Who needs TP when you got this?

 

Not my bathroom, but same setup.

Lean forward, hold it behind you and spray.  Females front and back.  A bit of soap if for a squeaky clean rear.

American baths though suffer from a bit of a disadvantage and are terrible at handling water on the floor.

Mine is all cement floor walls and tiled with granite floor and walls.  So in a plywood floor bath, you gotta take a bit more care and you can not just power wash off the toilet when you clean the bath.

Back online, shop misfortunes, and a vertical garden

 Earlier this week, I put the boys to building some projects and my MIG welder took a dump.  

Second time it has broke in the last couple months.  I really can not afford to go without a welding machine, as it was a decent amount of orders due for today Friday.  

So I called up my welding supply guy and made a appointment to see him.  We made the 10 mile drive in about 45 min.  

The welder he quoted me online was some chinesium crap.  A step down from what I have now but the price is higher than the welder I bought 2 years ago.  

Weld supply guy told me that the chip shortage has made his supply of welding machines from China scarce and expensive.  

But he did have a different model of old school type MIG welder without a computer in it.  3 controls, current, wire feed speed, and a timer.  

So I smoked 1400 bucks on a new welding machine this week.  Made in Italy, and he included a upgraded Panasonic MIG weld gun.  Double the price of the Chinese machine but at least I hope to keep it running for more than 6 or 7 spools of MIG wire.

One of those things, can not afford it, but I can not afford even more to be out of commission.

I hacked together this vertical garden prototype the other day also.  Not exactly the final design though.  I feel it may not be stable enough in strong winds.  So I will make a sort of cube out of steel tubing to tie 4 towers together.   

This one is has the pots attached with sheet metal screws, but for the working unit I will weld some bolts on the tubing like a stud bolt to bolt it on properly.  

Then after all that, I came down with one of those 2 day flu things and spent the last 2 days in bed.  Of course when the boss is not there, they work slower, so right now I had to go in to work to do payroll and push them to get the last shredder built and ship before lunch.  

Flu+caffiene withdrawl headache is not a fun experience.  Plus the new neighbor was singing and making noise till 4am.  If I was not feeling like shit right now, I would be running the angle grinder in my yard at 8am.  Nothing like the sound of a angle grider on steel to annoy people.  Much better than a leaf blower.  

My wife hid from me cause I was sick, so no help there, but at least my giant tomcat stayed with me.  I am rather fond of my cats.  They are much better trained than the shithead dogs I got.  

Not really feeling like commenting on the news.  Other than to say hard times are here, harder times are coming.  China is sutting down ports yet again.  Massive unemployemnt there.  I noticed that many items sold online here that come from China are simply not shipping.  As if the shop owner is dead or just quit, leaving the shop still up.  Messages unread, no orders shipped.  

Krylon paint is still in short supply here.  It is imported so it is more of a exotic import here.  Ace Hardware and Handyman Hardware both out of stock.  I had to use white instead of my usual black paint for this weeks orders.  I really can not use the local brands.  Despite being half the cost of the Made in USA stuff, a can covers half of the area, and it scratches off very easily.  Shipping is hard on the machines, so I need something that will not get rubbed off.  

Powder coating is not a option.  Way too expensive, and 2 week wait.  I have a 3-4 day turnaround time right now. 

Checked the solar usage this afternoon.  Shore power use was $7.28USD for the first 2 weeks of January.  Still no lithium batteries available on the market at a good price.  

Garden 2.0 sprouted in the days I was out of the shop.  6 or 7 rows of sunflowers and beans coming up.  
Harvested a bag of okra, some tomato, and one lone chili.  The sprinkler system I set up is just the ticket.  The secretary just turns on the valve for 20 min every morning.  

I neglected the backyard garden while sick and need to give that a good watering as well as the corn today.  Will mess with that this evening.  Need to go home and back to bed as my energy is just not back yet.

Getting off my ass

 

Having had enough with the doom porn, Monday I went to the shop and to my surprise the entire crew showed up.  

The one helper sick from the coof last week is already over it.  He did take ivermectin.  The vet supply stuff and a much lower dose than the human dose.  

Monday morning I had the boys drag the molder out from the back, re-arrange the shop and after a few practice runs they figured out what to do.

Afer getting the boys started I retreated to the ofice where the real money is earned.  Low and behold I made a couple sales.  So famine and doom is yet again postponed.  

This morning I posted the pots for sale in the local groupls and got some bites.  I am sellin them for 2 bucks each.  8 inch heavy duty pot,  You can literally use them as jack stands.  That strong.  30 ounces of recycled plastic bottle caps go in each one.  

Then as the boys were working.  One making machines, one molding pots, I spent the morning writing, thinking, watching video, and running around with a tape measure, while my vertical garden design was percolating thru the brain.  

I finally hit upon a sort of christmas tree design with a 2x2 piece of square tubing vertical at 4.75 feet.  (a length of the stuff comes in 19 feet so I get 4 even pieces out of that)  Which gets me 7 pots high and 14 pots on the stand.  

I will post some pics tomorrow of it as the welder is first building the money making orders that gotta go out Friday.  

The pot manufacturing process is pretty simple.

1 Shred the bottle caps I get from the scrap yard.
2 Weigh out and dump in 900 grams of plastic flake into the extrusion machine.  It will melt that in about 9 min or so, sometimes 10.  
3 hot plastic goes inside a turbo cooker with a small pan in it.  the turbo cooker keeps it hot until enough has extruded to be molded.
4 grab the pan while wearing welding gloves, and scrape the hot blob out of the pan on to a rubber mat that is lightly coated with veg oil.  
5 work the blob into a rough ball and toss into the molder. 
6 close the molder and scrape the excess hot plastic that comes out of the mold off with a tire crow bar and toss that hot plastic back into the turbo cooker.
7 refill the hopper with 900 grams plastic, and start the extrusion machine again.
8 by this time the plastic has cooled and the mold can be opened.  The excess can be trimmed off or left as it.  It is called flash.

Every machine in the process was made in the shop.  The mold was designed in CAD, laser cut and MIG welded together, then smoothed out with a flap disc.  It has water pumped thru the mold to cool it and that water also runs thru a automotive oil cooler radiator with a exhaust fan to cool that and a 1/4 hp household water pump moves the coolant water.

Single Mothers go from sexy to ugly real fast

 Just a observation.  On the street where my shop is there are some extremely sexy girls running around.  

Young, fresh and radiating feminity.  

I saw two of the notable good looking ones yesterday.  They were promiscious, got preg and now have babies.  

They now look haggard and unattractive.  Likely because the stress of being a single mother and not having a proper man to care for them.  Instead they run the street, not much different that the stray dog cranking out litters of puppies.  

When a woman who is well cared in her situation has a child she looks glowing, the opposite of the girls I saw.

Food shortages, things to look for.

 Via Michael Yon email newsletter:

All good info.  I have not seen yet it all put in one article and organized for understanding in this way.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/01/08/things-to-look-for/

High School Projects

 

School mate from high school posted this pic of a shop class project we did.  

When I was in high school, I learned how to stick weld, work on cars, evaluate soil for farming, run a cnc lathe, wood work, run a engine lathe, grow plants, drafting, autocad 1.0, use a PC and write programs in basic language, set up a pneumatic system, screen print, develop film in a darkroom, photography, how to sew clothes, calligraphy, cooking, first aid, CPR, basic electronics, house wiring, carpentry, and a bunch of other stuff I can not remember off the top of my head. 

At home, I built beehive parts (we had 2000 beehives) Worked in the family honey bottling plant, cut firewood, worked in the garden, sold at the farmers market, fished in the Mississippi river, helped build one house by tearing all the nails out of the wood from 2 torn down houses which was then re-used, and helped build a log cabin.  I put hay in barns, butchered chickens, pigs and steers.  

I thought that was normal, until I got in the world and realized that very few had these skills.

Now days, even my offspring... play video games and have absolutely refuse to learn how to build or create a single thing.  

My step son, I paid for him to go to Aeronautical Engineering college and he got his board license.  I gave him every tool and opportunity.  I had foreign engineers for him to work with from Denmark, Netherlands and South Africa in the shop.  I bought him his own CNC router, and 3D printers.  I had my experienced welder/fabricator guys spend time teaching him to weld.  So now he just plays video games every spare moment.  It certainly is not from a lack of trying on my part.  The pull of the retard culture is too strong. 

If I had to rewind the clock, I would have at the age of 29, married some 18 or 20 year old  to be the diligent house wife,  got a place on some remote island, saved every penny I could when I was making the big money, and started my own tribe.

Growing food in a small space

 On a sunny and warm tropical Sunday, I got the gardening stuff done which was pretty much just moving the sprinkler around to get all the spots, added a bit of my super dilute fertilizer mix to a few plants that look like they could need a bit of love and then home relaxing.

Via Ice Age Farmer I found this webinar and it is really good information.  As good as Epic Gardening Youtube but coming in from a different angle and really diving into calorie production.

It has given me a few ideas for the house to try out.  Namely building yet another raised bed, but in the space in front of the house between my fence and the property line.  

It is presently occupied with ornamental stuff.  

The ornamental stuff I realized is growing like crazy despite poor soil, and the reason is that that is the area where the rain has washed the dog waste over the years.  Not a direct dog piss in the garden, but rather after it has time to ferment in the front gravel yard, it gets washed out during heavy rains.  I just really need to use every bit of the property as my spaceship/lifeboat to make food and energy.

Yesterdays tomato is nearly done dehydrating.  I cranked up the heat when I have a excess of power when it was sunny today and yesterday and then lowered it down to mostly fan when the solar was not producing.  If I can not store it I might as well use it.  

Same goes with the washing machine, and electric cooking appliance uses.

Last weeks plans to make the vertical garden pots was a bust, with the boys being sick and now the sexytary messaged and said she too is coming down with the coof symptoms.  

Which basically leaves me. myself and I in the shop.  Plus I gotta somehow unscrew the pickup yet again.  The clutch fluid has leaked out yet again and the brake fluid has leaked out again.  It happened over the holidays when it was not being used.  So I got 2 lame vehicles at the moment.  I had a order come in yesterday which brings the year to date orders to 2 in 9 days.  It is okay, but the drought over the holidays of sales, has left things on a low flame only.  

I came up with a bit of a cheapo type recipe yesterday to make orange juice.  In order to make it you will need powdered vitamin C, which is something you should already have in your prepper pantry.  Cheap and many uses.      I used about half the peel of one of those sweet chinese oranges.  They are one of the original breeds, sweeter but smaller than your Sunkist orange and bigger than a seedless Mandarin.  Mandarins btw are even better in this recipe.  

Cut the orange in half, remove the seeds, and put the orange in the blender. Add in half the peel, or in the case of a sunkist about 1/4 the peel cuz they are bitter or you can just use the zest if you want the extra work.  

Add in vit c powder,, I used about 1/4 teaspoon to start and taste adding more if needed,  1/4 cup of white sugar, fill the blender about 1/4 full of cold water, and blend until there are not more chunks.  Should be a min or two.   Add more water until full, tasting and adding sugar and vitamin c powder to your liking.  

It comes out as a sort of sunny delight orange drink, with more rich flavors and you get a lot of vitamin c.  Make stronger or weaker to your taste.  A more dilute mix is perfect to chug on a hot day while a more rich drink is better with breakfast.    You can substitute splenda but it still will need a bit of sugar to keep it from tasting chemical like.  Too bitter, then you used too much peel.   Mine has a bit of a oily surface on the top after blending from the zest goodness.  Peels have more vitamin than the pulp also.

You can also use this method to make a gallon of lemonade with one lemon.  No one will notice the difference and if you are serving it in a restaurant, it is much more profitable than buying pre-made stuff.

It may also be possible to dehydrate the peel, grind it in the coffee grinder, add in vit c powder, citric acid, and sugar to make a instant juice drink.