Good Morning! 54F @ 5:45AM. Cloudy early with peeks of sunshine expected late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 73F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
On and off showers all day yesterday, clocking up another 0.3". Glad I finished the mowing last Thursday, as it's been showering every day since. Hopefully we'll see the sun this afternoon, and it's supposed to be warmer and sunnier into next week.
My old friend with the vineyard also has an old power hammer he says he's never run. If you've never seen one of these things, it consists of a fixed lower anvil and an upper hammer that moves vertically, driven by a heavy flywheel through a crank arrangement. All this is hooked to an electric motor. A foot pedal controls the stroke of the hammer. My first experience with one of these monsters was in the welding shop at Ohio State, and one of the things it was used for was to bend over fillet weld test plates. It shook the whole building when it ran, and it scared the bejesus out of me with it's power and fury. Anyway, Mike's machine runs, but the dies for the hammer and forge were badly worn. He showed me new ones when I visited last weekend, but they lacked holes for the locating pins that held them in the machine's jaws. I made some paper rubbings that showed the locations of the holes in the jaws into which the pins would go, and went home with both the new dies and one of the old ones. It was easy enough to copy the measurements from the old die to the new one and punch that hole, but I didn't have an upper die to copy and had to work off my measurements of that jaw and the corresponding rubbing. Used some CAD software to make a pair of drawings, then emailed it to him with a request to cut out the holes and lay them into the jaws to verify that they reflected the alignment of the holes. He did and they did, so I drilled the dies Friday night. Also turned up a new pair of pins since the one he had left was a bit worse for wear.
Saturday I picked up the motorcycle parts from the pin striper in Sacramento, and Mike met me afterwards for brunch at a Mexican restaurant. At least we tried; it turns out there are at least five of those restaurants in the chain, all in Sacramento, and we started off at two that were a few miles apart. We figured it out over the cell phones and GPS, and were soon tucked into machaca and adabado.
I also returned the empty Mason jar he'd given me; the salsa it contained was delicious, and it offered me the opportunity to inquire about his canning technique. He and his wife had taken a course at UC Davis on food preservation, and they were both volunteer teachers of that material now. He gave me a few pointers to get started, and promised some links to more material. Anyway, the thing that surprised me is that he cans meat as well as fruit and vegetables, and the potential for improved camping meals was a real eye opener. Especially with the Vanagon on the horizon.
But back to the dies: I haven't heard back from him if they fit, and now I'm hoping nothing went wrong and he hasn't hurt himself.:shocked:
The pin striping came out wonderfully; really turned a sow's ear of my leaf/lettering job into a silk purse. It's amazing what these very talented men can do by hand! I'm hoping this week's improving weather will let me shoot the last coats of clear to finish this phase of the build.
Happy mother's day to all that are celebrating out there. Show her the love and appreciation she deserves; she won't be there forever...
