Articles
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Chinese Death Ray
December 28, 2020
Read moreI got my wife a cool tool for Christmas. Hopefully it doesn’t burn the house down. The “K40” laser cutter/engraver has been ubiquitous for several years; it’s a fairly powerful (nominally 40W) CO2 laser, with power supply, X-Y motor drive, and controller board in a metal chassis, all for under $500 – which sounds like a real bargain, considering the several-thousand-dollar price of commercial-grade systems. However, it’s best thought of as a starter kit for the technically competent, rather than a ready-to-use consumer product…
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Sprinter Repairs
December 9, 2020
Read moreOur new-old vehicle always has something to attend to but that’s to be expected with a 13-year old van with 235,000 miles on the odometer… A recent trip revealed that the driver’s seat needed attention. I discovered earlier that the back of the seat was “floppy”; the right side could be moved fore-and-aft in a way the neither the left side, nor any part of the passenger seat, could be moved. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the source of this floppiness was, though, and driving around town it really wasn’t a problem. On a longer trip though, as I discovered, the difference in support between the left side and the right led to my back and neck and shoulders starting to lock up – thus, the seat must be fixed!
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Welding Cart
September 15, 2020
Read moreMy wonderful wife got me a MIG welder last Christmas. I don’t think she realized the slippery slope it represented… After all, MIG stands for Metal Inert Gas, so what good is it without said inert gas? Which comes in the form of a big and not inexpensive tank of Argon (mostly) and CO2 (25%). Now, hauling that sucker around the garage/yard any time you want to weld something is not just a pain, it’s a risk! Obviously I need to make a welding cart, in the name of safety. Some other tools may be necessary to complete the project…
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Bikepacking Gear List
September 12, 2020
Read moreI love to see what other people pack on their trips, so here’s my list from my last bikepacking expedition.
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Summer of the Apocalypse
September 11, 2020
Read moreWhat is it we’re feeling during this summer of the apocalypse? Pandemic, politics, heat wave, fire storm: we have it all! The pandemic has kept us cooped up and isolated for months, feeling desperate for travel and socialization and a change of scenery from the inside of our house. We started to get out a bit for hikes and bike rides, and then the heat wave rolled in and we hid from it in any cooler darkness we could find, and suffered through the steaming nights. The heat spawned a thousand fires, some of which sputtered out but others grew and raged and devoured our favorite preserves, destroyed our friends’ homes, and spewed great gouts of unbreathable smoke. The best air was inside the car, filtered and cooled thanks to burning dino-juice and adding to the planet’s global warming but not even noticeable in comparison to the conflagration in our back yard. “Let’s run errands!” became the welcomed excuse to simultaneously get out of the smoke, heat, and confines of the house, pretending that we’re “going somewhere” as if REI was a foreign country.