Recent content by spokewrench

I love a 1/2" belt sander, and it's not only because of the slow and variable speed and the ease of changing grit size. The length makes it easy to stay on the bevel. I paint the bevel with a felt tip pen. If the sander removes the "paint" from top to edge, I'm on the bevel, and it's easy to...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000ARKABW I've depended on this since 2019. I bought it to replace something similar I'd bought from LL Bean in 1984. (After only 35 years of frequent use, the plastic stone holder broke. I still use those diamond stones freehand, maybe to remove the burr after I...

Until 1962, St. Johns, Newfoundland, had 3 breweries. A consortium of 3 major Canadian brewers bought them out and combined them to a single brewery, a creepy building high on a hill, like Elsinore in "Strange Brew." There was no draft beer. The bars had all the popular Canadian labels, but the...

I wonder why they don't have carbide razor blades for shaving. At Oregon's site, they advertise 9 families of chain. Duracut is the family for harsh and abrasive environments. "Advanced plating process with extra layers of chrome extends sharpness up to three times longer than conventional saw...

I see that Oregon professional chain sharpeners are bench models using grinding wheels advertised to "resist burning of cutters and leave a clean, sharp finish." I guess professional sharpening saves the temper.

In the 80s I heated with wood. Filing teeth left a burr, which wore quickly. Sharpening was imprecise the chain would rock in the bar groove. I got a Craftsman electric sharpener: a Dremel tool with a stone and guide. A Dremel typically spun at 20-35 thousand rpm. Contact before the stone was...

I thought I was smart when I bought a Timex SSQ for $85 in December, 1975, equivalent to $525 now. Very accurate, easy to sync with WWV, and the stainless case protected the crystal. Six months later I was riding my motorcycle in the rain when I realized my watch was gone. The elastic wrist of...

Big watches are supposed to be macho, but big watches are easy to damage, which didn't seem macho to me. In 1972 I bucked the trend. I spent $6 on a little Timex with a blue vinyl band. It might have been intended for a first-grader. It lasted much longer than any big watch I'd had. In port...

Mine has the AFERIY brand. The manual calls it the UPS mode. The manual shows a bypass circuit to power equipment during charging. Running off the battery, it's rated at 1800 W. In UPS, it says the overload may trip if the load is more than 1200 W.

For chainsaw work out of range of an electrical outlet, it seems a LiFePO4 battery is far more efficient than a gas saw or a generator. It's a 14.5 A saw, so it might have pulled 1750 W cutting through the stump, yet in half an hour it reduced the battery energy about 40 Wh. Chainsaw work is...

How about gin? It started as brandy with juniper flavoring, but in England it devolved into liquor made from inferior barley with turpentine to make it taste better. England's Industrial Revolution depended on cheap labor, provided by a large starving segment of the population. Gin was provided...

It can charge at 500 or 1000. There's a switch. The generator is rated at 3400. The manual says it will run 3.5 hours on a tank at full power and 14 hours at 1/4 power (850). I guess the efficiency is similar from 850 to 3400.

I love another advantage. Corded tools are likely to be cheaper, lighter, and less trouble than those powered by gasoline or batteries. However, if a task is 50 yards from an outlet, that's a lot of trouble laying out and bringing in cords. You'll have to move them as you move, and you won't be...

My first calculator had bright green digits like this one, but no functions beyond basic arithmetic. It ran on one or two coin-shaped ni-cads. It didn't run long without the wall wart because the power supply had to generate 30 volts for the fluorescent digits. At times I needed natural logs or...

My first calculator had tiny fluorescent tubes to light the segments of digits. Before that, HP calculators were costly and primitive. I'd seen only one, when, far away at sea, I had to calculate a complex resistor network to troubleshoot an intermittent navigational radar that had stumped a...