Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Having spent countless hours of my life crawling under cars in muddy driveways or wet asphalt lots, I have finally come to appreciate the value of an ergonomic workspace. With motorcycles, that generally means working on the bike in an elevated position, rather than ground level. Obviously not worth ...

@sclass, your hp logo endeavor is giving me existential vertigo about where my life is headed. What's it like up there, packing a lifetime of ingenuity and brilliance into the revitalization of a bygone corporate logo mounted on a 25 cent obsolete calculation machine? I'm having a difficult time ...

I haven't worked much on the waste oil operation. My priority has shifted to building a shop space in the backyard before acquiring a refinery. I did find some cool designs online though.
The travel trailer is sistered with the bathroom install, which I have made progress on. All the materials have ...

I assume you didn't wear a respirator in the grow room? I don't but I'm so small scale that I don't think it matters enough to use one. And I wish there were high scale restaurants around me but there just aren't unless I want to drive a very long way. Do you remember the various types of ...

I worked for a couple months at a small, very successful mushroom farm in my area. There were probably four full time employees, including the owners, and a few part timers that would sometimes come in to make a few extra bucks for a harvest or something. They were successful by selling mushrooms at ...

My parents did that to me once or twice, and it was enough to instill in me, at a young age, how boring the repetitive, low-paid labor can be. I think it had a positive effect on me.
How different could that lesson have been if they exposed you to a different variety of labor? Why not offer the ...

My kid just had his first day of kindergarten. I heard about 10 people telling him to be well behaved, listen to the teacher, raise his hand, don't act out, etc. When he got out I asked him to tell me one thing that someone told him that wasn't true.

When people are of the age that they're ...

Cam, it's a joy for me to read through your journal, especially with your welding gig work. When I was in my 20s I did a fair amount of welding work. My close friend ended up making a very successful business out of what we started together in our mid 20s. though I chose another path. We started out ...

fwiw, i would have preferred the video training any day. i can do it at my own time and with minimum attention. i'd dislike being engaged in a teamsport-like event by a rah rah instructior much more. just let me know what i need to show you i know and i'll click the appropriate buttons and then ...

Here's a decent article detailing the difference between water hammer and resonance. The short explanation is resonance is a function of flow and water hammer a function of pressure surges from shutting down/opening valves. @GP's issue sounds like it would fall under the category of resonance ...

I think one simple solution to bettering the process is a test out option. If I can answer the appropriate questions about fire extinguishers, do I need to complete an hour long course that I have done 3 years in a row? If I pass the proficiency test, my employer should be able to make a good ...

I would imagine this symptom could manifest in both ways. The cause could be vortex shedding, or it could be the ram pump type water hammer/bernoulli effect as described by Jacob. It depends if there's a moving part in the system, IE a rubber gasket blocking a portion of the pipe that is pushing in ...

Most of the continuing ed classes are just a way for an organization to cover their asses so they have documentation that their employee has had the "training". They are looking at number of hours, not retention necessarily. I once sat in a class where the instructor was talking about seat belts ...

I had an interesting discussion today with my therapist, who I basically keep on retainer for when shit hits the fan at work and I have to scrape a dead person out of a car while their family is yelling at me or pull someone's teeth out of their oropharynx or something. I like the guy and having a ...

My dad buys rough cut lumber from his Amish neighbors (who have a mill) to construct outbuildings. He told me the cost of buying hardwood rough cut lumber from his neighbor is significantly cheaper, and obviously higher quality, than dimensional lumber at home depot or any local hardware store ...

@WRC I'm also in the PNW, and here in King County we have the "Loop Biosolids" program, which is a kind of fertilizing program which takes biosolids from wastewater treatment in Seattle and trucks them out to the forest service land and sprays the shitslurry, (tampons, flushable wipes, mood ...

I wonder if anyone has been keeping up with any of their primitive skills? On my last trip to visit my parents I split a hickory bow stave that we had harvested together several years prior. I got about 4 decent staves out of it and a couple pretty propellered looking ones. I'm going to make it a ...

It's impossible to get through concrete, rock, or stone with drilling alone.


Normal drilling is actually the more common way of putting holes in concrete these days. A concrete hole saw bit is used, which looks much like a hole saw you'd use for wood, that you'd chuck up in a regular drill. The ...

They're good for type I prevention as well, possibly many other autoimmune diseases.

"Helminth infection has emerged as one possible explanation for the low incidence of autoimmune diseases and allergies in less developed countries, while reduced infection rates have been linked with the ...

I've been rethinking of all the different skills/ideas that get discussed here on this forum and elsewhere as they relate to my own current lifestyle design, and it has helped me make the paradigm shift towards systems thinking. What tied this together for me was rereading a few books about ...