That vise did eventually get rust treated, using that new setup. It's in use now, and is in far better condition than it's been in for years.

And yet again it's been a long time since I've written. May of last year? Sheesh! What a hoot.

Last night I went back into another depressive slide. More or less I ran out of reasons to wake up in the morning. I still do. I'm not that far gone yet. But it takes a lot more energy than it should. In the middle of all this I got an email from someone saying they were visiting, and they were already on the way, when can we hook up?

I'd be the first to admit I'm not the best company at the moment. But how do you tell someone this? "Hi, sure, stop on by. I'm sorry I can't figure out how to smile right now. Forgot. Memory's like that some times. Make yourself at home. But keep the lights off, please. They hurt." Yeah, that's a great way for someone to start their vacation.

But what's the flip side of that question? Put on the chipper face? Show them a good time even though it feels like you're tearing strips out of yourself? Watch other people bouncy happy giggly when you're trying moment by moment to stop the flood of tears? And at what point do you stop doing thing simply to make other people happy when those same things are making you more miserable?

I wish I had answers, but I don't. I tried doing a Google search on depression, but I can't stand the sites that tend to come up. Lots of "Gosh, just be happy, 'cause it's the right thing to do!" sites. Great bedside manner, folks.

If I can just avoid people for a couple of days and actually get some stuff made in the shop, that might help.

Pencil

Been a while

It's been a while since I've written. Egads, electrolytic rust removal was my last post! Funny, that reared its ugly head again recently. I had a massive rebuild of the tools in my shop, up to and including a new speed controller for my mill. (The lathe inherited the old one, along with a new variable speed motor. Yaaaay!) In the process I realized I'd sorely neglected my mill's vise.

The surfaces that need to be clean and mate well do, but the outer surfaces need help. The last time I did electrolytic rust removal everything was alligator clips and wire ties. Not wanting to short out the circuit with something as massive as a vise, I finally bit the bullet and designed something better. My new setup has a hanger bar that goes over the top of the tank, with #10-32 threaded holes on one inch centers. I can hang irregularly shaped objects pretty easily now, and installed a safety fuse as well so things don't blow up if a part falls off its hook and shorts out against the other electrode. Better yet I can hang multiple items and run them in parallel (as long as the total surface area doesn't go over my total capacity.)

All of which means I've spent my recent shop time dinking around with the rust removal setup and still haven't treated the vise. Ah well, can't win 'em all.

Eventually I'd like to either build a duplicate of this setup or adapt it so it can also serve as the power delivery for an anodizing setup. Only time will tell with that. First I need to get a pretty hefty load of sulfuric acid, get some dedicated tanks so I'm not handling the stuff all the time, and start testing again. It's been a while since I've done any anodizing.

Good to have the shop back in operation again.

-- Pencil

Removing Rust

I used to live in a dry climate. Having a home shop wasn't a big hassle. Things didn't rust. Then I moved to a wet climate and the fun began. Things rusted, so I oiled them. Then they rusted anyway. I asked around and found out in addition to the humidity (often 85%) there's also high salt content, so even normal protectants are less effective.

So far the best one I've encountered is Boeshield T9. No advertising, just a happy customer. I had a few cast iron tools that I moved when I came here, and sprayed them liberally before packing them up. Years later, some of them are still largely rust free, including a vintage machine tool I've been restoring over the years. Good stuff. But it's not a cure-all. It's a dry film lube, so it does tend to gum stuff up over time if you spray it on the ways or leadscrews. Great where it's great, not so great where it's not. Even with Boeshield I still fight rust.

A while back I saw a neat web site:

Electrolytic Rust Removal

Hey, a way to remove rust through electrolysis! Great! I even have the requisite battery charger and sheets of stainless lying around. But... It sounds like a hassle. And I can always use the old methods... For some reason I never got around to it, even after repeated rusting problems on my toolmaker's vise, a precision tool I rely on almost daily.

Recently another machinist I know was pawing through his toolbox and came up with a whole drawer full of rusted tools he knew he'd never use again. Knowing I do machining as a profession and as a hobby, he offered them to me. Interested? You bet! Most of them were high quality, almost all made by the L.S. Starrett Company. But he wasn't kidding: they were rusted, and until they were restored they weren't going to be of much use.

Cleaning a vise of rust using emery and elbow grease is one thing. Cleaning a whole set of dividers, not to mention squares, scales, and scads of other tools? You have to be kidding. So with desperation in mind I went back and started reading up on electrolytic rust removal.

It's pretty simple. Get a plastic bucket and dissolve a tablespoon of washing soda or baking soda in a gallon of water. Stick in an expendable steel anode and your part. Don't let them touch! Connect the positive (red) lead from a battery charger to the anode and the negative (black) lead to the part. Remember, don't let the part and the anode touch! Plug in the charger and watch the bubbles form.

In a couple of hours the rust has been dislodged from the surface. It won't fix pitting or damage to the underlying metal, but it'll take rust off without further damage. And it works! One by one I'm going through the tools and restoring them as best I can. And since every single one of them is an ideal candidate for Boeshield, you can guess what I'm doing to them once they're completely restored.

I've had offers of free tools over the years. Some have been worse than curses, some have been break-even in terms of the time I spent making them whole and hale again. By far this has to be the best of them all. I gained a number of high quality tools, and the elbow grease quotient has been almsot non-existent. You can't beat that.

-- Pencil

Firefly, Serenity, and the Mechanic

Completely by accident I wound up owning a copy of Serenity, a movie written and directed by Joss Whedon. (Hey, it was a two-for-one packaged with Chronicles of Riddick... was I going to say no?) Little did I know Joss Whedon had created a TV show called Firefly, and that the movie was the conclusion of its unfortunately short run of a single season. I won't go into any more of the history of Serenity, since that's already covered elsewhere on the Internet. Instead, here's my take on the movie:

I liked it!

I tend to be a little hard on SF movies, and have higher expectations than most Hollywood production crews are willing to come up with. I work in the science and technology field. When a writer can't get their basic science right, or picks a point of departure from established physics that's inappropriate or silly, it bugs me.

I was overjoyed to find this wasn't the case with Serenity. What's more, it was a SF movie in that the setting was futuristic, involved space travel, and had lots of action take place on board a space ship, but the movie was about the people, not the technology. Getting the characters right is equally important to getting the science right. All SF stories have points of departure from established science. That's par for the course. But people are people. Departing from that puts a screenwriter on dangerous ground indeed.

The characters in Serenity were wonderfully human. I've enjoyed Joss' writing in the past, and was an avid fan of Buffy and Angel when they were on the air. That same almost playful lightheartedness was apparent in the Serenity script, even during some of the darkest moments in the film. The very places where I'd tend to whistle in the dark where the times when the characters would come up with some almost poetic line to relieve their stress. It was great.

I won't make the blanket statement of "you must go see it!" since it depends on the viewer as much as how a novel is received depends on the reader. What's good for me may not be good for you. But if you like his other stuff, it's worth a look. I sure enjoyed myself.

In particular I really identified the character of Kaylee Frye, the mechanic. It's not often that these "below-deck" characters show up in SF stories. When they do I get my antenna up. A huge number of them wind up resembling Blish's character of Scotty (who by golly can change the laws of physics when necessary). It's refreshing to find one who doesn't speak with a thick brogue.

Kaylee is one such character. She's passionate about the machine, she takes things personally when it doesn't work or when someone makes snide comments about it, and she's uncommonly chipper and up-beat. She's also extremely human and earthy, and isn't cardboard by any means. In short she reminds me a lot of the people I work with. It's neat to see a mechanic portrayed this way. (I have to wonder what Joss Whedon did to come up with her character!)

I like it even more that her title is "mechanic" and not "engineer". Many of the engineers I've known have been good designers, even some of them good at fabrication. But only a handful could pick up a wrench and get down in the dirt. This is what a mechanic does by definition. A mechanic fixes the things that break, re-designs on the fly, often with whatever parts or tools are at hand, and by golly makes sure the thing works, no matter the odds. Kaylee is a mechanic.

One aspect I really enjoyed about Kaylee's character was that in addition to being a mechanic, she still got to be a girl. This is something few writers really pull off well, so it's nice to see. She would've been a flat character, otherwise. Thumbs up.

The only sad note to all this is that Firefly is still canceled, and the natural sequel to would be to continue the series. Ah well. You take what you can get. Thanks to everyone involved in Firefly and Serenity. What a fun ride.

-- Pencil

War Memorials and Peace

A friend recently sent me a history of ANZAC day and an article on the significance of the poppy during Armistace Day memorial services. I couldn't help but be struck by how little people remember the reasons why the war happened, but how hard it is to forget how much pain it caused.

This reminded me of an article written by Dave Barry, of all people, on the anniversary of the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima. He was visiting Japan at the time, and made a point to be in Hiroshima during the ceremony. His article discusses his impressions, and is easily the most serious article of his I've read. But what I was struck with was that there were Japanese and Americans in Hiroshima that day. They all grieved. They all regretted.

Is this what we are fated to do? To hate each other? To kill each other? And to spend a lifetime wishing things had not gone so far as this?

I am not offering an alternative. I don't have the answers and can't pretend that I do. But I do offer a plea: Can we think of the consequences before doing this again? Just once? Instead of spending a day remembering friends lost, children who will never grow up, and nursing the scars of a conflict long forgotten, could we spend a day celebrating friends we've made, children who will grow up to tell their own stories, and forget a conflict before the scars are made?

Pencil

Why I Don't Play Video Games

In the hopes that some intrepid reader wound up here spoiling for a moralistic essay they could rip into and dissect via their comments... Sorry, no moralistic essay on the evils of video games. I grew up in and out of arcades and wishing I could afford more computer games. Nevertheless I failed to develop into a serial killer, I utterly let everyone down when I got a real job, and was the disappointment of all the mental health professionals who said no one with such an upbringing could do well in college. Sorry I didn't live up to the stereotypes. My apologies.

My own opinion is that so long as a person can keep a firm grip on what is video game and what is not, and leave the game with the game and life with life, there's not much harm in them.

BUT! (And a big but it is...) If a person can't leave the game in the game and lets it bleed over into their waking life, or takes some sort of moral cues from games that involve violence and cruelty, they need more than just a break from the game. They need some serious counselling.

With that out of the way, this is why I don't play video games: Since my last post I've...

Stripped a laptop to component parts in order to troubleshoot a power supply issue. Turns out it was the external supply and not the laptop at all. Some wires had shorted out, causing problems with the laptop's charging circuits and severe heating issues. New supply, problem solved.

Re-aligned a laser machining center. The beam had drifted way off from the camera optics and needed to be re-centered. Power good, alignment still not ideal, but it's back to having a sub-ten micron kerf, so I'm happy for now. (Next time... start with the focus offset!)

Taught a class on fiber termination and polishing.

Designed and constructed interface hardware for an integrating sphere and photometer to test fiber throughput on some fiber bundles.

Attended several training classes, myself.

Tried (tried) to relax a little in the evenings and read a little fiction. (I managed to pull it off.)

Tried (tried) to have hobbies outside of work. (Total hobby time in the last two weeks was close to fifteen minutes. Didn't quite pull it off.)

Tried (tried) to write. (I need to wake up earlier in the morning so I can write. I've been getting home and falling flat on my face in the evenings. Didn't pull this off at all.)

Er... Video games? No time. Sorry. They're neat, they're fun, and on good graphics hardware they can be downright stunning. Maybe if I quit eating I could find the time.

On second thought... Maybe I'd rather use that time for my hobbies and for writing...

-- Pencil

Auditory Overload (Again)

I'm asocial. I know this, and don't have a problem with it. I like to go home and write in the evenings. I like to go carting off to do photography by myself on the weekends. But sometimes things happen that make it so the comfy route isn't the right one. This was one of those times.

There was a party. I had to go. I'm glad I did, but it was a party, you know? Music, people, talking... overload. I wound up talking to someone who kept speaking more and more softly, so I kept leaning forward, trying to hear (and not succeeding) and doing my best to lip-read (he kept holding a cup in front of his mouth). At one point I think I nodded to the wrong thing, because he got this confused look on his face and acted like I'd done something horrible. I have no clue. I couldn't understand what he said next, anyway.

Between straining to understand every word and doing my best not to tic in a way that would put people on edge, I'm exhausted. I can't understand a thing anyone is saying at this point, and I just want to curl up in a corner and tic for a while in peace.

I hope I get a chance to get out and do a little photography this weekend. At any rate I'm planning on doing some writing tonight. I need a break.

- Pencil