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.

Vegas Vacation

Its been a loooonnnng time since we went on a real vacation. A few months ago Tania purchased a Southwest Vacation for Vegas, basically plane tickets and a hotel. I've been in Vegas a few times over the past few years for various reasons but Tania hasn't been there since our vacation in 1993.

When we arrived in Vegas it took us a while to find the Uber pickup area for the airport, its on the second floor of the short term parking garage. We were staying at the MGM and once we dropped off our bags we hit the strip for something to eat. I did a Google search for what was rated as a good buffet and the one listed on multiple sites was at Caesars Palace, so we headed that way while taking in the desert sun and warmth I have missed so much. I haven't been to that area of the US since we moved back to Indy from Tucson.

I haven't been in Caesars Palace before so it took us a little while to find the buffet. I was glad to see there was no one in line to get in and was looking around as Tania paid for us. While we were being seated I looked across the table at Tania, she looked like she was going to be sick. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I had no idea this was going to be over $160,00. I'm pretty sure I was able to replicate the same look she had, so in an effort to find the glass half full side of this, I saw a flyer that said something about all you can drink alcohol. When the waitress came over to the table and asked us what we wanted to drink I told her I would have a beer, and she asked if I wanted a bucket of six, I said sure. She then went on to explain that I could do the all you can drink (pointing at the flyer) for an additional $30.00 a piece. I then promptly ordered some iced tea. The remainder of the trip was a game for us in finding the cheapest places we could to eat. The buffet was good but maybe $35.00 each good.

We spent the rest of the night wandering around and headed back to the hotel early that evening. I did find some socks for my boss who has some kind of strange fetish for ugly socks.

After deciding that purchasing them for him could potentially be career limiting, I showed him this picture when we got back. He liked them so much he immediately went online and ordered a pair.
Saturday we walked the casinos did a bunch of shopping and bought a massive margarita. I had bought some tickets for KÀ by Cirque du Solei. I have never been to a Vegas show before so I didn't know what to expect, all I can say is if you get a chance to go you must go, it was very impressive. Don't worry about getting the best seats, even though we were in the fourth row I don't think it would have mattered much where we sat.

They didn't allow cameras during the show so I took a couple pictures before it started, the area surrounding the stage was awesome.

The next day we rented a car and drove to the Hoover Dam. I have wanted to visit the Hover Dam for quite a while but even with us living in Arizona for two years we never made the trip.
We rented a car with the points I had acquired, from a hotel near by. When we arrived the agent informed me they didn't have a midsize sedan available so they had upgraded me to a Range Rover, which for 24 hours cost me $1.86.

This is something you must do if you have the chance, its like a 25 minute drive from Vegas. Going early in the morning is important, it was busy when we got there but when we left there was literally a five plus mile line of cars trying to get in.
Even though we did get there early the full blown power plant tour had a 3 hour wait, so we took the standard tour which was still very good. It took us down in the dam to where the water inlets were and we were able to see the generator room as well. Its a very impressive place with tons of the original Art Deco everywhere.

When we got back into Vegas and while we had a vehicle, we drove over to Gold and Silver Pawn.
It was much smaller inside than I had envisioned and obviously none of the now millionaires that work there were at work, There were some pretty cool items on sale though and its not far off the strip so its worth the visit. I would bet that 98% of the people that were inside were doing the same thing.

Overall it was a good trip and nice to get away for a few days.

Dead Dryer

Nothing like spending a week away from home, looking forward to relaxing a day and finding out you have a new project.

I know nothing about driers but I decided I would figure it out. After 10 minutes with the cordless impact and 5 minutes with a Fluke I found the heating element broken. The new element from Amazon will be here tomorrow, it looks fairly easy to change. 

Al Bundy

I was traveling back from Dallas yesterday after a business trip. Normally I would be on Southwest but flight availability put me on an American flight. I had just looked up from watching a movie on my tablet when I saw this.

No this isn't photo-shopped and no I'm not on a SWA flight.

How does that even happen? Its like a rerun from Married with Children and Al Bundy is trying to find his seat. I also like the very professional flight attendant who has just seen the toilet paper and is probably trying to decide how to tell the guy without embarrassing him in front of the entire plane load of people.

One second after I took the picture the flight attendant with ninja like reflexes managed to grab the toilet paper right at the guys waist and tear it off without him even knowing. He then quickly wadded it up like it was something that happens every day.

Al Bundy never even knew it happened..

New Hooptie

After another long week in beautiful Rockford IL, I was looking forward to going home and spending a night in my own bed. The drive between Brownsburg and Rockford has to be one of the most boring drives a person could make. Most notably the stretch between Normal IL and Rockford IL. The trees along the highway are bent at their tops permanently, indicating not only the prevalent wind direction, but also a place I would never want to live. Apparently I am not the only one that thinks that way because there is nothing out there except some wind generators.

After making the 270 mile drive back home my son was waiting in the GMC at Hertz when I pulled in to drop off my car.I have made the drive enough times now that when I leave Rockford I can call him and give him a five minute window in which I will be arriving home.

After turning in the keys I climbed into the truck and Matty said, "Is it ok if we go look at a car"?

Not really my first idea of relaxation after driving through the snow for 270 miles.

I know he has been looking for a while, so I said "sure where is it"? to which he replied "a little north of South Bend".

The only thing north of South Bend besides Canada is Michigan. To make matters worse it was 5:30 and we would need to drive through some of the heaviest traffic in Indy during rush hour to get there.

Immediately I started formalizing reasons for why this would be a better trip to make on Saturday. Which he clearly expected because he had logical answers for everything. You can sleep and Ill drive. Its a Friday night he might sell it tonight. If we go tonight it wont ruin your day tomorrow.

Most of that was true except for the sleep on they way up part.

Once we got there and he looked at the car I knew right away I would be driving the 150 miles home so he could drive the car back.

He managed to find a two owner 2004 Jetta GLI with 27k original miles for $6500.00. I was skeptical as he was telling me about it on the drive up. But once we looked at the car it was apparent it was the original mileage. There are simple things you can look at such as the leather on the steering wheel and shift knob, the wear on the Recaro seats and the condition of carpet and sill plate, all of which looked new.

We both drove the car a few miles, it ran well and had no squeaks or rattles with very little wind noise.Apparently the seller was related to the original owner who purchased the car as more of toy / project / weekend car. He had done a lot of modifications to it, a Stage III turbo kit (you can see the massive intercooler and ducting though the front bumper), Euro headlights, lowering struts, stainless exhaust and a massive stereo with a overhead drop down screen. The modifications were the only thing that concerned me about the car, the wiring for the fog lights was very poorly done and some of it actually looked damaged. The had acquired the car intending to keep it but apparently his wife didn't like it or something so he had only had it a few months.

Other than a small paint blemish on the front bumper and the passenger mirror cover missing, the car looked like it was 1-2 years old. The paint on it is in really good shape for being 14 years old. The underside was clean, the brakes looked good and the tires looked to be fairly new. It was obvious it was well taken care of.

The previous owner also de-badged the car and put in an aftermarket front grille, which at a glance makes it look as much like a old BMW as a Volkswagen.

The day ended with me traveling almost 600 miles, but it was worth it for Matty. This should be a good car for him and last him quite a few years.