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.
Yesterday, I got the parts I needed to repair my 20 year old nail gun, so I did a quick video on how to repair it. I thought for a moment about just tossing it, but when I looked at how much it cost to replace ($170), I thought that I would look a little closer at repairing it.
The parts cost $21.22 plus about three dollars for shipping. The repair was easy and now it is back in service. Check out the video.
Last week’s entry was about functional fitness. I feel more like functional sickness lately. That being said, it was the monthly trap shoot last weekend. I took a picture of my range bag dump to show what I lug around to these things.
Starting at the bottom
The black thing (not a great picture) – that is a shell caddy to hold a box of shotgun shells and all the hulls if your firearm doesn’t fling them out.
100 rounds of ammunition – I take double what I plan to shoot, being that I am the only one that brings a 20 gauge, I can sell it all
Shooting muffs – I always carry extra
Stapler – that is for stapling targets, not trap
Safety glasses
Range finder – this is to get an accurate measurement of distance
A bag of binder clips, clothes pins, small bolts with wing nuts – this is for attaching targets to stands
Binoculars – these are for looking at targets, I frequently don’t carry a spotting scope unless I am doing rifle range work
Masking Tape – Also for putting targets on stands
Avid multi-tool – this has a choke wrench, pliers and bit drivers for that quick range adjustment
Range bag- for holding everything
I typically take another old shopping bag that holds targets, extra muffs, garbage and/or brass to take back home. I have experimented with taking cleaning supplies and other things before, but I have kind of settled on the fact that if something goes really wrong, I probably need to stop and fix it at home rather than keep going.
I have also found that all this gear starts to really add up in weight and bulk. There is the rest, weights, spotting scope, lights and more tools like a drill. It starts to get overwhelming just loading the car, so I try to keep it paired down when I can.
I would be interested in hearing what your essential gear is. Thanks for reading.
I still pay for the newspaper, I have always read the newspaper. Even when I was in grade school, I would look forward to the afternoon delivery. In college, I subscribed to the daily newspaper. When I was living in South Carolina, I was getting two newspapers because the local one only came twice a week. I wanted to see what was happening, I like the feel, I like the coalition of advertisements and I particularly think it is the best aggregator of local news.
That being said, when I woke up on Tuesday, I saw two headlines. The first one was “GOP senators walk out again” and the second one was “Trump piñata draws ire of far-right”. I read the articles and I did a lot of thinking yesterday – which is partly why I didn’t get a post in. I was thinking that this might warrant a more proper essay than a blog post.
I took a lot of notes and did quite a bit of research yesterday, but I think that this post will be a bit more succinct. Let me try to explain the situation of the walk-out first. Oregon requires a quorum in the senate to be able to vote on bills. Our senate has one short of a super-majority of democrats which means that legislation tends to pass in block form by party line. Oregon is also a part-time legislature, which means that there is a year session and there is a one month session the second year.
What is happening is that there is a set of bills that the democrat party is trying to pass which is related to ‘Cap and Trade’. This means that each entity (business, person or otherwise) is allowed by law some sort of carbon emissions maximum. If that is exceeded then you are taxed in an excise fashion for the overage and there is an offset where you can pay to plant trees to mitigate your excessive carbon.
The republicans have literally left the state (enforceable jurisdiction) to prevent a quorum from occurring and thus passing the legislation. This tactic was also used at the end of the full year session in 2019. There was a lot of name calling, threats of arrest etc, to the point where one local senator was barred from entering the capitol and he subsequently apologized. He was dismissed from this particular vote by the senate president.
There has been a lot of sword rattling from the governor Kate Brown stating “The Senate Republicans who walked out of the house are not against climate policy, they are against the democratic process”. Which to some degree is true, I suspect that this tactic will be used again given now that this is the second time this has been done in the last year.
The Statesman Journal states Democrats “have been given a mandate by a majority of voters to pursue climate change”. Here is where I think things are going off the rails and where history, demographics, geography all intersect.
The second headline was about a local bar setting up a piñata of Trump on Presidents day and running a theme entitled ‘Not My President’s Day’. Once local conservatives found out they started writing fake reviews in order to tank the overall rating of the bar and now both sides are mad about the situation.
The history lesson and deeper conclusions needs to wait for another post. For now, lets talk about a couple issues. One is that since the 1990’s Oregon is now a state where politics are completely controlled by the Democratic party. So, no matter how you vote, it doesn’t matter. The majority is becoming increasingly emboldened and radicalized. The riots over a Wallstreet, the dually elected president, the destiny comments, etc. are telltale signs of the future direction of the state.
There is a theory that getting caught up in the political dichotomy by picking one side or the other fuels the rise of extremism. By spending your time defending one sides actions over the other allows both sides to manipulate the population as a whole.
The use of the term Fascist gets thrown around all to often. The term has been propagandized and applied far beyond what is reasonable. We have the tools to change our government, but we don’t have the will or the desire because we live in the political dichotomy.
By far and large, we probably agree on more items than we disagree. Within my circle of associates, I am sure that we would disagree vehemently on political items. Heck, even my wife are opposites. But, there is very little I can do to change what is happening in Salem or Washington DC. And truthfully, there is very little the president or the governor have done to change my life.
One things for sure, this government does not reflect my values and we sure aren’t getting closer to more freedom. Those are the things that are important to me. So, I will move on to bigger and better things.
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