Huge Kite (10.9 M^2 Nasa Para Wing)

Muffin and Me just finished sewing up our enormous kite.

It's a scaled up version of the one he had made before.

It hauls!

yurtcycle

I cut out some roof panels for the yurt after doing some (very) approximate trig.

a few more hooked knives

wood things, rolling things

I slept a whole lot this IAP.  While I wasn't sleeping, I got a few things done. 

another Hooked Knife

Back at home and in the presence of the forge, I took the opportunity to make a proper hooked knife.  For this one, I used a chunk of steel from a leaf spring.

Stepper Motor Driver

I recently found out that Texas Instruments gives out free samples of some of their ICs.  I love free things.

huh? HTSSOP?

stove pipe fiddle

there's a new fiddle in town!

Carrying large and awkward things

The crufter's dilemma: You come across something simply wonderful, but it's too heavy, awkward, or hard to move to the place you want to move it and in a way you want to move it.
I think problems like this are interesting, and I'm going to dump experiences in this post.  Some of them even have pictures.

Summer 2012

motorized 14' long  projection screen - tied to bicycle seat and handlebars, did not attempt to ride bicycle.  would have been uncomfortably heavy to carry a long distance.

all of my stuff. shopping cart and backpacking frame were essential.  bungees and ropes useful also

Hooked carving knife

I tried to carve a spoon a few weeks ago.  It went well until I tried to carve the scoop.  I could really have used a curved blade.  Instead, I gouged it and ground it smooth with rocks.  It worked, but I'd rather have carved it instead.
Back at school, I was reminded of the "crooked carving knives" I saw on this site.  I love it when people provide lots of details on how they make things, even when they're trying to sell them, because it makes it a whole lot easier for me to try to make them.  So I tried making one.

Tongue Drum

I first saw these on youtube a while ago.  They're lamellophones just like the mbira, except made out of wood.  Having recently crufted some nice-ish wood, I traced out a pattern, figuring that if I made the tongues roughly different sizes, I could tune them later.

Dorm chair mandolele

A while ago I spotted a broken chair in the basement.  I scavenged some oak from it, and finally got around to using it this past weekend.  In a one-night extravaganza of poor craftsmanship, I put this together.

obligatory quadrotor post

I just recently got the chance to play with my first quadrotor.  A friend donated to me a small-ish (about 1' square) quad frame made of CF laminated over end grain balsa as well as a handful of older brushless motors and ESCs.  I haven't always been the biggest fan of quadrotors, but this one flew into my hands so I figured I'd better try it out.

strings and things

carbon fiber tricopter frame

The last tricopter frame was really light.  That was about the only good thing about it.  The wood was brittle, and broke at the joint of the T a couple of times.  It didn't take much to fix, but I wasn't pleased with how fragile it was.  

snow things

Boston weather momentarily stopped being unusual when it snowed a couple of days ago.  It's mid January, and that was only the second snow this year!  Super strange... anyway, there's more in the forecast, and I've taken to preparing.

When I saw that it was snowing a couple of days ago, I immediately went into sled mode.  2x4s were hastily cut and screwed together.  No measuring necessary!

I even cut out some steel flashing and screwed it to the runners to (hopefully) make it slide a bit better

In other news, I went to MITERS this evening for the Balancing Things Colloquium!  Charles talked about Segfault and LandBearShark, Jordan showed off her (somewhat) balancing skateboard, and Shane demoed his extremely low budget segway.  The drivetrain is nothing more than a couple of cordless drills zip-tied to a piece of wood.  The wheels even go in their chucks!  4PCB was also present as a controls example.  There was lots of talk about PID loops and tuning, which was awesome!

But wait, there's snow much more to talk about:

 While the talks were happening, I got to work on another project.  Not too long ago, I crufted a lonely looking skateboard deck.  When it snowed, I took it outside to play around with.  Being very slippery, it showed great potential.  The only problem was that it was hard to keep oriented in one direction, let alone steer.

  At MITERS, I found a couple sections of aluminum tubing.  I figured I could attach them lengthwise to the underside of the deck to make it travel straight.

 I had to bend the sections to fit the contours of the board.  The nice upturned tail begs to be manual'd

I flattened the ends of the tubes, then drilled holes to bolt them to the board.  This is only really to keep the ends in place while I slather the thing in epoxy

 The tubes flexed a bit in the middle, so I drilled some more tiny holes in the board to poke wires through.  I looped the wires around the tubes, then twisted them on the top of the board to snug the tubes down against the bottom.  I'll remove them later after the epoxy cures.

  And here it is epoxying over the MITERS trash bin!
The epoxy was unlike any epoxy I've worked with before.  I mixed a small batch, and it was very runny.  I waited a few minutes for it to cure, checking on it every minute while I listened to the balancing-things talk.  It was heating up normally, but still runny, then all of a sudden, the whole thing turned to gel -- Like very hard, chewy, sticky Jello from hell.

After being totally taken by surprise, I mixed up another batch and applied it to the board, still runny.  That's why the board is over a trash can.  I didn't want it to drip on any nice things.

And it looks like the epoxy will have just enough time to cure before the snow starts.. sweet!