Where does the time go? I spent my first post project day at the range and really enjoyed it. The weather was great and time was productive.
This was nothing heavy duty, but I am working on the thousand round trigger job. These were eight or nine shot groups at 15 yards with a Rossi 92 rifle. My plans for next month are to go to the proper rifle range get those iron sights setup for 50 yards.
Based on all the information so far, what would you do? I have that and more, I think the sights are set low and to the left. If this were 50 yards, then there is some definite adjustment that needs to be done.
Everything that I set out to do has been done. I have put in 12-14 hour days over the last week to get there, but here we are.
I learned a lot and I got some good practice in. I had my ups and downs in terms of making mistakes and recovering.
I learned that I couldn’t force my will on some boards with knots and checking because it was good work wasted with split boards as a finished product.
I found that the pressure on tight rips through the tablesaw tended to cause the edge of a board to skew up and not end up with at straight edge (something I will have to solve in the future).
I learned that not all cheap bandsaw blades are equal, I basically did all of the resawing using one blade even though I tried three different blades through the course of the project. One straight out of the box just didn’t cut. The first one spun off and hit the metal covers, I just threw that one out after that and didn’t try another cut.
My jointer is not square. I think that the blades do not sit parallel to the outfeed table. Confession – I have never changed them and that is the way they were set when I bought the tool, used in 2005. But basically, the more passes you make on a wide board, the more it takes off of the outer edge and the shape becomes more of a rhombus. The fence is square to the table, so you have to rejoint the first edge after doing the face.
On glue-up, I need to make sure each individual board is against the clamp face. I ended up with some wavy and curved panels because I was not paying enough attention when I did it.
It is hard to ‘sand out’ unevenness. It takes a lot of work and the results are not as good as a good panel.
Mistakes take a lot more time to correct than doing it correctly the first time. That is easier said than done, but knowing how to correct them is a long way toward a better end product. Doing a side profile drawing would have saved me making the broom cabinet incorrectly and having to build a cap (which I did twice 🙁 ).
I have been loading my 18ga. brad nailer incorrectly since I owned it. The brads load to the front of the magazine, unlike the Porter-Cable which load to the back. This caused a lot of jams and general dissatisfaction with performance until I figured it out, this week.
By now, you have probably nodded off to sleep, so I will stop now. It just goes to show that I have a lot to learn. So, what is next? I have vehicle problems, I have a rental that needs rehab and Coronavirus mania is picking up. I have a follow up on my political story as well.
Maybe I am unlucky or maybe tools go bad after sitting around for 15-20 years with little use. This is another tool repair and casualty of the pantry project.
I have decided that I am going to talk about preparations for life (i.e. Caronavirus) next week. I will also likely finish my project next week. It will be a whole new chapter for me after that. So with that, have a good weekend.
We have an exchange student for the year from Spain living with us. Unfortunately, part of his agreement to be here is that he cant participate in the things that are the most uniquely ‘American’. For instance, no shooting, no driving, no ‘high risk’ activities. We spend a fair amount of time enjoying those activities.
However, for Christmas, he purchased this book for me called ‘100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation’ by Clint Emerson. I have been slowly reading this over the last couple of weeks.
Now, I like to learn and I believe in the philosophy of preparation. Given the recent COVID-19 hysteria, I am noodling going quite a bit deeper into this next week. The title ‘Tacticool’ is denotes something that might look better on the surface than it really is as well as bring a little humor into my work.
Quite frankly, a lot of this book is mental masturbation such as how to ditch a plane, use a flight suit and swim into another country without detection. I learned a few things like cell phone cameras can pick up IR light or how to make a polymer from milk (casein). I think the value of this book is around the idea of situational awareness: where weak points in hotels could be or tactics around kidnapping and escape. Of course the likelihood of this ever happening is extremely small.
If you are a budding Mall Ninja or an untrained SEAL then this is a manual for you. Otherwise, it is primarily for fun. Remember that your brain is your biggest tool/weapon/asset and keep exercising it because you never know when you need recall the best technique to survive a grenade attack.
The end is near… probably not near enough to finish by the end of this week, but maybe if I work into the weekend then I will be done. I am hoping to have the final cabinet assembled tomorrow. I still have the face frame to build and paint as well as the final attachments and painting.
I am going back out to the shop to paint again. Talk to you tomorrow.
Have you ever seen a whole beef liver? I don’t know the exact weight, but according to a quick internet search, the average weight is 10-15 pounds. If you haven’t seen one then it is hard to conceptualize, but it is huge.
Since I usually get one with the beef that I order, I am always on the lookout for recipes. I have tried boudin and that needs some practice. Once a year I make liver and onions, that is about all I can sneak that in. I recently heard a recipe about Vietnamese Jerky that I though I would try.
Ingredient spread for the liver
Usually with new recipes, I scour sources for three or four different recipes and try to find the commonality, but in this case there are four or five different names I found that were all different. So, I just went with the comments on the podcast and did the best that I can.
Final plate
The results on this were 1) there was still an underlying liver flavor 2) it was a bit too salty (could have been my technique of salt/rinse) 3) the frozen stir-fry vegetables were distracting 4) its a challenge to try new things, but still fun.
I would like to say a few quick words about cooking liver. This is one of the cuts that is at its best when it is fresh, like the day of the slaughter. Cook liver lightly, it really does not have an unpleasant flavor when cooked to medium (145 deg F). Do not make more than you will eat in one meal, reheating overcooks and results in the iron flavor and mealy texture.
I would love to hear other ideas, techniques and recipes. I am all about frugality, preventing waste and trying new things. So let me know if you have some liver ideas.
Yesterday, my wife and I attended a funeral of a family friend. He was a man that I really didn’t know much about, he just seemed to always be around. He would have probably been considered of the Korean War generation, but wasn’t from this country at the time he was of age.
We had to travel to Eugene to attend the funeral. It is a city that I have spent very little time and is very foreign to me. Navigation is confusing and nothing seems familiar. We decided to take this alone time and do something we rarely get to do, go to Indian Food. It was here that I stumbled across the label ‘Unflavored Towels’.
I havent seen the polling numbers on people that prefer flavored versus unflavored, but I assume that it is probably fifty-fifty (insert ha-ha here). The point of all of this is that you don’t have to understand the exact meaning or translation to get a sense of the intent.
Here was a man that was 87 years old and the church was full. I would estimate 200 people were at this funeral. Every seat was taken, the vestibule had twenty or more people, the mothers room was full. I haven’t seen that very often.
His family was bigger than today’s standards but not huge, survived by a wife and four childeren. He was one of ten, but being from Mexico and older, there were only three siblings in attendance. That means that in order to get that sort of turn-out, at that age, given those circumstances you had to mean something to quite a few people.
As I stated, I didn’t really know him. Juan and his wife bridged age the gap between my wife’s grandparents and parents. They lived almost 100 miles away, but yet they seemed to be at every family function, including the Sunday afternoon barbeque and the Thursday night birthday party. Spanish was his native and preferred language, but he could speak fluent English as well. For me, that is a bit of a self conscious barrier to communicating with someone, unless they initiate the conversation.
Probably a third of the service was also in Spanish. Again, I wasn’t totally clear what was being said. The words were spoken very rapidly but given the setting, body language, audience participation, etc I got the spirit of each particular speaker.
The results were tears and laughter and a huge turn-out. Isn’t that the way that you would want it to be remembered? I don’t think that you have to know the man to understand that was a life well lived.
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