So, Howsda Brexit Goin’?

The UK is supposed to leave the EU finally and definitively at the end of this year and as each week some deadline is being set only to be ignored/postponed again, it is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I will not pretend to be very well informed on the negotiations and everything with them, but I would like to shortly muse about one phenomenon that I see online.

Before and after the vote for Brexit, the Brexiteers with Farage, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and similar upper-class twits were all saying how easy it will be to close a comprehensive trade deal with EU and how after being freed from the EU restrictions they will be able to also negotiate much, much, much better deals with everyone else. After all, the UK is the fifth-largest economy in the world and the EU needs the UK much more than vice versa, so negotiations will be easy because the UK holds the longer end of the stick, etc. And even if no-deal happens, no biggie, cuz everyone else will clamor to fill the gap in business with the EU.

So far the UK has closed several trade deals with other countries, and most of them are just copy-pasted trade deals that those countries have with the EU. The trade deal with Japan is worse (for the UK) than the one the EU has. And the trade deal with the EU does not go so well so far. In fact, it seems that hard Brexit is creeping ever closer.

And the rhetoric of online brexiteer experts is suddenly concentrated on how the EU bullies the UK and tries to punish it for leaving. The EU is the bad guy, of course, refusing to back down and give the UK everything it wants. To which I would say – so what?

Those brexiteers who will inevitably blame the EU for any negatives that befall the UK due to this mess seem to me to fail to grasp a blatant contradiction in their own reasoning. Not only in claiming that the UK is bullied by someone who, supposedly, was supposed to have a weaker negotiating position. But also they are often hardline libertarian capitalists, for whom negotiating from the position of power with the intent of screwing the other party completely over is a good thing. So by their own logic, even if the EU is the bully (which I do not think it is) and is just trying to screw the UK over to teach it a lesson (which I do not think it is) they should just admire the business acumen and negotiating strength of the EU instead of whining how persecuted they are, shouldn’t they?

It looks like the British Brexiteers do show here one common characteristic of conservatives the world over. They fire the sweepers, then the drop banana peels on the floor willy-nilly and when they inevitably slip and fall flat on their arse, they blame everyone else.

Kestrel Whoosh

Yesterday evening I heard a banshee wailing behind my window. Well, not being superstitious and knowing my birds I feared not for I knew it was no banshee but a kestrel. The little bugger has probably slept somewhere in my roof beams and decided to give me a loud “good night” just before sundown. In the morning, shortly after I woke up, I heard it again, so I put on a jacket and went out to take a look. And I saw the bird whooshing over the roof, confirming my surmise. I do not know exactly where it was overnight, but it was indeed somewhere near my window.

Later on, just as I was preparing to go pick up my mother at a hospital after successful surgery, I spotted the bird on a tree in my neighbor’s garden and I have managed to make a few pictures before it whooshed again. I even managed to open the window, although it did not help too much, the weather was foggy and the lighting was craparooni.

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

More pictures below the fold.

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Kitchen Knives Set – Part 2: Making the Blades

There are multiple pictures, so I am putting the post below the fold. I have filmed most of these works, but if a video ever comes out, it won’t be this year. I am already getting a bit sidetracked by making this project more elaborate than I originally intended and by my desire to re-build and improve some of my tools. Whilst being hampered in my endeavors by cold weather and other, previously mentioned, things.

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Gingerbread Houses

My mom almost did not bake any gingerbread this year, she is not doing very well I am afraid. And I am trying to make knives when I have time and stamina, so I probably won’t bake any. But my mom did make two houses in the end, so here they are (below the fold). She loves doing these things and I am glad I invested money when I had it into automated devices that take care of the most laborious and heavy work so she can do it even now.

She complained a lot that her hands are getting shaky and the decorating is not as neat as it used to be, but she does that for several years now. I still think she makes beautiful, original, and wholesome gingerbread decorations and I keep telling her.

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

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

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Bullfinches!

We have no snow yet, but the temps are below 0 °C sometimes, so we are filling the feeder with sunflower seeds. And at least bullfinches are here again, I had four pairs show up simultaneously this week, although I did not, unfortunately, get them all in one picture. I got seven individuals at once, but unfortunately, the focus was not on the tree with birds but on the tree behind them.

© 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.

TNET 43: Chess Anyone?

I did not know that there was an Online Olympiad for People with Disabilities, but I think it is a good idea.

The chess community has a long and unpleasant history of sexism and elitism, so it is good to see that the problems are being recognized by the current top chess brass and some progress towards the sport being more inclusive is being made.

I have learned to play chess at the age of five before I learned to read. I have always thought that I am no good at it because I was mostly playing with my father and my brother, neither of whom I could defeat with any reasonable frequency. I still could not beat my brother well into my thirties. That did discourage me a lot, especially since my brother – who was a competitive player, albeit not a top one – remarked often “OOH, you are starting with Italian today”. This always irritated me because I was never able to remember the names of beginnings, except those where the name was logically bound to the position on the board (like King’s Gambit, Four Knights). My memory does not work that way, rote memorization was always nigh impossible for me.

Anyhoo, in the spring of this year, I have created an account on www.chess.com and I started to play regularly. And since online gaming does match people with opponents of approximately the same strength, I am not losing all the time. And I have found out two things. First – I am definitively not at a competitive level, no surprise there. Second – I have Dunning-Kruegered myself, I am not as bad as I thought – I am in the top quintile, so I could probably win four out of five matches with random casual players.

If anyone is interested in chess and would like to play, let me know.

Open thread, talk whatever you want, but assholery is not allowed.

Previous thread.

Kitchen Knives Set – Part 1: Thoughts and Design

So, this is my next big-ish project, I have decided to make a basic set of kitchen knives – three knives and honing steel. I am not entirely sure about how useful honing steel is with knives from N690, but I have used it on my mother’s knives and it seems to work. It does not appear to hurt. If this small set works out OK, I will make more in the future and perhaps add some specialized knives along the way, but this basic set is meant for casual cooks like myself (and indeed most of my friends), who do not need a special blade for every task and will be probably very content with one knife for 90% of work.

And because this time I am preparing perhaps for more future projects, I have made templates in photoshop, printed them out, and laminated them in transparent foil for future use.

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

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

The grid is metric, with the smallest scale being 1 mm.

The “meat” knife is a de-facto universal knife, one that I expect to take care of that 90% of work. Medium-sized blade with a round tip, ergonomic handle for firm grip, suitable for slicing protein as well as fine-dicing herbs and vegetables. And for remaining tasks, there is a small peeling knife with a sharp tip for piercing and a relatively straight blade for scratching-peeling, and a big chef knife for tackling difficult cabbage and for those occasions when cutting a lot of big-ish vegetables or huge chunks of whatever is necessary.

The chef knife has holes along the blade edge, which should help with reducing the sticking of whatever is being cut to the blade. It is easier to make than hollow grind or S-grind and it does work too. The handle is ergonomic as well but it is formed with a focus on two main uses of such a big blade. The thicker butt with a hook end prevents the knife from flying out of the hand when chopping, and the thin front with a lot of space for fingers allows for a choked-up grip with the index finger and thumb on the blade for fine slicing and dicing with a rocking motion.

All these designs should work as expected since they are based on knives that I have already made in the past. Of these, the least tested is the chef knife, but I still do not expect any trouble. I won’t follow the designs exactly, they are just approximations and I expect to tune them up a bit during the work. Any thoughts and remarks on the designs are welcome, as well as any suggestions for further additions to the set ( I am thinking about fish-knife and cheese-knife).

However, I will definitively introduce one new and relatively original feature right now. One that I have not seen used by another knifemaker (which does not mean nobody does it, I just did not see it done). As you can see, there are four-five holes for pins in each tang, which might seem a bit excessive and dorky-looking. That is because I need more pins – two will be wooden and two will be metallic. And they will not be visible. That is, the knives are designed as full-width tang, but the pins won’t appear on the outside of the handles. I have tested this idea on one broken blade and it seems to work perfectly OK for a kitchen knife that won’t get hit with a mallet or hammer too much. Or at all, as things should be.

So stay tuned for the following articles with a full write-up of my manufacturing process for this project. I am decently far already given that I only could work three days this week. And because a video was requested, I am filming (almost) all work as well. But I make no promises there – a future video is, at this time, uncertain and might or might not happen.

Loser Should Not Be an Insult

This will be just a short contemplation about one word. But before you proceed with reading, I would recommend watching this video. It is only tangentially related, but it sparked a few months ago the train of thoughts leading here.

English is not my first language and I have always trouble to understand some things. And one of those things is the use of the word loser as an insult. But it got appropriated into the Czech language in the late decades, and given how it is used, I do consider its use as an insult to be a symptom of a toxic culture, even if not necessarily of toxic masculinity specifically. As a prime example of this, I would like to point out that it is one of the most favorite insults that Donald Trump likes to throw around at anyone he does not like – and now some people like to use that word as an insult against him. I do not.

Using the word loser as a derogatory term in this way signifies that losing at something (usually at finding a relationship and/or financial independence) is always a choice and personal failure as if we all have full control over everything. It also values zero-sum games over cooperation. It completely disregards the huge influence of chance in our lives. Plus we are often pressured by society to try to succeed at the arbitrary and sometimes downright daft things against our will – there are people who are happy to be single, women who do not want to have children, men who do not want a managerial career, etc. It divides people into winners and losers and only winners are worthy of consideration and empathy.

So before you, as an SJW, continue to use the word loser casually as an insult, perhaps consider why you are doing it and whether you are not inadvertently contributing to the things you intend to oppose. There are better insults for shitty people who chose to do shitty things.

 

Whinge, Knives, Whinge

It took me four months to finish the batch of knives that I started in July. I have documented every hour that I have worked on knives, and the results are not good. I have only managed to work about 20 hours a week. Plus some hours that I have not counted, like when I was making new tools, repairing or improving them, etc.

Please allow me to whine a bit about the causes of that.

I either have chronic fatigue or I am a chronic hypochondriac. I am reluctant to go to a physician right now, partly because of the ongoing pandemic and partly because of last year when after several months of pain, I never got a conclusive diagnosis – and the pain only subsided after a course of steroids that I got for a really bad but unrelated virus (possibly flu) that snuck up on me right before Covid hit Europe. So I am not all too optimistic about our GP being able to help me with this.

I have been more or less tired ever since that possible flu. You remember that short walk in the forest in August when I brought home two full shopping bags of ‘shrooms? It took me three days to get over that, and one of those days my legs hurt so much I was barely able to go to the loo. After just several hours of hand-sanding knife handles my back and hands hurt for two days. Etc. etc. ad nauseam. Add to that the necessity to spend time carting my parents to/from doctors, stacking firewood to the cellar, caring for my trees, and the result is that I do a lot less work than I want to.

I have never seen the point of exercise because my body never reacted to it the way other people’s bodies seem to. I did get stronger, but only in relation to my starting point. In high school, when I could exercise under professional supervision free of charge, after months of work I was barely getting just below the level where my schoolmates have started. This year is that – only worse. I am not going exactly downhill, but just barely. Plus my hands started to hurt again two weeks ago. With the sun gone, I have at least looked at what safe dose of Vitamin D I can take in supplements and I am taking that because it seems to help a bit.

Whining over. I hope it gets better. At least it is not getting worse.

The last knives I have finished are four universal kitchen knives from a batch of five blades. One of those blades was not suitably hardened after all- near the tang was about 2 cm soft part. I do not need to toss it, but I do need to try and quench it again with the next project.

These are a bit heavier and thicker (3mm) than my previous knives of this type because they are made from what was left over from the slabs for chef knives. I have also changed the geometry of the handle a bit – instead of a rounded rectangular profile it has a rounded trapezoid profile. They are also about 2-4 mm thinner overall and 5 mm thinner and shorter at the front to better allow a choked-up grip with thumb and index finger on the blade. And they are pointy this time.

One knife has the handle from apricot wood and I have tried tubular pins filled with the same wood. I think it looks good and I will use that idea in the future again.

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

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

Two knives have the handles from pickled black locust. It is perfidious wood, in the future, I have to be more careful – the scales were probably not fully dried when I ground them to final size and they shrunk on me a tiny bit when I was finishing the surface with resin. So the tang does exceed the handles a tiny bit. That can happen due to a bad shaping job too, but that was not this case – they were perfectly flush originally, I swear. Lesson learned I have to put this wood in the oven for an hour or so before glue-up and grinding the outline. Now I can forget the lesson before finishing the next batch.

© 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.

And last was fitted with padauk wood that I have again got for free with steel shipment. A prime example that there really is no need to use tropical woods, it does not look that much better than the black locust.

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

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

Knives are a bugger to shoot, I will have to build myself some better lighting system. Either the blade is over-exposed, or the handle is under-exposed, or the colors are off, or all three.

If you are interested in knife making, on Sunday I will start a detailed series about my next knife-making project. Not because I am qualified, but because I want to.

Brass Chisel

I made a new tool. I do not know whether someone else is already using it in a knife-making context, I would not be surprised if it were so. But I never heard anyone talk about it – a small chisel made from brass. I think it is a very good addition to my toolbox, well worth the ten minutes or so that I have spent making it. The inspiration were tools that I was using in my previous job to clean burnt plastic off of various testing devices.

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

This may sound like a joke tool, akin to the inflatable dartboard, chocolate kettle, or ceramic rivets, but it is not. But why would anyone make a chisel out of a soft material like brass, that will not hold an edge?

I am glad you asked.

When making knives with the use of epoxy glues and resin, an inevitable problem arises – epoxy stuck to places it should not be stuck to. I am always doing my best to clean any rogue epoxy from the bolster/blade boundary etc before it hardens with a towel soaked in denatured alcohol, but the epoxy tends to flow and bleed over during curing too, plus there is often some contamination on the blade where I fail to spot it in time. That needs to be scraped off, very carefully, without damaging the blade surface.

With my last batch of knives, I have used with great success a square piece of brass, so for the last few pieces, I ground it roughly into a chisel shape and fixed it to a handle. And it works great, exactly as it is supposed to work.

There are several reasons for using brass and not other materials like alluminium or mild steel:

  1. Brass is harder than epoxy, resin or wood, but softer than even unhardened steel. So it can be used to scrape the glue off steel not only on the blade but also on the tang, without damaging the polished surfaces.
  2. Unlike alluminium, Brass does not come with a hard-oxide layer from the shop, neither does it form one over time. It forms a patina, but that patina is not hard enough to scratch steel. Alluminium does scratch steel, partly due to the oxide layer, partly due to galling. Ditto mild steel.
  3. Brass is one of several so-called non-galling alloys, but alluminium is a strongly galling metal. That means that brass does not lead to wear and tear when it slides on a steel surface, whereas alluminium will tend to contaminate, even if not necessarily scratch (if you remove the oxide layer beforehand thoroughly), steel on contact.

And thats all, folks. If you need to scrape glue off of polished surfaces, a brass chisel might be just the tool for you.

 

Behind the Iron Curtain part 36 – Revolutions

These are my recollections of a life behind the iron curtain. I do not aim to give a perfect and objective evaluation of anything but to share my personal experiences and memories. It will explain why I just cannot get misty-eyed over some ideas on the political left and why I loathe many ideas on the right.

We were taught at school that Marx got one thing in his philosophy wrong and that it had to be corrected by Lenin – the idea of gradual societal progress over time. A violent revolution, we were told, is necessary to defeat the evils of capitalism and institute socialism, just as it happened in Tzarist Russia after WWI and in our country after WWII. After that glorious revolution, we can go back to gradual societal progress over time and the glorious, completely fair, and egalitarian communism will come. Eventually.

When communism did not come any closer after nearly one generation, people became restless. It was not exactly an attempt at revolution, there was no violence, and no attempt at actually overthrowing the regime, only an attempt at reforming it and making it better. But this cry for humanizing the regime that was supposed to care about human welfare did not suit well the powers that be in Moscow and the attempt was quelled by force. The Czech Republic was invaded and tanks from USSR, Poland, Hungaria, and Bulgaria rolled through the streets. It worked, but not as planned – the plan was to put up a facade that people do not want any reforms and that soviet-style socialism is wanted, as demonstrated by people welcoming the invaders as liberators. But weeks-long protests against the invasion put this idea quickly to sleep and what remained was subduing the population by brute force.

A year later, a young philosophy student Jan Palach has set himself ablaze in protest of this. He did not want the ideas that led to the push for humane socialism to die, he wanted the occupants to leave the country and in lieu of other options, he decided for protest by self-harm. I cannot say I condone his approach, but his goal was undeniably noble. He died, he became a martyr, but nothing much changed.

Fast forward another generation.

I was just a school kid during the times of the Velvet Revolution in the fall of 1989, in my last year of elementary school. I knew nothing about the things that happened short of a decade before I was born. I had no idea who Jan Palach is, I had no idea that we were still occupied by Soviet Army, and because I have lived in the countryside with no connectin to big cities, I had no idea that civil unrest is brewing for almost a year already. But it was. The boil of social unrest was swelling, unseen by many but clearly visible by others until it burst.

For me, the whole thing was an incomprehensible mess. I did not understand what is happening. Suddenly I heard on the news that peacefully protesting students were beaten to a pulp by police – a thing that only evil capitalists do to protesters, surely! And then the whole thing happened really quickly – and before the school year was over, before the next summer holiday, we had suddenly a different political regime and I had to learn that a lot of what I knew about how the world functions was bullcrap.

And suddenly I learned about all the things that were kept from school curricula – the deaths and torture in the name of the greater good, the lies and deception, and the fact that it all did not lead to a better life anyway. Those were not easy times – and I was lucky to live in a country where the armed forces were not given orders to use violence and the revolution was allowed to happen without bloodshed. Hearing about armed conflicts in other countries, and for example seeing Ceaucescu being shot to death was not cathartic or satisfying, it was only terrifying.

I do not like revolutions much. They might be necessary from time to time, but they are not pretty, they are not glorious and they do not lead to instant improvements. Not even the milder ones.

Prototyping Chef Knives

This was an interesting project. Interesting in the sense that nearly nothing went as planned.

First I started to make five blades and I broke one after hardening, so I have made it into a smaller knife for my neighbor. But what happened after that was a real bummer – the four remaining blades stubbornly resisted my attempts at tumbling. After over a month in the tumbler, none of them had the pretty, regular finish that I have gotten on my full-width tang blades. Maybe the point of balance of these blades, or their width, or both, have played a role. I simply do not know. I only know that after over a month I took it as “lesson learned, you cannot tumble these, finish them or toss them as they are”. And because they are prototypes whose main purpose was learning, I have decided to use them as they were.

The first piece went on a bed of flowers into a land far, far away. What happens there is in the stars and out of my hands.

The second piece I have finished with an experimental piece of wood – one of the very rotten willow pieces that I have stabilized with resin during my first tests. Only the piece was just a tad thinner than I needed, so the resulting handle is slimmer and straighter than I intended it to be. I am keeping this knife for myself. I just cut onions for dinner with it and it works reasonably well. Whether it works better or worse than other chef knives I cannot evaluate, since I do not use chef knives regularly.

© 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 handle looks…. interesting, but not very kitchen-knifey. I have used dark brown dye for the resin on the assumption that it will give the wood the most natural look. And it did that. Only it gave the wood also a decidedly camo-tacticool look. I think it would be great for a bushcraft/camping knife, but on a kitchen knife, it looks a bit odd. But maybe infusing the wood with bright colored resin – yellow, red, green, or even blue – might lead to interesting results. I am definitively going to try that next time. The rotten log will not burn – yet.

I have made my first bolster from buffalo horn here and fitting that and the handle together with the curved spacer from bone went reasonably well right until the last step in the process. That last step was buffing up of the horn. I have used my DIY red hematite buffing compound because it worked well on the horn – it is less aggressive than industrial steel buffing compounds. But some of it got stuck in the pores in the bone and it is impossible to clean afterward. That is unfortunately a common problem with bone – it has nearly invisible pores that tend to pop-up at the very end of the work when the piece cannot be replaced. So working with bone is always a bit gamble and you often get some dark spots here and there. It is not plastic but a natural product after all. But these red spots look like someone bled all over it. Grrr.

The third piece got fitted with bubinga handle and bone bolster. It goes to my former colleague, who has been patiently waiting for it for nearly a year by now.

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

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

Nothing went wrong with the knife itself. I have fitted the bone bolster with the handle really well, there are no gaps between the white bolster and the blade. Nothing to complain about except the large cut in my right thumb during assembly because the blade cut during all that wiggling through several layers of cloth and masking tape.

Bubinga is beautiful and very hard, but it is not a wood that I would normally use. It is not grown sustainably and the species, while not endangered yet, are on a way to becoming endangered. But since I got this piece for free with a shipment of steel, I have used it. I think I got it for free because it had a worm-hole, but luckily enough it got completely ground away during work. And the piece was big enough for me to make the handle in a shape and size that I have initially intended. It has a trapezoid-profile with rounded edges, for better grip and edge-alignment.

The fourth blade was fitted with a horn bolster and cherry crotch wood with a bone spacer. And this is the closest to my intended design of all three. It is now in the possession of my main tester – my mom.

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

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

The cherry wood is very beautiful, all the more pitty for the unseemly cracks. I will have to devise and use some kind of end-cap for cases like this when it would be a waste to toss the wood but there are some blemishes on the end grain. My mother does not mid it as it is and I hope it will serve well. Apart from these cracks, the only thing that went wrong was a cut in my left thumb – yup, I got symmetrical cuts with different knives.

Stats for all these knives: blade ~210 mm length, 3 mm thick, 50 mm wide, grip ~130 mm long. They are more forward-weighted than my full-width tang kitchen knives, so they would be probably very effective choppers too – the point of balance is right at the heel of the blade.