Vacation - Chicago

Last year I had the opportunity to take one of the "Architectural Tours" on a river boat while I was in Chicago on business. It was late fall and literally a week or so before they stopped running for the year. I thought Tania would enjoy it as much as I did so we decided to go to Chicago for the weekend.

I used some Marriott points and we stayed in a new Marriott on the south side of Chicago. Rooms facing the lake or the city were $40.00 a night more than the rooms facing south or west.

We spent the first evening there signing up and buying tickets for what we wanted to do on Sunday.

The Museum of Science and Industry was just a few miles south of our hotel. We signed up for the "Giant Dome Theater" and the U-505 exhibit in the morning with just under two hours to get to the dock for the "Architectural Tour".

The Giant Dome Theater was good but the U-505 was awesome. As you made your way to the exhibit there were long hallways that had everything from signboards to holograms that told the story of how the U-505 was captured. Just as you get to the point of capture, you turn a corner and this is your first view.

You could literally reach out and touch the sub from the mezzanine.

The lighting under the sub flickered to give the illusion of it being in water. Around the base of the sub there were multiple displays set up which contained artifacts from the sub. It was amazing the amount of items they still had that were in the sub as well as what they found years later when it was moved into the building.

The conning tower shows the damage from both small arms fire as well as a deck gun.

If you have ever been in a sub before, I would not recommend paying extra to tour the inside. Its a pain to schedule and not that much to see.

After you leave the display there are more signboards that explain how the sub was brought to Chicago, the time it spent on the lake and how it came about to be where it is currently housed.

We were able to leave the museum and make it to the dock with 30 minutes to spare. The Architectural Tour I would also highly recommend, even with doing it a year before, because I went on a different companies tour most of the information the guide narrated was new to me. The tour takes about 90 minutes to accomplish and it was a perfect day for it.

Because we went in the afternoon I didn't get any good pictures, they were all washed out by the sun. This is a picture from the last time I went.

The following day we had planned to drive though Rockford and follow the river down to St Louis. Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate and driving a scenic route 500+ miles in the rain didn't sound like a ton of fun so we headed home.

M&P 2.0

Ive been researching pistols for over a year now and I finally made up my mind to buy one. I initially wanted a 1911 .45, the limited capacity and the cost of the brands I was looking at made a big part of my decision to go a different direction. I started looking at full sized 9mm's and narrowed it down to the Glock 19, H&K VP9 and S&W 2.0. The 2.0 felt the best in my hand and its cost made it the clear winner for me. I was able to shoot both it and the Glock before I made my decision. I would have liked to shoot the H&K but in the end it didn't feel as good and was substantially more expensive.

Tonight after work I stopped at my buddies house and was able to shoot 300 rounds through it, I am really happy with my choice. I noticed that I was shooting high and left, basically twisting the gun while I fired. I changed the back strap to a narrower one and it helped bring it back to center. The fatter back strap felt better but made how I squeezed the trigger different.

Football

I walk a lot at work, even if I spend most of the day in my office my walk is a minimum of a mile. I was also going though dress shoes like I owned stock in their companies until I started buying Red Wings. Yesterday I was walking across the hangar and realized the ball of my right foot hurt. it felt like my sock was bunched up in my shoe, I took it off and found nothing out of the ordinary. Later in the day I found myself taking it off again to check the sock. I then stuck my hand inside the shoe to feel the insole and it felt weird, when I flipped the shoe over I found this.

Immediately I start thinking to when I bought these, because they are expensive shoes and have a year warranty on them. Convinced they weren't a year old yet I jumped in my truck and drove over to the Red Wing store all puffy chested and mad.

The nice young lady working the counter convinced me that it was almost two years since I had bought them. Now that I documented it here I can just check the date when the next pair wears out.

Range Fun - Update

I spoke to my boss today about the AR-15 I sighted in for him yesterday, and through that conversation the mystery was solved as to why the windage was full right. The scope is a UTG Bugbuster and it has a lighted reticle for which he believed there was a spare battery. Instead of screwing off the cover on the left side of the scope he turned the windage knob full CCW on the right side of the scope.

At least I know now why it was so far off.

Range Fun

The last two weekends were taken up by working on the range, this weekend we get to use it.

My boss just finished building an AR-15 for his son and asked me to sight it in for him. I started off and 50 yards and after 3 shots I couldn't even see where it was hitting. I moved up to 25 with the same result and then about 15 yards and still couldn't tell. We grabbed some clean cardboard and at 10 yards I could see the shots were three feet off center to the right.When I went to put windage to the left into the scope I checked and it was maxed to the right, I'm not sure why. With it fairly close at 50 yards we moved out to 100 and I was able to make three shots that overlapped each other on the 4" plate.

Here is my buddy's range from 100 yards, the white tent is where we shoot from 50.

This is standing in front of the trap looking back the opposite direction.

This is the same shot zoomed in, the shooting bench is just to the left of his pickup.

I was also testing a shell bag I bought last week for $10.00. It attaches to the gun with a velcro strap and has a zipper at the bottom of the bag to empty it. It works great and takes the pain out of collecting shells, with it on the gun you hardly even notice its there. I wish I had known about these a long time ago.

Next my buddy got out his Barrett .338 Lapua Magnum. He had never shot his AR500 with it and even though the guy he bought it from guaranteed it would handle the gun at 100 yards there was still some doubt. Here is a short video of him hitting dead center on the 10" plate.

The next victim for the Barrett was a 5lb fire extinguisher I have had in my garage for 7 years. It had dropped below minimum charge and because it has a plastic head no one would recharge it.

After that I shot the Barrett at some mild steel pistol targets we had hung next to the AR500. The targets were the type that flipped up and you would shoot one to reset them. The problem with them is it took a 45 to reliably flip them so we never shot them much .

As you can see the Barrett went through the one I shot rather easily, that was a hollow point round not even armor piercing or anything fancy.

We shot about 400 rounds of .22 the rest of the afternoon, all in all a very vun day.

Range Repair

The weekend after the 4th my buddy called asking if I could help him do some repairs to his shooting range. I shoot there quite often with him so I don't mind at all helping him with any maintenance on it.

He had family over for the 4th and noticed sand coming out from around the main wall. The wall we shoot into is one wall of a 8' x 8' sand trap. Its really overkill for anything we would be shooting and typical of my buddy.

This shows about two years of use and after looking things over has been falling apart for at least six months. Normally this would be a solid wall of rail road ties with some old interior doors screwed over them. The doors make it easy to staple targets in place but they also tend to hide the damage to the ties.

After we started removing the ties we noticed that the sand was also moving out around one of the sides. There have been a lot of recent heavy rains and the lag screws holding the ties to the 4x4 pulled through the ties. We had to bring in my buddies toy to dig the sand out and then dig out the corner by hand so we could push the ties back into place.

Here you can see the area we had to dig out to get the lower ties on the right side back into place.

This weekend we finished up by putting the lower ties back in place. We cut one in half and placed each half on end on each side to hold the lower ties in place. I talked my buddy into leaving out the upper ties. The sand sloping across is still over a food deep at its thinnest spot at the top. Behind that there is a railroad tie, 75 yards of heavily wooded forest and a 30ft berm, I think it is more than safe.

I bought a rail road tie from Lowes to place over the top since the upper tie is now gone we had nothing to hang the AR500 plates from. Unfortunately Lowes 8' ties are apparently only 7.5' so we had to add some 4x4s to hold it in place.

I think this setup will work much better and last a lot longer, the only consumable with this is the doors and I think he has about 12 more of them. To this point we have gone through three of them in two years. The 22's and .223/5.56 don't do much damage to them, not like the rail road ties that splinter and break up.

Parts Storage

Over the years I have collected literally boxes and boxes of aviation hardware. Its not useful to me because I don't know the majority of what I have. Last month I noticed a hanging bin cabinet for sale on Craigslist for $100.00 minus the bins. I didn't know that I wanted to take the plunge on a large bin cabinet so I blew it off until last weekend. Id looked up some options for just hanging bins but I didn't find anything that I liked or that was really even cost effective. So I texted the guy with the cabinet and Matty went with me to Greenwood to look at it.

Other than being really dirty the cabinet was in really good shape. Since the guy had the ad up for it for over three months and he had no bins for it I offered him $60.00 which he took and we loaded up.

When we had loaded it I notices something was up with the feet on the bottom of the cabinet. After we got it home and I could lay it down and look closer I realized they were extended nearly all the way out and had bent over from people sliding the cabinet around. I took them out of the cabinet and dollied the floor back to flat. The feet themselves were relatively undamaged so I added large area washers to the openings and put the feet back in.

I gave the cabinet a good bath and after drying it I hit it with the power buffer and a good coat of wax. Generally cabinets like this spend their lives in an industrial environment and look pretty rough. This one is in really good shape with really only a couple paint scratches.

 All the boxes on the floor around the cabinet have the hardware I want to load in it.

The cabinet is 36"W x 24"D x 72"H, 16 Gauge welded steel. I am not sure who makes it, it looks exactly like the cabinets sold by Global Industries. Their cabinets have a logo on the upper left corner of the left door which I believe is just a decal, this cabinet has no decals or stampings.

Last week I ordered 96ea 4-1/8 x 5-3/8 x 3 bins to fill the doors and 24ea 5-1/2 x 10-7/8 x 5 bins for the back wall. The bins set me back $150.00 and there is room for 40ea more of the large ones.

Today I cleared a spot on the wall next to the compressor and started loading it up, I basically have the bins 90% full and still have half the hardware to go through. I may look at purchasing bin dividers before I buy the last 40 bins.

I have $210.00 invested at this point and I have no fear that I cant get that back for it easily. A Global cabinet with the same bin loading sells for just over $1,000.00.

It may take a while but every time I'm able to use something from the cabinet versus buying hardware it starts paying for itself.

Qsonix

I have a friend at work that is a true audiophile, his home audio system is of the same value as a nice car. For years at the heart of that system was a Qsonix media server. Its basically a Windows XP based computer with 1.5tb of storage and a high end sound card that has a 24bit DAC.The internals are all bleeding edge for when it was built around 2007 and it came with a price tag to match of over $7500.00. The big selling point for it wasn't the fancy hardware, it was the software. It came with a 15" touchscreen that allows you to control all your music with a couple touches. Not really earth shattering until you think about 2007, the first iPhone came out midway through the year and the biggest iPods were around 8gb.

What does this have to do with iPhones and iPods?

It was the Apple interface that eventually put Qsonix out of business. Why spend $7500.00 when you can buy an iPad and interface it though a DAC or even use it to control a home built media server for a fraction of the price.

A few weeks ago my friend asked me if I was interested in the Qsonix, it had developed a problem where it would not reliably boot if it lost power. He didn't want to sell it like that, he knew I enjoyed tinkering with things so he offered to give it to me. After researching it I found that there is no real fix for the reboot problem.The units are still being built and still exist, they are used in very high end digital juke boxes. The software even still looks the same. Unfortunately to protect the software they were never shipped with disks to reinstall like a normal computer. If something went wrong you shipped the unit or hard-drive back to Qsonix. The company that owns the rights to them now does not provide support for the older Qsonix units.

The unit still works fine, once you have it booted. So I decided to put it in the garage, because that is where I generally listen to music. It actually has 4 zone capabilities and can be controlled through a web interface, so I ran a 100' Ethernet cable from my router to the Qsonix.

 
 While I was in the attic running the Ethernet cable I decided to mount some extra speakers I had bought at a garage sale a few years ago for $10.00. I bought the Ethernet cable $14.99, 100' speaker cable $6.00 and two speaker brackets $9.50 from Monoprice. I really don't know how they sell some of the things they do for the price. The speaker brackets are steel, support up to 33lb, can be tilted to most any angle and have a safety cable. I woudn't even try to make wooden shelves to set them on when I can get brackets for that price.

 I mounted the AIWA speakers in the corners over the edge of the garage doors.

Along with the Klipsch KG 4.2' I have less than $200.00 in the system and it sounds great. The Qsonix is awesome because I can create playlists on it that will play non-repeating for days. I have about 800 uncompressed albums loaded on it now.

ATS Allignment

Three weeks ago I took Tania's ATS in to a shop near work for an alignment. The place is very reputable and they have done at least three alignments for me in the past.

That afternoon they called me for what I was expecting to be a notification of the car being ready. Instead it was to let me know they had damaged it. Apparently the alignment tech left the alignment fixture still attached to the passenger side front wheel as he drove it off the rack. It hit the fender just behind the wheel and then pulled the fixture off the wheel, scratching it.

 
The Manager was very apologetic, had already contacted his body shop and had someone over to look at it. I was concerned not knowing who his "body shop" was, so I set my expectations of only OEM parts and let him know how particular I was. We mad arrangements for me to bring it back in just over a week and how they would pay for a rental.

I picked it up yesterday and looked it over closely. Even with the knowledge that it had happened I could not find any indication of it being repaired, I was very impressed with the quality of the work. When speaking to the Manager I thanked him for replacing the wheel, I found out they had it "repaired" and had used a wheel repair shop I have used twice in the past. It looked perfect, actually better than it had before because they removed the road rash from it as well.

Railing Project

A few weeks ago my boss showed me this picture and asked me if I wanted this railing. He said he had bought them for a project at home but they weren't going to work so he wanted to get rid of them.Initially I had no idea what I would use them for but decided to take them just for the steel.

I had them in my garage for a for a while before my wife suggest using them near the entrance of the house.

When I started looking at them closer, I saw just how badly rusted they were, as you can see in this picture the leg is completely rusted through. Fortunately for what I was going to do, the railing didn't need legs.

I ended up cutting out the center area of one of the railings and proceeded to spend about 15 hours of sandblasting, wire wheeling and at some points naval jelly to remove all the rust. I would never try to do that again, at one point it was apparent that even for free the railing was worth less than the time I had invested. After getting the rust off, I used some of the metal from the remaining pieces to make tabs to mount the rail between the columns at the entrance of the house. After a coat of primer and three coats of paint I mounted it with some massive lag screws.