Outfitting your home with Internet of Things devices can still be a pain. Figuring out which pieces of hardware from different companies work together is a trip down a confusing rabbit hole. But for those in the market for a connected home, is increasingly becoming a ready-to-go option.
Adding home automation elements during construction isn’t new. What’s changed in the last few years is that the prices have dropped dramatically (from tens of thousands to about $3,000) and the systems can be run from Apple’s HomeKit or a voice assistant like Alexa instead of proprietary hardware. Now large homebuilding companies like KB Home, Brookfield Residential and Lennar are offering IoT options for new houses.
Providing homeowners turnkey solutions gives these companies an additional source of revenue. But, it also shows that the current wave of connected home devices and platforms is finally reaching a level of maturity that will convince people that home automation is actually useful.
Jacob Atalla, KB Home VP of sustainability, tells Engadget, "We are at stage beyond the (individual) widgets." He added now that different devices are working together thanks to the HomeKit platform, his company is able to deliver a real experience to homeowners.
You shouldn’t expect to walk into one of these new houses and see a Nest on the wall or a WeMo controlling the lights. A home is a decades-long investment. Sure the startup world is exciting, but homebuilders are relying on established manufacturers like Whirlpool, GE and Honeywell. David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures, tells Engadget, "When you buy a new home, it’s a significant piece of machinery. We rely on and take a lot of stock in the manufacturing process and quality control of the large manufacturers."
The closest thing to a startup in these homes is Apple. All three homebuilders are working with the iPhone-maker to make sure the buildings are HomeKit-ready to simplify the transition to a smarter house. All the devices in the dwellings will be compliant with Apple’s IoT solution. "What people want is an entire package that’s simple and unified and easy to use. Consumers don’t want one device over another, they want an entire solution," Kaiserman says.
But the executives all also noted that they are open to working with other platforms — which should be welcome news to Android-using home buyers. Plus, it’s a sign that the companies see this as a long-term trend. Brookfield Residential COO, Adrian Foley, believes once people see what a smart home can accomplish, they won’t go back. He used the car as an analogy, noting that people don’t want to return to a time before keyless entries and electric windows. "I think we’ll get very used to the convenience of the smart home," he says.
In the meantime, house hunters have the opportunity to jump directly into a connected home without the headache of building it on their own. And while KB Home, Lennar and Brookfield Residential would like everyone to enjoy the benefits of IoT with a clean slate, the truth is that won’t happen. But, what will happen is that people will visit their friends in their fancy new automated dwellings will realize that maybe IoT is something they want in their own home — even if it still takes more effort than it should.
Our lives have never been the same since we left the comforts of the city to move to an off grid property deep in the Idaho mountains. We are building an off-grid homestead from the ground up (and blogging about it at purelivingforlife.com). We have the mentality that it’s better for the mind and body to start small and slowly build up to bigger projects, so rather than tackling the difficult task of constructing our house right away, we decided to start with something a little more, well, relaxing. We wanted to build something that would make it easier to build our home and something that could ease our sore muscles. A wood fired cedar hot tub seemed like the perfect project.
Why choose to build a wood fired hot tub?
Because we live off grid, our electricity is limited. Though a full solar set up is our dream for the future, all we have right now is an electric generator. A propane-powered system was an option, but seeing that we live in the middle of the woods it seemed silly not to take advantage of the free wood fuel all around us.
What is the advantage of using cedar?
Our initial plan was to build a cheap and simple “cowboy” hot tub, but we soon became captivated by the allure of building with cedar. This gorgeous wood would add a touch of refinement to our home, be more durable, and would be a whole lot more fun to experiment with!
Check out our hot tub series!
Cedar hot tubs are expensive, costing anywhere from $3,000- $7,000 to buy. We wanted to go a cheaper route by getting deals on materials and doing everything ourselves, and we thought it would be useful to others if we documented the process. When everything was done, we had only spent about $850 for the entire project. Not too shabby. If you want to see a list of tools that were needed to complete this project look here, and keep reading for farther building instructions.
Step 1: Source Affordable, High Quality Cedar Boards
By far the hardest part of building your own hot tub is finding clear cedar lumber at an affordable rate. Any board with knots in it can’t be used because knots are weak places in the wood that might blow out under pressure, creating a huge leak in the side of the tub. Yet clear cedar (considered #1 grade) doesn’t come cheap and is hard to find at most lumber yards.
We used Craigslist to find a lumber yard in our area with plenty of cedar available. The only catch was that it was #2 grade and full of knots. We requested permission to go through the pile to search for clear lumber that could we could use for our project. This is pretty rare — sorting lumber is usually frowned upon at lumber yards, so be sure to ask permission before you try!
The tub we built is 5′ in diameter and 3′ in depth and we knew these measurements before seeking out wood. For your own project, make sure to calculate the amount of wood you will need before buying any as it will save a lot of headache later on.
Additional, knotty lumber was also purchased to be used for a patio fence, hot tub seats, and other tub accessories.
Step 2: Cutting the Staves
The staves are the boards that make up the sides of the hot tub, and cutting them was the first part of this project we tackled. The dimension of each stave is going to depend on the size of lumber you are using and the circumference of your tub. Be mindful that the staves will be connected to the inside edge of the hot tub floor, meaning that the inner circumference will be decreased.
Because we were using #2 lumber we worked hard to get the most out of every board. We paid special attention to the order of our cuts to maximize the amount of usable clear wood. A table saw and cross cut saw were essential for this part of the project.
Step 3: Stave Joinery
We can’t overstate how important the stave joinery is for the success of this project. Seriously. Carelessness or inexact cuts will make it virtually impossible to get your tub water tight.
Building Bead & Cove Joinery
We decided to use a canoe joint (also called a bead and cove joint) for the joinery. Our stock was 1.5″ thick so we used a bead with a ½” radius and a cove bit. We found these measurements left a small shelf on the staves which allowed the joint to rest on them properly. Your router should work fine for this. Each board has to be run through four times to complete the joint, twice on each side.
A lip on the joints can be taken care of with a planer to smooth the joint. If you create your joinery correctly, the cedar should swell when water is added, allowing the tub to become water tight.
Dado Joinery
We used a dado joint to attach the boards to the floor. Later in this article we will talk about the depth you will need to create this joint at. Getting it super snug on every stave is super important. We used our table saw for this step, but there are lots of other ways you can do it. It’s worth jigging your saw because this cut needs to be as accurate as possible for maximum snugness. Check each joint to ensure they are being cut consistent.
Step 4: Building the Floor
For our floor, we used the cedar that was available, which was 1×6 v-groove tongue and groove. This wasn’t ideal, and we don’t recommend using v-groove with something else is available. Most cedar tubs are built with 2×6 stock which would be a lot easier than what we used.
To build the floor we followed the some technique of maximizing cuts as we did with the staves. We positioned the lumber on the ground so that the whole floor was clear cedar. To make the cut, we made a guide the length of the radius of our tub (2 ½ feet) and used it to draw a circle.
We built the floor joists with 4×4 cedar, using two pieces that were 5′ in length and two that were 3′. These were equally spaced around the tub.
The dado joints were cut to the theoretical perfect length that would give us the length needed to have a whole number of staves around the tub (it’s hard to use half a stave). We have a secret way to come up with the magic number for the depth of the dado joint, so watch this video to learn about it!
Sadly our magic fell a little short for us and our measurements were slightly off, meaning we had to get a little creative with our last few staves. But all’s well that ends well, right?
Once everything was put in place we used a ratchet strap to hold it all together while we used a jig saw around the circumference.
Step 5: Assembling the Hot Tub
The Staves
The staves were super simple to put in place. We gently tapped them in with a dead blow hammer. Getting a tight fit is essential, so take your time with this part and switch out staves if they aren’t fitting right.
Just need half a stave to finish it?
When we finished putting the staves in place we discovered that we needed a partial stave to finish it. We came up with a creative solution that’s shown in this video where we cut a stave in half and attached it to the second-to-last stave with a tongue and groove joint.
Cable Tension Bands
We used 3/16″ vinyl-coated cable to hold our tub together because we thought the coating would prevent it from harming the wood. We used two clamp sets on each cable (with three cables total) because we thought it made them look more finished. The ends were attached with a stainless steel turn buckle.
TIP: Ratchet straps are really helpful for holding the tub together when you are putting on the cable bands. It’s a good rule of thumb to have the turn buckles tightened half way when you finish, because the tub will swell when water is added and might shrink back down after being in full sun for a few days.
Step 6: Benches & Plumbing
Building Benches
Because it doesn’t matter if there are knots in the benches, we got to utilize our leftover wood. (This is why it pays to be careful with your cuts!) We used 2×4 #2 grade cedar for the legs and leftover staves for the seats.
We built the benches to fit in a hexagon shape, but we only built four sides of the hexagon. This means that the longest length of each bench is equal to the radius of the tub, and the angle of the seat lumber is 30 degrees from every direction. We invested in corrosion proof stainless steel hardware for the benches. Pricy, but certainly worth it.
Plumbing
For the hot tub drain, we installed a simple push-style floor drain like can be found in most bath tubs. Below the tub we attached a 90 degree pipe with additional fittings that could be connected to a garden hose when we want to drain the tub. A ball valve was installed as a backup measure, which was great foresight because the regular drain leaks! It’s most likely because we skimped on quality, which is almost always a mistake.
Step 7: Filling the Tub
For those of you lucky folks that live on grid and have an endless supply of water, filling the tub is super straightforward. For us… not so much. This was the most miserable part of the whole process for us because we don’t have any large scale water system yet.
When we first started filling the tub it leaked like crazy… for three whole days. Eventually it swelled enough to stop leaking and held water. This is actually pretty normal for cedar tubs.
Our impatience eventually got the best of us and we caulked the tub with a marine-grade clear caulk. It helped a bit but we aren’t sure it was completely necessary. However, we weren’t fully confident in our joinery (super important to get right, like we said earlier) so we wanted to be safe rather than sorry.
Step 8: Adding the Wood Stove
A wood stove is just one of many ways to heat a hot tub. We perused Craigslist until we found a used stove for sale. They aren’t listed often so check regularly.
Our stove was extremely buoyant so it took careful attaching to keep it from floating up. Beyond that the installation process was very straightforward.
Thankfully the stove came with 6′ of stove pipe, which allowed the smoke to be released above our heads.
For your own tub, be sure to research the best type of stove for you. An external wood stove that you plumb in can also work. If you live on grid, a propane of electric system can also give you good results. In a lot of ways stove type depends on personal preference and what’s available in your area.
Our initial plan was to build our own external stove with a washing machine drum and an old truck radiator, but when our stove came up on Craigslist we couldn’t resist the deal.
Step 9: Enjoy Your Hot Tub & More Tips
After all the hard work of building comes the fun part, relaxing in your new tub! We were so happy to discover our wood stove fired up easily and that our tub could be heated from 65 degrees to 102 degrees in less than two hours. The stove is simple to shut down when the temperature gets warmer than is comfortable, so we aren’t TOO worried about cooking ourselves.
Our Top Tips & Tricks
(Updated Regularly)
For additional resources on how to build this project with ease, make sure to check out our DIY cedar hot tub videos series page. We use this page to answer all the questions we have been getting about our tub so that all the information is consolidated in one place. You can also check out our blog post about the most rewarding experience we’ve had so far — our first soak.
Stay in touch for future videos, updates, and series!
Dyson’s Bladeless Fans are wonderfully awesome but also ridiculously expensive. Am I really going to spend 300 bucks on a fan? Nah. Thankfully, Rulof the master maker of things breaks down how to build the bladeless fan with a water jug, a few vases, and a microwave fan.
Just like Dyson, this DIY version of a “bladeless” fan hides the blades inside the base. It looks like it works pretty well. And while it doesn’t look as good as a Dyson fan, it has its own charm… sort of.
To be honest, am I really going to spend all this time and effort to make a bladeless fan? Probably not. Good thing that there are people in this world that would though.
For early- to mid-stage B2B software and SaaS companies, selling in to the enterprise is hard. Getting a lot of enterprise customers to pay for your solution on a repeated and long-term basis without seeing your sales growth stall out at $15-25 million ARR? That’s really hard.
Welcome to the challenging world of enterprise sales.
Companies like Salesforce, Workday, NetSuite and athenahealth found lasting B2B sales success and turned their companies into pillars of the enterprise SaaS ecosystem. But the majority of private enterprise companies still face this Mount Everest of a challenge. Many factors can slow a company’s B2B sales progress, including competitive challenges, timing issues and product deficiencies.
Here are three big sales mistakes we see private enterprise software companies make:
Mistake No. 1: Good product-market fit is not good enough
George Mathew, president/COO of Alteryx says, “In today’s enterprise software market, it’s important to define a user experience that is 100 times better than the status quo.”
There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that inertia, incumbency and bureaucracy are all working against you. For emerging companies, this means finding a way to be exponentially better with fewer resources. As a result, focus is key.
Yammer co-founder David Sacks addressed this when he took over as CEO of Zenefits earlier this year. “Companies execute better when they ruthlessly prioritize and sequence their efforts,” Sacks wrote. “For us, that means hyper-focusing on the small business market where we have product-market fit.”
To succeed, resist the urge to broaden your focus too much or too soon, and then scale proportionately.
What does this mean — “hyper-focusing … where we have product-market fit”? It means pursuing those market segments for which your product has a unique and compelling solution — exponentially better than the status quo — and pursuing only those segments.
Many private B2B companies have developed solutions that are working for a subset of customers, but are still challenged with sales cycles longer than ideal. Average revenue per customer remains below the target. Or new customer sales growth is incremental, not exponential. In other words, the product-market fit is not compelling enough.
Sometimes the market-fit issue with developing enterprise companies stems from insufficient focus. Ruthless prioritization, as advocated by Sacks, does not come naturally. Market fit can improve from having more ongoing dialogue with customers. For targeted sectors, your solution may simply be just a nice-to-have service and not compelling enough to overcome typical enterprise barriers.
With more market focus, however, companies can find a sweet spot by developing an acute understanding of customers’ needs in a particular segment, which is more nuanced than the broader sector requirements. To succeed, resist the urge to broaden your focus too much or too soon, and then scale proportionately.
Mistake No. 2: Are you competitively disadvantaged?
Competitors come in many different shapes and sizes. As Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svane says, “There’s an incredible variety of software products out there.”
Indeed, read the “About Us” section of all the companies in your market universe, and consider how many of those view your space as theirs. Your competitors include other private companies and larger established incumbents with massive sales organizations. You also compete with customers’ own internally developed efforts, which may be inferior but can be difficult to overcome given ties to their own solution.
Invest time to glean important, insightful information about your competitors.
Competition also includes service and reselling companies that represent third-party vendors.
AppDirect co-CEO Daniel Saks points out that 70 percent of on-premise software sales have traditionally been channel-based. He adds, “80% of on-premise software vendors operate a channel program to enable other companies to sell their products, while only 20% of SaaS vendors operate similar programs.”
This channel and reselling hurdle highlights a competitive challenge for SaaS companies facing off against traditional software vendors. It’s a zero-sum game among vendors, so signing a customer means a loss for someone else.
One often overlooked step is simply engaging with customers about the competitive landscape — including prospective as well as won/lost targets. Invest time to glean important, insightful information about your competitors and adapt accordingly.
Mistake No. 3: Bad timing — outta sync, outta luck
With enterprise sales, timing can make or break a company. Bad timing in the B2B sales process can stem from several factors. Here are three common timing issues:
Timing problem No. 1: You’re behind the market demand curve with a not-exponentially-better product — and losing to competitors or incumbents.
If you don’t give customers sufficient reasons to make a change, you will encounter too much inertia to close business. The enterprise customer’s default action is to stick with their current solution. Be aggressive in solving this problem by uncovering more unique, urgent requirements, and then credibly and proactively addressing those. More target market focus and customer-driven product iteration can help you move ahead of the curve.
Timing problem No. 2: You’re ahead of the market demand curve and struggling to close sales.
Enterprise markets can be unwelcoming to pioneers, so consider finding ways to bridge an entrenched solution to your ahead-of-the-curve solution. For example, TigerText introduced a secure enterprise mobile messaging platform to healthcare customers in 2010 but faced resistance from hospital employees that still relied on pagers. To overcome this, they developed a messaging solution that included paging options. To get your foot in the door, you may need to support valued but possibly outdated requirements to help companies transition to your platform.
Timing problem No. 3: You’re suffering under the weight of a long sales cycle and not closing enough deals quickly enough.
SaaS products and business models have shortened sales cycles in some sectors for a number of purchases in recent years (e.g. see Harry Stebbings’ interview with Immediately’s CEO Branko Cerny). This is not true for all purchases in all enterprise markets, however, including large purchases in regulated industries or many Global 2000 companies.
How to accelerate slow sales cycles
What to do about those long and costly sales cycles?
“Selling to the consumer is about selling positive emotions. Selling to the enterprise is about suppressing negative emotions,” says GoodData CEO Roman Stanek. “Enterprise IT is not a culture of early adopters.”
He is right — but there are a few practical strategies that can get slow-moving targets to move.
Employing best practices with your sales and marketing processes is critical. In many Global 2000 companies, there are multiple groups of decision-makers or influencers involved, including product users, IT gatekeepers, administrative or executive groups and compliance teams, any of which can slow down your sales process.
With incomplete information flowing back to the sales team, it’s critical to measure and track all customer communication and best practices by carefully utilizing your CRM and marketing automation tools — and then managing your team accordingly. Work to build a company wide culture to document customer communications and make best practices repeatable across sales, marketing, customer success and business development teams.
Also, there are countless times that we have seen large, long-term enterprise deals go to a competitor that has successfully triangulated the buying process or leveraged backchannels. Your team’s success in triangulating with customer targets and establishing backchannels of communication with friendly insiders is vital to winning long sales-cycle deals.
In fact, even though your product is B2B, perhaps the biggest mistake you can make is forgetting that your sales process is still P2P (peer-to-peer). Executives make decisions for all sorts of reasons that are not based simply on product features or depth of IP. With a long sales cycle, building rapport at many levels in the customer organization chart is critically important. Mastering these softer P2P skills can help drive successful triangulation and backchanneling, which lead directly to more enterprise sales.
“We’ve seen that successful enterprise sales stem from a variety of factors,” says Nick Elprin, CEO of Domino Data Lab. “But in closing the largest and most important deals, people skills are ultimately at the top of that list.”
There’s no shortage of weather sites and webapps around the web that will show you weather conditions now or predicted ones in the future, but Ventusky is brand new, looks great, and shows you current conditions on a live, always-updating map that you can drag around, click on, or just search to explore.
If you’re used to using a service like Google Maps, then Ventusky will come naturally. Type in your location (if it’s not automatically detected) to see your area, and a live map of temperature and wind patterns in your part of the world. You can adjust the altitude to see wind and cloud cover at different levels, or add more layers, like cloud cover, precipitation, wind speed, snow cover, and more.
From there, you can browse other parts of the world, or select a span of time to play back temperature or wind changes, or the movement of cloud cover or storm systems. You can even view predicted information for the future, so you can see if you’re going to get that storm this evening that a friend of yours out west mentioned in an email this morning. There’s even a handy settings panel that walks you through the webapp’s features and explains the nuance to you.
Even if you use another service for local forecasts and up-to-the-minute weather data, Ventusky is one of those sites you could probably bookmark and keep out on for a while. Hit the link below to give it a shot.
“No killer is going to walk away because a little sign says he can’t bring a firearm inside,” says Praesidium writer Paul Myzia on the short film’s Indigogo page. Myzia is the Warrenville, Illinois cinematographer behind Reel Clef Studios
Praesidium, which is defined as a standing executive committee in a communist country, focuses on the fact that while we cannot change the past, we can help save our future by eliminating ‘gun-free’ zones that only serve to disarm law-abiding citizens.
Nothing drives a point home like experience. Our government is deceiving its citizens to think they are safer with stricter gun laws.
This is absolutely false.
By allowing something as simple as a little sign that says “no guns allowed”, we are giving up our freedom, and in a growing number of cases – our lives. The idiocy of the idea that a killer will see that sign, and turn around and leave is just absurd. These signs only tell a killer that nobody inside is armed or dangerous, and every citizen just becomes easy prey. This film shows exactly that – no verbal message necessary. It will spark conversation, debate – it will be controversial. But no one who watches it will be able to deny the truth that the only thing that saves a life in these situations – is a law-abiding citizen able to defend them-self and others with a firearm, concealed or not.
Myzia’s short film features a man trying to prevent the murder of a woman he loves by using a watch capable of sending him through time. When going back and plastering the scene with gun-free signs fails, he tries leaving a gun for her to use for self defense.
Watch Myzia’s film here and let us know what you think: does this short film hit it’s mark?
Many people try to claim that the Founding Fathers couldn’t have conceived of repeating rifles at the time they drafted the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights. The story of Joseph Belton, an inventor and gunsmith from Philadelphia, and his correspondence with the Continental Congress proves otherwise.
Belton claimed to have devised a new form of flintlock musket that was capable of firing as many as sixteen consecutive shots in as little as twenty seconds. After the gun had fired its consecutive loads, it could then be reloaded individually like all other traditional weapons of that time. He wrote to Congress about his new invention on April 11, 1777, letting them know he could be available to demonstrate it to them at any time.
Intrigued by Belton’s claim, Congress ordered 100 examples of his “new improved gun.” They authorized him to oversee the construction of new guns, or alteration of existing guns, so that they were capable of discharging eight rounds with one loading and that he “receive a reasonable compensation for his trouble, and be allowed all just and necessary expences [sic].”
On May 7, Belton replied to Congress with his terms regarding what he felt to be reasonable compensation. He wanted to arm 100 men with his invention, demonstrate the capabilities to top military officers, and see how many men the officers felt his 100 men were equivalent to. For example, 100 specially-armed men were equivalent to 200 regularly-armed men, or more. For his ability to double the manpower, he felt that he was entitled to £1,000 from each state that he armed 100 of their men. Belton justified his price by claiming that a state could not raise, equip, and clothe 100 men for £1,000, making his 100 men armed as though they were 200 men a bargain. For reference, £1,000 in 1777 is the equivalent of £116,500 in 2016. If all 13 states outfitted 100 men, Belton would receive £13,000 – or a cool £1.5 million today.
Belton argued that arming 3,000 men or more with his invention created enumerable advantages beyond description on the battlefield and that, as such, his compensation was “vastly reasonable” and that if the Congress refused his terms, he wouldn’t do it. (For those doing the math, 3,000 men armed with Belton’s repeater would mean that he’d collect almost £3.5 million if adjusted to 2016.)
Belton must have realized immediately that his demands were more than outlandish because the next day, on May 8, he wrote a letter to John Hancock lowering his fee to £500 for doubling, £1,500 for tripling, £2,000 for quadrupling, and so forth.
On May 15, Congress read Belton’s letter to the body. They quickly dismissed it because of his “extraordinary allowance.” (No one saw that coming, right?) Congress considered the matter dropped and didn’t reply to Belton, likely assuming he would take their lack of reply as a refusal.
Having heard nothing from Congress, Belton wrote them again on June 14. This time, he claimed he could make the shots accurately out to 100 yards and then, obviously feeling that wasn’t impressive enough, said he could make the shots out to 200 yards and would be available to demonstrate this to the body on the State House Yard.
Again, he heard nothing for almost a month.
Still undeterred, Belton wrote Congress again on July 10. This time, he tried to rile members of the body by claiming that Great Britain regularly pays £500 for such services. He also enclosed a letter signed by General Horatio Gates, Major General Benedict Arnold (before he became a turncoat), well-known scientist David Rittenhouse, and others, all claiming that his invention would be of “great Service” and that Belton is entitled to “a hansome [sic] reward from the Publick [sic].”
Having received the letter immediately, Congress resolved that same day to refer Belton’s petition to the Board of War, made up of five delegates. Among these five delegates were future 2nd President of the United States, John Adams, and Benjamin Harrison V, father and great-grandfather of the 9th and 23rd Presidents of the United States, respectively.
Nine days later on July 19, Congress got word from the Board of War. They dismissed Belton’s petition altogether. At this point, he must have finally gotten the hint that Congress wasn’t going to authorize such exorbitant payment for his services because the historic record turns up no more correspondence between Belton and Congress.
Despite the fact that Joseph Belton failed to convince the Continental Congress to outfit colonial soldiers with his repeating rifle, it’s still a very important story. Belton invented his gun in 1777. The Bill of Rights wasn’t ratified until 1791. I’m no math whiz, but even I know that means our Founding Fathers not only knew about repeating rifles 14 years before the creation of the Second Amendment, but that they thought highly enough of the design to pursue further development and implementation of such technology.
So, the next time someone tells you the Second Amendment was never designed to protect the right to own a repeating rifle, or that it was only meant to apply to flintlock muskets, sit them down and tell them the story of Joseph Belton and his repeating flintlock musket.
HBO did a beginner’s guide to Game of Thrones and got Samuel L. Jackson to narrate it.
Over in Westeros, Lord Eddard Stark, aka Ned, is asked by his friend the King, Robert Baratheon, to be the Hand of the King, aka his right hand man. Ned doesn’t wanna go, but das his boy! So he uproots his family and heads to King’s Landing. Nice family, right? Don’t get attached. I’m just saying.
Does anyone swear as delightfully well as Samuel L. Jackson?
The problem with mounting optics on most semi-auto pistol is the rapid reciprocation of the slide. The optic has to be small enough to permit cycling, robust enough to withstand the constant acceleration, and yet have sufficient objective size to permit rapid target acquisition.
UM Tactical developed a mount that locks around the dust cover Picatinny rail and encircles the slide. That neatly solved all the problems associated with the slide-mounted red dots: the sight doesn’t go back and forth with every shot, a larger optic may be used without making cycling unreliable, and sight acquisition gets easier with bigger glass. Since optics and pistols vary, UM Tactical also offer a universal holster: the optic mount, rather than the pistol, locks into it. The mount may be moved between pistols, and the holster would fit almost any semi-auto handgun.
The system has limitations of its own. For one, a sturdy dust cover is necessary. CZ SP01 qualifies, some of the flimsier polymer frames might not. Because the universal mount has to provide sufficient slide clearance, it is a little bulky. Compared to slide-mounted optics, sights installed with this mount sit about an inch higher. The higher and more forward placement makes the pistol more top-heavy, but also reduces muzzle flip slightly. Since the mount is best suited for metal-framed pistols, the change in balance isn’t drastic.
The front view shows the locking lever that releases the mount when depressed. The two sides of the mount are brought together by the mount or the rings of the optic, and the outward-directed tension keeps the installation secure.
I am not sure how this mount would fare on a defensive carry gun, given the overall bulk of the solution, but it works extremely well for target shooting and hunting. Since stability and limited iron sight resolution are the two overwhelming influences on handgun accuracy, the UM3 mount is a very helpful addition to handgun hunting. The Picatinny rail strip at the bottom of the mount can be used either for lights and lasers, or for a small bipod. The top rail can hold a red dot or a magnified scope, something that direct slide mounting cannot support. Given the inherent accuracy of top-tier pistols like the SP01 shown here, using UM3 for improving aiming accuracy and stability enables hits to much further ranges that typically expected.
Antonia Okafor has been told her entire life that as a black woman, she shouldn’t support the Second Amendment, that she shouldn’t want to have the right to protect herself, and that she should fall in line.
But Antonia didn’t listen.
She’s a millennial woman who refuses to be put into any box.
Antonia doesn’t care what names anti-gun bigots call her. She refuses to be a victim. And she’s talking to women just like her every day.
