Monday, December 26, 2016

Posterior Microdiscectomy Foraminotomy

.... or what Santa is bringing me for Christmas in two days time. It is supposed to provide some pain relief to my left shoulder and arm as well as eliminate the tingling in my hand and arm... in 90% of the cases it does anyhow. Hopefully the doc don't mess it up, and the anesthesiologist manages to wake me up afterwards.


https://youtu.be/sgHQas9VeLA

Sunday, December 18, 2016

More closet work

It's the job that never ends. Not a bad thing really. The smaller hallway closet in my customer's house needed some shelving. But it had to serve both as a coat closet and a place to park large kitchen counter-top appliances. Nothing to it.
So I picked up some birch ply, some #2 pine and fired up the wood stove in the garage.
It would barely keep the place above freezing while it was in the single digits outside and blowing 40mph
A couple of hours later, once I got some of the cold knocked out of the garage I started to put together a kit as it would need to come apart in order to get it in the closet.
About 4 hours of fiddling got me this far.
  I was out of the shelving pegs so I ran to Lowes to pick up some more and bought a small bag with 20 count of them. When I got home and opened it I found this Chinese coin in among the shelving pegs. I figure some poor slave worker in China is trying to send me a message.
On Friday afternoon before the storm I took it all apart and brought it over to the house. With some degree of fuss I was able to assemble it inside the closet. The whole thing sits on the top edge of the baseboards and there are screws that go in from the underside to fix the bottom to the sides of the shelving unit. I used the shelves to elevate the whole box temporarily while I got those screws in from underneath along with some liberal use of expletives.
The shelves on the left are on moveable pegs can be adjusted for height as needed.
Murphie's food bucket even has a place to live.
Then Saturday morning we woke to winter.
Doves were huddling on the patio fence.
There were a few fools driving around.
Yuck
Welfare bums were helping themselves to the spoils.
I hear tell those doves make for good eating.
Pearl had the right idea.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

A Barn Door

My last customer wanted a barn door on the closet in the hallway. It had a four foot opening so nothing standard would fit.
Nothing to it then, we build it out of knotty pine to match the floor.
Countersunk screws and pegged just like the floor.
Sanded and polyurethaned about six times as I kept getting blemishes.
Got it to the job site on top of the van as it was too big to fit inside.
Got it hung. Tough job with a bum arm.
Looks good and the customer was happy with the results.
Though some continue to be unimpressed.
So I made a nice pizza to celebrate.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Squibs

As it was raining on Thursday and not much could be done out-doors, besides I have orders from the doctor to take it easy on my lame arm, I loaded up my gear and drove up to Howell's in Gray to try out their new indoor shooting range.

Went through about 150 rounds with the 9mm S&W and switched over to the Rossi model 68.
First shot sounded real lite. Hmmm! Real odd ..... OK...... STOP..... Unload the cylinder and check.
I can see light though the barrel. No obstructions. That was odd!
Lets reload and try again. Second shot was like a cap gun, just a little pop and no recoil. Alright then!!! something is not right. Unload the cylinder and check.
Well look at that!
That is what they call a squib. When a bullet gets stuck in the tube. If you pull the trigger again with one like that you get a big Kaboom and in all likelihood you will damage the firearm and be seriously injured. Good thing I am a bit paranoid about these things and was being careful. OK so we put that one away and go back to the 9mm. Cut out after only a half hour and headed home as I only brought a couple hundred rounds for the 9mm.
For the 38 SPL I was using my own pet reloads which consist of 158 grain SWC over 3.2 grains of Hodgdon HP-38.
This allows the ease of using the .03 cc dipper from the LEE powder measure kit to meter powder and makes for nice light powder-puff target loads.
When I got home I cleared the obstruction easily enough and weighed the offending bullet.
125.7 grains? no wonder!!!
3.2 grains of HP-38 is not nearly enough to propel a 125 grain bullet down the pipe. Using my Hornady bullet puller to remove the bullets off the remaining cases in the box I found 25 of them, one half the box had 125 grain bullets and the powder was consistently 3.2 grains. Somewhere along the way I must have had a major Brain Fart and grabbed the 125 grain pill box instead of the 158 grain box when I was reloading them. Lesson learned.
NOTE: For those not familiar with reloading the it seems counter intuitive to use a less propellant for a heavier projectile, but you have to think of it in terms of maximum allowable pressure in the firearm. See the right hand column in the above image. A lighter projectile offers less resistance than does a heavier one, thus the pressure is less if you use the same amount of propellant as you would for a heavier one. So for lighter projectiles we use a heavier propellant charge or you have the results I experienced here. Also to consider is whether the bullet is cast lead or jacketed as they offer different resistance and this result in different pressures, even if they are the same weight and use same charge of propellant.
On the Hodgdon can it  list 3.7 grains of HP-38 for the 158 grain bullets, but that would mean weighing every powder charge individually as ....
.....one of the issues with using the LEE Powder Measure kit I like, is that it skips a few dippers in the selection. No .2cc came with it so I have an older one I have added. But more importantly there is no .4cc dipper, which is exactly the range useful for the HP-38 powder.
So using a cut down .380 ACP case, a piece of wire and some heat shrink tubing I was able to make one ....
... that consistently throws 4.2 grains of HP-38 powder for the 125 grain pills...
and fits in between the .3 cc and .5 cc dipper
So I did a bit more reloading using my standard recipe.
158 grain lead-cast-semi-wad-cutters on freshly re-sized, re-primed and charged cases
 On the press before seating
Seated and crimped, about 5 cents cost compared to 25 cents for store bought
Repeat fifty times
Repeat two hundred and thirty five times

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Thirteen-hundred . . .

Thirteen-hundred holes, thirteen-hundred screws, thirteen-hundred pegs.... and you ask where have I been lately?
It all started when my last customer decided to move his children in to a better school system in neighboring town of Cape Elizabeth. So he bought a new house. Nothing remarkable really. Just your run of the mill 1970s split foyer that saw previous service as a rental and was in need of some serious mending.
It seems the tenants left their dogs alone all day and they needed some relief. There were multiple spots like this. So the carpets came up and the urine soaked particle board sub-floor as well.
Materials were ordered
And the lumberyard conveniently delivered to the second story deck for me.
Six hundred lineal feel of 1 x 12 eastern white pine dressed three sides
Easy walk in to the house... except for the painful shoulder and constant tingling in my arm
So I pulled up about eighteen-hundred screws and six hundred square feet of piss soaked three quarter inch particle board.
and two layers of ply and linoleum in the dining room
About 30 hours labor just in prep work alone ....
... til I could start laying the pine floor. Its just about here where I threw my lower back out and had to take four days off  to lay flat on my back and have it recover to some degree of function so as I could stand up and would not dribble on my self when I brushed my teeth.
after a quick recovery I went back at it . . .
Got the hallway done
then I tackled the living room
Pretty good for a lame back and a sore arm that tingles like the worst funny bone whack you ever had.
It was slow going as I was trying to make sure they were as tight to each other as possible.
All set with thirteen hundred counter-sunk screws....
...for which I needed to make thirteen hundred plugs....
A morning in the garage on the drill press
Produces something like this
Ripped in to strips and taped.
Then run through the table saw on edge to free up the plugs
Resulting in something that looks like this
A day and a half crawling around on the floor with a bottle of glue and a hammer....
and thirteen hundred holes are plugged.
Looked kind of nice with all the plugs standing proud like that.. but they all had to be chiseled flush with the floor
Then I got to dance with the buffer for about two days. Using a full blown floor belt sander would be way too rough on the soft pine.
Then the first coat of sealer goes down
Then I dance with the buffer some more
And first coat of polyurethane goes on.
After two coats of semi-gloss polyurethane are on it, it looks like this
It has that shabby chic look to it. Another fifty five hours of labor on the install and finish.
Then I tackle the oak treads on the stairs..... not good for my bad arm
and after two coats they look like this. Not bad, considered they had never been sealed and started out full of dog piss stains. Hoping to finish up this week.