15Dec 2022

Electrician’s Tool Pouch

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Occidental Leather Electrician’s Tool Case
15Dec 2022

Perfect Mechanic’s Tool Kit

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Perfect Mechanic’s Tool Box

There’s a story behind this tool box. When I spent time on my grandfather’s farm he let me run wild. This usually ended with me breaking something. He had a lot of patience; it amazes me. What I remember most was his ability to grab his go-to tool box and fix anything I broke. It was perfect…magical.

I inherited that tool box and, although it’s not quite perfect for me, it served him well and I cherish it. It inspired me to make my own “perfect” tool box. Below is the list of tools, including the box itself, that I came up with:

23Jul 2019

Cabin Cabinets (2-Door Base)

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2-Door Base Cabinet

Construction on one of the 2-door base cabinets is complete. It took me a little longer than I would have liked because of so many other projects interrupting me. I still need to build another 2-door base and a 1-door base to complete all the cabinets for the cabin.

I’m about halfway through construction of the second 2-door base cabinet. I’m happy with the results of this first one and I believe the rest will be fine as well. I’ve learned a few things along the way that I will implement into my workshop cabinets. Nothing major, just small design and construction things that come with experience.

Finishing these cabinets will, of course, trigger other projects for the cabin but that’s the whole point. It really, really, needs to be completed and I’m building up momentum. Don’t want to lose it now.

29Jun 2017

Just Finished Reading “The Vanishing American Adult”

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Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-Of-Age Crisis—And How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance recently came out and I just finished reading it yesterday. Because my reading list isn’t huge (50+ books a year), I try to pick good, impactful books to read. This isn’t always easy so I’m constantly looking for sources to help me populate my reading list.

That’s one reason I wanted to read this book but it unexpectedly delivered more than a source for great literature. He went into the mechanics and techniques of making great readers. Whereas I did have some moments of pause and reflection (I’ll need to read other books to weigh his points), reading this book didn’t cause me to outright disagree at any point; that’s very rare for me.

Something I found very reassuring was that I’d read so many of the books he refers to or suggests. The shear number of books he referred to impressed me so much that I collected them in a rough bibliography. Here it is:

Bibliography for The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

  • Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz (retired Yale professor)
  • Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith (a Notre Dame sociologist)
  • The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama
  • The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman
  • The Affluent Society by C. Wright Mills
  • Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman
  • The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
  • Outside Lies Magic by John R. Stilgoe
  • Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch
  • The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (philosopher and classicist)
  • Agamemnon by Aeschylus
  • Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
  • On Old Age by Marcus Tullius Cicero
  • Shop Class for Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
  • Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
  • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  • John Dewey (Sasse disagrees with atheist Dewey and mentions these books, in particular, as to why he disagrees with him):
    • Democracy in Education
    • Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal
    • The Primary Education Fetich [sic]
    • The School and Society
    • My Pedagogic Creed
    • The Humanist Manifesto
  • Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto
  • Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
  • The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
  • Escape from Camp Fourteen by Blaine Harden
  • Children of Dictators by Jay Nordlinger
  • White Collar by C. Wright Mills
  • Common Sense by Thomas Paine
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
  • Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman
  • Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt
  • Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
  • Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
  • Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
  • Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
  • Moneyball by Michael Lewis
  • Religion
    • Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
    • Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
    • Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen (Sasse disagrees with this book but it’s a great book to read)
    • Book of Genesis in The Bible
    • Book of Matthew in The Bible (especially Sermon on the Mount)
    • Commentary on Galatians by Martin Luther
    • The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
  • Greek Roots
    • Ethics by Aristotle (starter book)
    • Crito by Plato (starter book)
    • Odyssey by Homer
    • History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
    • Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
  • Homesick Souls (or, Fundamental Anthropology)
    • Confessions by Augustine
    • Why God Became Man by Anselm of Canterbury
    • Bondage of Will by Martin Luther
    • Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
    • Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
    • Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Sasse has a long struggle with this book; he ultimately sees Rousseau as wrong)
  • Shakespeare
    • Romeo and Juliet
    • Hamlet
    • King Lear
    • Julius Caesar
    • Macbeth
    • Sonnets
  • The American Idea
    • Declaration of Independence
    • U. S. Constitution
    • The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
    • Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
    • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an America Slave by Frederick Douglass
  • Markets
    • Politics by Aristotle
    • Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
    • The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 by Charles Sellers
    • Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
    • Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
  • Tyrants
    • Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (laid the intellectual foundation for communism and, hence, the murder of more than 100 million people)
    • Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (the best analysis of the rise of scientific racism and anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe, which led directly to the Holocaust)
    • The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek (explains the close relationship between fascism and communism)
    • Animal Farm by George Orwell
    • 1984 by George Orwell
    • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • The Nature of Things (or, a Humanistic Perspective on Science)
    • On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
    • Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
    • Elements of Geometry by Euclid
  • American Fiction
    • Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
    • Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
    • O, Pioneers by Willa Cather (a Cornhusker substitute for Death Comes for the Archbishop)
    • Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
    • Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (about his alienation as a black and gay man growing up in Harlem with an abusive Baptist minister as his stepfather. This is a disturbing book in many aspects. It illustrates the ways in which religious life can turn hypocritical and repressive.)
    • Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

This a great list to dig through and start reading which, in itself, is an exciting prospect.

07Feb 2017

Ammo Can Storage Rack

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Ammo Can Storage Rack

I’ve needed a way to store ammo cans. They pile up, they don’t stack very neatly. You’d think the military design would accommodate stacking and storage a little better. Furthermore, it’d be reasonable to expect there would be a rack on the market to hold them. Nope, and nope.

So, I had to design my own (here are the drawings and Sketchup 3D model). I don’t think wood will be strong and compact so I need to go with metal. I’m not a welder so I’m going to have to have the rack fabricated. I’ve got a good welder so that’s not such a big deal. Hopefully he can make sense of my design and this project goes well.

Once my welder does his part I’m going to use UHMW tape to make durable, slick sliding rails for the cans. Also, I’ll mount the rack into the Man Cave on finished wood rails to distribute the weight and I’ll trim it out with finished wood (especially on top) that will match my Man Cave Shelving. Above that, eventually, I’ll take shelving up the wall to the ceiling.

The rack holds (20) 50-cal cans so there’ll be quite a bit of storage in them. I’m confident it’ll look pretty cool and fit into the Man Cave well.

24Oct 2015

The Traitor Within from “Wild at Heart”

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While reading—and deeply enjoying—the book Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men: An Utterly Invigorating Guide to Being Your Most Masculine Self by Stephen Mansfield, the author mentioned another book: Wild at Heart (Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul) by John Eldredge. I bought Wild at Heart and, after skimming through it, began to read it as well. It’s rare for me to be reading two books I enjoy so much at the same time. They compliment each other well and have a message that I think has been missing in the Church: men are supposed to be manly. What, to me, makes the message work is that it’s in the context of scripture. This book will be one I go back to reference often. Below is a short clipping from the book:

To put it bluntly, your flesh is a weasel, a poser, and a selfish pig. And your flesh is not you. Did you know that? Your flesh is not the real you. When Paul gives us his famous passage on what it’s like to struggle with sin (Rom. 7), he tells a story we are all too familiar with:

I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. (The Message)

Okay, we’ve all been there many times. But what Paul concludes is just astounding: “I am not really the one doing it; the sin within me is doing it” (Rom. 7:20 NLT). Did you notice the distinction he makes? Paul says, “Hey, I know I struggle with sin. But I also know that my sin is not me—this is not my true heart.” You are not your sin; sin is no longer the truest thing about the man who has come into union with Jesus. Your heart is good. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you . . .” (Ezek. 36:26). The Big Lie in the church today is that you are nothing more than “a sinner saved by grace.” You are a lot more than that. You are a new creation in Christ. The New Testament calls you a saint, a holy one, a son of God. In the core of your being you are a good man. Yes, there is a war within us, but it is a civil war. The battle is not between us and God; no, there is a traitor within who wars against our true heart fighting alongside the Spirit of God in us:

A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death . . . Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells . . . if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus . . . When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. (Rom. 8:2–3, 9–11 The Message)

The real you is on the side of God against the false self. Knowing this makes all the difference in the world. The man who wants to live valiantly will lose heart quickly if he believes that his heart is nothing but sin. Why fight? The battle feels lost before it even begins. No, your flesh is your false self—the poser, manifest in cowardice and self-preservation—and the only way to deal with it is to crucify it. Now follow me very closely here: We are never, ever told to crucify our heart. We are never told to kill the true man within us, never told to get rid of those deep desires for battle and adventure and beauty. We are told to shoot the traitor. How? Choose against him every time you see him raise his ugly head. Walk right into those situations you normally run from. Speak right to the issues you normally remain silent over. If you want to grow in true masculine strength, then you must stop sabotaging yours.

Buy the book. Read it. You won’t regret it.

27Jun 2014

Learning by Doing

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I’m not entirely sure of the source for my compulsion to “do something productive, don’t just sit around” personality. It’s probably my father; he is always “doing something.” If I don’t have work at the office or a project at home to do over the weekend I don’t know what to do with myself. It causes me to get into a fidgety, anxious, moody state. I’m not claiming this is healthy—very likely it’s not.

I like to be with my family…working. It’s traditional. The real value of working with my family is that it allows them, and me, to learn together.  In the past, as in early American History, fathers and mothers did things—worked—and the children learned skills from them.

Children are more likely to be mollycoddled than taught nowadays. Few people develop real mechanical skills and even fewer know how to design a project from concept to completion. Most people think they can contract these skills but the pool of truly qualified individuals to do that work is diminishing quickly. Besides, if we don’t have any understanding of the job being performed, how can you know it’s being done correctly or even merely adequately?

We don’t do all the work around the house but we do major projects—the real important ones—together. We’ve done quite a few projects as the kids have grown, here are a few of the more recent:

Underground Gas Lines for Generator & Patio Kitchen
Back-Up Generator Pad
Underground electrical conduits to generator.
Installing Generator on its pad.
Generator in place.
Raised Garden Boxes
Greenhouse

12Apr 2014

The Crowd Renders the Individual Wholly Unrepentant

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A crowd — not this or that, one now living or long dead, a crowd of the lowly or of nobles, of rich or poor, etc., but in its very concept — is untruth, since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision.

— Søren Kierkegaard, The Crowd is Untruth

08Apr 2014

Step No. 1 to Learning

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LXXII

If a man would pursue Philosophy [learning], his first task is to throw away conceit. For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn what he has a conceit [preconception] that he already knows.

— Epictetus, Harvard Classics, Vol. 2, Part 2 – The Golden Sayings of Epictetus

07Apr 2014

The Crowd is Untruth

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In groups of people (committees) there tends to be an inclination, for the sake of consensus, to demand compromise from all the participants rather than evaluating (debating) whether certain points of view are wrong and should be changed and whether they are right and to remain unchanged. This is why Kierkegaard makes the claim “the crowd is untruth“; the introduction of a single untruth will corrupt the truth and, therefore, make the consensus untruth. Here’s Kierkegaard on the subject:

There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side. There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that ‘the crowd’ received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.

For ‘the crowd’ is untruth. Eternally, godly, christianly what Paul says is valid: “only one receives the prize,” [I Cor. 9:24]

— Søren Kierkegaard. The Crowd is Untruth

Here’s the whole scripture to which he referred:

24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.

— Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 9:24 (NIV1984)

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