drilling through rock

[cute fuzzy bunny]

They also recommend against hammer drills

They havent seen my hammer drill. Makes the lights in the house go dim. I think some people also refer to it as a "jack hammer".

Try this:

 

[Martha]

Lovely biffies.

No hammer drill precisely because of the jack hammer action. You are more likely to have the rock shatter. If you were drilling only a small hole, you would be better off with a diamond bit Dremel.

 

[TromboneAl]

I've made a lamp or two from driftwood. A lot easier to work with than rock, but still challenging.

Maybe with a trip to a crafts fair you'll find some things you'd like to make that don't involve drilling into rocks with industrial machinery. (you can send me the money now, Greg).

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

If you were drilling only a small hole

Well now, what would be the point of THAT?!?

 

[Martha]

Al, I am a rock person, not a wood person. I have always enjoyed going down to the lake a picking rocks. The drift wood never did anything for me. Last summer we worked on a little patio area where I filled the cracks between the sandstone with rocks I had picked. I have to find a use for the stones.

Yes, CFB, I see no reason for a small hole in a small rock. I want a hole that I could stick dynamic into.

 

[Nords]

My parents have planned for years on my retiring into the same gated community they are in, with the intended "sideline" of being one of the resident handymen. Keep telling them, sounds too much like w*rk to me.

It's a trap! Run Forrest run!!

You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective! Even if it is painful...

Dang, I knew I should've taken photos of all those submarine heads.

Ah, here's one from the WWII USS PAMPANITO. Not much has changed since then...

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

alright...whats the rope for...?

 

[greg]

Ah, here's one from the WWII USS PAMPANITO. Not much has changed since then...

Nords:

I have a FI/RE hobby suggestion for you: Submariner dioramas

http://www.ehow.com/how_12761_make-diorama.html

 

[LeatherneckPA]

Last summer we worked on a little patio area where I filled the cracks between the sandstone with rocks I had picked. I have to find a use for the stones.

And a fine job you did, too.

Another "trait" I acquired from my parents is recycling other people's castoffs, which is akin to but not the same as dumpster diving. This usually means noticing something while driving around and "offering" to dispose of it for someone. Hence I have 12 beautiful 2 inch thick 2' x 2' flagstones stacked against the deck waiting fo inspiration to strike. Something like your patio is what I had in mind.

 

[rogerc1944]

Now that you are retired and have loads of time, maybe if you just stared at the rock long enough .........

 

[Dreamer]

What a lovely patio!

 

[Nords]

alright...whats the rope for...?

That's not a rope, that's a dipstick!

Just kidding. I hope.

While a lot has changed in the submarine force in the last 60-70 years, when you go on one of the museum ships it's pretty scary to see what hasn't changed.

I have a FI/RE hobby suggestion for you: Submariner dioramas

Greg, if you can figure out how to download 30 MB of files, I can hook you up with the Naval Submarine School's "Virtual Submarine Visit". It was hot stuff in 2001 when we needed to educate junior sailors on how to find their way around their first boat without actually ever going on board. I'm sure NAWC TSD wouldn't mind having this demonstration of their software skills released to the public!

Or download one of APL's fine products: http://www.jhuapl.edu/websub/

 

[spideyrdpd]

Personally I think you should use old bowling balls ....
http://www.heartofstonestudio.com/bench tips.htm#Drilling through stone or glass
Some of the rock lamps look really nice, but errr heavy :

 

[lazyday]

Also, my new goal is to get rid of as much plastic, teflon, and unnatural toxins as possible over the next year. That means we go back to cast iron pots and pans. I'll slowly de-toxify all the cupboards, replacing plastic drinking cups with jelly jar-ware, i.e glass. I'm now on a mission. Rocks and electricity don't mix (except high up on mountains during storms). No more polyester either. Seriously.

I've long avoided putting anything plastic in microwave, or storing anything in plastic. Have a few cabinets of glass jars of various sizes, and lids. (From storebought food.) After have enough of one size, just save the lids occasionally and throw out new jars. Some jars can do double duty for drinking or food storage, but also have ceramic mugs and ordinary glass glasses.

Why no polyester?

(My aversion to plastic kitchenware is because of the taste it can add, since it can absorb odors/flavors and perhaps release them into other foods, it can get microscratches where microbes can hide, and, yes, a probably illogical paranoia about letting anything plastic get hot and a few parts per billion of wierd chemicals leeching into food, or into the air. And it can be bad feng shui/bad for the soul/just not "feel good" if you know what I mean.)


On the economics of crafts: no firsthand knowledge, but I wouldn't be surprised if competition, local and international, often drives down the prices of anything that easily sells, to minimum wage levels or worse. Some crafts are imported from third world countries.

But if it's enough fun making the stuff, then low pay might not matter.

 

[greg]

Nords:

When I was a young sailor aboard a Great Lakes ore freighter, I had a one season hobby of turning out ashtrays, shot glasses, and . . . um . . . small smoking pipes from scrap brass. I had an engineer friend on the same watch, so we'd filtch materials and make little items on the lathes. He made a couple complete sets of chess pieces. I think I still have about five pounds of brass wool hidden somewhere in the basement--and a five pound ashtray somewhere.

So, what do submariners do for fun excitement when not working? What sorts of hobbies, crafts, etc. to keep them busy. They can't be watching HGTV, can they?

 

[greg]

Why no polyester?

(My aversion to plastic kitchenware is because of the taste it can add, since it can absorb odors/flavors and perhaps release them into other foods, it can get microscratches where microbes can hide, and, yes, a probably illogical paranoia about letting anything plastic get hot and a few parts per billion of wierd chemicals leeching into food, or into the air. And it can be bad feng shui/bad for the soul/just not "feel good" if you know what I mean.)


On the economics of crafts: no firsthand knowledge, but I wouldn't be surprised if competition, local and international, often drives down the prices of anything that easily sells, to minimum wage levels or worse. Some crafts are imported from third world countries.

But if it's enough fun making the stuff, then low pay might not matter.

A few years back when 'they' first started genetically splicing fish chromosomes into tomatoes, I started getting creeped out about our food supply. I've just sort of gradually expanded that notion toward many of the other man made materials out there. It didn't strike me until just recently that microwaving in plastic probably puts a fair amount of non-food into the food. (I have a favorite plastic spatula that is only about half the size it used to be; I suspect I ingested most of the missing section .)

So, I'm now thinking the less man made materials involved, the better, at least those things that go inside me or near me. Better that a Texas farmer gets more money for his cotton, than DuPont and company get for their converting natural gas and stuff into imperishable, non-biodegradable whatever.

We will do some sort of shared hobby someday. Personally, I hope it involves some transference of money into my pocket, but that's not the primary motive. While DW was doing her rock path one or two years ago, we discussed casting concrete outdoor tables and then laying glass or ceramic designs in the tops. Then sell them; maybe do custom orders if there was a desire at some point. I also wanted to make cribbage boards from some of those water rounded beach stones. I thought we could shave the top and bottom off flat and put holes in the top. Add some nails pegs and a deck of cards: $50-$100.

 

[Nords]

So, what do submariners do for fun excitement when not working? What sorts of hobbies, crafts, etc. to keep them busy. They can't be watching HGTV, can they?

Well, there we were at periscope depth this one sunny day when we saw a sailboat with an all-girl crew who...

Oh, you mean when we're offwatch. Lemme shift gears here.

Sleeping is a tremendously popular activity in high demand and short supply, especially if the CO2 level is up and O2 is low (but within specs). Eating runs a close second (meals every six hours, ice cream machine chugging all day long). Movies are obsessive and more than one crew has worn out cinematic works of art like Patrick Swayze's "Road House" or the submarine force classic "Highlander". (I mean "obsessive" in the sense that some watch teams can still recite 90 minutes of dialogue to each other from movies that haven't been in circulation since the 1980s.) Then there's Friday Night Pizza, which combines elements of all of the above.

The crew's mess was a good place to review statistical probability with poker or cribbage or backgammon. Chess was popular sometimes, other times not so much. Laptops and video games were starting to show up in the early 90s. One or two guys could play a tolerable guitar. One audiophile used to bring his nature cassettes/CDs onboard, pop them into the messdecks player, and have the forest sounds twittering away when people would walk in for a cup of coffee. A crowd would gather to watch the double-take expressions (hey, best show in town). Others would tape hours of radio or TV while they were ashore and loop it "live" while underway. Budding artists were popular, especially if they could draw caricatures of various supervisors. Pranks were common, the more complicated and long-running the better. The wardroom was usually busy with professional discussions (no, really, good-nuke stuff) or meetings or the XO's business.

One division smuggled oranges & Tang out of the mess decks and fabricated a still behind the locked door of their watchstanding space. ("Gee, I don't know, that doesn't seem possible. What's it smell like to you?") I understand their first batch was just about ready for production ramp-up when the still broke free of its moorings during a large angle and made more of a splash (so to speak) than they'd intended. It turned out to be a wonderful bilge cleaner.

The truth is that most submariners are standing three-section watch (those who aren't port & stbd) and too busy for much personal time. After a six-hour watch you spend another four-six hours on post-watch reconstruction (writing the mission report, drawing the track of what you wish really happened, and gathering all the evidence into a neat package), preparing/executing/critiquing drills, catching up on your admin, and preparing/attending/giving training. Then you realize that you're behind on your next qualification and will be in deep kimchee with the boss if you don't complete at least one signature in the next 12 hours. If life really sucks then you had six hours of midwatch, spent a morning with ship's drills, and spent the afternoon getting caught up before your evening watch. Maybe you even got a nap before you took that watch. If life sucks like a wind tunnel then your ragged gear's broke and you're up all night trying to fix it while supervisors hover over your shoulders offering helpful suggestions.

I spent a 32-month division-officer tour being a good nuke. Even when I was reading in my rack it was a reactor plant manual or a naval warfare publication. (The upside is that I quickly fell asleep.) As a department head, when I finally finished qualification for command after eight years of study, I "celebrated" by kicking back in my rack with the latest Stephen King novel-- the first unofficial publication that I'd ever read on a submarine. An hour later I was back on watch and back at work.

If I'd known how to surf back then I wouldn't have had the discipline to show up for work.

 

[lazyday]

Greg,

I try not to get too caught up in avoiding suspicious chemicals, since natural things are probably more likely to kill me than manmade things. Like milkfat. Or, burned foods, maybe even browned foods.

Glass vs plastic is pretty easy, shunning scary cleaning products is a little harder. At some point there's a tradeoff, making life too difficult for yourself and others. Makes me a little harder to live with, I guess...


Oh, and if you wear a tinfoil hat, make sure it's really tin and not aluminum. RDA for aluminum is zero, I believe. Both are probably effective at blocking mind waves.

 

[spideyrdpd]

So when do we get to eat fishmatoes ?

They keep making a big deal out of the fact that they screwed with our corn. Supposedly they had the "genetic corn" in fields far away from the "regular corn" yet somehow they mixed .....
Kind of scary

 

[greg]

lazyday:

You're right. And I mostly just do the easy stuff also. The basics in food are pretty simple 1) eat natural foods in moderate amounts. 2) Stay away from the easily identifiable toxins. I really don't know how much teflon I've eaten over the years or how much off-gassed plastic has been injected into my food while microwaving things. And I don't hunt down other toxic sources in green magazines so that I have more to worry about. I just do the simple, easy, and obvious things . . . things I can do without my tinfoil hat falling off.

spideyrdpd:

Fishmatoes? I think we already have lots of fishmatoes on the market. I read the story a number of years ago. Basically they spliced a fish gene into the tomato so that the product wouldn't deteriorate as quickly. It was for all those winter tomatoes sent from Florida and California to the great northern race of folks from Minnesota who wanted "fresh" veggies on their Taco Bell food. They make it fresh with fish parts :. I suspect that many of the newer 'hot house' tomatoes now on the market are, in part, a response to some of that genetic alteration.

Also I think/believe that virtually all our major grain crops in this country are now changed in some fashion. All corn, to my knowledge, has been genetically altered so that it is unaffected by Round Up, a toxic chemical: "Hey, this corn lives thru repeated poisoning attempts (and may contain toxic residue), let's feed it to our citizens and cows and pigs and chickens too--without telling them." Fun stuff. And I don't bother to find out/think about the other 99%. I switched to olive oil a few years ago simply because it comes from Europe where genetic alteration is banned until the evidence is in (from us?). Canola grain? Genetically altered.

 

[lazyday]

how much off-gassed plastic has been injected into my food while microwaving things.

If it makes you feel any better, when I last checked, I couldn't find any evidence that there is an issue with microwaving plastic. Just some study done by a kid, which has since been discredited. It's just that heating plastic "feels" very wrong to me. People tell me it shouldn't hurt you at all though.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Somebody also needs to do a study on the use of rusty, chrome flaking instruments, aluminum and other hideously dangerous metals when used with food products...

Or do what I did and go with silicone. Poses no known health hazards. Does not interact with any foods. Produces no fumes, etc.

 

[spideyrdpd]

Wow
There are lots of genetically altered foods. I did a quick google.
When in pharmacy I got to on a trip to eli lilly the drug company. They had a lot of agricultural products as well. At the time I thought it was an interesting mix. Drug companies decided what to feed animals and what to use to treat crops....
Scary
Rob

 

[samclem]

l I switched to olive oil a few years ago simply because it comes from Europe where genetic alteration is banned until the evidence is in (from us?). Canola grain? Genetically altered.

Some bad news. Greg. They use quite a bit more pesticide per acre (hectare) in Europe than in the US. Because of the big agricultural subsidies, the farmers can afford to spray much more of the rather costly insecticides/herbicides/fungicides per acre than would make economic sense in the US. Another unintended consequence of govt protectionism/subsidies. Bon apetite!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Yeah, be careful of non-US food products, particularly in the area of organics. Rules for what is "organic" vary wildly from country to country. Some allow extensive use of pesticides, hormones and antibiotics "when necessary" but still allow the product of those plants/animals to be labeled "organic" or "natural".

I got schooled a bit on organic milk when I discovered that a large percentage of it is produced in countries that allow the 'organic' label for decidedly un-organic procedures. Its then dried and shipped to the US, reconstituted and doctored with all sorts of other goodies. Specifically the stuff sold at costco and sams would not, if produced originally in the US, be able to use the 'organic' label.