My gallbladder surgery is coming up fast. I’ll be going in for pre-op testing this Monday and the actual procedure will be early Wednesday morning. Even though I’m glad that it’ll finally be out of me on Wednesday, the thought of the surgery is starting to mess with my mind. Last time when I had the surgery set, I had just gone through the worst pain in my life and would have been willing to undergo emergency surgery right then and there. But now, since I’ve had to wait with the surgery, it seems I’m less willing to jump on the operating table. I hope I can keep myself calm enough these next few days…
Yes, you read that right. From the same guys that made the solar powered hot water system I mentioned yesterday devised a system that takes only sunlight to melt glass (and do a bunch of other things). Take a look:
He’s using a massive fresnel lens to focus the sunlight to one extremely hot spot which is powerful enough to melt glass. I may just have to get one of those lenses for the fun of it…
Now this is an interesting project. Take a look at this video:
It shows how you can harness the sun to make hot water using just a PVC pipe cut in half and the inside covered with a reflective material. It’s an ingenious yet utterly simple solution. I may just have to try that out later.
With the idea of adding an electric motor to my four wheel pedal cart, I got to thinking that I could make that project even greener if I were to charge the batteries using renewable power instead of from the power grid which is predominately coal powered. I looked around the internet to see what my options were and discovered that wind power would be the best as it’s almost always windy here. After searching a bit more, I found quite a few tutorials on how to build a wind turbine from scratch, even including the alternator. This has me quite excited as I’ll not only be able to do something green but also to play with the welder I’ll be buying shortly. I’ll be adding more info on this project within the next few weeks.
After thinking about adding an electric motor to my four wheel pedal cart yesterday, I decided that to do that kind of project I really need a welder. After looking around, I found a nice 140 amp MIG welder on eBay for around $300. I should be able to do lots of interesting things with a welder and metalworking than what I can do with wood like what I have used in the past. Of course, now I need to teach myself how to weld…
So I have this four wheel pedal powered cart that I got about 9 months or so ago. It’s a pretty nice cart, but the only problem is that it is quite difficult to pedal the cart on anything put absolutely level ground. So my next project may hopefully be adding an electric motor and batteries to the cart so I can easily drive it around. But, instead of just riding, I’m planning on attaching a camera mount to it so I can use it film stuff as well. I should have more details of the plan by tomorrow.
Today I decided to finish up the camera dolly project by building the track. The track consists of two aluminum tubes six feet long and four 1″x3″ pieces of wood cut to around 20 inches. I attached the two tubes to the four pieces of wood by first drilling a large hole in the top of the tube to allow the head of a screw and the drill bit to pass into the inside of the tube and then a smaller hole directly opposite of the larger hole to allow the screw to pass into the wood. In between the tubes and the wood planks, there are four washers. Two rubber washers sandwiched between two metal ones to allow further vibration dampening. And since there is only one screw attaching each tube to each plank of wood, the whole track easily collapses allowing easy transport. The final result is quite amazing. It rolls extremely smoothly, and if I needed to, the track can be expanded.
Since today has been quite rainy and I need to work outside to build the track of the camera dolly, I decided to come up with a system that will hold the tripod securely to the moving platform. Here’s what I came up with:
I used three 1.5″ “L” brackets per foot of the tripod. Two “L” brackets are positioned on one side of the foot slightly bent so it can cup the tripod foot, while the other bracket is on the opposite side with a bolt drilled through it. I tapped the hole for the bolt in the bracket so it allows you to tighten or loosen it on the tripod foot. The nylon stop nuts are there only as a grip to allow me to twist the bolt. With a few twists, this setup holds the tripod very securely and should prevent any accidents to happen to my expensive camera rig.
I did some shooting for some commercials the other day with the 35mm DOF adapter. However, I found all of the dolly shots I did, with the dolly that attaches to my tripod, to be very shaky. There seems to be a couple of reasons for this. First, the optical image stabilizer in my Canon GL2 behaves badly with the adapter so I have to turn it off. Second, the adapter adds a considerable amount of weight to the camera rig causing the cheap dolly rig to vibrate even more. So I had enough of that and decided to build myself a real camera dolly with a metal track. Here’s what I got so far:
As you can tell, I’ve built only the dolly platform. The track will be made out of the two aluminum pipes you see below the dolly. Interestingly enough, the dolly will roll very smoothly on the pipes, even with the pipes just on the ground and not attached to each other.
So here’s how I built the platform. The platform itself is 2 feet square made out of three 2 foot long 2″x6″ and four 2 foot long 1″x6″. The outer two 2″x6″ have had 45 degree rip cuts along each edge to allow easy attachment of four “L” brackets that hold each set of wheels at 90 degrees to each other. This allows the wheels to easily roll on a round pipe. The eight wheels are actually skateboard wheels usually used on old school style skateboards. These types of wheels are ideal because they are very soft and cushion the platform. To attach the wheels to the “L” brackets, I first drilled two holes in each bracket and attached the wheels with 5/16″ bolts and nylon lock nuts. I also added skateboard “speed” washers on each side of the wheels so the wheel or skateboard bearings wouldn’t touch the bracket or nut allowing the wheels to rolly freely. All in all, the platform wasn’t all that hard to build, and it rolls very smoothly. I should hopefully be able to build the track this weekend, and I may play with building some form of clamps on the platform to hold the tripod’s feet so it doesn’t fall off.
So today I decided to check out the local book store and picked up this book called “Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics.“ I read only the first chapter so far, but I must say it’s a great book. It humorously points out the amazingly bad physics in most blockbuster films with some nice technical detail including real mathematics. I hope to maybe leverage the info in this book to make very realistic films in the long run.
