where assumptions get you

My old Hobart welder--1941 with a four cylinder Wisconsin engine--wasn't working this Spring. She was fine in the fall, but her winter nap must have taken something out of here because, while the engine fired right up, the welder gave out not a single amp of juice.

It's hard to work on this old machine because I have no information on it and no schematic to show me around. Requests on websites with forums of tinkerers and even a call out to the manufacturer provided nothing of assistance. But I wake up one morning to find an email from Canada where someone on one of the sites not only sent me a scan of old documents, he also kept looking around for other information, which is a tall order considering we're talking about a machine 50 years old that even the manufacturer has no records for.

All I needed to do was flash the exciter windings and that would re-magnetize the iron core and then the welder would crank up plenty of voltage. I'll spare you the tech details, but I kept insisting that this welder--basically a big DC generator--was self-exciting and had no separate windings. This guy kept saying that there must be an exciter and kept sending me more scans. Finally, I realized that I was wrong. Had I had my eyes open--well, really my brain open--I would have had this thing fixed right away. In reality, had it not been for someone else seeing things clearly, I'd still be staring at a welder that just makes a lot of noise but no spark.

How often do we close ourselves off from solutions or possibilities in life due to assumptions that we make and protect?

It makes all the difference

I google "sea mule" every now and then--one never knows what'll come up. I happened to get 2 good hits: one a newspaper article for the Oregonian about a Sea MUle that sank down at the John Dey dam and one for a Sea Mule for sale on a Government auction.

Pretty exciting! I called people at the Dam to connect with staff there who worked on their Sea Mule, or at least operated it, but couldn't get anywhere. You would have thought I was prying information out of the FBI. Nobody would talk. Finally after many pestering calls I caught the Head of Maintainence at his desk. "The best I can do for you is pass along your phone number to the people in the garage and, if they want to, they'll call you." Nobody ever did. The organization our tax dollars fund that was so helpful to me here? The Army Corps of Engineers.

I managed to track down the other Mule, by luck and a guess. It was at the Grand Coulee dam. Sent them an email and got a response back right away. "You betcha we got a Sea Mule. What would you like to know about it?" I ended up making friends with one of the staff, Kent Peterson, who even invited me up to see the boat in person.

Of course, I took him up on the offer and got to see the first Sea Mule other than my own. It gave me some great ideas and a shot in the arm that, yes, there is hope for my boat.

It also restored my faith in people. I'm choosing to believe that it's at least 50/50...for every dead-hearted, unhelpful stick-in-the-mud there's another person who's wide-hearted and even on the lookout for opportunities to help fellow travelers.