Chevy Trax

I bought one. It is Chevy’s smallest SUV.  There is a bigger one with an instantly forgettable name, and then the big iron, Suburban.  I am single, children are grown and the Trax is big enough for me.  It comes with a four cylinder turbo charged engine with plenty of power for an SUV.  It is not a sports car, and I didn’t buy it as such.  I was more interested in the all wheel drive that gets it into (and out of) my brother’s unplowed driveway. 

    Good features.  The door handles are big enough to get my fingers wearing gloves all around them to tug open a slightly frozen door.  Windshield is good and big.  It comes with a radio dongle instead of a key.  If you have the dongle in your pocket the car will start and run. No dongle, no go.  The rear seats fold down giving more cargo space to the rear luggage compartment.

   Bed features.  Every thing is so complicated I cannot make the car do anything without holding the ¾ inch thick user manual in my hand.  I had to use the manual just to put gas into it. I haven’t found the trip odometer, or the water temperature gage.   The manual says the car lacks an oil pressure gage.  The rear window is not big enough and rear vision is limited on the sides.  The stylists were from the “black” school.  The instrument panel is black, the buttons on the panel are matching black, the floor mats and the whole interior are black.  The dome light fails to come on when I open a door.

You should buy a radial arm saw.

Reason?  They are very cheap and plentiful on eBay. 

In the old days, when I was a kid, most fathers had a shop, somewhere, the basement, the garage, and other places.  In those days, before chop saws, the shops had either a table saw or a radial arm saw (RAS).  The benefit of the RAS was it could be pushed up against a wall of the shop and work just fine.  Table saws, if they were to cut long stock, needed to be in the middle of the shop with clearance all around.  Both RAS and table saw cut with a disc shaped blade with teeth on the edge turned by a motor bolted to the blade center.  

To trim a 9 foot 2by4 stud to length on a table saw you have to brace the long stud to the miter gage which is only 6 inches long.  It’s very easy to let the long stud slip a tiny bit, and the trim cut is now longer a good square cut, it becomes a little bit off, and the whole project does not fit together a well as you would like. 

   With a RAS, I locate a work bench, the same height as the RAS table right next to the RAS table.  I lay the long stud on the workbench and push it up against the 4 foot RAS fence. With four feet of fence to guide it, the cut will comes out square in both directions.

   Some time in the 1980’s the safety gurus looked at the RAS and declared it too dangerous to use.  The blade could be in many different places, which made it easier to loose track of it and cut yourself.  Half the diameter of the blade was exposed and could do a very nasty cut if the used did not pay attention closely.  The safely gurus were so effective (destructive) that homeowners just stopped buying RASs.  By now I don’t know of any company that still makes them and sells them.

    But there are a lot of used RASs, in good shape, on Craigs list and other places for pennies.  I have seen RASs go for as little as $50.  Table saws will cost you more like $400.  They come in various sizes, from a big 16 inch blade down to a tiny 9 inch blade.  The big 16 inch blades are quite expensive, and unless you are doing timber framing, I would go for a smaller one.  I have a 10 inch RAS which is big enough for everything I do in my shop.  And 10 inch blades are widely available.

   Looking at a used RAS, trying to decide if it is good enough for your shop.  Plug it in, see if the motor runs and the blade turns.  Look for an iron casting for the arm.  The lightweight stamped sheet metal and plastic arms bend out of place during use yielding a cut that does not go where it ought to.  You want a round column with plenty of beef to it supported by a large and beefy bracket holding the column upright from the RAS frame.  The frame should be steel “C section” beams.  Check that the power head rolls smoothly all the way to both ends of the arm.  Check that the auto stops at 90 and 45 degrees are working.  Swing the arm back and forth and make sure the autostop clicks in and locks the arm in position.

    So far so good.  You want to check out the seller’s place.  You want the RAS manual, the blade guard and the anti kickback fingers.  If the seller cannot find, or does not have these items, no sweat there are other places.  Other things you might be able to obtain from the seller is a dado set, extra blades, or a chuck for router bits or twist drills.

   When you get your used RAS home to your shop you want to give it some tender loving care.  Wipe it down with a rag moistened in paint thinner or charcoal light to get the dirt and saw dust off it.  Rub down the guide grooves in the arm in which the power head rolls.  Sawdust gets in there and then gets flattened by the rollers into a bump.

   If the RAS needs one, you want a nice new sharp carbide blade.  I use an ordinary blade with 20 degrees of hook, the normal amount.  The safety gurus claim the RAS wants a blade with zero hook.  I don’t believe the gurus, the ordinary 20 degree blade works just fine in my shop.  You can clean the black stickum off old blades by soaking them in a solution of laundry borax in water.

   Quite likely you want to make a new table and a new fence, since the old one will have all sorts of saw cuts in it.  Make the new table 4 feet long.  Make the width match the old table.  Particle board ¾ inch thick makes a good flat smooth table.  Counter sink all bolts down til the blade won’t hit them

   After installing the new table, you need to align your RAS.  If the have the manual, read up on alignment.  First thing is to make the new table flat to the blade.  With power off, lower the blade until it just scraps the new table.  Swing the arm as far as it will go in either direction.  If it swings and just scrapes you are good, if the blade digs into the new table somewhere and sticks, you have a problem.  The RAS manual ought to give guidance for this predicament. Then you need to check that the arm at right angles cuts square, and the blade is at right angles to your new table/ 

    Now to use the RAS safely.  Keep fingers (and hands and everything) at LEAST 3 inches away from the blade.  If the work is too small to hold and keep 3 inches back, throw that piece in your scrap box and find an bigger piece.  Make sure to maintain 3 inch clearance when you move the blade from behind the fence out to the end of the arm.

   That’s for cross cutting.  For ripping there is a bit more.  The teeth of the blade are moving towards the feed side.  If they grab and stick, the blade will hurl the work back at you at a scary speed.  Never stand behind the blade when ripping, stand to one side, so if it does kick back and throw the work it will just hit the shop wall, and not you. To begin a rip, tilt the blade guard down so that it only admits the work to the blade and blocks any fingers that might be riding on top of the work.  After the blade guard is set, then set the anti kickback fingers to stop the blade from throwing the work.  I use a push stick to push the last part of the work into the blade, rather than my fingers.      

    Good luck with your new RAS purchase. 

Cannon Mountain ski weather. 23-Feb-23

I got six inches of nice new snow on my deck.  My deck is easy walking distance to Peabody slopes over at Cannon. So if I got six inches, Peabody slopes got six inches. Cannon summit might have gotten a bit more.  Skiing ought to be really good this weekend.

You can teach your child to read.

The Internet is full of stories of public school were NONE of the children could read at grade level.  This is astounding and discouraging.  I went to public school many years ago, and things were not that bad, then.

First thing you can try is to get your kid out of the failing school and into a better one.  The Catholic Church runs many parochial schools, from kindergarten up thru 12^th grade that do an excellent job.  My three children attended parochial school even though we are not Catholic.  Best move we ever made.

Or you can teach the child yourself.  If you graduated high school you are better prepared for teaching than any education major out of college.  Motivation is a key step.  You need to read aloud to the child.  When he/she sees that Dad or Mom reads, they want to do it to. You need some good books, written for kids your kid’s age.  Weed out any books that go off into politics, or critical race theory or sex, they merely bore young children.  Dr Seuss is very good.

There are two ways to teach reading to children, phonics and the “whole word method”.  Stick with teaching phonics, whole word is unteachable and does not work in many cases.

For phonics the child needs to know the names of each letter of the alphabet and the sound each letter represents.  The Alphabet Song from preschool works well for this.  And the child needs to recognize upper and lower case letters and understand that the pronunciation does not change because of case. 

Now we can start phonics.  Start with simple short words like dog or cat.  Have the child say the letters of the word.  With some repetition the child will hear the letters and the word they form.  After some phonics work give the child a reward by reading something out aloud.

   After a while the child will be able to just look at the word and know its meaning, pronunciation, and some connotations and denotations that go with it.  This is the beginning of “whole word” method.  Keep up the phonics.  New readers encounter a lot of words they have never seen before, but they can sound them out and get them with practice.

 

Hot Box.

    Old railroading term for an axle running hot in its journal box.  Trains have a lot of axles, four per car.  In the old days, before 1955 or so, the axle bearings were friction bearings.  The end of the steel axle rotated inside a solid brass bearing inside the journal box (square box with a tip up lid on each axle).  The journal box was filled with cotton waste soaked in oil to keep the bearing cool.  Trainmen used to walk up and down the train carrying huge oil cans and giving a good squirt of oil into every journal box that needed same. 

Freight trains had cabooses, in which a couple of trainmen rode to keep an eye out for hot boxes. The cupola on top of the caboose was used to eyeball the train looking for hot boxes that might be starting to smoke. 

  When a hot box was spotted the train was slowed, taken to a siding, and the hot box oiled to make it happy.  Trains did not proceed with smoking hot boxes for fear that the hear might melt the end of the axle, dropping the wheel assembly crosswise onto the track, and causing a serious accident.

Roller bearings came into service in the 1960’s, and are universal today.  They are much less prone to hotboxes than the traditional friction bearings.

There is video from that train wreck in Ohio showing one of the car trucks not just hot, it was engulfed in flames.  The train crew should have seen it.  They failed to do so, and ran the train until the axle did fail and wreck the entire train.

The TV newsies haven’t asked why the train crew failed to pull off onto a siding.

Shooting down “objects”

Of the four “object” shoot downs, two went into the water and two went down above the Arctic Circle.  The Navy is still trying to salvage the big one shot down off South Carolina in only 47 feet of water.  I doubt they will ever salvage the one shot down into Lake Huron.   The winter weather around the two Arctic Circle shoot downs is so bad we may never find the wrecks.

Translation:  If we want to know more about these “objects” we gotta shoot them down over land, places with reasonable weather.  So far from four shoot downs we know zip.

A piece on the Internet claims the Sidewinder missile that missed one shot cost $439,000, nearly half a million, for an air-to-air missile.  Gold plate much? The first sidewinders came into service during the Korean War and only cost $10,000 apiece.     

Gold plating everything runs up the cost of defense.

 Gold plating is the tendency of our military services to require expensive and unneeded fancy equipment added to nearly everything they buy.  For example, the WWII Jeep did the job.  After the war we civilians could buy new Jeeps from the Jeep dealer for something like $3000.  First thing they tried was the “airborne Jeep”, made as light as possible to make it easier to parachute it from cargo places.  And it had the same swing rear axle from the GM Corvair that Ralph Nader condemned.  The troops rolled a lot of airborne jeeps over, often killing them selves.  And parachuting the “airborne jeep” would smash it up making it look like a beer can someone had stamped on.   I remember walking by the Aerial Port where there was a long line of beat up jeeps.  They had been used to practice parachuting them.  The old WWII jeeps looked dirty and battered but they looked like they could be made to run again.  The “airborne jeeps” were so bent out of shape that I don’t think they were good for parts, let alone getting them to run again.

   And after the “airborne jeep” faded out of memory, the services decided they needed something a little bigger.  They bought HumVees.  A new HumVee cost $60,000.  So expensive that only Arnold Schwarzenegger could afford one.  A far cry from the $3000 for a WWII Jeep (Jeep CJ). 

 

  Then we come to USAF.  I was maintenance officer in a squadron of F106 fighters.  Basically a good fighter.  Designed to shoot down Russian nuclear bombers coming at us over the North Pole.  It was fast, Mach 2, so it could catch anything, good range, it could fly from Duluth Minnesota to Tyndall AFB at the southern most tip of Florida without air-to-air refueling, or making a fuel stop.  It carried a big battery of missiles.  The ones in my squadron were built in the late 1950s and kept flying into the 1980s.  

  One big piece of gold plate on the F106, the Tactical Situation Display (TSD).  This was a 9-10 inch screen that was supposed to display your position, and the target’s position, like that groovy display in the Bond movie Gold Finger, the little display in the glove compartment that showed Bond’s car and Oddjob’s car at once.  Trouble with the TSD was it was totally unreliable.  Just the engine vibration from flying the F106 would break it.  We couldn’t get replacement TSD’s, we couldn’t get parts to fix the broken TSD’s, and by the time I joined the squadron the boys had given up on the TSD.  When it broke they just left it in the aircraft.  What’s worse, the TSD didn’t do anything that needed doing.  The F106 had very powerful radar in its nose that would show targets out to 200 miles.  It had voice radio to the ground controllers who were more than happy to tell the pilot about the target’s position, course, speed, and altitude.  Who needs a TSD with that kind of support?

 

Some things we could do.  All these gold plate boondoggles are made in Pentagon meetings.  Mostly procurement paper pushers attend them.  We ought to require that specifications for weapons systems be reviewed and if necessary vetoed by operators, pilots, aircraft maintenance mechanics, submariners, navy officers, and others who actually know something.

 

W should insist that the armed forces buy stuff off the civilian market and not require (and get soaked for) a custom military only design.

The US Army is planning on a new rifle cartridge. And new rifles to shoot the new cartridge.

 The modern rifle appeared after the US Civil War, say 1870 or so.  These were Winchester and Marlin lever actions, early bolt actions, and other competitors.  They were mostly chambered for a .30 caliber center fire cartridge with enough power to take American game, such as elk, deer, buffalo, bear, and wild hog.  This rifle cartridge served well from the Spanish American war up thru WWII. Korea and Viet Nam. 

   During WWII the troops fell in love with full automatic weapons, the Thompson submachine gun and the M3 “grease gun”.  From the soldier’s point of view, the ability to point the weapon and hose down an entire enemy unit with one quick “BRAP” could be life, should they encounter a strong enemy unit in combat.  The American WWII sub machine guns fired pistol ammunition, the .45 caliber round used in the Army .45 automatic pistol.  The pistol run lacked the power of rifle rounds, but the recoil was light enough to permit full automatic fire from a 7-9 pound shoulder weapon.  The regular rifle rounds kicked so hard that they just drove the rifle up until it pointed at the sky. 

   After WWII the Army adopted the full automatic M16 rifle.  To get the recoil down enough to make the gun usable in automatic fire, the power of the M16 round (5.56 mm) was reduced quite a bit.  The real riflemen in the army still liked the WWII 30 caliber round, it reached out further, it could penetrate more body armor and it made a sniper more effective than the 5.56mm round from the M16.

   So after decades of grousing about the lack of power in the standard 5.56 mm round, the Army has announced it wants a 6.8 mm round (.270 a civilian gun shop would call it) The army claims that the small increase in bullet diameter will give a round with ballistics nearly as good as the antique .30 caliber rounds and light enough recoil to allow fully automatic fire from a 7-9 pound rifle.  

   Needless to say, adoption of the new recoil will require the army to replace all the M16 rifles with whatever will fire the 6.8mm round. And all the machine guns too.  This could become very expensive.    

What parents need to do about fentanyl. Before it kills their children.

 Six out of ten sample pills bought from street drug dealers contain enough fentanyl to kill.  Your children need to know this.  The MSM doesn’t talk about it, so unless you, the parent, pass the word to your children, they won’t know. Taking just one pill bought from a street drug dealer has a 60% chance to killing the child, right then and there. 

   The few times the MSM mention this tragedy they call it “a drug overdose”, implying that the victim took too much of the drug.  Better is to call it deliberate poisoning, because the drug dealer sold the child a pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl in it and when the child swallowed that one pill, it killed him. 

    If the children just have to get high, they should stick to alcohol or weed.  Neither of them is good for the kids, but they won’t kill them as quickly as fentanyl laced pills from the street will.  And, if the children just have to get high, they ought to do it in their rooms (dorm rooms) and not be out driving.  Just one can of beer can discombobulate a beginning driver and cause a fatal car accident. 

Biden’s State of the Union fails to impress.

 I stayed up and watched it to the end.  Biden ran on for an hour and twenty.  Biden failed to explain what he would do in a second term to pull the country out of it’s tailspin into the ground.  Biden did make a lot of claims that sounded false to me.  And he complained about stuff well within his powers to fix, without saying he would bother to fix them.  He complained about corporations who make serious money but paid no federal income tax.  That’s caused by a tax code loaded with loopholes, and an IRS that doesn’t audit the big boy’s tax returns.  Biden could fix both of these problems with executive orders or acts of Congress.  Biden said nothing about keeping Chinese recon balloons out of US airspace, or having a US Navy strong enough to keep the Chinese communists out of Taiwan. Biden apparently plans to continue current lefty greenie policies that give us $5 a gallon gasoline, $10 a dozen eggs and $10 a pound bacon. 

Balloons.

The Chinese have flown a sizable balloon over the continental US.  The Chinese admit to ownership.  They launched it from Chinese territory and it crossed the Pacific, entered Canada, and last was heard from drifting across Montana.  The TV newsies have been going ape over it. 

 

The military has discouraged attempts to shoot it down, claiming that falling balloon pieces might hit innocent bystanders on the ground.  I have a little trouble believing that. Montana has a lot of prairie that doesn’t care what falls on it.  It isn’t the way things are in the middle of say New York City.

 

So far, the balloon looks like a civilian weather balloon.  Shooting it down, although attractive, is close to shooting down a civilian airliner that got lost and violated Soviet airspace, which happened maybe 10 years ago.  The Russians took a lot of flak over that.

 

Government briefers have implied that the balloon is maneuverable, implying it has an engine.  I don’t really believe that.  I suspect it is just a free balloon that goes where the winds blow it.  Prevailing winds over the US blow from West to East.  Give the balloon a few days and it will blow out into the Atlantic. 

 

If we really want to show the Chinese that we disapprove of balloons over the US, we can launch a few of our own balloons to drift over China. 

 

 

 

Global Warming

 It is 8 degrees this morning up in Franconia Notch.  I am listening to Biden saying that climate change is the most serious threat faced by mankind.  That sounds foolish to me on a morning this cold.