To have a goal and miss it is not failure. To not have goals & dreams; or worse yet, to have them and not strive for their attainment, however, is IMHO a failure. To spectate your way through life, sitting back & doing little but pointing out whatever faults you can find in someone else, does not make you look any better in anyone’s eyes – not even your own I might suppose. With the possible exception of yourself, no one of any intelligence is deceived by your misdirection – your “look at their mistakes and not mine”, but a rising tide lifts all ships.

Unless you’re “a natural”, to be good at something you must first have to be willing to be bad at it, to realize that you’re going to make mistakes and learn from them. Nobody really wants to make them, but mistakes are just that, mis-takes. They’re part of the learning process and as long as we’re willing to learn from them they’ll serve their useful purpose. As long as we keep trying to bury them, we’ll continue to think they never existed, repeat them, and we’ll not get from them that which was intended. Continue Reading »

Five weeks of a planned maintenance outage at one of our powerplants crammed into <10 mins of video. It’s how we roll.

Enjoy!

As is the case with most diversions, we meet all kinds of people when customizing vehicles to suit our own tastes – from creative people of character and substance to the pretenders who pathologically lie to take credit for work they haven’t done, speaking of how good they used to be when they were in Astronaut School or whatever – and I have had recent contact with both extremes, the latter helping me to appreciate the former all that much more.

Norm, a man whom I’ve written about previously, belongs to the “creative & substantive” group of individuals and with his permission I’m appreciatively able to share one of his current projects.

Having conveyed his mental picture to me in the form of a scale model ’51 GMC, I’ve got to admit some admiration here for not only his inventive vision but also the flat-out cajones it takes to start and persevere through an undertaking of this scope. I know this man capable of seeing this project through to its successful completion so I’ll let him take it from here through some excerpts of his emails:

Hi,

I thought that you might be interested in a few photos of my ’51 GMC truck project. I’m doing a 3″ chop and 4″ section. I’m also lowering the roof crown about 2″. All this is resulting in having to lower the floor about 5″ to have at least a little head room. I’m also cutting the cab crossways and extending the doors 4″. The whole affair is on an ’80 Buick chassis.

The spots that you see around the windows are from drilling out the spot welds that held the inner shell to the outer skin. I used a spot weld cutter like a 3/8″ hole saw and works pretty well. The problem is that they put a million spot welds in the truck. The dashboard was welded to the windshield frame in the same manner.

I took the firewall out for the section job. I am also thinking about putting in a new one that is properly recessed for the giant engine that is going into the truck. In fact putting the engine/trans in is the first step in putting the truck back together. I want to be sure that the floor and firewall fit around the running gear.

While grinding on the welds I had plenty of time to think of various things. Things like what is accuracy anyway?  I read a book awhile back on building the Dobson telescope and he was making mirrors in his back yard that were accurate to one half of the wave length of visible light. He was only using hand made forms and abrasive compound.

Anyway I call this one vice grip envy.

This is where I left off the other day, it is actually starting to look like a vehicle part.

I have a bunch of other pictures if there is any particular detail that you want to see more of.

Enjoy,

Norm

I started shaping the wind turbine blades yesterday, after having this project systematically knocked down the “things to be done” list. There are only so many hours in a day and we need to be intentional on how we spend those hours, the hours turning into days, weeks, years, a lifetime and a legacy.

Thanks to the  medium of the Internet and blogging, you can tell at a glance when was the  last time I did something on this, but I had to look back to find out I haven’t touched it much since June of this year. Those hours I just wrote of quickly turned into months.

Having some successful experience cutting large and small props for my hovercraft some years ago, I originally started cutting these blades to shape immediately after confirming the alternator did, indeed, generate useful alternating current. But then I set out to find a quicker, easier way than the last time to make them a reality.  I wanted a more effortless way to remove everything that didn’t look like blades from the blocks of wood, “roughing them in” if you will, the correct shape being finalized with the rotary sander. The hunt was on for a wood-cutting bandsaw that could handle 8″ tall material.

I won’t say here that I was diligent in my search, enjoyably working through the outage projects at work, laying hardwood floor in the house, etc; but five months later, I look back through the realization that if I had started cutting these out by hand back then, I would’ve been done by now. Ever been there? Maybe with saving, investing or from some other seemingly unrelated position in life?  It all ties together. So I started.

Thanks in no small part to the Wright Brothers, we can now take it as a simple fact that the back surface of our blades will need to have larger surface areas than the fronts to create low pressure areas behind, helping them to “pull” through the oncoming wind, increasing unit efficiency.

The fronts then, should be flat but tapered from “leading end” to “trailing edge” into the wind; the backs a functional airfoil tapering to a thin, but not fragile, tip. And since this machine will be safely anchored to my backyard, I’m going to use some simple design generalities and a few accepted aerodynamic structural “rules of thumb”. No need to worry about “accelation vs. cruise”, “climb rate”, or any of the multitudinous other considers otherwise taken into account when designing propellers as long as : the tips don’t go supersonic (mine ~60mph @ cut-in, calc here), they hold together in high winds, and are relatively efficient. Other efficiencies could be better made in the machine itself (and will be on the next), rather than spending more resources on a lesser gain here. “Think: ROI”.

Going by hand, you can see how far I got with the roughing-in last night:

• I’ve tapered the backs of the 3 blades (where the airfoil will be) from the “root” (part closest to hub) to “tip” (farthest from hub)
• Marked out “kerf marks” on all three fronts (the flat side) and cut one to check my “leading edge” to “trailing edge” taper.

I still have much more to do and will be happy to share the particulars of the design and “what’s coming & why” with anyone interested, but parts came in for the ’58 and I’m going to run out and pick them up while the boys are in school.

More on this soon…