Air Tool Heaven
2007-07-23 12:24:37

I've made several trips to my local Harbor Freight, which have so far netted one air compressor, seventy-five odd feet of air hose, and several air tools, including one rather largish roofing nailer. I do like air tools; the sound of the air drill makes me giddy, it's right out of NASCAR.

Some major renovations are underway on the house right now. In general, we're doing just about every upgrade a 1950's rambler could need, all at once. Last weekend included a jack-hammer rental. Jack-hammering is both fun and exhausting. I didn't feel at all bad about having a friend over to lend a hand -- a sweat covered brow shared its face with a shit-eating grin.

The afore mentioned sweating resulted in the removal of concrete steps, to allow the installation of a new western style covered porch. We're also taking the opportunity to replace the windows and exterior siding. This weekend, we blew insulation into the walls.

There are a bunch of critical paths when stacking a lot of projects together, fortunately, many tasks are actually made easier by having others ongoing. Having the siding off, for example, makes insulation and windows far simpler to install.

Over the course of this week, I plan to have the windows replaced and deck framed out, so that by this weekend I can put up the new siding.

Benchtop Metal Lathe
2007-03-20 16:13:10

My new metal working lathe arrived this week. This is a tool I’ve been wanting in my shop for quite some time. I’ve said it many times before; being a software engineer is great, but wouldn’t it be nice to make something!

Anything that comes in a crate, looking like it contains the Arc of the Covenant, is sure to be a good time.

Having emptied the crate, however, I found remaining in the bottom, one bolt, with its head sheared off. Crap -- now I’d have to strip the machine until I discovered where it came from. I can’t safely start it without knowing what is broken.

On disassembly, I found the cross-slide feed nut was busted, and I’d have to order another. Aftermarket, it’s a five dollar part, so I wouldn’t even try to get it in warranty.

With the new part in and the machine rebuilt, I loaded some aluminum stock to turn some parts. Not to make anything yet, but to get a feel for the processes: turning, facing, tapering, threading and drilling.

Good fun!

US Liberty Ship
2006-11-08 18:09:54

As posted earlier, I’ve temporary shelved construction of the IJN Yamato for work on a US Liberty ship. I think the smaller project will make a better test-bed for experimental construction techniques.

I had originally planned to employ a vacuum thermoforming technique to mould the Yamato's hull from polystyrene or ABS, but when faced with building a vacuum table nearly eight feet long, I opted for fiberglass. The US Liberty Ship is just under 36 inches, and will fit nicely on a vacuum table I already have.

I also think I'll be able to mould most of the internal structures, such as the water channel, bilge pump, servo and motor mounts all as a single insert part, making final assembly much simpler.

Thermoforming is also much faster, cleaner, and cheaper than laying-up fiberglass.

If the whole process turns out to be as trivial as I imagine, then I should be able to turning out several of the little ships as kits and provide them to friends and onlookers as fodder for the more heavily armed vessels.

The construction rules for Big Gun and Small Gun R/C warship combat converge for a ship of this class. The US Liberty ship is a lightly armored, lightly armed vessel for which both club specifications are identical. The Seattle Fast Gun Club has quite a few members, and the US Liberty can act as a crossover ship, allowing me to play in both clubs.

The Yamato is not forgotten, but I'm taking the opportunity to see how all the parts fit together on another vessel before resuming construction.

Washington Cascade Column
2006-09-19 15:35:40

I drove with two colleagues from Seattle to Cle Elum, Washington, on Sunday to observe maneuvers of the Washington Cascade Column R/C warship combat club.

WCC is a "fast gun" club. I am, of course, building a 1/144th scale battleship Yamato for R/C Combat, but conforming instead to the "big gun" standard. We did learn quite a lot on our trip, and these guys where clearly enjoying themselves, however, we reaffirmed our decision to form a new Seattle club using big gun rules.

The number of glitches and technical malfunctions on the boats were surprising. Perhaps I show my naivety to think they could easily be made more reliable.

There were fewer boats than expected at the event, which made it difficult for the attending captains to organize sorties. They finally decided to engage in a series of all-against-one matches, to ensure that they would get at least a couple of sinks over the course of the day.

Wi-Fi Remote Control: In The Bag
2006-09-07 14:17:41

I have my Linksys Wrt54g v5 wireless router loaded with OpenWRT RC5 Micro (code named: White Russian ).

The SSC-32 32-channel serial servo controller is connected to the second serial port on the router through a Max233a rs-232 chip .

By running "nc -l -p 3000 > /dev/tts/0" on the router, I can telnet (wirelessly, of course) to the router on that port and pass command to the servo controller.

As it turns out, by moving a couple of jumpers, the servo controller can be configured to accept TTL input, so the Max233a wasn't strictly needed.

I may remove the interface and just use TTL when it's finally in the boat, so there'll be one less piece of hardware to fail.

When flashing the rom, I did end up "bricking" the router a couple of times, so the serial console was pretty handy after all.

Now, off to write the fancy user interface necessary to keep the all the moving parts manageable.

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