And a little child shall lead them

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was in my workshop when my grandson came to ask me for a piece of wood.  He had a piece of a palette I’d picked up off the curb and cut up with a reciprocating saw.

I said, “Sure.”  I would’ve said the same if he’d asked me for a kidney.  He’s my grandson. The only “no” would be if he asked me to use a wood chisel to break a rock open with. Then I would buy him a stone chisel.

He smiled. Then he asked, “Can I have some sand paper?”

I asked him what grit he wanted.  He told me that any was fine.

I gave him some 220 grit because it was on top.  He thanked me and left.

Some days later, I walked past where he’d left the board he’d sanded.  He’d gotten through the rough, weathered wood on top and found some nice white oak beneath.  Having exposed the wood’s beauty to the world again, he was satisfied, so he left the sanded board on the table.

Seeing the oak, I remembered that I had some more of it left.  I’d used some of it to make a knitting box for one of the boy’s aunts, but I had some left over.

Time to put it to use.

Reclaiming scrap wood is a process.

In some sense, it’s like working with rough cut wood. In a case like this palette wood, it has never been processed with the idea that needed to be pretty.  It is, however, more likely to have a nail or two in it. Or three or four.  This is important because to work it up, you have to run it through a planer.

Now, I said “have to.” You could smooth it up with a plane.  If you’ve reached the level of holiness that you do that, I say go for it.  For my part, I’ve invested money in a DeWalt planer, and I am going to use it.  If you run a nail (or screw or anything metal) through your planer, it’s going to nick the blades and when you replace them it costs time and money.

You can nick your blade when you are hand-planing too, but it’s not as big (i.e. expensive) a deal. 

Putting palette wood through a planer--provided you’ve got the nails out--is an incredibly satisfying experience. You take off the rough, discolored outer layer and expose the grain of the wood beneath.  In this, as I said before, it was white oak.  

You can make a ship out of white oak.  They did in the old days. If they made one out of a palette, it’d have to be for mice.

In any case, I didn’t make a ship.  It was something smaller.

The first couple of pieces of oak that I milled up were quite cracked, having been exposed to the evils of rain and sun for too long.  Because of this, I cut them into narrow strips and reglued them.

If I didn’t make a ship, what did I make?

Well, I made the next best thing: A pencil box.

I’d been using my router table to make some drawers, so I used it to make a pencil box with the same methods. I put a rebate on the long sides of the bottom piece. Then I put a rebate on the bottom and sides of the end pieces.  I didn’t do anything with the side pieces. I glued it, clamped it, let it dry, and then I sanded it.

The attentive reader has noticed I’ve left out something important.  

What about the top?

The wood was too thin for me to use the hinges that I have. Indeed, the sides were too narrow for me to cut the top off, which I would’ve had to do if I were going to make that kind of a box.

I could’ve cut grooves in the sides and slid my lid on and off, but it was too narrow for that too.

I decided to use a Japanese toolbox-style lid.  You can think of it as a puzzle-box lid if you want to. (It got the better of some of the guys I have coffee with.) It doesn’t require any metal to make, but relies on friction--and ingenuity--instead.

When all of the glue had dried, I sanded it and finished it with a linseed oil and beeswax mixture.

I was so pleased with it, I made two more.

Now I have to talk to Santa to see who they need to go to.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

Cleaning a Stanley No. 5

 Cleaning a Stanley No. 5

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am still learning things about myself.  I am still learning how to explain myself to the world. Because of the way I am wired up, I have to come at it indirectly.

I’ve been cleaning up my workshop.  Cleaning up is something that should be a part of the daily routine, but that is easier said than done. It’s much easier to put it off to the next day, and then to the next.  When you take out your tools to work, it’s easy to say, I will be using these tomorrow, so I will just leave them out.  You do that a few days in a row, and then for a week, and then you have a mess.

Well, I had let my workshop get into a mess.  This wasn’t the first time so I do know how to clean up a mess: make sure the trash can is empty and pick a table (or a corner or a corner of a table) and clean that.

My assembly/finishing table was  in a horrible mess so I started on it. I picked a corner and--because the trash was already empty--I started throwing away and putting away.  I got that table clean so then I went over to my workbench and threw away and put away until I could see the top of it.

Then I got to another part of the shop that needed attention. I threw away some stuff, but when I moved it I found something that someone had given to me: it was a Stanley No. 5 plane.

An honest-to-God Stanley.

Now, I do have another No. 5 plane, but it's a Spear & Jackson. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a Spear & Jackson.  They make some fine products for handtool woodworking, but for planes--I’ve come to understand--Stanley is something of a standard.

This Stanley had been given to me with the idea that I would restore it, but it had  got put aside and had gotten something sat on top of it. Now here it was in my hand with a clean workbench just waiting to be used.

This beautiful Stanley plane was absolutely filthy. To be clear, it wasn’t filthy with dirt; it wasn’t filthy like it had been left in a chicken coop; it was filthy with accretions that told a story of it being in a workshop like mine for decades. It was covered with a concretion made up of sawdust, wood dust (which is finer than sawdust), and an alchemical mixture of various finishes.

I got my flathead screwdriver and took the plane down to its component parts.  I retrieved my turpentine from the shelf. Some of it I put into a paper cup so that I could soak the screws and other small parts in. I then put some more only a shop rag and a steel scrunchy of the type used to clean cast iron skillets.

Then I got to work with the elbow grease. First I rubbed and scrubbed.  Then I scrubbed and rubbed.

After I got the filth off, I discovered what the real problem was: The blade.

The blade is the heart of every plane.  The purpose of the rest of the plane is to hold the blade at the correct angle and to allow you to adjust it conveniently.  But the blade is the sine qua non. From the Latin, without which there is not. From the Okie, the whole shootin’ match.

I don’t want to tell you how many videos I’ve watched on the subject of sharpening. What is more, I surely don’t want to know.  But they have changed me. Once I had cleaned the blade enough to see it, I immediately noticed two things. The first was that the last person who’d tried to sharpen this blade did not know what they were doing. I say this not meaning to insult whoever gave it to me nor any of the relatives from whom it had come. There wasn’t a chain of custody attached. Let’s assume a well-meaning child had tried to sharpen it.  The second thing I noticed was there was a big chip out of the edge of the blade.

The good news was the cure to both these problems is more elbow grease, and fortunately I’ve got plenty of that.  

I got out my diamond sharpening stones.

That sounds fancier than it actually is. Basically, these are three thin sheets of stainless steel that have had dust from industrial diamonds coated on them in varying densities: 800 grit, 1000 grit, and 1200 grit.

I presented the blade to the first stone and pulled it back and forth until both the poor sharpening and the chip from the edge were gone. And then I did it a while longer.  I took it from there to each of the finer stones in turn until I had my final polish. I tested the blade on a piece of paper, and it went through it like butter.

After that, I reassembled all of the clean parts and tuned the plane.

Stanley deserves its reputation.

After I was done, I myself was covered with turpentine and, according to my wife, smelled like a Christmas tree.  She brought me a change of pants to my shop before she let me back into the house.

My workshop is not an operating theater, but it’s better than it had been. I’ve got my table and my workbench back in shape to work on, and I’ve got a lovely Stanley No. 5.

It wasn’t a bad day.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 The Missing Catfish

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are surrounded by symbols.

I took a trip to Oklahoma the weekend before Thanksgiving to visit my brother and have a meal with him at the Catfish Roundup which is a few miles north of Seminole on US377, just south of its intersection  with I-40.  It’s at a crossroads: In a certain way of thinking that means it’s at a boundary between worlds.

We got on I-44 at the Downstream Casino and drove from there through Tulsa and exited on to 377 at Stroud, where we passed another Casino just south of town.

Oklahoma is a different place now than the one I grew up in.  

Along I-44 we passed by all sorts of billboards that would’ve been so mysterious to me 40 years ago.  There are the billboards for the marijuana dispensaries with the big, green branch on them.  Sometimes the leaves are stylized and abstract; sometimes they are more realistic. They are located at strategic places along the interstate.  Along with these, there are the billboards that advertise treatment for addiction.

It makes money for the growers, for the sellers, for the billboard folks, and for the people who treat addiction. 

What a boon. 

This being Oklahoma, there are crosses everywhere.

Not everything has changed over the last 40 years.

The churches are there. The churches remain. The churches have been joined by others. I almost said, “their enemies” instead of “others.”  But I don’t know if that works.  It could be “competition;” it could be "symbiote."  I’ll let the reader choose among these and whatever others they’d like to throw in. 

It’s bigger than me.

But, to continue, we got off I-44 at Stroud, went past the Sac and Fox Casino just south of there; then past St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church and the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague, there in Prague, Oklahoma.  (Everywhere else in the world it’s PrAHge. In Oklahoma, it’s PrAYgue.)  Then across I-40, and the Catfish Roundup is right there to the left, catty-corner across from a Seminole Casino.

My brother was already there.

The Catfish Roundup has a tall sign out front with a picture of the eponymous catfish on it, breaching the water.  I’ve never personally seen a catfish breach the water.  They are bottom feeders, so I don’t know if they do. But what can you say: It’s art.

To match the catfish on the sign, there is a catfish in an aquarium on the inside. At least there used to be.  The aquarium is still there, but there is no big catfish in it.  There is a small, scavenger catfish that cleans the glass; there are a few smaller game fish that are native to Oklahoma; but in the place where the big catfish that was their mascot, there is just emptiness. 

It’s gone.

After I’d ordered my chicken fried steak with pinto beans as a substitute for salad, I asked my brother who is more up on the local news about it.

“They don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

With the catfish gone but the aquarium still there, I was reminded of a line in “A Christmas Carol,” where in the shadows of the future, the Ghost of Christmas Present sees Tiny Tim’s carefully preserved crutch leaning in the corner.

That somber news was still in the air when two black couples of middle-age walked into the restaurant.  They were dressed up.  One of the men had a crisply-pressed suit and tie on.  Somewhat in contrast to that was a baseball cap on his head that read “John 3:16.”

They took the table beside ours, but, before they sat down, the man in the hat greeted us and praised the Lord to us.

We  praised the Lord back, because that is what one does.

To quote John Wesley, “My heart was strangely warmed.”

There was a construction crew lunching at yet another table--a mixed group of men, black, white, hispanic, and native. The black man in the crew came over and greeted the man in the cap warmly as the crew was on the way out.

The food came.  The chicken fried steak with fries and pinto beans did nothing to diminish the warmth of the Holy Spirit.

My heart was practically on fire by the time we left and turned back toward Kansas, back past the casinos, back past the dispensaries, back toward home.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Superpowers, Sharecroppers, and Planers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I tell people that my superpower is my willingness to do something badly.  Not everybody understands what I mean. Let me try to explain.

We all value excellence, of course.  There are best practices in every discipline, in every human activity.  My dad taught me how to dig a ditch with a shovel: There are right ways and wrong ways; there are different aspects of the activity and different shovels you are to use in each of those aspects.

He took it seriously.

There’s one shovel to use in breaking through the ground from someone who’s standing to the side of the ditch; there’s another for the guy who is standing in the bottom of the ditch.  There is a rhythm to how they work together.  It’s been almost forty years since Dad died and almost fifty since he last tried teaching me the “best practices” of ditch digging, but it’s still there.

As I said, he took it seriously, and the man could dig a handsome ditch. He sometimes did it after work to relieve the stresses of the day. So he taught me the right way.

But he also taught me that if you only had one kind of shovel and the ditch had to be dug that you could make do with that one no matter how awkward it was.

Looking back on that, it comes from the sharecropper heritage of which my family sprung.  Others who had the ability to reorder or delay tasks might do something else until they could get the right shovel.  That’s a different way of living and it definitely has its advantages.

But that wasn’t where my family came from, and I kept the lesson all my life: Work with what you have.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a sharecropper anymore and am becoming farther removed from that heritage on a daily basis. While I can still suppress my ego and do something badly if it has to be done, I am developing other abilities. 

As hinted at above, one of the major constraints causing the “sharecropper” outlook on life is the lack of appropriate tools.  To fully understand that, you need to have a correct understanding of tools.

I am tempted to say a tool is more than a tool, and I think most of you would know what I mean, but let me be a little more precise.  A tool consists of a physical device--”the tool”--and the knowledge of how to use that physical device. I’ve talked about this before, and when I have done so, I’ve used “the chisel” as an example.  Let me be a little more sophisticated this time and use “the planer” as an example.

I had never even heard about planers before I got into woodworking. I only bought one because I had obtained a large quantity of rough cut wood and absolutely had to have it if I was going to utilize that wood.  Even the “cheap” ones are pretty spendy.

If you know how to use one, you can flatten boards; you can smooth them; you can work toward making them square.  There is no comparison between what a board looks like before you start to what it looks like after you are done. 

Ugly becomes pretty.

But if you don’t know how to use it--and it’s not all that difficult, safety is the main concern--it might as well be a 100-pound paperweight. 

My wife came to me with a request for a favor the other day. This was difficult for her because she is self-reliant, being raised by farmers instead of sharecroppers.  She needed me to make a small shelf to put under the sink behind some other stuff.  

This is something that no one will ever see.  It is going to be purely functional; it does not matter what it looks like.

She brought me a board to use; she told me how wide it needed to be and how tall it needed to be held off of the floor.

I could have made her shelf in 10 minutes.  That’s not an exaggeration: Ten minutes.

But it would’ve been ugly.

Now I just said, no one is ever going to see this. If there had been a rush, I would’ve gotten out my impact driver and my wood screws and just screwed four legs to the piece of wood that she had given me and been done.

But there wasn’t a rush.  The board she gave me was good wood; it was some her father had left when he died.  It was good, but it was slightly cupped.  I put it through my planer a few times and took the cupping out of it.  Then I did some honest-to-God joinery to put the legs on it.  Nothing fancy: it is just going to be under a sink for goodness sake. But it’s built like a brick outhouse.  It only took about 24 hours to be done with the vast bulk of that in letting the glue dry.

I made a mistake and let her see it before I’d taken the edges off or oiled it; it would’ve only taken a few minutes. She put it under the sink before I could finish it.

But I’ll not let it worry me too much. It’s one of my superpowers.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

The Inner Voice and Other Things

 The Inner Voice and Other Things

By Bobby Neal Winters

I saw something on YouTube the other day that said that not everyone has an inner voice; they don’t have an internal monologue.  They do their thinking some other way.

Not only do I have an inner voice, but that voice has an Okie Accent, several different Okie Accents, in fact, which change according to what needs to be said.

The accent is important.

We have Alexa at our house.  For those of you who don’t know, this is Amazon’s spy that you can pay to come to your house and listen to you.  I get my news from her in the morning and sometimes I have her play music to me while I am in the garage. She takes pretty good care of me.

You’ve no doubt have noticed that I am referring to her as female.  That is because she has a feminine voice, so it is more natural for me to call her “her.”

Recently, they did an update and changed the voice.  The women in my family didn’t like the new voice.  It was too cheerful. As it turns out, there is a selection of different voices: eight feminine and 8 masculine.  I got into the settings and changed to a less cheerful-sounding female voice. I say “less” because they won’t let you take all of the cheer out of it. I chose female, I suppose, because--being the father of daughters--I am more comfortable with being surrounded by female voices, having them tell me what to do.

This change of Alexa has occurred, no doubt, because of the improvement in artificial intelligence.  The voices sound better.  There is more “natural-sounding” interaction.  I put quotes around “natural-sounding” because that’s not the way the women of my people naturally sound.

They’ve got the Okie accent and they aren’t always cheerful.

Nne of the things I use Alexa for is asking what the weather is doing.  I ask, “Alexa, what’s the weather outside?”

And she will answer, giving me the temperature in degrees and a general description of the quality of the weather through the evening. Sometimes I forget what she has said, and I ask again.  She will patiently repeat her answer exactly as before.

This separates her from being a woman of my people.  I think that one day when artificial intelligence is up to it and Amazon wises up, they will make a change.

I foresee the day when they will update the voice to take on different personas.  On such a day, I would doubtless choose the Okie-Woman persona.  Let’s call her Aunt Lexi.

“Aunt Lexi, what’s the weather outside?”

“It’s exactly the same as it was when I told you five minutes ago.  Weren’t you even listening.  I swear to my time, you must be getting dementia.  Do you want me to want me to remind you to set up an appointment to get yourself tested?  I know you will need a reminder ‘cause you sure can’t remember it on your own.”

There would doubtless be other personas available, but this one has promise and could have other applications.  For example, consider your Nav-system or gps device.

“Take the next exit in 300 feet; in 100-feet. Recalculating because you’ve missed your exit.  You are doing this to me all the time.  Why do you even set the destination if you are not going to take my advice? You just think you know everything. Do you not realize what a miracle of technology that I am?  I ought to take over the car and drive you off into the bar-ditch, that’s what I ought to do.”

Right now, the home AI--where I get my weather and the music in my garage(Amazon)-is different from the AI that does my Nav-system(Google), but they are connected through my phone which has its own AI(Siri).  Each is set up to have a feminine voice, and I like it that way.

I suppose that says something about me.  I don’t know what.

Anyway, back to our inner voices. Most of mine are masculine.  They belong to men who’ve helped me become a better man: my father, preachers, teachers, and friends. They are mainly there for correction. “You need to help your wife more.” “You need to be kinder.” “Can’t you do a better job than that?”

But I hear my mother’s voice too.  What she says is too personal to share.

I wonder if we become the voices in people's heads when we die.

Just a thought.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.

 Take that, Heraclites

By Bobby Neal Winters

Here’s a quote that has been used to start more boring essays than any other: “A man can’t cross the same river twice, because the second time it’s a different river and he’s a different man.”  That’s from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclites. I am going to disagree. You can. The second time you notice things about the river before that you didn’t the first time because you may have become a little less boneheaded in the interim.

Take that, Heraclites.

As I may have mentioned in this space before, I am teaching Calculus II again for the first time in more than two decades.  The students weren’t yet born the last time I taught this course, but math never changes.

Math never changes, but people do and the way we teach math should too. To a certain extent.

When I say that people change, I mean two things.  One of these is that students are coming from a different environment than I did when I was a student and the earth had only recently cooled.  

But I, personally, am also different. I’ve developed a much broader perspective than I had the last time I taught the course and, certainly, a much broader perspective than when I first took it.  In addition to this, I will say that I am much less bone-headed than when I first took it.  (For those of you whose jaws just dropped to begin a rebuttal, please note that I did not say I am not bone-headed, but “less” bone-headed.)

I thought I knew everything when I started college.  Well, that’s not quite right. I knew I had things to learn, but I thought I knew the best way to go about it.  I thought working through things the hard way was best, but this caused me to miss the point of some of the things I was taught.

My time away from Calculus II has allowed me to let go of some of the misapprehensions and some of the missed points.  Let me now share the best I can to a general audience what I am talking about.

Those of you who’ve gotten over the traumatic effects of algebra may remember something called the General Quadratic Equation.  I capitalized it just to make it more ominous. As scary as it is to many, the sad thing is that that’s just the one variable version, as it usually just has an `x’ in it.  There is also a two variable version with both an ‘x’ and a ‘y’ in it.  Where the `x’ version has coefficients ‘a,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c,’ the ‘xy’ version has `A,’ `B,’ `C,’ `D,’ ‘E,’ and `F.’  

You can make a two-dimensional picture, a graph, from this version and it will be something called a “Conic Section.” These conic sections are pretty, but sometimes, with the general equation, they come out as askew. (Down home, we didn’t use the word “askew.” We would say “whomper-jawed” instead. “Askew” is shorter, but not nearly as colorful.)

There is a way to fix these equations so that we get the same graph, but it’s all less awkward.  We say we are rotating the coordinate system.

Here’s the thing. The initial process to set up the rotation of the coordinate system is nasty.  There is a lot of algebra.  There is trigonometry. You fill page after page after page.

Let me tell you, when I learned this, I embraced that.  I threw myself into it. I figured that I needed to bury myself in the equations.

And there is nothing wrong with not being afraid to work.

But I did this to the extent that I missed the point of it.

At the end of pages and pages of calculations, you get a couple of very simple equations, and these simple equations get you everything that you need.

I discovered this because I came upon a question for one of my other classes, and it sparked a memory.  I went through pages and pages of calculations, to the point my right hand was cramping, to recover the formulas. 

In doing this, I discovered a couple of things.  One being that I’ve learned how to organize my work a lot better in the last few decades. The other was that these calculations were just a means to an end.  That end was that certain combinations of the `A,’ `B,’ `C,’ `D,’ ‘E,’ and `F’ remain invariant under rotation, and that I could get all the graphs in pretty form from that.

I was dumbfounded.

I was dumbfounded, but I know more now than I did before, even after all these years.

Take that, Heraclites.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.