Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Doug Coulter]

Allow me to tell you a "the one that got away, except it didn't" story.
Someone interested in the fusion work, who will not be named, came to visit me from DC a couple years ago, bearing gifts (thanks for the craft beer and Redbreast whisky, you know who you are).
Hearing that I am a gun guy, he brought down a rather large collection of new handguns - glock type stuff, a springfield 1911 copy, other things I don't recall. A table full of handguns.
I had brought over just my CZ 97b (.45 ACP) and my S&W mod 14 .38, as they really, really shoot.
Bill had recently brought me a nice ~ 2' steel plate I drilled a hole in and hung up on the target stand for close in rifles at around 70 yards.

For fun, I put a round in the CZ and took a shot at it. OK, I'd been thinking about it and did calculate the likely 14" drop of .45 hardball at that range.
See picture. That's one of those "I'll never wash that hand again" kinds of things - and yes, of course it's luck, I'm good but not THAT good.

Some days, even a blind squirrel gets lucky.

It was, however, the end of any d*ck waving at the range that day. No place to go after that! No way I was going to take another shot and probably miss the whole target...and no one else wanted to try either. After that, we shot
rapid fire at a much closer target and backstop - 7 yards and "get it on a sheet of paper" grade accuracy.

[Donovan Ready]

Sweet, Doug.

Well, I forgot that you don't keep gigs of drive space, so I can't upload the promised pics of my compact 9 made ridiculous with a 4.6" barrel. I'll fool around with Gargle Drive...

[Doug Coulter]

No need. Our host, iPower, gave us "unlimited" space (in theory). However the board code only lets you put in a certain number of attachments per post. Just break them up and it's fine.

Not that it's necessary anymore, but I use a little script(when I think of it) to shrink my jpegs from the ridiculous zillion pixel camera before uploading - mostly to save time, I have a slow connection.

It looks like this, and I put it in the directory that shows up on right-clicks in linux (which sadly, is different in different distros).

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash

#ls > ~/test.txt

 for file in *.JPG;  do convert $file -resize 1920x1080\> -quality 70 shrunk-$file; echo file; done

#convert image.jpg -resize 600x400\> image.jpg
# for file in *.png; do convert $file -rotate 90 rotated-$file; done

Needs imagemagick installed to provide the convert command. It's fast, even on a pi4 with huge pictures.

In the pi I'm posting from (low sun day, don't need the gigaflops), this is configured via the file browser edit menu selection "configure custom actions" and I just put the script in my ~/bin directory and made it executable. Somewhere I have a fancier version that handles different ways of spelling jpg (case insensitive and with and without the e). It's dumb but saves a lot of time, just does the whole directory you're in. You could obviously change this to use just a selected file.

[Donovan Ready]

Oh, well. I just shared to Google Drive. Here's the link.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[Doug Coulter]

Ah yes. Clearly a nicely compact "I can actually carry this" gun. Does the extra barrel make it any harder to carry? The original is obviously too short to be much good unless you do serious load development work like I had to do for my snubby.
So-called "high performance self defense" rounds barely got going fast enough to get out of the barrel - you'd do better hitting the attacker with the gun butt. I finally wound up with extra heavy for caliber bullets and very fast powder to get something to happen before things reached the end of the barrel - and let me tell you, it really stings to shoot it. Not that you'd care if you needed it, but it's no fun to practice with.

I just made a bunch of video clips of running the borescope up and down various rifles here to see if there's something obvious correlating with which ones shoot super well and which don't. It being late and me being on that pi4 just now, I'll have to wait to splice them together. As well - it's not yet obvious to me what the trick is here - some of the ones that shoot really well look really nasty in some ways. The hope is to learn how to do this better and maybe save some of the work making things look perfect that don't actually matter..

[Donovan Ready]

In stock configuration, it's a 25 yard gun. With the long barrel I can reliably hit steel at 40. No harder to carry at all at about 4 o'clock.

I've got some slow heavies, but my mags have 124gr Speer Gold Dot loaded.

[Doug Coulter]

Wrote a nice reply that was interrupted by a robo call (politics!) and wasn't here when I finished hanging up on them....sigh.

I wasn't saying slow heavies were the only way, and in your case, you've got enough barrel to not need special feeding, I think.

In my case, a Taurus ultrilight Ti revolver...the longer wad cutter plugged the cylinder-barrel gap longer so more powder could burn before the leak, and again slowed the leak out of the muzzle brake a little longer. I was able to get 550 fps out of 150gr projectiles that way. Sounds terrible, but...the +P "special self defense loads" were lucky to get 125 gr bullets to over 300 fps in that gun! I was afraid one would stick in the barrel...
Plenty of bang and flash - you could set the adversary's hair on fire at belly gun range I guess.

That same load did shoot well in my 6" barrel S&W 14. Slow powder, light bullet, nice numbers on the box if that's your gun. Didn't fit my use case. The slow heavies shoot even better in the S&W, though, and hit more like 770 fps there.
It's that bog-standard load for .38; 2.5 to 2.8 gr bullseye and a cast or swaged wad cutter in the 140-155 gr range. Almost any of those combos work well. 9 mm just doesn't have the cylinder gap, but a lot else is similar.

I seem to recall someone making special loads now for short barrels, but you don't need them anymore. Was it Speer, Federal? I forget as once I had my own solution I didn't chase it down.

I'm collecting some interesting data - some videos to come once all the prerequisites come together and I get some days of health (I'm sure you know about that one).

One is a bunch of borescope examinations of various rifles (I have quite a few) that shoot variably - one is more accurate at 100 yards than some drill presses, it's crazy good. A couple others come close, and a couple more not so great - "hunter grade" in the 1 moa range, not the .1 range like the really good ones. As someone said "only accurate rifles are interesting".

OK, since I'm building up all these gun parts I'd bought years ago for hopefully some additional income to spend on fusor stuff - it's kind of important to me to find out what matters to getting that sub moa performance. And yes, I recognize there are a myriad of factors that have little or nothing to do with how the inside of a barrel looks. But it does seem to have something to do with it, and if possible, I'd like to avoid the week of hand lapping work I'd done on some of my older ones in the process of making them really shoot - it might not have been required in all cases....things like that. So I'm making this video with a lot of raw data I don't always have a good interpretation of - and I'm going to toss it out to the vicious youtube comment section for people to tell me what I'm missing....I'll do skin thickening practice first, of course.

Hint, the best one doesn't look that fantastic inside...other great ones do (all sub .2 moa here). Only a Ruger M77 mk2 seemed to actually need that old, difficult hand-cast lapping treatment - they were having a really bad month at the factory then (there was a lot else wrong) - it was made right around when Bill died.

As a fusion tie in, do the math for say, the size of a lithium nucleus vs their spacing in say, LiF. Very roughly, golf balls at 1/3 mile. I've got rifles that good. A beam accelerator fusion machine might not have barrel vibrations or variations in twist, wind, different charges and case capacity, bullet variations and so on, and it would seem Heisenberg doesn't limit this either...Doggone it, this should be possible.

[Doug Coulter]

The only sad thing about replacing the original toolpost on my lathe was loss of use of my homebrew toolpost grinder, which I used to cut and chamfer quartz and alumina tubing, as well as drill accurate tiny holes for grid making.

I could always put the old toolpost back. Nah. This did work like a dream, though.

That loss couldn't be allowed to stand....

2nd try

That's a 1/8" ball mill (!) in the pic. Lots of cool tools around surplus, solid carbide, from the PCB industry, cheap. Also cheapo diamond bits that wear out quick but are cheap (horrible fright).

I know I keep promising videos and I've got a lot shot for the gun stuff and for this - try #1 was a real comedy of errors ... broken off taps, welding machine got misadjusted by people brushing against it and I didn't check, you name it.
Some are even partly edited. It's just taking longer than I thought, I'm at the beginning of the learning curve on both shooting the right stuff (and planning) and editing...

And FWIW, the power supply that came with this little kit should be sent to bigclive for a real aghast video - the motor terminals are at 1/2 line volts +/- one diode drop - as is the speed control pot. Not that little leakage the old filters used
to add via small caps to either side of the line - this is amps....as long as there are no insulation failures anywhere it's maybe OK but surely illegal as hell to import.
The motor is all you need anyway, er11 collets are cheap, and it comes with the one you always need - 1/8".

Here I'm just running it from a 30v bench supply and it's fine, I have a 60v one coming soon.

Kit and drawing for 1rst attempt (worked but not great)

Runnout is really good....
The good part.

The kit looked nice till I checked out that power supply - comments on Amazon prompted me to measure first, and I'm glad I did this time. I thought the don't tear this apart label was kind of amusing...

You can discover the utter lack of isolation without breaking the sticker, but...

'The kit might be worth it depending on if you need the nice clamp and the collets and can't find them cheaper. Just ditch the power supply.

The whole kit. https://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Star-Spin ... GYQSXBZS3T

Danger!

[Bob Reite]

Cheap copy of a Meanwell SMPS. At least that what the photo on Amazon looks like. Actually there is isolation between the AC and DC output, it's the ferrite core transformer that's driven by the power oscillator that runs directly off the power line bridge rectifier and big filter cap. Then again, you don't know about the build quality and maybe your sample is different. What the heck! Take it apart!

[Rex Allers]

Congrats on your new lathe add-ons. Looks good.

About 15 yrs back I bought a used metal lathe. A 1980's Taiwan 11 x 36. OK and within driving distance. Owner had added a quick change toolpost (BXA size) and a Sargon 2-axis DRO. Both are now things I would never want to be without.

Quality toolpost grinders seemed way more expensive than my uses could justify. But something like that was desired. A while back I bought a Proxxon rotary tool, like a Dremel but better quality. I thought for my needs it might be good enough.

I made a holder bracket that fits in a BXA holder. Here's two pics...

It has met my needs so far. One use was cutting thick wall borosilicate tubing. I used cheap ebay diamond cut-off wheels. One issue is clearance of tubing passing the rotary tool body. Because of that I had to use 60 mm dia diamond wheels but it worked with a little water as cutting fluid and slow manual cross slide feeding.

I made a couple cylindrical fusor grids based on your great design. I used this rotary tool setup to drill the tiny holes for tungsten TIG rods. For that job I also made an adapter for a degree wheel mounted in the outside end of the lathe spindle. I rotated the lathe chuck by hand and felt that angular accuracy within a degree was good enough.

Here's a link to a zip I made of that process. It's mostly just a bunch of pics.

http://www.xertech.net/pub/Make_Coulter_grid.zip

zip file is only a bit over 2 MB in size.

Hope some find it interesting. Ask if any questions.