It has been a wonderful shop week. I squared up a 3.5x6x1.5 using a homemade fly cutter. Very nice results. Tried to mill a slot with a 3/4 roughing end mill, but it didn’t sound good, so I switched to using a face mill.

Finished cutting the slot to depth, pleased as punch, found out that the slot was too wide. Measure at least once!

This led to me doing still more organizational work in the shop. That includes 12 strong magnetic hooks, so I can hang clipboards almost anywhere.

Turns out that I can mill that face down level and then cut the slot again, with an end mill.

The result was beautiful. I’ve milled a slot 1.406 wide, 0.420 deep in the center and 4.005 deep on the edges. I started cutting the dovetails. It looks beautiful.

My dovetail cutter is too small.

Oh, well. I can’t stop there, I’ve got a larger dovetail cutter on its way.

Meanwhile, the missing parts to the dividing plate accessories arrived today. I do have to cut a grove for the spring washer to hold the sector arms in place. I am also going to turn and thread the eccentric to take a threaded ring for tensioning.

I should be able to cut my first gears this weekend! I’m looking forward to it. I do need to take a picture of the 3-jaw chuck holding another 3-jaw chuck with a backplate bolted on for facing. That worked better than I should have expected.

One of the things I’ve started doing since my cast iron mistake is that I am actually looking at and working with the right feeds and speeds. It makes a difference.

In court cases.

The Supreme Court held a conference yesterday, they will release their order list on Monday. During this conference, they discussed Harrel v. Raoul. This is the lead case in the cases out of the Seventh Circuit court over PICA. The Illinois semi-auto and magazine ban cases.

In my opinion, this is the case to be watching. Given the opinions that were issued yesterday by the Supreme Court, the justice that will be writing the opinion is Rahemi will be one of the conservative justices. It could even be Thomas, himself.

Thank you for all the feedback I received regarding being fat. I will continue to work the problem.

The comments, of course, are open. Please let us know what is on your mind, what you’d like to hear about, or just pick your best meme of the week and share.