Last week I'd shaped my knife and it was just about ready for heat treating. I have had a few other things getting in my way this week including some broken tech and a roof repair, so I didn't get as much done as I hoped but still, did achieve some bits. Here we go..

Pre heat-treat, I shall give the blade a quick coat of satanite which is a clay-ish substance that helps prevent oxygen getting to the steel and oxidising it, then fire up the forge - nice and hot, this is stainless so it wants to be over 1000C in there.

Get it up to temperature, let it soak a while then it's into my somewhat bodged together plate quench, two bits of aluminium that will suck heat out of the blade while holding it straight. Stainless is OK with a slow quench, carbon steels prefer the faster and showier oil or even water quench. Just as an aside, this level of forge heat is approaching if not actually exceeding my personal safety threshold. My workshop is, as you can see, made of wood. That's a little too much inside fire for my tastes. But everything was OK in the end.

Now the blade is cool, and clearly the satanite wasn't on thick enough because there is some nasty scale on there - a lot more grinding happens. Which I didn't photograph. But a few grinding belts later (the metal definitely hardened!) the blade is flat, shiny and about 90% sharp (I'll finish it on a wetstone once the rest of the knife is done). Which means it's time to glue the handle on, using JB Weld epoxy glue. This is a simple recycled plastic handle material, later I'll try some pieces in wood with some nice brass pins. Anyway, that glue will take a while to cure, time to get on with something else, modding a hammer.

Let's angle grind that to shape, I want a long, flat edge, which I can use to put trough shaped marks into metal. Aww yeah that boi got hot. When you use a hammer to add texture, any marks on the striking face get transferred to the metal you hit so the face is nicely polished. This level of finish is almost certainly overkill but my metalworking background is jewellerymaking so I tend to work to ridiculous levels of detail. This is also why it takes me forever to polish my steelwork, steel is a LOT harder than silver/gold/copper. Because I have time, I've added some paint and cut the handle down before finishing it with some shou sugi ban (aka fire).

Right, glue is dry and I'm going to start shaping the handle, this plastic grinds ok but it does tend to clog up the grinding belt.. I have even less experience of shaping knife handles than I do knife blades, but I think this is coming together alright. UNTIL, this happens - I have since discovered that you're not supposed to clean surfaces for JB Weld with alcohol, as it can cause the bond to weaken. Guess what I was cleaning with?

So, it's in pieces again and this is the worst time because I'd just ground the plastic down to the metal, now I have zero error margin when re-glueing it. Ho hum, here we go..

Knife is currently clamped for at least 24 hours to let the glue cure, hopefully it'll hold this time. The hammer is for the next blade, which will be carbon steel not stainless, and will involve some actual forging, which is the really fun bit.

I hit two major snags this week.
Firstly I discovered that I'm allergic to the darkroom chemicals! My hands broke out in a rash that spread to hives on my chest. It took a week for it to finally go away. I'm going to have to get gloves and be very careful until I can find an alternative developer.

Secondly, I'm having some camera issues with my light seal. A replacement part has finally come in, so hopefully this week will be better. I do have one print to add to the collection.

See Here

I feel like this week I got more done, in part because I wrote more than the first week and I also got past the damned cuff of the sock and am working on the body. Hurray for progress!

Knitting: Here's a wip! I've gotten a few stripes down (1/5 of the way there before I have to do the heel lol) and I'm mostly happy with how it's turning out! After doing two stripes, I had a lot of loose ends from switching between colors and it's a mess to have to work with. I tried one weave in as you go method, and while I like mostly how it works, it messed with the stitches on the outside of the work. The stitches look SUPER tiny, so it looks like there's a weird zigzag here. The little Vs look staggered instead of straight across. I'll be trying another method I saw and hope that goes a little better, or I'll modify the one I used already. Either way, it's the far preferable option than to have to weave everything in at the end since there'll be like 20 something stripes I have to work through. No thank you, I have weaving in the ends.

Writing: Slow and steady wins the race here. I've gotten through a few more of the writing exercises, and one I particularly struggled with. It was to write a story with the start at 3 different moments (when the race begins, when the character finds out about the race, and the start of the race or competition). I had a doozy of a day with that one, but I still managed to push through it and I feel all the better for it.

I think overall I'm proud of what I've done, but I need to kick it up a notch and get MORE done, with both the knitting and writing. I'm hoping to spend the day doing both and half catching up, half getting somewhere I'm more comfortable being given that the month is half over (I perish!).

I didn't really sign-up at the start of Timasomo, but wanted to share what I'm working on anyway. I've started building a VR voice chat app using Unity+Google Cardboard+WebRTC. The idea is to get a simple multi-peer voice chat working with 3D sounds so peers can hear "where" the participants are and possibly also move away into subgroups later. So far I've gotten moving around to work as well as the 3d sound part. Next step is to slap together a naive signaling server to facilitate the initial connections between peers and then figure out how frequently to send position updates and interpolate between positions. Anyway, it is a fun project to think about!

I kind of ... fell off the wagon last week. I got a smidgen of the Sad so I lost a lot of steam with that. I'm thinking of just trying to finish my crochet blanket by the end of November.

I'm trying to be gracious with myself and forgiving, you know?

This week has been okay, I'm trying to wrap up a cohesive set for my last class tomorrow. I basically just have stories and jokes regarding where I grew up and have specifically focused on that. I'm looking forward to branching out to new subjects.

What I thought was a good set with a lot of laughs didn't go over well at all at my latest open mic (it didn't go well last week either at this same event). I seem to do much better at open mics that are 100% comedy only. The only people who seem to do well telling jokes in the other events, are telling a hodge podge of jokes that they didn't come up with, but rather stole from another site online.

But, back to the drawing board I suppose. I think I might work on putting together my own open mic comedy event in AltSpace so that there are more venues for practicing.

I talked to more people about their experience with community this week. One lived in a commune for a few years, another has lived in five countries over the past eight years, and a third has lived in San Francisco since the 80s and watched it change. Their perspectives were all very interesting.

I wrote a first draft for my post, which I always scrap. The second draft is usually the one I publish, and I'll try to get that done early next week. I didn't expect removing my wisdom teeth and breaking my phone this past week would affect me as much as it did. Oh well, I'm feeling better now. No excuses this week!

EDIT: I finished it up last night and published it this morning! Let me know what you think: Humane Communities: how we can live and grow together

I continue to work on an android gemini browser. I found out that someone else beat me to the punch here, which was a tad bit disappointing but has provided some pointers, which is nice.

I got android studio all set up and had a lot of fun plugging in my phone and playing around with different layouts on there. It's nice to see immediate results on a device I carry around all day, it makes everything feel much more applicable.

I'm currently working on a java cli to make gemini requests, and learning a lot about SSL in the process. One problem I didn't foresee is that since gemini is still pretty new, it's very difficult to search for answers to gemini specific problems :( just gotta keep keeping on, I guess.

Clipping along nicely. Experienced a bit of burnout last week from the constant churn of writing, but I'm more or less back into the groove now. Will see how being at work affects it though.
I challenged myself to learn 30 songs in 30 days earlier this year, and I feel like that prepared me for daily writing in a good way. That said, learning something that already exists is much easier than bringing a new creation into the world.

Got nothing done on the text-based game. Work was exhausting (I've got a whole rant about American coworkers not understanding English), I procrastinated with some worldbuilding for an ongoing setting when a bolt of inspiration struck me, and my desire to code over the weekend was flushed when I thought an acquaintance of mine was in a hostage situation.

On the plus side, someone commissioned art of one of my characters from the previously-mentioned setting from an artist, so I'm technically counting that as fanart to cheer myself up. Hooray.

Work continues on the Toyota Big Block Build even if it wasn't as much work as I'd like it to have been... Previous update is here.

Didn't get as much as done this weekend as I only worked on it Saturday (and even then didn't get as much as done as I should have), Sunday was a day spent dealing with personal issues. Saturday involved poor time management by first doing things out of order and secondly spending too much time on things that didn't need that much attention. What should have started with degreasing the remaining cam cover, cams, and associated hardware was instead spent with me removing the crank sprocket and needlessly cleaning (again) nooks and crannies of the block that ultimately won't matter. So while I could have been accomplishing two tasks at once by letting the cams, et al, sit in degreaser I instead wasted time on the block as they sat untouched.

On the one hand the crank sprocket removal took more time than it should have, on the other hand that's pretty much expected when working on old cars so I didn't mind too much. Ultimately it's a matter of doing things "properly" vs quickly, but it's a bit of adding insult to injury when the proper way doesn't work and you have to resort to the quick way. The special tool I mentioned last week did arrive, but didn't work (and is being sent back) for a couple of reasons. The tool was supposed to be low profile enough to squeeze into the area between the sprocket and sprocket guard, but it wasn't; so I wasted time busting out my die grinder to eat away at the guard to make room for the tool. Once I was covered in enough aluminum chips that there was clearance I find that the lip on the crank sprocket, where the tool grips, just kept breaking off as force was applied making the tool doubly useless.

Between big screwdrivers, crowbars, cusswords, and even the correct tool for the job it was clear it didn't want to come off and I was tired of asking. So what's a man with rotary tools, diamond cut off discs, and chisels to do? Line up with key slot to minimize chances of damaging crank nose, cut as deep as you dare, make relief cut on opposite side, and hit it with a chisel to split the little bastard in two. It should be noted that this process of cutting it off took, at most, 20 minutes, compared to the hours spent on the other methods. Afterward take off the oil pump, that even if you weren't replacing with a high flow version you'd have ruined anyway, and clean up the gasket surfaces before moving on to the previously mentioned time wasted cleaning the block further than what's necessary.

After last week's dialing in of sodablasting cabinet and realizing that it'd probably be better to degrease at least a little of the valve covers, cams, and related components before putting the baking soda spurs to them, I picked up some brake cleaner and set out to get some of the previous owner's neglect off of this week's blasting targets. In case you were wondering, oil should not be chunky. Story time below!1 After degreasing, and confirming that while there's plenty of old stinky oil remnants on them the cam lobes and bearing surfaces aren't burnt (praise be the god's of Toyota), off to the sodablaster to get cleaned up.

That's where this week's update ends, with plenty left to do. Valve cover number two is mostly cleaned up, but needs some spots gone over again. I need to pull the head out of my storage shed, remove components attached to it, degrease, and put it in the cabinet as well for cleaning both on the top end and the combustion chambers. Do an inventory of the rebuild parts to be 100% sure I do have everything (and order anything I missed), get the pistons and rods together (which will be exciting as there's fire involved), and finish the rebuild as far as can be done without having pulled the old motor out of the car yet. Paint the block, let it dry, and mount the head. Also having one of my best friends over next weekend for some welding work so you might get a glimpse at that as well even though it's not related to this project.

Hope everyone's projects and plans are going well, here's cat tax round two: Hank.

Researching and reading this week went pretty well. I probably should have taken more notes but oh well, note taking makes a fun project more of a chore, and I'm planning on being a bit more "Here's my sources, I'm going to talk about them and not cite every little thing" in what I eventually write. Either way, I read two life cycle cost analyses that reached opposite conclusions on the topic of which kind of Christmas tree is best for the environment, so I think there should be some good opportunity to talk about why that might be, make some recommendations on how to reduce your consumption as an individual no matter what option you choose, and speculate on how both natural and artificial Christmas tree production could be made more environmentally friendly.

10k words written out of 50k. Probably won't be done on time, but I'm determined to finish it so I'm not too bothered about that.

I’m still chugging along! I’m just shy of 24k words out of 50k. Got a little behind over weekend due to traveling, but I made some of it up yesterday and today. I’m pretty sure I’ll hit my goal so long as nothing super crazy happens. Even Thanksgiving should be pretty chill this year.

I made limited progress this week. I have decided to use Zola as a static site generator, be and have put together a basic site. I did very limited design and development of the theme. This week just got busy for me; had too much work and a water leak that had to get fixed.

Whoops! I did it again! Or more precisely, I didn't do it again. Still kind of busy with stuff, and when I finally had some free time I didn't do music. The last few weeks I got quite into doodling on my graphic tablet, one evening I made this digital drawing thingy. So at least I am still making something in this Tildes make something month, even if it's not what I said I will be making.

I still believe I will stop procrastinating and make the damn song(s)!