Week 551 Wood working

year 10, Week 29, Day One (week 551)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
08-01-10 Sunday

93 degree, mostly sunny, spotty clouds, breeze from the wrong direction early morning but it picked up in the afternoon. This weather report was brought to you by the City Of Fort Lauderdale Department Of Tourism.

To save some of you some reading, I did no woodworking this weekend other than adding finish to the face vase, which I ended Monday.

Thursday:

I left work without borrowing a truck, since I was not going to work Friday. I walked about one and a half miles to the bank. I then took a bus to a grocery store I usually stop at as it had something my normal store does not carry.
I then walked about one and a half miles to a my normal grocery store. After I got my groceries, I took a cab the two miles to my house.
At most, I doubt I walked four miles, but it was far farther than I have walked in years. Periodically, I will walk around the 1.3 mile block and do well there.
the walk I did would have been utterly impossible two years ago. I could barely walk around a store as I had foot problems. That I could do this distance with one blister on my foot, and some cramping during the night, was good. I will have to do some short distances to get stronger.

Saturday:

My brother brought me over to his house and we worked on the truck.
when the crankshaft was made by the factory, they did not machine the hole, where the transmission shaft goes into, properly. when they put the truck together, the bearing was on the end of the transmission shaft and they stuck it in and bolted it in place. The bearing was not set all the way in. The bearing bound to the shaft and spun in the hole.
My brother machined a bearing to meet what he thought the tolerances needed to be, but decided it was too loose, so he machined another bearing.
We drove the last bearing in, then put the transmission into place and it would not go in, it bound. We got the bearing out (fill hole with grease and drive a shaft in. the grease forces the bearing out.). We had to make a new tool to remove the bearing as he had modified his previous one for something else. after we got that bearing out, we put that tool in my tool box.
We put the loser one in and accepted that as being good enough. the tolerances we are dealing with are measured in thousandths of an inch. The original bearing is .830. The one we put in was machined (with a file this time) to a setting of .826. The one that we tried first had a setting of .827 which was just enough to cause a bind when driven in.

Sunday:

My brother picked me up and brought me over. We had to get brake fluid for the hydraulics. We were given synthetics and that was not what was in the truck. My brother had to drain out the entire system, which was not much, to correct for the error. We had simply asked for the fluid that the truck needed and that was what they gave us.
We had to go and get some bolts when a few bolts disappeared. We then had to go to get transmission fluid as the stuff we got when we started last week, seamed to have disappeared too.
The truck all assembled, we gave it a quick test, running it through the gears. Everything worked but we still had to add the transmission oil.
My brother looked at the plug and said "oh no! what tool will work for that?" The plug has an inside hex. There is nothing to grab onto.
We were about to go to the store to see if they had that tool, then he got an idea. He found a nut that fit the hex of the plug, then braised a nut onto that, and that became his tool to work the plug. That is also in my tool box. I love how we were abler to make several of our own tools, and figure out a solution to the problem, on our own.

We brought the truck down, and it was stiff at the beginning of my drive around his quarter mile block, but then it settled in. We made sure all the tools were taken care of and I was able to drive home in my own truck.
I had some old parts in the back of the truck. I was driving home and hit the brakes to slow down and heard a loud thump, what one would expect if a rope caught on something. I saw nothing tumbling on the road behind me. I pulled off, got out. the instant I saw the parts in the bed, up by the cab, I knew exactly what I had heard. The parts had slid forward.

Next week, I plan to do some woodworking!!!!!!!!