It is spring time and hope springs eternal once more.
The past year or so has been a time of gathering my strength for one more push. And working some insane hours at numerous jobs to gather some extra cash. It was all part of a plan.......sort of made up as things went along. And now, the past couple weeks were spent to rebuild the new machine.
Here it is all assembled. The filter is replaced and years of crud scraped out of the tank. The drain hose is new. ($88 for a 6' section of hose? Are you kidding me?) The fill hose is new and the upper seal around the window is all replaced. I checked the electo-magnetic tool holder and it works fine. The pump sprays oil as it should. Lights are working now too. You push a button and compressed air floods the tank pushing dielectric fluid up in to the upper chamber. It must cover the work as all cutting must be done submerged to avoid igniting things. There is a copper wire inside the fill hose that grounds out the tank to prevent the gases trapped in there from igniting and blowing the tank apart. Overall it looks extremely safe and the odds of igniting this special fluid seem to be very remote. A cheaper alternative is to use kerosene as your dielectric fluid in which case the odds of ignition worsen exponentially. I spent the money and went with less-flammable stuff. It seemed prudent as the insurance company now refuses to cover my workshop, for some bizarre and inexplicable reason. I do not understand how they stay in business. I have had loads of experience with accidents and mishaps and yet they do not give me any credit for learning from those situations. Instead they will happily insure someone who has never so much as blew up an outdoor grill. Makes no sense.
Anyhow, so far so good. I plan to do some test cutting next week, depending on how many bases I have to produce to keep things in stock.
BUT...............................
There is one small nagging question that I have not been able to figure out.
This switch seems important. It is in a very obvious spot and is claims to define the status of the ram. Sort of like your status on Facebook, although they give a lot of options including no less than 58 genders to choose from. This switch is just one way or the other.
It must have been used heavily by some ham-fisted machinist back in the day causing the words to rub off. Using the same techniques used by Zecharia Sitchin to decipher the cuneiform clay tablets of the Ancient Sumerians, I have concluded that the top word should be "Locked". This means a safe and secured position I assume.
The bottom word is the real challenge. It seems it ends in "O". It could be NO, as in "Do not ever switch to this setting". Or maybe, "Is this locked?" And the answer is "NO". Still seems a bit strange.
It might be the end of a "D", but I am not certain. The "O" seems more plausible. And judging from the location of the "O" it might actually be a 3 letter word. The only decent 3 letter word ending in "O" is of course "UFO".
At this point it is probably just wishful thinking that the machine has a "UFO" setting. Ruling that out maybe "SLO". Why would they misspell the word slow?
It has to be some sort of 2-3 letter synonym for "UNLOCKED". Maybe they could not fit the word unlocked on the surface so resorted to an abbreviation of some sort. Of course the top word might not be "Locked" , which pretty much throws everything up for grabs.
It might be best to just turn things on and throw the switch back and forth under various conditions and see what happens. Learning all of this is going to take a bit but someday it should all bear fruit.
I plan on making another blog post once the EDM machine gets figured out. It really should be a massive game changer. Along with the 3D printer it is a lot of investment in time and money that will someday pay for itself I hope.
And one last note, there are a couple of egg shaped bases in the store. I made these for some customers to rebase their cavalry models. I also lowered the price of the magic tokens. At current sales rates there will still be some left forever. I do not plan on making any more if by any chance this first run ever sells out.
I leave you with a couple of quotes you should never dwell on.
From the 40K book I think- " Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment."
And from Latrell Sprewell- "Success is just failure that hasn't happened yet."
Life is a little more magical when you take some time and ignore reality and think about the possibilities.
Take a look at this film-Dudes and Dragons . A film made by people on a budget. I watched the little "making of" feature on the DVD and was massively inspired. And actually it was a lot better than it should have been given the methods they used. I give them the utmost respect for the ability to do something like this.
Have fun guys.
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