Ace-Garageguy

Save yourself untold unnecessary grief and just use CA and epoxy to assemble white metal kits. I've been soldering electrical stuff, plumbing, and brass models together for over 5 decades, I'm kinda good at it, and there's still no way I'd risk soldering an essentially irreplaceable cast white metal kit together. Even some of the most highly skilled model railroad soldering guys embraced CA and epoxies early on when they hit the market...many many years ago. There are so many things to know about relative melting temperatures and heat sinks and sources for oddball solders and irons vs. guns vs. resistance soldering that it's well beyond the scope of any but the most serious modeler who is enamoured of learning old-school skills.

The USA is in exactly the same boat. And a lot of young people who complain endlessly about "not being able to afford anything", but who consume three $8 coffees daily and can't exist without $1500 phones and $400 sneakers, are in abject panic about the prospect of manufacturing jobs coming back to the States ("ewwwww...icky!!!") even though it was exactly those semi- and highly-skilled jobs that enabled the creation of a well-paid middle class in the first place, with families who could own decent housing on one income. "Experts" and the management classes "offshoring" manufacturing have pretty much ruined everything. EDIT: It's my parents' generation that started us down the path to ruin after WW2, my generation that pushed to accelerate the snowball down the hill, and every one since that's been too preoccupied and entitled to do anything about it. So here we are.

"Ripe" is good in the connotation of "best-before" date, but can mean quite another thing afterwards, as in "man, that smells pretty ripe".

Up, Up and Away With My Beautiful Baboon is about traveling the world with a big monkey.

Harder metals take more effort to work than softer ones.

Money and making change are hard.

Thing is, it's not just "these kinds of occupations". Anyone who uses services on the web (and is at all critical) can see there are far more companies staffed with do-as-little-as-possible and never-check-and-verify-functionality-like-a-real-user than there are companies whose staffs really give a rat's backside about making stuff work well, and have the expertise to do it consistently. It's rampant in engineering too, with GM's fabled ignition switch fiasco being a prime example. The early failures of a significant number of "wet-belt" systems is another, and anybody who works on production cars regularly has at least 5 "what were they THINKING???" moments every day. American journalists who misuse words and don't know standard English sentence structure is another class whose work I frequently see exhibiting the results of the "who knows, who cares?" attitude, and even Hollyweird getting a host of technical details wrong whenever aircraft or cars or trains or scary bangy shooty things (to name just a few) are involved is part of the problem too.

All largely because the populace has been brainwashed to look down on tradespeople with hard skills, and believe that to be "successful", everyone needs a college degree...even the useless (insert course-of-study-that-leaves-you-unemployable-as-anything-but-a barista-or-a-dog-walker) degrees. Never mind that a competent mechanic or bodyman or painter or plumber, etc. can still make well in excess of $100,000 annually working for somebody else, and for a smart guy with good skills AND who can handle business management and isn't afraid to go out on his own, the sky's the limit (with the hardest part being finding conscientious and talented help). I can teach skills to anyone who has the right combination of attitude and aptitude, but even that is in much shorter supply than it was in the 1980s and '90s. Without God-given mechanical aptitude and an innate desire to do things right, fergit it.

Do you want fries with that?

I have seen a huge number of cracked or otherwise damaged parts or stripped threads / heads where chimps used power drivers or the wrong tool or just way over-tightened screws by hand, especially prevalent on instrument panels and inspection plates on aircraft, and anywhere there's a Phillips or JIS or Pozidriv or Torx fastener in cars...or anything else a chimp might have "fixed". When I had the fleet services company, almost every one of the approx. 60 trucks my largest client had needed wheel studs replaced because of stupid, lazy air-gunning by the company that had the tire contract with my client (I solved the problem by buying several sets of wheels and having the tire company do nothing but mount and balance tires on loose rims, and we changed them out in my shop). A cowboy "race car mechanic" I knew destroyed an FE in a real Cobra by air-gunning the main and rod journals. Engine scattered on the third lap. Etc. etc. etc. And people seem to think I'm just being nasty and negative when I remark about the poor quality of craftsmanship in the "skilled" trades. EDIT: And it's much the same in construction, drywall, house painting, plumbing, welding and fabrication, electrical contracting, HVAC, any kind of mister-fixit operation, etc. Which Is why over the years I've learned to do damb near everything myself. And which is why I'm always overjoyed when I get lucky and find somebody who can do ANYTHING well.

Dream big, work hard to make it real.

I think, therefore I am.

Cake is nice, but I really like pie.

As much as I tend to complain about the countless moroons all over YooToob, I've always been aware that there's also one helluva lotta great content too. Being essentially chained to my computer chair until my ribs heal enough to do physical work again, I've been going down random YT rabbit holes. So far this AM, I've learned a couple time-saving layout techniques for fabbing different jounts in rectangular and round tubing, and I've found a couple of templating tools that I've made my own cobbled up cardboard versions of in the past (for headers and roll cages) but are now available for purchase 3D printed. I've also found some philosophy references I'll be following up on, a few great ethical and political quotes, and insights on physical-world engineering I previously had no knowledge of. I'm trying to consciously focus more on positive aspects of life during this period of recuperation.

"Kapish" is one of several informal spellings derived from the Italian "capisce", used as slang for "do you understand?"

9 kinds of stupid is what I see every day.

Time is nature's way of making sure everything doesn't happen all at once.

Said the spider to the fly, believe in all my pretty lies.

Older ribs seem to crack easier than young ones.

Units built to new oh-so-mo-better resource-management standards don't always perform better in the real world, like my "low flow" terlet that takes 3 flushes to get the job done sometimes, and the HVAC heat pump that never did a decent job of heating in winter, requiring a backup gas-burner.

Right now I wouldn't mind having a few million bucks.

Much mayhem was unleashed by the Spooky / Puff the Magic Dragon AC-47 and AC-130 gunships.

Here Be Dragons.

Fell off my 4 foot high front porch Friday night after tripping on a cat. Cat's OK but I'm pretty bruised and have a couple cracked ribs. Thought I mighta cracked my pelvis again, but probably not. Glad I landed on flowerbed dirt and not concrete. Seem to be healing up pretty well, as I've already been able to cut way back on the pain meds...but yesterday was rough, still having to sleep in a chair. Coulda been a lot worse. EMTs seemed kinda surprised I didn't break anything else, and by my pulse and BP, so I guess there may be something to all that harping I do about exercise, eating "right", etc. Plenty of supplies here as I'd just come back from the grocery store, and I ought to be reasonably functional by Tuesday or Wednesday...but I'll probably take the week off.

4 semi-sight-unseen lots of HO scale model RR stuff, listed as "locomotive motors and frames, some work, some parts". Kinda rolled the dice on these and came up 7s and 11s. The locomotives are all at least 95% complete (only missing things like couplers and brake wheels), run, and a couple are nicely super-detailed and/or weathered. The cars are pretty much NOS/NIB. The "parts" are all complete kits, every single one. Probably the best single score I've made to date on vintage HO stuff.