Naturally, I called my credit card company to get these charges revoked. I was successful in blocking these theives from stealing anymore money, but I’m still missing $39.95. The charge showed up as, ” PROFITGGL8882164952(Other). ” Turns out those numbers are their customer service (haha) number. I called it to try and reclaim the money that they plucked from my pocket while I was sleeping or working hard at my job. I was greeted by a hostile woman who insisted that it was indeed me who ordered a get-rich-quick informational DVD about how to scam Google for cash or some other baloney. (This was the $39.95) I also had some sort of monthy charge for $7.97 that showed up as, ” WWW FEDGRANTUSA COM(Dining and Entertainment) ” for which I have no idea. The $7.95 was subsequently returned to me for the last two months that I had been charged, but I’m still waiting on the $39.95.

If you visit fedgrantusa.com, you are presented with two options: Fraud recovery or I’m an idiot, let me in. If you proceed down the idiot’s path of doom, it leads you to http://www.grantmemberssite.com/

To say the least, I’m pretty upset with this company, and I encourage anyone who reads this posting to watch their back and maybe do their own research on these bottom feeding leeches. Here’s a bit of information to help you get started:

FedGrantUSA.com’s Grand Dragon ringleader is “Dr.” John Porter.
If I saw him walking down the street, I would sidle up, fart loudly, take his wallet, remove exactly $39.95 + $7.95 + $7.95 + $7.95 + etc… and then sell his credit cards to the nearest bum for a nickel just so he could tast a bit of his own medicine. After that, I’d invite him to a party at my house where all the victims of his sham company could meet him face to fist..I mean face.

A few interesting things I’ve dug up online:
435-773-1795 - supposedly a direct line to some customer service nit.
Given email was customerservice@cshelp.org –so I visited cshelp.org, but their servers are down due to the heat from the friction of extracting stolen credit card information.

1-800-487-6815 Fedgrantusa.com’s customer service number where you can be belligerantly bullied into hearing a sales pitch for the very scam that you were probably a victim of. I find this an excellent number to call from a public restroom and complain about the cleanliness and lack of toilet paper…pretty much anything on my mind. Gibberish is fun too.

And here’s a blog entry from another victim who may have found the leak that started my woes:
Inside the Outside describing how a popular online bike store threw open their security gates to hordes of spammers and crooks…I’m guessing just for kicks.(I too am a was a bike nashbar customer)

I started by removing the plastic handle. At first I wasn’t sure how to do it, but I resorted to the tried-and-true method of baby sledge hammer and anvil. Seems to work every time!

The inner plug had a molded plastic part around it. Since I was planning on inserting it into a turned wooden handle, I needed to shave it down a bit. The bandsaw made short work of this…followed by a little trimming with a box knife.

I used part of a maple block for the handle. After sawing out the blank, I marked it with a circle and cut off the corners on the bandsaw.

I rough cut the block into a cylinder using a small gouge.

I then used the gouge to approximate the handle shape in the cylinder. I didn’t have a drawing to go by, or I would have used calipers at this stage to be sure I was accurate. Instead, I just periodically stopped the lathe to feel the handle until I found a size that was nice.

After smoothing the final form out with a curved scraper, I sanded it at 1400 rpm with a variety of grits. I used a pointed tool to dig deeply into the top and bottom end so only about a half inch of wood was holding each end. This makes it a lot easier to cut the scrap off and then finish with filing / sandpaper.

I carefully drilled a hole in the end with a 3/4″ Forstner bit on the drill press and then epoxied the whisk into the hole. I thought I would finish the handle with laquer, but it feels so nice, I have left it raw for now. A natural oil or wax finish might be in the future, but we’ll see how it goes.

Last Saturday I found a bus that I really liked. I’ve been searching Craigslist and TheSamba several times a day for at least a month prior to Saturday. I had a pretty specific set of criteria…must be a 1971, must not have major body damage, must be able to drive as-is, must have a camper pop-top, etc. So imagine my glee when I saw this around lunchtime on Friday:

After being giddy for a couple days, I’m realizing just how much work there is to make Boris running and operating the way I want.

Some of the things that are at the top of the list:

New transmission! I already have the replacement, I just need to put it in
Paint huge white patch on the side to match (sort of) the rest of the bus
Re-wire the broken blinker arm
Replace rear struts in the pop top to fix the leaning problem
Sew shut pop top vinyl rips
New seat upholstery
Tatami mat walls
Japanese pattern bungee cord curtains
Remove and rebuild camper cabinetry
Rebuild auxiliary seat to include mini sink, tile counter top and cooler / stove storage areas
Paint wheels
Paint spare tire cover
Radio in the glove box
CB / PA radio
Roof rack to replace the front fiberglass top
Lights!

Fast forward 3 or 4 years: Paula and I are visiting one of my favorite stores, Harbor Freight. It’s one of the bigger ones, and it happens to have a kitchen section. And in that kitchen section….a very familiar (if ugly) knife block for only 13 bucks!

I brought the block into the woodshop for a few modifications. It actually has a false bottom, which works great for what I had in mind. I began by removing all the cheap hardware bits from the base.

The support leg was just glued on, so I used a small mallet to “coax” it from its home. This really didn’t take much force at all. I was slightly worried about tearing out some of the body wood, but I figured I could just place this side to the wall when I had it finished. The opposite actually happened, and I had to sand off a little hunk of the leg that was left stuck to the body.

I wanted to make my new block completely vertical because the knives tended to stay in the bristles a bit better when it wasn’t tilted, and I wanted to take up less counter space. This is where the false bottom came to the rescue. I simply cut the angled bottom off right below the plastic bottom to make the block stand up 90deg.

I then sanded the freshly cut bottom on the disc sander and ran it around the router table using a 1/8? rounded bit to smooth things out. I used a miter guide on the sander to make sure I didn’t grind it out of square.

The original block had a light varnish on it, so I sanded it until the raw wood was exposed again. I used the power sander to take care of little imperfections and round off the rest of the sharp corners a bit.

A solid bottom works just fine for this box, because the bristles already have their own bottom. Any potential drips would be caught by the plastic tray, so I wasn’t worried about trapped moisture in the wooden box. A simple square piece of wood should do the trick. I measured and cut a piece juuust slightly larger than the hole so it would press-fit into place and not require very much glue. I rounded the corners a bit on the disc sander to make sure the block would slide around on the counter easily.

Since the interior bristles were black and most of my knives are black, I decided to stain the block a very dark ebony. I used Minwax Ebony stain to get the color and a general Ace hardware glossy spar varnish for the shine. I let it dry over the weekend. It ended up a bit rough, so I did a light sanding to smooth it out and applied a second coat.

Once the second coat dried, I filled it up with knives…and it looks great! If you have done anything similar or have any questions, leave a comment below! :)