One year ago today: July 8, 2013, I extol 3D printing.
Five years ago today: July 8, 2009, swearing on TV.
Ten years ago today: July 8, 2004, Soapy Smith
MORNING
Today we learned that Agt. M and solar power do not mix. Folks, listen to me or waste time and money when you finally get around to your own solar power system. What I tell you is not, repeat not, in the textbook and the grinning salesdork isn’t about to fill you in. Solar power demands an independent study of lead acid storage battery technology. What did I just say?
Meanwhile this is the door hinge of the clubhouse. The doors are beautiful, they are weightlessly hung on springs and silently open with fingertip pressure. Just take a look at this heavy duty hinge. Why that looks like one of the pedal cranks off my old bicycle. Because that’s exactly what it is.
The good news is we discovered some beautiful furniture grade sheets of plywood that were really 11-ply veneer. I’ll get a picture if I can find the right camera charger, this weightless lumber seems to nice to cut up. But I did because I need my camper pod more than I need nicer furniture. Somewhere below you can find a terrible photo of this plywood taken with a camera-phone. Look closely, you can see the number of veneers between where I am gripping the panel with gloves.
Now I’ll tell you two things that are useless. First, that “friction” tape you bought because the store was out of electrical tape again. Its major use is to wrap hockey sticks and tennis racket handles. But it is pretty useless for that, since it becomes slippery tape the instant anything coats the rubbery surface. Some people put it on bicycle handle bars because they don’t know any better.
The second useless item is vinyl electrical tape itself, which is not much better. It is not waterproof, it doesn’t provide good insulation (at least not on guitar plugs), and has almost zero endurance to rubbing. The glue becomes unglued if you store it on a shelf and creates a mess on your hands. It does not stick to anything except itself when you don’t want it to, and no matter how carefully you wrap it, the end will eventually come loose and start to unravel.
Agt. M came by again, we had to go back and cut some more lumber for the clubhouse. Stalemate, we have used up the budget for the project and there is no more to be had. I fronted the club $12 for the 2×4s but now we have a whole frame and half a door. There is no funds for the sheet of material needed to complete the smaller access door. Pictures will follow, but I am presently camera-less. Somehow the charger for the Kodak went missing. Poof! We did the only thing we could do, which is drive over to the coffee shop.
Of course, M doesn’t follow how we have money for coffee, but not plywood. It’s called a budget and it is also called a very difficult lesson that most people never learn in their entire lives. No, you can’t just throw all the money in a great big pot and start grabbing what you need as the bills and crises start to roll in. Want proof? Look at the Federal government. All the tax money goes into common pool. When that happens, what goes out loses connection with the reasons it went in.
AFTERNOON
Rain or shine, I’m getting that pod renovated. It was spritzing all afternoon, but I got some of the sidewall work done. Blogs rules say I must report that Agt. M broke my $38 carbide tooth saw blade the first time he used it. He replaced with with 2-for-1 diablo blades which are not good for much other than sawing studs. (The blade gets hot, wobbles, and pulls to the left. Plus, the blade is super thin and won’t hold itself on a straight cut like my good old one did.) When I say rain or shine, in Florida those are generally extremes and you generally get one or the other. Sprinkles are unusual.
This roof panel will be hinged, so as to swing upwards, and I’m debating whether to include some wings on the interior to form a small windbreak when the hood is up. However, the best place to hand keys and such in the interior is exactly where those wings would be when buttoned up.
The sharp-eyed may notice the back bottom of the panel does not quite extend all the way to the bottom. This is because these areas are access hatches so I do not have to completely open the camper pad to get at small tools and gadgets. This was a minor problem last trip.
The blue strips are just undercoat showing and they will be painted over soon in flat black. The only part I built in a rush last year was the roof panel, and I used untreated plywood. I thought it would be destroyed in the weather, but the standard five layers (one fungicide paint, two undercoats, and two overcoats) shows it to be still in brand new condition. I will recycle that as it conveniently has all the correct bolt-holes for the solar panels pre-drilled.
However, the new overhead hatch or trapdoor is not an afterthought. I intend to brace it strongly enough to support several hundred pounds. So if I opt to climb up there for a look around, it will hold me. This activity, so you’ll know, is far more frequent on a motorcycle journey than in a car. Some of those choicest shots last November from Salt Lake were made standing on a picnic table.
As for the pilot trip when the camper is built, I did Lake Okeechobee last year, so that is out. There are several contenders this time, including a return trip to Winter Haven for a deeper look at the place and its prices. I could go anywhere in a five hour driving radius, which is 250 miles and a full day on the sidecar. Ah, not to worry, something exciting will come along. You know me, anything is better than a boring sit-at-home life. I like home, but not constantly for years on end. I don’t know about you, but I can spot a homebody a mile away. Not all critics are homebodies, but all homebodies are critics.
ADDENDUM
If you see a sample of today's natutical table nearby, that is proof I defeated the MicroSoft print-block. That's my protest for putting restrictions on the word "free". Decent humans don't do that. This blog is free.
It was 3:58AM, the answer hit me in a dream. Not the whole answer as in the secrets of the universe, but the next stage in celestial navigation. For ten consecutive days now, I was unsure of how the puzzle pieces fit together. Instead, I kept doing examples of what I thought were the most important calculations. I was partly right. And last month, I arbitrarily picked the noon sun sight as the one to study. That was one lucky guess, for although it is the least utile, it turned out to be the easiest measurement to conduct.
Yes, I’m disappointed with all my books on the topic. Celestial navigation must be a type of engineering, because all the authors fall into the same bad engineering habits. Worst habit is using the wrong words to describe things or using an ordinary word out of context. A “nearest whole degree”, a common term in navigation, does not mean anything of the kind, but rather a multiple of 15. But I finally got it. Mind you, I soon lost it again. But the “aha” flicker was there a moment and that’s long enough.
A reminder to the reader that in these heavy (for me) learning situations, each new discovery supersedes any previous remarks [I have made] as this is an evolving situation. This is a blog, not the encyclopedia.
And this is where things stand. Based on your time of day, you read the angle to some object in the sky. If you drew that angle information on a map, you’d find you are somewhere on a huge circle, so huge in fact that the tiny arc where you are looks like a straight line on the map. This is the “ring around Dallas” analogy I gave the other day. What you do then is take a “guess” where on that ring that you might be. This guess is called dead reckoning. “Shucks, Marshall, ain’t that there yonder the road to Richardson?”
Next, you modify your guess. But in a very special way. Some really nice person over in England made up a set of tables that tell a lot about certain known spots on the Earth. So you select the known spot closest to where you think you are. "Yep, Festus, that's the Richardson road, alright--but it ain't Dallas. The hangin's in Dallas."
This is the tricky part. You select that spot over all others because it has the about same angle as the reading you took in the last paragraph. By looking up what little you know in those English tables, you can tell roughly where you are on the circle—with a reminder that the circle is so huge that your tiny part of it seems to be a straight line.
"Yep, Marshall, but I figures if Richardson is this-a-way, then Dallas must be that-a-way."
Then, a few hours later, you do the same thing over again, and there will be a place where these two “straight lines” intersect. That is your position. So in reality, your “fix” is the result of two best guesses. I don’t know the reason yet, but the tables mentioned contain a huge amount of other information that is not used in the version of navigation I am learning. That version is called “sight reduction”.
I also found out what those little templates are on a map compass. One is a little circle, the other is a triangle. I think they are for indicating on a map your starting position, the circle, and your DR (dead reckoning position), the triangle. They are also fun to play with at the coffee shop while you are trying to figure all these things out, I always was partial to stencils. But not tattoos.
And anyway I always thought Gunsmoke should be called "The Festus Show".
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