Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing How to cut a black walnut tree for stock blanks?

Oh there were some around by the mid-'80s like OS-9, had a lot of fun playing with it. Beyond the kernel you only needed to load what you needed and in fact didn't have to load the whole kernel. It was easy to extend and it even had a GUI though it was painfully slow. Never liked Intel architecture with its bizarre (to me) page switching scheme and anything from MS-DOS which comes off as a kludge. Even now you have to reboot to do something as simple as dismount a driver. What little PC code I write is as far from the iron as I can get.

I play with PIC chips for fun and even on the low end people are abandoning assembler for C and licensing code libraries. If you look at the 18xxx instruction set you'll find it was written to favor C, never mind the 16 bit chips. I haven't found a need for a RTOS for my projects though interrupt handlers can get a little complex. Mostly it's just easier to let an ISR run to completion with one or two higher priority interrupts allowed. Context switching overhead can kill you.

OS-9 was around for the Motorola 6809 and its offspring.
OS-9 is still around for bigger chips today.
A former Mostek engineer and I even wrote a real-time, even-driven version of CP/M for the 8080 and Z-80, with an extended BASIC language centered around the event handlers, much like Visual Basic was 15 years later.

Vesta and other such companies had their real-time C compilers, which were really nice. You could write it over an RS-232 line to the main board, run it, and then ROM it right there, even remotely over the phone.

But when your ISR is complex or involves handshaking like a terminal session, TCP/IP, or has enough dead time between packets or characters, you can need to be able to switch tasks. Doing this, you can run 8 terminals, a parallel printer, console keyboard, and real-time DAC like multi-axis, coordinated motor control and vision systems, with all that slower stuff in background, on an 8-Mhz 80286.

The last one I developed from the low level was in C and mostly the DSP assembly, on a PC-104 bus, with dual DSP chips having their memory dumped DMA to the Pentium's RAM in one clock cycle. The setup interface and real time control in Watcom C++, ran on that Pentium under QNX. The operator interface was written in C++ for Windows.

C is too loose, and C++ is a cobbled fix. I'd rather have encapsulation over inheritance any day.

For C, I long ago wrote a wrapper for every bit of the Intel BIOS and direct calls, then a hierarchy of code modules. Same for C++ and an object hierarchy. Stub everything you think might warrant using someone else's code library.

Most complex RT application I ever worked on was from the ground up, on the PowerPC. I had rolled my own 64-bit system in 1987 and two of us had written our assembly language for it, but the PowerPC was way more complex, especially with the tight memory constraints.

I, Me, My, and Mine. They'll get you every time!

This is my first and last post about Lee. It is so obvious he is simply playing with you guys, trolling around just to get your goat. He must be giggling all the while he reads your responses.

Why don't you just ignore him?

Ted

This thread is still going? kwg

DMA in one cycle? Must be tiny or a ton of dual port.

All that time slice task switching is convenient if you have cycles and stack to spare, then you don't have to think much about timing. In 8 bit controllers there's rarely that luxury. And by the time you figure the preemptive part, and the blocking part, context switching overhead, and so on, you're usually better off making it interrupt driven. Which is sort of like a RTOS except interrupts rather than the system clock control task switching and priorities, blocking, etc. are in the ISR and/or interrupt handler (ISR for each task with a handler directing the flow) rather than at system level. Eliminates a lot of overhead and there's usually not so many tasks that it's too hard to manage. Dependencies can be a gotcha though, depending on how you structure your code. If it gets to be too much, usually it's easiest to add another processor - silicon is cheap. There is a trend to turn to 16 and even 32 bit parts where an 8 bitter will do just for the extra resources but it is inelegant!

For tiny stuff C being "loose" is a virtue. It allows you to get almost as close to the iron as assembler when you need to without adding inline assembler code which can cause its own set of problems. You can still do encapsulation but it's your responsibility rather than the language's. And it's low level enough that processor specific extensions are sensible. You'll have to take up C++ with Stroustrup, I don't use it much. I've fallen into Python for what little I need on the desktop.

I still don't like the old Intel architecture though compilers hide (most of) the warts.

Time to return to your regularly scheduled program.

The app with the DMA from DSP memory to program control (Pentium) memory was 50,000 words (32-bit) of a 3-D point cloud for a laser contour range and mapping system ( IOW, map a 3D surface in real time).

Golly. I thought this would be over by today. Not so fast.

Lee's posts remend me of a line in a very old, very funny Bill Cosby routine. The premise is sort of a Black Professor Irwin Corey. Cosby's line, designed to be inexplicable (read "bullshit"):

"Who 'de one dey say got the rebersober on the motorcycle? Hmmmm?"

Stand back. I'm gonna give it a try;

"The standard industry premise (as I learned while instructing at the Sorbonne) is to posit G = f/llk over n, where G is distance of the optical interface from the CADCAM b-reader, f is the inverse of the cube root of pi, k is the bit speed (as I determined while at Cal Tech), n is a 10th degree prime number, and 11 is a constant. How many times do I need to repeat this?"


So. How'd I do? Constructive criticism earnestly solicited.

That's kind of funny.
At least you admit you didn't comprehend our techno side conversation, without getting hostile about it.

Old hat. Obviously you've not kept up with research in the field since leaving the Sorbonne. If Cal Tech would collaborate with MIT then you'd know. Not to mention Cern's work interfacing sensors at the Large Hadron Collider (though it's a "quarky" system).

Well first yer gonna need a saw.

What are you trying to do???? Get this thread back on track?

Gotta go, large download is over.

Quarky? Quarky? As in Quarks? Mu mesons? Dark matter? String theory?

Wait, I get it. Jeff Cooper used to give names to his firearms. "Quarky" is Dave's FN/M70 .375.

Wpsuth: You explanation is mostly correct, but you forgot to include the cube root of torn underwear.

Edited to correct, The fingers tend get out of sync on the vowels. Thank you.

before Lee24 corrects you, 1minute... the word is spelled

UNDERWEAR...

LOL..

In a little known subnote, Lee24 was instrumental in designing the original sewing machines used by Haynes.

Hanes subcontracted the sewing of their underwear, mostly to Stone Manufacturing. As a matter of fact, a sewing machine mechanic at Stone held over 50 patents for improvements to their sewing machines, which were licensed back to the manufacturers, netting him some nice royalty checks over his career.

My apologies in advance for bringing this back to surface. There is a tremendous amount of disinformation in this thread and there are likely many confused by the whole thing.

To start, black walnut is a fine stock wood. The best of it is as good as it comes anywhere, from any tree. It is the nature of wood growing wild to be affected by growing conditions and vary greatly in the end due to that variability. In general, however, black walnuts are not as dense, fine-grained, stiff, strong, or hard as Juglans regia, the European or thin-shelled walnuts, but more than adequate for virtually any stock.

Many areas, notably the "Fertile Crescent" around Turkey, has amazing, extremely old walnuts being cut for stock blanks. The wood is hard, dense, beautiful and much has the difficult-to-describe depth when finished which puts prices into the stratisphere. Even the best black walnut will never have the depth.

Suggesting black walnut is 8% of anything compared to European walnuts is ridiculous as strengths of both vary hugely. However, if one were to use an average, European walnuts run harder, heavier, stronger, stiffer and far less inclined to split than black walnuts. Exactly opposite what Lee24 posted.

While Turkish walnut is structurally outstanding for stocks, Bastogne or paradox walnut is every bit as good on a blank by blank basis. It is not generally as pretty as the best Turkish and frequently has a greenish cast which many do not really like. It is 100% American in origin, a mule cross between claro (a native NA black walnut) and any European walnut. It is frequently planted as a shade tree because it does not make the nut mess of other walnuts.

Quarter-sawing is NOT all it has been made out to be here, in the best walnuts, especially. Wood shrinks and expands according to moisture content and it does so more in the tangential plane than the radial plane. Quartersawing orients the radial plane through the greatest dimension, the depth, of the stock. It orients the width on a tangential plane. The only structural advantage is the reduced movement in reaction to water is in the longest dimension. That leaves the most reactive dimension oriented in the narrowest direction.

If you are using oak for a stock wood that might make a difference... But with well-seasoned Turkish walnut? Give me a break! In poorly seasoned wood, finished with oil you might possibly see a problem with other woods, but never with Turkish, done well.

The next advantage to quartersawing is the way it enhances fiddleback figure. Wood fibers bend back and forth primarily in a tangential plane. When quartersawn the fibers are interrupted repeatedly and light is refracted most on the quartered faces. Top and bottom are virtually devoid of fiddle.

I apologize for the ugly stocks, unsuited for any firearm, but this an example of the figure as I tried to describe it above. The upper stock is quartersawn and the bottom is flat sawn. Both came from the same piece of wood and were side by edge in the slab. Boardsawn wood shows marbling (caused by fungus digesting sugars in wood) and burl better than quartersawn.





Burl is a function of erratic and unusual growth at the cellular level and is NOT related to the base or roots as Lee24 stated. The meristem tissue which replicates as a function of growth suddenly decides to change its job description from "stem meristem" to "apical meristem" and starts growing out as a point rather than a member of a flat layer. It can happen anywhere in trees.

Wood drying in mills is very controled and the goal is to produce the most wood with the least degrade at the best cost... Cheaper balancing degrade. But there are lots of variables. Considering bunks of lumber waiting to be kiln-dried will often force a mill to speed the drying of one lot, increasing degrade in that lot, to reduce the possibly worse degrade in waiting bunks.

None of which should have any affect on stock blanks, because stock wood should not be kilned. Air-drying is not inferior to kiln-drying, just slower. Done properly, kiln-dryied is not close to air-dried because it has been dried faster than it should be for the best wood. "Brash" is a term used to describe most kiln-dried walnut and refers to splintery, erratic cutting as fibers break off ahead of and below the cutting edge producing rough channels and flaked-out areas.

Now for the part that really chaps my azz... Ray Atkinson, after repeated claims as a stockmaker posted:

"As a matter of fact the one that has made the most since on the subject, as to gun stock wood is Lee 24, I don't know him or from whence he came, but most of what he said in the begining of this thread is correct."

Actually, virtually nothing posted by Lee24 was correct. For Lee24 Squared to step in and post such utter garbage is hard to believe. The source is his ego claiming only the very best is good enough for his "talents" and his guns.
art

You could have stopped at "the opposite of what Liar24 posted".

call me crazy.......but of the two pictured above, i like the board sawn one the best.....course some consider me not right in the head anyway

We had a roof like that when I was a boy too!