whither video?

 I realized that all the video channels I watch - including the folks I called out in a previous post - are using nice cameras on tripods, and that shakycam BS taken with a phone is going to annoy ME, never mind be unacceptably amateur-hour for my tastes.

SO...

 I'm going to wait until I have the dough to spare for a tripod and a Go-Pro or similar (or I figure out the video recording issue with my SLR), before I attempt to make actual, long, lecture-y, talking sorts of videos.

IN THE MEAN TIME, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth, um, mumble frame rate times minutes of running time... well, you get the picture.*

So I'll occasionally use my phone to shoot shorts bits of video, like this one:

Oh crud, sorry about the background music, I forgot to mute the mic.

 That piece of steel which is floating across my surface plate is one of three pieces of scrap low-carbon steel I've been working on to make flat and parallel.  I'm trying to prove that I can make gauge blocks effectively out of junk, and without owning a surface grinder.

 With one proviso: I'm not planning to finish them to any particular dimension. So if they come out = .17278xx but reasonably flat and reasonably parallel, I'll be pretty darn content. (the xx's are values I care about, but won't be able to measure with any accuracy any time soon because my name ain't Tom Lipton)

 I do however, intend to make all three equal, otherwise they'd really be useless.  The point is to prove the process, but I need better measuring tools - some actual gauge blocks, say - before I'll be ready to try making any to a specific dimension.  Even so, with almost minimal effort, they are flat enough to float, which means they are trapping a layer of air - thinner than .001 in / .025 mm - between the block and the plate.

 To do that means that the microscopic features of both surfaces have to be very low in height - the surface has to be very flat and very smooth - for this to work. Realize there is no lubricant present but air - the surfaces must be very clean and free of finger prints, etc.

 This is actually already more flat and more smooth than I'm even ready for; the three blocks need more work on parallelism before they are ready for lapping; they are more like small angle blocks†... and they are not supposed to be...

___________________________________________________________________________
* sorry not sorry
† .0382º if you're curious, or 138 seconds of arc, or .00067 radians...