Who’d a thunk it?

Did you know that J-B Weld Kwik can be used to fix a bicycle pedal? It’s true!

My youngest has a inexpensive bike from Walmart with a solid crank. Not a knock against it – it works well for her. The problem is that she somehow managed to literally wear the threads out of the pedal hole, along with most of the threads off the actual pedal. 8-O. My dilema – hunting down a replacement crank or drilling out the pedal socket and threading it or pinning the pedal. I decided on a third option – I pulled out the secret weapon of enlightened men everywhere – J-B Weld, more specifically, the Kwik. I mixed up a batch and set it up. Wow! It filled the voids of the missing threads and when it was done setting up it was on there good. My girl got on the bike and took off. Another job done!

Oh, another thing I fixed this weekend – the dishwasher. The upper tray has these axles that clip on to the tray and has rollers that fit into the stainless slides. We’d gone for years with one broken, then another broke last week and when it dropped down we lost a few glass cups. Something had to be done. In just a few days we had a pack of four. In a few minutes (after I figured out how to take off the ends of the slides) the job was done. Kind of embarrassing it took me so long to take care of it. Oh well.

Et tu, TTC magazine?

So, I’ve been looking for a source of magazines for my CZ-52 pistol. Back when I had more money and the magazines were more available I didn’t buy any more – just the one extra one I found one time at a gun show. Now that I’m trying to get properly equipped, they’re few and far between. And expensive.

On SARCO’s website I saw a TTC magazine that is 7.62×25 and supposed to be an 8 round magazine. The Russian/Eastern Bloc TT-33 uses a magazine that is very similar to the CZ. Unfortunately, it wasn’t similar enough. I’ll attach pictures of the TTC magazine vs the CZ magazine later to illustrate the difference. What to do?

I continued to do some research on magazines and it looks like I need Yugoslavian M57 9-round magazines. The reason these are a better candidates is that it appears that it is/was common for M57 owners to use CZ magazines as spare magazines with the minor modification of adding a cut for the magazine catch. That by itself answers the question of which one to try next. Good thing they’re cheap. 😉

I will have to get the magazine bottom plate, the extended ones that I have on the CZ magazines. Might try to make some if I can figure out where to get a cutter that can make the slots for the magazine bottom.

As they say in ‘Helix’ – progress

So, this past Sunday I had an extended melting session. Started up the foundry easily enough, but it wouldn’t heat up enough and when I’d hit it with the blower it would die. Not to mention that I initially forgot about the clogging issue. Needless to say, frustration level was high.

After some troubleshooting I decided not to use the blower – it was causing me more issues than helping. I got to the point where I figured out how to set the burner to really push out the heat without running rich. It’s all a combination of fuel pressure, air pressure, and controlling fuel flow with the needle valve. Wow. It was a great learning experience. Once I got everything figured out it was late in the afternoon, about 4pm, so daylight was getting to be an issue. By the time it was all said and done, the sun had gone down and I was putting stuff away with the light of the camp lantern.

volvo_head_3What was the outcome? I melted down two boxes of drives and parts for a total of three ingots and two small stakes (what I call the smaller triangular ingots) and one Volvo cylinder head, which yielded three good size ingots with one stake and a tiny piece of a stake. I probably could have made three full size ingots (bread molds) which is what I’ll do next time.volvo_head_9

Monday afternoon (17-FEB-2014) I received the 6-ft pieces of ACME threaded rods: one 5/8″x8 and 2 of 1/2″x10 and the 5″x1″ bore pulley for my boring bar. Nice! I was sweating how I would bore the tail stock and what size I would make the bore then it occurred to me – just make it match the head stock spindle like the Gingery model. So, I’ll make it 1.5″ bore. I started looking at steel bars on-line – pretty reasonable for CRS.