I decided to watch the Discovery Science channel a bit today and saw a show called “Punkin Chunkin.” It was about the pumpkin tossing contest in Delaware showing all the insanely large pumpkin tossing devices including air canons and catapults. I have a few words about this show: I am so building my own punkin chunkin device! And I got a great design concept that will be completely different…world domination will be in my grasp!
This is an interesting concept. Homesteading is basically living off the land that you own. You produce and farm everything you need to live right from your own ground and not buy stuff from a store. Living that kind of life, in my humble opinion, is very noble. Your footprint on this earth would be minimized just to your property and that would be about it. Obviously it would take quite lot of external resources to setup a system like this as you would need ways to generate power and equipment to do the farming. However, after that, you’d be able to be completely self-sufficient until the equipment fails or something else goes wrong that needs external resources. But, I can definitely see that time frame last around a decade or so.
This has been a fairly quiet day. Not much going on as I await for my surgery in a few days. Besides that, I do wonder how the elections this Tuesday are going to end.
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.
