I’ve taken up smoking
For Christmas, I got Miguel a Sig P365.
He, in turn, gifted me a Cuisinart vertical propane smoker.
It’s been sitting outside since December because winter in New Hampshire sucks.
With the holiday weekend and the weather being beautiful, I decided to try it out.
I picked up a brisket, boneless leg of lamb, and boneless chicken thighs, as well as a bag of hickory chunks.
The brisket was dry rubbed with a mix of kosher salt, sugar, brown sugar, paprika, and black pepper, and left in the fridge for 48 hours.
The other meats got dry rubbed for three hours with some dry rubs that were gifted to me.
At noon, the brisket went in.
Three hours later, the rest of the meat and some Vidalia onions went in too.
At dinner time (about 7:00) everything came out.
Man cannot live by meat alone (he probably can, but his wife makes him make vegetables), so I did corn on the cob and potatoes on the grill.
After the meat rested, the spread was ready.
It was delicious.
I need to work on the timing a bit better, the thighs got a tad dry, but this was my first time.
We are going to be eating smoked meat for the next couple of weeks.
Thank you Miguel.
P.S. I need to refill my Atorvastatin.
When a Judge gets it right
—No. 45 Harrel v. Raoul, No. 3:23-cv-00141, slip op. at 3–4 (S.D. Ill.)
Some compelling prose from Judge McGlynn, District Court Judge, S.D. Ill. He gets it.
He does the right thing and grants the preliminary injunction. The state runs to mommy, the Seventh Circuit court.
There, Woods and Easterbrook make a mockery of judicial decorum, judicial precedents, and show their utter disrespect for the Supreme Court. They decided that icky guns aren’t arms under the Second Amendment, so there was no infringement.
As the Amici said in United States v. Kittson
By its plain language, Bruen eschews a two-step test and calls for a one-step test: “Despite the popularity of th[e] two-step approach, it is one step too many.” Bruen, 597 U.S. at 19. It would make little sense for the Court to expressly abrogate a step as unnecessary only to then reinsert a substitute.
Because the district court fundamentally misunderstood the approach Bruen requires, this case provides an excellent opportunity for this Court to clarify that the simple requirement that a Second Amendment case implicate the right to keep or bear arms is not a significant analytical “step,” and thus, as the district courts and other courts have transmuted it, an imposing hurdle. Rather, it is a simple qualifier. This is critical because courts have cynically transformed this manufactured first step into a barrier relieving the government of its burden of the historical analysis altogether, unfairly shifting burdens from the government to civil plaintiffs (or criminal defendants), and reinserting the interest balancing derided and forbade by Bruen under the guise of a purported “plain text” analysis that allows lower courts like this one to treat obvious arms-related questions as though they are not.
Memorial Day
FAFO Physics
Above a certain height, jumping into water is like hitting concrete pic.twitter.com/0XWDKb664o
— Lore of the Land (@LoreOfTh3Land) May 26, 2024
I read somewhere that when you go past 120 feet, your chances of surviving an impact with water are pretty much zilch.
Shop Update
I’ve decided I really don’t like FedEx delivery. The last two times they have delivered, they have delivered late. For the company that made a name for itself by being on time with the best tracking is now performing worse than the USPS.
When last we left you, we were doing something in the shop. Progress has been made.
This shows a different view of the shop. On the right, the Bridgeport is cutting a slot in the homemade toolholders.
These 3 are BXA sized, but the front slot is for 1/2″ tools. The key is that the top of the tool is at nearly the same height as if you had a 5/8″ tool in a regular BXA holder. It will be using 1/4-20 set screws for clamping and 3/8-16 for the height adjust.
The red tray over the lathe is shop made. Originally, there would have been a plate to hold collets for the lathe. I did not have the collet chuck, the collet closer nor did I have the tray. I had the post and the ring to hold the draw bar.
A few years ago, I made up this thing. It has three separators to keep the toolholders from sliding down or off. The plate is steel, but the separators are aluminum angle. This was a great improvement and organization system.
The three rows are “right hand turning tools”, “left hand/facing tools”, and boring bars.
I actually have more tools than I have holders, thus the need to make the toolholders. I’m waiting for a dovetail cutter to arrive before I can complete the toolholders.
There is another 12 inches for 6 more toolholders. 4 will be 5/8 slots and 2 will be 3/4 slots.
You can see the rotary table on the mill. I used the rotary table to finish the alignment boss for the chuck. You can see the shiny backing plate attached to the second chuck. Once it was attached to the chuck, I moved both to the lathe to face and turn it to size.
The jaws have been removed from the second chuck to allow it to fit against the jaws.
Yesterday’s progress didn’t feel like that much. I finished the slots in the first three toolholders. I got this picture, so I can break down the chuck in chuck setup. I drilled and tapped the holes in the retaining plate for the rotary table., and I started cutting the groove for the spring washer.
On the rotary table, you can see a small lever pointing to the right. That is the lever to rotate the eccentric to engage or disengage the worm. That disk is a replacement for the original. That is now completed.
Once that was done, I removed the retaining collar, the worm backlash adjust, the eccentric retaining plate.
With that, the eccentric came out with no issues. The worm came out by unscrewing it.
It was here that I realized that I had to cut a groove in the eccentric, not the central. Bummer.
This required changing out the chuck for the four jaw.
Which meant I had to actually clean the four jaw chuck. That went well. It still has 3 tight jaws, but it is much, much better.
Once the four jaw was back together, I realized that the cradle for the 3 jaw doesn’t fit the four jaw. This meant it was a pain in the rump to get it on. It happened.
Then I had to dial in the eccentric so it ran true. What this means is that by moving to opposing jaws, you can move the workpiece. By putting a dial indicator on the boss, you can measure the difference between opposite sides. You then move things until the reading stays the same as you rotate it.
I dialed everything in to within 0.001. For a groove, this is more than good enough.
I then realized I didn’t have a grooving tool. So I ground one.
Just as I started to cut the groove, Something felt off. I think the workpiece slipped in the chuck. I’m not sure that I tightened all the jaws fully.
This means I have to dial it back in again. Not a bit deal, but that is a today job, not a yesterday job.
The only task, after completing the groove, is to cut flats on the worm. This is a slight issue as I do not have any metric 5C collets to hold it.
This means that I will need to get ER40 collet blocks to go with my 5C collet blocks. A cheap set of metric ER40 collets covers nearly the same range as 5C and is pretty cheap.
What I will likely do is to use a pair of matched V-Blocks to hold it and use a square to make both sides parallel.
Again, this is not critical. It just has to be good enough for the crank arm to fit over and to be locked in place by the screw.
Is the goal to make us hate them?
GRAPHIC: Sturgeon, Missouri police officer kills small blind and deaf dog who wandered from yard.
The city says it “believes that the officer acted within his authority based on the information available to him at the time to protect against possible injury to citizens…” pic.twitter.com/TvhAnJJgOF
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 24, 2024
And the City doubled down in theory support.
The cop shot a old, blind, deaf, 10 lbs Shih Tzu because he feared getting bit.
What a dickless coward.
He makes the officers who stood around in Uvalde with their thumbs up their asses looked like He-Men.
If the cops wanted us normal people to hate them, would they be doing anything differently?