Sorry Groupers,
I thought I was responding directly to Chuck on that last email that he misstakeingly sent to me via the group which, of course, I then misteakinglie sent back to the group again....
I didn't mean to have you waste your time reading an email without any content relative to you...unlike this additional time-waster....
So I'll add some relevance...
PREAMBLE:
I'm currently? holed up in my little basement office with a corundum:
I was working on a little side project for my daughter's upcoming birthday. For over 10 years, she has wanted something in particular and rather unique, that you can't really buy in stores. I have tried to make her one several times with less than gift giving or daughter satisfying results. I tackled it again last week, did hours of detective work online and thought I found the solution. I ordered a couple of parts online for my latest attempt and they arrived in the mail Monday morning. But there was no way that the parts would mate together and nothing in my massive collection of oddball stuff in the Qhut would facilitate any mating, so I headed to my local hardware store.
Now, a little sidebar is in order: My very first job was as a stock/sales clerk in our local hardware store in Cape Elizabeth Maine. I learned both hardware and sales from the best. The owner Chet had been in hardware all his life and this was his retirement business. I started on my 16th birthday and worked 7 days a week all through high school. Anyway, I got to know fairly well the inventory stock of a typical hardware store which really hasn't changed much over the years except for the additions of newly invented stuff over the last 50+ years since I last stocked a shelf. So I left the hardware store business, went off to college, earned an electrical engineering degree and have spent almost 50 years in the field of new product development. Needless to say, I have hosed up many a prototype both simple and monster 'while working in the lab late last night'..
Stay with me as this is all relevant....
I go to the hardware store and search several departments myself looking for a solution to my problem primarily because I don't know exactly what I'm looking for but I'll know a solution when I see it! Plumbing: nothing, nuts & bolts: nada, tools: zilch. So I approach a older gentleman (but not as old as me) clerk and ask him if there is a thread gauge in the store. He stops his stocking and takes me to the nuts & bolts department and shows me a very heavy metal plate with threaded holes, protruding bolt threads for sizing nuts and nuts welded on it for sizing bolts. I politely tell him that I have already been here, seen this and my problem is with a fine thread. He points out that the bolts in this sizing unit have coarse and fine threads which of course is right but I would hardly define 20 tpi bolts as having a fine thread. As many of us know from working with smaller machine screws, 24 tpi is considered coarse (relatively) with 32 and 40 tpi (and up) defined as fine..... So I started to tell him this when he interrupted me to tell me that he was a retired mechanical engineer and he knows all about nuts and bolts and 20 tpi is a fine thread. I tried to explain that in my line of work, 32 & 40 tpi were considered more as fine then what you find on 1/4" bolts etc. He gets testy with me so I interjected that I too was a 'retired' engineer and then he got even testier. There has always been a running rivalry between engineering disciplines and it was now rearing its ugly head here in my local hardware store. I again show him my 2 things I'm trying to mate up and state that what I'm looking for is more in the 32 tpi range. I further explained that it was more like the fine threads found on gas compression fittings but NOT the same. (I had already tried all the compression fitting sizes without finding a match which is why I was trying to find a thread gauge) So he heads over to the compression fitting department, which is about 10 steps away from the nuts & bolts department and proceeds to rifle through all the little bins looking for a match. I politely (my memory is a little hazy here) explained that I had already rifled through all these bins myself looking for a match. He continues to rifle and tell me that I might have missed a bin (or some such nonsense). Frankly, I had given up on his help several minutes ago but was still trying be polite and let him help me NOT find a solution in the bins..... After quite a bit of bin openings and closings he proceeds to tell me that is seems that the answer is not in the bins and further probably not in the store. Then he tells me he has to go back to his stocking task as he is now falling way behind.
All through this interchange, we are wearing our masks as dictated by common sense and the state mandate....but I must admit that we were closer than the suggested 6 feet as our interchange got livelier. He scampers off to return to restocking the nail department and I amble off to look in other departments I haven't visited yet because I didn't think they didn't have any relevance to my current dilemma. My next foray was in well & plastic well pipe, again zilch, and then came the heating/cooling department. I swiftly scanned all the items there and in the adjacent heating & stovepipe department for a final wrap-up of the hardware gondolas. I was standing right next to the furnace filter rack just beside the doors leading to the stockroom and across the isle beckoned the paint and electrical departments but first came the battery, phone, TV accessories, gas line and tubing racks. I was instantly drawn to the tubing rack. I quickly realized that a possible hack solution was to simply hose my 2 weirdly threaded metal parts together with some plastic hose. I found a very heavy walled 1/2 poly tubing that would allow me to 'cut' the threads into it with my actual part. I hailed a young clerk passing by, heading for the stockroom, and asked him to cut me off a 1' piece. Off to the counter, paid my 74 cents for the tubing and headed home. Less than 5 minutes after getting home I had the 2 pieces hosed together with the tubing....but it wasn't working! I took it upstairs to show my wife my non-working hacked together prototype and she takes one look at it says that it looks like my reed is in backwards. What can I say, I'm an engineer NOT a musician!! I quickly turned it around and it instantly came to life! One fine honking prototype!
But wait, there's more!
Tuesday, I wanted to take the prototype and turn it into something that looked more like a gift my daughter has waited almost half her life for. So I head back to the hardware store to get a couple more items to gussy it up with. I get my stuff, head home and spend a couple of hours making a presentable gift. I made it pretty, boxed it and then it was off to the post office to mail it to my daughter so she will get it in time for her birthday. Now it is 6 days until her birthday but watching my many QRPme orders take DAYS longer to get anywhere and lately 2 days just to get it out of Maine (I can drive out of Maine in 10 minutes from Limerick!), I wanted to mail it as early as I could. It's off and my daughter will be thrilled and think I am the best dad in the whole wide world! Which, of course, I am.
The REAL STORY.
Now my wife chimes in on Wednesday and says I need to finally fix her little antique cabinet whose door never stays shut and 1 pair of spindle legs keeps falling off. I fix the legs but need a little magnetic cabinet latch to fix the door. I have just 10 minutes to make the 4pm closing of the hardware store (good help is hard to find) and when I get there a full 8 minutes before closing time. I discover ALL the windows covered over with kraft paper and signs in every window saying the store is temporarily closed and please visit one of the other 3 family operated hardware stores in the surrounding communities. HUH! I return home, ask my wife to check the Limerick Facebook page and see if there is any posting about the hardware store.... Closed due to Covid-19 exposure! No public statement from the store, just confirmation from town busybodies... Now I'm thinking that if they had employees who tested positive on Wednesday morning, I have a small(?) problem. I've been in and out of that store at least 6 times in the last few days, always wearing my mask though, but Monday's dust-up with the mechanical engineer clerk got within the 6 foot rule for 15 minutes of more. I call the store number, answering machine saying pretty much what I read on the non-informational sign posted in all the windows. So I call the closest other store. I talk to manager of that store and he can tell me nothing except that the owners work out of the Buxton store. So I call the Buxton store and talk to that manager. He can tell me nothing more either but I did 'enlighten' him a little on who I was and why I was calling and needed to find some answers. He said he would pass my concerns on. I called MY store again and left a message on the machine this time. Then I got a little more concerned that I needed answers now rather than 'maybe' from my voice message. I called the Buxton store back and asked to talk to the manager again. The clerk said he just went on break and could she take a message. I asked for someone in authority and she counters with her boss Bob. I ask if he was an owner and she says yes. So I say I would LOVE to talk to Bob. She puts me on hold and after a while a nice lady (not Bob) who works in the office picked up the phone. I ask her if she was an owner and she tells me no but that she is married to an owner (I assume Bob) and asks if she can help me. She also mentions that the store manager has relayed the conversation we had a few minutes ago and says that I shouldn't have 'ripped him a new one' (my paraphrase). She goes on to tell me about how hard it is to run the store with no employees and that everyone has to get tested, store has to be cleaned etc. etc. I listened patiently but then I reply by telling her that it was good that she was taking care of her employees etc and then ask her about their obligation to their customers. Absolutely no information flowing to their customers, like ME, and to the community! I tell her that I've been a loyal customer for over 20 years and tell her that they have an obligation to keep me safe too. She counters that that is a decision that I have to make myself and with my doctor...yada yada yada. I counter with it is hard to talk to the doctor without any REAL facts! I tried to explain that ME and their other recent customers could probably use some information to guide us in our decision making process. I didn't want HIPA type info, just something like if we (and I in particular) visited the store on certain days when certain un-named employees were working might be a useful piece of information that would help in our decision making process. I get nowhere with her. I'm not vindictive BUT, even though the local hardware store is about 1/2 mile from my house, I think I might become a future un-loyal customer and only shop there as a VERY last resort! I'll just might plan my hardware purchases around when I can get a shipment from McMaster-Carr, or make a trip to a big-box store 30 miles away. I am now self-quarantining for another couple of days before I go somewhere to have a Covid-19 test and then self quarantine again for the remainder of time that the test givers advise....or results come back....whichever comes first.
ASIDE: McMaster-Carr, if you don't know about them, you should check them out. I'm not a stock holder, employee or anything other than a satified customer. I can order stuff as late as about 6pm and get it off the UPS truck the following day. When it comes to general suppliers of hardware, tools, raw materials, and maintenance equipment & industrial materials, they are tops! No need for a commercial account and small orders are OK. I buy lots of QRPme commercial stock materials from them.
RELEVANCE?
Well, I'm now confined to the farm so I should be able to get lots more things done. I just kitted up almost all my outstanding orders and will send them off to the post office tomorrow. Next item on the agenda is to really get into finishing up the kitting and doing the final build videos for the Acorn Tube 2 Buildathon kit. By one means or another, AT2 kits will be somewhere under or near a bunch of Christmas trees in a few weeks.
Rex? W1REX
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