It Must Be Thursday

"It must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays." -Arthur Dent

Probably one of my favorite quotes from Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Anyway, here's what I've been up to...

Current status of the new micarta press. I've got some work to do here! I should have it in operation this weekend.

I'm pissed about this! I got a dimple die for a job I'm doing with a friend. I mushroomed it. This is "unsat" as we used to say in my service days...as in...unsatisfactory! It was clearly not properly hardened. I should have been able to press the dimple I wanted, even though I was working in 1/8" thick steel...which had been thinned down at the location of the dimple. I don't even know if I'm going to screw around with the manufacturer or if I'll just scrap it and make a new one.

I took a bit of risk when I built my EERF grinder. The original design is all steel. I made much of it out of aluminum. These two parts form the sides of the "box" that the tooling arm rests in. The tooling arms I made are also aluminum. Rubbing two like metals together causes galling. The movement of the tooling arm in the box, over time, will cause this to happen. My solution is to make these poly shims to go under the sides of the box. We'll see what happens.

An old dress shirt. I wore it once. I hate patterned shirts. As in...HATE...in all caps. I'm a solid color kinda guy. This has been in a box at my dad's house since my days as a teen. I recently brought those last couple of boxes to my house (hey...after 20 years...it was time). Not that long ago, I would have just tossed it, but not today! As I type this, it is in my micarta press becoming a knife handle! I hope it turns out, should be pretty cool.