I had to travel to Dallas this week for work. Our dinner was scheduled coincidentally at Gas Monkey Bar and Grill on the night of the big race between Gas Monkey Garage and Street Outlaws Oklahoma.
Not surprisingly after the beat down widely publicized on the internet, only two of the multiple TV's both inside and outside had aired the episode of Gas Monkey Garage. Even those two TV's had the volume turned off, I guess it would be bad for business.
We did have a great evening there with very good food. I wanted to buy a tee shirt in their gift shop but wasn't willing to pay $30.00 for a 100% cotton non-brand tee shirt.
This week I got a chance to take one of our customers hockey game at the United Center.
I've been to some of the minor league games recently but no major league games in the last 20 years. My company has a suite at the United Center that takes all of five minutes to get into from the parking lot.
The Blackhawks played the Dallas Stars. I forgot just how large professional ice is compared to the rinks the minors play on.
At times with all the lighting and sound system it looked and felt like being at a rock concert. The lighting on the ice was very impressive.
The Blackhawks won in overtime, it was a very enjoyable evening doing something I wouldn't normally do.
Over the last few weeks I started looking at different soft cases available for my AR15. The particular cases I was looking at were in the $50-$80 dollar range when I came across the Plano All Weather Rifle Hard Case for $62.00.
Plano claims their All Weather cases "create watertight and airtight shields that protect your guns even in the most extreme conditions" and "are designed to withstand the continuous bumping and jarring of airline travel". I found a lot of positive reviews on it so I went ahead and ordered one.
The main layer of foam in the case consists of approximately 2.5" of "pick and pluck foam" which consists of partially cut 1" squares. Once you have traced an outline on the foam you pluck what is not needed. It makes it easy to make a cutout for the gun but it gives it an unsightly appearance and it is not at all durable. It is not as supportive as solid foam and if anything catches on the foam it will pluck that piece out.
Here is a picture of a newly done gun case with pick and pluck foam, note how the pieces around the gun are already starting to be displaced.
This one shows the same type of foam after it has been in use for a while. You can see where it has started to deteriorate and separate.
The alternative is using solid foam that is cut specifically to the items you are trying to protect. This is a far more durable option that produces a more professional appearance. There are various ways to cut solid foam from regular knifes to water jets and lasers. Hot wire cutters are fairly simple and make very clean cuts so I decided to build one.
I purchased a folding tailgate table from "The Walmart" and using some scrap metal I had along with some uni-strut constructed a, way more complex than it needed to be, hot wire foam cutter.
The folding table made the entire project much harder than if I had just used a simple piece of wood. I wanted something I could fold up and put away when I wasn't using it.
The top piece of the cutter has an adjustment knob for when the wire heats up or stretches. The wire itself is Kanthal and seems to be fairly durable. The adjustment knob also allows for the wire to be quickly disconnected and strung through the foam for making inside cuts. The fan was a last minute addition to blow the smoke away from the cut.
The cutter clamps to the sides of the table by interference fit. There is a common beam across the bottom that has a tongue which fits into the main piece. This is also interference fit which allows the entire cutter to be quickly installed or removed.
A simple automotive battery charger is used to apply 12v @ 2 amps to the cutting wire.
This video shows the cutter in action with an old piece of 3" thick foam. This was the first time I tried using it.
With the cutter working the next step was to make templates for the items I wanted in my gun case. Using poster board allows the wire to be run along it, because the wire wont quickly cut the poster board it makes for very accurate cuts.
The templates are difficult when the item does not sit flat, the gun itself took me about 90 minutes to accurately trace. This can be done more quickly if fit is not a big concern.
Once it was traced out I cut it with scissors and pinned it to the foam. It took about 6 minutes to cut it out with the hot wire. The cutouts are then placed on their side for a perpendicular cut this is to make a piece that goes back in the cutout hole and raises the item in the cutout hole. In the picture below I set up a simple fence for the amount I wanted to cut off the gun cutout. If I were to make a hot wire cutter again this would be something I would include in the design.
Overall I am very happy with the hot wire cutter, I have about 45-50 dollars invested in it. The foam itself can be very expensive, I was lucky enough to find a few pieces in the trash at work that were close to the size I needed. Below is a shot of my first try at foaming my gun case, It was a lot of work but I am very happy with the outcome.
I positioned the gun to the left side in anticipation of the Hearing Protection Act. To offset the weight of the gun I have 5 loaded mags positioned to the right with a minimum of 1" spacing from any item to the edge of the foam.
After weeks at the dealership and four additional trips back for parking sensor issues, I have my truck back.
The damage was limited to the bumpers and the seat belt tensioners. I also had its first service completed while it was there. I did have them install Denali bumpers on the truck since they were being replaced anyway. Its funny that painted bumpers cost me almost 1k over having the chrome ones put back on. I prefer the look of the painted bumpers and it helped me over the whole wrecking the truck thing.
I've been researching scopes for my M&P 15, early on I decided on 1-6 versus a red dot, the 1-6 is more versatile in my opinion. My price point took me to the Vortex 1-6x24 Strike Eagle which is a very popular scope and didn't appear to ever go on sale. I found it after thanks giving as a package deal at SWFA for its normal $329.00 with a S.S.A.L.T. mount and two Magpul magazines.
Over the last few weeks I have added a Magpul MOE handguard, a Fenix PD34 TAC and the Strike Eagle.
Yesterday my buddy contacted me, he said he would be working on some projects outside and I should stop over to sight in my gun. When I got there I set up his shooting bench, grabbed a couple targets, and his bench bag.
I shot 21 rounds before I was satisfied with the setup, probably way more than I needed to use but I had only done this once before and never alone.
I numbered my three shot groupings on the photo below with the last shots I took being at the lower right corner of the target.
After the seventh grouping I stood an empty brass up at 50 yards and dialed in another click of elevation, I hit the casing on the first shot. I'm by no means a good shot but I am more than happy with the sighting on the gun.
A friend of mine who is a Pacers season ticket holder got his hands on some tickets in a suite. I'm not exactly a big basketball fan but I'm always game for a suite.
The suite was a large shared area with open dining and assigned seats outside the dining area. The seats were actually pretty badass and the food was very good.
I was working on a project at home today using corrugated plastic sheets that I was cutting with an X-ACTO knife. I ended up cutting across my index finger and thumb. I wasn't actually cutting anything when I did this, I knocked a bottle off the table and reflexively tried to catch it with the knife in my hand.
It was a clean cut and really didn't hurt that bad, but I knew it was deep and needed stitches so I went to a redi-care and that's where it got painful. The Doctor on site deadened my thumb around the base with multiple injections that were actually quite painful. In the end all it did was make my thumb drastically swell while providing no numbing effect to the area that needed stitched.
It was a bit windy last night. We jumped in the truck to head into town and saw this on the way. I haven't see the pickup since they cleared out the tree it must have been totaled.
Friday nights Tania, Matty, Savannah and I generally go out to eat together. This Friday our supper was delayed because I didn't see a deer standing in the road until it was too late.
I caught the deer with the front passenger side bumper at 50 mph and ended up in the ditch on the other side of the road narrowly missing a tree and a telephone pole.
When we hit the deer it activated the seat belt tension devices filling the cab with smoke to the point I couldn't see out the windows. This set off the emergency flashers that were impossible to turn off and OnStar calling me while I'm trying to figure out what happened and why the truck was full of smoke.
We were only a couple of miles from the house, so after I got the truck out of the ditch and the police did their thing I limped the truck home and we took the ATS to supper.
I was not really in the mood to take pictures of the damage to the truck, even though it was relatively minor, its still a 55k vehicle with less than 5k miles on it that got smashed. All of that is material and can be replaced, thankfully no one was hurt in the slightest or well no one except the deer...
Yesterday was the first time for the Red Bull Air Races in Indianapolis, I was more excited about this than the 500. It would be a lot less people and basically all seats would be fairly equal. I first saw the Red Bull Air Races on TV about seven years ago, not something I would go out of my way to watch but it was entertaining and the venues provide very interesting backdrops.
To promote the race Red Bull put out a video shot with this years Indy 500 winner Alex Rossi and two time Red Bull Air Race World Series Champion Kirby Chambliss.
We found some residential parking (free) about five blocks west of turn four, our tickets were for seats on turn three. Attendance was obviously much less than the 350k+ for the 500, they estimated it just over 40k. The majority of those 40k were in turn three and four, all the other stands were closed for safety reasons including the short chutes between turns three and four.
Below is a layout of the course, the aircraft took off from the road course and immediately entered through the starting gates. After two timed laps they would circle off track while the next competitor did their run. When the next competitor finished their run the previous one would land. The timing of all of this was very well orchestrated.
At first it didn't appear the weather was going to cooperate. It rained off and on during qualifying the day before, and yesterday the ceiling was less than their minimum 1k feet. This delayed the start of the races by an hour during which they had motorcycles performing stunts on the track and an aerobatic paraglider performing stunts over the track.
This was a view of the finish gate from our seats in turn three. None of my pictures a very good for the day, the weather combined with the distance and speed of the aircraft were greater than my abilities as a photographer.
Here are some various shots I took during the day.
The last two shots were taken at over .5 mile distance. The first shows a track worker zipping in a new section of pylon, they are wearing black and yellow shorts and their legs are sticking out of the top of the pylon. This was the first set of air gates after the start gate, the wind was blowing the southern pylon towards the northern causing it to be clipped six or seven times during the day. Generally the workers had the pylons on the course repaired and back up within 3-4 minutes.
This is the B-17 Yankee Lady that did a flyby.
We had a great time and I hope they come back again next year.
