Whizbang - Son of a Gun

I'm proud to say my scrounging skills are still intact. I taught a construction class a few years back and there was a garbage disposal floating around in the tool room. I checked it out the other morning and it was still there. So I got the hard part of the apple grinder taken care of right away. The maintenance crew came by to have me fix a piece for the snow plow so I asked the guy about the best place to buy an electric motor locally. Just so happens, due to the construction this summer a surplus motor came to the surface. So that took care of the second big expense. I think I'm going to go with the apple grinder plans as drawn rather than building an aluminum frame. I picked up some lumber but I still need a coupling to join the motor to the disposal. I found one at the local farm store but it was $27.00, which I thought was a little excessive. I'll see if I can find something a little cheaper, but if not, I know where to get one.

I watched a new show on the Discovery Channel last week called Sons of Guns. It's a gun shop in Louisiana that builds all kinds of custom firearms and does restoration work on antique firearms. It was pretty interesting. They fired off a Civil War cannon, built a gun for breaching doors by combining an automatic weapon with a shotgun and made a suppressor for a shotgun. There wasn't a whole lot of drama like some of those bike/car builder shows. In fact, the guy in charge seems like a real likeable guy. Looks like the kind of place I'd like to work in. As a result of the show I would expect to see an up tick in enrollments in gunsmithing schools soon. Mostly machinist and mechanical skills required. Regardless of how anyone feels about firearms, you have to admire the skills of a good craftsman. The show is on Wednesday evenings, 8:00 Central.

I mentioned helping out my sister-in-law in a previous post. Her husband had this welder and I'm trying to move it for her. I'd like to get the school to buy it. I hooked it up the other day and tried it out. It will stick and TIG weld, plus it has a pulse option on the TIG. Its amazing what these little things will do with the inverter technology that's available now. You can plug it into any input power from 110 to 440 volts either three phase or single. 200 amps output and you can carry it around by the handle or the shoulder strap. It has a real small torch on it. It would have been nice to have when I was welding up the bicycle frame. I used it to weld the Rickati swingarm back together and it's the cat's pajamas as they used to say. She also has a MillerMatic 130 amp MIG welder, if you're in the market.