Knife and Fixtures

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The work on the chef’s knife continued today:

Trimming the knife handle

Trimming the knife handle

The epoxy for side two cured overnight. I removed the clamps, and trimmed the sides down to near the tang, all the way around, using the scroll saw.

Sanding the knife handle

Sanding the knife handle

Sanding the knife handle was a multi-step process. This first phase used a couple of sizes and grits to get the wood down to the same profile as the tang. I used mini-sanding drums in the drill press for the task. Then I drilled through the rivet guide holes from the other side, then finished drilling the rivet profile in the handle. 0.177″ ∅ through, then 0.25″ ∅ drilled 0.21″ deep from each side for the rivet head.

I seated one side of each rivet using a hammer, after treating the drilled-out surface in the handle with cyanoacrylate adhesive. I put some more adhesive on the threads of the mating side and on the shoulder in the handle, then screwed each rivet together. Oh, yeah, the rivets: I got them from North Coast Knives – pleasant folks, quick & efficient order fulfillment, and lots of parts in stock for just about any sort of knife fabrication and repair you’re contemplating. Recommended!

Hacking off the rivet heads

Hacking off the rivet heads

Removing the rivet heads required application of the hacksaw. Sanding or grinding them all the way down would have caused too much heating … I know this, and caught it before I burnt the handle. Then sanding, a bit of carving, and a lot more sanding at progressively finer grits brought the knife to the place where I could apply the first coat of Danish Oil:

Applying finish

Applying finish

Three or four more applications are due, with sanding and/or rubbing with #0000 steel wool between each coat. This will be done Sunday, I think.

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 I also finished building my table saw fixtures today. Here in one image you can see both the outfeed extension table (the leg actually still needs hardware, so I’ll go get that tomorrow) and the over-size cross-cut sled I built. It’s not light, but it makes getting true 90° cuts possible on large pieces:

Tablesaw fixtures

Tablesaw fixtures

Knife Work

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I suppose that means different things to different people. To me, in the context of this week, it means “repairs.” The chef’s knife handle was going to pieces:

Broken Knife

Broken Knife

The cracking has been present for a while, but it started getting loose, which is a recipe for damaged knife-wielder, so it was time to fix the problem. It didn’t take much effort to get apart, and it looks like there was a fair bit of rust and corrosion pushing things apart. One crack leads to this, eventually. The next step involves picking some new handle material, and preparing for reassembly:

Repairing the Knife

Repairing the Knife

I am using some offcuts from the hockey glass table project to make the new knife handle. I cleaned up the tang with a wire brush mounted on the drill press, and cut the wood to the correct thickness on the table saw. The end of the wood nearest the blade is canted out at 7° to match the casting. I used JB Weld to epoxy one side onto the tang and let it cure overnight.

Partially Repaired Knife

Partially Repaired Knife

Today, I pre-drilled through the holes to provide alignment after the other side is epoxied on, and used the scroll saw to get the profile partially cut. Finally, I epoxied on the far side and set that aside to cure until tomorrow. I also executed the first stage of assembly on that cabinet sled I was talking about a couple of days ago. Ciao!

Wood working

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I’m getting going on the new office project. Remember that? Anyway, today I went shopping at Exotic Lumber in Gaithersburg. Sadly, I don’t have budget for any actual “exotic” lumber, so I got ten sheets of maple 3/4 ply, one sheet of cherry 3/4 ply, and three each of maple in 1/4 and 1/2 thickness. To get all this home, I rented a U-Haul truck for a few hours. I loaded it all into the garage, then set up for parting out the plywood.

Parting out the plywood

Parting out the plywood

The configuration is easy. Lightly glue (I used a low-tack spray adhesive) some foam to a sheet of plywood. Lay that out on saw horses. Then, one sheet at at time, use a straight edge, a couple of clamps, and a circular saw with a high-tooth count, thin kerf blade to part the sheets into “close” sizes. I sketched out on paper the cuts for each of the cabinets, and laid those out to minimize waste, then started cutting. As each component comes off the foam, I label it with some painters tape and a marker. By the time I was “done” and cleaned up for the day, I’d dismantled 8 sheets into the components to build the carcasses four shelving units, four base cabinets, and one upper cabinet.

Cabinet Carcass Parts

Cabinet Carcass Parts

Now what’s downstairs is ready and of a manageable size to work with the table saw. That and a panel sled, plus some housecleaning should fill the day, tomorrow.

A Week Off

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I’m taking this week off of work. I’ll still check email from time to time, but mostly I’m going to do some chores around here, organize a bit of woodworking, and get caught up on my reading.

Wrapping up school: Late this week, the grade for the last course should drop. On the 30th, the degree should be conferred. Fun stuff, really.

*      *      *

Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Petty Officer 1st Class Nicolas D. Checque, 28, of Monroeville, Pennsylvania, died of combat related injuries suffered Dec. 8, while supporting operations near Kabul, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Wesley R. Williams, 25, of New Carlisle, Ohio, died Dec. 10 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Staff Sgt. Nelson D. Trent, 37, of Austin, Texas, died Dec. 13 in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. Michael J. Guillory, 28, of Pearl River, Louisiana, died Dec. 14 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Nicholas J. Reid, 26, of Rochester, New York, died Dec. 13 in Landstuhl, Germany from wounds suffered on Dec. 9, in Sperwan Village, Afghanistan, when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. 1st Class Kevin E. Lipari, 39, of Baldwin, New York, died Dec. 14 in Logar province, Afghanistan.

And Done!

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I turned in the final final, on the 33.3 year path from entering university in the Fall of 1979 to the end of this year. For the last five years, I’ve been taking courses at UMUC, filling in holes in my education, and taking lots of new, shiny, politically correct classes. I’ve had some real trolls for instructors, and some gems. This last one was much more in the latter category, but I have to note the 5-year winner of the category Best Instructor I’ve Had At UMUC: Charles Neimeyer, PhD. I have no idea how the Marine Corps Chief Historian comes to be teaching the History of War at an online college, but I’m glad I took that course.

Overall, I’m very happy with the quality and depth of education I’ve gotten these last few years. UMUC is not a diploma mill. I worked my ass off, usually an additional 20-30 hours a week, a bit more when classes overlapped. I was not the best (or perhaps not the best-behaved) of students, 33 years ago. But application of nasal prominence to gritty rotating device has meant that I’ve gotten an A (I’m assuming that I’m getting an A in the current class, since the work is done and I’m just waiting for the ball to drop) in every class I’ve taken. Whew, tiring, but very glad of the journey.

Thanks, also, to y’all who’ve been with me while I shorted this venue to give time to the studies. Many of you have sent me kind words of support, and I appreciate every one of them.

 

Last Week

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More like: The Last Week. I finished up all of this week’s work yesterday, and did a big hunk of the final week’s worth of schoolwork today. So close I can taste it, this school thing, it will be done. I also did a bit of cleaning here and there, and tidied up the woodshop.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Lance Cpl. Anthony J. Denier, 26, of Mechanicville, New York, died Dec. 2, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Sgt. 1st Class. Darren M. Linde, 41, of Sidney, Montana, died Dec. 3, in Lashkar Gah City, Helmand province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Spc. Tyler J. Orgaard, 20, of Bismarck, North Dakota, died Dec. 3, in Lashkar Gah City, Helmand province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.

Work, Schoolwork, and Statistics…

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If you are playing along at home, you might suspect that “Damned” could fit in for “School” in today’s word-swap cipher match. The upside for me is that I’m developing a project website that I’m likely to put into play early next year. But not to discuss until it’s nearly ready. I don’t know whether I’ll take it down the customized blog path, or go back to my beloved bespoke hand-crafted HTML approach that served me so well over the years.

Yesterday I went shopping, because I had about 5.5 hours of work to do today, helping launch a new infrastructure. That went pretty well, all things considered. The planning meetings paid off in spades, much as it pains me to say that. The work was done by about 1330 EST, and then it was back to the schoolwork. Tonight, reading for the coming week, and more tuning and content writing for the project site.

Oh. Well, I’ve actually got nothing about statistics to discuss. But it helped the headline flow, eh?

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Our condolences to the family, friends, and unit of this fallen warrior:

Cpl. Christopher M. Monahan Jr., 25, of Island Heights, New Jersey, died Nov. 26 while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.

Leftovers

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Our turkey day was full of thanks and food and more food. Just the two of us, and a 17 pound bird … shedloads of leftovers, needless to say. Marcia’s job-hunt continues, and I’m back to work tomorrow after a week off. It’s been very weird, frankly. I did a lot of schoolwork – both for the week in progress, and groundwork for the final website project. I played some Half Life 2, and watched a bit of Top Gear UK. And the week is gone, just like that.

*      *      *

Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Lance Cpl. Dale W. Means, 23, of Jordan, Minnesota, died Nov. 18, while conducting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • Petty Officer 1st Class Kevin R. Ebbert, 32, of Arcata, California, died Nov. 24 while supporting stability operations in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan.

Moving right along

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First, for US visitors, Happy Thanksgiving. A weird holiday, to be sure, but it’s always good to be thankful for life, family, friends, and first world problems.

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I’m posting from Linux again, for the first time in a long while. I’d been trying a variety of solutions for storage here, answers that didn’t involve running a full-size system 24×7. I couldn’t do it. You see, it isn’t good enough to just back stuff up here at home. I’m not going to backup home data on a cloud somewhere on the Internet – our friendly government doesn’t appear to respect the Fourth Amendment when it comes to online resources. So I don’t keep email online. Well, I try not to, but I’ll bet Google has it all anyway. But there are files and work I do here that I’m not willing to trust to another administrator and their devotion to security. So while I backup online stuff here, and I backup the home systems here, I need to get a copy of those backups offsite. Fire, theft, and other quirks of life are risks that need to be managed.

So, a weekly copy of the local backup, written to an encrypted disk, and driven to work … that’s a good answer. But when I stood down Slartibartfast, the old Linux server, and replaced him with a dLink NAS box … well, some things didn’t happen anymore. Automated backups of online properties – not happening. Trivially easy local and encrypted backups: neither trivial nor easy anymore. But I kept after it for a while, so that local systems could spin down, data could flow to the storage when it was available, and … I’d figure something out about the offsite.

That didn’t happen. Finally, I broke down a few months back and installed FreeNAS 8.mumble on one of the towers. Key needs: local AFP, SMB/CIFS, and NFS service. Scheduled tasks to pull backups from out in the world, so that problems there don’t kill our data forever. And encrypted backups to removable storage. Seems easy, right? And a dedicated local storage server STILL seemed like a better idea than toying with using a workstation ALSO as the storage server. Feh!

FreeNAS eventually solved everything but the removable storage problem … and the AFP service. The latter problem first: Apple presents a fast moving target for their file services, and I want a networked Time Machine target. Could not get it working with the latest FreeNAS, so the dLink kept spinning. Formerly, and more importantly, while I could plug in a USB disk, write an encrypted ZFS file system to it, create the walkabout tertiary backup, and take the drive to the office … I could only do that once per boot. That is, to get FreeNAS to recognize a drive reinserted into the USB or the eSATA connections, I had to reboot. Probably a failing of the non-enterprise support for hotplug … but a failing all the same.

This week, a “vacation” week for me, I’d had enough. I installed Scientific Linux 6.3, and got all of the above stuff working properly in less than a day. The ONLY thing I miss from FreeNAS (and this was a big driver for me) is ZFS. I *love* ZFS. Filesystem and volume management done properly, with superb snapshot capabilities – I LOVE ZFS. But I can’t have that, and everything else I want, so I’ve solved my problem.

Serenity boots and runs from a ~160GB SSD, and I have three 1TB drives in a software RAID5 serving as the data partition. It’s all formatted EXT4. I have a SATA slide-in slot on the front of the system, I can slot in a hard disk, give the crypto password, and have my offsite storage accessible for updating using rsync. Everything is working again. I can spin down that dLink, and decide what it’s fate is, one of these days. I also don’t need Dortmunder, the Raspberry Pi, running as my SSH and IRSSI landing “box” anymore. That I will find another use for – I can play with it now. And I’ll cautiously update and maintain this system. Frankly, I happier with it running Scientific Linux – the stability of a RHEL derivative is good.

Now to figure out why I can’t get my external SSH port open again… Thanks, Netgear, for giving me one more problem to solve on my “vacation.”

Oh, and finally: a good disk management GUI for a Linux:

Gnome Disk Utility

Gnome Disk Utility

Gnome Disk Utility – I don’t often prefer a GUI, but managing complex storage, which may involve hardware or software RAID, LVM, encryption, and more … well, the visibility of this utility makes me happy. Thanks to Red Hat for writing it.

Marcia’s back (again) & Linux reloaded

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Today, I relaxed a bit. Shopping in the morning, a bit of Top Gear UK during the day, and I picked Marcia up at BWI around 1500 EST. Happy dog is happy, and so am I. The holiday bird is in the fridge, I’ve got a tray of mac-n-cheese ready, and … we’ll see how the table ends up.

Tonight, I blew out the FreeNAS installation, and installed Scientific Linux 6.3 x64 on the box still known as Serenity. I had a lot of trouble getting things working right, and there are issues with offsite backups that are much more easily solved with a Linux at the helm. Instead of returning to the Ubuntu way, I figured one of the RHEL retreads would be a good way to go – I’ve got to re-certify in the next few months, and more practice is good.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Capt. James D. Nehl, 37, of Gardiner, Oregon, died Nov. 9, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, from small arms fire while on patrol during combat operations.
  • Sgt. Matthew H. Stiltz, 26, of Spokane, Washington, died Nov. 12, at Zerok, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with indirect fire.
  • Staff Sgt. Rayvon Battle Jr., 25, of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, died Nov. 13, in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.
  • Sgt. Channing B. Hicks, 24, of Greer, South Carolina, died Nov. 16, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.
  • Spc. Joseph A. Richardson, 23, of Booneville, Arkansas, died Nov. 16, in Paktika province, Afghanistan, from injuries suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device and small arms fire.