Mortises by Router

The traditional methods of cutting mortises require fancy tools, or a lot of hand work with chisels and mallets.   Routers will cut nearly anything, but they are grabby.  Freehand router work is beyond my skills. Freehand, in my hands, the router wavers back and forth, cutting wavy lines.  I need  a guide for the router to cut straight lines.  To guide the router I fit a "template guide" aka schnozzle.   The schzozzle is big enough to pass the router bit clean thru itself, should the router bit contact the schozzle, bad things happen.  The outside of the schozzle  follows a wooden template.

This is a brass Porter Cable style template guide bushing (schozzle) mounted on my elderly Craftsman 1/4" router.  This clear acrylic base plate holding the guide bushing is shop made.  A 1/2" straight cutter pokes thru the schnozzle.   Here is the shop made template to guide the router in making a nice square mortise.

This is my shop made template.   The rectangular guide guide hole must be the size of the mortise, plus an allowance for the size of the schnozzle.  In this case the schnozzle is 0.75: in diameter covering a 0.50 inch cutter, so the template needs be 0.25 inches larger than the desired mortise size in both directions.  And, the template need be as thick as, or thicker than the schozzle is deep.  In this case I had to shim up my template to 5/8" to prevent the 5/8" schnozzle from getting stuck on the surface of the workpiece.  Rule: your template HAS to be thicker than the schnozzle is deep.  The bits of wood nailed to the template made a 1/2 plywood template thicker than the 5/8" schnozzle. 

And here is the final routed mortise.  Nice straight sidewalls, flat bottom.  I wanted a 0.50 inch deep mortise but settled for 0.47 inch, mostly because I didn't dare pull the cutter any further out of the chuck, lest it fly out and do evil things. 


  

That first hit. Why do addicts take it?

We have been having a sad increase in heroin addicts in NH.  I can understand how hard it can be to give it up once hooked.  The part I don't understand is why people take that first hit.  Surely every sentient creature on planet earth knows that a heroin habit is a life wrecker.  Everyone must have heard that word by now.  And they must believe it.  
  You would think that fear of sinking to the absolute muddy bottom of society, would make people resist taking that first step down the drain.  Surely they would stick with weed or booze before tossing their lives away with heroin addiction.  Apparently they do, but I don't understand why. 
   If we are to have effective public policies against heroin use, they need to focus on preventing people taking that first hit.  Unless we understand why people take that first hit, we won't be able to do much about preventing it.

CCleaner works good on Windows 8.1

CCleaner  (Crap Cleaner) has been around for a long time and is quite dependable.  I've been using it since Windows 2000.   This morning  Avast anti virus perked up and gave me the "optimize your PC" pitch.  So I tried it, and Avast reported all sorts of things to fix up, but then wanted money before it would do anything. 
   So I downloaded the latest version of CCleaner (v5.09) from File Hippo and let er rip.  Took awhile but it found and zapped 6.5 Gigs of  unneeded files.  
   I ran the registry clean feature and it found and zapped a bunch of unneeded registry keys. 
Not bad.  And, FlatBeast is noticeably more lively than before, so something good happened.

Splat Splat. Market falls further

Today it looked like the NYSE might recover from Monday's 588 point fall.  About lunch time the Dow was up 350 points from opening.  Then something happened, and most of the 350 points went away, leaving the Dow about where it was Monday night (in deep doo-doo).  Shepherd Smith on Fox said a rumor of Chinese troop movements swept across the trading floor about 3 PM causing a wave of selling.  Shep said the rumor was totally unconfirmed, but it did a job on the Dow before close at 4PM.
   Wall St Journal said the overall price/earnings ratio was 25 on Thursday before the s*** hit the fan on Friday.  As of Tuesday the price earning ratio was down but only to 23 which is still high.  Historically, going back to the Civil War, price earning was about 11.  Rule of thumb used to be buy stocks with a P/E less than 12, and sell anything with a P/E above 24.   It may be that this market disaster happened when all the computer programs decided to sell 'cause the P/E was as high as it could go, why not cash in? 
   Anyhow, with an average P/E of 23, the market can go down a long long way before it gets to 11.

Legion d'Honneur for Americans suppressing Train Terrorists.

TV shows the three Americans and one Brit  accepting France's highest honor, the Legion d'Honneur from the president of France.  The Americans are wearing knit polo shirts and khaki slacks.  To my way of  thinking, they should have been wearing coat and tie for such a ceremony.  We were required to wear coat and tie merely to go to dinner at my old prep school, let alone receive the Legion d'Honneur.  Oh well, they are heroes, and they make me proud to be an American. 

Splat. Market falls

The Dow Jones took a 500 point drop on Friday.  The market opened this morning and it dropped another 900 points in the first 10 minutes of trading. 
Scary.

Securing the Border

Everybody is in favor.  Nobody has spelled out just what they mean.  The Donald wants Mexico to pay for it.  Nobody has estimated the cost.  
   Let's ignore the problem of people who just drive up to a border checkpoint, show some paper work and drive on thru.  And neglect to go home.   That's another problem for another day.  I'm talking about preventing people walking or driving across the 1900 mile border that stretches from San Diego to Brownsville. 
   For me, I'd settle for a regulation chain link fence from sea to shining sea, backed up with a dirt road on our side of the fence, a few hundred yards back, to allow for jeep patrols.  And air surveillance, by two place light aircraft, say Cessna 172's.  No trendy but pricey drones, helicopters, electronics, camera's, and other welfare for contractors.  The fence stops vehicles, or at least the hole in the fence tells you someone crashed thru it.  The air reconnaissance spots people on the move and calls for agents to drive out and arrest them. 
  Costs for fence.  We need 1900 miles of chain link fence.  That's 10 million feet.  I haven't priced fence lately, but I bet you could put it up for $10 a foot.  So $100 million for the fence.  Guess that the road (dirt, just good enough to get thru with a jeep) might cost the same.   Buy twenty light aircraft at $100,000 apiece ($2 million)  and you could fly over every part of the fence every hour.   Let's assume the current ICE force can handle the arresting and patroling with their current appropriation. 
   So, we are talking  maybe $202 million startup costs.  Lets assume the ICE budget can handle manpower and maintenance. 
   Gee, we haven't every gotten to a $ billion yet.  "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money" said Everett Dirksen a long time ago.  So far we only have a fifth of a billion.  Long way to go before we are talking real money.