So, I bought a house

I still stand by my position stated some months ago but then a very good opportunity came by and I did the most sensible thing.

I bought a ticket for the Titanic house.

A nice place full of fruit trees. Three vines, a Fig, an all-year-round Lemon tree, Peach tree, Camphor, Blackberry, Pomegranate and Passiflora/Mburucuyá.

And on top of that it has a dance hall, with mirrors and a barre.

There’s a house, someplace behind all those weeds.

Brand New Old Home

Installing rope guides and rollers

Today after waiting more than a year since I built them, I finally installed the rollers on our lamp fixture. I also exchanged the roof mounts with something sturdier. Now I only have to retouch the paint on a couple of spots and perhaps build a better winch to pull on all the ropes.

Homemade bearing puller

Tonight I made something that resembles a bearing puller. I’ve been putting off for quite some time fixing a couple of tools because I needed one and this stormy evening seemed like a good time to end that.

(And also fire up the tig welder again now that I have a full bottle of argon.)

Yeah, it looks passable. But doesn’t work at all.

While building it I made (again) the same mistake of not getting the screw out after tacking the nut. And so, between the galvanized coating inside and the different expansion of the nut and the threads on the plate, the screw was firmly locked.

I waited for it to cool, applied penetrating oil and only managed to turn it a bit. I kept torquing and lo, it snapped. This is not a puny screw, it’s a stainless M8.

I welded a nut on the other side and again it snapped.
Then I ground it flush with the nut on the plate, affixed to the original end and tried again. This time just as I felt it about to give and break, it got loose and came apart.
Jut a little twisted.

Making a beam compass

Today was one of those days when in order to do something I say to myself “I need this tool and (especially now) I can not buy nor justify buying it. So let’s build one”.

And that in itself takes more time than the whole project.

I was in the process of fixing an old dentists lamp that was laying around, the fresnel lens was originally held with some tiny and feeble metal strips that were in horrible shape.

Instead of making a replacement with some leftover stock or filler rods I decided to make a proper retention ring with sheet metal from a computer case.

But, my simple compass wasn’t able to make circles as big as I needed. Thus I set to build a beam compass.

I had the hardened points from a couple of broken punches, so it was only a matter of cross drilling some bolts and figuring out how to end up with something that would be useful.

Except from the bolts everything else came from either the rust bucket or the trash.

There are a lot of things that can be improved but as it is, it fulfills its intended purpose just fine:

Pity that it’s already too late to start the plasma cutter and finish this part.