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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   243 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for January 28, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I made my own currency for my party. I borrowed a friend's 3d printer. Neither of us really knew how to use 3d modeling software, but we were able to fumble through modifying someone's game token into a coin with my initials. We made 48 of them, two of the prints were kinda fucked up and discarded.

Coins were distributed evenly at the start of the party and everyone pitched in as new guests showed up. Observed uses were:

  • Making someone a mixed drink (1 coin)
  • Getting something out of a car (1 coin)
  • Cleaning up someone else's spill (3 coins)
  • Messing with the party playlist (1 coin)
  • Rights to last bits of food/drink (1 coin)
  • Gambling on outcomes of others' games (Max pot size 12 coins)

Seems like people valued them at 1 coin == 1 favor. Next time I want to experiment with different denominations and see if more price granularity develops.

I would like to bid USD$4 for 3 FallingStarFavorCoins to be held in reserve for me. I also like to pre-emptively spend one FallingStarFavorCoin to change the music from rap or hip-hop to 90s 3rd wave ska at your next party. The cover of Come On Eileen by Save Ferris if that fits, your choice if it doesn't.

Do you take venmo?

I'll take you up on that deal. No venmo though. Crypto is the preferred way to take money from internet people. I take Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Monero.

I will be doing some plumbing this weekend. Moving a T-joint in a copper pipe, and installing a shower fixture on pex.

I'm lazy but somewhat handy, but any advice for soldering?

Clean the pipe thoroughly, get it hotter than you might think is about all I've got.

Alternately, if it's just a couple of joints and you are lazy, the sharkbite fittings are about as lazy as it gets, and work fine on copper and pex, or combinations thereof. Plumbers don't like them because they cost $5 per joint, but it might be worth it. (expecially if the place you are soldering has any access issues at all)

Looks like I'm not going to catch a break any time soon, so still no tinkering for me. Any more luck @Southkraut?

Nope, not right now. Too much work and family trouble, too little sleep, whine bitch yammer etc.

I have racked up quite a bit of overtime, so once I'm done with my current task at work I might just take a few days off and sneakily tinker away while nobody's watching.

Tested out some handloads in my 1903 and my M1 this weekend, both feed great and shot even better. Hit steel at 200 yards on demand not much more I could ask for

What's a handload?

What the layman refers to as a "bullet" is actually a cartridge, which is made up of four main components: a case, a primer, a propellent charge, and a projectile (the actual bullet). Assembling these components is known as "loading". If the assembly is done at a factory, the cartridge is "factory-loaded", but you can also buy the components separately and assemble them yourself, which is known as "handloading". In addition to being cheaper, handloading also allows for a significantly higher ceiling on the quality of the finished cartridges, and also allows for the creation of variant cartridges that aren't commercially available in a factory loading.

Most serious competition shooters specializing in accuracy use handloads, and a lot of hobbyists do as well, generally for the cost savings and increased accuracy available.

What's the status quo for reusing the spent cases? Are they valuable enough that it's assumed people will want to collect them other than maybe the big spenders who let the range keep them as some kind of tip? Or are they so cheap/un-reusable that they go for scrap? Or something else?

As a Brit the nearest thing I have in my experience is finding a giant pile of obviously worthless spent plastic shotgun shells in the woods.

What's the status quo for reusing the spent cases?

Generally, you can reuse them multiple times. Some guns abuse them in various ways that make reloading impractical, and some factory loads use case materials (aluminum or steel are commonly used in cheaper factory ammo) or case designs that complicate reloading, but typical brass cases are relatively valuable. A lot of modern firing ranges have rules that all brass on the ground belongs to the range, and ranges that don't often will have customers offering to collect your brass for you, or simply collecting it without your permission.

I'm curious what the social perceptions are, whether saving your own brass is seen as normal and expected, or unusual and miserly/prepper-y, or whether the other customers offering to collect it for you are like the firing range version of squeegee men or something more like safety conscious hosts who just want to keep the range running smoothly.

If you went to an unfamilar range that didn't have a rule that all spilt brass is forfeited what would the normal etiquette be?

If I see someone saving brass, I assume they're a handloader; beyond that there's no real connotation. Even if you aren't handloading, you can sell brass to reloaders or for scrap, and ammo is expensive enough that people trying to save a bit isn't prepper or miserly, just a reasonable thing some people do. What does have connotations is trying to collect other peoples' brass; that's what gets the "stingy/miserly" attitude, from what I've seen, and I think that's what's been driving the adoption of "brass goes to the range" policies. "Squeegee men" is the right model in my experience, especially because collecting brass off the floor lends itself to being mildly unsafe, since it's a divergence from the normal business of remaining stationary while you shoot in your own bay. The safety-conscious version is to use a provided broom to sweep cases down-range so people don't slip on them. Thinking about it, it's kind of an oddly-prickly area; my impression is that people kinda look down on the range for mandating ownership of all spilled brass, but also look down on other shooters for trying to hoover it up, but also mostly don't collect it themselves; the range keeping what you yourself don't capture is the least-worst option, and trying some varying method (showing up with a shop-vac, say?) would be generally frowned-on.

Thats better than I could have described it, I mostly do it for cost lowers 30-06 to about the cost of shooting an AR which is nice

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