Perishable skills

It isnt always ‘like riding a bike’.  Certain skills need constant polish applied or they wither away. 
Shooting
Welding
Bushcraft
All are perishable skills. 
Take a year off from shooting and when you get back into it, you’ll find that your ‘minute of badguy’ group might hit the platoon said badguy is in.

In my case, its the welding thing.   I haven’t burned rods regularly in years. (As in ‘High School’)  The occasional plate to beam thing, but never anything serious, ” just stick ’em together’ kinda stuff.

Since I now have a serious welder in possesion, I have taken it on myself to get back into the rod and lightning type stuff. 
Whoa,  I suck at this!
It aint the rods,  it aint the lincoln, its me.  Rusty buckets of bolts in my skills department.  I can MIG all day: run verticals, overheads, and blind holes like nobodies business, but these rods are tripping me up.  The funny part though; the flats are where I’m tripping. My uphill verticals and overheads are passable (not perfect but,,,) but the flats all look like birdsquat.  Thats with both 6010 and 7018 rods.  The 6013’s I have are purt-much crap, and I fight with ’em and it doesnt seem to matter what voltage or amperage setting I use. The only rods I can get to work well in the flats are the 308’s I first used when I got the ol’girl running again.  (Scary enough, those rods are 40 years old. My dad used to weld with them when I was knee high.   Been sitting that long in a rod box and still burn great.)

I’ve got a lot of practice time ahead of me, I can tell.  (And if I want to charge for welding I had better,,,)

More done on the rig setup.  Nothing huge,  just a rock solid rack that I can lock my mini bottles to.  Still getting the ammo cans for storage,  and still need lights. 

Took ol’Gal to the filling station and filled her up, brake action was a touch spotty at first,  but whatever gunk/rust/loose spat was gumming things up worked its way out.  By the time we returned, flawless stopping.  The thing I like about surge brakes is they can’t lock up, short of a mechanical failure. The closer they get to locking the slower the trailer moves and eases up on the pressure applied as the towing vehicle is moving faster then. Its a simple negative feedback system.   Its not perfect, but, IMO,  better than finicky electric brakes that depend on some complicated electronics and can be ‘mis-adjusted’ by a wayward knee or even fail completely thanks to nibbly packrats looking for nesting material or cheap battery failure.   This is pretty straight forward, the most complex part being the shoes themselves.   A ‘piston’ as a hitch, lever, a cable actuating on a pulley to a pair of levers at the shoes.  Pressure is applied evenly to both shoes by the pulley.  Worst case, I break a cable and no brakes: thats the weakest link in the mess, but that cable is 1/4″ aircraft grade steel rope.

Anywhoos, its late, I’m rambling, its ‘back to work’ Monday in the AM, and I have a ticked off cat eyeballing Voodoos throat (yeah, he ate her food again)
I’ll chatatchay’all laters.