Mark Bronkalla – Page 13 – Projects, Travels and Fun

Salsa Day

It is now late summer and we are blessed with an overabundance of tomatoes and peppers. It is always hard to predict how well they will do so we plant 12+ of each. This summer things have gone well with plenty to eat and give away. However, much of the summer has been hot and dry and recently we have had a lot of rain. This causes the tomatoes to split and rot if not picked aggressively. This means we have gallons of tomatoes, Yellow pears, orange and red cherries up through some really nice beef steaks (Romas were a bust). For peppers we have loads of sweet bananas, cubanelas (sweet), jalapenos and a decent number of poblanos.

Last weekend we made tomato sauce and this weekend is salsa. Low 70s temp and rainy so it was a perfect day to be in the kitchen.

Our oldest daughter Jessie brought up the idea canning of Pineapple – tomato salsa . This sounded interesting but there are few recipes available. However we found one on Taste of Home: http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/spicy-pineapple-salsa and modified it slightly.

NOTE: canning of salsa is one of the more risky endeavors and you need to follow well documented and tested recipes. This is not a time to risk a “pinterest fail” and be poisoned with botulism. Don’t just take my word for it, read up on several of the University extension web sites prior to doing this for proper safety procedures such as:

http://learningstore.uwex.edu/assets/pdfs/b3570.pdf
http://www.extension.umn.edu/food/food-safety/preserving/tomatoes-salsa/canning-tomato-based-salsa-safely/
http://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/uga/sensational_salsa.pdf

I really have to give credit to my wife Teal. She cleaned and chopped gallons of tomatoes today. On top of it she doesn’t eat tomatoes, salsa or pineapple (unless blended with rum and coconut). We ended up with 29 jars of salsa.

Our final version was close to the original but we went for roasting the pineapple and jalapenos as well as draining the pineapple to make it thicker. Final cooled sauce pH test with pH test paper came in at between 3.5 and 4 .well under the 4.6 required for safety.

So here is our version:

5 lbs tomatoes chopped – Yellow pear, orange sungolds, yellow plum

2 large yellow onions chopped

2 sweet banana pepper chopped – preferably ripe and reddish if you have them

1 can 12-18 oz crushed or chunk pineapple – drained (save juice for the rum drinks later)

1 can chunk pineapple roasted on skewers on the grill – go for caramelization – not black – beware it sticks badly

1 can (15oz) tomato paste. If only there was yellow tomato paste – the color would be better.

2 large sweet banana peppers seeded and chopped

2/3 c roasted, skinned , seeded and chopped jalapenos and / or poblanos – go for a nice dark roast and bubbly skin

1/3 c cider vinegar

1 Tablespoon salt (you can always add more later depending on your chips)

6-8 large garlic cloves minced (about 2/3 bulb of garlic)

2 tsp fresh ground cumin (seeds in your mortar and pestle – none of the pre ground stuff)

1 tsp fresh ground black pepper

Mix and cook at a hard boil for 15 min.. Stir frequently. If you want a smoother consistency (as we did ) use a stick / immersion blender to smooth it out near the end of cooking (yes it will clog up but just shake the skins off).

Pack into pint jars and boiling water process for 15 min.

Enjoy.

We made a bunch of conventional tomato salsa as well – that recipe will be a subsequent post .

Baby Gate completion

The baby (and dog) gate turned out well. The flat pieces were all 1/2″ ash. Pivots are 3/8″ dowels. These may need to be sanded or the holes reamed a bit due to the variation in the dowel diameters. Make sure to round off the ends to make assembly easy.

The spindles were all pre-finished prior to glue-up . This is very important. You cannot get good coverage once assembled but more importantly, if you have any glue squeeze out form the dowels you could end up with a frozen / inoperable gate.

Stain is Minwax Provincial which is what we used when we built the house. As well as 2 coats of garnet shellac to moderately match the aging and provide a modest degree of protection. The 2 coats of garnet shellac help the color match tremendously but the old wood is still more yellow. Oak and Ash yellow considerably in the first 2-10 years of sunlight exposure. So new pieces stained the same and placed next to old ones will look sickly pale in comparison. The shellac makes up most of the difference. Don’t go for an exact match as the wood will darken, you just don’t want it to be seen as initially being completely out of place.

The gate pieces were fastened on to the stairs with # 6x 1.5″ screws. So when it is removed years from now the holes will be small and easy to fill and match.

The left side rests on a couple of rests that are fastened to the stair baluster . They are unobtrusive when open and almost completely hidden when closed off.

When parked to the side the gate rests on a small block that raises it up parallel to the hand rail and holds it open. We expect that cats, kids, and dogs will try to shut it on the unsuspecting and this will likely foil their evil plans.

Overall, it is a successful project. Teal is happy and as a reward today is Meatball Day ( she gets Swedish and I get Italian).

I am waiting for the replacement stepper motor controller for the CNC router. Some of the parts for the over-voltage / counter -EMF protection have started to show up. That will be for another post.

Baby gate

This past weekend we started on a new project: building a baby / dog gate for the bottom of the stairs. When the kids come over they often bring their dogs which we don’t want upstairs and at some point our grand son, Sawyer will be wandering about and stairs are not an desirable early adventure.

So we need to make a gate at the bottom of the stairs . However the end of the stair is exposed and wider than there is clearance on either side. So an ordinary swinging gate wont cut it.

After searching for a bit we came across a post at: http://woodgears.ca/home/baby_gate.html that was close to what I had in mind!. SO here was the jumping off point for the new design.

Design constraints:

Made of oak or ash ot match the existing wood work, yet not weigh a ton
Pivot out of the way on the inside of the stairs
Stain to match existing wood work as this is likely to be in place for 10 years or so.
Use the CNC router (yes I still need to show pay back for the $$$ invested)

Initial rough design was done in Sketchup, to slim out the spindles I went with “lollipop ends”. They would be a pain to do manually but a perfect excuse for the CNC router.to make them .

Stock is 1/2″ thick ash. This was to use up some planks I had that were a bit on the thin side and save weight compared to oak.

The spindle drawing was exported from Sketchup and imported into Vcarve Pro.

From there it was copied and I laid it to do multiples form one board. Several things to watch out for:

Auto tab placement in this case is useless. You need to place the tabs yourself to make them line up with each other rather than air.
Add more tabs than you think you will need. Sometimes the wood will spring as it is cut due to internal stresses. You don’t want to have the pieces ruined due to the tabs breaking due to stress.
Make sure you have adequate material left for your clamps and consumable clamp ends if “cutting it close” to fit the available stock

So the with the first piece I got 3 spindles cut before the board warped and broke apart (hence the lots of tabs requirement). Plus I was seeing more chatter / roughness than I would like with 4 tabs per piece . Second plank was done with 6 tabs per piece. Much better cut quality and it held together. Here is a sample of the CNC router cutting the spindles – sped up after the first cuts.

I then moved the gantry to the far end to clear off the parts and place the blank for the new one. On removing the pieces, I see the waste board has the outline of part of the last spindle — oh oh – router bit slipping in the collet – I must tighten more next time. I then reset the bit, put in the new blank and then go to move the gantry and – nothing. System is in emergency stop and on further investigation I find one of the stepper drivers for the Y axis is malfunctioning.

Bummer. I had hoped to run a bunch of parts over the weekend and the stepper drivers are 1 week short of the 1 year warranty limit.

Even with the failure I had almost enough spindles cut to make the gate. One had to be cut by hand on the bandsaw and then cleaned up with hand plane, scraper and sander –what a pain. So we had the parts ready for staining and assembly the first day although with the CNC failure my mood was not great. We pre-stained the parts and added 2 coats of garnet shellac to better match the yellowing of the 20 year old wood.

Assembly went rather well. The shot above shows the spindles with the lollipop ends. This photo shows the gate with the cover side glued on.

Beef Brisket – sous vide and smoke

We had a craving for slow cooked smoked brisket. I have tried a couple of times in the past with corned beef but that was too salty (even after soaking over night in a pot of water). We wanted this for Saturday night dinner so I was running short on cooking time (most recommend 13-16 hours at 225-250) and some sort of mix of smoker and wrapping or steaming. Final target temp 195-203 but testing for tenderness to see when it is truly done

With ideas in mind and research in hand, the experiment begins…

Teal picked up a whole “packer cut” brisket, 14lbs at Costco. . She liberally applied one of my rubs to it and set it aside in the “big fridge” (that is the garage in the winter). This set for 8 hours. 24-48 hrs would probably be better but were running short on time.

The whole brisket was then cut lengthwise and the halves vacuum bagged. The reason for the cut was that my biggest bags are only 11″ wide rolls and it would not fit otherwise. More surface area also means more smoke and spice flavor.

The bagged meat was then put in the canning kettle with the Anova Cookerset for 170. This ran overnight for 11 hours. Next time, I will need to cover the kettle as the water level dropped almost 2″ over night . When the meat was unbagged, there was about 5 cups of juice and a cup of rendered fat. Juice was saved for later.

The Big Green Egg (BGE) was started , the Heatermeter hooked up and set for 240. The meat was on at 7AM. Here is a shot of the meat as it first goes on the smoker. The internal temp at this point is about 155-160 degrees.

Cherry chunks are providing the smoke flavor.

The reason that there are 3 pieces i on one half I separated the flat and point / deckle muscles. The other half was left intact as it was not quite so thick at the point end.

7 hours in the smoker and the temps were approaching the 190 range and it was feeling tender and I was afraid of it drying out if left on longer. So it was pulled off and put in a large covered pan in the oven with the juice that was saved from the sous vide step. Set for 200 degrees for 3 more hours.

Temperature curves are bit odd, with the big piece seen in the top left rising and then falling. You can see also at the beginning I let the BGE get too hot while tending to other things before putting the meat on.

We had most of the kids and their spouses (Elyse, Paul, David and Kelly) over for dinner and the unanimous decision was that this was definitely a keeper recipe. Tasty, juicy meat. Sides were twice baked stacked potatoes, green beans with garlic, sesame and lemon as well as Teal’s buttermilk biscuits. This photo shows just part of the meat. Note the nice smoke ring seen on the left.

Definitely not a high speed recipe (who would rush smoked meat anyway?), but one that is handily done in just over one day.

Sous Vide cooking – steaks

This past summer I talked Teal into letting me get a an Anova Culinary Bluetooth Precision Cooker. It was a bit of a stretch as she once again thought I was crazy and then crazier still when we then went to Costco and picked up an enormous roast.

The roast was portioned out into 1.5-2″ thick slices and seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and fresh thyme, marjoram and oregano. Each was then vacuum sealed, dated and thrown in the freezer, except for for the first dinner. First steak was cooked at 129 degrees for 90 min. We have since moved to 130 for 2 hours as the sweet spot for these steaks as our standard.

Prior to grilling remove as much fat as you can. This prevents flare ups and a sooty / bitter exterior. You want a clean crisp dark brown but not black surface. Grill needs to be blazing hot 700-900 degrees for 2-3 min per side. I use the Big Green Egg but you can get similar heat by placing the grill right on top of the charcoal chimney. Note that the sliced steak photo is NOT the way to go – trim the fat and life is much easier.

The technique works perfectly whether doing 1 or 6 of these . Perfectly consistent and fork tender.

The Serious Eats and Anova web sites provide lots of ideas for Sous Vide cooking. I also strongly recommend: The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Scienceby Kenji Lopez Alt. I first ran across his posts on Serious Eats and the book is a must have for anyone who is looking to go from just experimenting a bit to really understanding what they are doing in the kitchen.

CNC touch plate

The CNC router has achieved functional status. That is I can now with modest effort actually make useful things. These can be furniture pieces or parts for the router or other tools.

One of the hard parts has been zeroing out each of the axis. X and Y i have been doing with a standard edge finder. I particularly like the 1/2 inch diameter ones like this one: Brown & Sharpe 599-792 Edge Finder Single. The smaller diameter (typically .2″ diameter touch) are bit small for woodworking due to the rougher surface of the wood and the large ones seem to be easier for me without false indications of the edge.

The way I am currently setting up my fixturing on the CNC table, I have a left size (x axis work zero) fence and some movable stops from Rockler in the table slots. This works out quite well. I measure from the stops / fence to the home position and modify the zero references and I am off and running for several projects.

The hard part has been easily zeroing out for cutter height. This has to be done after each tool change and is just plain tedious. So I was determined to set up a touch plate and have that working with the Mach 4 controller software. This took a little bit of time. First was getting the Mach 4 “Probe” input working. It requires at least version 2803 of the Mach 4 software which I am using with the Ethernet Smooth Stepper (ESS) version 130 software. The touch plate is simply a block of acrylic plastic about 3/8″ thick with a sheet of brass mounted on top and connected to the “Probe” input. The router spindle itself is grounded for safety and this conveniently completes the circuit for the touch plate.

The idea is to drive the Z axis down at modest speed until it touches the plate, and then it backs off slightly (~0.1″) and then moves downward very slowly to touch again for the final height. Once complete, the height of the touch plate is subtracted off and you now have the height of your base (spoil) board on which the project will rest. This is all great in concept but the Mach4 software does not complete this for you. So I had to modify the UI / Screen set, add a new button and some scripting to do this. This is one of the points where having an active user community helps tremendously. Searching for help on the Mach4 forums I came across a thread on this topic and some script code from another user “DazTheGas” see the message thread. I had to convert from metric to inch measurements for the movements and enter the height of my touch plate (.487″). This works great. Much easier than manual zeroing and I don’t have to worry about breaking small diameter tools or chipping the carbide on bigger ones. You can see the video of the process here

Lembeh Straight Diving 2015

In October of 2105 we went to Indonesia with the group from Underwater Connection. The primary destination was Lembeh Straight. Lembeh is well known for what is often referred to as “muck diving”. It is really that you are diving on a black sand bottom. The depths are typically quite shallow (<30 feet) and visigbility is not great. The slightest movement can easily stir up clouds of debris and swirling sand which takes minutes to settle back down. The goal of this diving is to see the many rare and unusual critters that inhabit this area. It is macro photography heaven.

We stayed at Kasawari Lembeh resort. This is a small boutique resort with excellent service and attention to detail. One of the key details was the small groups on the dive boats. Typically 6 divers to a dive guide. The guides are a necessity. We were looking for critters that were well camouflaged and often the size of your fingernail. We often wondered : “How did they see that?” However, after a few dives we started spotting some on our own but still not with the regularity of the guides.

On many trips we feel lucky to see an octopus or a small group of squid on a trip. Here we had the fun of seeing as many as 5 species in a single dive! These included coconut octopus, mimic octopus, wonderpus, blue ring, flamboyant cuttlefish and more. Dozens of nudibranchs (including mating couples), and an endless variety for shrimp and crabs.

A sample of the photos can be found here: Lembeh Straight Critters 2015

These were taken with a Nikon D300S, Nikon 60mm macro, Subsee+10 wet diopter, Ikelite housing with glass flat port, Ikelite DS125 strobe and a Light and Motion Sola 600 as a focus light. The side lighting pf the focus light was extremely helpful to find the target and actually provided nice fill in of the shadows. The overall murky conditions were best suited to macro. I did not get a chance to do any significant wide angle shots. For those I use a Tokina 10-17 and Ikelite 8″ dome with a single strobe and diffuser.

Rebuild in progress

I am in the process of overhauling my website and postings. In the meantime you can find my old boatbuilding website here: Riviera Construction Project.

In the last few years I have been letting my projects, comments and photos get scattered. This has resulted in a mix of items on Facebook, columns I have written and various forums with the unfortunate consequence of not having a single place to go and find my prior posts which are located at:

Glen-l boatbuilding forum – I was active while building and did a column for the monthly newsletter for a few years
Wisconsin Woodworkers Guild – I wrote a monthly column while I was president.
Facebook – Lots of posts , notes and photo albums including the majority of my dive photos, but not very accessible to the general public
Youtube – I have a Youtube Channel that will be gaining more content. Currently mostly dive videos.
Southbend lathe yahoo groups – Superb resource for those interested in South Bend Lathes . Huge help when I rebuilt my SBL 13
HID Dive Lights yahoo group – This is where I documented much of my dive light builds
Hobby Machinist – Another great resource and most helpful while I rebuilt my Bridgeport Mill
CNC Zone – Current CNC router project resource

and more – you get the idea. Lots of scatter.

So now I will be consolidating everything back here. It will take some time to gather the various pieces back as well as get the new content posted.

The impetus for all of this is my newest project. It is a CNC router. This is another scratch built project. I want to document the build and resources as I did with the boat and not just have it in another web site’s forum.