I am currently assembling the last of the equipment I need which will eat up about $800 (wonder if there are any venture capitalists out there wanting to throw me money….)

Anyway, once all that is taken care of and I have a proper workstation and tools I will begin production on some 1911, Hi-Power, Beretta and even a Ruger SP101 set of grips. These are what I am starting with because they are the pistols I have available.  I will probably be able to get hold of a Model 60 and do some S&W grips too,

If anyone has a special request for a set, feel free to let me know, I am always open to expanding my range of skills and I will back my work with a 100% money back guarantee.  I plan to be up and running by March and as things get closer I’ll let you know about the website, product designs and what I have available in inventory for immediate sale (I’m positive that this will include some full and compact 1911 grips as well as some Brownings).

I look forward to putting some work into your hands very soon.

Digital Calipers.  Now I can get some very precise measurements for those grips that don’t have a simple flat back on them and instead have weird lips and levels – like the ones on my Browning.

At the end of the month I’ll also be picking up a nice tabletop drill press and bandsaw.  I’ll also be ordering the wood-burning (aka – pyrographic)  tools that I need as well as the chip carving tools.

My goal is that by new years I have the website done (I have to learn about online shopping carts and payment methods/costs) and by March I have some product to offer and also be ready to do custom orders as well.

I always thought that when I went to art school I would end up doing animation.  That’s what I focused on and all my classes were for, but now I am finding that all those classes have instead sent me in the direction of custom grips and woodworking.  I now use my computer modeling skills to model out a grip design so I can have a 3D look at it before I attempt to make it because many times what looks good in 2D doesn’t work in 3D.  Of course, many times what looks good in 3D doesn’t work in the real world either.

I am still going to finish my thesis – I have been stalling on it and that is a bad thing, but I am very excited to be working with my hands again.

So here’s the meme. Long answers or short.

1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?
2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?
3. What happened to it, what’s the end of the story?

My very first car, like all good first cars, was a hand-me-down.  I had just turned 17 and was ready to get my license my grandparents gave us their old 1972 Duster with a (to me) MONSTER 340 v-8 engine..  It was gold with a green interior and the on the column automatic transmission.  We actually had to fly out to Dallas and pick it up so dad and I went out there and drove it back to New Mexico.  For me it was some practice time with my learners permit, for dad it was 8 hours of pure terror as his youngest son tried to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do.  Finally, in frustration and no small bit of anger towards me, he took over driving and got us home.

Once there, the car was essentially mine and I spent the summer under the hood and realized that my grandparents did not know what the meaning of “Scheduled maintenance” was.  I ended up replacing all the belts and hoses, the distributor cap (which had a crack) and the rotor which was worn out, and the spark plug and battery cables.  Along with that I learned about greasing and replacing the speedometer cable and all the gaskets that had rotted away because an oil change had never been done as far as I could tell.  I also had to have a second fuel pump put on it because the damn thing liked to vapor lock every once in a while.  Once all that was done it would move like a bat out of hell, but was the most ass happy car I have ever driven.  You could just think about stepping on the gas and the back end would start skittering around on you.  I ended up loading the trunk down with concrete bags to hold it to the road.

I always kept a 4’ wrecking bar in the trunk, not because I needed it for construction, but because some of the nastier gang bangers in school (remember, this was back in 1984) liked to bring knives to school and cause problems out in the parking lot.  The wrecker gave me a much longer reach and wasn’t illegal to have.  I wasn’t a dummy 

My car became the go to for me and my friends because the back seat could hold four people and the front bench easily held three.  One night though, as we were coming back from movies and video games, I got pulled over.  I wasn’t speeding and I knew all the lights worked because I had just done the annual walk around that morning so I was honestly confused about why I was being pulled over.

As we sat there with the engine idling and red lights in the rear view mirror, the officer walked up shining his flashlight over all of us and finally resting on me and then my license.

“So.” He says to me, “What time do you think it is?”

“Uh,”  I actually didn’t know what time it was so I looked at my watch.”10:30?”

“Right. What time were you supposed to be home?”

Shit.

I was dead.  My dad new every cop in the city and since I was supposed to be home by 10:00 he must have made a phone call.  It was almost 11:30 by the time I had dropped my friends off and made it home.  Dad didn’t say anything, he just held out his hand and I passed over my keys.  The next morning I was out doing manual labor in the yard, that lasted for the next month, after that, I got my car back.

Sadly, when I joined the Navy my parents sold my car.  They reasoned that I wasn’t going to need it since I would be overseas.  I still haven’t forgiven them for that, but I plan on getting another one someday.

A U.S. official says an American-born cleric killed in Yemen Friday played a “significant operational role” in plotting and inspiring attacks on the United States.

And this was done, not by a drone, but by an honest-to-god airplane flown by an American pilot.

Today is a good day

**UPDATE**

The news just gets better and better, seems it was TWO US born terrorists that are now basking in their own personal hell, though this article says it was a drone strike, which is only a small disappointment to me

Don’t get me wrong, I am very, very grateful to have a job, and to have one that has medical benefits, but my problem is that the more I work at my current job the more I realize that management doesn’t really give a crap about anything BUT the numbers.  Everything to them is just another number.  If you are absent it is 10 points off your record, show up the whole week – +2, the whole month +15; If you are at 0 – your fired, no exceptions.

When I asked why a system was being put in charge of who is hired and fired instead of the persons manager I was told “We tried that and the managers weren’t doing what they were supposed to do.”

“So,” asks me,” why didn’t you fire the managers and get people in who would actually manage?”

Blank stare followed by a change of subject.

See, I want to work for a company that actually has a real game plan, not just one that says “We are putting you in charge of you!” as a way of really saying “We don’t want to take responsibility to manage so instead we have set up the computer to manage for us..”

Everything I deal with right now ends up with the same answer “What does the system say” as if it is some sort of Oracle of Delphi or, more likely, the Wizard of Oz.  Many times in my day I am asked questions by customers that they system does not have a nice neat answer laid out for, or if you do search for an answer it comes back with 364 answers.  I don’t know about you, but when you are on a call with a customer you generally don’t have time to dig through 300+ answers HOPING that one of them is what you are needing.

Nope, I need to find something different so today I am off on the hunt.  Maybe in the near future as my grip making and checkering skills get better I can live off that, but right now I’m gonna have to work for someone else a little while longer.

Most of it came from just rethinking some of the design aspects and separating items into multiple objects so that I didn’t have to build so much detail into one part of the object simply because the other side required it.

Now, I think I should have the main building structure done by the end of the week.  After that it will be security fences and stairways.

Right now the focus is all on the thesis.  All my class work is done and I just need to get my thesis finished and submitted so I can have my piece of paper that says I can do the job.  So, I’ve broken out the thesis project and pulled it apart some to make improvements and correct a few things that I noticed were not the way I would like it.

First up was the ‘Birdcage”, the metal framework that supported the glass ceiling to Penn Station, I have just a few items left to build for it and it will be finished (construction wise that is).  Next up will be replacing the placeholder textures with the real one, so lots of Photoshop work in the future for me, as well as CrazyBump and maybe even some zBrush for it.

So here is how it looks now.

Now I just have to go over the concourse floor, ceiling, walls, railroad tracks, benches, luggage, trains and lights.

Yeah, it might take a few months.

So, as a hint to the wife for Christmas I now present a few of them.

Maxpedition Fat Boy GTG I like the left side carry version. Or, I guess I could get the right side version and just carry it on the left.  That would put the keys on the front rather than the back and the water bottle would be in easy reach.

Since I shoot either hand, if I have it in the bag it’s fine and If I have in on my right hip the bag isn’t in the way.

The other good thing is that it has room for the kids bottle, a diaper or two as well a snacks and extra ammo.  Yeah, I know ‘baby gun blogging’, be glad I haven’t stuck in any cute baby pictures yet.

Next up is more of a survival/ camping item, the Trailblazer Axe/knife combo.  I’m very much a dual use kind of person and this axe does that.  Hammer on one side, axe on the other and utility knife in the handle.

I like that feature because it means you have three tools in the space of one, and an extra knife is never a bad thing to me.

So, there they are, the beginnings of a “do want” list that isn’t about weapons.  Well, kind-of not about weapons… a little.

Jennifer asked the question, so here’s the long answer:

I grew up with guns and if I am perfectly honest, I think it made me a little complacent about the 2nd Amendment.  I mean, I grew up thinking that everyone had a gun in the house, it wasn’t until high school that I found out a friend of mine’s family wouldn’t let him come over because we had guns.  My dad was UDT  then went to NIS, and finally became a  NM State Police officer.  Later he moved on to being an investigator (motorcycle gangs and homicide) so there were always guns in the house because of his job.

I remember when I was about seven or eight he took us out onto the mesa and showed us kids what kind of damage a shotgun could do to a watermelon.  After that it became a regular weekend excursion to drive out to the mesa and do some pistol, rifle and shotgun shooting.

At home for plinking my brother and I both had BB guns.  During the summer we would set up targets on the back of the shed and spend hours out there cocking and firing away.  At one point we used each other as targets, a fact which not only broke the four rules (or, followed them in a twisted way), but something that our mom did not learn about until 30 years later.  Later we shared a semi-auto .22 rifle and a CO2 powered pistol and since there was a good supply of soup cans, milk jugs and bottles of various sizes there was always things to aim at.

In high school I did more shooting as part of the USMC JROTC unit.  We did rifle shooting with .22 rifles and learned more gun safety and shooting positions, I managed to get my expert badge too.  After high school though instead of joining the Corps like I wanted to, I ended up in the Navy because at the time the Marines were full up with recruits and I didn’t want to wait around to get out in the world.  Did more shooting in boot camp, got another badge (sharpshooter with pistol) and then didn’t touch a firearm again for four long years ntil I was assigned to the MP’s and went to the range for qualification again.

During that time I had decided that maybe I wanted to be a cop on the outside.  My dad was a cop, both my brothers are cops, so what the heck, right??  So while serving with the MP’s I put myself through the California Police Academy.  Again, more shooting, this time though it was pistol and shotgun.  After graduation though California’s economy crashed (sound familiar) and with no jobs to be had (and not wanting to reenlist with Clinton as President) I moved away and instead ended up in a regular job where I realized something – I was actually happier NOT busting heads.  So, I set about figuring out what I wanted to REALLY do for a living.

So, I ended up at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio working on an animation degree – no time for shooting, heck no time for sleeping!  But, eventually I graduated, got married and then we thought about grad school and that took us from Ohio out to California, and that is where I got the wake up call.

Living in San Francisco I was exposed to a level of crazy that I had really thought was only present in stupid movies.  I met people who were literally willing to trade their freedom away for some kind of perceived safety, and would sell you and I up the river to get it. 9-11 had taught them NOTHING!  I had teachers who thought, and taught, that the government should be in charge of taking care of us and we should never have to lift a finger to get what we want.  The scariest part of these people though was that if you didn’t think like they did, you were a target – not that I really cared, but the whole “You must be assimilated” thing was a bit too far out for me.

When they would find out I was former military, the hostility was obvious.  Not everyone was that way, but enough.  I had one person ask me how I could be conservative and be an artist at the same time.  These people truly hated and didn’t understand a damn thing about the people and rights that kept them free.  They were all very good at spouting off about the 1st Amendment, but most of them only knew the ‘freedom of speech’ part.

At the same time, I had started this blog.  Originally it was just to keep in touch with friends as we moved and a good place to put up some photos, but as I discovered other blogs, and especially gun blogs, I realized that I needed to get back to shooting again and really exercising my 2A rights. So, I got with a friend of mine out there and we began hitting the range and a month later I bought the very first weapon I ever bought for myself, my shotgun Bruce.  When I bought it the girl behind the counter gave me a look like I just killed a kitten in front of her.

Now that I’m back in a free state, the shooting is on, the blogging is on and I’m getting my wife going with us too, and she likes it a lot.

My grouping does kinda suck on this one, but since it has been about 10 years since I shot this Browning and I was doing it from ranges of 10-30 feet, I’m not to disappointed in my performance.  Besides, have you ever seen the sights on a 1976 Browning?  It looks like this:

Not exactly a huge front sight to work with, and the rear sight is a dovetail design.  I love this pistol, but I’m going to be saving my pennies and getting a P229 as soon as I can for a defensive gun.  Maybe I can order a new slide for this one with more modern sights?  That would be a nice thing.

So, since I couldn’t make it to the NRA convention, I went shooting instead.