I hope you had a great week and I hope your weekend will be better.

Last weekend, I had a chance to speak to a couple of expert survivalists. The sort that go off into the woods for a couple of months with just a few things, no food, no water. They go out to survive on the land.

I was asking about skills. There are many skills I do have and more that I don’t have.

What skills do you think you will need if you can’t just buy it, that you would suggest learning?

Examples: Making lye. This is a precursor to soap. Brewing, filtering water, grinding wheat, preserving meat and vegetables, making cordage.

On Saturday, I made a piece of scrap metal. I did a stupid, and then could not recover.

Then I proceeded to think my way out of my issue and into an incorrect answer.

Today I did the job over again, making different mistakes.

I’ve had more crashes making this backplate than any other task I’ve done.

The safest way to cut threads to a hard shoulder is to not cut towards the hard shoulder, cut away from it.

This means that you need to run the lathe in reverse. You have to position your cutter upside down or on the back of the side of the work.

Both options require a “left hand threading tool.” Don’t worry about it. Left hand and right hand just indicate which side of a tool the cutting edge is on.

Working in reverse, cutting an internal thread from a hard shoulder is simple. You pull the tool towards you, away from the work. You move the tool to the left to a hard stop. Your tool is now in the correct position along the axis. You then dial in the cut. This is the amount of material you are going to remove.

The final step is to engage the half nut. When you do this, the cartage starts to move away from the shoulder at the pitch required. When the cutter leaves the work, you disengage the half nut, rinse, and repeat until you have cut your threads correctly.

Chances of a crash? Almost none.

With my lathe, this can be an issue. The chuck is just screwed on. This means that it will just unscrew if the cutting force is high, and you are turning the chuck in reverse. You can make light cuts, but you have to watch, and you have to be careful.

This means I don’t do it. I don’t have the right tools to do it. That has been corrected.

I will be able to cut in reverse shortly.

If you are not cutting to away from a hard shoulder, you need to have a relief groove for the threading tool to enter. Without that, there can be issues with thread form at the end of the cut.

I have external grooving tools, I didn’t have an internal grooving tool. That has been corrected.

Because I didn’t have the left hand boring bar threading tool, and I don’t have that grooving tool, I decided to just do a through hole and thread that.

Because I turned my cross slide, all of my clearances are different. Even when I checked for clearances, I still messed up. I had the cross slide touch the work, no big deal but stupid. I had the 7/8 drill touch the jaws. About the only touch that didn’t happen was the tooling.

I got the threads cut. I got the registration cut. I then went to measure and double-check the size of the registration boss for the chuck.

That is 0.53 tall and 2.26 in diameter. The 2.26 will be cut to fit the chuck. The hole was bored to 1.75. It was then threaded 8 TPI. This means it has a major diameter of 1.87 or so. The size matching hole in the chuck back is measured at 2.17 this gives me 0.29 inches. Divide that in half, and we have 0.145 wall size, instead of the 0.59 that we would have done if I had used the proper design.

Regardless, I now have a collet check on a backplate that fits my lathe. The world is better.

Today, this song would never get air play. Yes, the south lost. That didn’t mean that the army was dishonorable, nor did it mean the people were.

President Lincoln, famously said:

Later, after the surrender, he stated I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. It is good to show the rebels that, with us, they will be free to hear it again.

There are so many things that are now labeled “racist” because somebody is offended.

Some things change because they should. Some things are removed from history, to allow the past to repeat itself.

Translation, since Bruen said that the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulations —New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. V. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. 2111 (U.S. 2022) that there must be some regulations from that time that would be acceptable under Bruen

This argument has been made many times. “If Bruen means what Bruen says, there are no modern infringements that would stand. Since the Supreme Court presumed that some infringements are constitutional, or that they were not addressing questions regarding those other infringements, then Bruen can’t mean what it says.”

“No true scotsman…”

I recently picked up 8.75 inches of 5.5 DuraBar, a type of cast iron. This is to become the backplate for a lathe chuck.

Friday afternoon, I started work on the backplate.

Since I repaired me horizontal bandsaw, cutting 2.75 inches off the bar was trivial. While the saw was working its way through those 5.5+ inches, I turned the jaws around on the chuck and got ready.

My saw did an outstanding job. It was time to start working on the blank.

The first operation was to face the raw end. The raw end had a sticker on it and was too rough to think about. It had around 0.25 of variation.

Since this is an interrupted cut, it requires light cuts until we are cutting almost completely. I was taking 0.050 cuts at the end. About an hour to get the first face done.

Normally, you would flip the piece and face the other side so that the two faces are parallel to each other. Since the purpose of this job is to end up with one face perpendicular to the spindle, that was not required.

The next operation was to poke a hole through the center of the disk. I did that in three steps, spot drilling, 3/8in starter drill, then a 7/8in taper shank drill.

I then bored the hole out to 1.125inches. Perfect.

The next step was to turn down the face to create a 0.625 boss with a 0.25in radius. Doing that operation was time-consuming, but I got it done. It looked great. That huge corner radius made it work.

My only issue was that my 0.5″ button toolholder needs to be kicked out. I didn’t notice at first, which required some adjustments. All the final passes were free-handed.

That was the end of Friday’s progress. I would have done more, but I couldn’t find my large, 18″ adjustable wrench to get the chuck off.

Saturday started with getting the chuck off. I found a tool that I could use, a couple of light taps with a dead blow hammer and the chuck came loose. It is still held on by at least an inch of thread engagement.

You would rather not drop the chuck on your ways, it would damage them. I use a piece of 3/4in plywood. I then started unscrewing the chuck.

I was using my left hand to support the chuck.

I stupided.

You can’t tell from that image, but my ring finger is the color of a purple grape. It is swollen by about 30%. It is no longer painful after taking meds.

Oh, did you suspect that I’m a touch typist? I use that finger often to type characters on the left of the keyboard.

Regardless, that stupid is even more stupid as I was contemplating making a cradle for the chuck, as Joe Pie suggested in one of his tips videos a few months ago.

I didn’t. I am suffering the consequences of my stupid.

After I had my “oops” I continued with my measurements. Turns out that a Craigslist purchase a couple of years ago has paid off again. I have not only my personally purchase’s 0-1″ micrometer, but that purchase came with 0-1″, 1-2″, 2-3″, 3-4″, 4-5″, and 5-6″. I’m happy to have found them again.

Once I have my measurements, I put the chuck back on the spindle and go to work boring to minor ID for 1 7/8×8 threads.

I hit my mark at 1.753 instead of my target of 1.750. Still within the specifications for 1 7/8×8.

Because I was set up to do the boring, I then bored to 1.887 0.250 deep. This is the most critical operation. The spindle has a registration boss at its base. This pocket needs to fit snugly on that boss. The better the fit, the more repeatable returning the chuck to the lathe will be.

I hit 1.8875. That’s spectacular for me. All is going well.

After lunch, I came back out and made that cradle. It took 15 minutes on the band saw.

That’s ready for the next time I need to pull the chuck.

I then cleaned up the lathe, cast iron chips had gone everywhere. Yes, I wear good protective eye wear.

The next operation is to single point the thread. This requires me to rotate the cross slide from 29 degrees to 119 degrees. This was done. I then indicated my tool post square.

It was time to cut threads.

This is where stupid number two comes in.

Normally, I use a dial indicator when cutting to depth. Because I wanted accurate locations, I used my micrometer stop.

That works for most things, but isn’t as accurate as using the micrometer stop. Nor is it as easy.

I had been using the micrometer stop for the boring operations. I now moved it out of the way to use the dial indicator.

And it doesn’t fit with the micrometer stop in its parking location.

So this is where error number two comes into play. I think I have a “regular” boring bar with a high-speed toolholder at the end. If I had bothered to find this and if I had bothered to grind a tool for grooving, I would have cut a relief groove inside that bore.

When you are cutting a thread on a lathe, the tool moves to the left in sync with the rotation of the spindle. At 8 threads per inch, the tool is moving at around 0.5 inches per second. I need to stop the forward motion at exactly the right spot. If I do not, then “bad things” will happen.

If I had that relief groove, I have more of a landing spot.

Using the dial indicator, if I over shoot, nothing bad happens. With the micrometer stop bad things can happen.

And bad things did happen. I missed.

Once I had everything straightened back out, I tried to recover.

No luck with that. I didn’t notice, but that crash rotated the cross slide, it rotated the tool post, it pulled the tool out of the toolholder. Yeah, everything was wrong. The good news is that nothing broke.

I’m cutting threads at the back of the hole, but I can’t seem to get things to work at the front. Nothing is working.

The tool post looks wonky. I slap a wrench on it and prepare to square it up again. As I start to loosen the nut, the entire cross slide rotates. That explains everything! I get the cross slide back in place and try again.

Nothing is working as expected. I can’t pick up the threads. I can’t seem to cut. It is just weird.

Looking hard at the boring bar, I decide to check to see if it is still square to the toolholder. It isn’t. That fixes it all, right?

Nope, the tool post is still twisted.

In the end, I get everything straightened out. I try to pick up the threads. At which point I realize that I’ve chewed the treats to shit.

The part is junked. I’ll be boring out the mess I made in the center, then that chuck of cast iron goes into the scrap bucket, and I’ll start all over again.

At the time I scrapped this part, I had about 6 hours of labor into it. I’m slow. I had turned around 4 pounds of cast iron into chips of the original 16 pounds.

Regardless, I had fun making chips.

No. Simply no.

I give you Judge Easterbrook, Judge Wood of the Seventh Circuit court, who looked at the Heller and decided it didn’t apply to the states. That was their “honest” understanding of the Constitution. Since the Second Amendment didn’t apply to the states, only state constitutions could be used to defend the rights of “the [little] people”.

I give you Judges Jacobs, Lynch, and Lee for the Second Circuit court, who looked at Bruen and Heller and decided that 3 regulations from 1837 and 1843 (past the founding era) excluding people with intellectual disabilities, mental illnesses, and alcohol additions from militia service plus some unknown regulations restricting firearms in schoolrooms met the requirements of this Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulations.

They reasoned that since alcoholics, mentally defectives were banned from Militia’s, not from keeping and bearing arms, that justified modern infringements on people who are neither alcoholics nor mentally defective.

I give you Judges Kayatta, Selya, and Gelpi. Who, using Bruen and Heller, found that even if the presumed that LCMs and “assault weapons” are arms (but they don’t know for sure), found that they are not in common use for self-defense. Thus, they are not protected.

But, you say, these are those nasty circuit courts coming up with these horrible opinions. But it isn’t just the circuits. It is happening in anti-gun courts everywhere.

Look at the fact that of the half dozen or so cases that were combined for the Seventh Circuit to hear, only one was in our favor. The courts in all other cases found that PICA was constitutional. Out in Oregon, we see the same thing. The district courts are finding the state’s infringements constitutional.

We are a land of common law. That means that the law means the same thing for everybody everywhere in the country.

When it is not, a superior court will bring it into agreement.