You're in Georgia. I'm pretty sure you can score a complete 350 from marketplace for under $200. You might have to buy a gasket set and reassemble it, but you'll be money ahead
^^^ Fookin' marvelous. Again.
And the life-ring with the sandwich pretty much describes the entire Welfare system. Zero expectations, zero gratitude, zero responsibility, zero improvement. In fact, the War on Poverty is such a total and dismal failure that there's more parasites than ever. Every generation of deadbeats is larger than the previous generation.
The saddest part is that "most" poverty in this country is due to folks conceiving kids they know in advance they can't afford. Which makes "most" poverty in this country VOLUNTARY.
They just expect the Taxpayer to pick up the check for...everything important. That leaves loads of money for tattoos, snack foods, and illegal drugs. When the money runs out...have another kid so you're eligible for more Free Stuff. Our Welfare system prevents people from learning from their bad decisions.
Yep. All of those good paying jobs where you could start out in a trade as a pumpkin and learn your trade and become a master craftsman and then pass that knowledge on are long gone to china or vietnam or mexico.
Those were the jobs and the craft and the trade that allowed you to buy a house and put your kids through school and had health insurance and a retirement.
I know that some of you old farts made your way through your trade in the same way I did.
You start out as a young kid thinking you know everything.
All full of what they used to call "piss and vinegar"
If you are lucky, you find a mentor.
Some old venteran of the psychic wars.
And that rotten old ******* teaches you how to stay alive.
Thats step number one when you are a dumb **** kid.
Staying alive. Young and stupid and bold will kill you.
Just as sure as old and worn out and got away with it for twenty years will kill you.
In between those two exteremes is that ramping up of knowledge that you learn from those rotten old farts.
Those days sitting around the welding table while everybody brings a pot luck lunch.
Everybody chipping in because your daughter is selling girl scout cookies.
Everybody shows up with a truck and helps you move and we have a barbeque party already planned.
That feeling of becoming good at my trade to the point that I was accepted and I became the ******* guy.
I didnt have to fight for it, nobody ever tried to put me down.
I had to earn it by working like a dog to prove that I was worth thier trust and that I was not dangerious.
If you work in an industry where your slack ass stupidity can kill people.
Trust is everything.
I started in aerospace,prototype shops.
We manufactured some pretty damn amazing military equipment.
In the early days the HUMVEE had no underseat armour.
Any homemade IED would kill the driver and passenger.
We engineered and tested and manufactured the underseat armor for HUMVEE
We, by contract, were only allowed to test the plates with a 9mm.
Like that has **** all of anything to do with an IED.
Aint ******* nobody laying in the road to shoot into the cab with some crappy 9mm Tokarov.
We took our prototype seat brackets out on the desert and shot them with every ******* round we could think of.
They were spec at regular A36 steel.
We fabbed them out of Hastalloy with an A286 backing plate and layers of composite fill.
And it ******* worked.
We were so ******* relieved and happy as hell.
It was awesome. We had finnally figured it out.
The ******* stress of trying to do everything we could do to come up with a explosion proof seat bracket.
They bought 200 hundred brackets from us and some accounting full bird chicken decided that it was to expensive.
This **** showed up at the shop with his KFC extra crispy hat on.
And were not the only shop working on this.
Every legit proto shop in the country was working this problem.
We were all talking to each other and swapping engineering and test results every damn day.
We put toghether a whole crap load of information from engineers and fabricators from all over the world.
This is before the internet.
Back then if you were manufacturing any type of military hardware that had NATO involvement you had to get up at 1 or 2 am and call your contact in quebec and get him to call Paris or Brussels and try to fugure out what the rules were for trying to manufacture and export military equipment.
That ******** started because we manufactured the electrical contacts for kidney diallysis machines.
Which may lead to more people surviving.
The fuckery that goes on is just pathetic
We all of us back in the late 80s early 90s were really experimenting with CNC controlling and how to apply that to atrificial limbs and heart valves and if that was even a possibilty.
All with 486 desktops running fake pentiums made in India
And paper tape readers and even punchcards.
You really havent lived untill youve been through the absolute computer fuckery and dedication it takes to bring your entire crew in on a Saturday morning and go over every linear inch of a 400 foot long paper tape looking for chads and splicing it all back toghether and test running it through an analog tape reader so that it will work on Monday.
And every bit of that tape is hand calculated and hand punched.
Just a a guy with a pencil and some math.
But to get to that level of craft you had to know your bend deductions and tool offsets and die clearences and how to avoid slug pulls.
Turret setup, Turret rotation, Etcc..
We always kept a bin of Brachs candy in the Punch shop.
Not only because it was about 125 degrees.
If you are trying to punch thin material like .030 copper with an .005 die clearence without pulling a burr.
Eat a piece of candy.
Cut a 1/4 x 1/2 strip out of the plastic candy wrapper.
Put a little film of oil on the non burring side of the die
Put the plastic on that side of the die shoe.
A candy wrapper will bump your die .002 to .003 when you crush depending on how much you put in and how long you cut it.
Punch and die obviously have to be ground and true and sharp.
But this crappy old school die alignment trick when done carefully will let you high speed punch .030 copper without a burr.
Its all about the slug pulls
Thats the story about how people lost thier legs in IEDs and humvees.
They
And not a ******* bit of all of this applies in China.