Posted by Jerry on February 24th, 2006 — Posted in History, Journal, Steam, Technology
Now here is a site to see – The Steam Car Club of Great Britain has galleries of images, a UK steam carr register of all known steam cars in Britain – even a for sale and wanted notices section! Yes you could buy a 1903 Locomobile for a mere STG 40,000, or a 1919 Stanley steamer for US$42,500 – oh well perhaps if I have a big lottery win 🙂
There are also galleries of pics from the London-Brighton veteran car run
One of my favourite sections is that on the Field steam motorcycle – complete with a quicktime video of the bike in action. The page lists the rather complex starting procedure for the bike and has some great photos. There is even a later version of the bike that was filmed doing the wall of death – and that means a speed of at least 50mph (about 85kph)
This is a great site and one I keep coming back to 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on January 29th, 2006 — Posted in History, Journal, Technology
Leonardo da Vinci was known for many things – his wonderful paintings, his anatomical science, his optics, his flying machines, his war machines etc – but not so many know he also contributed many innovations to textile technology.
Bear in mind that textiles was one of the leading industries in the Renaissance and played a central role in many European economies at that time.
In addition to innovative mechanical looms and hand looms, Leonardo designed bobbin winders that evenly distributed thread across the bobbins to avoid tangles or high-spots.
He also designed teaseling machines for carding fabric; and a machine for doubling silk – the silk road had been opened to the Orient by then and Europe had a rapidly expanding silk production industry; and a continuous teaseling machine for large bolts of fabric.
So he was clearly as interested and curious about how to solve problems for textile workers as much as for other occupations.
cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on January 9th, 2006 — Posted in Technology, Woodwork
Happy new year everyone! Time to review one of my new toys – the GMC 1HP dust collector.
I was due to run some fence palings through the Ryobi 13″ thicknesser for a friend who makes picture frames, so it seemed a good test for the GMC dust extractor. My earlier attempts to keep the dust and chips from the thicknesser from forming a large pile of chips on the floor and a thick cloud of dust in the workshop had only met with marginal success.
My Ryobi thicknesser did not come with a dust extraction port (the new ones do from last year). So I had fitted the dust port from a Sherwood 13″ thicknesser – it fits perfectly (purchased from Timbecon as an accesssory at last year’s Working with Wood show in Canberra). And I had cobbled up an adapter to the shop-vac but that had been only partially successful – when the bin filled all dust extraction ceased!
Enter the GMC dust extractor. It came in large box with some simple assembly to do – fit the handle, the casters – which do help with moving the 20kg machine around – and the collector hose and bag.
First the good points – set up was easy with a clear well illustrated instruction booklet. The construction seems pretty solid – although the 4″ (100mm) hose seems very thin walled and looks as though it would hole easily on a snag. The induction motor is very quiet compared with the shop vac, and there was little discernable difference in sound whether the motor was under load or not – ie whether or not the hose was constricted. The bag is a good size for hobby use and is made from a tight weave polyester, and is rated for 30 micron particle size.
What this means is that it will do a great job of clearing the chips and coarse sawdust, but the fine stuff that damages your lungs will go straight through the bag – you can see it as a fine cloud when you start the machine up – so keep the mask on for personal protection. GMC would do well to offer a 4 micron felt bag as an accessory – but I suspect the carbatec or sherwood ones would fit perfectly – and will be on my shopping list.
The hose was a good fit on the 100mm extracator port on the thicknesser and the machine did a very respectable effort at capturing probably 98 percent of the dust and chips – and it did so for a good hour without getting warm.
Summary – this is a good hobby machine for those with limited workshop space who need a solid, but light and portable dust extractor for occasional hobby use. It does not have the capacity or airflow (measured in cubic feet per minute – cfm) of a 2-3 horspower machine, but it represents a good effort for GMC’s entry into dust extractors. I would definitely fit a carba-tec or sherwood felt bag to capture the finer dust, and contrary to the brochure I would not be using this for more than one machine at a time. But at half the price of its competitors (under AUS$100), this is a great accessory for any hobbyist woodworker.
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Posted by Jerry on September 18th, 2005 — Posted in Journal, Music, Technology
Well, if the blog has been a bit quiet lately, it’s not because life has been quiet! After five years with the graphite iMac the technology is starting to show its age – or rather sound its age. The disturbing whining sound coming from the hard drive made us think about the way we have continually pushed our home technology until it is well past its use-by date, by upgrading RAM and buying ever bigger hard drives. So the time had come.
We actually went shopping for a big hard drive so we could back up the formerly big one and still have room for growth. That was quickly solved when we found the price of 500GB drives were down to about half what the 250GB drive had cost us before. But we couldn’t easily work out whether itwas the external or the internal drive that was the problem. Hmmm time to look at other computers.
With our interests well into the graphics and music software, there was really no comparison to make – it had to be another mac, and then it came down to which model would be right for us.
The result was a bit of a dent in the plastic fantastic but we walked out with a couple of boxes – a 20-inch G5 iMac (big flat screen) with 1.5GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive and DVD burner built in. And an Epson stylys photoR210 printer – the latter because we can use it to print directly onto CD/RW – good for the Band’s demo CDs.
And it matches the electric fiddle! While the iLife GarageBand software looks good, I chose to upgrade to Mackie’s Tracktion2 for recording. The screen size is great for recording – everything is a good size. And the processor is quite a bit faster than the G3 iMac – and the whole lot a far cry from the machines we started on – the 512k mac and the mac plus. Those and the color Classic and the PowerMac all still work – each year we fire them all up. I reckon we need to start a tradition of Mac Day and fire up all the old macs on the anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh back in 1984!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on July 23rd, 2005 — Posted in Technology, Travel
For this latest trip to Copenhagen, I managed to put together the closest yet to my ideal travel technology. Interestingly, it is not all the latest gizmos, but stuff that has been around for a while. The photo shows all except the camera (which was taking the photo) that I took on my latest trip.
Of course the squared paper Moleskine notebook and Waterman fountain pen (it doesn’t leak on aircraft) are indispensible. But then there’s the other stuff…
First the Psion 5mx PDA. Despite its age (made in 2000) it is still the only one with a really type-able keyboard, and aside from the lack of wifi or USB port it is as capable as most notebook computers – without the battery/security hassles at airports. I can just walk through with it in my carry-on bag and no-one bats an eyelid. On the plane I can type up blog entries, notes about the trip, build web pages, do my accounts – and it even doubles as a travel alarm clock. The wide screen gives me a full page width of typing, or a reasonable version of a web page using the Opera web browser. I can also update my www.20six.co.uk/ijerry blog with the sms function, by typing the message in the psion, then using the infra red port, connect to the phone and send an sms/email to the blog. The Psion is also very light on batteries – two AA batteries will last a good fortnight when travelling – but I take a mains adapter on trips for use in hotel rooms. The other minor drawback over a notebook computer is the lack of photoshop for resizing images or playing with brightness and contrast, or adjusting image file size. But the Psion is pretty close to ideal for my purposes. The great news is that these wonderful machines look like coming back on the market, thanks to POS Ltd in London.
The Sagem V-55 phone using Vodaphone also has a camera. The photos from the camera can be beamed via the IR port to the psion for saving on the CompactFlash card. Once there I can name the photo and integrate it into a web page. The phone is GPRS-capable and can use GSM roaming when overseas to stay in touch. I can send photos direct from the phone to the blog (via MMS), or send them to an email address by phone. I have a standard plug-in charger and a car charger – I take the latter if I’m going to be doing much driving.
The Canon A75 camera provides 3.2 megapixel photos, as well as video with sound, and saves these to a compact flash card – commonality of storage medium is very useful! Yes I can take the camera card and use it in the psion – again for building web pages, or for integrating into related documents. The camera uses four AA batteries, and I always keep a spare set in the camera bag. These can be charged up in the hotel room overnight.
On this trip I picked up the ultimate storage device – an Apacer ‘Disk steno’ CP-200 travel CD/DVD burner that doesn’t need a computer – it will burn CDs direct from a compact flash card (as well as SD cards, USB minidrives, sony memory sticks etc) and it can do so on batteries or mains – so once the camera card is full or I want to back up a whole web site from the psion – as well as all my notes and finances, I just pop the CF card into the CD burner and drop in a fresh CD/R and burn a disk. The thing writes multiple sessions and verifies the burn afterwards, so with some confidence you can wipe the CF card ready for more photos, or at least have some stable media if you are worried about losing data through the airport security screening process. It’s also a great way to pass the time between planes – just burn a couple of CDs in the airport lounge! And you can review the CD images on the hotel TV using the supplied connectors – so you know if the images have burnt correctly.
The whole lot fits easily into my carry-on bag, along with a change of clothes, toiletries bag, a couple of adapter plugs and 4-way powerpoint so one adapter can take four Australian devices, a battery charger, a couple of 256MB CF cards and some blank CD/Rs.
At airports I walk right past people struggling to remove batteries and laptops, and when the pilot asks for electronic devices to be switched off the psion is instant off and instant on – no waiting for hard drives to spin down! And the whole kit, including camera, Psion, CD burner and phone weigh collectively less than almost all the notebook laptops on the market. And in the worst case if I am caught short with low batteries, most places sell AA batteries that will get me through.
And that’s about it – keeping it simple, using reliable technology with common batteries and common storage media seems to pay off when travelling – and with the CD burner you can take as many photos as you like, burn them back at the hotel and start fresh each day with a clean CF card.
travel safe folks
cheers
Jerry
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