Preposterous Past Pre-Portland Post

So, I went to Portland Oregon last week for about five days. It was sweet and now we have another person in our family. SSShhhhh no facebook pictures about that. Hey man, I'm just playing by the rules. Anyways, besides legal contracts that give people tax benefits and join them in holy matrimony... we did lots of other stuff.

I got the chance to check out Powell's Books, if you ever get the chance to go... DO IT. Powell's is hands down the best bookstore I've ever been to. They have new and used books and in terms of selection there is no competition (besides Amazon). They have a huge main store with another building across the street dedicated to science/engineering/technical books. My only complaint is that I didn't find the other building soon enough and didn't get to spend much time in it. The main building is huge with signs pointing to different rooms. I actually got pretty lost in it. They even have a MUCH smaller Powell's at the airport, where I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

 I had my eye out for a book on Bonsai trees. Powell's actually had a much larger selection than Amazon and I spent 20 minutes just looking through the books on Bonsai. Oh, yeah. I bought a Bonsai tree. After seeing these these a year or two ago, I've been interested in getting one to see how quickly I can kill it. I bought one for my grandmother's 91st birthday because I felt like that was quite the milestone. Nothing says "Your a badass" like a miniature tree that is given just enough nourishment to stay alive in a tiny pot.

Enough about Portland, I have a pretty good overview of the trip on the facebook album. So now for pre-Portland stuff.

I tried my hand at making a raspberry pie for Pika's holiday party. Used my grandma's recipe but I think I didn't have enough water (or cooked it too long) because it came out a bit thick. It was however, completely devoured by the Pika crew.

Raspberry Pie

I'm realizing a lot of the pictures I take on my phone are from work and kind of proprietary so I shouldn't post them online. So, here are a couple that are pretty safe. This was an installation in Greene, ME like 2-3 days before a massive ice storm that left a bunch of the state without power. It's on a 100 ft lattice tower which made this install a little technically challenging.

Turbine was assembled on the ground and hoisted up.

We used a couple tag lines on the turbine and some clever rigging to raise the beast. A one-off wooden gantry was made and attached to the tower top. A Raum turbine used to be installed on this tower before it well.... died.

Half-way up

The site is located next to a river, the land actually dives down about 20-30 feet from the base of the tower. It's a very steep drop down to the edge of the river from there, so from the water this turbine probably looks pretty high up. Unfortunately the ice storm actually iced the thing solid for a couple days, finally a day with some sun and it's all free.

In other news... I decided to take apart my perfectly good rowing machine in the name of truth, justice and the American way. Actually, I'm hoping to make a sweet demo for an Energy Conference at the MIT Energy Conference. Thinking about making this rowing machine grid-tied. Fortunately, I work at a place where we ... ya know, do... that. I was even given an alternator that might work for me. It's got a pretty cool backstory too. The alternator is an experimental high voltage wind for the Air-X, which was originally made by Southwest Wind Power. The rowing machine is actually pretty simple and is pretty elegantly controlled. The resistance is controlled by an eddy brake. The fan has magnets on it and a flat metal plate is moved closer to the spinning magnets to induce eddy currents in the plate and increase torque. The plate position is controlled by a knob which adjusts a Bowden cable the pulls on the plate. I am guessing (big guess) that the resistance increases linearly, but interestingly the air gap between the magnets and metal plate is not linear. It might be neat to take the Bowden cable assembly apart further to see what it does to achieve that. I plan to scrap it for a potentiometer but I might want to be able to reassemble the whole machine and get a couple hundred dollars for it someday. 

The project is still in the planning phase. I'll need to measure the RPM range I'm operating at for the rowing machine and see what gearing might be needed for the alternator. I've got to come up with a mounting solution and then hack some electronics to make it work.

I started working on repairing the front seats for my bus too. I hand sewed a couple of tares in the seat back together. Need to do some rust removal on the frames, cut some foam and see if there is a good way to patch tears in vinyl.