Projects – Page 19 – Ephemerality

September 7, 2017

.30-06

After using the rifle to watch the eclipse, I was left with a nagging sense of incompletion: the rifle still didn’t have a sling. Here I was feeding my family with a garden, building rain barrels, canning vegetables; and yet–my arsenal still required attention. I mean, how am I going to fend off zombies/raiders post-apocalypse?

And a ridiculous premise necessitates a ridiculous decision. Therefore I opted for no mere sling, but one with an integrated bandolier! That’s right–I’ll need to maximize ammo capacity, or everything I’ve learned from video games is wrong.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t much in the way of rifle sling bandolier options, at least not one meant for actual rifle cartridges. The majority seemed to be catering to 12 gauges, which admittedly does make more sense. It’s a lot more likely that one would be firing a lot of shotgun rounds rather than .30-06s. The latter would generally indicate the user was just a really bad hunter.

But perseverance paid off and I found what I was looking for. A company named “Big Daddy Holsters” (WTF?) manufactured what I needed, and right here in the US…which seems appropriate. The Remington 700 is about the most American modern rifle there is, and the .30-06 is undisputedly the most American rifle cartridge ever created, so it would seem a bit of an injustice to outfit it with Chinese parts, regardless of anyone’s political stance on outsourced manufacturing.

Fully loaded, it now carries 28 rounds, which is 7 magazine’s worth. I opted for 150-grain rounds, mostly because that’s what I had on hand, and partly because if I’ll be fending off humans/desiccated animated husks of humans, larger rounds wouldn’t be necessary.

I’m now incrementally more ready for the end of times.

–Simon

August 2, 2017

Strawberries

A month ago, we had picked up some old wooden boxes for a strawberry garden. My own experience with strawberries generally went like this: I would plant some plants, watch hopefully as some berries grew, then collapsed in despair as the day they ripen an insect had beat me to them. But Liz was hopeful.

And her hopes were not dashed upon the rocks. This last weekend I was tending to my garden and saw these (tasty):

Aside from the Japanese beetles, the bugs have been rather merciful to our produce. In light of these successes, garden expansion plans are in discussion.

–Simon

July 30, 2017

Pickles

This is the Year of the Cucumber. And because of this bonanza, I needed to do something with all the extras. One family can only eat so much cucumber salad, after all.

So I thought I’d try making pickles, as I so predicted I would. Know thyself, I guess. Anyway, off to the Internet! Unfortunately, unlike canning tomatoes, pickle-making has a far less unified following. The USDA, who’s sole mission it seems is to sterilize everything, was not helpful. If you sterilize a vegetable, as in–boil it for 45 minutes–it becomes mush. This is fine for tomatoes, but when I tried a similar approach to pickling peppers a few years back, I ended up with a jar of pepper goo. I therefore sought anecdotal information.

It boiled down (see what I did there?) to two main approaches: a high-temp and short duration treatment, or a lengthy but low-temp treatment. I opted for the first simply because it’d be a quicker process.

The brine consisted of equal parts cider vinegar and water, with salt, then boiled. I cut cucumbers into spears, packed two jars, then poured in the boiling brine, then flash-boiled the jars. I added additional seasoning of dill seed, dill fronds, and crushed red pepper.

Admittedly, I have no idea what I’m doing here, but presumably the brine preserves the cucumbers, which supersedes the need for an extended sterilization process. I suppose I’ll find out.

[Edit: 2 days later I found out. Curiosity won out and I opened a jar. I was very pleased with how they turned out, and the red pepper gives them a nice bite.]

–Simon

June 29, 2017

So Much I Don’t Know About

No, this isn’t an existential post. Well, maybe a little. So Liz wanted a tiered strawberry bed. That wasn’t a priority project, but something she had been keeping in mind. Recently, we had a kid-free day, and she suggested a couple options to fill that opportunity: Dayton’s 2nd Street Market, and Mendelsons liquidation outlet. The former didn’t sound very interesting to me as I had envisioned food and hippies peddling art (we went there later anyway, and my prediction wasn’t far off). But Mendelsons sounded just odd enough that I became intrigued. And so, off to Mendelsons we went.

“Liquidation outlet” didn’t do this place justice. It was somewhere between hoarder’s opus and nerd’s paradise, if that means anything. It occupied 3 stories of a downtown Dayton manufacturing compound, and was filled with surplus/deprecated products, ranging from plastic restaurant containers to decommissioned business electronics. One day I’ll have a server rack, and I now know where to acquire one to refurbish.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Liz found some nice wooden boxes on the ground floor, which we would go back to. A sign, however, informed us of electronics being on the 3rd floor (the 2nd was off-limits for an unknown reason). Following these signs, we were led down a hallway to a choice: elevator or stairs.

Context often gives words more meaning than the words themselves–looking at this elevator, the notice that it could hurt me was taken VERY seriously

A service elevator with a dubious last-maintenance date? We took the stairs.

It was on floor 3 that I realized there is so much in this world I just don’t know anything about. There were piles of circuits and various mechanical components. Alarm systems, telecommunication systems, closed-circuit surveillance systems, row upon row of capacitors and resistors. There was a section filled with ball-bearing rotation devices. There were things I was afraid to even touch–what appeared to be high-pressure sodium light bulbs. How is this place allowed to exist? I don’t know, but I’m glad it does.

A room dedicated to the era predating transistors

There were many, many ideas for future projects. But, back to the strawberries. Downstairs, we picked up the two boxes we had set aside earlier. They were labeled as NCR boxes–a company I had to research as I am a non-native to these parts. Once I did, however, I remembered the logo. Sadly, it was another big company that had abandoned Dayton with the recession. The meaning behind those numbers, written upon the wood, will be forever lost to time as the sun physically erases them from existence.

But the wood is solid and looks nice. One placed inside the other, raised on bricks, created the tiered strawberry garden Liz wanted.

They just don’t make ’em like they used to.

–Simon

June 24, 2017

Barrel of…Water

Amusingly, it was shortly after writing this post that I received a bourbon barrel from Liz as my anniversary gift. That isn’t as weird as it sounds. The traditional year-5 gift is wood-themed, I like bourbon, the last barrel was a nice rustic decoration, and of course it’s been an effective rain barrel and we’ve discussed wanting another one. And so, she arrived home late one day with this barrel in her back seat, suffering another round of tears to the leather of her car’s interior. Dry, they weigh about a hundred pounds, although they are very oddly shaped to maneuver solo, but as before I managed to muscle the thing out of the car. I also had some time off work, so the following day I began my project, leveraging the prior barrel’s lessons to make the second a little better.

This time around, I had a reciprocating saw, so I didn’t break any drill bits. Also, the wood of this barrel wasn’t as dense, so it was easier to cut. Still, I think I’ll just go buy a large wood bore bit should I ever do this again. That would be way easier and would yield a rounder opening.

For the spigot, however, I didn’t want to deviate from the proven method. Last time, I drilled a 3/8″ hole and gradually whittled it down with a knife until it accommodated a 1/2″ brass spigot. Manually cutting away slivers of oak is exhausting, but I didn’t want to risk drilling too much and ruining the seal. It took an hour, and I was thoroughly baked from the summer heat, and I had a bloody knuckle, but eventually I was able to grind away an appropriate hole and forced the spigot in with vice grips.

I also had the same materials available for the screen, which is still working a year later on the other barrel, so I didn’t feel the need to try anything different. I constructed the same square frame, secured with staples, two layers of nylon screen, and nailed it to the barrel with finishing nails.

This time, I wanted the barrel higher to allow easier access to the spigot. I already had a couple cinder blocks from a previous abandoned project, and the height was good. But the base wasn’t wide enough that the barrel’s frame was being supported by the sides, so I extended it with leftover pressure-treated 2x4s.

I worry, when I make these, that I’ll go through all that trouble only to end up with a barrel that doesn’t hold water. Fortunately, this was not a problem. I filled it to test, and it held just fine. Hooray! I cut the boards and pounded in the spillover–leftover brass piping from the last barrel. Here’s a final shot with it working as intended with the following rain: