Creuzer

I was working on some of my hand forged Settlers of Catan pieces on my UNiMAT mini lathe tonight. I mainly wanted to flatten the bottom of the pieces so they would sit flat on the board. I also tried to machine the roof of one just to see if I could do it.

I will be machining all the bottoms it looks like. I think I will leave the roofs alone. More work than it's worth. It takes longer to machine the bottoms than to forge the pieces – never mind machining the roof!

In album

A stack of rough forged game pieces. These are pretty bad.

Trying to use the 4 jaw chuck on the lathe to mill one of the game piece ‘roof’ faces.

Roof was machined flat.

More importantly, the base is machined flat. Now the piece can sit on the board.

The 4 jaw chuck allows me to grab this 4 sided piece and machine the bottom flat.

I think I like the blacksmithed roof building better that the machined roofed building.

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This in my Electronics Hutch in the LaBOREtory

It's nice having the right tools for the job and a place to work on things. I just wish I had the time to work on it more!

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SOPA

Most people who know me know that I am pretty a-political. I am a live & let live type of person.

My theory is that politicians created all the good laws that needed creating years ago, and in order to stay relevant and appear to be working, now create really dumb laws. All so they can appear to be working and justify our voting for them again.

SOPA.

Basically it’s like taking somebody’s name out of the phone book because somebody made a BBB complaint against them. A really dumb idea, and trivial to work around.

Essentially, they are wanting to break the INTERNET in order to censor Americans without due process.

We have a process that deals with the problem they are trying to solve. It’s called Copyright litigation. It’s a poor process, slow, expensive, and difficult, but it’s a hell of a lot better than breaking the INTERNET!

I know from experience that it’s not often wise to come up with a technical ‘solution’ to a social management problem.

So, my act of defiance against this dumbness is to join the SOPA blackout.

I am not completely shutting down my site. That would be as dumb of an idea as SOPA is itself. So I am just using a splash screen and changed my template to a black template.

If it’s post-SOPA-blackout, you can see the SOPA unWELCOME screen at http://mike.creuzer.com/#stopsopa .