Chris Johnson

I am attempting to learn a new skill. Wood turning.

This is a Craigslist find. The cost was good enough. The motor and lathe chuck are worth more than I paid for it. So I wasn’t concerned about it working.

The lovely people we bought if from were ready when we arrived, s

Tuesday, I spent a few hours turning a log into a shaped spindle thing. It isn’t for anything, it is just practice.

Yes, I pulled that piece of wood out of the wood pile. Biggest issue? When I spun it up for the first time, the bark came off at speed. I wasn’t anywhere near the line of flight

I played with a bowl blank, was ok with what I was getting, decided I wanted to do something a bit better. Watched a half dozen YouTube videos.

That is my new bowl blank. It is two big, by far.

This morning, it was a fallen tree, the sort that kills kids. It was up high enough that kids will walk under it, it wasn’t stable. That is why it became a donor for the wood project.

Instead of my normal 20″ logs, I cut one thin. Or at least I thought it was thin. When I got the disk up to the shop, it turns out that it was a little to big to spin up.

The bandsaw did a good enough job cutting it down to a size I could mount.

Once mounted, I started roughing it to round. That was fun. The entire lathe was vibrating like mad. The roughing gouge peeled off chunks of wood.

It was fun watching the chips go flying. Well, until I turned around and saw that I had wood chips to the back wall, 20 feet away.

Once it was mostly round, the vibrations died out, and I started making it smooth and round. It looked like ribbons of wood flowing down a sluice gate.

The bowl like shape that I have there is smooth. I did an ok job. As they say, a grinder and paint make me the wielder I ain’t. In this case, a decorative cove and some sandpaper.

Unfortunately, it is too deep to turn unsupported. I’m going to cut part of off to make a top, then try again.

It is a learning curve. I’ll be up at the Fort at #4 on Saturday, I hope to use some of the skills I’m learning to make some spindles to repair some broken artifacts.

I swear that I don’t trawl TikToc. I swear.

Umm, don’t ask about X.

I remember taking some classes back in the olden times, where they described the Republican form of government that was created for these United States. I seem to remember that the federal government was made up of three branches, the legislative branch tasked with creating laws, the executive branch, tasked with implementing those laws and has veto powers over laws passed by the legislative branch, and the judicial branch, tasked with resolving disputes about the meaning of the laws.

If the President decides that a bill that has passed congress is unacceptable, he can veto that bill. If congress strongly disagrees with his opinion, they can override that veto.

Once the bill has become law, the President, as head of the executive branch, implements the law.

If there are any disputes about the law, that goes before the judiciary for their opinion.

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“That’s a nice business you have here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

For years and years, I was told to shut up and sit down when the Supreme Court made a 6-3 or 5-4 decision. My side lost. Just shut up.

And once I lost, I was told that I couldn’t fight it anymore.

When the left loses at the polls, they run to the court. They can always find a judge to rule the way they want.

I am reminded of the gay marriage fight in California. The people of California were asked to make gay marriage legal in multiple referendums. The people voted “no” each time.

Finally, they got a referendum to modify the California constitution to codify that marriage was between a man and a woman. The voters approved and the California constitution was amended to add that definition.

The left screamed and took it to court. In court, they got a judge to say that the amendment to their constitution, don constitutionally, was itself unconstitutional.

The court literally said that the constitution was unconstitutional.

When the Dobbs opinion was released, the left protested, violently. When Bruen was decided, the left had a violent meltdown.

Every time they lose, it is always because the other side is cheating.

The left is the party that breaks with tradition, to give themselves more power. Then they scream for the very protections they dismantled, once they are out of power.

The odds of Joe Bidden being the next President of these United States is getting lower and lower as the MSM finally stops hiding his abuse.

If Trump were to win, I am afraid that they will burn this country down. It will make the “mostly peaceful protests” of BLM and saint Floyd look like a small corner protest.

They are currently claiming that the Supreme Court has said that the President can murder people and get away with it. That’s not how it works. But it was another 6-3 opinion, which means that the left will not accept the results.

They lost, they won’t accept a loss.

Yesterday, I went up to the Fort at #4 to pick up Allyson and to play with the Lathe.

This time I took my chisels and was better prepared. I also took along some grease.

With a bit of patience, I got the lathe belted back up. About that time, Allyson arrived. She took on the task of pumping.

Since I brought up some grease, I was prepared to liberate some wear points. But, I was so excited, I just didn’t.

It took us a few tries, but we finally go things moving, and I was able to make chips. The squarish thing is slowly becoming round.

I checked the drive, and it was getting warm/hot. I stopped to get some grease into place. That seemed to have made a difference.

With that, I could try, try again. I could get it spinning. I can’t keep it spinning as I lose coordination. But for the time it is spinning, I was able to make wood chips.

I hope you notice the 2A shirt and the Kimber 1911 on my right hip.

The goal is to make my shop a usable space again. I used to have around 8 square feet of workbench, of which 2+ were taken up with the bench vise.

The wielding table is outside. The hydrologic press is outside. The blast cabinet is outside. Normally, they are under tarps, but that isn’t a long-term solution.

Mind you, the cost of those three tools was about $50 in raw steel.

The shop is really two shops in one. There is the wood shop and there is the metal shop. The wood shop consists of jointer, plainer, table saw, freestanding drill press, shaper, mortising machine, small belt sander and 12-inch disk sander, two vertical bandsaws.

There is 8 sq foot of cabinet top for all of that, 4 square feet of which is taken up by my bench grinder.

The other cabinet is supporting my wood machinist chest.

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Just what is —Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ____ (2024)? Chevron is the case where the Supreme Court found that the courts, both the Supreme and the inferior courts, should defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of statutes those agencies administer.—id..

The Chevron doctrine was another two-step framework. 1) Did Congress directly address the precise question, and was the congressional intent clear? 2) Is the statute silent or ambiguous with the specific issue at hand.

If the answer to both questions was “yes”, then the court was required to defer to the agency administrating the statute.

Like the two-step shuffle of pre-Bruen Second Amendment jurisprudence, the courts always found for the state. Is the puddle in my backyard navigable waters of the United States, as defined in the EPA? Congress did not precisely address puddles, and since this is a dispute, it must be ambiguous. EPA, do you think that puddles in his backyard qualify as navigable waters of the United States?

Well, yes. You see, that water flows into that ditch, that ditch flows into that stream (which is dry 9 out of 12 months), from there it flows into that creek, from there into that river. Rivers are navigable waters and this puddle is connected to it and contributes to it. If the owner of the property were to divert that water, they are effecting the river.

Now, that might sound like a made up example, it is not. It is a case from memory where the EPA took a homeowner to court for violating the Environmental Protection Act because they changed the contours of their backyard to eliminate a soft spot that got yucky a few times a year.

What is Loper
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There was a reason that the DoJ wanted Rahimi before the Supreme Court. The facts in his case were bad facts. Bad facts lead to bad law.

The first thing to note about the Rahimi opinion, is that it is an “as applied”. This means the opinion only counts for Rahimi. The decision does not directly affect anybody else.

Rahimi claimed that §922(g)(8) was unconstitutional on its face. This requires that there are no circumstances where it could be constitutional. This is an extremely high bar to meet.

This is where the bad facts start. Rahimi was subject to a domestic violence temporary restraining order. This requires that certain requirements be met. As stated in other articles, the law, as written, does not require that the accused receive notification, only that the notification was sent. It does not require that the accused appear at the hearing, only that they have an opportunity to attend.

Rahimi received his notification, appeared in court. This means that the first two, of three requirements are met.

The third requirement, is that the accused be found to be a credible threat.

Rahimi admitted, and the court found, that he was a credible threat.

This meets all three prongs of §922(g)(8)
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There was a remark about the lathe flywheel I recently worked on. Something about the precision of previous eras.

They had more precision than you might think.

Today, one of the tools we use to measure accurately is a micrometer.

This magic device allows use to measure down to 0.0001, all because of a screw.

Inside the thimble is a threaded rod. It is 40 TPI on an imperial micrometer. When you turn the thimble one full revolution, the spindle advances 0.025 inches.

The thimble is marked with 25 evenly spaced marks. With just those, we can measure to 0.001″

But what about those 1/10,000s? That is done with another piece of old tech, the vernier.

If you take and mark the sleeve with 10 marks, with 9 spaces between them, such that the 10th mark aligns with the 11th mark (10 spaces) on the thimble, we have a vernier scale.

The lines of the vernier align with the lines on the thimble at exactly 0.0001 increments.

You can use this method in larger things as well. If I have a stick with 101 marks and I place that against a stick with 100 marks, I’ve created an ability to subdivide that stick by 100. It is pretty remarkable.

The Wheel

The wheel is laminated to create a width of 3 inches. The wood is a hardwood that does not expand or contract. One laminate is about 2 inches thick, and the other is 1 inch thick.

If we were to remake the wheel, we would likely do it with two layers, 1.5 inches thick.

The jointers create wheel layers by jointing two or more planks of equal thickness together to make a single plank, 44+ inches wide in both directions.

To hold the laminates together, holes are drilled in each plank, about a foot apart. The holes are then transferred to the other layer. The other layer then has the hole drilled slightly offset. When the wooden pegs are driven into the holes, that offset pulls the planks together to make everything tight.

A piece of cordage or a beam compass can be used to draw the perimeter of the wheel. This would be at 44+ inches.

The laminate would be trimmed close to the line but not touching.

A hole would be drilled at the center point, and then made square with chisels.

The entire thing would then be mounted on a spindle to drive it. That could be as simple as two benches with a groove to hold the spindle. The wheel would then be spun up to speed.

A tool rest, would be brought in, the craftsman would then use his lathe chisels to make the wheel completely round. This is an easy, but time-consuming process.

It is easy because the task is to slowly move the chisel from one edge to the other. The speed of that movement requires that the cutting chisel be in contact with the work for one complete revolution.

Since the wheel is turning slowly, 40 to 60 RPM, it means that you can only move a 1/16th of an inch per revolution, or so.

After the wheel is turned true (completely round), the crown is put in via the same method.

A reasonable person turning a wheel like that can expect to get a 44-inch wheel running true within 1/32 of an inch, without having to work at it. It is easy.

There are entire volumes written about making things flat or straight. If you can make something flat or straight, you can make right angles. It is not difficult. If you can make right angles, you can make many other angles.

While the micrometer is a new invention, a simpler tool was used before, it was just a straight stick that was fairly long. It was placed on a pivot, near the nose of the stick. The other end moved across some sort of scale. As the nose moves, the tail moves more. If the distance from the pivot to the nose point is 0.5 inches, and the distance from the pivot to the tail point is 12 inches, every movement of the nose is amplified 24 times.

While you might not be able to see a movement of 0.001 in the nose, you can see the movement of 0.024 in the tail.

We can have precision with simple, old tools. It just takes a bit of work to get there.

I’m hoping.