The weekend indoors left the electronics club one hell of a lot smarter than we were before. For instance, my home-made variable capacitor, shown here, is all the wrong dimensions but I am continuing anyway for the learning experience. Except for the more impenetrable sine wave formulas, which I would just plug into a spreadsheet once I get a reason to do so, we are now able to zero in on exact frequencies and design the appropriate antenna. We have not yet built any from scratch. That’s next week.What sort of things are we learning? My part of this week’s design is the capacitor. When I said it was wrong, I meant it will still work, just not as well as a better design. The fixed plates are the stator, the moving plates are the rotor. The pieces are cut in a curved fashion. But why?
Not because it looks nice, not because they mesh better, and not because the lack of sharp angles makes it easier on the fingers. The reason for the rounded edges is because any acute corners will allow electricity to concentrate to a point and risk the danger of gap sparks, known as “arc-over”. My plates have the exact same curvature as an American 25-cent quarter. Sixteen rotors and seventeen stators.
All this is certainly not helping meet any women either. Yeah, but nor has this made us rich and famous yet. Gee, maybe we should invite women to join the club and see who shows up. Can you just see that stereotype? A robotics club that spends 99% of its available energy on getting along instead of getting ahead. Then smugly claim that makes us superior to other clubs. And despite never having actually invented anything, we demand to be paid the same. Imagine the stimulating conversation! “Did you hear who’s fembot is pregnant?” In unison, “Again?”
I’ll cheer things up with a photo of the coil built by Agent M. I do suppose many things, but on my best day I could not have produced such a fine product so fast. My original plan was to show my attempted coil side-by-side but this product by M takes every prize. We spent hours in the hot sun testing antenna designs. We were unsuccessful, but we have a better idea what does not work.Jimbos is right near the clubhouse so this one of the few nights I go there when not performing. This entailed a “big” conversation with Eddie, the guitar player. We got to talking about music and we will never agree. Eddie still suffers badly from guitar-think, that a band is made up of a guitarist and a bunch of zero flunkies who do what they are told. Eddie does not like my “play it once” rule, which is understandable, because he got caught by it.
This is the rule in my (that’s “my” as it not yours or somebody else’s) band is that before anybody plays their own version, I need to hear them play it like the original at least once to prove they can do it. There are solid reasons for this rule; the main one being is that it will expose any musician who cannot play it in the first place. You have no idea how many bragging guitarists I’ve caught on this one.
Well, you can visualize how well Eddie did on that test. Eddie, who can’t play the same song the same way twice. When he says that isn’t true, ask him to play the intro to his own favorite song, “Have You Ever Seen The Rain”. Case closed. But he doesn’t like the test saying it stifles innovation. You see, Eddie just wrote a new original in the form of the 13-7/37th bar blues. And if you flunkies were real musicians, you’d be able to follow him. This does not apply in reverse to the guitarist because it stifles innovation, get it?
At any rate, I was taking inventory of what I need to fire up my old act, this time with vocals and two complete new sets including more chick music. Faith Hill stuff. My conclusion is that things may come to this unless there is remarkable improvement with the existing arrangement. The odds of that are rather poor. The current vocalist is too shaky for stage work, passing the burden on to me to cue in the intros and such. And I am already far too busy on stage to adopt anyone.
