General

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. (The Second Amendment, The Constitution)

In the years before the American Revolution, British rule stated that only Protestants could keep arms for self-protection (Regan Library). In the quickly coalescing United States, those early State governors and representatives realized that We The People required arms in order to protect ourselves, both at a personal level and as a country, and that denying arms to a subset of people (those not Protestant, for instance, and a few years later, Black people) was a bad idea. Either the Right was going to be infringed, or it wasn’t. Our Founding Fathers decided that not infringing was the correct way to go.

I happen to agree with them.

I am an absolutist when it comes to the Second Amendment. It is wrong, 100% wrong, to infringe on the right of someone to keep and bear arms. Anyone. Even Leftists. Even criminals, in fact, though I still struggle with this one (as an aside, if a criminal is too dangerous to be allowed to have their firearms, then they ought not be out of jail). You want to own a rail gun? Sure. You want to have a nuclear missile in your backyard? Fine. You just have to follow all the laws surrounding the owning of those things (for instance, if you have nuclear weapons, you have to have adequate, safe storage for them so that you don’t poison your land or your neighbors). It’s permissible, to a small extent, to limit certain things when it can inherently damage other people (as with nuclear weapons). The Founders were clear: SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.

The moment you start saying, “Oh, but I don’t want *that* person to have guns…” you’ve lost. You’re now on the Left, and you’ll be issued your blue hair dye and have your septum ring installed momentarily. And yes, this IS a hill I will die on.

“One primary motivation for the Second Amendment was the fear of federal tyrannical power. Many Founders believed that governments naturally tend toward oppression, and that an armed citizenry served as a crucial check against government overreach. This reasoning reflected the Revolutionary experience of fighting against what was perceived as British tyranny.” (Vanho Law)

People on the Right have long talked about the concern of the tyranny of the government. When Biden was in office, I heard it every other day. I heard it almost as often when Obama was in office. Valid concerns were voiced, and while I didn’t agree with all of them, I did listen. At that time, the Left thought the Right were a bunch of nutters.

Right now, people on the Left are concerned about tyranny of the government. They are in a complete and utter froth over Trump, ICE, and DHS. I hear this several times every day. I’m strongly of the opinion that most of the concerns voiced are bull… but even when I don’t agree with them, I listen. And now the Right thinks the Left are a bunch of nutters.

Is it scary to me that people who might be my enemies are arming themselves? Yes it is. But here’s the thing… freedom is not free. It’s not safe. It’s not easy. If you think anything about freedom is safe or easy or free, you obviously have not read your history books. Go read them, and then you may come back and comment.

It doesn’t matter if I’m scared or nervous or freaked out that the left may be arming themselves. In the same vein, I have been telling the left that for years, that the fact that I’m arming myself or my husband is arming himself or whatever is none of their business and it doesn’t matter if they’re freaked out or scared. It’s my right, I get to exercise it, and if you want to be upset over it, you are absolutely welcome to be but you’re not going to stop me exercising that right.

There is no possible way for me to say that to the left and then turn around and tell them that my piddly little fears or my gutty terrors are a reason for them not to be allowed to have firearms. I refuse to be a hypocrite. I refuse to be unethical, or situational. My ethics and my morals stand, no matter who they are aimed at. I believe the same things have to apply to everyone, and if there are laws and rules and regulations that don’t apply to everybody equally, then they should be removed. You can’t have rules for me but not for thee.

To bring this to a close, I strongly believe that people who jump through the hoops to get their firearms and the training, and maybe their CC paperwork, will become good and ethical 2A people. Eventually. I believe it is functionally impossible for someone to be a firearm owner, do training and practice, and not become a 2A supporter. In my albeit limited experience, everyone I know who has gone on to learn how to safely and properly use their firearms, has realized the stupidity of the gun control crowd.

Let the left arm themselves if that’s what they feel they need to do. If I’m scared, then I’m scared. That has nothing to do with their rights. Just as I tell them that their feelings have nothing to do with limiting my rights, I have to give them the same in return.

If you’re all for taking away the rights of your enemies, or restricting their access to certain things, whether that’s free speech, firearms and self-defense items, information, etc… then you are the Gestapo that they have been afraid of.

This is important stuff. You are all welcome to believe however you want, because I believe in the first amendment as well as the second. You have the freedom to believe what you want, think I’m an idiot, and anything else. But so do I.

I will protect your right to be afraid of the left being armed, to talk openly about that fear, and to brainstorm ways ways to be safe. But the moment you step out of line and start trying to take away the rights of others to speak freely, to keep and bear arms, you’re no better than you’re saying they are. I’ll still protect your right to say what you want, but I’m not going to protect you from the consequences of your statements.

I have often said both here on the blog and in other places that only in the crazy world that we live in right now, could I be considered conservative. In a sane world I would be slightly right of center of the liberal side, and I don’t have a problem with that. But in writing this missive and in interactions recently, I think I might be a bit more conservative than some of you give me credence for. Because I will say it clearly, it is a conservative value to refuse to use the government to take away the rights of someone else. And that’s where I stand.

If you look at the current snow maps and storm maps available, Chris and his family, and me and my family all live within the wibbly red area (in New England) labeled “Armageddon Area.” They are measuring likely snow in feet, not inches. We are ready and prepared for the weather, and have plans in place for if power goes out. If you don’t hear from us for a few days, you know the reason why. We’ll post when we can, and give updates. You update us, too!

If you live in an area about to get hit with ice or snow, and you aren’t used to that, please be prepared. That doesn’t mean bread and milk, although those aren’t a bad idea either. It means making sure you have enough food to last through the worst of the emergency (because having to go out to get eggs or whatever is never a good idea). It means having firewood on hand to make a fire, if you have the means to do so. Have a camp stove ready to go, with extra fuel, so that you can cook if your power goes out and you’re dependent upon an electric stove. Know how you’ll keep warm, should you lose power and heat. Have something to use as a port-a-pottie if you can’t use your bathroom due to frozen pipes.

To generate heat, pick a single room and designate it “the warm room.” Everyone stays in that room unless they have to pee, and trust me, they’ll move quickly to get back to the warmth. Get every blanket, towel, woolen thing, tablecloth, and bring it to that room. Seal that room off so that the heat stays inside it. Cover windows, doors, doorways to halls, anything that might have a draft. If you lose power and must stay at home for a while, drag a mattress into that room so you can sleep there as well. If temps go into the single digits, consider setting up a cheap tent in your warm room, and sleeping inside that to conserve heat.

Ways to make safe heat:

• candles and oil lamps
• fireplaces (though they sometimes let out more heat than the give you)
• wood stoves
• indoor safe (RATED) propane heaters like Little Buddy
• hot water bottles
• hot food
• layers of clothes and blankets

Ways to kill yourself:

• use your stove, outdoor rated gas camp stove, popcorn popper, etc to make heat
• bring your generator inside the house
• leave candles and/or any flame unattended
• putting flames where they could get knocked over by a pet
• eating snow (it lowers your body temp very quickly)

You can use tea candles to cook over, if you’re desperate. Having a camp stove makes it much easier. I prefer propane to butane, because in the temps we’re expecting, the butane won’t work. It’ll fail more often than not. So be aware. You also don’t have to have the fancy folding stove like in this video for the sterno stove. I just have an old wire basket that was once used for doing deep frying, and I turn it over top of my candles. I put my pot on top of that. Voila, stove. You can also put a brick on either side of your heat, then use a baking rack. And remember, you can always go outside and cook, even when it’s cold. Snow is an insulator, so if you dig yourself a snow pit and cook in the center of it, it’ll help keep you warm and keep the breeze off your fire.

My first computer was a Litton Automated Business machine. It used drum memory to store data and had an instruction register and maybe two other registers. I purchased it for $100 my first summer home from college.

It was a remarkable machine. It was fun to work with, but you really couldn’t do much with it. It had dual paper tape readers, a printer, and a paper tape punch. I wrote an inventory control program for my father with just that, in something that looked very much like machine code.

It wasn’t a usable machine for my father.

The computer I told my parents to get was a Macintosh. They just worked out of the box. Plug them in and you had a word processor, a paint program, and I think a spreadsheet. It all just worked.

They got a PC and fought with it for years.

Today I can buy a piece of hardware, load an operating system on it, and have it fully functional as a general purpose computer or acting as an embedded machine in just about an hour.

The biggest time sink is removing and inserting screws to hold everything in place.

3D Printer

10 years ago or so I purchased a 3D printer kit. I’m sure I never got a fully successful printout of that damn thing. I had to do so much to just get it to do something. I spent more time trying to make it work than I did printing. And it was fragile.

Today, I believe that the kit instructions had the count of the number of teeth on one of the drivers wrong. Which meant that cubes were squished.

Today we have Macintosh printers. After 6 months of research, I pulled the trigger and purchased a Bambu Lab’s P2S printer with AMS.

Setup took around 2 hours. Every step was clearly documented. All the tools to do setup were included. Mostly setup consisted of removing packing, tape, and shipping screws.

Thereafter, it was plugging in one cable, 2 tubes, and the power. Turning on the power brought up the screen that forced me through an initial setup process that calibrated everything.

Finally, I pressed a few buttons on the control panel, and it printed a tool.

From there I used the phone app to scan a QR code, which took me to a cloud version of a storage box to print. That’s printing as I write this.

Again, there is no effort on my part to do any of this. It is pick, click, and print.

Calibration

My kit had no bed leveler. That was done by putting a piece of paper on the bed, lowering the nozzle until it just touched, and then clicking the next button to repeat. I think there were 20 or more sample points. And I still don’t know if that was enough.

The automated version required the printer to be working to print a new piece for the printer, which would hold a switch. The switch used a paperclip as a probe. This went much faster, but it still didn’t work.

The motors were noisy, but it was a joy to watch them move the hotend around.

Today’s calibration took around 45 minutes. This included using the built-in lidar to measure the distance to the bed, and then I think it used a pressure sensor to determine when it actually touched the build plate. It took samples every centimeter or so in a grid. That went rapidly.

It then went into a noise tuning calibration. For 20 minutes it ran the hothead around in diagonals, working to find the correct stepper speeds at different head speeds and then tuning them to be quiet.

It worked. These are stepper motors you can’t really hear. It blows my mind.

From there it did vibration calibration. This thing can accelerate so fast that it will cause the printer to move. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This thing figured out, for this printer, on this surface, just how much the printer reacted to head movement to be able to offset that motion during the deceleration stage.

The first print after calibration took only a few minutes to check calibration before it started printing.

Slicers

To create a 3D print, you start with an idea. You build a 3D model. I use FreeCAD; people use many CAD systems; Fusion 360 is a popular one.

Once you have a “solid”, a completely closed volume, you export that solid as an STL or a STEP file.

An STL is a triangulated file; a STEP file still retains geometry. For example, an STL file will represent a cylinder as a mesh of triangles, while STEP represents the same geometry as a cylinder or as a curved surface; regardless, STEP is the cleaner format.

Now that you have a surface representation of your solid, you import that into a slicer. I’m using OrcaSlicer which is a fork of the Bambu Studios.

This allows some manipulation of stl/STEP objects. The important part is to position the object on the build plate with no overlaps. Once that is done, you can slice the volume.

This is where things have come so far.

The solid is sliced into layers, generally 0.2mm high. The slicer then calculates the path of the print head over the object at the same height. It knows where edges are and uses loops to make solid walls, it adds internal fill to keep the print light yet strong.

3D prints can’t print in thin air, sort of. They can span short distances before the plastic droops too much. To print with an overhang, or to put a top on something, the slicer has the hot end create a raft across infill or across supports. Once that layer is completed, it will put a more finished layer, then an actual finished layer.

The slicers are pure magic. It really is easy.

All the hard work remains back in the CAD package, which is the same package I’m using for all my other engineering builds.

If you are interested in 3D printing, decide why you want it. Then pick any of the plug and play printers out there. I strongly suggest getting one with an enclosure. An enclosure will be needed for certain types of filament.

A good set of starting projects are GridFinity, an organizational system for flat surfaces, including shelves and drawers, and MultiBoard, which is a hyped up pegboard system.

Folks, my ability to connect with the Left is becoming more and more dicey. The ones that aren’t insane are slowly creeping to the Right (which doesn’t mean they should be Conservatives, but is a relief), and then there’s the insane ones. I would like to say that the insane ones are a loud minority, but I think that’s not entirely true. I think it’s a rigid subset (Leftist women who are/were radical feminists who have been brainwashed by the media and have become radicalized jihadists for so-called Liberal values), and it’s not small. I don’t think it’s a majority, by any means, but it’s certainly the only part of the Left getting any air time.

Y’all know I’m not Christian. I was HORRIFIED at Lemon and his cohorts invading a church service. I don’t have to be Christian to know that’s a no-go. When I visit someone else’s house of worship, I follow *their* rules, not mine. If I’m unwilling to do so, I don’t go. Churches are the one place I consider to actually be a place of sanctuary. That is time-honored and long-standing, and goes far beyond the United States. Watching children cowering in the aisles, it was awful. But those folks, they were true Christians in my personal opinion, because their response to Lemon’s invasion was to pray. That part, at least, was nice to see.

I’ve been watching people on the Left go crazy in Minnesota. Blocking traffic, protesting in roadways, stopping ICE and other LEO vehicles, these things are wrong but I can at least kind of understand them. They’re “normal” protest tactics. I disagree (and for what it’s worth, I have *always* disagreed with any protest that blocks roadways, schools, LEOs, or hospitals, don’t care which side is doing it) but that’s between the protesters and the LEOs. But stopping everyday citizens and demanding papers (the protesters, not ICE who have the right to do so under many circumstances), requiring people to chant slogans (“I hate ICE!” and “I am not a Nazi!” are two I’ve seen on TikTok of late), etc… Why is this being allowed? WTF folks? That is literally what the Gestapo were doing. What ICE is doing is NOT what the Gestapo were doing. I’m aghast.

Mr. Magoo (my name for the heavy set Leftist gentleman who’s “protecting his neighborhood” with a firearm in Minneapolis) originally had my disdain because I thought he was breaking local laws (ie it’s illegal in Minneapolis to open carry a long rifle, which is what I thought he had), but turns out he’s perfectly within his rights to do what he’s doing. Therefore I’m fine with him, even if I think he looks a bit silly “protecting” his very white, very not-bothered-by-ICE neighborhood each day.

Which brings me to 2A stuff. Folks, there’s a lot of Leftists right now going out and purchasing firearms. There’s a LOT of noisy Conservatives complaining and bitching about that. I say to those Conservatives: shut the fuck up. I don’t CARE why the Leftists are finally exercising their right to keep and bear arms. They are doing so, now leave it alone. Encourage them to learn how to use their firearm safely, explain the basic rules to them, offer to take them to a range to practice on the regular. They are new 2A people. It’s none of your business WHY they are new 2A people. Doesn’t fucking matter. They think we’re nuts for the reasons we carry; we think they’re nuts for the reasons they carry. It doesn’t matter; they’re carrying. Time to step up and put your values into action. I am all for everyone carrying who wants to, and if we have new folks doing it, GREAT. At the end of this bullshit in Minnesota, they will still have their guns, and will probably continue to carry, and that makes them one step closer to being rational human beings. They’re also extremely unlikely to be vocally anti-2A while holding a handgun or rifle. The correct answer to, “I’m going to go buy a gun for protection!” is “Great, here’s the name and number of a fantastic trainer who’ll show you the ropes. Use it.”

About Charlie’s Voice: if men want women to be “real women” today, then they need to start being “real men” first. Yes, first. Because that’s LITERALLY the basics about being a man. You get to go first. Do you know when I started wearing skirts and cooking and doing home-bound stuff? When my man stood up and made it safe and comfortable for me to do so. Before that, I was working and trying to keep myself alive and healthy, and I didn’t have time to fuck around with peasant skirts and home cooked food. You want me to be a woman, then start by being a man. I’m really lucky that I have two very manly men in my life, who make it safe for me to be the woman that I am. They also support my decisions about myself, whether I want to exercise or work or stay home and write, or whatever. They make it safe for me to take the softer route, and I’m thankful for that. I was well on my way to being a hard-ass old woman, and instead, I’m a happy, healthy, productive and softer lady.

Three men were abducted by aliens. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer.

When they woke up, they were on one side of a room, and on the other side was a beautiful blonde with a pistol beside them.

A disembodied voice says, “You are allowed to move half the remaining distance across the room each time you move. If you can make it to the other side, you can do what you will with the blonde, and you will be set free. If you don’t make it to the other side, you can either kill yourself or be taken for the probings.”

The mathematician sits and thinks for a little, calculates a bit more, then says, “It is impossible; no matter how many steps you take, there will still be more to go.”

With that, the mathematician picks up the gun and shoots himself.

The engineer and physicist sit in shock for a moment before the physicist speaks up.

“You know that mathematicians are stuck in their numbers. They have no real-world experience. I’m going to test his hypothesis.”

So he does; on the first move he makes it halfway, on the second he is 3/4s of the way, and on the next move he’s 7/8s. He’s making progress, but he realizes he will never make it all the way.

He returns to his side of the room, picks up the gun, and offs himself.

The engineer is nearly in shock. He looks at the two bodies and then gathers himself up. He starts the process of crossing the room.

After over 50 moves, he reaches out, grabs the blonde, yanks her into his arms, and says, “Good enough for all practical purposes.”

For All Practical Purposes

During the age of steam, engineers developed a working idea of how steam engines worked and how to measure them. These men were not dumb; they understood nature, and they understood Newtonian physics. They developed formulas to guide them as they designed new engines.

What were they interested in? They wanted an efficient engine that produced enough work to make it worthwhile.

What is efficiency in a steam engine? How much steam it consumes. A boiler is only capable of producing a limited amount of steam. That is based on the amount of heat put into the system along with how efficient the boiler is at transferring the heat into water to force a phase change.

The more efficient the boiler, the less fuel it took to run. Coal and wood cost money.

An inefficient steam engine consumes more steam, which requires the boiler to produce more steam, which means more fuel.

The work that an engine produces is defined as brake torque and brake horsepower. Torque is how much rotational force is being produced, while horsepower is force of distance. Steam engines produce good torque over the entire range of supported speeds.

They had methods of measuring torque and horsepower. They could also measure the pressure of the steam. They knew the size of the piston they were using. They needed an expression for determining torque and horsepower before they designed an engine, much less built it.

The formula was P.L.A.N., which is pressure times length of stroke in feet times area of the piston face times the number of power strokes per minute.

They can easily measure stroke length, piston area, and power strokes per minute; those are simple things that can be measured with a ruler and a counter over time. But how do you measure the pressure?

The pressure changes over the time of the power stroke. At the start of the stroke, the cylinder has not yet filled with steam; it is still entering, so it is lower than the source. As the cylinder begins to fill, the piston starts moving, increasing the volume while reducing the pressure. The cutoff takes place, and now no more steam is being allowed to enter, and the steam that is there just expands, decreasing the pressure even more.

At every moment of that cycle there is a different pressure in the cylinder. With advanced math, you might be able to calculate it at every step then integrate over time.

These guys stuck some sort of pressure gauge on the cylinder and somehow measured the average (mean) pressure.

This is the value they used. The Mean Effective Pressure or MEP.

This is good enough for all practical purposes.

What is the starting pressure

If you have a closed system, the pressure at every point is the same. A steam engine is not a closed system. There is always steam being vented to the outside, either directly to the atmosphere or into a condenser.

This produces a sequence of pressure drops. The pressure is then built up as new steam flows from the boiler. All of this happens very rapidly, but it does take time. To reduce the amount of pulsing that hits the boiler, we use a steam reservoir, which is part of the steam chest.

When the flow of a fluid is stopped rapidly, it causes a “hammer” effect. Opening and closing the valves, allowing steam to flow into the cylinder and then stop can do just this.

The following video explains the water hammer phenomenon.

By putting that reservoir closer to the valves, we can stop that phenomenon from hammering on the boiler.

But how do we know what the pressure is in the steam chest? We might assume it is the same as the boiler, but it takes time for the steam chest to fill. The amount of time it takes to fill and stabilize is dependent on the size and shape of the piping from the boiler to the steam chest.

We need to measure or otherwise determine what the effective pressure in the steam chest is.

So we have a basic idea of what the pressure might be.

How much does it cost

Steam travels from the steam chest into the cylinder via a steam passage. The shape, wall texture, and size of the steam passage affect the speed at which the steam enters the cylinder. In addition, we have the mass of the fluid (air/steam) that is in the passage when we start pressurizing it.

We need to measure how long it takes to reach the cylinder port and how long it takes to fill the cylinder. The smaller the passage, the more velocity you lose and the longer it takes to fill the cylinder. If it takes longer to fill the cylinder than the admission stage of the cycle then we are not getting full power from the engine.

Sometimes these passages are drilled and plugged or covered. Other times they are cast into the cylinder body. If cast, the quality of that core determines the texture/smoothness of the walls of the passage. Other times, they are drilled in a straight line to intersecting passages. Regardless of how they are made, they are a complex shape that causes turbulence and can cause other issues.

We need to know how much we lose, the cost, of getting steam from the steam chest into the cylinder.

And what happens in the cylinder

As stated before, the cylinder volume is constantly changing. The volume is decreasing when we start allowing steam into the cylinder. This lead steam acts like a cushion or spring to help start the piston back in the other direction. Remember that we are not only using energy to create power/work, we are also using energy to reverse the direction of the cylinder.

With a standard 4 stroke engine, we have four stages: Intake, where we suck a fuel air mixture into the cylinder. Compression, where the fuel air mixture is compressed for maximum efficiency. The power stroke, where the fuel has burned and the expanding gas is driving the piston. Finally, we have the exhaust stroke, where the expended gases are pushed out of the cylinder.

Only the power stroke puts energy into the system. The other three strokes are wasted. The energy to move the piston comes from other cylinders or energy stored in a flywheel.

With the steam engine, as the volume is decreasing, the expended steam is being pushed out the exhaust port. In simple engines the exhaust port is the same as the inlet port. Just before top dead center, steam is allowed back into the cylinder, pushing against the piston. This slows the piston as it reverses direction. The steam pushes the piston away from the cylinder head, causing the volume to increase.

Before we reach bottom dead center, the inlet is cut off. The steam continues to expand, continuing to push on the piston. Finally the piston reverses direction, and the used steam is exhausted to the atmosphere.

We need to integrate the pressure at the surface of the piston over the entire cycle.

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

I have studied Finite Element Methods (FEM). CFD is a different from FEM but has many similar aspects. The gist is that we create a mesh of a volume. We set the initial conditions of every surface or point. The initial condition is the pressure and a velocity vector.

We then define some formulas that describe how the fluid acts. From this we propagate the initial conditions through the mesh to a “stable” result. We can then use that result as a new set of initial conditions and iterate another time step.

With this we can see pressure waves, velocities, and just about everything we need to know about the flow of the fluid through the mesh.

The great thing is that there are good, free CFD packages out there. I’m using OpenFOAM because I am using FreeCAD as my modeling software.

With FreeCAD you can build a “body” or “part”. A part is a single item. It can be created by additive or subtractive means. It could be a rough or machined casting or something made from bar stock.

The bodies are combined into “assemblies”. An assembly is a collection of parts that are connected with joints. Joints can be fixed, sliding, rotating, and a few others.

I’ve been able to take the parts of the steam engine I’ve modeled and create assemblies, which have shown me that I misread the prints. Meaning I’ve had to go back and redo the body/part which sometimes required redoing the assembly. An iterative process.

With a body, I should be able to create a negative of that body, representing the domain of for the CFD, which is what gets meshed.

I can use the CfdOF workbench to create meshes, set initial conditions, set the properties for the fluid, refine the mesh, and a dozen other things before passing the actual analysis off to OpenFOAM.

OpenFOAM runs for a long time and then produces results that I should be able to visualize. That has not been working all that well.

From this, I should be able to calculate what MEP is at every location and step of the system.

And I’m stuck here. Not totally stuck, but more of the I know I don’t know something, I’ll have to figure it out.

But what about the rest

All of the above is just to get a cylinder that will produce the power I need or want.

From there we move into the mechanical world. Here we have to design the components to meet the requirements of the cylinder.

How big should the piston rod be? It has no rotational or angular forces applied to it, just tension and compression. This is an FEM calculation or uses simple analytical calculations.

The connecting rod gets more complex. The big end is connected to the crankpin, which moves in a circle. The small end is attached to the end of the piston rod. It moves in a linear motion. We need to evaluate the forces in play on the crosshead pin and the crankpin to make sure they are strong enough but not overkill. We need to design for reduced mass because mass changing directions takes energy.

We also have to worry about the vibrations we get from throwing the crankpin in a circle.

If you want to design a vibrating thing, just put a weight off-center on a spinning thing, and you get vibrations. We balance the wheels of our cars to remove that type of vibration. We have to balance the crank to remove as much of the vibration as possible.

But we have to know what the forces in play are at every stage of the cycle to know how to cancel them. Painful.

We need to know the size of the driveshaft. My small models use a 1/4 inch shaft. For my 1/2 HP engine, I doubt a 1/4 will be strong enough.

The shaft must ride in bearings that can withstand the reciprocating forces as well as the axial forces.

But why?

The answer is never simple, but for me I want to be able to enter a desired HP rating and torque rating and have a custom designed steam engine modeled.

I currently have an integrated spreadsheet with my 3D model. You can select or set the desired brake power you want at a given boiler pressure and a given RPM. This feeds into several formulas, which then drive the model.

Change the stroke in the spreadsheet, and everything from the cylinder through the final assembly changes to match that cylinder. It even goes so far as to define the number of screws or bolts in the cylinder flange, the size of those screws and bolts, as well as the proper torque values for those screws and bolts.

The next step is to get the steam passages correctly designed and sized. This will drive the steam chest which will drive other components.

In the end I should be able to have the system give me patterns for casting.

For some reason last year moved more rapidly than I expected. There are so many things I didn’t get done that I needed to. Yet we are here.

The big thing to me is how the culture battle changed.

2 years ago, I would not have imagined talking about birthright citizenship. We all knew that whelping a baby on American soil meant another anchor baby, another family of immigrants, and another strain on our resources. Today we are arguing if there is such a thing as birthright citizenship for illegal aliens.

2 years ago, I would not have imagined we would be talking about massive ICE enforcement actions. Today we are talking about over a million illegal aliens who have self deported.

2 years ago, I would not have imagined we would be actually fighting a war on drugs. Today we are arguing about due process for narco terrorists that have just been blasted out of existence.

2 years ago, I would not have imagined peace breaking out in so many places. Today we are arguing about a ceasefire being broken while the peace is happening in so many places.

A year ago I was hoping for an end to the war in Ukraine. Today I see that we are no longer sending dollars, but we are supporting.

Finally, a year ago I knew that there was corruption in my government. I knew money was being wasted by the millions. Today I’m watching massive fraud being detected, and it looks like action is being taken.

It was a good year.

We wish you and yours a wonderful new year. We are glad you are hear.

Here’s a long debate. Charlie vs. 25.