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Building a super mosin….

I’ve been lazy about posting for a bit due to holidays, trying to get a piece of property, work, ect. Posting should pick up again, unless I get that property then I’ll be moving stuff.

I have been busy out in the garage, working on various projects. Lately it’s been a mashup of small things from the hit-miss motor restoration to model engines and firearms. I took a series of pictures on the latest Mosin Nagant 91/30 overhaul and figured I’d share them with everyone. The 91/30 is a WWII era Russian rifle, the one in the pictures was made in 1936 and bought surplus from a box store. Firing one of these in it’s as-purchased configuration is painful, it kicks solidly and the buttstock has a metal plate on the end. Somewhat uncomfortable on the shoulder after a few rounds. Also, it doesn’t have any place to put an optic on it as it came from the factory unless you want to use a WWII era PU scope, which I dont. Optics have come a long way since the 1930’s, and even a ‘cheap’ optic made recently is easier to see through and use.

On to the pictures and descriptions…..

There’s the basics of the rifle with the bolt removed and taken out of all the woodwork. Not a lot of parts there, basically the trigger, trigger spring, chamber and barrel. I will be doing a trigger job, installing an optic rail, changing the bolt handle, refitting an M1944 muzzle break to fit the 91/30 and installing it, putting it in a more comfortable stock, and putting a bipod on it. To give you an idea how radical the change is here is a before and after of a previous super mosin I built.

As you can see, it’s a tiny bit o’ difference.

Time to get the trigger out for a little modification. The trigger is held in by the trigger spring, which is held to the gun by that big screw in the middle of the pic, and a pin that acts as the trigger pivot. Thats it, remove the screw and the pin and everything comes out. What those parts look like….

The trigger spring is on the left, trigger on the right, pin and screw in the middle. The trigger spring passes through the trigger out the other side. That weird block on the spring is the sear, when the trigger depresses the spring enough it releases part of the bolt and the firing pin sets off the cartridge. The problem with this is that there is usually a gap between the trigger and the spring, allowing the trigger to just kinda flop around before making spring contact. I don’t know about you, but that annoys the shit out of me. Floppy triggers suck and need to be fixed. Fortunately, a little time and a set screw can go a long way to remedy this situation. First we need to get the trigger in the mill (or a drill press) to drill a hole.

Trigger is in the vise, wrapped in a surplus business card from my last employer. No need to mar 70 years of patina if I don’t have to. 😉 Next comes a center drill to make sure I place the dimple in the right spot and get a good penetration on the surface for my drill bit. Center drills arent expensive, they are very rigid, and they beat the heck out of trying to start a hole with a drill bit wandering all over trying to get a start. Buy them, use them. On to drilling the actual hole.

In case anyone is wondering, I’m going to install a 4-40 set screw. Go bigger if you want, I don’t think it will hurt anything, I just have always used 4-40. I typically use a HSS numbered bit for drilling tapped holes. Tapping charts are available everywhere to download so I won’t get into numbers. Once the hole is drilled, time to tap it.

Whoo hooo, the joys of free hand tapping. Slow is best, break off a tap in that hole and you’ll be shooting with a sloppy trigger, guaranteed. Once again, retired business card to preserve the patina. I use a tapping compound to keep the threads going smoothly, picture of that later in the series I think. I also use mineral spirits and an old toothbrush to clean the tap about every two full turns , it gets the grease and any trapped debris out of the cutting threads and helps prevent chip binding. Learn from what I say, don’t add to your scrap pile by repeating mistakes I’m trying to help you avoid.

Once the hole is tapped, put a set screw in it and reinstall the trigger. Access to the set screw is through the receiver from the top with the bolt removed. Even without the bolt you can adjust the set screw and get a feel for the adjustment possible on the trigger. I usually take the slop out of the trigger, install the bolt, feel the trigger break, and then remove the bolt and make adjustments as needed. Once I find my happy place, a drop of green (bearing retainer) loctite keeps it from changing.

By the way, here’s a pic of my loyal shop companion. Usually hangs out right by my side through all of my workshop time keeping me safe from roving bands of shopping-cart-pushing zombies.

I bet you thought it would be a dog……. lmao! Next post, optics rail.

Just flying..

Sometimes I just enjoy flying for the sake of doing something different that most people don’t have the ability to do. If that sounds shitty, then so be it. It’s the truth and I’m not going to apologize for it. I lost the ability to fly for a while due to a motorcycle accident, I wasn’t cleared medically to be a pilot, and it was a rough time in my life. I can fly again, and I’m going to enjoy it while I can.

Some pics from Friday.

Oh yeah. It’s raining in California for once, I hope it stays for a while…

Mead update

The fermentation slowed to the point I decided to rack the contents and check the alcohol and sugar levels. The alcohol is at 8-10% and the sugar is still in the 22% range, which gives a slight alcohol taste and a LOT of sweetness left. In fact it’s too sweet, so I decided to filter out all the blackberry seeds and pulp put it back in the jars and ferment it some more. Filtering out the seeds is just a matter of some cheesecloth and a funnel.

Yup, made a bit of a mess with it, but that is to be expected, I can’t seem to do anything without making a mess. It’s on a second ferment and I’ll keep a close eye on the alcohol content to try and get the balance of ‘bite’ to sweetness that I want.

The red flame raisin mix is still bubbling away and the fumes coming out of the water lock smell like heaven. I’ll do a post on that soon when I get a taste of the results.

Picking up another airplane

Another student disabled one of my airplanes, so we had to go do a recovery run to Pismo/Oceano California. The propeller on our Tomahawk took a bit of a beating, and when there is the possibility that a propeller impacts the ground or a heavy object the entire engine must be disassembled and inspected before it can fly again. Since we can’t fly it back, it had to come home on a trailer.

It was a nice day, sunny with a slight breeze and a temp of around 78 degrees. There was a slight overcast that showed up late in the afternoon. First things first, we took a look at the prop and assessed the damage. There were some chunks of aluminum missing from the ends and it was pretty beat up for about 4″ from the end on both blades.

We were told by the person that damaged the prop that something had blown into the prop while they were on the ground with the engine running. After looking at it in person, me and my recovery team were a bit skeptical about that. Still, we needed to get the plane home and daylight was burning and the process to tear it apart and load it on a trailer started.

We got the trailer positioned and the tools unloaded from the truck. Off comes the engine cowling so we can get to the nose gear and compress the strut, meanwhile another person climb in and starts undoing the interior so we can get to the bolts that hold the wings on the airplane.

While one person is getting the interior bolts prepped for removal, the other two of us pull panels off the lower side of the wing and start disconnecting the brake lines, fuel lines, control cables, and electrical connections that go from the cabin area (fuselage) to the wings.

One of the other panels we take off is a cover that hides where the wing passes through the airplane, so that we can drop the wing straight out of the bottom when we separate the two pieces. You can see the actual wing spar in the upper right corner of the picture above, its aluminum with all the rivets in it.

All of the interior wing attach bolts are out, the landing gear is off of the wings, and the tow pieces are actually separate in this picture. The wing is resting on the two supports under it, while the fuselage is supported by the two red stands in the back under the tail and the lift on the engine. We then removed the stands under the wingtips and lowered the entire wing to the ground and put it on roller dollies. We slid the wing out of the way and began to remove the center supports so we could separate the wing halves.

Next was to get the fuselage stabilized and loaded on the trailer. It’s a bit of choreographed movement to do it since the tail is taller than anything else and makes the entire body want to roll over to one side or the other. Basically one person has to stand under each side of the horizontal part of the tail and lift while a third person works the engine lift and pushes it where needed.

I got a good picture of the wing channel that the wing spar sits in when the wing is in place, I’ll show it above a pic of the wing spar that sits in the channel.

That got all the pieces in broken down, we got them loaded on the trailer and strapped down for the journey home. It took us 12 hours to drive from Fresno to Oceano, break the airplane down, load it, and drive back to Fresno. Not a bad days work.

Oh, and a helpful person who saw what happened gave me the real story about how it got damaged. It wasn’t something blowing in the wind. Maybe I’ll share that story with you if we ever meet up over a glass of home made mead.

Continuing work part 2

I did quite a bit this weekend and didn’t think to get any pics of it. Just for the fun of seeing how it would turn out I stared the fermentation of 15lbs of red flame raisins in my main fermenter. It’s just the raisins, a couple pounds of sugar for starter, and the yeast. I’ll post more on it when I get the first taste and see if it was worth it. I also worked on the cast iron treadle base from the table project. I tried to braze one of the cracks but couldn’t get enough heat for the rod to stick and silver solder didn’t like the cast iron. I may have to get a specialty braze for it. The mead is still giving the occasional bubble in the water lock, so the ferment isn’t done yet. I am looking forward to pulling that batch and getting the first taste once it’s done, I’ll be posting that moment for everyone. And I spent Saturday morning partly on my Kenwood TS430S radio talking to people on 40m Ham bands and partly playing my bagpipes.

Yes, you read that right. Bagpipes.

I began the machining of a new valve guide for my 1929 Fairbanks-Morse hit-miss engine in part one HERE. It’s a couple weeks later and I felt like spending some more time on it, so here is the next bit in it’s making.

The inner bore where the valve itself rides is done, now I need to turn the outside down to be an interference fit with the reamed hole in the cylinder head. An interference fit means that the part to go in the hole will be just slightly larger than the hole itself so that the parts ‘wedge’ themselves together. They have to be a tight enough fit that when they get hot from running the engine, and expand at different rates, that they stay ‘wedged’. This also means that I have to turn the whole length of the guide to size, and I cant grab on to it with the chuck in the usual manner, instead I’ll have to hold the work piece from the inside while I machine the outside.

In the picture above you see the valve guide in the middle with and expanding lap on the left and a ‘live’ tailstock center on the right. The expanding lap goes into the guide bore and the center does the same from the other side. The pointy part of the center is mounted in bearings that allow it to rotate with the part it is contact with, thats why it’s called a ‘live’ center, it moves. All together in the lathe it looks like this.

Now that it is all in place it’s just a simple matter of turning the outside diameter down to size. Any machinists out there who look at the next picture, yes, I know that I’m cutting using the back side of the insert and it isn’t proper. I did it on purpose because there is just enough ‘spring’ in the insert holder that running the cut backwards gives a smoother finish. And since I need a fine finish for the press in fit, it works for me.

And the guide all finished inside and out, ready to be sized to length and pressed into the cylinder head.

Mead update

All is going well, the fermentation has slowed a bit but is still going strong. By this time next week it should be ready to start testing alcohol content and sweetness.

😉

Mmmmm…mead

We left off last night with our berries sitting in mounds of sugar and turning into something wonderful. Now it’s time to pull them out of the fridge and take a look at how they are doing.

Thats looking good. See all that juice? That’s super food for the yeast, and it give our mead its flavor. The berries are good and soft, but they are still a little big for the yeast to process, so they go into the blender and get reduced to a thick liquid.

All the juice and berries go into the blender, make sure to scrape the bowl clean. Excess sugar that may be in the bottom of the bowl goes in too. Then hit the button and you should end up with something like this.

No one can resist putting a finger in that and seeing how it tastes. It’s like the sweetest blackberry jam, perfect for putting on a big bowl of vanilla ice cream…… but I wont. Instead I need to put it aside for the mead after just one more finger full….

Ok, now to the heart of making mead. We need 5lbs of honey. It needs to be raw unprocessed honey, cooking the honey or adding preservatives to it will change it so that the yeast won’t thrive. You can use raw filtered honey, I use the unfiltered because the brand I use doesn’t usually have any comb or other things in it needing to be filtered. Here’s what I use but any good quality honey will work.

The other important thing is to make sure all of your processing equipment is clean. There are wild yeast all over the place and we want our yeast to dominate and be the only yeast processing the sugar into alcohol. So everything needs to be freshly washed and clean.

I use water as hot as I can stand it with liquid detergent and a cap full of bleach to clean everything. A big bottle brush helps to get into the recesses of the 1 gallon containers and get them scrubbed out. Make sure to rinse well too, the bleach can kill off your good yeast just as quick as the bad yeast. Some people us campden tablets to sterilize their stuff, I’ve heard it can leave a taste in your finished product so I don’t. Try it if you want, its a personal decision on my part not to.

When everything is clean, get your big ass pot up on the stove and get about a half gallon of water into it. Put it on low heat and get the temp to around warm bath water temp. I have filtered water on my house, but I still use bottled water to make my mead because of the mineral content in the water here. You want the water warm, but not hot, just warm enough to dissolve the honey in it but not so hot it scalds the honey. Once it’s to temp pour in your honey and stir until the honey is completely dissolved into the water. If it’s good honey you will be left with a honey water (it’s called the ‘must’) that is a nice deep amber color and still sweet to the taste.

My my, that is nice. If you wanted to make a straight mead then you could just use the must (honey water) and yeast to make a true unflavored mead. I’ve done it, it’s nice, but I like my flavored meads and so do most who try them. So, since we are making a flavored mead, lets add the flavor..

The blackberry mix is so thick and rich the few drops that fell look like blood on my stove.

It tastes a lot better than any blood Ive ever tasted though, lol. Keep stirring the blackberry mix into the must until its well combined and a consistent temperature. Remember to not let it get too hot! just warm bath water temp.

At this point I usually pour a little bit into a shot glass and enjoy the sweet concoction I have made. If you are going to sample it in this way do it now before the next step cause we will be adding the yeast to this happy new home we have made for it. Speaking of the yeast, better show you what I use.

The yeast I use in my meads is Lalvin EC-1118. It’s a champagne yeast and produces high alcohol levels if given lots of sugar to eat and a favorable environment. Yeast can really change the flavor and alcohol level of your creations. I have used Fleishman’s bakers yeast and it works well, but it is less tolerant of the alcohol level and dies off at around 8-10%. This is good if you like a sweet wine, lots of sugars left over, but if you like a kick and don’t mind your stuff slightly dry go with the Lalvin. If anyone uses a different yeast that comes out well then drop me an email so I can try it too. On to the feast!

That is the yeast just poured right on top. It’s warm, there’s lots of food, everything yeast like for a feeding frenzy. Well, except the light. Yeast aren’t particularly fond off light as far as I can tell. That’s why I use the green glass bottles to ferment. Speaking of bottles, mine are all clean and ready to go with sanitized stoppers and water locks. Since the yeast don’t like light, stir them into the mix where they can re-hydrate and wake up.

Next is to get the yeast and mix into the bottles where they can ferment in peace and make us a wonderfully intoxicating blackberry drink. I use a cut off funnel that I keep special for filling the 1 gallon containers and my small 1 liter casks (more on that in a later post). Just make sure everything is clean and you are good to go.

When filling the bottles don’t fill them to the top. The yeast can get aggressive in the fermentation and it causes a lot of carbon dioxide bubbles and agitation. If you fill them too full then your mead will end up coming out of your water lock or popping the stopper, a very bad thing. I fill mine about 2/3 full and it has worked well for me so far. Once you get the fluid in the bottles put the stoppers on.

Next comes the water lock. There are three parts: the body, the bubbler, and the cap. The purpose of the water lock is to let carbon dioxide gas made by the fermentation process escape and not letting outside air with wild yeast back in to the container to ruin our work. It’s fairly straight forward. Insert the body into the stopper first.

Next put the bubbler into place. This part moves and allows the bubbles to escape while keeping the outside stuff outside.

Now fill the body of the water lock with… yup, water… until it reaches the line scribed in the body of the lock. This sets the proper water level to keep everything working like it should. You need to check the water level regularly through the ferment so that it doesn’t get low and allow outside air to get into your container. Finally, put the cap on top of the water lock. Don’t leave the cap off, I learned the hard way it’s a bad idea to leave it off.

There it is. Two 1 gallon containers filled with blackberry love in the making. It will take about two weeks in a dark room-temp area (I use a my pantry closet) to complete the ferment. Make sure to check on the water locks every couple days and let the yeast do their job.

To make things easy I have some links to an online supplier for the equipment I used. All up: two 1 gallon containers, two locks, 4 stoppers, and three yeast packs is $20 plus tax and shipping. Not an amount that should stop anyone curious to give this a try.

Water lock/ Fermentation lock

Lalvin EC-1118

1 Gallon Containers

#6 Stopper

You need to make this.

Hi kids, dads in a pissy mood today because thoughts of his ex-girlfriend are running through his head like a psychotic ear-worm. Thus, this post will be short but informative and then I’m going to go ride the f’ing cylinders off of my Harley up in the hills.

This is a picture that leads to greatness…

Thats right, I’m making a batch of blackberry mead (honey wine for those who don’t know what mead is) some of which will be rendered down to blackberry eau-de-vie (raspberry liquer for those who think eau-de-vie is toilet water). I’m going to make this like a Betty Crocker picture book, just follow along and make your own. Part of this post was inspired by MissK and her post about a moonshine still, part because I been making this stuff for years and everyone asks for some or how to make it, and part because … well…. because I just freaking want to. Oh, and I’m currently out. Forgot that part.

Part one of blackberry/raspberry/tripleberry mead is to get the berries all prepped for inclusion into the must (I’ll explain later) so we are going to put them in a bowl and treat them with LOTS of sugar. Why sugar? Because the yeast I use is a champagne yeast and in order for it to produce enough alcohol to kill itself off (18-21% alcohol) and still have anything remotely sweet about your mead you need LOTS OF SUGAR. Whats this about the yeast killing themselves off in the alcohol? Yup, you heard right. Yeast eat sugar and alcohol is the waste they excrete. Last time you got drunk it was by ingesting a yeast community’s collective sewer. YAY! Isn’t science fun kids? On to the sugar. You should have a bowl of berries like this ready to go.

Now we pour some sugar on me……. Damn, Def Leppard. Pour some sugar on the berries, more than you think…. more like this….

Now get a big ass spoon and stir that shit up. Stir it up like it’s christmas eve and you favorite uncle is drunk and looking for a fight. Get all the way to the bottom. When you are done stirring every berry should look frosted, if not you have done it wrong, add more sugar and stir again. See, frosted berries…

There is no good way to convey an evil laugh on social media, but thats what I’m doing cause I can see the sugar already pulling the tasty goodness out of those raspberries. It’s the bloody looking patches in the pic above, similar to making strawberries for strawberry shortcake. Now we put more sugar on top for extra goodness. As the sugar gets into the berries and softens them, the sugar we put on top will work its way into the juice and berries doing more of it’s magic.

Now you cover them with something, I prefer foil over plastic wrap because I’m currently out of plastic wrap, and then put the whole thing in the fridge and leave it alone for at least 12 hours. LEAVE IT ALONE. Go do something. Pet your animal, play a game, play with yourself… I don’t care as long as the berries get at least 12 hours to soak up sugar and make a good base for the mead. I personally am going to go ride my motorcycle.

Watch Bench

It’s another post from the watch bench, continuing on with the Lord Elgin watch. In the last post about this watch I disassembled it and put a new mainspring in the barrel, and you can see that post here.

This is the plate that most everything else in the watch movement attaches to. It has gone through the ultrasonic cleaner a couple times and a quick look at the jewels show they all look good, meaning there aren’t any cracks or jagged edges in the holes to damage any pivots that will be running in them. The next step is to put the gears (gear train) into the watch without breaking anything. This is a bit of a challenge for me still since it involves putting 4 small gears and a toggle into those jewels with steel pivots about the thickness of a human hair. Once you have them kind of aligned, you have to put a ‘bridge’ or support for the top of the gears in place aligning all the tiny pivots into the bridge.

In the animation above (if I remembered where I got this from I would note it here, but I don’t) you can see how the balance swings back and forth toggling the pallet with its two jewel fingers allowing the escape wheel to release one tooth at a time. I will be installing the jeweled pallet and escape wheel first.

Time to give it a shot.

Do you see the piece that was added in the picture above? If not, I dont blame you the part is about 3mm long and just under 3mm wide. Here is the same pic with the pallet and fork highlighted.

The pallet has it’s own cock to hold it in place, so that goes on next. It’s crucial to make sure that the top pinion on the pallet seats securely in the pallet cock and that the pallet swings freely from side to side against the banking pins.

The shiny plate with a jewel over the pallet is the pallet cock. It is in place, secured down, and the pallet swings freely. To make sure I installed it correctly I place the escape wheel in it’s spot and do a quick inspection of the pallet jewel clearances.

Now for the rest of the gears.

First off to get installed is the center wheel, which is what the minute hand attaches to, and turns one complete revolution every minute if all is installed correctly.

With the pinion from the center wheel protruding out of the other side I need to use a movement holder so I dont do damage to the shaft. Then I can install the third wheel next to, and under, the center wheel.

And finally the fourth wheel is installed connecting the escape wheel to the rest of the gear train. So far, so good, but next is the tricky part. Now I have to install the bridge on top of these gears and get the pinions you can see on the top of each gear lined up in its jewel hole.

There it is. Gear train and bridge is installed. I use a slight pressure from my tweezers to shift the center wheel back and forth to make sure the gears all move freely and nothing is binding.

As a side note, while I worked on this part of the watch I realized I am completely out of my home made raspberry mead. This is completely unacceptable and the next post will probably be this weekend with details of how to make your own raspberry mead. Raspberry mead… watches…. now all I need is a spirited red-headed woman for company….. lmao!

Time to look at other properties

Unfortunately, even though I own my home and can use all the equity in it toward another piece of property, the lenders let me know that the property in the ‘I like this’ post is one I cannot qualify for. Such is the price for being unmarried and without a second income to add to the cause. Thank you to EVERYONE who had their fingers crossed on that one.

Never fear, I will not give up and there is the perfect property out there. I just need to find it. Lol.

To console myself I spent the evening eating indulgent foods, thinking deeply about my favorite red headed women, working at the watch bench, and drinking home made rum. In other words, its still been a good evening. 😉

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