Saturday, March 11, 2017

Gun auction was a bust

I went to the preview for the gun auction yesterday. The Garand sniper rifle was a hack job. Homemade, and you could tell. It still pulled $1700 out the door. The Rocola M1 carbine was in horrid shape. No finish left. Sights damaged and partly missing. Mismatched components. It went for $1000. Even some of the lower end plinkers I had a slight interest in went high. When I saw the shape the main guns I wanted were in, I just stayed home today. I was able to see the selling prices online. My buddy texted me that it was a madhouse. I did go to the gunshow. It was a bust as well. More cheap Chinese knife booths than gun booths. Nothing even remotely interesting there. I did manage to get in and get my haircut, so I did accomplish something today.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

New machine

The new CNC grinder is awesome. I love how it grinds, except, being brand new, it has all the new OSHA safety devices functional. Thus making the machine a real pain. Having a brain, I tend not to place my appendages into harms way, so having access to the machine while running so I can do minor adjustments to the coolant lines is nice. Being able to test the machine motions out with the wheel off and seeing everything is nice as well. New machine, you have to have the doors locked before anything moves. Total pain. Have not crashed it yet, but that is because I am overly cautious. She is sure to have a misadventure somewhere in the near future.
I get to go to school to learn how to thread grind and do non-rounds. It is only a three day condensed course. I have seen videos on you-tube of threads and form grinding. It is really cool to watch. Not sure how fun it will be to actually grind and check the finished product. Everything we grind we have to hold a .0002 tolerance on. Not much room for error. Ridiculous tolerances seeing as how the molds make single use containers which are thrown out once product is consumed. But, you have to hold tolerances set by your customers. All parts are checked and documented through our CMM's. I still prefer working on the round containers as they are very simple to rebuild compared to the square tooling. Glad I am closer to the retirement age than just starting out. Making the molds odd shapes is making the job much harder than it needs to be.