Ugly

Less ugly

Today’s pic o’ the day brings with it – an extra pic! Woohoo! You’re welcome.

I usually try to limit it to just one picture to force myself to learn to make decisions, but today’s post simply wasn’t going to go over so hot without having a “before” shot. And, um, actually, the “before” shot is really more of a “already started, but still ugly” shot.

Shall I explain? I shall. In the top photo in the foreground you can see what looks like a pretty ugly piece of wire. In the, um, aft-ground a wire that looks kinda shiny. That wasn’t like that minutes before I shot this. All the wires looked blackened and scarred up like the foremost one. I wish I’d thought to take a picture before I started cutting things off. Pity. At any rate, there were two main wires for the track that were haphazardly connected to each other with two U-shaped pieces. They were all horrible welds, and some of the pieces were nearly cut in half rather than being welded together. It was a mess, and I didn’t think it was even going to stick together for long.

With my recent success in welding, I decided I absolutly had to fix that aberration. I picked up the bolt cutters and proceeded to remove all manner of nastiness. Then I fabricated new pieces to go in place of the dead ones. It took a total of ten welds to get everything back together, and I’m happy to say that only two of those were less than decent. Unfortunately, you can actually see one of them here (that black dot on the connecting piece is a hole), but an 80% success rate for me is ridiculously high. In short, it was a good night, a very good night indeed. I hope this streak of goodness continues, then we’ll be able to look at photos of me building stuff instead of pictures of welded spots like these.

Did I mention I wanted a punch press yesterday? I’d like one, thanks. And the vertical mill also, still want that. A lot.

Did I also mention that I was looking up geometry on line and CAD stuff and that I looked up the course requirements for a machinist? Yep, losing my mind here, folks.

Tonight I’m also going to meet with someone from my NaNo group and we’re going to go over the edits and suggestions we had for each other after swappping novels. I do still write, you know, lest that be forgotten amidst this morasse of machinery obsessiveness.