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Building and Breaking

  • Derailed Part 2 Building

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    Tue 16 February 2021

    Cleaning and repairing an old Simplex Derailleur round 2 getting rid of some rust

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  • Derailed Part 1 Building

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    Fri 12 February 2021

    Cleaning and repairing an old Simplex Derailleur round 1: Disassembly and degreasing

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  • Threads Building

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    Mon 16 November 2020

    Sharing a satisfying effort to fix a hat and a glove with a little sewing

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  • Gears and Batteries Building

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    Wed 04 November 2020

    How small can we get with a functional gear part on a FDM printer? What about packing in extra batteries?

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  • Fixing a Broken Bag Clip Building

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    Tue 03 November 2020

    Designing and printing a replacement clip for a backpack

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  • Working with small gears Building

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    Sat 24 October 2020

    How small can we get with a functional gear part on a FDM printer?

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  • Undoing High Impulse Disassembly Breaking

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    Tue 29 September 2020

    Fixing a seat support that cracked (shattered?) in a crash

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  • Taking Notes in Jupyter Notebooks Building

    Sun 21 June 2020

    Taking notes in Markdown (LaTeX?) and Python

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  • What I'm Reading 2020-05-19 Building

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    Tue 19 May 2020

    Blogs, Books and Podcasts (technically listening, I know)

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  • Restomod Day 28 Building

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    Mon 18 May 2020

    Two more iterations on the battery cover / side skirts

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  • Restomod Day 27 Building

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    Sun 17 May 2020

    Iterating on designs for a more "aero" replacement battery cover and the rear bumper

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  • Restomod Day 26 Building

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    Fri 15 May 2020

    Today was focused on quickly iterating to getting a functional rear bumper designed for extra airflow.

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  • Restomod Day 25 Building

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    Thu 14 May 2020

    Today was mostly focused on how the rear bumper fits on the body

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  • Restomod Day 24 Building

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    Fri 08 May 2020

    The first order of business for the day was printing the new aero front bumper. The end result was somewhat flimsy and didn't print well, but it's a great start. It's probably the least manufacturable of the part designs by traditional methods so far, making it perfect for 3D printing once the print is dialed in.

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  • Restomod Day 23 Building

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    Thu 07 May 2020

    The first round of chassis dyno printing is done. During initial testing I noticed that the car did not track straight, so I added guides to some of the rollers so that the car would be encouraged to remain centered on the dyno and not roll off into the sunset when I wasn't looking. It also makes higher speed testing more boring (in a good way) where the car has less of a chance (but still a chance) to jump off the rails and drag around higher voltage cables.

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  • Restomod Day 22 Building

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    Tue 05 May 2020

    The parts for the full chassis dyno arrived. After an initial print on the rollers and the bearing housing, it looks like the design is mostly ready.

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  • Restomod Day 21 Breaking

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    Mon 04 May 2020

    Today was mostly a breaking day. The printed half-shaft design melted itself apart after some high voltage testing for a couple of minutes, so it's going to need a redesign.

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  • Restomod Day 20 Building

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    Sun 03 May 2020

    Electronics time! Today I got the bench power supply hooked up to the fully running chassis that lives under the '05 Mustang.

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  • Rendering Math ML Building

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    Fri 01 May 2020

    I'd like to render mathematical equations nicely in the browser. MathML seems like the right tool, but it's not supported everywhere.

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  • Restomod Day 19 Building

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    Tue 28 April 2020

    The suspension work continues! The rear design is now printed in a high-shell configuration. This leads to (mostly) nicely aligned filament.

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  • Restomod Day 18 Building

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    Mon 27 April 2020

    The suspension work continues! The rear design with very short arms plastically deformed after the first flex, so I ended up changing to a more complicated design with longer arms. The new design should also allow for equal length and thickness arms on the front and rear designs.

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  • Restomod Day 17 Building

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    Sun 26 April 2020

    Today focused on simplifying the suspension with a printed design. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the existing XMods suspension, but I do think there's room for improvement. For example, the existing suspension limits its own range of motion and has relatively poor ground clearance. Also, I've taken it upon myself to replace most of the front clip with printed parts now that I've gone off the deep end and printed the uprights.

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  • Restomod Day 16 Building

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    Fri 24 April 2020

    Replacing the skid plate for the steering rack

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  • Restomod Day 15 Building

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    Tue 21 April 2020

    Photos from Day 15: Printing a new front upright and new axles

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  • Restomod Day 14 Breaking

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    Mon 20 April 2020

    Photos from Day 14: A replacement half-shaft and a broken front upright

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  • Restomod Day 13 Building

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    Sun 19 April 2020

    Old Body Style, Next Generation Power and Suspension

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  • Restomod Day 12 Building

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    Sat 18 April 2020

    New wheel design! Inspired by the Alfa Romeo 8C

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  • Restomod Day 11 Building

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    Mon 13 April 2020

    Pictures from Day 11: Replacing the axles to enable using metal sleeve bearings

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  • Restomod Day 10 Building

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    Sun 12 April 2020

    The triumph of the day was proving out the concept for creating custom wheels. The center hub uses a D-shaped drive and is sized so the wheels snap-fit into place.

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  • Restomod Day 9 Building

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    Sat 11 April 2020

    Today's focus was on replacing the wheels for the XMods. This has two purposes: I've wanted to play around with printing my own wheel designs and I wanted to experiment with replacing the wheel axles to see if I could reduce slop in the wheels that comes from a loose fit between the axles and the hub.

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  • Macro Lens Shots Building

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    Thu 09 April 2020

    Images taken with a new macro lens

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  • Restomod Restoration Aspirations Building

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    Thu 09 April 2020

    One of the more complicated restorations that I'll need to complete is reviving the older shorter chassis for the Mitsubishi Lancer Evo and the classic Ford Mustang.

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  • Restomod Day 8 Breaking

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    Wed 08 April 2020

    One aspect of reviving the XMods parts that I have involves figuring out what I need to fix to get the shorter chassis running again.

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  • Restomod Day 7 Breaking

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    Tue 07 April 2020

    The wheel mounting design leads to some slop in the location of the wheels. In taking apart the mechanism, it appears that the slop comes from the plastic bushings not locating the driveshaft precisely.

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  • Restomod Day 6 Building

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    Sun 05 April 2020

    The latest design has almost all of the features that I'm looking for, with support for some more interesting customization to go beyond the style of the original bumper.

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  • Restomod Day 5 Building

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    Sat 04 April 2020

    Before and after pictures, the design is almost a good fit. There are some spacing issues at the wheel well but visually the layout and the headlights are close to the original style.

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  • Restomod Day 4 Building

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    Thu 02 April 2020

    The first attempt at curvature got close, but the dimensions didn't line up with the hood as expected.

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  • Restomod Day 3 Building

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    Wed 01 April 2020

    With the first prototype, I focused on getting something that would fit the 3 mounting points on the standard body.

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  • Restomod Day 2 Building

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    Tue 31 March 2020

    With the first prototype, I focused on getting something that would fit the 3 mounting points on the standard body.

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  • Restomod Day 1 Building

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    Mon 30 March 2020

    I recently dug up a box of parts for XMods, 1:28 scale RC cars with customizable chassis and bodies. Along the way I've started to document what I'm working on. The first project is going to be replacing the front bumper of the 2005 Ford Mustang.

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  • Adding Card Support Building

    Mon 31 December 2018

    What are cards? How can I automate making a nicely rendered preview for the articles I write?

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  • Making a Website More Accessible: Part 2 Building

    Sun 30 December 2018

    In this blog post, I'm going to work on bringing a nicer experience to people who use screen readers by adding ARIA landmarks and roles.

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  • Making a Website More Accessible Building

    Fri 28 December 2018

    In reading online, I've always preferred simple, fast-loading websites that are easy to read and don't get in my way from reading their content. In this blog post, I'm going to work on bringing that experience to people who use screen readers.

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  • So You Like Data Science? Building

    Wed 05 September 2018

    I think that data science is a fascinating topic, and I wanted to share some interesting things that I've found in the area.

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  • AT Hiker Plays Firewatch: Day 2 Building

    Sun 29 July 2018

    Back playing Firewatch. The game is more than just scenic views.

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  • Tearing Down a Quadcopter: Part 4 - Reading Upside Down Breaking

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    Thu 26 July 2018

    I decided to go for the full-break method of investigating the electronics, and while it worked out well to start, it's looking iffy going forward.

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  • Tearing Down a Quadcopter: Part 3 - Reading a Circuit Board Breaking

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    Wed 25 July 2018

    My background in electrical engineering involves the first 4 chapters of an electronics textbook I read on my phone when I had internet connection and power in town while hiking the Appalachian Trail. What can I figure out about how the circuit board works for the quadcopter?

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  • Tearing Down a Quadcopter: Part 2 - Power Systems Breaking

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    Mon 23 July 2018

    Mechanically, it's in shambles. What's left in the rubble? I dive into the electronics to figure it out.

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  • AT Hiker Plays Firewatch: Day 1 Building

    Sun 22 July 2018

    I've had the game Firewatch for a while, but I just started playing the game today. What makes the game particularly special to me now is that I spent last summer hiking the Appalachian Trail. Many aspects of the game bring back memories from that experience which I think is kind of amazing. This probably will spoil some of the game for you if you haven't already played. Day 1!

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  • Tearing Down a Quadcopter: Part 1 Breaking

    Thu 19 July 2018

    This has been a back burner project for a while; I'm now finally taking the time to take apart a quadcopter I've had for a while to see what goes into making it tick (and see if I can't mess with it a little bit too)

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  • What's in a stepper? Breaking

    Thu 19 July 2018

    For a lot of my life, the robots I worked with were pretty close to what CS wants from them: a stream of sensor data in, nicely organized in a common format across all sensors. To make things happen, I stream some outputs in another selection of formats. The sensor …

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