Laser test

Failure

You're going to fuck it up. We both know that you have no idea what you're doing. Success is about coming up with a strategy that can tolerate what a colossal failure you are.

For instance, 'relentlessness' is a solid strategy for engineering. You will put the part in backwards and fry the whole circuit. It will teach you to design more resilient circuits and add fail safes. You will weld the part on upside down. And the moment you do, drop everything and go out to get a grinder. If you waste even a minute thinking about what this means for the rest of the project, you will fail at this project. If you do this often, it's why you fail often. You can ask questions like 'why did I do that' in the shower or when you're staring at the ceiling after sex.

'Completing projects' is not a realistic strategy for engineering. For starters 'finishing' isn't a goal you can realistically take action on or achieve. You don't know what it's going to take to finish. You're never built this device before. You're learning as you go. You don't know what you're doing, stop expecting to have benefits like 'predictability' or 'quality'. You will not because you're a fucking novice at this. And if you're not a novice at this task, it's time to stop being a human factory, that's what machines are for.

Focusing on completion when you're doing work you haven't done a million times before will only demoralize you when you watch your self-imposed release date and intended design slip and slip from under your feet. It will demoralize you. Expecting success will make you feel like a failure when you have no idea what you're doing. Which is exactly the position you're in when you're learning. So don't expect success. Expect progress.

Stop trying to predict. Stop trying to 'finish'. You don't know how to do that. Just make progress. If you make continuous progress, finishing will coming on it's own.

Man fork

My friends and I were talking about grill tools. There's a claim to be made that grill tools are too classy, too costly, too fragile, and too fucking small.

Having not thought about the problem at all, I don't see why I can't make one tool that handles all my camping-cooking-fire needs for less than $10 and an hour's work.




I've always found it's important to gather requirements by having outlandish fantasies of greatness.

I don't want to have to change tools between killing zombies and roasting their bodies in the heat of a post-apocalyptic office-tower conflagration. It'll need to save me time while I'm drawing "don't worry, I got this shit" in fire-lit letters on the abandoned highway with their smoldering bodies. And then I'll want to use the same tool for cooking bacon and pancakes in the morning for the gun-slinging nuclear scientist after we begin the re-population process in the back of a tank.

So I'm imagining kind of like a really big fork. With, eh, I guess a spatula on the other end. Strong enough that you could play baseball with it.

So what do we have lying around here to work this out with? Some 6"x20ish" 16 gauge steel plate, 4'x1"x1/8" angle steel, and a 2'x1/4" steel rod.



Of course we're going to need a lot of bad-ass industrial equipment to turn that pile of steel into awesome. Moments like this are why I live with a 90Amp MIG welder in my kitchen.

But first, let's start with the band-saw next to the couch. I'll only need a few cuts but they're going to be a bitch to do without this machine. If you're about to do this holding a chunk of steel over a cardboard box with a hack saw... then I know exactly how you feel because I did that shit for like 10 years. It sucks. If you're going to get one metal-working tool... well fuck, you should actually probably get the welder because no amount of elbow grease is going to melt that fucking steel. But if you get two tools... get some vice grips. Eventually get a band saw. These things are a fucking there-is-no-god-but-engineers-saved-my-ass-send.




It's a good thing the neighbors play a lot of video games because it makes me feel better about the 10 minutes of deafening metal-on-metal screech at 7:00 on a Sunday night.




So now we've got the parts we need. Time to haul the grinder out on the deck. If I'm going to build a cooking utensil capable of felling a horseman, it'll have to be razor sharp. Hell, I might even use the 'fine-grain' cutting wheel. For the pronged end, I'm thinking just two spikes with 30ish deg points. For the flipper/shovel, a light bevel will do fine and maybe even rounding out the edges. Don't want to rip those fluffy flap jacks while the lady is watching. It'll be important to show some finesse after the tough and tumble I showed her up against that nuclear weapon I've been carting around. (It was a perfect choice for an engagement present.)



Now it's time to get some weld on. The 16 gauge steel can't take much heat so I'll have to turn it down a little. Also, to hell with clamping things down. It's a man-fork, not a microscope. Just put the pieces nearby each other in the configuration needed and paint with the welder. Sure it'll be a few millimeters off but that hardly matters. Besides, this whole thing is supposed to take less than an hour.

Sent some sparks around, quenched it in the nearby snow, and now I've got a real ass-kicker. One cheap and easy to make tool that will kick the ass of any store-bought grill utensil.

Go forth and fabricate!

The table moves

Simple optics: I'm still doing it wrong

I did some approximate calculations and picked the really nice (expensive) laser lenses I needed.




I drilled out some plates to mount them on since they were both super fucking small. A little super glue and they were on there perfectly without messing up the light-transmitting surfaces or even having to touch them with human hands.

Then I disassembled the laser gun and used little stand up clamps to hold them in approximately the right places.

And it totally didn't work. The light was more or less collimated but it was so out of focus it just kind of spread out on it's own. It is clearly not going to work this way. But I didn't know for a while why it wasn't working.

I noticed that the website I bought lenses from also sold duplets (just two lenses affixed to each other). I also noticed that these duplets, which I'd gotten one of in the scope and one in the original projector, seem to work far better than any other lens I have. But when I look at diagrams of how they bend the light it doesn't seem to be any different than any other lens.

So I did some root investigation. I bought some simple 5mW lasers and shined them through the duplets.



It seems like the real strength of the duplets to me is actually their tolerance for poor placement. When you shine a light through them at not quite 90 degrees and centered the lens on the far side just corrects the odd angles the lens on the near side made.





In the case of the laser, it came through clear even when I was off by a bit. Using a single lens or a lens duplet I placed myself it would always be skewed out of focus because my placement wasn't just-fucking-right.

By contrast the manufactured duplet always focused the laser on the other size like one would expect even when I did it at a bad angle or offset from center.

At least that's my theory. So I did some more approximations and bought a duplet that I think will be better for this than the ones I have.

My table has 99 problems. None of them are related to women because it's a table.

For starters, I've got the main shelf structure together. A few problems I've run into:

I didn't consider that the welded-on shelves would get in the way of the rollers. They do. I noticed after I'd only put on a few of them. A little angle grinding solved the ones I had on there. For the others, I just had then stick out the back a bit instead. This caused them to block the cross bracing in some areas. More angle grinding and some hack-saw.



The shelf that slides up and down needs to be put on by sliding it underneath the shelf structure. Unfortunately each side of the shelf structure weighs about 90lbs. They're just within my limit to easily maneuver. I believe I'm too weak to safely tilt a constructed setup backward so I can put the movable shelves on. I also don't believe the cross bracing would survive this. The shelves must be put on and then the main structure assembled. That's a bitch.

The cross bracing is generally too weak for how much the structure as a whole weighs. There's nothing that keeps it from bowing out. It'll have to be replaced with cut angle iron.




I've mounted the motor on the moving shelf. It does run but it makes a terrible racket. I need to run it more and investigate what exactly is being so damn loud.

During some light stress testing I also had one of the pegs for the rollers just fall off. It looked the welds were bad. I took an old piece I'd done as a test before doing this one and took a hammer to the pegs. They all bent instead of broke off. From that experiment I concluded that this piece was done badly but the process in general was good. I re-welded all the pegs on the existing piece and attached a new one in place of the one that fell off.




I've mounted the winch on the top piece. This just sits across both shelves. There's nothing particularly wrong with it except that I had to make pieces that kept it from tipping over and I didn't make them long enough the first time because I wasn't thinking.

The new workspace: Submitted plans to the city.

Google docs link to plans

There's a process called 'intake' in which the city reviews the plans with you waiting there so they can assure you have at least all the documents and basic data you need and they can reject you right away if you're totally effed it.

During our intake, the woman reviewing our plans actually brought over her manager just so he could marvel at how ridiculous it was.

The planning phase alone was about $15k-20k. The city's share of that for permits and reviews was around $7k. We'll just have to wait and see if our plans are accepted by the city. If so, construction will begin around April. I'll still need to give more information about interior before we'll have a quote on how much the whole thing will cost.