It was just announced that UPS and FedEx are being sued by the families of the victims who died in Uvalde. Yes, the shipping companies are being sued.

The goal is to make it as difficult to conduct business around firearms as possible. The claims are that these companies shipped “parts” to somebody that they should have known shouldn’t have these parts because they make scary guns scarier.

That is not the topic of today’s post. In trying to do research for the new case, I stumbled on a case from June 2023.

There was massive fanfare all through the media about how Daniel Defense, LLC, Oasis Outback, LLC and Firequest International, Inc were all being sued by some Uvalde families because an asshole did bad things with a product produced or sold by a third party.

It turns out that Daniel Defense had absolutely the best defense, they didn’t even bother to respond. Oasis Outback, the company that sold the firearm(?) to the asshole who did the shooting. Firequest also responded.

The gist? Both companies filed motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Hearings were held on December 1st, the court dismissed the suite on March 27th. Nine months of lawfare, taking money from people that did nothing wrong.

In one case, a thing which wasn’t a firearm was treated as if it was a firearm, and the seller should have predicted that an asshole was going to do a bad thing with that particular item.

Having lost there, they are no going back to the well, attempting to get UPS and FedEx to decide it is too risky to transport firearms or firearm accessories.

There are some reports that this is already affecting people.

"Is it my imagination, or have you and your podcast become more political? I enjoyed the interview with @Riley_Gaines_ but was really surprised to see you “go there,” and speak so candidly about such a politically charged topic." Carol Marks

Hi Carol.
It’s your imagination.… pic.twitter.com/yOqIagEkfF

— The Real Mike Rowe (@mikeroweworks) June 6, 2024

I like Mike Rowe. He speaks plainly and doesn’t care if you are offended.

I believe that most of the firearms I own are “used”. The R92 had no problems throwing a lead pellet at good speed into a trash panda and dispatching it. One boom, one dead raccoon.

I have a coffee grinder that was made in the early 1900s. It does a better job of grinding coffee than any but the most expensive modern grinders. I have taken it a part to clean and refurbish it. I’ve had to make a custom feed hopper, but the grinder itself, is just fine.

If you want to do machining, you need a lathe and will want a mill.

“Mini” lathes and “mini” mills run about $700, each. Looking at the mini lathe offering, they include an 0.8″ through hole, chuck, tools, and just about everything you need to cut metal except metal and oil.

What they lack is rigidity. They don’t have enough mass.

When dad got his mini-mill for Christmas, he had no cutter, not collets, nothing. The next time I saw him, about a two years later, his mill ways were badly worn. He didn’t know he had to oil the ways. Metal on metal is not good for a mill or lathe.

Looking at Craig’s list, I find metal lathes from $500 to $1,500. There is a Southbend 9″ in great condition for $1,500 in Rockland, Co. NY. With what is included, I’d be happy with it as a second lathe. It is in nicer condition than mine.

The other day, Hagar gave me a link to a free lathe. If I had room, I would have gotten it.

But, let’s take a modern “new” lathe as a starting point. You are going to pay $650, and it comes with a “4 tool post”.

These are neat, you can mount 4 tools in them, then rotate them to present the tool you want. The issue is that your tool will not be on center. Being on center is a requirement. You will have to have the right shims to get it right.

If you get an Aloris BXA tool post with 5 toolholders, you are investing $850. If you buy a good Chinese version, $300.

If the used lathe you purchase comes with an Aloris tool post, you have just gotten an $300+ boost, just for the tool post.

What I’m saying, is that the used machine is more likely to have good “extras”. My mill came with a 6″ Kurt vise. That was $725 I didn’t have to spend.

Next, you have robustness. I am scared to open up the Bridgeport or Southbend. There is no need to be fearful. My fear is that I will have to replace something expensive. And yes, that does happen.

A Bridgeport J head rebuild kit. The top half rebuild kit is $270, the spindle bearings are another $400.

Old machines have wear. You have to know how to deal with it. The backlash on my lathe was nearly 0.125 inches. This was a complete rotation of the dial. This made certain types of work more difficult.

I made the replacement cross feed screw and purchased a replacement nut. Now my backlash is around 0.15.

If I had to do it again, I would buy used. I would invest in a better lathe. A gear head that was more rigid, that had a faster spindle, and which did not have a threaded spindle nose.

Buying a used Bridgeport is risky. Unless you know what you are looking at, you will not know how bad the ways are.

Still, I will continue to buy used equipment.

I have one story that confirms this.

The automatic down feed on the Bridgeport was stuck with only one speed. After overcoming my fears, I took the handle off, and went to take the screws out.

I was ready for the screws to fight me, just like every car screw has. I knew it was going to be a pain in the rump. Those screws were tight, but not stuck. Enough torque and the cracked and came out.

I took the control apart, cleaned it. Put it back together the way it looked like it should go together. Put the control back in place. All three down feed speeds are now available.

Not a single issue.

I want to write about some court cases, but bluntly, there is nothing new happening. Everything is sitting at the circuit courts or the Supreme Court, waiting for movement.

We should be hearing on Rahimi in the next 20 days or so.

We are waiting to find out if cert will be granted in any of the 2A cases before the Supreme Court.

We are waiting for opinions on cases that have been heard in a few circuit courts.

Thank you to those of you that purchased coffee ($5) and a month of services ($50), it helps.

We still need more, we haven’t made our minimums for the year. Please help if you can.

It is so nice to have all the right tools to do “the thing”. I was cutting dovetails with a 1/2″ 60° dovetail cutter, it didn’t cut deep enough to complete the dovetail. I ordered a 3/4″ 60° cutter. It cut deep enough, but not high enough. I did some math and was able to make a finishing cut to finish the dovetail.

Yesterday I was using a 25 mm 60° dovetail cutter. Full cut. So much nicer. Deciding I was willing to use a 25 mm cutter instead of demanding a 1″ cutter dropped the price substantially. I can cut full depth and full height in one pass.

I now have exactly ONE metric R8 collet. Oh, well.

Cutting with a 3/4″ solid carbide end mill is interesting. Much more stiffness, much better results.

A few days ago, dad was in a minor car accident. The hospital admitted him for observations and because his lab work was a little off.

Yesterday afternoon he coded. They brought him back. Bro, a doctor, is with him. It doesn’t look good. Bro and I will be making the decision today.

It hurts.

This is a weak post because my father is in the hospital with health issues after having a minor car accident. That, and I spent most of the day working on getting clients back up and running.

So what are “speeds and feeds”? These are the magic numbers to run your machines at to get the “best” results.

Let’s assume you want to make a 3″ diameter hub on a 4″ diameter rod of aluminum.

The starting diameter for your rod is 4.12″.

We look up in a table, the “speed” of Aluminum. We are using 6061 which has a surface speed of 500-800 feet per minute if using high-speed steel (HSS, old school) or 2800 if using carbide.

This means that we want the single point of a lathe cutting tool should be traveling at 500-800 feet per minute over the surface of the aluminum.

With a diameter of 4.12″, the surface speed is:

$$\frac{4.12\mathrm{\pi }}{12}\mathrm{RPM}=<mn>500</mn>$$

$$\frac{4.12\mathrm{}\mathrm{\pi }}{12x<mn>500</mn>}=\frac{1}{\mathrm{RPM}}$$

$$\frac{6000}{4.12\mathrm{\pi }}=\mathrm{RPM}$$

$$\mathrm{RPM}=463.6$$

As we remove material, the diameter gets smaller, so our RPM has to increase to maintain the same surface speed. At 4″ the speed should be 477 RPM. At 3″ it is 637 RPM. At 1″ we need a whopping 1900 RPM.

The speeds required are higher if we use 800 instead of 500 SFM and scary fast if we are looking at 2800 SFM.

My lathe doesn’t spin that fast.

But this is only part of the equation, the next part is “Depth of Cut”. This is how deep you are cutting.

I could zip along at 418 RPM at 4″ taking a 0.010 depth of cut. This means it will take 56 passes before I am at a 3″ diameter.

If I take a 0.050 depth of cut, it is only 12 passes.

Besides the depth of cut, there is also the feed rate. This is the distance the tool advances per revolution.

I have a single tumbler Quick Change gearbox. This means that I have three controls to set the speed of rotation of the lead shaft.

The lead screw is threaded 8 TPI, for every eight revolutions, the carriage will advance 1 inch. By setting the gears correctly, I can choose how much the lead screw rotates per rotation of the spindle.

I normally use a feed rate of 0.007.

So, my depth of cut is picked to be either 0.050 or 0.025, taking 0.100 or 0.050 off the diameter per pass. This means that to make a 3 inch boss from a 4.12 inch rod that is 1 inch long, I have to make 11 0.050 passes, taking off 1.100 from the diameter, then I make two finishing passes of around 0.006.

I normally run at the depth of cut I want, merely listening to the lathe to see if it is straining. If it is not straining, the DoC is good.

Removing metal on a milling machine isn’t as easy. First, the tools are more likely to break, which is expensive.

We start with the same calculations for SFM. Instead of using the size of the workpiece, we use the diameter of the cutter.

With an 1/8″ cutter, we should be spinning that thing at 15,000 RPM in aluminum, and 2500 for a 3/4″ cutter.

I’m cutting soft steel, 1018. The SFM for milling is 100 SFM. Using a 3/4 end mill, I should be running at 500RPM. Since I am using a solid carbide end mill, I push this to 660 RPM.

But what about Depth of Cut and Feed Rate?

Well, that is where it gets interesting. According to my tool dealer, the depth of cut should be Diameter * 0.05 to Diameter * 1.5, or 0.38 to 1.125. I picked 0.200.

The same tables show that my tooth load should be 0.005. This means each tooth should be removing 0.005″ of material.

Running at 400RPM with a four flute end mill, this means that the tool should advance 0.005*4 = 0.020 per rev. of the cutter.

That means we should be advancing 400 * 0.020 = 8 inches per minute.

My old Bridgeport isn’t that stout anymore. I’m running at 5 IPM with a 0.200 DoC @ 400ish RPM.

That is smooth and boy does it hog out the metal. I stopped shop time because it was time to do computer work. Not because I was tired or frustrated.

I should have the next toolholders ready for bluing before the weekend.

Sorry about the site being down for the last few hours.

Our cloud provider had a server stop responding. It was enough “up” that it didn’t show down from the outside.

Our cloud hosting provider is Linode. I hope you can understand just how good they are.

My initial contact was that it looked like the load balancer was failing.

They did a thorough examination and determined that it wasn’t the load balancer, but something related to our configuration.

Given that our configuration is freaking stable, this did not make any sense.

These lead me to determine that the database server was not responding. This is not good.

This in turn led me to discovering that I had pods that were “stuck”. I attempted to manual stop one of the pods, and it just hung there.

The ticket was updated to “I can’t terminate pods.” The update I received was not helpful. It was talking about disks not attaching correctly, suggesting that I was attempting to attach the same drive to multiple machines.

This took me to attempting to log into the node. Something I should never have to do.

The node was borked. I took the reset hammer to it. It rebooted. Things are working again.

Linode did a great job working for me to help resolve the issue.

A couple of YouTube videos went past my feed today. They were talking about the case of Morin v. Lyver, 4:18-cv-40121, (D. Mass. Mar 03, 2023).

After Bruen, some cases were GVR by the Supreme Court, these include Duncan and Bianchi. We saw the Ninth Circuit kick the case back down to the district level. It is now back at the Ninth Circuit, waiting for oral arguments.

We saw Bianchi get oral arguments shortly after it was GVRed. Then, just weeks before the merit’s panel was due to issue their opinion, the Fourth circuit decided to take the case en banc on their own.

Just nasty games in the inferior courts.

Morin v. Lyver is another one. In this case, the game was very different and the results much quicker. Without giving the 2A community a win.

Mr. Morin had jumped through all the hoops in MA to get his LTC back in the 90s. He held that license until 2018, when he went to renew, where he was denied.

It seems that Mr. Morin did a stupid. He traveled with his firearm without knowing all the restrictions. He was in DC, visiting one of the museums, when he noticed that there was a “no guns” sign. Being a law-abiding citizen, he went to the nearest security guard, informed the guard that he was carrying, and asked where the storage was for firearms.

The guard was very helpful in getting Mr. Morin’s firearm to safe storage. He called the police, who arrived and arrested Mr. Morin.

DC does not recognize MA LTCs, and a CCW doesn’t allow you to carry in many places.

Mr. Morin got off with a slap on the wrist of a misdemeanor charge.

When he applied for his renewal, the local authority, in charge of hearing the subject’s pleadings for their rights back, denied the renewals because Mr. Morin had “misdemeanor weapons charges.”

The district court heard the challenge, using intermediate scrutiny, decided the state had ample reason to disarm its subjects whenever it wanted.

The case was appealed to the First Circuit, which agreed with the district court. The state has a reason, that was good enough for them.

The Supreme Court held the case over until Bruen issued, then they GVRed this case.

In March 2023, the parties agreed on a settlement.

Mr. Marin would get his LTC back.

But that is all that happened. It looks like Massachusetts was afraid of what might happen in court. If the district court had followed Bruen faithfully, this would have been another nail in the coffin of gun permitting.

This weekend I thought I had finished all the machining on my toolholders. Yesterday, I had to remake the height adjustment disks. I had made them 1.12 in diameter, this interferes with the screws that hold the tool in place.

The size of the Aloris adjuster disk is 0.980. I remade the disks at 1.0. There is enough clearance now.

I’m waiting for the rest of my chemicals to arrive, then I’ll hot blue the toolholders, at which point they will be done.

There is still another 12 inches of steel for toolholders. When I was putting the three new ones into production, I realized that I did need to make some 5/8 toolholders.

I joyfully started the process. This was tramming the head of the mill. It was off 0.0005 over 8 inches. I didn’t adjust. I then had to dial in the vise. It was out less than 0.0005 over 6 inches.

First step, cut the bar to length, 6 and 6.25. With the new apron, my scale was where I needed it. Quick and easy.

The saw is cutting well, I’m using my spray bottle of water-soluble oil to keep everything nice and cool. The blade stops.

The pulley belt seems not to be working. Groaning, adjusting, realizing that some idiot had mounted the motor wrong.

I get everything “fixed” and put back, the belt rides up and off the pulley, yanking the motor around on its tensioning post.

I fight this thing for an hour in the heat. Give up.

Later, I went back for try number two. This time, as I’m watching the thing not work, I see brass shavings showing up on the face of the motor housing.

Everything is rattle loose. I’ve killed the damn motor. Frustrated, back into the house.

A replacement motor is going to run me $250. I do not have $250 for the shop. We talk about it at the dinner table.

The decision is to hold off until after graduation of the kids (high school), and I was going to beg you guys for a motor.

After dinner and a show with my lady, it is out to the shop to read the motor plate.

As I take the motor out of the saw, the step pulley is loose and comes off the motor shaft.

The set screw that locks the step pulley to the shaft has backed out. The damn thing was just spinning. There are things that still need to be fixed, but the panic is over.

Done.

The case was distributed for conference on 2024-06-06. This is the fourth time it has been distributed for Conference. I still consider this to be good news.