Random Thought Thread

Alone said:
Thanks, Brother.


John Garcia and I graduated from "Central Catholic High School", here in San Antone, in 1989.

I've been eating at "Garcia's Mexican Food To Go" (*or "Garcia's Mexican Food", as it is now known) for almost three decades. The Garcia Family just got recognition in the prestigious "Michelin Guide"...


guide.michelin.com

Garcia's Mexican Food – San Antonio - a MICHELIN Guide Restaurant

Garcia's Mexican Food – a restaurant in the 2024 MICHELIN Guide USA. The MICHELIN inspectors’ point of view, information on prices, types of cuisine and opening hours on the MICHELIN Guide's official website
guide.michelin.com guide.michelin.com


If you ever find yourself back down this way, you'll have to let me treat you to some lunch. 🤙
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Awesome gesture! Thank you. I miss the people, food, deer, hogs, turkeys, etc from Texas but I sure don’t miss the summer heat.

We have our favorite Mexican restaurant here where the owner brings our meals without having to place an order (we go there frequently🤣). Super nice Mexican family with great food.
 
yoko said:
Okay.... positive note....

This skunked beer might have some hallucigen properties..... I'm tasting color and hearing flavors at this point

Maybe it's the chasers hahaha
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When my Dad passed, my Cousin (*Frank) knew how much his passing took outta' me. Because of that, Frank took it upon himself to come babysit me on Friday nights, for a few months.

It didn't take us long to turn Frank's regular Friday night visits into a weekly "Whiskey Tour". Every Friday night, I'd score a different bottle of Tennessee Whiskey or Bourbon, all the way from basic hooch to some pretty expensive sh!t. We'd polish-off the bottle and share our sober thoughts the next day.


Anyhoo (*and speakin' of hallucinations), one night, I scored a bottle of "Angels' Envy". As usual, we polished it off with zero effort.

In keeping with our habit, the next day, we were sharing our thoughts on it. Frank told me that he had nightmares and a bad hangover. Likewise, I told him that I kept seeing sh!t that wasn't there, and also had nightmares. If you don't know, Angels' Envy is aged in Port wine barrels.


After our experiences, I just happened to share them with my Buddy, "Nico", who is also a "whiskey" guy and works as a Neurological Trauma nurse. Nico informed me that Port wine has a neurotoxin that (*no sh!t) causes brain interruptions and hallucinations.

Needless to say, Angels' Envy is forever off the menu. :confused:


True story.
 
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Alone said:
When my Dad passed, my Cousin (*Frank) knew how much his passing took outta' me. Because of that, Frank took it upon himself to come babysit me on Friday nights, for a few months.

It didn't take us long to turn Frank's regular Friday night visits into a weekly "Whiskey Tour". Every Friday night, I'd score a different bottle of Tennessee Whiskey or Bourbon, all the way from basic hooch to some pretty expensive sh!t. We'd polish-off the bottle and share our sober thoughts the next day.


Anyhoo (*and speakin' of hallucinations), one night, I scored a bottle of "Angels' Envy". As usual, we polished it off with zero effort.

In keeping with our habit, the next day, we were sharing our thoughts on it. Frank told me that he had nightmares and a bad hangover. Likewise, I told him that I kept seeing sh!t that wasn't there, and also had nightmares. If you don't know, Angels' Envy is aged in Port wine barrels.


After our experiences, I just happened to share them with my Buddy, "Nico", who is also a "whiskey" guy and works as a Neurological Trauma nurse. Nico informed me that Port wine has a neurotoxin that (*no sh!t) causes brain interruptions and hallucinations.

Needless to say, Angels' Envy is forever off the menu. :confused:


True story.
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More for me 😋
 
yoko said:
Been a weird week hope all of you are doing great!

I was gifted some skunked beer...... so I'm fighting my way through it cause I won't throw it away hahahaha

Every drink is followed by a head turn and a "gahhhhhh" sound lol
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Weren't you just talking about how life is too short not to celebrate Friday?

If that's true, it's too short to eat bad food and drink bad drinks!
 
carnifex knifeworks said:
Weren't you just talking about how life is too short not to celebrate Friday?

If that's true, it's too short to eat bad food and drink bad drinks!
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Probably something to that. I guess I’m a “suck it up, buttercup/suffering builds character” type 😂

Back when all the Covid shutdowns had started, and grocery logistics were somewhat iffy, someone told me that Gordon Food Services did retail sales, so I checked it out. Figured they supply a lot of restaurants etc.

Hmmmm… prices seem good. Ordering in bulk for commercial supply, probably provides better pricing.

Ordered ~$300 worth of steaks, burger patties, ground beef, frozen chicken breasts etc.

Ugh. Crap. All of it. One example was the burger patties and chicken breasts. They were so heavily water injected, cooking them resulted in them shrinking by 30-40%

No one else would eat them. Took me a while to work my way through all of it (because I figured, I paid for it, so I’m gonna darned well eat it). Wouldn’t even feed it to a dog. 😝
 
bluemax_1 said:
Back when all the Covid shutdowns had started, and grocery logistics were somewhat iffy, someone told me that Gordon Food Services did retail sales, so I checked it out. Figured they supply a lot of restaurants etc.
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I had no idea who they were, so I did a Google search on them. Anyone that posts a picture of a beef brisket cooked like this is not to be trusted.

764043-PWB-6-1724334811.jpg
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
I have a twin brother, Jonathan.

He and I went to NC State together in the '90s

He worked at a French cafe.

He brought home some beer from there. Grolsch. I still can't drink it to this day.


So anyway, we were college kids so money was tight and he had brought home this nice beer that was in our refrigerator and, without asking, I grabbed one and was drinking it and it was terrible.

Fucking terrible.

But I would be damned if I was going to pour out this fancy beer that Jonathan had brought home just because I didn't like it so I forced my way through it. Every drop. But it was terrible. TERRIBLE.

The next day he asked about it. He said did you drink that beer!?

I admitted I had

He said: "Damn! That beer was skunked as hell? My boss gave it to me and said if any of it was any good to drink it but they were just going to throw it out...

I can't even stand to look at it anymore...
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I like grolsch, and the swing top bottles are handy to keep for home brewing or making sauce. They stopped making it a year or so ago though.
 
toker said:
I had no idea who they were, so I did a Google search on them. Anyone that posts a picture of a beef brisket cooked like this is not to be trusted.

764043-PWB-6-1724334811.jpg
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And I forgot to mention, their frozen chicken breasts were all very flat, and a very curiously uniform size, unlike even the 10lb bags of Tyson frozen chicken breasts at Walmart (which were actually cheaper, per pound).

Turns out, the frozen chicken breasts from GFS are formed, glued white meat, which explains the consistent sizing.

When I want to use frozen chicken breasts in a hurry, I just thaw them in a bowl/container of warm water. They started falling apart 😡
 
Our old NH5000 is starting to mess up and the repair is staggeringly expensive. More than the machine is worth.

It's an issue with the pallet changer and the b-axis curvic coupler.

It wouldn't even matter to the average normal user but for our application, a mismatch of even .001" variation in the placement of the fixture when we are beveling creates a real problem and it's making my hair fall out.
 
Due to the shallow angle between the primary grind and the flats, even a tiny amount of mismatch in the location of the blade can create a visible movement of that intersection point.

And if the blade is off slightly in one direction, that mismatch adds on one side and subtracts on the other

So if the blade is off by .002”, it can create a problem.

We never used to have this problem.

Nothing that I make as flawless, every knife I ship has imperfections and having those intersection points line up perfectly is completely frivolous, I get them as close as I can and I call that good enough.

The best I can do is the best I can do. And I always try to ship my best work. I'm not able to ship something better than my best work, if you think about it.

We get that adjustment dialed in pretty tight during setup and our machines repeat very well. It doesn't generally drift.

.002" is a problem, and the Mori repeats to better than .0001". So, no problem.

Until recently. We have started having an issue with the mechanism that holds the tombstone after a pallet change. There's a tiny amount of random variation that cannot be compensated for.

This is a new kind of problem and it kind of caught us by surprise. We found it, and are actively addressing it, but the precision of this cosmetic attribute is not as perfect as we would like for it to be. Which is creating a lot of manual rework here.

It is completely cosmetic in nature, not very noticeable, and it is affecting one of the most affordable patterns we offer. I believe the knife is a fantastic value even if two intersection points on two opposite sides of the blade are off a little bit. As long as it's just a little bit. If people are using the knives the way I intended, meaning just using them, it is of no consequence at all, but there are collectors who acquire our work because of the perfection they often demonstrate and I could understand some people wanting it to be perfect.

Anyway, we're doing our best to make these blades as geometrically perfect as we can and we're taking actions to address these little cosmetic problems as they arise but if someone gets a knife that they're not satisfied with, they can always return it for a refund. Short of that, be aware we are sorting every blade for this issue now but a few probably slipped out before we caught it. The tolerance is plus or minus 1/16" per side so the difference between the intersection points could be as much as 1/8". This represents a blade blank that was mislocated in the fixture by .002”. 100% completely non-functional issue that most people would never notice unless they went looking for it, but if you have one that you don't like you can return it for a refund, no questions asked. And if you have one that is out of spec, you can return it for a replacement, no questions asked.

Edit: shifting the center line of the blade by .002" moves that intersection point by .067". Forward on one side, backward on the other.

A Mori is capable of repeating on a pallet changer an order of magnitude better than that.

This is my Mori. There are many like it, but this one is broken....
 
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Hatchet_Jack said:
Nathan the Machinist Nathan the Machinist if mine isn’t perfect I don’t want to know what perfect is. I’ve got 2 of your knives and to me they’re faultless. That’s not even arse sucking, just my honest view.
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Yeah, we are, honestly, pretty good at what we do. In my opinion.

We're not aiming for perfection in this regard, but we usually achieve something pretty close because we try to control variables, we're using good equipment, and we're pretty good machinists and we care a lot about what we do so things do tend to look pretty good most of the time.
 
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