The Threadless Nut

A while ago purchased 2 stripped AR lowers from Cavalry Arms. I’ve finally gotten around to putting these together.

If you’re not familiar with the AR rifle platform, the traditional lower receiver is forged aluminum. The action parts, grip and stock are added to this stripped receiver to form a complete lower receiver.

The Cavarms lowers differ from the traditional in 2 major ways. Most obviously, they are 1 monolithic piece incorporating the lower receiver, grip and stock. The other way is not so obvious until you pick it up. They are molded from an advance polymer, (ok, plastic). This results in a significant weight savings over the traditional lower, a full pound lighter. Another benefit is the ability to mold them in any color imaginable. They have done the obvious blacks, greens and tans, but also yellow, pink, blue, neon green, and even glow in the dark!

Even with this radically different construction, the Cavarms lower uses standard AR action parts and assembly is mostly the same. There are a few minor differences, but anyone who has assembled a lower will have no problem with the Cavarms assembly. It took less than 30 minutes to completely finish each one.

I won’t bore you with the step by step assembly process, but just a couple of pics to illustrate. Here is everything before assembly, lower on the, uh, lower. The parts kit is above:

And here we have the parts from the normal lower parts kit that are leftover due to the Cavarms construction. Trigger guard, pistol grip, and some assorted pins, fasteners, detents, and springs.

And, finally, here’s a shot of the 2 completed rifles. The one on the bottom is my “ultralight” and I know it has no sights, it’s a work in progress.

Sorry for the less than stellar pics, it’s actually pretty hard to take a decent photo of something that’s all flat black.

I was recently riding through Rosendale on a pretty hot day. If you’re not familiar with Rosendale, they have these large caves there and they open up right near the road. They spill out large amounts of very cool air, even on the hottest of days. When you go through in the car, you get a little blast of cold on your arm if you happen to have the windows open. On a really hot day, you don’t even get that since you’ve got the AC on and the car buttoned up tight.

Riding through here on the bike, where buttoning up isn’t really an option, you get the full effect. It was literally like riding through a waterfall. A quick second of the icy blast and then it’s back into the heat. Immensely refreshing.

Just something about being IN the environment and getting (nearly) the full affect of whatever’s out there. If it’s hot, you’re hot and you have to deal with it. Maybe it’s a bit of a return to simpler times when we weren’t so insulated from everything. I’m sure when it gets to be 20 degrees out, I won’t be so appreciative.

So we have one of those “rewards” credit cards like I’m sure 143% of you do. Since it’s free money, we use the card for most purchases and get a not insignificant amount of “reward” back. It used to be nice and simple. Every year our friendly banking conglomerate would send us a check with whatever we had earned. It was an easy to understand 1% thing. Spend $100 get a buck back! And we didn’t have to do anything to make it happen. How could it go wrong?

Well, here’s how.

A couple of years ago they changed it. Now, instead of cash, we get “reward points”. 1 point for every dollar spent. You can use 2500 of these points to get a $25 gift card to various merchants, or even a $25 check. So, on the face of it everything looks OK. It’s still the same rate of return, they’ve just abstracted the idea of “dollars” to “points”. I’m sure this is a multi-step plan to slowly increase the number of points it takes to get a dollar, but that hasn’t happened yet, so I’ll save that rant.

Anyway, there is a bit more hassle involved since instead of just sending us a check every year, we have to go through the web site and cash in our points. Not a huge deal, but here’s where it gets dysfunctional. I just cashed in our points, we had 74,000ish points accrued, which if you do the math, works out to 29 $25 gift cards or checks with some points left. Not seeing the benefit of committing to any particular gift card when there is cash as an option, I took the check route. And you know what they’re going to do? Do you? I bet you can guess.

They’re going to send us 29 individual $25 checks. I know because they did it last time. Anyone want to bet if they optimized this process enough to not send us 29 checks in 29 separate envelopes?

UPDATE

Well blow me down, corporate America is not completely brain dead. It seems that someone realized what was going on and fixed the insanity. I receive a single check for the entire amount. Sorry to disappoint you.

Alright, the title of this post doesn’t actually relate to the contents, but it was the phrase that triggered the following horrific series of events.

Apparently, some lucky students in some lucky schools had the pleasure to experience what it’s like in the inside of a cow’s stomach. You see it seems that someone thought it would be a good idea to cut a giant hole in a cow and stick a porthole in it. Someone (it may have been the same person, or not) thought students would learn a lot by sticking their hands in those holes to feel around inside said cows. I had never heard of such a thing, not sure how I managed to avoid it, but that’s neither here nor there.

If you will direct your attention to this site you will see some evidence of this practice. According to them, the cows don’t seem to mind when you poke around inside their digestive system. There is even a student’s account of what’s in there. It includes descriptives like “warm peanutbutter with grass mixed in” and “the constistency of a melting Wendy’s frosty”. Lovely.

This kicker here is those weird little shadow puppet animations that are on the page. One of them discusses some poor bloke name Tom. It seems Tom made an error when he was 9 and rapidly ingested some very hot chowder. This destroyed his throat, so the doctors cut a hole, um… I mean, fistula, in his stomach. From that point on Tom’s form of sustenance required him to “chew his food and spit into a funnel directly into his stomach”, Yum!

Enjoy clicking around other links behind those shadow puppets. It’s an art piece about the Tom Thumb story with interleaved fairy tails, recipes and medical facts.

I’m participating in The Van Buren Experiment with a couple of other guys from work. In a nutshell, we’re trying out life with the $1 coin instead of the obvious denomination of bill. The blog will detail our, hopefully juicy, findings. Check it out if you are interested.