I know we missed the gun news last week, but this week we have some tabs to clear! I’ve also been busy with extreme home brewing. I’ve been wanting to make more lagers. The problem is, I still won’t them very often, and I don’t want to have to buy a whole refrigerator just to lager the occasional lager, nor do I want to use my kegerator and then not have beer on tap for eight weeks while it ages. So what about using one of those big gatorade coolers (which I already have in my equipment inventory) to jacket water around a carboy fermenter? Then cooling the water with a Peltier cooler? Turns out it works, but thermoelectric coolers are a pain in the ass because they a) take up a lot of DC current and b) don’t like being controlled by ordinary thermostats. They need PID control with the output filtered to smooth out the pulse-width modulation. They also don’t like being wired in parallel, which is a problem when you’re dealing with a 15VDC 6A device. So I’m trying to decide between driving the 3 TECs with 3 of these, or one of these, with the TECs wired in series. Or maybe just build my own current source, which is the ideal way to drive TECs. Anyways, enough of that. Here’s the news:
Obama backs Australian gun laws. Remember that Australia engaged in mass confiscation of all semi-automatic rifles and pump-action firearms. At one time, this was considered a losing issue for Democrats. He also condemned the big gun rushes that follow his pronouncements. I would encourage readers to go to your local gun store and disappoint the President.
Add Uber to your list of anti-gun companies. They banned guns for drivers and passengers. I’m sure the criminals will be the first to comply!
John Lott points out what the VPC doesn’t want you to know about justifiable homicide statistics.
Joe Huffman refutes one of the big straw men built up by gun control advocates.
The judge who awarded attorneys fees to Lucky Gunner explains his ruling. LG will donate all the money to a gun rights charity. Please go and vote for a responsible gun rights group. I think it would be a real shame if GOA were to get that money. Might as well burn it.
A surprise to no one, it turns out that compliance with New York’s SAFE Act is practically non-existent. They can erect their utopian laws, but it doesn’t mean we have to go along with their scheme. Even when registration was tried in Canada, the compliance rate was low.
It’s be awfully nice if we could convince people that walking around a Wal-Mart racking a shotgun is, frankly, just being a jerk for the sake of getting people to pay attention to you. One of these days, one of these clowns is going to get his ass shot, and I’m not going to feel sorry for them.
The killer in Charleston looks to have purchased his firearm at retail and cleared a background check, despite the fact that he shouldn’t have. Our opponents are wringing their hands demanding to know how this happened. Well, you know, government is mostly incompetent even on a good day. Do you wonder why we don’t like relying on the government for our personal security? If they want to do that, fine. But don’t force that choice on me!
It’s open season now that the Supreme Court has basically given the lower courts free reign to ignore Heller. The bill in New York has passed the Assembly.
Puerto Rico has gone constitutional carry, and for purchase, federal law is now what’s controlling, since a court tossed their gun control laws. SAF took this case through Puerto Rico Commonwealth Courts. I don’t know how long this will last, but it’s an interesting development.
Are New York Republicans the biggest impediment to getting New York’s ridiculous knife laws repealed? I can totally believe this. Remember, without Republican cooperation, SAFE would never have passed.
Speaking of Delaware (linked in the previous article), it’s in trouble. The truce is off, and it’s a blue state. Once the blue establishment becomes convinced the gun vote can’t hurt them, you have nowhere to go but down. I hate to be a pessimist, but we are fast becoming two Americas, and the courts aren’t going to do anything to stop it. Worse? Their America is growing.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, activists are trying to show the gun vote can still hurt.
Remember, the media are the enemy. They are bitching about losing access to permit data. Given what happened in New York, they have no room to complain. The media has shown nothing but contempt for gun owners.
Martin O’Malley is still a git. I think Bernie Sanders is probably a bigger threat to Hillary.
Bill Clinton: “You can’t have people walking around with guns.” Does that include his armed security detail? No. Of course it doesn’t.
An old lady who worked Intelligence in WWII died, and they found she was still keeping a Sten submachine gun in her house.
Charles C.W. Cooke takes Obama to task for his gun control proposals, none of which have a thing to do with the Charleston shooting.
Colt: Free to a good home! Only comes with hundreds of millions of dollars of debt!
Ace on NRA’s “Extremely Strong Grip” on Congress: “Obama’s real enemy is now, as it as always been, a powerful special interest lobbying group called The Majority of American Citizens.”
In New Jersey, if your spouse is a prohibited person, you are too.
Off Topic:
Is the New Deal in trouble? We can dream, can’t we? The Supreme Court has done the right thing for raisin growers.
Ace describes Obama’s technique of trying to channel “stray voltage.”
You forgot to mention Toomey’s statements of recent: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/capitolinq/Toomey-Charleston-shows-need-to-keep-guns-from-criminals-mentally-ill.html
I didn’t see that. Shit. Just when I thought he might have learned his lesson.
I suggest just a used [or even new, given their prices] mini-fridge?
I mean, that might be a little too easy, but…
There aren’t many mini-friges out there today that will work for brewing. My current kegerator is a Sayno 4912, but they were discontinued, and when they come up in the secondary market they get snatched up quick. I’m lucky to have mine.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that most of the mini-fridge makers also sell kegerators and wine coolers, and don’t want DIYers undermining their profit margins on those by converting dorm fridges.
Interesting registration numbers from NY SAFE ACT. From the same link I see that Connecticut registered just as many from their AW ban expansion as did much larger New York.
Has anyone done a recent article measuring rates of resistance to AW bans? My impression is that rates of compliance of AW registration easily fall under 10%.
CA’s last AWB (’94-’95?) had a very low response. I’ve never seen any numbers released, but dealers said it was much lower than 10%. (The .gov never seems to publicly mention the ban.)
After CA was forced, by a lawsuit, to grab a particular rifle model that had been listed as part of the earlier ban (’89?), people realized that they would take guns. Then the second ban was announced. That killed any real numbers showing up for The Ban, part 2. The state had a rough idea how many to expect, based on sales numbers from dealer paperwork. They were shocked at the non-response rate, I’m told.
Compressor based setups are the dominant approach for refrigeration and a/c for a very good reason. I’ve been through this exercise (but with ales in Florida, where indoor temps are like 85 in the summer) and I’ve played with peltiers, to my eternal frustration.
I don’t advise it, but your best bet (as far as peltiers) is probably to run a large number of peltiers hooked up to a water block- one side to carry frozen glycol to a sleeve around your fermenter and another to carry away the heat from the hot side to a radiator (with a pump for each). And you’re going to need quite a few them and a very good insulation setup around the fermenter. If you don’t put a lot of cooling on the hot side of the peltiers, they heat soak. Also, keep in mind that the temperature differential across a peltier seems very impressive when you touch it or cool a small piece of material, but keeping 5 gallons of beer 30 degrees below ambient without tons of insulation around that beer is going to take a LOT of peltiers. Even with insulation, it’s going to be a lot of work. Peltiers are just plain inefficient.
My personal choice would be to get a mini-fridge and perform surgery on it until it fits your fermenter. Mini-fridges usually have little difficulty maintaing 10+ gallons of beer at 45 degrees or so. Alternatively, get a 150 dollar window air conditioner and build a little insulated box around the cold side that fits your fermenters.
I have three peltiers hooked up right now. What I did was stick a carboy filled to 5 gallons with water in the big rubbermaid cooler I use as a mash-lauter tun. Then I poured a jacket of water around the carboy. I circulate the water jacket through the cold side of the heat sink. I’m using my brew pot to circulate the hot side. I’m running it through my wort chiller too with a fan blowing on it to keep the hot side to about 85 degrees. The cooler side insulates quite well, and I’ve gotten the 5 gallons of water inside the carboy down to 43 degrees. I’m running the peltiers at about 11V right now, and they are rated for 15V. So I think it’ll do OK if I can get a power supply that can run them at full power.
But yeah, I agree a mini-fridge would be better, but with the 4912 a discontinued product, I’m not sure there are any other mini-fridges that can hold a full carboy. There are deep freezes that can I do it, and I’ve done that before, but deep freezes take up a lot of room, and the cheap ones rust out after a few years.
You don’t have an old computer power supply? Those have heaps of 12V power lines.
For peltier control, don’t use PWM, just switch it full on and off periodically, like a thermostat does. Basically it’s PWM, but your pulses will last or tens of seconds instead of miliseconds. Or have peltiers take turns shutting off to reduce the cooling effect, etc. I’m sure you can think of a billion variations that would get the job done.
That’s what I’m using now. PC power supplies are meant to run PCs. Look at the wires on one. They are meant to draw a few amps. Even if a PC power supply has an overall 20 amp 12V leg, that’s over several wires. You can join all these wires together, but most cheap PC power supplies suck at maintaining voltage at high current. Plus, TECs are more ideally driven by a current source, unlike PCs.
And for TECs, they apparently don’t like to be switched on and off over long periods. It thermally stresses them and reduces their lifespan. Everything I’ve found on driving them suggests filtered PWM is preferable to traditional thermostat control.
Hold on to your butts. Manchin/Toomey are at it again:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/06/23/manchin-toomey-both-interested-in-reviving-gun-control-push/
Does he need another lesson? Does he truly think this will help him in a primary against Joe Sestak?
OTOH, assuming that the negotiated bill isn’t as ominous as last time, this could be a viable avenue to attach some pretty *AHEM* creative pro-gun riders floating around that enjoy more support than gun control.
I’ve long been surprised by Delaware. Demographically speaking, we should be as bad as MD, NY etc. on guns and it’s always seemed like luck that we are not. Basically, gun control seemed like something that really wasn’t on the radar for most of our legislature. Sure, the usual suspects would propose bills, but by and large our reps, even the Democrats, were largely indifferent on the matter.
There’s really nothing much stopping them from ramming all the gun control they want down our throats. Try explaining this to OC’ers in DE who occasionally talk about carrying rifles around in public, but they don’t get it. Political realities say if we do something to put guns on the radar Delaware Pols have both the incentive and political clout to screw us.
This bill is extremely worrisome. Come across one vindictive, manipulative, crazy woman who bothers to go to family court and….bam, say goodbye to your rights. Family court judges ARE going to side with the woman, despite evidence, especially when guns are involved. Why? to cover their own ass. That’s a political reality.
And I say this as someone who has had the misfortune of dealing with a vindictive, hostile and unpredictable crazy woman of late.
It should be noted that should SB83 pass it will likely contain this amended language, so at least it won’t be quite as dangerous for Delaware gun owners
http://legis.delaware.gov/LIS/lis148.nsf/vwLegislation/SS+1+for+SB+83/$file/legis.html?open
What is the latest on SB83? The last update from DSSA I saw was June 10 when it was voted out of committee. There doesn’t seem to be any hurry to pass it.
Passed a senate vote 15-6 on 6/17. No action since then.
We all knew this was coming… http://abc27.com/2015/06/25/pa-court-overturns-law-that-allowed-gun-groups-to-sue-cities/
Hope you do a followup post on the brewing. It’s always cool to see people’s results.
In Delaware…
The NRA was able, at least, to get a provision allowing gun owners to get safe storage for their guns at gun shops instead of having to hand them in at a police station, where they would almost certainly be damaged.
($1 to anyone who knows anyone who had guns temporarily confiscated by the police who got them back in the same condition in which they were surrendered. The Philadelphia Police are particularly notorious in this regard.)
The latest outrage by the non-citizens who run the state (headed up by the Marxist-in-Chief: Margaret Rose Henry) is a bill that would prohibit the marketing (actually, forget “marketing”, think “mentioning”) of anything even remotely gun-related on any website accessible by the youth of Delaware.
Stay tuned…
-JW
Anyone see Scalia’s dissent today in the lethal injection case? Sounds like it would be a perfect dissent for when a big ccw case comes to the court.
“We federal judges live in a world apart from the vast majority of Americans. After work, we retire to homes in placid suburbia or to high-rise co-ops with guards at the door. We are not confronted with the threat of violence that is ever present in many Americans’ everyday lives,” he wrote.