Grey Matters

I’ve said it before: Wifey’s cuckoo clock is not a precision instrument.

As I’ve been timing and adjusting it to get accurate timekeeping, it has behaved strangely. At one point, it was losing 0.3208 seconds per hour over 25 hours. Accordingly, I adjusted it to make it slightly faster but it lost .4413 seconds per hour over the next 23 hours.

Now, I was reasonably certain I had *increased* speed but it became slower. Strange. I gave it a hefty speed increase again.

Over the next 54 hours, it lost an average of just 0.1015 seconds per hour. Nice.

I decided to make no adjustment and instead see how consistent it would be. It lost 0.30 seconds average over the next 24 hours. Again making no adjustment, it lost 32.62 seconds over the next 50 hours for an average of 0.6524 seconds lost per hour.

So, with no adjustment, it had gone from .10 seconds lost per hour to .65 seconds lost per hour. It seems to be slowing. Will it settle out after it is sufficiently broken in? Is it dying?

I gave it another speed increase because I’d prefer it to be too fast rather than too slow. Once I get it running slightly fast, I’m going to time it repeatedly with no adjustments to see how consistent it is.

Tick tock.

Wifey’s cuckoo clock is plugging along and I’m trying to get it to run at a speed as close to correct as I can.

Out of the box, it was losing 35 seconds per hour. I’ve been adjusting it and had it down to 0.32 seconds per hour loss over 48 hours. Again increasing the speed a tad resulted in a loss of .44 seconds per hour over the next period. It should have been a lesser loss than .32 but was instead more. I adjusted again and just concluded a run of 54 hours over which it lost just 5.48 seconds (0.10148 seconds per hour).

Without making an adjustment, I’m timing it again now for another 48 hours or so to see it it is consistent at that 0.1 seconds per hour. I’ll be adjusting it again later in any case as I prefer it to be running a tad fast instead of slow. Were it running fast, I could simply remove the weight allowing it to stop for a period to let it lose a little time and get back in synch. It’s running behind, I have to nudge the minute hand a bit to correct it. Crude.

“NEWTOWN, Conn –-(Ammoland.com)- On Tuesday morning, Gov. Larry Hogan signed SB 736, the repeal of Maryland’s ballistics imaging program that had required firearms manufacturers and retailers to submit bullet casings for all handguns sold in the state.

“The signing of the bill is a victory for the industry as it brings to an end a decade-and-a-half-long experiment in crime lab technology that never worked, but that was embraced by gun control advocates.

“Under the direction of Jake McGuigan, Director, Government Relations-State Affairs, NSSF has worked diligently to repeal this legislation. The effort was capped by a final push in the waning days of the legislative session to repeal the 15-year-old law that had been defunded more than seven years ago.”

Defunded more than seven years ago? I guess they weren’t getting their money’s worth.

I wonder if anyone anywhere ever solved a homicide based on shell casing(s) left at the scene and catalogued in some imaging database? As I said in an earlier post on this subject, if I lived in a state that employed this nonsense, the first thing I would do after buying a new gun for which an expended shell had been sent off to a state agency would be to alter it to change those markings left on fired shells. And I’d do this before firing the first shot with my new gun.

While on her trip down the Rhine (or maybe it was up the Rhine), my wife ordered a cuckoo clock. It arrived a few days ago. Alas, it is not some work of Old World Craftsmanship; for all I know, it was made in China. Gaudy. Big – 47 cm wide, nearly 60 tall. It cuckoos and plays music every hour. There are three weights, 2.7 pounds each, one for the cuckoo mechanism, one for the clock and one to run the music box part of the show.

When I unpacked it, “Home Shopping Network” came to mind.

It depicts a bierhaus scene with old guys raising their steins on the hour while one of them is clunked on the head by a woman with a rolling pin. There are also an animated water wheel and dancers whirling and spinning when the music plays. Outside is a fellow driving a horse-drawn beer wagon and there’s a small church, not to scale, and a pine tree. And a steeple bell on the bierhaus. Kitschy. Doesn’t seem to blend well with the adjacent shelf of Kachinas.

At first, it lost 35 seconds per hour. I’ve been tweaking it and overnight it gained 1.65 seconds in 9 hours. I’m curious how close I can get it and how consistent it will be. And how long it will last.

This video from SAAMI (Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute) was shot to demonstrate how much danger firefighters are exposed to when a fire includes stores of ammo. Conclusion: Ammo that “cooks off” due to a fire outside of a gun’s firing chamber presents little danger to firefighters. Normal turnout gear is sufficient to stop the low-velocity projectiles (bullets and casings) resulting from cooked off ammo.

Huge amounts of ammo were subjected to fire, impact, crushing and so on to see what happened. In the case where a round did go off due to impact, the effect did not propagate to other rounds.

If there are any loaded guns in the fire, the one round in the firing chamber will achieve close to normal velocity if cooked off. But that’s just one round.

Firefighters have less to fear from ammo cooking off than from normal fire hazards.

<http://www.pagegunclub.org/knowledge-base/>

This is my gun club’s web site and is new, lacking much information that is yet to come.