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I think that figuring out a way to make cheap yet pressure reliable hatches is going to be the defining design criteria for all my AUV designs. Shifting the CO2 tank to outside the hull lets me use smaller hatches, which will be easier to build.

This “Cyclops” design is my experimenting with that shift. There are two tanks shown, a 24oz and a 12oz. Tank size will drive a lot of the design – so I have taken to having both visible when sketching out a hull design.

I’m starting to think I need to introduce some more separation of all these variable before I start building – so I may do spin up a design with a smaller hull to work out technique and construction details.

So first – let me say – oh my lord the Finnish people know how to make a good doughnut! This was black licorice on a cake doughnut with black coffee. The combination was awesome. The Finns have what is basically a really nice doughnut – in the same way that a Portia and a Volkswagen are both cars.

Anyway – given that there had been a bit of a cultural gaff between me an Klaus regarding Americans and bringing doughnuts to work on your first day, I figured I would pick some up for the office as a joke.

Moving your machine shop is like a reverse barn building, only in this case your friends show up and start taking things apart. In this picture Joel and Ben are about to lift the head off of my mill.

It was a long weekend – but we broke down my machine shop and moved it 1200 kilometers into Ben’s shop. Having shops and a lab is awesome, but they do sort of keep one foot nailed to your home base. Ben is being nice and taking care of the machining equipment for a few years, enabling me to be more mobile and do some traveling.

Ben recorded the move – so we have this video.

If this all seems like some high testosterone weekend – it was quite the opposite. I spent as much time making flowers from gravel on the driveway with one of Ben’s daughters as working on the equipment. Sure – that was mostly so ben could work on things undistracted, but I actually had a lot of fun. Getting older is both fun and weird.

Dam you farmers union iced coffee, despite my best efforts you drew me into your madness. Even 8 years later I see something like this on the shelf and think, maybe this is the one, something like you that I can get outside of Australia. I get my hopes up. Then I have it, and its just bad coffee and milk.

All these years later and I am still getting my hopes up when I see something like this. Dam you Farmers Union. Dam you. You are liquid evil.

The big improvement was replacing the surgical tubing with fish tank tubing from the pet store. A chemist friend tipped me to the fact that with just a little Vaseline, the fish tank tubing will slide onto 6mm OD glass tubing we are using and make a great seal. That seemed to work great, was cheap, and was much easier to work with. I also increased the inverted NH3 catch flask size from 250mL to 1000mL. That should make for a better looking fountain.

In order to detect when the flask was full of NH3 I used a clothespin to clip a litmus paper inside the flask stem. Last time we just bombed the flask with way more gaseous NH3 than needed. It worked, but was inelegant. The idea with the paper was filling the flask to have just enough gaseous NH3 to work. Turns out the paper is hard to read when reacting to gaseous NH3.

It turned out we filled up the flask partially with ammonia – but nowhere near as much as we needed to draw enough vacuum to trigger the fountain, just enough to trigger the litmus paper. The whole point of these projects is to get a better feel for physical chemistry, and practices at the lab work. So I did learn a lot, but it was still frustrating.

The Makiwara has done more to clean up my strikes than anything else. It regularly teaches me new thigns and shows me how things I thought I understood were wrong.

Well karate has a number of finger and nuckle strikes that I have only recently gotten to the point where I have added them to my stiking practice. Only problem is even soft strikes just killed my fingers. My sensei showed me a neat trick to work on my finger strikes. Basically you hang a punching target from the makiwara, then do your strikes against the pad. After a few months I was able to work up to striking the naked makiwara.

The big problem I am trying to figure out currently is my pinky finger hanging out from my hand during the strike. It does not seem to impact the stike, but I cant help thinking that having the one finger separated from my hand has the potential for it to get hung up on the harget or broken.

Now that I am regularly practicing Nukite, I can see how I am doing it wroge all over the place. Pinan Shodan for example has a Nukite strike to the throat, and I can now see I was just thrusting with a knife hand during the kata. My finger position was all wrong. So now I need to fix my Kata and my strikes.

I am working on a few side projects at the moment and took a few days off from thing a day. I’still am shooting to wrap up the experiment on thing #30. So to get back to it – things number 20, 21, and 22 were more drawer liners and look just like things 13, 14, and 15. Unfortunately I have a lot of drawers that I want to make liners for, so I am chipping away at them.

Thing number 23 is another tool rack. I have been building a couple projects that all use hex nuts, and are spread over multiple benches in the shop. Figured I would make a traveling rack for hex wrenches.

This is the first time I used ball end wrenches, and I have to say – I really love them. Specifically, they let you drive the hex nuts from an angle of up to 30 degrees. As mechanism get more complex that’s a really sweet benefit.