AAAAAHH it’s 1:12 AM and I’m wide awake and bored. I had better not wind up going to IHOP from 3AM-5AM like I did Sunday morning because I couldn’t sleep. I think the waiter guy was on speed, he kept coming by the table every 3 minutes asking if everything was ok. For fucks’s sake, let me enjoy my big breakfast platter in peace!
I’m in a flighty mood again where I don’t want to come home. Fortunately, I have a trip to Seattle coming up in two weeks.
Somehow either I talked myself into, or I was talked into, building a roof rack for Alex’s Land Rover. New, they run for $1300; I figure we can build one for less than $300. The part I’m sort of working on now is fabricating rain gutter mounts. It’s an interesting project in that the Rover is 2,500 miles away from me so I can’t like make something using trial and error, and I don’t have a proper workshop with metal working tools (chop saw, oxy-aceteylene torch, plasma-arc cutter, drill press, MIG welder, sheet metal brake, pipe bender). The goal is to fabricate what I can in Austin, then take it with me to Seattle and build the rest of it up there — and hope it all fits sight unseen. I’m pretty confident I can get creative and improvise what I need. I have a decent amount of tools I can use now to build the mounts; hammers, large pliers, propane torch, jigsaw with a bunch of metal cutting blades, drills, angle grinder. What I really need at this point is a vise that’s mounted on a reciever hitch bar, since my apartment has no workbench. They don’t exactly sell them at Harbor Freight or Sears, usually some rancher builds his own. If I had access to the cutting and welding gear, I’d make my own. I suspect I’ll jury-rig some sort of vise/hitch setup somehow. Stay tuned…
