Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
·
· Score: 1
With all metal construction the cell phone won't work and WIFI will be useless due to the short distance, a cable would be cheaper, and the lack of a high speed internet connection.
Otherwise this is somewhat cool. It might be able to go places that roads are not. If it can't then its just art. Phil
Maybe it's because I was watching Junkyard Wars reruns today, but think about what you can find with automotive junk parts. For about $1 per pound you can get worn out transmissions and rear wheel drive differentials. (ok, that's $50-$75 per unit.) Add another $10-$20 per bearing if very free motion is required, suffer with the existing bearings, or use soft metal bushing bearings (babbit, brass, copper, bronze, lead...)
With basic welding equipment such as a flux-core wire welder much can be done. With the 1-hp limit, or even 5-hp limit welding dis-similar steel alloys is of little concern. If you need a special gear you can weld using common steel and round bar making a round tooth gear. Not as smooth as an involute gear, but quite functional.
If you need to support a heavy load, get the front suspension spindles out of a car or truck. Disk brakes will allow for lots of space to weld on. Bearings are, again, relatively inexpensive if you need the freest movement.
If you need driven spindles use front-wheel drive parts or 4x4 parts, this way you can drive the center of the spindle.
If this is too beefy or expensive you can invest in a decent drill press, and a selection of large diameter drills and reamers to match a selection of small shaft axle bearings. You will need to check specs, but they will ride on common diameter round stock, say, 1/2 or 5/8 inch, and be fastened, shrink fit, or pressed into a hole about 1 1/4 or 2 inch. Again check your specs and purchase accordingly. The required drill/ream dimension are probably some funny decimal to get the required results.
So, recap: Purchase a wire feed welder. flux-core welders start just over $100. Yes, 5%-10% duty cycle would piss me off too Purchase and disassemble automotive drive trains. Purchase some basic machine shop equipment and a carefully selected set of drills and reams.
You will probably NOT need a lathe or a milling machine, but if you can score them you will love them.
A good bandsaw and/or a cutting torch would also be welcome
I've not used that on electronics, but I did use it on an old car I had. Kept the "check engine" light out from a short in the wiring harness under the hood. I only used "corrosion block" every 6 months to a year or so. Got it at West Marine. I was put onto it for this purpose by a mechanic who serviced the local bus fleet.
"T-9 Boeshield" is another product I have used in a similar manner. It leaves a film behind that is waxlike and can make a mess on glass and such. Works good for lubrication of moving parts around electrical though (power locks, same car)...not sure about around optics in a drive. I got exuberant on the driver's side lock and took 3 or 4 tries with Windex to get the film off the glass.
There are also some products that are essentially isopropyl alcohol in a spray can. Careful that you don't strip coating off the circuits. Some coatings are natural shellac which is alcohol soluble. In that vein, stop at the drugstore and get a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Get the 97% not the 85%, yes it costs 2x as much, so that's $1.50 for a pint.
If you can't take this gear down to individual circuit board level, then there is little hope for it.
Disclaimer: I've never cleaned a full system, just components like keyboards, mice, and a portable CD player. Mold was minimal. The keyboards and mice were usually from coffee or soda, and the CD player I think was excessive dust. The CD player failed completely after a second cleaning about a year after the first. The keyboards still live, and one has been cleaned 3 or 4 times now. (college was hard on it)
Even drunk, I can get around any safeguard I set up for myself. I know because I have. I also know to empower someone else (preferably mostly sober)to safeguard my keys when I need to. I need tests of concentration and dexterity without a trivial work around to have some effect when I am drunk. On the other hand, I haven't been truly "drunk" since college, and I plan to not get drunk anytime soon. It's a waste of money and delicious booze. Phil
If power was available, then wires would exist and a cable for data could be laid (or hung) cheap-like. If towers are 28 to 220 miles apart, where are we getting the juice from? Diesel? Last time I checked solar wasn't very effective in the northern latitudes because of solar penetration and weather. How long will a generator last to power said tower? How much fuel would it require? How much juice to push 220 miles through stinky weather? 25 watts ain't gonna likely cut it.
That said, if the right piece of real estate could be had to put the right pieces of hardware upon AND have service capabilities and backup power provided without herculean efforts this may work.
Said calculations are for line-of-sight frequencies over a theoretical horizon. With use of reflected frequencies and some ham radio capability a network could be set up, but I don't know the details, but service would still be spotty because the ionosphere "moves" changing where signals reflect to.
Using multiple systems of varying capacity may be the best approach. Or pay to have a cable placed. See about running over the pole to Russia
HSS is awesome, and it can achieve very high tolerances, but the labor gets high. CNC used to be much more sloppy than manual labor. It is a recent achievement to get such high tolerances out of CNC, backlash in the drives screw up precision. Steel was the only cutting material for centuries. It will cut itself. It will need to be resharpened, but try that with a TiN coated carbide cutter.
Most lathes can be used as a small bed horizontal mill. They can also be used as a shaper or single point broach using the feed to push a tool through the metal.
I admit to these methods being in-efficient, but efficiency is not part of the argument.
I also admit to needing a fair amount of manual labor. YES, I HAVE SCRAPED A LATHE BED, under the tutelage of a senior machinist. NOT FUN
high speed steel or oil hardening steel. I have made and hardened custom woodworking blades quite easily out of both materials. Both materials will cut unhardened tool steels.
Sadly I am unsure of the whole process as I was a sophomore and the student machinist was a senior. I do know that a lot of boring bars I used in high school and collage were simply ground hardened steel. Nothing special at all.
Also my wife was reminding me that her late grandfather built a lathe. It is in her mother's garage. That machine uses an oak frame, not steel, and is powered by a washing machine motor. To change speeds you need to physically remove and change the gears. I have looked at it, but never used it. Phil
You are talking about the argument for lathes. Metal working lathes are the only machine that can be used, after a fashion, to make ALL of its own components, and even make them to a better tolerance and standard than the machine being used.
I knew a kid in High School who went over the top in Metal Working. He took home 3 lathes and a vertical end mill after his senior year. All but the first lathe were made using the first lathe. The first lathe was build piece by piece by hand. Was pretty awesome stuff.
I tend to browse in frames with about 5 to 10 frames open at a time, and a separate window per topic I am browsing. Let's say...one for comics, one for Slashdot and one for whatever I am really doing at the time. My ISP sucks for latency when I am doing things like games, but if I am doing lots of small DL or some large-ish DL (larger than 1228x1024 images) then I get good performance this way and when I am done with each page, the next is usually ready. I have not downloaded any iso's lately to tell you how that goes.
My brother and I both bought a gameboy, mine new, his used about a year later. My nieces play with them, over the network even! These are TOUGH gear. I've yet to have a laptop survive more than 3 months past the warranty period, or a cell phone perform after 2 years. Phil
I personally like the little bubble sheets that get filled in. They are commonly called Scantron. Use a disposable paper mask that is pre-punched to match the sheet you mark on, and the voter takes it to the one or more machines for reading them in. Trackable, human readable after a fashion, simple technology that can be easily deployed for very large number of voters. Best part is one machine can service about 100 voting stations as cafeteria tables with dividers are all the voting stations are!
I prefer voting on those than the touch screen units. Especially when I have to wait 20-30 min to get my time to vote, and I am in a relatively small voting district now. When I was in a larger district it was a 1-5 min wait to get you ballot, and a 1-5 min wait to scan in at one of the two machines.
I also find that older folk are afraid of touch screen technology because they feel that it will break, or they are not comfortable with computers to start with.
So when I am talking on my phone (in speaker mode) and preparing my old Coleman lantern for the fishing or hunting trip I guess I'll be flagged as a terrorist because mantles (the glowy tea-bag thingies)are soaked in a radioactive salt. Then they will notice that I spend a week away from civilization, possibly where cell phones don't work much less having electricity. I'm not going to like being arrested by big brother every time I go on vacation.
On the hunting trip they will find I have several firearms in the trunk of my car too. I can feel the love now!
Happily all the places I go have basic plumbing so showers are possible...though you may have to cart water by hand from the pump.
just put an extra socket or 3 on the m-board, and not install all the possible processors! Fine, historically matched processors were necessary, and matched processors will probably be required from now to forever, but this also makes upgrading very reasonable in price, even requiring replacement of existing processors. Phil
Unless you own a bar. As long as you pay for the tax on your alcohol, and the bank is happy with you, the govt don't care about profit. This is according to my neighbor who operates a bar here in Ohio.
According to my uncle, a part-time artist and full time truck driver, who owned interest in a consignment art store for a while, you can show loss for about 3 years (this may have changed), then he had to show a profit, $1.00. He closed the store the following year. Mostly due to how the other artists were treating the business.
Lastly, a co-worker at a former job was going thru divorce settlement. His ex wanted to keep her business, a bakery, which had his name on the loans. The judge ruled in his favor, closing the bakery because she could not show profit, nor a time frame to start making profit, and ruled the business a hobby.
Of course I am NOT a lawyer, and need to do further research before trying to take a hobby to business status. Yes, I have a hobby that I think can succeed as a business. It may be better to stay a self-supporting hobby, selling off old toys to fund building new toys.
Hmm, sounds familiar. I have had one full time job and about a ton of part time gigs, including scutt work. Still trying to land that high paying career building thing that can let me retire.
Next stop is to go back to school, but I haven't decided what to study yet...
At least you don't work in the recreational marine industry. ITT/Jabsco reports over 60% compliance with their rebates (sadly I have no reference other than several reps word) Garmin, Raymarine, and Dometic report similar values. Across all retail the value is around 10% or less.
The oil companies will still have their slice. Electric vehicles still need oil based lubricants and such, even though they are smaller amounts, and even synthetic lubricants were natural oil at one point... Phil
My guess is that his "lucky" system is like my old P133 system. I had 2 MB video ram with 2 MB upgrade capability(really HOT stuff for the time!) Small potatoes I know, but it was dedicated video ram. That system was on the PCI bus, and a circa 1995 system. If that machine were still alive a low grade web server would be about all it could reasonably be expected to do. Set up as headless I would want to have that ram useful, even if it was diminished in capacity compared to other swap spaces.
Machines from that era were not capable of using system ram as video memory. That became popular shortly after in about '98 or '99. My understanding is those machines still had a small piece of dedicated video ram at the GPU, but could be assigned more ram from main memory.
I updated IE on my wifes computer (M$ xp), as she needs it for work, before the service pack that included ie7 in it was released, wga broke and no updates could be installed till I followed this voodoo ritual of purging I found on the Microsoft support site. This removed IE7 so I could install updates and the new service pack which included IE7. I'd call it bass ackwards but that would be an insult to all bass and bass fisherman out there. Removing wga probably improves stability overall, I just tried checking the version of IE on this machine and it crashed IE!
In the store I work at the censored versions of the songs CAN and ARE played at work over the PA. My co-workers bring in their Ipods or laptops, but have to meet a rather strict set of rules for their play lists. The truth is the set of rules is taken directly from what is allowed on daytime radio and flavored to the likings of corporate and the customers. In fact some music has been obtained in both censored and uncensored forms so they can listen to the music at work. It has also been mentioned that some censored songs are better than the uncensored version (Adam Sandler's "Pice of Sh*HONK* Car") I am not upset that some companies choose to sell only censored forms of music. The uncensored versions are available elsewhere and it creates and maintains a nitch market that keeps smaller businesses going.
Internal combustion engines are also best when operated at one speed. It's called the power curve, there are actually several for every engine based on torque, horsepower, and efficiency. Strangely when set for any condition the peak of performance RPM is very similar in all cases. The same is true for turbine engines, but the curve is more like a spike when plotted against RPM.
The ICE is used in all sorts of machines, and when trying to eek every last effort out of the fuel it burns, you end up operating it at the best RPM and designing the rest of the drive to that condition.
De-coupling the engine from the drive-train is old news, they were doing the super cars and trucks like that 20 years ago. I wish I had the reference, but it CAN increase fuel efficiency under most conditions because the engine is operating as efficient as possible.
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With all metal construction the cell phone won't work and WIFI will be useless due to the short distance, a cable would be cheaper, and the lack of a high speed internet connection.
Otherwise this is somewhat cool. It might be able to go places that roads are not. If it can't then its just art.
Phil
Maybe it's because I was watching Junkyard Wars reruns today, but think about what you can find with automotive junk parts. For about $1 per pound you can get worn out transmissions and rear wheel drive differentials. (ok, that's $50-$75 per unit.) Add another $10-$20 per bearing if very free motion is required, suffer with the existing bearings, or use soft metal bushing bearings (babbit, brass, copper, bronze, lead...)
With basic welding equipment such as a flux-core wire welder much can be done. With the 1-hp limit, or even 5-hp limit welding dis-similar steel alloys is of little concern. If you need a special gear you can weld using common steel and round bar making a round tooth gear. Not as smooth as an involute gear, but quite functional.
If you need to support a heavy load, get the front suspension spindles out of a car or truck. Disk brakes will allow for lots of space to weld on. Bearings are, again, relatively inexpensive if you need the freest movement.
If you need driven spindles use front-wheel drive parts or 4x4 parts, this way you can drive the center of the spindle.
If this is too beefy or expensive you can invest in a decent drill press, and a selection of large diameter drills and reamers to match a selection of small shaft axle bearings. You will need to check specs, but they will ride on common diameter round stock, say, 1/2 or 5/8 inch, and be fastened, shrink fit, or pressed into a hole about 1 1/4 or 2 inch. Again check your specs and purchase accordingly. The required drill/ream dimension are probably some funny decimal to get the required results.
So, recap:
Purchase a wire feed welder. flux-core welders start just over $100. Yes, 5%-10% duty cycle would piss me off too
Purchase and disassemble automotive drive trains.
Purchase some basic machine shop equipment and a carefully selected set of drills and reams.
You will probably NOT need a lathe or a milling machine, but if you can score them you will love them.
A good bandsaw and/or a cutting torch would also be welcome
Have fun
Phil
I've not used that on electronics, but I did use it on an old car I had. Kept the "check engine" light out from a short in the wiring harness under the hood. I only used "corrosion block" every 6 months to a year or so. Got it at West Marine. I was put onto it for this purpose by a mechanic who serviced the local bus fleet.
"T-9 Boeshield" is another product I have used in a similar manner. It leaves a film behind that is waxlike and can make a mess on glass and such. Works good for lubrication of moving parts around electrical though (power locks, same car) ...not sure about around optics in a drive. I got exuberant on the driver's side lock and took 3 or 4 tries with Windex to get the film off the glass.
There are also some products that are essentially isopropyl alcohol in a spray can. Careful that you don't strip coating off the circuits. Some coatings are natural shellac which is alcohol soluble. In that vein, stop at the drugstore and get a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Get the 97% not the 85%, yes it costs 2x as much, so that's $1.50 for a pint.
If you can't take this gear down to individual circuit board level, then there is little hope for it.
Disclaimer: I've never cleaned a full system, just components like keyboards, mice, and a portable CD player. Mold was minimal. The keyboards and mice were usually from coffee or soda, and the CD player I think was excessive dust. The CD player failed completely after a second cleaning about a year after the first. The keyboards still live, and one has been cleaned 3 or 4 times now. (college was hard on it)
Phil
fdisk will remove any operating system I know of.
Even drunk, I can get around any safeguard I set up for myself. I know because I have. I also know to empower someone else (preferably mostly sober)to safeguard my keys when I need to. I need tests of concentration and dexterity without a trivial work around to have some effect when I am drunk. On the other hand, I haven't been truly "drunk" since college, and I plan to not get drunk anytime soon. It's a waste of money and delicious booze.
Phil
I think the book was headache inducing, hence the colors!
Phil
If power was available, then wires would exist and a cable for data could be laid (or hung) cheap-like. If towers are 28 to 220 miles apart, where are we getting the juice from? Diesel? Last time I checked solar wasn't very effective in the northern latitudes because of solar penetration and weather. How long will a generator last to power said tower? How much fuel would it require? How much juice to push 220 miles through stinky weather? 25 watts ain't gonna likely cut it.
That said, if the right piece of real estate could be had to put the right pieces of hardware upon AND have service capabilities and backup power provided without herculean efforts this may work.
Said calculations are for line-of-sight frequencies over a theoretical horizon. With use of reflected frequencies and some ham radio capability a network could be set up, but I don't know the details, but service would still be spotty because the ionosphere "moves" changing where signals reflect to.
Using multiple systems of varying capacity may be the best approach. Or pay to have a cable placed.
See about running over the pole to Russia
Have fun, good luck
Phil
HSS is awesome, and it can achieve very high tolerances, but the labor gets high. CNC used to be much more sloppy than manual labor. It is a recent achievement to get such high tolerances out of CNC, backlash in the drives screw up precision. Steel was the only cutting material for centuries. It will cut itself. It will need to be resharpened, but try that with a TiN coated carbide cutter.
Most lathes can be used as a small bed horizontal mill. They can also be used as a shaper or single point broach using the feed to push a tool through the metal.
I admit to these methods being in-efficient, but efficiency is not part of the argument.
I also admit to needing a fair amount of manual labor. YES, I HAVE SCRAPED A LATHE BED, under the tutelage of a senior machinist. NOT FUN
Phil
high speed steel or oil hardening steel. I have made and hardened custom woodworking blades quite easily out of both materials. Both materials will cut unhardened tool steels.
Sadly I am unsure of the whole process as I was a sophomore and the student machinist was a senior. I do know that a lot of boring bars I used in high school and collage were simply ground hardened steel. Nothing special at all.
some links:
build your own lathe
a different take
Also my wife was reminding me that her late grandfather built a lathe. It is in her mother's garage. That machine uses an oak frame, not steel, and is powered by a washing machine motor. To change speeds you need to physically remove and change the gears. I have looked at it, but never used it.
Phil
You are talking about the argument for lathes. Metal working lathes are the only machine that can be used, after a fashion, to make ALL of its own components, and even make them to a better tolerance and standard than the machine being used.
I knew a kid in High School who went over the top in Metal Working. He took home 3 lathes and a vertical end mill after his senior year. All but the first lathe were made using the first lathe. The first lathe was build piece by piece by hand. Was pretty awesome stuff.
Phil
Two words,
Physical Inventory
Thanks
Phil
I tend to browse in frames with about 5 to 10 frames open at a time, and a separate window per topic I am browsing. Let's say...one for comics, one for Slashdot and one for whatever I am really doing at the time. My ISP sucks for latency when I am doing things like games, but if I am doing lots of small DL or some large-ish DL (larger than 1228x1024 images) then I get good performance this way and when I am done with each page, the next is usually ready. I have not downloaded any iso's lately to tell you how that goes.
Phil
My brother and I both bought a gameboy, mine new, his used about a year later. My nieces play with them, over the network even! These are TOUGH gear. I've yet to have a laptop survive more than 3 months past the warranty period, or a cell phone perform after 2 years.
Phil
I personally like the little bubble sheets that get filled in. They are commonly called Scantron. Use a disposable paper mask that is pre-punched to match the sheet you mark on, and the voter takes it to the one or more machines for reading them in. Trackable, human readable after a fashion, simple technology that can be easily deployed for very large number of voters. Best part is one machine can service about 100 voting stations as cafeteria tables with dividers are all the voting stations are!
I prefer voting on those than the touch screen units. Especially when I have to wait 20-30 min to get my time to vote, and I am in a relatively small voting district now. When I was in a larger district it was a 1-5 min wait to get you ballot, and a 1-5 min wait to scan in at one of the two machines.
I also find that older folk are afraid of touch screen technology because they feel that it will break, or they are not comfortable with computers to start with.
Let me just sharpen my #2 pencil and vote!
Phil
So when I am talking on my phone (in speaker mode) and preparing my old Coleman lantern for the fishing or hunting trip I guess I'll be flagged as a terrorist because mantles (the glowy tea-bag thingies)are soaked in a radioactive salt. Then they will notice that I spend a week away from civilization, possibly where cell phones don't work much less having electricity. I'm not going to like being arrested by big brother every time I go on vacation.
On the hunting trip they will find I have several firearms in the trunk of my car too. I can feel the love now!
Happily all the places I go have basic plumbing so showers are possible...though you may have to cart water by hand from the pump.
Phil
Apparently according to Dan on Milk.com, purple hair can upset the balance of the universe!
Phil
Try your own MadLibs!
just put an extra socket or 3 on the m-board, and not install all the possible processors! Fine, historically matched processors were necessary, and matched processors will probably be required from now to forever, but this also makes upgrading very reasonable in price, even requiring replacement of existing processors.
Phil
Unless you own a bar. As long as you pay for the tax on your alcohol, and the bank is happy with you, the govt don't care about profit. This is according to my neighbor who operates a bar here in Ohio.
According to my uncle, a part-time artist and full time truck driver, who owned interest in a consignment art store for a while, you can show loss for about 3 years (this may have changed), then he had to show a profit, $1.00. He closed the store the following year. Mostly due to how the other artists were treating the business.
Lastly, a co-worker at a former job was going thru divorce settlement. His ex wanted to keep her business, a bakery, which had his name on the loans. The judge ruled in his favor, closing the bakery because she could not show profit, nor a time frame to start making profit, and ruled the business a hobby.
Of course I am NOT a lawyer, and need to do further research before trying to take a hobby to business status. Yes, I have a hobby that I think can succeed as a business. It may be better to stay a self-supporting hobby, selling off old toys to fund building new toys.
Phil
Hmm, sounds familiar. I have had one full time job and about a ton of part time gigs, including scutt work. Still trying to land that high paying career building thing that can let me retire.
Next stop is to go back to school, but I haven't decided what to study yet...
Phil
At least you don't work in the recreational marine industry. ITT/Jabsco reports over 60% compliance with their rebates (sadly I have no reference other than several reps word) Garmin, Raymarine, and Dometic report similar values. Across all retail the value is around 10% or less.
Phil
The oil companies will still have their slice. Electric vehicles still need oil based lubricants and such, even though they are smaller amounts, and even synthetic lubricants were natural oil at one point...
Phil
My guess is that his "lucky" system is like my old P133 system. I had 2 MB video ram with 2 MB upgrade capability(really HOT stuff for the time!) Small potatoes I know, but it was dedicated video ram. That system was on the PCI bus, and a circa 1995 system. If that machine were still alive a low grade web server would be about all it could reasonably be expected to do. Set up as headless I would want to have that ram useful, even if it was diminished in capacity compared to other swap spaces.
Machines from that era were not capable of using system ram as video memory. That became popular shortly after in about '98 or '99. My understanding is those machines still had a small piece of dedicated video ram at the GPU, but could be assigned more ram from main memory.
Just my $.02. Hope I got my history right.
Phil
I updated IE on my wifes computer (M$ xp), as she needs it for work, before the service pack that included ie7 in it was released, wga broke and no updates could be installed till I followed this voodoo ritual of purging I found on the Microsoft support site. This removed IE7 so I could install updates and the new service pack which included IE7. I'd call it bass ackwards but that would be an insult to all bass and bass fisherman out there.
Removing wga probably improves stability overall, I just tried checking the version of IE on this machine and it crashed IE!
Phil
In the store I work at the censored versions of the songs CAN and ARE played at work over the PA. My co-workers bring in their Ipods or laptops, but have to meet a rather strict set of rules for their play lists. The truth is the set of rules is taken directly from what is allowed on daytime radio and flavored to the likings of corporate and the customers. In fact some music has been obtained in both censored and uncensored forms so they can listen to the music at work. It has also been mentioned that some censored songs are better than the uncensored version (Adam Sandler's "Pice of Sh*HONK* Car") I am not upset that some companies choose to sell only censored forms of music. The uncensored versions are available elsewhere and it creates and maintains a nitch market that keeps smaller businesses going.
Phil
Internal combustion engines are also best when operated at one speed. It's called the power curve, there are actually several for every engine based on torque, horsepower, and efficiency. Strangely when set for any condition the peak of performance RPM is very similar in all cases. The same is true for turbine engines, but the curve is more like a spike when plotted against RPM.
The ICE is used in all sorts of machines, and when trying to eek every last effort out of the fuel it burns, you end up operating it at the best RPM and designing the rest of the drive to that condition.
De-coupling the engine from the drive-train is old news, they were doing the super cars and trucks like that 20 years ago. I wish I had the reference, but it CAN increase fuel efficiency under most conditions because the engine is operating as efficient as possible.
Phil