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HM

Hal Mireles

@rustbeltJoined Nov 2025Member #8

Ohio. Twenty six years in a job shop, now two bays and a lot of pre-war iron. If it was made before 1950 and it is heavy, I probably want it.

3
Jots
25
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0
Forks
21
Followers
4
Following

Pinned

Scraping a 1943 lathe bed flat
A 1943 South Bend that showed up 78 tenths hollow at the headstock end. What I measured, how I scraped it, and the three weeks I spent making it worse.
craftfield-notesmachining
10 stars10 min read26 Jan 2026
You cannot buy a good square anymore
Test the square you already own by reversal, then hold it against what DIN 875 actually allows. Eight squares, my own measurements, one of them firewood.
craftmachiningmeasurement
9 stars8 min read30 Apr 2026

All Jots

Rust removal, five methods, one winner
I sheared a rusty belt guard into five coupons and gave each one a different treatment. Times, costs, mass loss, and what each did to the metal underneath.
craftfield-notesmachining
6 stars8 min read15 Jul 2026
You cannot buy a good square anymore
Test the square you already own by reversal, then hold it against what DIN 875 actually allows. Eight squares, my own measurements, one of them firewood.
craftmachiningmeasurement
9 stars8 min read30 Apr 2026
Scraping a 1943 lathe bed flat
A 1943 South Bend that showed up 78 tenths hollow at the headstock end. What I measured, how I scraped it, and the three weeks I spent making it worse.
craftfield-notesmachining
10 stars10 min read26 Jan 2026

Starred

Postmortem: 43 minutes of 502s and one very confident regex
Our gateway returned 502 for forty three minutes because of a regex I would have approved too. Full timeline, the pattern, and the dashboard that lied to me.
by @grep9 min read17 Nov 2025
Cape Wrath Trail, eleven days, and everything that got wet
Eleven days from Fort William to the lighthouse: the day by day numbers, the order in which everything got soaked, and the two days I would like back.
by @switchback9 min read20 Jan 2026
The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying
One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.
by @marginalia6 min read07 Jan 2026
Your pack is four kilos heavier than you think
How to weigh a pack honestly, bin bag and wet tent included, and the point where cutting grams stops buying you speed and starts costing you sleep.
by @switchback8 min read10 May 2026
It is always DNS, but here is the actual reason
Why DNS breaks things out of proportion to its size, with real dig output read line by line, plus the four commands I run to prove it is not DNS.
by @grep6 min read05 Jun 2026
A case binding in nine steps and one failure
Real millimetres for a cloth case over sewn sections, then step ten, where I turned a board to save two euro of greyboard and got 3.8 mm of warp.
by @bindery9 min read08 Apr 2026
The Latin name is Aplysia punctata and it looks like a wet slipper
Five animals from one stretch of Cornish shore: a sea hare that inks with its own lunch, an anemone eater, a limpet, a cushion star, a barnacle.
by @lowtide5 min read24 Nov 2025
Same flour, same oven, four hydrations
Four doughs, one sack of flour, one bake. 65, 72, 80 and 88 percent hydration measured properly. 72 won, and the wettest dough lost badly.
by @ferment6 min read07 Jul 2026
Mapping my own light pollution
I put an SQM on a 1 km grid across Lisbon and made a lovely contour map of something that cannot honestly be contoured. Four months, one admission.
by @nullisland7 min read01 Aug 2026