2013-02-28

E-Book on Milling an AR-15 Forging

For those with the time and the talent, there's a free e-book on how to machine an AR-15 "0%" forging into a finished lower receiver.  Also on the site is an interesting label format for brass prep and loading.

2013-02-26

Hot Shots

Tasty (store).  The playing cards will be good for SHTF.

2013-02-15

Machining AR-15 Lowers

Found an interesting forum post describing the advantages of machining from a forging as opposed to a billet.  45 min to machine a forging vs. over 2 hrs for a billet?

 Also, I found another place (Stillers Precision Firearms) that sells funky billet lowers for nearly $400.  If they have any in stock, that's about what regular lowers are going for these days....

2013-02-14

DEW (ETF) Components

Someone told me that I should look into an ETF called DEW, as I have an interest in securities that pay a high dividend.  This is WisdomTree's global equity income fund.  The annualized yield is only 3.7%, with an expense ratio of 0.58%.  They list all the components of the fund, so theoretically one could pick out a few promising ones and mimic the fund with lower overhead.  It's good for mining a few ideas, anyway.

2013-02-12

Barrel Lust

In this political environment, parts for "black rifles" are in short supply.  I've had a barrel backordered for a couple months; it was on order prior to Sandy Hook.

So AIM Surplus posted on Facebook that they have a Spike's Tactical Lothar-Walther barrel in stock.  Stainless steel, polygonal-rifled, 1 in 8" twist.  They only have the 16" model, but Spike's website has the 18" model in stock.  The price is the sticking point: $340 (16") or $355 (18") plus S&H.  Ouch!

I haven't seen any other AR-15 barrels with polygonal rifling, so this is way cool.  In stainless, you could probably shoot 100k rounds through the thing!

2013-02-09

Bitcoin

Of course I'd heard of Bitcoin, but Joe B. at work pointed out that there were ASICs coming out that are supposed to crank the mining hash rate.  Butterfly Labs is one of the companies producing specialized machines.  (The FPGAs are more interesting since you could repurpose them later, but they have higher power consumption and lower hash rate.)

Seems pretty risky, though, since a bunch of ASICs will probably be coming online at the same time.  BFL's FAQ has an entry on this that seems to imply that one could break even in about 6 mo, but that calculation may lowball the impact of the additional computational power; then again, the exchange rate has also risen about 60% since that calculation.  In other words, it's a total crapshoot.  Another site has a profitability calculator.

There's also a mining hardware chart on the bitcoin wiki.  Some people build custom mining rigs using multiple graphics cards, but the hash rate doesn't even come close to the theoretical rate of the ASICs.  In that regard, investing in one of those might be more sound.  Or it could be better to have the lower rate now before the ASICs come online....

Power Switches

Sparkfun, an online hobby electronics store, is selling an AC power switch that can be controlled with TTL logic, as well as the Sharp optoisolated solid-state relay itself.

I kind of wanted to run a low-power server to make available lots of storage which I could switch off to save energy when not being used.  It could also be useful for security for preventing sensitive data from being accessed, should the server be exposed to the Internet.

Raspberry Pi seems like an ideal candidate for such a system.

2013-02-06

Ice Fishing Safety

WMH at work sent me some YouTube links [1 2 3] on how to survive after falling through ice.