The Explosive Bonded Packer

During my undergraduate days I ran a shock physics lab primarily studying the welding window for explosively welding dis-similar materials. You can find a very brief article on the subject here. The gentleman I worked for at the time was considered one of the world's experts on the subject. I published a few journal articles and learned quite a bit. A few years later I was working at my career job and I got a phone call out of the blue. The caller told me that he got my name and organization from a quite obscure thing known as a world wide web search, Netscape was still fairly new and the only real browser, and he understood I knew something about explosive welding.

This is my Rifle...

This is my gun... I don't suppose I need to repeat that little ditty that one picks up in Basic Training in the U.S. Army. I assume they don't use that anymore given the coed nature of the Army these days. This is the object I'm speaking of.

Bacon is a Many Splendored Thing

On occasion, living like we do out in the boondocks some things get a little old. Everything has to be done by myself, maybe not alone, but certainly you have to take care of it yourself. Recently I had to replace the booster pump on one of the water wells. What a chore, I'm one of those people who inspect everything when I'm doing a job and replace it if necessary (Do It once, Do It Right). Yeah, anal retentive over our infrastructure about covers it. But then again I rarely have to hear at 0 dark 30 from my family that something is wrong with... (insert appropriate system here). There is also the idea of having personally taken care of it for myself and my family which always appeals to me.

Most of our food comes from my supplying it either through growing or raising it, or getting the raw ingredients from other people I know and trust. I don't like pigs, but I do like pork, especially the belly, because of Bacon! I get my pork belly from a fellow who raises hogs who also supplies me with the cuts I need for making our hams. I just got a slab which yielded about 10 pounds of cured meat ready for the smoker. I always wet cure my bacon. Below is the cure I use.

Some New Ballistics Calculators Added

As I've been developing my Android application for a shooter's assistant I've also been putting the pieces I need to make it function in spreadsheet format. The recent one I have completed was looking at the exterior ballistics problem using Pejsa's Methodology which you can read about at the link. An internet search will bring up a number of uses of it. I have provided my version of it in my downloads area. The spreadsheet can be found here.

Crotalus Scutulatus

Or as they are more popularly known the Mojave Green rattlesnake. Our main residence is on the eastern front of the Sierra Nevada mountains and is classified as high desert. The high desert is full of life it just tends to be spread out more and much of it is nocturnal. One member of the local fauna is the Mojave Green rattlesnake. They can have a nasty bite as the venom is both a neurotoxin as well as a hemotoxin.

I don't see them very often but I make sure they don't stay around. If I can't transport it easily I'll put it down quickly. Children and dogs are especially at risk from a bite. Just today a woman my wife knows had an unwanted visitor. They have 5 kids and numerous dogs, so, "something has to be done!" You can guess what happened, and I brought the carcass home. Here it is showing the beautiful pattern it has and I decided I needed some more rattlesnake leather.

Ballistics Calculators

I've been working on a system to take with me shooting. It's essentially an external ballistics application for my Android phone that gives me bullet path calculations. It's not meant to be a whiz bang super ballistics calculator that will tell you everything for every bullet and condition. It's set up to calculate the functions I want for a limited number of cartridges, loading conditions and projectiles.

The first thing I did was develop the means to make any corrections needed for the flight path due to temperature, humidity or altitude. These can be all lumped together by calculating the air density. This is the circuit for the Assistant set-up. It's a little module (Bosch BME280) that reads temperature, atmospheric pressure, and relative humidity. I use those inputs to calculate the air density. It also accounts for any altitude corrections that might need to have been made through the direct reading of the atmospheric pressure. In fact the manufacturer likes to claim you can get an altitude within a meter or so from it. The values are read in and sent via Bluetooth to my Android app.

The Curiosity Shop: Can I Get A Witness?

Over the years a lot of experimental work I did was centered around high strain rate phenomena in solids. Which, there are probably more people attending your hometown high school football game than are interested in that field.

I have always had an interest in steel, its chemistry, its properties, and also its role in human history. Thus, my interest in knifemaking which embodies the art and craft of steel as well as the science.

In testing explosives a steel witness plate is often used to give a quick qualitative look at what the explosive output may have been. Often times it's more of a convenient way to rest the test item on a more stable surface. Over the years I must have used thousands of steel plates of various sizes and deformed them, punched holes in them and generally scattered them everywhere. I think I may have spent half a year out of my life just collecting them up afterwards. Needless to say I still have a few of them lying around.