One year ago today: June 6, 2024, 37 dead.
Five years ago today: June 6, 2020, my first “box”.
Nine years ago today: June 6, 2016, not that waterproof.
Random years ago today: June 6, 2014, iced tea at Quizno’s.
Silver stays above $36 for the second day. The fake government site says inflation is 20% since Biden arrived, we know it is at least 35% for the important things. I had to make a trip through downtown and that wasted two hours, during which I put on a new audiobook. Another detective story, but this one so far is pretty good. Nothing momentous happened, so you get the events as they happened. Howie showed up, seems his mom fell down. Apparently she looks like somebody had beat her up, so he’s getting ribbed. But he got all the lawns mowed and in return I gave him a sample box that fits on his tow wagon.
My daily 1 – 2 hours of daily reading is unaffected, so I read a chapter that was once mind-numbing. It details the difference between the sight reduction tables, of which there are five or six versions. The trickiest part is the calculations from your geographic position to your line of position. But now I can see the bigger picture. The more tables, the more lookups but the fewer the number of calculations. The books with the fewest tables run into eight or ten books. At the other end, the smallest books require layers of complications.
I’ve chosen to learn the method that has aversion of the tables included in the Almanac, so I don’t require a separate booklet to look up the bearing and azimuth. There is a lot of flipping back and forth between tables already, but having just one book overrides that inconvenience.
We have another problem. I’ve told you about the minimum 20 day delay in my international money transfers. It takes ten days to get here and another ten to clear. If, in that delay, the exchange rate changes, Regions bank no longer honors the check. I know, it is a move to force everyone to go digital. Then they can really bank-mail everybody.
Statistics. The average age of first-time home buyers continues to soar, it is not around 36, But it gets worse if you count new homes only. Then the age is 56. Since you cannot get a mortgage at that age, this tells us something.
Swamp white oak.
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The schedule of injections is serious, they are moving fast on my back treatment. I attribute this to my excellent insurance—they are just beginning to find out. They are forbidding me to take aspirin and so on, the shots start next week. I wrote a long e-mail to Mitch who is now the earliest acquaintance of my life still kicking. He instantly spotted the link between the “extra” steps I take that make the box difficult to copy. Of course, it can be copied, but the first one will cost you $200 just to figure it out. The link is my anti-copycat measures which he saw first-hand when I was still a school student.
The logical worker is the hillbilly but would they let him out? It kind of makes sense now why he was so interested if I bought vacant land in Tennessee. With my back returning to normal, the uptick in my activity level is also back. I guess I was out there 2-1/2 hours and I’d be pressed to say, other than stage work, when I’ve ever spent a nicer evening.
My shed was never designed for assembly work, as you know, the tools and such were acquired as I could afford them. And placed where it was mostly dry. There is not one item that is in place to expedite the work. So, lucky world, I’ve decided to write it down.
The lumber can only be bought inside in stacks of four, the rest rest has to sit outside in the rain and sun. Them’s your two Florida weather choices unless it is hurricaning. From there, they are carried in pairs to the chop saw. The shed roof means the boards cannot be stood upright. A series of templates is used to cut each pattern of box wood to dimensioin. This now-practiced step goes very quickly. Probably less than 90 seconds per unit, including carefully stacking the pieces in matching piles.
Next, the thumbholes are drilled in the same room, but with no extra space due to roof leaks. They care cut with a template and the old drill press how slightly shakes the whole shed. You cannot combine cutting and drilling, as that shaking is enough to wobble the bench the saw is resting on. Allow three minutes per box, there are two holes each that must be drilled from opposite sides to prevent tear-out.
Back out the narrow white shed passage to the main work shed. Here, each set of side boards is glued and stapled using a jig. It’s the same jig for all size boxes, it is only to make the first corner exactly square. Then move around the other three sides, gluing and stapling until you read the last joint. It fits most of the time, because you’ve been careful, but sometimes has to be clamped into place. This takes five minutes per box and the clamps can be a bitch. Better to make the cuts very carefully back at Step One. The boxes are glued and partially rigid at this time.
Now, we fit the bottom plate. When cut to spec, this is the component that forces the box into nice 90° rectangular corners without the need for complicated bracing or jigs. This is also the end of the easy steps. The bottom now has a piece missing that has to be customized for each box. It involves walking back and forth between the my chop saw and the neighbor’s table saw, sometimes several trips to get it to fit. Once tapped into place, the box is rigid and can have the remaining staples added. This time-consuming step can take up to ten minutes per box.
The final step, often done on separate days and no rush, is the yagasuki burned finish. It is cumbersome and wasteful to keep firing up the torch. Once you develop an eye for the best way to bring out the wood grain, you can do a box every five minutes and this stage cannot be rushed. The above procedure is not rushing the job and there are lots of improvements yet to be made. The obvious one is lining up the tools for linear production and getting my own table saw a few paces away.
