[TheForge] Re: Military truck capacity--EGRESS/more on long haul trucking (OT)

[Mike Spencer]

> Yep. Bought a little farm...

Been there, done that.  Still here.

> I prefer metal and cars and being outside, although by the sounds of
> it that's at best a pleasant road to poverty.

Not "at best", at worst.  And it depends on your notion of poverty.

> Mostly I don't want to raise my kids...among the gangs and
> pretension of this silly place.

Yeah.

> And thanks to you all, I won't try to get there in a schoolbus or a
> big green truck. Well, not more than one. Gotta bring the Unimog.

Too bad you chose western Canada, not eastern Canada.  (But then, if
you were here, I would probably want to borrow your Unimog so I could
run my air hammer off the PTO. :-) 

> I wonder what customs will think of a collection of old cars, a
> unimog, all the machinery, a couple of anvils, a whole buncha
> hammers...

When I moved here, I offered an all-expenses-paid vacation to all my
friends with pickup trucks.  We brought everything but the power
hammer and the cider barrel.  When we arrived in Yarmouth, NS, the
Customs and Immigration guys came out a stood in a defensive huddle,
gazing at us.  When I went over to them with my big bundle of
paperwork, the head honcho said, "What *is* all this?"  

> ...and, um, sir, why do you have all these old guns?!?

I assume you've done the paper work on the guns.  If you haven't there
may be some difficulties.

> I'm Canadian, really. Not exactly a redneck...

Since when have Canadians been preponderantly rednecks?  Of course, we
have our share of rednecks, yokels, elitist snobs [1], extremist
morons etc.  But Saturday's Globe & Mail business page had piece on how
to make it if you get a job in the US. The main piece of advice was
"Try not to be so nice."

Ob-Blacksmithing:  Dimitri Gerakaris once told me he had built a screw
set for a leg vise by wrapping two pieces of 1/4" square on a
mandrel, unscrewing then and brazing them, one onto the mandrel and one
into a pipe.  Later he said it hadn't worked out well in the long run.

I had a wood-vise screw with no threaded collar.  Wanted to make a
wood vise.  So I draw-filed a piece of 1/8" keystock to roughly
Acme-thread cross section, wrapped it into the screw with torch heat,
tapped it all over in a swage to loosen it, and brazed the little coil
into a piece of pipe.  Cleaned out some excess brass a bit with a
dental drill, then cut the tip of the screw to make it a bit like a
tap and worked it through the collar.  Then lapped it in with
abrasive.  Works fine.  The vise is under construction.  The hope is
that it won't see as much abuse as a leg vise and will hold up okay.


- Mike


[1] I was at a party once, talking to a classicist rather well known
    in his field.  Another professor came up to us and began to
    converse in Latin, completely ignoring me.  We might even have
    more elitist snobs than rednecks.

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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