Monday, February 5, 2018

Squirrely Things

The Missus showed me an article in Saturday's NWI Times talking about an addition to a local high school that's going to be adding a welding program. Indiana changed the law concerning pensions of retired teachers a few years back so now you can retire and then go back into the classroom and still keep receiving your pension while teaching. I hinted at applying for the position and that went over like a fart in a space suit. No way I'm interested but I could make a pile of money, at least by school teacher's standards, for a year and then retire again. If I really wanted to work more, it wouldn't be a problem to get a couple more classes at the college. In fact, my boss would jump for joy. Can't see either of these scenarios happening, however. High school = heart attack. No thanks.

The back is doing much better. I went to the gym Saturday morning for a light workout to get things loosened up. Three light rounds each on the double-end bag, heavy bag and speed bag. Then home for a trip into the crawl space. There's a squirrel that has gotten into the walls of the house. I don't know how he got in but we've heard him in the ceiling and I heard the pipes for the hot water heat making some unusual noise in one corner of the house. I went into the crawl space under that room and found where it's been chewing on acorns so I put the trap down there. My truck radio has quit getting decent reception like the antenna is not working well. I have a feeling a squirrel has gotten to the truck again also. Looks like I'm going to have to declare all out war on the little squirrely-whirrleys.

It was about 40 on Saturday, so I took care of a few outside things and went into the shop and puttered a bit. I made up the coil mount for the motorbike, so one step closer on that. The top of the carb is up close to the top tube on the frame, so I drilled a hole in the frame so the cable will pass through. I'm going to weld in a small piece of tubing to reinforce the frame and to give a nice smooth surface to prevent chafing the cable. Chain guards are about all that are left now and then I can take it apart, finish welding things, paint and reassemble. I was going to take a photo of the progress but the batteries were dead in the camera. By that time my back was starting to tighten up a bit so I decided to play it safe and call it a day.

Cold and snow here again. If you're going to be spending some time in the house, check out the Friday Night Steam post at Chicken Mom's. It's a video of the building of a big steam locomotive including everything from the pattern making, pouring of the castings, forging, welding, machining, assembly and test running. It's about 14 minutes long. Maybe something to watch during your coffee or lunch break. Worth a look.

4 comments:

Kevin Kaluf said...

What school is adding on the welding program?

Shop Teacher Bob said...

Lowell High School. There'll be 16 welding booths. The article didn't really mention much about the rest of the equipment, mostly focused on being able to graduate students with job ready skills and all the rest of the current buzzwords. No way I'm going back to a high school. I am going to teach a class at the college starting in March for eight weeks. It's a fabrication class - just have to make things.

Traveling Pirate said...

On LHS, my experience was like throwing a frog into a pot of boiling water. We all know what happened after that.

On the squirrel front, I once took my car in because a squirrel had chewed up some wiring, got it back on Friday, and it was back there by Monday as the squirrel(s) had already chewed up the new wiring. That time the mechanic covered his finish product in hot sauce and moth balls. That did the trick!

Traveling Pirate said...

Side note - I think we're about due for a meeting of the braintrust.