rogerholeman.com

Every once in a while this guy Danny Westneat surprises me with a nice less-than-liberal insight into a problem, and this is one of those articles.  It’s about Seattle’s big-spending activist mayor who bought a fleet of 14 Toyota Priuses and then spent $12k each on them to have them converted to “plug-in.”  The program was advertised as being capable of producing 150+ mpg and the bumper stickers on the car even say they’re getting 100+.  “It will use no more energy to drive a plug-in Prius for a year than your water heater does in 3 months.” is what they promised.

Except one problem:  The don’t get any better mileage than my friend Keith’s Prius, which is 51 mpg.  The program is a complete & utter failure.  But hey, it wasn’t their money.  It was yours, Seattleites.

The fact emerges that much of the green promise is not just hot air & hype, but is actually a cover for our government to spend huge money on pet projects that will not produce, while at the same time taking a bite out of our own freedom thru higher taxes, robbing from our children & grandchildren, and doing nothing to solve our nation’s energy problem because they are at the same time shunning traditional energy development that would actually free us from our foreign oil addiction.

Seattle’s plug-in hybrid program has said it all.  Looked at it a certain way, we could be thankful that their half-million $ program has revealed these flaws–if we just use the results to avoid further mistakes but it would appear that WA DC is bound & determined to prove all of the same things using hundreds of billions of dollars.

By the way, Seattle has 330 Priuses.  What happened to the days when governments would by inexpensive cars from Chevy and Ford for their fleets?  330 import cars instead of buying from Detroit…multiplied by thousands of US cities…is it any wonder that we’re now bailing out our auto industry?  At least the Seattle police are still riding mostly Harley-Davidsons.  They’ve tried BMW’s & Kawasaki’s and just keep coming back to the right answer, namely, Milwaukee motorcycles.

I love hybrid vehicles, I really do, they amaze me, I have friends who own them, I’ve driven them, and I wish I had one of the new Suburban/Tahoe hybrids (aside from the fact that you can’t any longer fit an 8’ board into them even though that was a feature of these SUV’s for the last 75 years which might partially explain GM’s problems).

But a lot of green programs are Trojan horses built so that the government can take greater control of our lives.  Watch out for another Kyoto coming your way only this time your elected reps might just pull the trigger and crash our entire economy.  It’s sad, because going green shouldn’t have to be an attack on our freedom.

Here’s the Danny Westneat Seattle Times link:  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2008771363_danny22.html?syndication=rss

And here was the Seattle Prius Promise:
http://www.seattle.gov/mayor/newsdetail.asp?ID=8496&dept=40

OK, you may think I’m bored, or being overly thrifty, or even trying to show off.  The truth is that I have no idea what I am but this is the recent yield of idle hands in the workshop here.

So, I’m looking at the 4-drawer file cabinet in my office and there general filing in the top drawer, cars & taxes and some other stuff in the 2nd drawer, and then it starts to get a little muddled in the bottom 2 drawers.  Ergo I decide I’ll buy some dividers and put things into categories that make it easier to find things.  Office Depot, right?  Wrong.  Here’s what I wanted, but I only had the one single solitary green cardboard divider:

Not only do the office supply joints not have these, but they’re expensive to order and you have to get lots of them.  I didn’t feel like spending $50 or $75, I just wanted a few measly dividers onto which I could stick a category label and have better organization.  Figure $10 or so, right?  Wasn’t going to happen, at least not commercially.

A few days go by and I decide that this must be a use for my woodshop and so I scrounged 3 different scraps of useless plywood, made a prototype modeled after the green divider shown above, and then cut out 12 more of them.

The 220 volt table saw makes quick work of little plywood scraps like these.  These pics were taken after the job was partially completed, so you see the shellac finish on the boards.

After the table saw yielded the basic plan form of the new file dividers, I jigged up the router table to cut out the relieved areas on each side of the up-sticking tab on each panel.  Rout one side, flip, rout the other.  Every piece comes out symmetrical & identical.

A little sanding…I used mostly the belt sander (not shown here) and a little handheld knobby plastic thing that holds a round sheet via hook & loop, plus a little sandpaper held in the fingers magic.  This gets rid of all the “feathers” left by the 2 power cutting tools.

Shellac is a great coating and we keep finding more applications for it.  It’s available as a clear or amber-tinted finish, or as a white primer that can be tinted for easier coverage by your top coat.  It dries fast.  As you can see I used the amber, this writer’s usual choice due to the warmth of the wood’s color that is rendered along with exquisite grain emphasis.     (Belt sander partially visible in corner.)

Each piece was shellacked, then sanded by use of the knobby hand sander and a little manual sanding for the curve by the tab.  The first coat always raises fur, thus requiring the sanding exercise.  I used the 220 grit recommended on the Zinsser Shellac can and it seemed to be a perfect choice, needing no further sanding after the 2nd coat.  [For a thoroughly professional job, one would do a lot more sanding before, during & after the application of various coats of finishes, but c’mon, I mean…these are freakin’ FILE DIVIDERS, OK??!!]  The various different woods–mahogany, oak & birch veneers–each create a unique look…

Stack ‘em up, outta the shop, take ‘em to the office…

What would we do without the Avery Label company?

Not being displeased with the results, the new file dividers were deployed into all 4 drawers:

Granted, this seems like low-level stuff, and it is.  But it is satisfying to do this kind of thing, in one’s own shop, for almost no cost, and have a result that will be pleasing every single time the file drawers are opened, which is usually a few times each day.  The total cost was about a nickel for the shellac and maybe a dime for the labels.  It took a couple of hours and will save a little time and frustration at the file cabinet.

As I get older, I find that it is easier to achieve fulfillment.

Roger