Tornadoes in Czechia

Smaller whirlwinds do happen quite often even in Central Europe, although usually we just have ordinary high winds. Occasionally some roofs get torn off, but rarely anything more severe than that.

Yesterday was different. A once-in-1000-years tornado ripped through the south of Czechia and flattened seven towns and villages.

If you can spare some money for disaster relief, you can donate here. This is run by a non-religious charity foundation.

There might be some glitches, their servers have difficulty coping at the moment.

High as a Kite and Higher

There is a pair of kites flying around every day and I hear their typical cries from morning until evening, so they are probably nesting somewhere close-ish. I hope they do and I also hope they will help with local water vole population, i.e. massacre it.

Unfortunately, I did not manage to get both into good focus, so a blurry picture must do.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I did manage to get a few decent pictures of one of them though, from different angles.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The pictures are of suboptimal quality because they fly very, very high. Even finding them through the camera lens is a challenge, and to take focus and press the trigger button on a moving target that high is a bugger, that much I can tell ya.

But no matter how high a kite flies, there was something even higher that day around her. I could not find it in my bird atlas so the species is not determined. If you know it, let me know in the comments.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

Close Encounters of the Graffiti Kind

When waiting for my father to come back from a doctor’s appointment, I wandered around a bit and went into an underground garage. I was around and about there several times, but I do not ever remember wandering inside. But the weather was extremely hot and I needed some shade and cold. So I went down the stairs…

…and there I saw beautiful graffiti that immediately caught my eye.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I had to take two photographs and make a composite, this thing is huge, ca 4 m tall and 10 m in length. Graffiti is usually just pieces of vandalism around here, just initials or a highly stylized signature lazily sprayed over some newly painted facade. Those deserve a ding around the ear and a duty to pay for the cleaning/repainting. But this is a work of art and it was probably done with the approval of the garage owner. This must have taken several days of work at least. And that was just the start.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

There were some small insect pictures on some of the support columns, and that still was not all. The whole huge second wall was covered with art too. Possibly done by several different artists because it had several distinct styles.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The last two panels of the walls did contain beautiful pictures too, but also bear witness that the graffiti vandals seem incapable of not being vandals for a bit, even when the thing they are vandalizing is someone else’s graffiti.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

 

TNET 45: Baelin’s Route

This is a kickstarter funded short film made by a group of New Zealand actors.

It is not the mostest originalest story ever written and it does contain a lot of fanservice to fans of their Epic NPC man series that probably does not resonate with audience outside that particular circle.

But I liked it and maybe some of you will too.

Open thread, talk whatever you like, just do not be an asshole.

Previous thread.

Kestrel Maneuvre

Unfortunately, I was taking these pictures against the sun and I did not have too much time to get the exposition settings right. The little bugger hovered in one place exactly as long as it took me to take a focus and press the trigger button. So this is the “whoosh” sequence.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Deadlier Than Chucking Nuns – And Legal!

In my last rant about the stupid “weapon” law in Germany, I mentioned that nuns chuckers are illegal to even own and use as training equipment. Similar restrictions apply to kusari, monkey’s fist, and several other weapons that are essentially rope/chain with a metal weight attached to the end.

Today I would like to expound more on the stupidity and nonsensicality of this law. Because when I mentioned that I used to train with nunchaku, what I did not mention was how I started. I did not have nunchaku at first, and it took me a long time to make them because I first had to get my hands on some suitable wood, then a piece of chain, then to figure ut how to make them, etc. This shortly after the fall of the iron curtain when buying even simple things still could be challenging, the internet did not exist and I was a kid with zero money anyway.

But what I did already have was jumping rope. So I took it, tied several knots on the rope to adjust the distance of the handles at the desired length, and voila! I had perfectly suitable training nunchaku. Not for training combat, but certainly for training flourishes, which is what I did. It also had the added benefit that the handles did not have too much mass to them, so even when I hit myself (which did happen at the beginning), it was never anything even remotely dangerous. It was also a great workout, much more fun than using the jumping rope for its original purpose. And then when I finally got some real nunchaku, I already had some muscle memory to use them safely. Which I did. And since the nunchaku weighed more than the jumping rope, the workouts got even better.

And remember, the reason why nunchaku are banned in Germany is that they can be used as an effective garotting weapon (no they can’t), and the reason for banning ropes/chains with weighted ends is because they are highly dangerous impact weapons by generating momentum by slingshot/whip effect (at usual length,  they don’t, it is just angular momentum like with a hammer, the only benefits to the wielder are that there is no shock transfer to the hand and compact size).

But guess what – jumping ropes, even with handles from metal and adjustable rope length, are legal in Germany! A thing that would be both much better for garotting than nunchucks and that could generate a lot more momentum than an illegal monkey’s fist keychain!

I will leave you with that thought.

Unexpected (But Not Surprising) Benefit of Tumbling Blades in Sand

I just might tumble all blades from now on, even those that I will mirror-polish manually afterward. Because after two-three days of tumbling, an interesting phenomenon appears. Something that is not surprising when you think about it, but I did not in fact expect it upfront.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

It is difficult to snap a picture of it, but here it is visible – the blade is all shiny except that triangular shadow at the tang. That is an area where the blade is not hardened.

In this specific case, this is OK. The tang should be soft and a soft piece of the spine, especially near the tang, also does not hurt. And because this blade will be blackened with oak extract, the visible difference in color should not be a problem.

However, there were two other blades, one from spring steel like this and one from N690, that had shown this discoloration in areas where soft steel definitively is not desirable – one about 2 cm at the tip and one ca 2 cm of the blade near the ricasso. Those were improperly hardened and I did not find out during the scratch test right after the quench, because most of the blade was OK.

That is quite useful and thus I really consider incorporating sand-tumbling not only as a cheap surface finish but also as cheap and easy quality control.

Not Tacticool, But Hopefully Cool

A friend tasked me with making a knife for their spouse. The spouse does not cook, so a kitchen knife was not an option. But they do occasionally go on a camping trip or a forest walk with the kids, so we eventually established that some sort of camping/bushcraft knife would be best.

The ideal material for a knife of this kind would be spring steel, but since it is unlikely that their life will depend on it, N690 should suffice and rust won’t be a problem. So I set to work and I have made this.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The blade is 160 mm long and 5 mm thick at the handle and tapers toward the tip. N690 steel, sand tumbled satin finish. The handle is made from rotten willow wood stabilized with green-dyed resin. It is a big boi – it weighs 300 g (and that is with the fullered blade and handle is lightened too by holes in the tang). A sharpening angle of 25° should guarantee that with occasional use, the blade will not need sharpening any time soon. Despite being thick, it is reasonably sharp and cuts well, because it has a flat grind all the way to the spine. It is balanced at the bolster, and it packs quite a punch, as a knife of this type should. And because the spine is so thick, it should withstand even some serious abuse should the owner decide to inflict it on the blade. Which I suspect they won’t.

The accessories are a ferrocerium rod and carbon steel striker as a fire starter (more for fun than real purpose, matches are better) and a sheath with a pouch for these. Theoretically the carbon steel striker is not necessary, but when testing it out, I got the subjective impression that carbon steel strikes better sparks from the ferrocerium rod. I might be wrong, I could not think up an objective test for that.

Making fullers by hand is very difficult, it will probably take several more blades before I get it right. I am currently wracking my head about how to make an accessory for my grinder that would make this difficult task just a tad easier. So far no success, just a few semi-functional, semi-failed attempts.

How Many Nuns Would Nunchucks Chuck…

… if nunchucks could chuck nuns?

I am going to ramble a bit about my pet peeve nonsensical weapon bans and regulations around the world. I am in no way a freedom absolutist in this regard. Weapons are dangerous objects that definitively need to be regulated, and the more dangerous a weapon is, the stricter regulations regarding its accessibility to people should apply. There should be background checks, aptitude tests, mandatory training, and licensing for all firearms. But banning hand weapons is useless and oftentimes downright silly and makes no sense whatsoever.

Take for example the titular nunchucks. I have trained with nunchucks as a kid, I have never hurt my self and I never broke anything either. It was great fun and it was beneficial to me. They are great for hand-eye coordination, great for training speed, and spatial awareness, and it was a good workout too. What it was not – despite me not knowing it at the time – was useful combat and martial arts training applicable for self-defense. Nunchucks are a terrible weapon, although they are better than nothing (not better than running away).

To my great surprise a few years ago, I have learned that nunchucks are banned in Germany. Not only to carry around but to own or manufacture. You will not find Karate or Kobudo class in Germany that trains in their use, not officially at least. That is daft, especially with the reason given – they can be used as a garotting weapon. Well, theoretically, maybe, but they would be awfully ineffective for that. That is not what they are designed for.

And since I have already sold knives to people in Germany, I have looked into laws regarding them a bit and those are too silly squared. Knives that can be opened with just one hand are banned to carry. Knife with a fixed blade can be carried if one is currently performing an activity facilitating its use – like fishing, hunting, or mushroom gathering – but I have read some stories about knives confiscated on the way to a forest, so it can depend on how pissy the policeman you have encountered feels that day. And balisongs are banned to even own, just like nunchucks. I did not dig too deep into that, but whatever the reason, it is just silly.

Because balisongs are really, really bad pocket knives. Their advantage over other pocket knives is that they are very easy to make, but that’s it. They cannot be made very sturdy, their very construction means the blade will be always a bit wobbly. They cannot have any meaningful handguard so when stabbing something with them, there is always the risk of your hand slipping on the blade upon hitting some resistance. And several other things make them bad. The only thing they are really useful for are the same things that other small pocket knives are useful for – cutting food, opening packages, and so forth.

When watching some random videos on YouTube recently I have learned that flails and maces are allegedly illegal in parts of Canada too. And again, I fail to recognize the reasons for this.

In the UK, the reasons given for these imbecilic weapon bans are to prevent gang violence. It does not seem to work. You can ban nunchucks and kusaris, but you cannot ban keychains. You can ban knives, but not screwdrivers. You can ban maces, but not spanners, and hammers – and guess what, the gangs are using these everyday objects exactly for that reason.

I suspect that these weapons were made illegal because they were portrayed as very deadly in 90s action flicks. If so, then legislators enacting these laws should learn the difference between a movie and reality. Bruce Lee movies are NOT documentaries!

But OK, when these laws are in the EU, they are very silly, but at least they are somewhat consistent with the overall culture. But when they are enacted in the USA, their silliness condenses into a black hole of daftitude.

Now one can say that nobody actually needs weapons like nunchucks, maces, or similar and I should shut up about this. I disagree, but I won’t argue against that right now.

 

Bobbin Lace: Peacocks

My mother had a “peacocks” period now and has made several. This was our classical collaboration where she bounced a few ideas of me, I then suggested some improvements, she has drawn it again and so forth until she arrived at a design we both liked. Two of them she has even changed after she has already done them in lace because they did not come out right.

All except the last one are approx A4 size, that last one is about half of the others.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Sharpenatrix

Walter Sorrells has recently made a video about a sharpening tool for his belt grinder, which gave me an inspiration for finally making my own. I have been planning to do this for a long time, but watching that video helped me to solve the final piece of the puzzle.

Walter Sorrells is of course not only a much more experienced knifemaker than I am, but he is also much better equipped. So my project has all the hallmarks of my handmade tools – it is crude and made from scraps.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I have started with a very rough sketch of the jaws and I have also spent some time calculating trying to establish various proportions whilst finding a compromise between stability (shorter arm is better) and consistent angle across the blade (longer arm is better).

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

Here you can see it in full when finished. Jaws for holding the blade are mounted on a ca 40 cm long 10 mm stick with a ball on the lower end. The ball goes into a socket at the end of an arm that can slide forward and back with regard to the belt, thus adjusting the angle at which the edge leans on it.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size

The 10 mm steel rod is recycled from our old heating oven. The plastic ball at the end is an old furniture handle. All the wood is recycled from an old bed.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

The jaws are made from 4mm mild steel and lined with 0.25 mm bronze held in place by means of double-sided adhesive tape. Near the tip of the jaws are two 5 mm pins that are screwed into the smaller jaw and slide into holes in the bigger jaw. They provide an end-stop to rest the blade against in order to fix it easier into the jaws and they also prevent them from wobbling.  The upper screw tightens the jaws and the lower one sets the distance between them, so I can vary it according to the blade that is being sharpened.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Originally, I have planned to make the socket from wood and I expected it to take a lot of time. But I got a brilliant idea during the work to use a lid from a fabric softener bottle. It cracked during work, but I still could attach it to the arm with a  screw and a large washer. After that, I have covered the screw head with a piece of PVC flooring and after some consideration, I have also added two hard gaskets to keep the ball centered and to provide ever so slight resistance to movement.

The sliding arm can be fixed in position with a fastening screw salvaged from some defunct kitchen appliance from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away, from times when things were made to last.

When the weather allows it, I will give the thing a coating of grey paint so it looks slightly less amateurish and also to protect the wood from moisture. And I will mark a scale on the sliding arm so I do not need to bother with measuring the angle.

I do not expect this to save a lot of time. I already sharpen knives on the belt grinder and it does not take me more than about five-ten minutes per blade. But it will make the job a bit easier and the angle should definitively be more consistent, which is a plus. I am not one who is overly concerned with sharpening angle, I think that anything between 15° and 25° works just fine for most knives, but consistency does have an influence on the durability of the edge. For example, the N690 steel that I am using for most of my knives allegedly should not be sharpened at a too steep angle (below 15°) because then it tends to chip and break. With this tool, I can at least be definitively sure that I won’t go any lower than that.

We shall see how it works. I do have a lot of knives that need sharpening.