sorry about the lack of posts

 I am still recoving from sciatica.  It sucks.  Do your crunches, strengthen your core, and lift with your legs by squatting, never by bending over.  Failure to do so can lead to seriously undesirable outcomes.

 Think of the worst pain you have ever experienced.  If that pain was anything other than a kidney stone, a broken rib, or sciatica, then take that pain and multiply it by ten.

 One bit of good news is that I finally picked up the media-blasting cabinet a few days ago, and have been slowly assembling it.  Just for yucks, here's a quickie phone-cam video, hand-held, so I apologize for the shaky-cam:

 
 Yes, my workbench is a mess.  Yours would be too if half of it was taken up by a big metal box you can't move right now, and the other is occupied with three projects going on at once.

 The assembly instructions are quite sparse, in fact there is a derth of necessary info, so you just have to puzzle out the details for yourself.  Add to this annoyance that it hurts when I do just about anything, then what would otherwise be slow progress for two fully-functional adults becomes positively glacial.  It'll get done eventually.  I might even find the spoons to blog about the modifications I'll be doing to turn a barely adequate tool to a satisfying and efficient one.

 A bit of a side note on that: I had got so used to "free shipping" as a convenience (only when the price is sufficiently competitive against non-free-shipping sellers) that I had been preparing to spend $250 online for what is available in every major city in the US for $180.  So I drove over and bought it last week.

 While I was there, I did remember to check whether they had the vise I'm searching for (they didn't, it's discontinued; they sell a lighter-weight and much cheaper / weaker casting now) and totally failed to buy the electric hoist I also need for the shop, despite writing all of this stuff down on a 3x5 note card which I stuffed in my pocket and never once looked at again... @_@

 That hoist is going into a DIY material handling cart with a built-in miniature jib crane, as a half-assed (but one-tenth the cost) replacement for one of these:

 The idea is that you put counterweights (the black objects on the bottom shelf in the photo) opposite the crane, so the crane can lift up to 500 lbs.  Their version costs upwards of $800 for the crane alone or over $1K for the cart version.

 My version costs a total of $300 - $400 and involves no cranking whatsoever; just pushing buttons.

 The real thing can also be mounted on your machine's bed ways or tool post to lift accessories like chucks, grinders, indexing heads, etc. onto and off of the machine.

 My version, um, costs $400.  You don't get fancy features without a fancy price.