It was a busy week at work with lots of unintentional overtime on my part. You know how it is when you are working on a project, time just gets a way from you and the next thing you realize is that it is 6:30 pm and everyone else has left.  As a result I got home later than I expected and I had no evening time to do any sanding on the anvil or plan the next projects.

But that is what I hope to do today. I have placed the 100 grit on my sanding block and hope to get the top of the anvil  started with that.  One thing I have noticed about the anvil is that over the course of the week a bit of fine rust appeared on the top surface, 
but not everywhere, and there are dark spots which are not rust.  I am thinking that this anvil might be handmade and that the metal is more iron than steel.   I removed the rust early this morning but maybe next week I will post a picture of it but now I know to put a very light coat of machine oil or WD-40 on the top.


The other thing I will be working on today is my design for next year's fair entry.  That will take several weekend to sketch out and finalize so IF I start now I won't be rushing about at the last minute next year. 

A few weeks ago I did some ebay trolling and eventually snagged an 18 pound vintage round table top anvil and a cone mandrel with removable hardy hole tang.  I am not certain but the anvil looks hand made.

I decided yesterday to start the refinishing of the anvil top.  The cone does not have pits like the anvil but will require just a small amount of surface sanding to clean it up. But as you can see from the first two pictures, the top of anvil is badly pitted. 

I went out to the garage where my new belt/disk sander is and fired that puppy up with an 80 grit belt to take down the top surface fast.  

The first problem was that the edge of the bevel does not blend into the main body, there is a thin step between where the be bevel ends and the main body. So I first round a thin piece of wood to support the body of the anvil thus allowing me to the face to touch the sanding belt evenly.  Of course this was not wide enough to support the entire body and so you had to "hold up" the body to keep it against the belt which was vertical.  I then tilted the belt back about 30 degrees from vertical so the weight of the anvil was directly slightly downward and away I (we) went.   My husband then took a turn at it and if you click on the pictures below, you can see the progress as we removed the pits. 

I used a level and laid it across the surface and there are no air gaps between the level and the surface even though the level tells me that the top surface is slightly higher on one edge and this could just be due to the bottom surface not completely square to the to body or parallel to the top. I did check my bench first and it was almost level so it is the anvil. Overall my working surface is flat just not 100% level to what ever surface it is sitting on. 

I post these images below, on my Facebook page last night and received some very nice complements including one from Kevin Potter of Potter USA  He said "I admire your determination laurie but I am more than happy to polish it for you" and then added "Spend your time making beautiful stuff let me do the dirty work."

Well I have thought long and hard about this. Ok, I only thought about it for 10 hours.  And I am very tempted to ship the anvil and the cone mandrel off to him. Just last month he modified some vintage stakes (the tangs) for me so they would fit in his stake holder and did a perfect job.  

Back in 2010 I scored a lot of  18 vintage hammer off of eBay but they needed work and I spent almost 2 months of weekends refinishing the faces.  Working on the anvil will require at least 10+ hours over several months and using the belt sander for the initial phase of pit removal took 1 1/2 hours alone. The long arduous work is still ahead of me with hand sanding. If Kevin did it, in his shop on his wonderful machines, it would take probably less than 5 hours and it could be as few as 2 or 3 to machine it down just a bit further and then working his way up to put a nice 600+ grit polish on it. 

But what would I get out of it besides saving quite a bit of my time??  And there people was the quandary.  

Saving Personal Time vs. Personal Satisfaction.  What you you do?? 

But the more I thought about it this morning over my Sunday cuppa; the more I realized I wanted the personal satisfaction of doing this vs. the time savings.    I want to say "Look what I refinished" and then be able to show these, and more, pictures off and hear people say WOW.  

Even if Kevin did do this job for me we all know people would say WOW.  PLUS it would help drive more business to Kevin which is a good thing cause he stays in business and continues to make great tools and equipment and then would be able to refinish other things for you and me when we really, really, really need it. 

So, sorry Kevin, I really do appreciate the offer but this time, this is one is mine to do.   Next weekend I will take a few hours and work my way through 100 grit. Each weekend I will then progress further up from 120, 220, 300 and when I reach 600 grit THEN I will decide if I want to spend more time for the extra WOW factor. 

In my last post, I chronicled The Saga of the Inventory Software.  
In this post I will explain how I resolved it.

To refresh your memories, finding BUSINESS accounting software that runs on a MAC that does not cost a hefty penny; does inventory; and works well is a very rare thing BUT after much Googling I located Express Accounts and Inventoria which are both my NCH Software. 

I won't go into the evaluation process but let me just say that after working with each for a week I was convinced that they would meet my needs. I was fortunate enough to hit this right as they were having a software sale so I bought both.   

IF you want to do just inventory management then Inventoria alone will suit your needs. You can set up suppliers, customers, inventory categories and sub-categores, unit of measure. Create orders and receive parts as well as Invoices for items you sell, as well as reports for costing. If you want to track COSTS and what your business is doing money wise, then Express Accounts is for you. AND in Express Accounts you can do some basic Inventory Management too.  So it comes down to basic double entry accounting;  purchasing, selling and reporting.  A basic knowledge of accounting is required.  For either package I will not teach you how to do all of this but their website will help you if you have further questions on it.   

Once I had bought the software, I now had to move everything I had done in Bead Manager Pro (BMP) and export it so I could import it onto the new system. Yes this would take time but starting over from scratch would be even longer. The ace in my pocket to do this was my many years of experience working with and installing this type of software. FYI in big business the entire suite is called Enterprise Resource Planning "ERP" and this covers Sales driving Manufacturing which drives Purchasing and Recieving and the Accounting that ties it all together.  I was in my element even though I would have preferred not be there. 

From BMP, I exported my suppliers and I also did separate exports of each category of parts; these I set aside.  In Express Accounts I set up the chart of accounts and imported my suppliers. Next I massaged the parts exports to give me lists of parts and categories which I could then import in the software world this process is called a data conversion. It took a few tries to get the files setup so I could import each portion of the data but working with just one or two lines of data allowed me to eventually import over 166 different items in inventory along with their costs and quantities (wire, sheets of metal, disks, jewelry components, stones, etc.) an for those items that did not export from BMP (about 20 items) those I hand entered.  This was all done in Inventoria.

Then I had to do journal entries to take care of the dollar amounts in Express Accounts. For items like hammers and other equipment that is not tracked in a normal inventory, I had put them into BMP so I could track the costs.  I just had to find the totals, in BMP for these categories and make the appropriate journal entries. I then did journal entries for the inventory categories.   

Afterwards, I did a quick reconciliation which is just bean counter speak for make sure it all totals and I was done.   

In 3 days I had moved out of BMP and into my new system.  
I would not recommend this for the faint of heart or if you don't know how to do it; but I did and I could so it is now done. 

What can you learn from all of this. 
Don't do a quick evaluation
Test everything! In the past I would have, doing this on a paid job but I admit I was lazy this time around
Don't be afraid to say "This won't work" and ...
Quit while you are a head, not when you have a head ache. 

I hope I have helped you.

Last year I wrote this blog post about choosing a program that did inventory and some basic accounting. At that time I was focusing on jewelry software so I could avoid a lot of extra work with a chart of accounts [very bean counter term for categories to track money] and double entry accounting [you spend money here and thus the same amount of money goes into another bucket like inventory, supplies, etc]. But it also HAD TO work on a Mac computer as a native program; no running Windows on a Mac. 

I started with Beadia since it was for the Mac and very simple. I found many bugs and eventually I gave it up because the developer was not fixing the issues I found.  

I should note that I have this uncanny ability to find bugs in software. I found some very deep (this is a term which means the average person would never, ever come across them) bugs in a software tool/package back in 1995 such that the company paid for me to come to their facility to discuss, with their developers, how I came across them. While there they fixed and I tested.  Over the years I have had friends tell me they DO NOT want me to test their software.  But I am getting off track.

Earlier this year I moved onto Bead Manager Pro.  I worked with it for about 3 weeks and then spent the money and purchased a license.  I spend several weekends slogging through all the receipts I had kept since late 2008 entering EVERYTHING - hammers, files, rolling mills, wire, sheet, stones, solder and even workshops and books. You name it I had a receipt for it. BMP's inventory valuation methodology was not exactly what I wanted which was FIFO (First in First Out) but did a weighted average which was my second best choice, and along the way of entering items I did a physical inventory (what I really had vs. what I have purchased over the years).   

And of course I found a bug. The program has the ability to "make" a product using items in (raw) inventory and then will add up the costs. You can then add the labor and mark-up, and then you know what FINISHED items you have so you can sell them.  I was trying to assemble/make a bracelet and the program would not let me use less than one ounce - I had .75 troy ounce of silver wire in inventory and i wanted to use .25 troy ounce and it kept telling me that I had ZERO in inventory.  I wrote to BMP about this and let me say that the tech support in the beginning was rather poor. I was first directed back to their help page, which I had said in the email I sent that the answer was not there. This first response took several days for me to get. So, I responded as such and it almost 3 weeks to get it sorted, a new version was sent to me to test/verify, and then I could move forward [A new version was then sent to the user base soon afterwards]. 

When I finished EVERYTHING last month I went to print out some of the reports so I had a year end inventory valuation from last year. This would help my accountant with this years income, purchases, and cost of items sold.  

Hold on to your web browsers people cause can you guess what happened next??  

Yup, I found TWO more problems; I would call them bugs but once is a limitation of the BMP system.  So let's go through them in order. 

FIRST ISSUE: 
When printing, the report does not scale to fit on the paper which is in landscape mode. I know many of you have used PDF's, Word, even Excel and you can tell the printer dialog box to scale the page to FIT on one page (horizontally) so it does not have some text hanging as an orphan on another page even though vertically the total contents will be on  many pages.   I selected the columns I wanted to print; I then set the width (a description field) such that some text even wrapped and then hit the print preview button. That is when on the screen the text was CUT OFF - yup, it did not even push onto another page IT WAS CUT OFF.  Even when the actual print dialog box came up and I checked the scale to fit page check box - IT WOULD NOT SCALE.   

I was not a happy camper to say the least. 

Once again I filled out a support ticket on the BMP website. Several days later I got an email back telling me to refer back to specific page. Well I had been there and I had removed the columns I did not need; I NEEDED ALL THESE COLUMNS. So, again I replied and after a few other emails it came down to: 1) that was the way the software was. 2) maybe I print the information twice each with a sub-set of the columns and just match them up.   

SECOND ISSUE: 
I then decided that I would just export the data to a spread sheet and do the report from there. The ability to select columns to get the data you want is fairly reasonable if you have worked with report writers before, if not good luck. I found the columns I needed and did the export. That is when I found several items missing from the export.  Into investigation mode I went. The system does have an inventory number and one would assume that this was the key (a primary key in database terms) used to distinguish between items even if the description was the same. OH NO MY FRIENDS it turns out that item 057 which was Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Round) did not export because 056 Wire, Silver Sterling 18 G (and in the size field marked Square) some how caused a conflict.  This happened for the majority of the wire, sheet, and my jump rings. 

At this point I was done. DONE, DONE, DONE I say!!!!

I have just finished spending another 3 weeks of evenings finding another business accounting program that allows me to also do inventory PLUS migrating all my data from the BMP system to this new program. 

When I am done here, I will delete all evidence of BMP from my Mac and say GOOD RIDDANCE.  I write software for my day job and this was just too much.

Next week I will tell you about the software I did find and how I migrated my data and how it meets my needs.