JimTimber

I've seen the Boss first hand and there's nothing about that machine that needs cast iron for the body as long as wear surfaces were sleeved/inserted with a more durable material. Did they cheap out back in the day? I can't comment on that. I've never looked closely at them.

Kubota makes tractor rear ends (traditionally made of cast iron) out of aluminum. Boeing makes airplanes out of aluminum. Rock climbers trust their lives to aluminum all the time... The design needs to account for the characteristics of the material it's to be made of.

One could be added to the end of the original one, but it would be custom made.

You need a licensed prefix to use a UPC. $250 to buy the prefix and 10 numbers, then $50 a year to maintain it. GS1 is the officiating outfit.

You can go down to a 110/18 needle on a 441 clone. It makes the same size hole as a smaller machine.

I'm guessing it was a scam and got pulled. 0 feedback seller and one listing.

You seal the ends to prevent them from drying faster than the middle (which is what causes the "check". Checking is the technical name for a stress crack in wood). The grain of the wood is actually made up of thousands of little tubes that are filled with various levels of water depending on where in the log they're located. Heart wood is dryer, because it's not the "live" wood of the tree (that's the sap wood around the outside edge). Trees grow up when they're young, then start growing outward once the tree hits it's peak height adding growth rings at each spurt of growth (usually around 4 a year). "Old growth" trees are more sought after because they grew slower under natural succession (more competition for sunlight = slower growth = tighter grain). Without that competition, the tree grows a lot faster and puts on more growth per spurt and has looser grain, while getting bigger in a shorter time period. Bark seals the water in and will allow fungus and mold to thrive. Get that off so the sap wood can breathe, and seal the ends so they can't - that's your best bet for an air dried log. Still no guarantee you won't get checking, but it does help keep it to a minimum. If the stump is brought inside before being exposed to much outside contamination, you can leave the bark on and leave the ends bare. I did it with the log my anvil lives on, and it checked a bit but not enough to pose a problem. I didn't know what I do now when I cut the green ash it came from (10 years ago), so I would do it differently today.

Get the bark off it pronto! Painting the ends will only possibly prevent checking (cracks radial to the diameter), and will slow the overall drying. You're looking at more than a year. Hardwood dries 1" per year when cut into boards (2" = 2 years, etc). If you have a wood stove or fireplace, you might speed the process but risk inducing cracks from uneven drying.

You could narrow up the teeth, keep your SPI, and reduce the spacing at the same time. No new blank and much quicker to second test. I used to do everything with a jig saw, sawzall, or angle grinder. Been there, and feel your pain. Doing knives, a mini-mill might be worth the $$$.

CNC is great for complex shapes and repetition. For a simple pattern, a manual will do just fine and will be faster - no touching tools off, fixturing, edge finding, etc. Just line up the material to the cutter and start making chips. There's a lot of work that comes before you push the green button on a CNC mill.

Manual mill will do that quicker than you can draw the CAD file to write the program off of.

I thought they were lovely and well priced given the materials and finish. Inspired me to look around for something to make my own that's a little nicer than a hunk of aluminum. Kudos for not racing to the bottom.

The theme in the supplier threads lately has been that leather workers will never be happy. I owe Rusty and SLC a public apology for my participation in the other locked thread. My dissatisfaction in the size of the remnants overshadowed the quality of the leather in them. I've looked through one of the bags (they didn't want them back) and if I had different needs, I would've been delighted with what they sent. So if Weaver's policies rub you wrong, then don't buy from them. Companies raise prices to eliminate customers all the time. Sometimes growing your capacity costs more than it's worth, so the logical solution is to reduce your demand by raising prices to shave off that bottom tier while keeping the people who keep your margins up.

If you haven't found out how racist St Cloud is, you just haven't been there long enough. You're also likely white, which means you're not going to be treated to it the same as if you weren't. It was racist against the non-Somali African immigrants long before the Somali influx. My Asian friends were also treated differently in St Cloud - I witnessed it first hand. That you don't know the difference between Minneapolis proper, North Minneapolis, and every other suburb in the 500+ square mile 7-county metro is also indicative of why you don't know that the 45 mile distance dividing the areas also has a large phase shift from how things work down here. Andover is only about 10 miles from the concrete jungle of what people associate with "Minneapolis" and there's still active farms there. You can go a matter of blocks and change your world in this area.

You're buying on price alone, but you want the service that comes with retail pricing at the wholesale rate. That's how businesses fail. Do you want the supplier to go out of business because they made you happy and had no profit to show for it? When you spend all your time dealing with the little people and then cut your profit to make them happy, that's when you decide the business of being their slave isn't worth it and you close shop. Now your "loyalty" has cost you their services. The Walmart model doesn't work with leather. You have a high quality expectation, which takes trained people to make good decisions when filling orders. What grade leather goes in the box? I've never seen a laser marking of a hide's grade, so you can't say "put this in this order" to just anyone and expect it to be right - those employees capable of doing it cost money. Maybe not money in wages (because order picking still doesn't pay much, and sewing labor sure looks cheap from the want ads I've seen in MN), but you will have to spend money in screw ups and time teaching them what makes an A, B, utility, or whatever hide. I've learned a lot about this business in the short time I've been around this forum. I would NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER sell hides.