Today I worked on a larger project. I don’t want to reveal the whole thing until it’s done but it’s basically a cabinet. So far I cut the sides of the cabinet, routed out a groove to hold the back, and screwed it all together. Here’s a picture:
February is thing-a-day month, and I’m participating. Well, I’m not blogging with them, but I’m making something every day and blogging here about it.
In honor, or perhaps in defiance, of the snowpocalypse setting in tonight, I made snowshoes. It’s just a rectangular wooden frame with a small platform to stand on and wrapped in fabric to add surface area. It didn’t work great, but it worked well enough. You can see the effectiveness in the photoset linked below:
Snowshoe victory!
By the end of August, I intend to build a working Hero’s Fountain. I made my first attempt the other day. It didn’t work, but I identified a number of ways I can improve it for my next attempt.
Below is the test apparatus. It uses a plastic bowl and two milk jugs for the water vessels. The nozzles are pieces of copper tubing and are attached with plumber’s epoxy. The hoses are simple nylon (I think? The material for that isn’t really important.) tubing and are attached to the nozzles with twist ties.
Hero's Fountain Apparatus 1
Hero's Fountain Apparatus 1 Internal
The first mistake was using the plumber’s epoxy. I used it because it’s simple and fast and I’d seen it used successfully in a similar application before. Unfortunately, after I was half done attaching the nozzles I saw the instructions said it’s not recommended for use with polyethylene, which is what milk jugs are made of. As you can see, the epoxy didn’t bond with the milk jugs, which broke the air seal. This is most visible on the leftmost nozzle in the picture above.
Beyond that first failure the rest is more speculative. My apparatus has both lower chambers at the same height, which means the water has a long way to rise from the blue topped milk jug to go through the fountain spout at the top. The air moving between the pink chamber and the blue chamber will rise much easier, so I believe raising the blue chamber to shorten this distance will improve performance.
Also, it takes a substantial amount of water to fill the tubes between the chambers, at least compared to the amount of water in the red bowl. Priming the tubes with water would probably improve performance, but hopefully that will prove unnecessary.
Finally, as the water drained from the red bowl I didn’t consider that it would form a vortex. That pushes some air down the tube as well as water. I don’t think that’s a problem, in fact it might make the machine run a little longer, but it’s something I will pay attention to in my next attempt.
I got back from the Maker Faire last weekend, and it was amazing. Many of the projects I had seen online like the Singing Tesla Coil, the RepRap, Cyclecide and their freak bikes, all the kits from the Maker Store and Adafruit Industries, and some projects from Instructables were there to be played with in meatspace. The highlights for me were riding a double decker bicycle, seeing the 10 foot tall trebuchet launch a watermelon, Cyclecide’s bicycle powered ferris/hamster wheel, the CNC woodworking tools, learning how to spin wool into yarn, 5 minute t-shirts with Bre Pettis, and actually playing the singing tesla coils through a keyboard. Unfortunately I’m an idiot and brought my camera to the faire, but left the battery safely plugged into the wall in Chicago. Fortunately, plenty of other people documented the event for me. Enjoy the pictures, and start saving up for San Mateo in May!
I’ve been planning to go to the Maker Faire in Austin, Texas this October, and I’m surprised none of you are interested in going too. If you’re not familiar with the kind of stuff that’ll be there, here’s some videos showing the cool stuff at the first two faires.
http://revision3.com/systm/makerfaire
http://revision3.com/systm/maker07
Check out information about this years faire at http://www.makerfaire.com.
A long time ago I read an article that peripherally mentioned making charcoal at home. I couldn’t do whatever it was that the article was really about (probably forging swords or casting rocket nozzles from aluminum or something), but I could make charcoal. However, I never actually did anything on this since I live in Chicago and have no yard where I can burn things for hours on end.
Then last month I heard something about an episode of “Dirty Jobs” where he worked in a charcoal factory, and the process was described as basically putting a sealed container of wood in a fire so that it partially burns, but not completely. I was already planning a camping trip soon, so I decided to give it a shot there.
When I got there, I found a log and sawed off some 1 inch rounds, then chopped it into pieces a little smaller than my palm. I put about two gallons of this in a 5 gallon metal bucket. Then I turned it upside down so it was more or less sealed with the earth and started a fire around the outside. I had trouble getting a decent fire going and the fire pit was probably too small to allow the size I would need, but I set it going nonetheless and left it to burn for about 6 hours. When I returned, I pushed the fire aside and lifted the bucket to find … warm wood. The fire wasn’t nearly sufficient to char it all. I found a few pieces that were charcoal, but this was definitely a failure.
So I tried to figure out where I went wrong. The careful reader might notice that earlier I said I read “something” that mentioned making charcoal, then I heard “something” about a show that mentioned making charcoal. Nowhere did I say I read instructions on how to make charcoal. So step 1 for next time, read instructions. I found a couple good articles on the process. The first describes the science of charcoal pretty well, and the second describes the rig much better with bigger pictures. The second also has an interesting feedback loop mechanism where the wood is heated by burning the hydrogen, oxygen, vaporized alcohol and tar that are driven off in the heating process, ensuring an almost perfect heating duration every time. These rigs look a little more complicated than I’m able to do at the moment, but there will definitely be a charcoal round 2 at some point in the future.