10/7/13

We have 220v in the shop… and it works!  Saturday morning I headed to Beenbroke at around 0745 h hoping I wouldn’t keep John waiting too long.  I arrived to find myself alone.  No big whoop.  I was calling him just as he was texting me to say he was running late.  My call was to ask if he’d already passed the new shop and if not could he stop and pick up the big croissant wrench.  He had not and asked why I needed said wrench.  It was to disconnect the argon bottle from the welder, I informed him.  He said he would bring something.  I went inside and fired up the compressor.  As I was moving shit around to make room to move the compressor to the door, I found the big assed Chanel lock pliers.  I called John back to tell him to come on without stopping at the new shop.  I shut off and wrestled the compressor to the door and cleared out the junk underneath it so I could reach the drain cock.  I opened it up and expected a huge surge of air and water.  It just kind of flowed out in a neat little stream.  Eventually the pool of water was gone and it began sputtering and then flowed a steady hiss of air.  I started disconnecting and organizing the welding cart.  John arrived and backed Fifi into the door so we could get started on the load out.  We went in with the welding cart first so it might protect the back window from the welding table… if we were to decide to move it instead of the compressor.  This we did not do.  We loaded the compressor in, after I drained the oil, and then put in the little roll around table to use as a temporary welding site.  We shoved in a few odds and ends then closed up to leave.  John said he needed to stop at the Mazda dealer to pick up his tags and I said I needed to stop at Lowe’s for another wall plug.  We decided that would be the plan.  As we were pulling out of the facility, the welding cart fell over.  I stopped to look at it and was just about ready to drop the tailgate, hit the gas, and keep going when all the shit fell out of the back.  I got back in instead and rolled to Lowe’s.  I was pissed enough that I was thinking how I would walk away from all the shit if anything were broken.  Fortunately everything looked ok.  I went in and bought the socket thingy I needed, as well as a Slim Jim and diet Mountain Dew, the headed towards the new shop.  I was wondering if, when, and where I'd meet up with John again when I saw him entering the freeway right in front of me.  I laughed.  We got to the new shop and pulled straight in as the gate was open.  I parked and opened up the shop while John began futzing with his license plates and sticker.  We moved the Mini over and then I backed Fifi into the building… not in the door, into the building.  John doesn’t believe me but the passenger mirror was really screwed up and I couldn’t see anything… and that is the story I am sticking to, ‘cuz it are the truth!  We unloaded the compressor and “walked” it to the back corner of the shop.  We unloaded everything else and sort of, like, stuck it all places… sort of thing.  We decided it was time to poop or get out of the Ganges and had a look at the wiring.  We mounted the new box and the plug for the welder to the wall and were about to start wiring of said plug when my brother pulled up.  I could feel his eyes on my back and turned around to say, “You really want us to use that conduit, don’t you?”  He said, “It would make it less of a code violation.”  I sighed and we got to work “doing it right.”  John fed the cable through the conduit while I put a conduit grommet thingy on the plug.  We then wired up said plug and strung the conduit to the new box.  We grommetted the conduit to the box and wired in the breaker.  At some point while I was hooking up wires and stuff, John hung the plug for the compressor.  We ran the conduit from the box to the plug this time and wired it all up.  Then it came time to hook into the old box.  We shut off the power and I checked everything with the anti-getting-killed-o-meter.  Everything was cold… and yet I was still a pussy and couldn’t stick a screwdriver in the box.  John finally hooked up the first wire.  When I saw him not die, I took over again and finished up.  We stood back to grok our work and I think it looks pretty good.  We fired up the main breaker… nothing ‘sploded.  We fired up the other breakers in the old box… nothing ‘sploded.  I took a few readings with the anti-getting-killed-o-meter and then we fired up one of my new breakers… nothing ‘sploded.  I tested the voltage there and saw 240 volts.  We shut off that breaker and fired up the other… it ‘sploded and we all died, the end.  No, nothing ‘sploded that time either.  I tested the voltage on that plug and was happy to see 240v there as well.  We turned everything off again and put the covers on both boxes and plugs then declared the job done.  Then Bruce, my brother, went out to his truck and brought in the parts he wanted welded together.  We hooked up the welder and I set up the temporary welding table… yeah, that ain’t going to work for me.  I need my welding table from Beenbroke.  I zooked his parts together and he was happy with them.  I was happy that the welder worked.  John was happy that I was not so down on his building now that we have power.  When Bruce left, I zooked the oil pressure thingy back together.  We decided that if we refilled the compressor with oil we could test my weld.  I found some Mobil1 and we poured it into the compressor then fired it up.  John discovered a leak so we switched the breakers and I tried to re-zook the thing to seal the pin hole.  It worked but John found another hole right next to the old one.  Since it was approaching 1300 h, we decided to call it a day and go to Mexican Inn for lunch… but that is a story for tomorrow.