Anonymous Web Angel(GFZ)

At one time, I was a member of the NRA. My mentor gave me that membership. The legislative announcements we received were useful.

We submitted testimony three times, I spoke before the Maryland Senate committee that was looking at infringement bills. Every time, it was the NRA that gave us the heads-up. It was the NRA there, fighting for our rights.

In those committee hearings, there were always a dozen or more anti-gun groups and exactly one pro-Second Amendment group.

We look and see the NRA is missing in the current court battles. They were there. They still are.

Consider the name of this group, “The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association”. You might remember them from such hits as “New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York” and “New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, Et Al.”.

Let me quote you a little something from their web page: We are a not-for-profit 501(c)4 organization and the official NRA-affiliated State Association in New York..

That’s correct, that was the NRA working for many years to help get our win in Bruen

Today, the NRA is a shell of its former self. I know people who maintain their memberships because they just do. I send my money to other groups, groups who I see in court battles time and time again.

Please pray that the NRA can recover from its nose dive to become a powerhouse in the support of the Second Amendment again.

I am a “hobby” machinist. I’ve read some books, I’ve watched 1000s of YouTube videos. I’ve even been in the shop and made things. But I’m still a hobby grade machinist.

Occasionally, there are things that you just don’t know you don’t know.

The bible for machinists is the Machinery’s Handbook. It contains maths, it contains formulas, it contains specifications, it contains just about any knowledge you might need to machine something.

I’ve looked at the section on bearings, and it didn’t click.

Then one of you sent me some feedback on the Casinator. It was obvious from the outset that they knew what they were talking about. They rattled off specifications and bearing identifiers without issue. I had to spend some time looking things up.

One of the things that we deal with is attaching things to one another. You can glue things together with molten metal, but that has its issues. You can attach things with bolts and other fasteners. You can also shove something into a hole that is too small for it with enough force that it goes in and stays in place.

That last thing is called a “press fit”. Assume you have a 1/4in hole, and you want to press a 1/4in shaft into that hole and have it stick. If the hole is 0.2500 and the shaft is 0.2490, the shaft clears the hole. As long as the shaft doesn’t expand or the hole shrinks from heat, everything is fine.

But we want it to stick. We can either make the hole smaller or the shaft bigger. The Machinery’s Handbook will guide you to the correct values.

Bearings are designed to be held in place. One of the most common methods is a press fit. For the types of bearings I’m using, this means that when the bearing is pressed onto the shaft, it stays. When the bearing is pressed into the faceplate, it stays.

The amount of interference is based on many factors, some of those factors are known only to the manufacturer of the bearings.

Thus, “nominal”. With the R4ZZ bearings I am using, they are nominally 5/8 OD and 1/4 ID.

They are not 0.6250 and 0.2500. The OD is large, and the ID is smaller. The interference fit is built into the bearing design.

My job is to hit the proper sizes when I machine the pockets and shafts. That is to say, my pockets must be 0.6250 within the given tolerances, and the shaft must be 0.250 within the given tolerances.

No maths for me! Just hit my numbers.

Thank you!

Thank you, everybody who has given me feed back on the reloading series and on my dreams of building the Casinater.

The court cases are starting to ramp up, I’ll be digging into those a bit more as progress happens.

My wife told me that when she sees an article with countless words and numerous quotes, she has to put extra time aside to read them. That reading the quotes is particularly difficult.

I’ve added some new formatting capabilities. I’m going to start highlighting important parts of quotes. I need those quotes because I want context to be available to you. I want the highlighting so that it is easier for you to follow what I consider to be significant.

The comments are open, please let us know what we are doing right and what we need to improve.

Thanks again.

I have all the raw materials in hand, as well as the motor and power supply. The 5 mm drive belt material is somewhere in the reloading supplies. It is the material I used to make a replacement belt for the wet tumbler when the original, 20-year-old belt broke.

Is this a commercial design? No. The front drive belt is there to provide a built-in safety. It will slip if there is too much drag on the system. In a finished product, I would be mounting the motor differently, behind the front plate.

In the same way, the idler shoulder bolt would be a blind hole instead of a through hole.

Finally, it is likely that a better design would use belts for driving everything instead of gears and belts.

Here’s a peek at the rear.

As soon as I get working drawings out of FreeCAD, I’ll go into the shop and make the faceplate and mount up the motor.

The next step will be to press the bearings into the faceplate. Then I’ll make the drive pulley, the cutter/driven pulley, and the three toolholders.

The last step is making the gears. I’ll be cutting a longish piece of Delrin with 22 tooth gears. That long gear will then be cut into 4 actual gears to use. The final task will be the 14 tooth idler gear and the shoulder bolt.

Exciting times.

The Seventh Circuit court ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen and decided that Illinois did nothing wrong when they held their Bruen tantrum to bass PICA.

The case got dumped back in Judge McGlynn’s lap. The plaintiffs filed motions for things to help The People.

Judge McGlynn denied them, but in writing that denial he took issue with the Seventh Circuit court. This is the same as publicly stating, “The boss told me to fill your home with concrete. I have to do it. They are wrong for all these reasons …”.

But in the meantime, the state has continued their quest to deny Second Amendment protected rights to The People of Illinois.

On December 22, 2023, the state told the court: Our attorney is super-duper busy. She’s scheduled herself out of the office from December 26 through January 9. And she’s so busy, she has other cases with deadlines, there are three holidays, she just can’t do it.

Yesterday, Judge McGlynn said, “NO. You WILL have the scheduled reply by the 19th of January.”

From following these cases, I believe that the normal scheduling is about a month, with replies due 3 weeks after and responses do a week after the reply. It feels like Judge McGlynn is going to keep the state on a short leash.

There was a time when I had the luxury of going shopping for movies and music every Friday. The family would get in the car, and we would drive over to Circuit City and look through the new movie releases.

As we were looking through the movies, I heard a nice five string quartet on the store speakers. I asked what the group was, found the disk and went to purchase it.

My eldest daughter, a freshman in high school, took one look at the cover and accused me of buying the album because the cover art showed some fine ladies.

If this is a repeat, sorry.

Welcome to the beginning of another year of crisis.

One and a half years after the Supreme Court issued their opinion in the Bruen case, not a single Second Amendment challenge has been resolved. Every state that had Draconian infringements now has worse infringements.

After Bruen I was hoping to get a permit to carry in MA. That is not happening anytime soon.

The economy is the worse I’ve ever seen it. For the first time in my life, I’m stressing about bringing in enough money for the family.

We are already into the campaign process. I’m watching Biden hide in the basement, not bothering to campaign at all. Meanwhile, the media is attacking each of the Republican candidates in turn. It will only get worse.

I’ve decided on my next project, I just do a reasonable job of it.

It turns out that there are multiple different companies that sell trimmers for cutting cases to length. The issue is setting the distance to trim. Both Lee and Lyman have a system where a probe goes through the flash hole to bottom out on the case holder.

Those probes fit all the standard cutters.

The cutters have standard threads.

My project is a geared motor driving the trimmer. The connection will be via rubber pulley. The shaft will feed through the face and where a gear will be mounted. That will drive a distribution gear to drive three other shafts. Feeding back to the front where they will be drilled and tapped to take the standard case prep tools.

So, when setup and running, you will be able to trim a case to length, chamfer the outside, chamfer the inside and then mount the next case for processing. When doing the pockets, you can have up to four tools spinning. I figure a reamer, a normalizer, and a pocket hole cleaner.

It is all fun, I’ve got some Delrin rods to make gears from, looking forward to making this monster.

Happy New Years to you all.

Stay ready, stay prepared, have fun.

My original router was Vyatta running on a virtual machine on at PC. 100baseT connections
I upgraded that to an EdgeRouter X by Ubiquiti. The base software was built on Vyatta.
The EdgeRouter X is dual core 800Mhz MIPS cpu with 4 (or 5?) Gig-E ports.
The EdgeRouter X was unable to keep up with 1GBit/s traffic between two ports with NAT running.
The EdgeRouter X was just replaced with an EdgeRouter 4.
The EdgeRouter 4 is a four core 1Gz MIPS cpu with 3 Gig-E ports and one 1Gbit SFP port.
The Edgerouter 4 is keeping up with the current traffic load.
Things will likely break when I upgrade to the Fidium 2Gbit/s services.
END-UPDATE
(950 words)
One of the things I enjoy doing is teaching English as a Second Language to some of my client’s employees. (You in the back, stop sniggering, yes, I can actually teach dis stuf.)

I have written a custom program that tracks the progress of each student in their book of choice. There is a screen for reading which displays a bit more than a paragraph. I have buttons to show definition or to play a pronunciation sound bite.

It tracks each session, recording which paragraphs are read, what words we look at. At the end of a session, I can click one button and email them the automatic notes along with any notes I might add.

To do the actual communication, we use Google Hangouts/Meetings. Unfortunately, switching between different displays is not easy.

Enter Open Broadcast Studio, or OBS for short. OBS allows me to set up scenes. Each scene has different sources. These are combined to create a single output.

The output is then streamed to a streaming service, or it is recorded. Or you can use the virtual camera to export the image.

This thing is so neat that I created a short animation of Sonic popping up over my shoulder as I sat at my desk. Then, in a video chat with my grandson, I clicked the button that made the animation run. My grandson was over the roof to see Sonic in the same room as me.

I set up OBS to follow the window that has focus, of an allowed subset, which makes it easy for me to run three windows and have my students see exactly what I want them to see.

The problem that started to crop up was the network was dropping out. Two or three times per session.

In addition to that, we’ve had significant issues with the upstairs getting good signal since the new roof went on the house.

When we upgraded from Comcast to Fidium, we got a 100x speed up in our uploads. This means that we can do regular backups of the machines at the house.

Except I can’t. I’m topping out at 20 Mbits/second on the backups. This is much too slow.

Tuesday, I had had enough. I had communicated with my cloud provider, verified bandwidth in and out of my instances. From there I followed up with Fidium. Fidium said, “that’s slow” and sent out a tech.

Wednesday the tech arrives. We do speed testing with all of my equipment out of the loop. 995Mbit/s. Close enough to 1Gbit/s to make no difference.

The problem is with my equipment.

My equipment is commercial grade stuff. It should not be failing. So I do testing. Sure enough, my router is the bottleneck.

My original router was a virtual machine running on a PC with Vyatta router software. It worked fine, but that PC needed to retire. It was replaced with an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. That was a fanless box about 4x5x1 inches. 5 ports with PoE. Great little router. 800Mhz Dual core. It replaced my old PC box and just worked.

That is, until I tried to move 1Gb/s in and out of that poor little box.

It crapped its little pants. Up to and including locking up hard.

As I’m investigating, my wife screams from the kitchen. When I went to investigate, the door of the front-loading washing machine had broken off.

That’s ok, It is mostly plastic with some metal bushings for the hinge.

NOPE. It is mostly plastic. The outer frame runs $250, the inner door panel runs $250, the hinge is cheap at $55.

And I can’t get it apart because one of the screws has rusted and stripped while I was attempting to take it out.

Which leads to ordering new and better tools.

The next day we were in the garage, on a 20ft extension ladder leaning against the slope of the roof, drilling and cutting a hole in the roof.

When we had the roof replaced, I had the guys go into the garage and mark where it was safe to cut through into the space between the house and the garage. So I was able to drill it safely.

We then spent nearly 3 hours trying to pull cable from the house side to the hole we had cut. It didn’t help that my son got his left and right mixed up and was yelling at me to move my tape to the right when he really wanted it to go left.

In the end, we stuck a 6 ft length of aluminum rod through the hole at the house side. My son then fished a zip tie loop over that rod and then that was pushed back to the wall. Then we feed the other fishing tape out from the house and through the loop. Then my son pulled his tape back to the hole we had cut, finally pulling it back into the garage.

10 minutes later, I had cable upstairs and the PoE access point powered up. It all just worked.

Network win! We finally have good connectivity in the upstairs again.

This left the washing machine and router to deal with. After discussions with the family, I ordered a new router.

It arrived Saturday. I was able to transfer the configuration from the old router. Did some other magic configuration. Then simply unplugged the old router, plugged the cables into the new router.

The upgrade was so seamless that connections to my remote instances stayed up while I did the switch over.

So I now have 950Mbit/second in and out of the router. My backups might run faster. The world is getting network better.

Oh, no glitches in network traffic since I replaced the router.

(1100 words)
My friend, Jim, use to tell me, “Never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.”

Does anybody who reads this blog believer that Rob Bonta actually believes the stuff he peddles about every California infringement being “constitutional?”

Who here believes that Judge Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit and his Muppet, Judge Wood, actually think that AR-15s are machine guns and can be banned?

Does anybody actually think that Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, really believes that the “in common use” phrase is confusing?

We look at these cases, and it is clear that this in not incompetence, this is pure malice on the part of the state and of the inferior courts.

We know this is malice, intentionally inflicted on The People, when we see the state play games to avoid a ruling that would remove an unconstitutional law.

In Winter, the Supreme Court described the four factors in determining if a preliminary injunction or a stay should be issued. Likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, balance of equity, and public interest. Every lawyer knows this, every judge and justice knows this, every state actor involved with litigating these legal challenges knows this.

Hell, even you and I know this.

Another part of the Winter opinion was that it addressed how important it was to look at the likelihood of success on the merits. The court is not allowed to look at the “public interest” and decide on that factor.

Yet courts did it, over and over and over again.

They would decide that it was in the public interest for some infringement to exist and deny injunctions.

So what happens if the plaintiff is likely to prevail on the merits? The court moves to the next Winter factor, irreparable harm. The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury[xCite item=”DZH5W8VT” p=373 pos=0]. More bluntly, if it is a constitutional challenge, and the movant is likely to win on the merits, they also win on irreparable harm.

Similarly, the Supreme Court has found that the balance of equity favors the movant when it is a constitutional challenge they are likely to win on the merits. Finally, the Supreme Court has stated that there is no public interest in enforcing an unconstitutional law.

What this all means is that if the movant is likely to win on the merits of a constitutional challenge, they win.

When the inferior courts decided Second Amendment challenges based on public interest favoring the state, they had to knowingly disregard all the Supreme Court instructions on merits first and if it is a constitutional challenge, they win.

They did this by creating circular logic. They could deny the movant’s motion for a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to win on the merits because the inferior courts were going to disregard the merits because of public interest.

Before Bruen, we were watching another case coming out of New York State. That was the challenge to NYC’s regulation that said you could not transport your firearm out of NYC. The only places you could take your firearm were to the very few actual gun ranges in NYC.

The plaintiffs (good guys) wanted to take their firearms out of the city to other states and even NY, for competition, hunting, and other.

For multiple years, the state fought tooth and nail to stop the challenge. At every moment, they made the claim that their infringement fully comported with the Second Amendment. They continued to make this claim until the case was being considered for certiorari. When that happened, the city removed the regulation. The state passed a new law to forbid NYC from reinstating the regulation.

Then the city and state went to the Supreme Court and whined that the case was now moot. There was no more conflict. The plaintiffs (good guys) had gotten all the relief that they had requested.

Regardless of your stance on abortion, it is obvious that the longest a woman can be pregnant is 9 months, give or take a little. That means that if a woman wants to challenge an abortion regulation, she has to get through the entire legal process, and reach a resolution within 9 months.

It isn’t going to happen. For many years, abortion cases were mooted because the fetus had aged out of being aborted.

Consider one example case. A single woman residing in Dallas County, Texas brought suit in federal court in March 1970. She was at least 1 month pregnant at that time. By December 1970, she would have given birth. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued their opinion that she could get an abortion.

When the Supreme Court issued their opinion, her daughter had recently celebrated her second birthday.

In the normal course of events, this case would have been mooted in December 1970. Because the plaintiff amended her original complaint to sue “on behalf of herself and all other women” similarly situated, the case was not mooted.

If your law is good and constitutional, why would you want to keep the Supreme Court from issuing an opinion? They are going to find in your favor, right?

Up in the Eighth Circuit court, we see the same game being played. The plaintiffs (good guys) have been attempting to have a Minnesota law overturned banning 18-20 year-olds from getting gun permits.

These plaintiffs have been fighting this legal battle since June 2021, before Bruen. The state demanded that the plaintiffs prove they were in the age group. The state was upset that the individual plaintiffs had joined the organizational plaintiffs the same day the suit was filed.

In discovery, the state attempted to get a complete list of members from the organizational plaintiffs. That was rebuffed and only the three on the suit were disclosed.

Amazingly enough, the three individuals are now old enough to get a permit under Minnesota law. The state wants to moot the case.

Knowing this was going to happen, the plaintiffs moved to amend their original complaint by adding other individual plaintiffs. The state claims “it ain’t fair!” the lower court has given a deadline for filings. The amended filing was after that filing, so it should be disregarded.

If their law is good, why are they attempting to moot it? It isn’t like there aren’t other people in the same situation. The plaintiffs have even attempted to bring forth more such plaintiffs.

The state wants this case dead. If we want the law overturned, the state argues that we should start all over again.

[xCiteBib]

I hope you all had a great Holiday Season.

Thank you to all of our readers. You are what keeps us going. Well, at least me.

I’m hoping for some short articles this weekend (yeah, AWA, you wouldn’t know a short article if it bit you in the arse.)

There are some interesting cases moving forward. There are several cases that are being appealed to the Circuit courts.

In the meantime, the comments are open.