When you're bored and in traffic....

I drove the full hour from work to Living Legends wearing this.  I got some quite funny looks from other drivers. 

That night were the free pump games sponsored by CCM.  I played "back player" with a pump gun.  Not just "a pump gun."  But a stock class pump gun.

After three games I had 90 rounds left, and half my air.

Oh... and while we're at it.  Here's my phantom.

Moving, forward, if not actually in.

This is an empty storage unit.  It used to contain approximately one two bedroom apartments worth of stuff. We need to thank my sister for suprvising the crew that did the moving.  Thank you!



As of today, my house actually is saving me money.  The cost of this storage unit is 1/4 of the mortgage payment.  The only thing left here is to clean it out, and sign the papers saying "we don't need this anymore."  It's all now in the garage, and I can move it in as I please.

Also on the house side of things.  The electrical work is done.  That means my garage has lights.  The switches in the house all work right.  And all the light fixtures work.  Say the least, I am pleased. 

On the not so bright side, I"m slowly discovering that the FHA 203k home inspection was massively incomplete.  In this case it's: SUPRISE, your heater will kill you. 

Really Old Paint

So... digging through the storage unit, I found a box with paint in it.  This is paint left over from when I was playing tourny ball.  Something tells me that means this paint might be six years old. 

I am quite sure draxxus doesn't exist anymore.  The paint isn't exactly round.  And the processing oil seems to have sucked the red dye out of the shells, so there was a wet red oil on everything.  None of the paint was broken though!  So, unlike the other bag of paint I found in the storage unit, I decided I could save this. 

Paper towels work wonders.  If a ball "just" broke in a bag, you can roll paint around in a towel too to get the paint off of it.  As long as you're quick, the paint will be ok.  In this case, I'm years late to be quick about it.  But all I want is paint to shoot in the back yard to figure out why my promaster is chopping paint!  That said, it chopped some of this, along with the stuff from Living Legends.

The paint looked pretty good after cleaning the stained oil off of it.  The paint isn't even the lumpiest stuff I've shot.  (that award goes to some brass eagle stuff from the first celebrity paintball event.  That stuff was like shooting dice)

Ten minutes of effort, and sixteen paper towels later I'm left with this:

The stuff that was in the bag previously, I wouldn't have fed through my worst hopper.  This stuff, is just fine.  I shot about 300 rounds today.

Somehow, I still have roughly half of case on hand.  All RPS now. 

Cheap EFI for steady, or near steady state engines. (Read: Airplanes)

http://www.rotaryeng.net/simple-cheap-555.html

Something else to think about.  EFI is a beautiful thing.  And that page suggests a method to keep an engine running if the EFI dies.  I like it.  I think it would be better than trying to run some sort of ghetto rigged carb, and would provide individual cylinder leaning.

Mmmm fuel economy, and power.

Thinking About Propellers

So I keep thinking about propellers. 

Propellers are pretty wrong. (your average one, that is.)  This article goes into it with good depth.  http://www.eaa.org/experimenter/articles/2009-02_elippse.asp 

Tonight I broke out the spreadsheet and started trying to replicate the math.  In large part because Paul Lipps died, and his son is now working on drones, instead of the recreational aviation market. 

So starting with the most obvious, I started with this statement: Your available lift goes up with the square of speed.  And wing lift is also a linear relationship to area. 

I calculated the speed of the propeller at every 2" along the radius.  But that's only good for when you're not going anywhere.  As your forward speed goes up, you're adding to the perceived airspeed of the propeller blades.  This has some really funny effects on blade chord. 

With a 64" propeller, and an 8" hub, you'd need a 64 times more chord to provide equal lift! But as airspeed goes up, that ratio drops off rapidly.  The slower the prop speed, the faster that ratio drops.  At 100mph, and 3000rpm, that ratio drops to 22 times.  (for giggles, at 400mph, it's only 3:1, but the tip speeds are at a freaky 697mph)

While typing this I figured out that I am forgetting something.  Swept area.  All of the math I have done (or, in this case, OpenOffice Calc has done..) only tells me how to produce the same lift across the blade.  This would produce a lift profile like that of a constant chord wing. 

I need to think about how to compensate for that, if it's even worth compensating for.

Welding.

I did my first welds tonight.  I can now use the metal squirt gun!  I ran about 10" of beads tonight.  More comes later.

Buying a house.

Buying a house is hard.  Very hard.  The people involved don't reliably tell you what you need, they don't reliably respond.  And they love to spring things on you at the last minute. 

I'm debating writing the story of my buying a house.  But I think it would come out rather nasty and mean. 

So...  I now own a house.  :-)