Lousy Weather But Moving Ahead Still

Here's yours truly welding on Surly's fender. Photo by him as well, of course. You'll notice I'm wearing a heavy coat and my flannel lined fitter's cap. It was late enough in the season to have put that away until next fall. In fact, I had already washed it and hung up in the basement hallway. I washed it up again the other day planning on tucking it away again - this time for sure - and now I see where it's going to be chilly all week and a chance of frost on Friday night. Damn! I want to get the garden started and the fruit trees are in blossom now. I can hold off getting the tomato and pepper plants in the ground but not much I can do about the fruit trees.

I do have the ground all ready to go for the garden and I've ordered some plants to doll the place up a bit. The yard needs quite a bit of work. The front isn't too bad but the back is fast getting away from me. I've been avoiding using too many chemicals since we've already had to deal with cancer here but I'm about out of other options. 

I bought a cheap de-thatcher last year to help with the front yard. The top is a tray that will accept a couple of concrete blocks except there's no provision to hold them on. I made a couple of hold-down brackets that should do the trick. There were punched holes in the tray already, so a couple of pieces of 1/8 x 1 flat with nuts welded to the inside was all that was needed. This should make for a little bit healthier lawn.

Surly pointed me to a really cool welding cart on Instagram. It's a tube frame built around a Harbor Freight bottom box. It's large enough for a welder like my new one and a plasma cutter both on top. It's a very well made and thought out job. I can't figure out how to copy the photo or I'd have posted it.

Since I just made a cart for the plasma and I'm pretty happy with it, no point in making a cart big enough for both the welder and the plasma. However, this cart would be just about right as a place to start for my new welder. It's 16" x 30" which will fit in the hole where I want it go with room to spare, I'm guessing. I think if I took the handle off one end and lowered the end plate a little, I'd have easy access to the controls and cable, drawer for tungstens, collets, etc., and I can make something for the bottom tray to keep welding rods and the foot pedal. I'm going to double check a few measurements and think about it a bit. I got a Harbor Freight catalog in the mail but it's still in quarantine. I'll take a look through it later on today and see if I get lucky and there's a coupon. You can usually count on a 20% off coupon on a single item. I don't want to go to the store, though, and it might be a little expensive to ship.

Indiana opened things up a bit starting yesterday. I'm thinking we might see a spike in the virus with more people out and about so I'm going to stay hunkered down as much as possible. I "attended" an advisory committee meeting at the college the other day. They're facing a lot of uncertainty right now as to how to get the students the welding time they need. Most of the courses are sequential, so if they couldn't complete the first one, they can't take the next one. The e-learning didn't go well, which is what I figured would happen. Most of the college students and the dual credit students take the lab courses because they aren't interested in sitting in front of a computer for their education. I've been wondering how the high schools can graduate their students without it just being here's your diploma, wink, wink. Maybe an asterisk on the diploma with the fine print saying something to the effect of don't expect too much from me. I missed the whole last semester.