I'm still here. By now I bet some of you were thinking last night's UFO's had carried me off. Maybe they considered it and rejected me as not a representative specimen of the human race. I suspect that might be true!
I went out to the sawmill in Santa Anna this morning and picked up some mesquite. It's for a special commissioned project I've got going on right now, but it's enough planed pieces to make about 30-40 knives! I'm surprised. It was cut exactly to my specifications (which will save me a LOT of labor in the finishing of each knife) and only cost me $25. It adds roughly $1.60 to the expense of each knife, but seeing as how I'm not going to be burning through one sander belt per knife (at $8 per belt) then this is an enormously good idea. I continue to get more efficient at the knifemaking. Which is a good thing!
I'm still having power problems. I can't run a belt sander on any power solution I can come up with. My generator is still down so it looks like I've simply got to get that going before we can move back into production with the knife shop. It pulls 120 and 4.2 amps, but somehow that's too much for the 1500 watt inverter I'm using. I think the voltage drops down too low when it kicks on and that shuts everything down. Not much I can do about that reliably for now. Looks like it's fix the generator or nothing. I think it's an inverter problem. The inverter I have is a hodge-podged vehicle inverter so it's not really designed for these solar applications. We'll have to come up with something else there. I was holding off on purchasing the proper inverter for awhile longer. It's expensive.
Looks like the day is mostly spent and there's not much newsworthy out there so I'll skip the roundup for today. I've been putting tin up on the roof at an awkward angle and now I have a bad case of "hammer shoulder". Anyone know an off-grid solution for a bad shoulder? Normally I would have put an ice pack on it but that's not feasible without a freezer.
5 comments:
Hey Ernie,
How about mailing me a box of them mesquite pods... Understand they can be ground for a kind of flour...
Can you put some rice in a sock and heat it up some how and use it as a heating pad? or if you have peppermint oil or vicks even - rub that on like a icy hot type solution
A little baby oil on the hands of your sweetie and some soft rubbing on the shoulder may help (If the kids can go long enough not needing mom, lol)
check out the Danzer, I believe it is. They make fridges or freezers for solar applications, they run on DC so you don't have to convert...
You want a freezer, you can have one for around 6 bills I believe...
Good advice, all! My shoulder feels much better this morning, though I didn't do anything but rest. Essentially I was hanging off the edge of the roof like a Chinese acrobat trying to hammer in tin that was above my head. Just a poor decision altogether. I'm lucky that all I got was an achy shoulder!
Re: mesquite pods ...
You know, when we first got here I searched all over and couldn't find a single pod. We have TONS of trees but there wasn't so much as a bean on the ground. You can make coffee from it (good, from what I hear) or grind it and use it as flour. There are hundreds of traditional recipes available online for such. I suspect that the critters around here foraged all of the dropped beans by the time we arrived in December. It's said the mesquite bean has four times the caffeine of a coffee bean so I bet those were some caffeine-crazed critters running around!
We'll have to see what this season produces.
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