Matthew Dockrey

Today I learned that Michaelangelo's first paid commission was a snowman during a rare snowfall in Florence, and I'm not quite sure how to incorporate that into my understanding of the world.

Pro tip: knee pads can make perfectly serviceable spaulders/pauldrons! (Useful if you need to carry something narrow and heavy.)

Since I'm going to need it for making the grip rim of the drive wheel, I'm finally playing with the big old wagon wheel roller I picked up 2 years ago. First up was knocking out a simple handle for the crank. Aluminum hex stock isn't quite the vibe for something like this -- the crank is obviously hand forged, possibly a replacement, the rest is cast iron -- but it just needs to work for now.

So it's almost time to put together the drivetrain for Goose2, including the ~3 meter roller chain running from the drive wheel at the bottom up to the intermediate axle at the very top. And one thing I learned from Goose1 is that chain length calculators can't be trusted at that length. It will seem very snug if you assemble it horizontally, due to sag, but then be WAY too loose once tipped up vertically. The ceiling is too low to do that in the shop, so we only found out during final installation. Embarrassing.

I really wanted to do better this time around, and tonight I put together a system for doing just that. I needed a way to mount two sprockets ~3 meters apart, vertically. I also wanted that distance to be finely adjustable, so I can be empirical about the final axle spacing. Luckily, I already had something exactly like that -- the legs of the gantry crane! With these clamped at the top and bottom, and the crane extended to its max, I've got about 150 mm to spare.

It took some doing (have I mentioned I'm not particularly great at electronics?), but I think I've worked out all the problems with the v2 prototype of the Conway's Life Cell. Biggest mistake: a completely wrong pin out on the buffer IC. Subtlest mistake: a very slightly different wiring of the second status LED from the breadboard version. On to v3, and then hopefully I can start working on the real boards finally.

Why do I have the absolutely cheapest vertical turntable I could find? As you might have guessed, it's not for playing music. Not exactly, anyway. More to follow as things ramp up, but I think this project status just flipped from "exploratory" to "active".

...wait, was "film at 11" originally a thing because they had to *chemically develop* the actual, literal film, and only later became proto-clickbait with the advent of video?

In other news, it sure would be nice to sleep at some point.

Got the crankshaft counterweights tacked on, and mounted the starboard wing on the test stand. Not the most productive night, but it's all ready to get the drive wheel disk cut and mounted this weekend, which will (if all goes well!) validate the entire system.

RE: @occult@vox.ominous.net

The visibility is down to under 100 smoots!

After finally getting them up on the test stand with the wing segments, I've come to the conclusion that the crankshafts need to be 30-50mm shorter. Which means I need to cut the keyways longer. Which means I just spent 2 hours exploring different ways of mounting them on the mill, ending up with this.

At least those straps might be useful again in the future sometime.

Ffs, YouTube. Either let me cast Shorts, or don't show Shorts in my feed when I'm connected to a TV. Why do you insist on making this so annoying?

I finally got my hands on a resonant reed tachometer, which works by having rows of tuned rods that resonate at specific frequencies, letting you measure RPMs by just touching it to the device. A mechanical, analog, solidstate tach! So cool! And it's a lot more sensitive than I had expected. I can dial in my mill CVT to be right between two marks and see very little movement. Or I can set my lathe to 2K, which its split phase motor really struggles with, and watch the activation point slowly work its way up the scale as it gamely chugs along.

Maybe it would be interesting to get a couple other tachometer types, and do a video comparing them? There are a couple other resonant types, plus classic mechanical and modern digital. I'd love to know how well calibrated this one is, if nothing else.

I really hate the Q on California license plates. It's like a diacritic broke loose and got snagged on a zero while rattling around the bottom of the frame.