Major Bummer

[gringobill]

The Paul Harvey, "Rest Of The Story."

I got all my money back.

The seller told me to keep the pieces of the splitter saying that maybe I could "use it for parts somewhere down the road." So far so good.

So I got busy disassembling it and cleaning it up so I could see if I could repair it. It took a good dose of penetrating oil, a long time on a wire wheel, some emery paper, a flap wheel on an angle grinder and a session on a belt sander but I got the pieces cleaned up pretty well. As I said the blade is pretty pitted but I have honed it and it will do in a pinch. Hopefully Bruce Johnson can find a better one.

After getting it apart and all the parts cleaned up I partially reassembled the frame minus the springs, blade, rollers and anything else that might be damaged by heat. I bolted the four feet to a piece of sheet metal so that along with being put back together every thing was pretty square. I am attaching a "before and after photos of it.

I also prepped the four places where it needed to be brazed filing out a "U" shaped groove to be filled with the brass rod and did a lot of scrubbing of all those joints with a stainless steel wire brush.

Then started brazing which took awhile, I had to braze four sides of four breaks. When the brazing was done I let it cool as slowly as possible (I didn't bury it in lime or ashes to further delay the cooling,) and crossed my fingers. I was hoping I would not hear any cracking as it cooled and luckily I didn't.

So it turned out pretty well, no cracking that I'm aware of and seems to be sturdy and pretty square. I am amazed that it broke the way it did because when the thing is put together it is sturdy, a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

I reassembled it and it's taken a lot of fine tuning and adjusting. These splitters have a lot of places to adjust, a lot more than either of the other two splitters I have, one of which is another old Osborne model 86.

Now I'm trying to figure out exactly how it works as it works differently than any other splitters I've used.

So at the end of the day, a deal that looked like a real disaster turned out way better than I initially thought it could.

I need to remember this incident next time something looks like it's headed south and I start twisting off because over the years I keep being reminded that most of the time things end up working out far better than I expect they will.

I hope all of you have a very blessed Christmas and that 2012 is the best year ever!

Bill

[ara]

As the privileged spouse of a veteran letter carrier I have to throw an opinion in here. My bride, who busts her butt and back six days a week with no days off save Sundays and holidays, pretty much agrees although she is used to whiners on both sides of the mailbox.

Something that arrives Priority Mail looking pretty good from the outside and loaded with cast iron and styrofoam peanuts on the inside--and being found to be busted all to hell and back when opened--well, the physics don't work on that one, pardner. To sustain multiple fractures in something as stout as cast iron and still have the container it arrived in look "pretty good" just doesn't compute. For that damage to have occurred in transit the first thing to disintegrate would have been the packaging. The first thing.

The heavy contents would have torn the packaging from the inside out as multiplied impacts occurred and that apparently didn't happen from what your initial report said. Sounds to me like you paid for a pile of scrap iron and that you were fortunate enough to break even in the end. The stated laxity of the seller in regard to communicating with you raised immediate suspicions on my part. I'd have to bet it was packed that way.

Glad to hear all's well. The post office has it's share of crybabies and losers working in its bowels but there are solid gold employees who take their jobs very seriously as well.

Remembering that is always appreciated by those who deserve more respect than they are generally afforded.

Best in '12.

ara