Pickling vegetables

10th July 2017 11:34

Generic recipe for pickling vegetables, serves as a suitable basis for pickling most things and can be scaled up and adapted to taste.  Good for gherkins, courgettes, peppers and more.

See also: Russian gherkins

Pickling liquid proportions:

  • 1l water
  • 180ml 10% white, pickling, vinegar
  • 5 teaspoons salt
  • 7 teaspoons sugar

Boil the pickling liquid and dissolve the salt and sugar.

Prepare the vegetables:

  • Courgettes: peel them and remove the seeds.
  • Gherkins: top and tail them.
  • Carrots: thickly slice them.
  • Peppers: remove the seeds and chop them into quarters.

Pack the vegetables in the jar as tightly as possible – this helps to stop them floating too much.

Add bay leafs, peppercorns, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, dill and any other seasoning you like.  Pro-tip: put the seasoning in between two layers of vegetables to make sure it stays fully immersed in the liquid.

Cover the vegetables with onion slices to above the top of the jar.  When the lid is closed they will hold the vegetables down in the liquid as they try to float.

Pour the pickling liquid over the vegetables whilst it’s still boiling.  Fill the jar until it starts to overflow and close the lid.

Leave them for at least three days, although longer is obviously better.

Gherkins after bottling

Liked on YouTube: Dating Armor from Effigies: Be Careful!

9th July 2017 22:40

Dating Armor from Effigies: Be Careful! Sometimes effigies can play a trick on you. For the most part effigies are carved within a few years of either side of the death of the individual they represent, but in some cases there exists a significant disparity from the date of death and date of manufacture which can cause confusion when trying to date the armor.

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Specialist tool

8th July 2017 15:42

I was doing a bit of tidying up work on the fuel tank which involves inserting some bolts vertically upwards.  The problem with this – as I learned before – is that, under the influence of gravity, they will drop back into the socket which doesn’t leave enough thread protruding to bite into the nut.

Following the principle of the sump plug socket I put a slice of fuel hose into an 11mm socket.

11mm socket with fuel hose in it

The bolt now sits on top of the fuel hose with the full amount of thread available.

11m socket with fuel hose in it holding up a bolt

Airfix Chieftain Tank

09:53

As the Chieftain is my favourite tank – for a variety of subjective and non specific reasons – I thought it was probably time I got round to making a model of it.

As it’s now long out of front line service I couldn’t find anyone making a 1/76 model so I took to fleaBay to pick up the old Airfix Mk 2 Chieftain. This kit was originally released in 1970 and the box art on mine dates it to 1975-1978.

Airfix 1/76 Chieftain box

The crew pictured on the box don’t come with the tank but the hatches do open so I got some Wargames Foundary 20mm British tank crew.  These are WW II but British Army tank crew kit hadn’t changed significantly by the early 1970s so they were fine for my needs.

Wargames Foundary Brittish tank crew

They needed a bit of fettling to fit the Chieftain so after some basic assembly of the hull and turret I got them to a point I was happy with.

Airfix Chieftain with Wargames Foundary crew

 

 

Replacing 2CV rear wing retaining screws

6th July 2017 21:12

Although someone had painted the heads silver, the original rear wing retaining screws were rusty – to the point one had seized fast and had to be cut out when we took the wings off during the rechassis.

Original 2CV rear wing retaining screws

SPOG do replacement stainless screws for these so I picked up a pack.

SPOG and original 2CV rear wing retaining screws compared

As we’d done the hard work when we took the wings off, and had reassembled using copper grease, the old screws came out one at at time to be replaced with a new one.

SPOG 2CV rear wing retaining screws

As the rivnut at the bottom of the offside wing had been seized to the screw and had come out I used a flanged stainless nylock nut for that screw.  (Standard M5 0.8 thread.)

Liked on YouTube: Soviet PSM Pistol History: Really a KGB Assassination Gun?

30th June 2017 14:27

Soviet PSM Pistol History: Really a KGB Assassination Gun? The PSM is a Soviet pistol from the late 1970s which has gotten itself quite the fanciful reputation here in the US, thanks to extreme rarity and some imaginative magazine articles. Common lore would have you believe that the PSM and its 5.45x18mm bottlenecked cartridge is capable of astounding feats of armor penetration, and that it was designed specifically for KGB assassins.

The truth is rather more mundane – the PSM was a sidearm for high ranking officers who did not want to deal with carrying a Makarov pistol. Much like the US use of the 1911 and the Colt 1903 back during WW2, general-rank Soviet officers carried sidearms as badges of rank, not as actual combat weapons. To that end, the PSM is extremely thin to make it as unobtrusive as possible. The 5.45x18mm cartridge is basically a centerfire .22 long rifle ballistically. It does offer armor penetration that would be surprising to some, because its metal jacket, mild steel core, and small frontal area are all beneficial in piercing Kevlar. That is a side effect of the design, however, and not an original intent.

Mechanically, the PSM is a simple blowback action, and very similar to the Makarov.

Thanks to Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage magazine for providing the PSM and its ammunition for this video! See his regular column here: https://armsheritagemagazine.com

Cool Forgotten Weapons merchandise! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow via YouTube

Popping the progressive bubble

11th June 2017 12:08

In the aftermath of the Tories pyrrhic victory and Labours glorious defeat it’s easy for those in a progressive bubble to assume that things will continue on this trajectory and the path to utopia is now all but assured so we can sit back and relax.  However, let’s try and look at this without a bubble filter.

Assumption: There will be another election in short order.

The Tories are currently an omni-shambles and when there is another election, after what we’ve just seen, Labour should win.

Assumption: The next election will look like the last one.

At the start of the last election campaign the Tories looked like a lock in for a strong and stable majority so that shows that things can change dramatically in a short space of time.  There’s no way the Tories will fail to learn the lessons of the last election, they’ll get their house in order and run a very different campaign.

Assumption: UKIP are dead and their previous voters were split roughly 50:50 between Tory and Labour.

Although they have no MPs their vote share is still pretty high but we’re assuming they’re not a challenge.  The Tories were using hard Brexit to get the UKIP voters to move to them so, freed from that they can now move to a softer Brexit which could earn them votes from ex-UKIP voters that voted Labour because they wanted out but not at all costs.

Assumption: The Tories are a shambles, no one will vote for them.

Whilst they are currently a shambles they are as aware of this as the rest of us and they won’t let it stand.  There’s a good chance they’ll now come down hard internally and come back with something that is more like the strong and stable Tory party of old.  If you’re a mythical floating voter who leans right then you might well vote for a re-invigorated Tory party because you’ve seen what happens if they don’t have a strong majority so you’ll want to give them that.

Assumption: Labour are riding the crest of a wave.

Labour certainly did well with their left wing stance and they significantly benefited from significantly increased young voter turnout but what if they’ve got everything they can out of that – this is the high water mark and it still wasn’t enough?

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

There is no inevitable trajectory to be extrapolated from the recent election, things can – and will – change.  Conservatives will learn and adjust so progressives will similarly have to learn and adjust.  There is no end game here – it’s ongoing.

“You can’t get too high or too low, we play this game every day.”