Refinishing for fun and profit

That first pad, that needs furniture, can be a real money black hole. Even IKEA is expensive and the standard furniture stores are outrageous. But, there is another way. You can refinish older furniture and have the job come out looking like new. I still have a chair I bought for $1 and refinished years ago.
For those of you who have never tried it, here is the way to go. First pick your used furniture carefully. It needs to be all wood, no upholstery, no particle board, and it has to look right even when old and dingy. There has been a lot of plain ugly furniture made over the years and even refinished, ugly stays ugly. Look for signs of quality, dovetail joints on the drawers, really top notch stuff has dovetails on the back of the drawers as well as the fronts. Drawers with a center guide rail are better than those without. Avoid elaborate carvings cause it is hard to sand them.
Then you have to get the old finish off. Paint remover will cut thru anything. It is also bad on skin, worse on eyes, and will burn like fire if you get some on your clothing and it sinks in. Rubber gloves help. Pick a sunny dry day and do the job outdoors. Slather on the remover, wait a few minutes for it to make the old finish crinkle up, and then scrape the resulting sludge off with a putty knife, or a rag, or steel wool, or scotchbrite pads, or a rag. Do the entire piece, except you don't have to strip the insides of drawers, just the drawer fronts. When done scraping and wiping, take a garden hose and wash the whole piece down. Dry with a clean rag. Do this fast, and then let the sun dry it the rest of the way. Police up the remover soaked rags, and such to prevent children, unwary friends and passers by from getting paint remover burns.
The remover and the water have by now raised the grain, and you have to sand it all smooth again. Sand paper comes in various grades. Start with 120 grit and go down to 220 grit as soon as possible. 220 grit is as fine as I ever go. The wood should come out smooth to the touch. For larger pieces an electric pad sander can be had new from Walmart for $30 or so and it really speeds the job.
After sanding, and before finishing, you want to clean up the shop to lay the dust. Then wipe down the piece with a rag moistened with thinner to pick up as much dust as possible. Give the air in the shop a day for the flying dust to settle and them wipe it down again.
Simplest and most foolproof finish is "penetrating resin" of which Minwax is the best known tradename. These finishes soak into the wood and harden, filling the pores and giving the wood a nice glow. The do NOT create a surface film and are never glossy. The stuff is water thin and you can apply it with just a rag, although brushes work fine too. Slather it on generously and give it 5 - 10 minutes to soak in. Then wipe it off with a clean dry rag. That's it. You are done. Give the stuff overnight to dry hard and carry your new classic antique up from the shop into the pad.

Greenery

Watched the Sunday Pundits again. Dunno why I bother. Today it was NBC Meet the Press with David Gregory. They spend a lotta time trashing Obama over the Gulf oil spill. Of course the Gulf spill isn't Obama's fault, and there is nothing he can do to stop it, but hey, they gave Bush the same flak over Hurricane Katrina, and if it's good for Bush, it's good for Obama. Then they drove off into deep green territory. I watch Ed Markey, my old US rep from back when I lived in Massachusetts, claiming that a wonderful renewable energy future was right around the corner, if only someone would get the lead out. Sounded so nice and green.
Too bad it doesn't work that way. I need gasoline to make my car run and furnace oil to keep my pipes from freezing, and only way to get that stuff is from oil wells. And there is something wrong about watching a US Congressman peddle that kind of snake oil on national TV.

Why, Oh why can't the laptops do it right?

Right is simple. When the lid is closed, any intelligent laptop ought to power down to save the battery. So, just to see what would happen, I closed the lid, packed laptop into his carry case, and drove over to mother's place, some 15 minutes. Pull laptop out of bag, and damn, his battery is nearly flat, and all he can due until he gets plugged in is whine about low batteries. Damn thing was near full charge when I closed his lid 15 minutes before. In short, laptop had failed to power down, and during the short drive had wasted nearly every electron in the battery.
This has been a laptop problem for years. You cannot trust the little critters to turn off unless you do the Windows shutdown procedure. PITA. There you are in the airport, catching up on a little paperwork while waiting for your flight. Then they announce boarding, and you can't just close the lid and get on the plane. On no. You gotta click on the start menu, click on the shutdown item, wait for windows to actually shut down, and then pack laptop into his bag. If you don't, your battery will be flat by the time the seatbelt warning signs go off. And you can't plug in on the plane.

Roasting BP

Watching yesterday's Congressional hearing on BP was kinda like watching a bull fight. You know how it's going to come out, you watch it to see the blood flow. The congress critters demanded confessions from BP CEO Hayward, and Hayward wasn't about to confess to anything. They repeatedly asked Hayward to admit that BP had taken short cuts to save money, and Hayward wasn't buying that one. Committee chair Henry Waxman, came across as clueless and vindictive.
Hayward missed several opportunities to defend BP's drilling practices and paint the blowout as an unavoidable accident. He finally resorted to stonewalling the committee's "have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife" questions. Hayward clearly is not at his best public speaking to a hostile audience.
Neither side had slides to illustrate what they were talking about.
In actual fact, the well had a leak that allowed natural gas under great pressure into the drillpipe. BP skipped three important leak checks, any of which would have detected the problem. Then they pumped the drilling mud out of the well, and the well blew. The committee interrogators failed make this clear to the TV audience. Hayward kept his cool, disclosed nothing, and came out of it looking better than he went in. Which isn't saying much, but it could have been worse for him.

The sun is exploding

A NASA scientist announced that a super magnetic storm on the sun, strong enough to do all kinds of bad things, is expected in 2013. Instapundit picked up the Slashdot story and passed it on.
Gotta wonder about that one. In actual fact, sun spot activity is at an all time low. The 11 year sunspot cycle is almost stopped. Astronomers and radio amateurs are waiting for it to start up again. So a prediction of intense solar activity three years from now arouses a certain amount of skepticism among those who pay attention to the state of the sun.
By that as it may, how much badness could an intense solar storm do? The last really bad one was back in the 1850's and it scared the bejesus out of telegraph operators. It was strong enough to cause sparks to fly off the telegraph wires, lighting up the telegraph offices.
Today we have built more targets for solar storms to disrupt. Telephone, cable TV and electric power wires, plus all the station and central office equipment, and everything electrical plugged into those wires. However, all these networks have been hardened against lightening hits. It is doubtful that a solar storm is a bad as a lightening stroke, which can toast anything electrical and set the place on fire to boot. So the networks will stay up. We may have truckloads of melted modems, scorched stereos, and toasted TV sets, but I think the lights will stay on, and the phone will work.

Hor rodding ain't what it used to be.

Things have changed. Used to be you could pull an engine out of a junker and drop it into something cool and it would run. Not any more. This Hot Rod magazine story shows how things have changed. The "junk yard jewel", a 4.6 liter Ford V8, won't run as it come out of the junkyard. The electronic boxes that make the fuel injection run don't come with the engine and the electrical harness to the injectors is toast.
Solution. Simple. Go with a carburetor. OK so far, except the carb needs a new Edelbrock intake manifold for nearly $600. The whole damn engine only cost $400. So before they can even crank it over, the $400 engine becomes a $1000 engine. I can remember replacing the entire engine in a hobby stock racer for $50 total. Speed costs, how fast do you want to go?
And then, Hor Rod magazine had access to a dyno. Us shade tree mechanics used to judge improvements in engine power by the seat of the pants, or quarter mile times, or looking at manifold vacuum. Dyno was a luxury far beyond our pocket books.
I shouldn't carp. Following this article you can produce a very strong engine from readily available parts and the whole project is less than $3000. They pushed the stock Ford mill from 200 and a skosh horsepower to nearly 400 horse and it's still driveable in the street.

When Judges legislate from the bench

Granite Grok has an excellent piece here.