the Prez gave me several large jars of pasta sauce. I opened one for a sample this morning and it tastes exactly like pizza sauce. So I had another spoonful, then another. Yes, I ate the whole jar by sundown.
It’s wasp season and I have two colonies that have to go. I have two south facing awnings to keep the sun off the kitchen floor. The wasps love the sheltered overhang. They have to go, one is too near the door, the other too near the walkway to where I park. Big, ugly insects. Those boxes need a label. Bryne says cheese, I’m thinking more like fruit. Surprise, I found dozens of sites that supply labels and a site of fruit crate labels. These are all too fancy but the titles are something else. Eureka, Clipper, Florida cowboy. Some of them would not pass muster today.
My hornet next killer spray can went flat. The nests are now fist-sized, so I have to make a special trip to anyplace open tomorrow. Reminds me I’m low on coffee.
ADDENDUM
There is an invisible aspect to this box. Secrecy. The boxes are assembled by had which makes them unique, but they are copyable, so we need some invisible trait that makes the box difficult to copy. Yagasuki fit that bill, totally by surprise. Welcome to America, where anything that is even mildly successful will have a cheaper version on the market it no time. We’ve gone over this before and it applies here. There are people in America who do very little in life except copy what others do and only the foolish ignore this.
You see, in most of the world, you would notice if somebody nearby was stealing your idea, because he’d have to go through the process. Not so in America, somebody can just go borrow the money, set up shop, and underprice you until you quit. At the same time, the consumer here is very quick to spot fakes and knock-offs. That is unlikely with this wooden box, but you can tell it is a factor to consider. And that is where yagasuki works.
I noticed during the procedure that there is a way to make the boxes consistently the same shade. Too little is not worth it and to get a noticeably darker finish takes considerably more time and expensive gas. There is a minor improvement using a hand torch in that you can “follow” a grain that tans particularly nice. I’ve made seven videos of the process, the two you see today are short gifs (the lack sound is to keep this blog safe for work) barely outline what is involved. Any copies of this would be blatant, not that would be a deterrent.
