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What did you do this weekend?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I helped a buddy move out of his 5th floor, elevatorless apartment. My Apple Watch counted 102 flights of stairs climbed yesterday. It was a very tiring day.
Your friend must have legs of steel to live there.
My sister wanted to take down a part of the hill next to her driveway to extend the driveway / walkway. To do so, we needed to build a retaining wall, after digging out the massive amount of dirt. We dug down to about 4" below the sidewalk, and about 5 feet into the hill. I did the first row of the retaining wall, and it was a persnickety job. Usually it would be my dad who does the fine work - the bottom row has to be basically perfectly level, all the way across and that is tiresome - but he is getting old, and just didn't feel like it, so it fell to me, the next most capable adult, to do the hard work. Kneeling down, getting the bricks perfect - it was actually harder than digging out the dirt, which was hard enough on its own. But we got it done, and it looks pretty good.
I played a couple rounds of disc golf as well at my local course, which is a 9 hole with some switch ups for your second play through (longer pin positions, alternate tees) and I shot +3, which is pretty good for me. It's not a hard course - I feel like I should be able to hit par on everything, but I'm not quite there yet.
I got a DJI mavic mini 2, and I have been working on getting it set up for flying. Unfortunately, my phone USB was just filled with lint - I never use it for anything, so I guess it hasn't gotten cleaned out. I'm going to 3d print a cover for it, but in the mean while I painstakingly cleaned out as much of the lint as I could, and it finally connected. I'm planning to take it out for the first flight maybe next Saturday.
As per usual, a whole lot of nada. Just tried to enjoy the three day weekend. I had been dealing with a terrible eye infection for about three weeks, so it was nice to be able to see clearly as Saturday was the last day of the antibiotic eye drops. Not 100% sure it's totally gone, but it's definitely at 95% well.
I finished up the labor-intensive assignments for my psychology course. I've got to say that the types of assignments I have been assigned aren't terribly great at making me remember everything considering how much effort I have to put in to them, but this is a survey-level class so I don't think it terribly matters. And the positive thing is that the only other thing I have to do to end this extremely long semester is to take the final exam, which is somehow worth less points than the other work I finished.
I finally assembled my Gundog Forge belt grinder kit. It was a christmas present, and I only just found time for it.
Here are all the bits pre-painting, and from a different angle. The shiny bits are where I've welded and then ground the welds flat(ish). I'm an OK welder at making things strong, but I am no good at making things pretty. It's partly due to my welder, which is a gasless MIG system, which I'm told are inherently quite messy. But it's mostly due to lack of practice.
Anyway, paint covers a multitude of sins. Three coats of Hammerite Smooth Yellow should do the trick. Mostly. It needs a little touching up in places, I slightly misjudged which bits were going to be visible and which weren't. But at least it's jolly. It'll be covered in dust in no time anyway.
If anyone is interested I made a timelapse of the assembly, with a quick demo at the end
Less time-consuming option is this still shot of the finished article.
I still need to build a control box so I don't have to fiddle about with the drive - a speed control knob would be handy, as would a nice big start/stop button, but it works for now. Then I just need to find time to actually use the thing. I have a miniature sword-making project which it's going to be very useful for. But I need to build a couple of other tools before that, although nothing as involved as this.
@AugustusFerdinand you were interested in this project, all those months ago...
Aww yeah!
Looking good! How do you like it? Did you ever weld the tang on the broken knife? What are the other tools you need to build for the mini-sword?
Thanks! It was a fun build, and my Dad came to help with it which is the first time I've seen him in nearly a year.
Also, until you mentioned it just now, I'd completely forgotten about that knife. I have to drag the welder out when making a plate quench for the mini sword, so I shall try to remember it then.
That's the other tool, btw. Two 350x150x18mm slabs of aluminium, which are going to be bolted to the inside faces of a woodworking vice, then mounted vertically so the plates are horizontal. Should look something like this
I'll weld a 3/8" socket onto the vice's handle, so I can impact drive the thing shut hard and fast. Hot steel comes out of the forge or out of the oil quench and gets slammed between the plates. The big mass of alu will suck enough heat out fast enough to let hardening happen, while the pressure from the vice keeps the metal straight. That's the theory, anyway.
I'm considering some sort of mini-scale fuller grinding jig as well but I think I'll wait and see whether I need that before sinking any time into it.
Oh man, homemade big machining tools is possibly the most exciting and terrifying thing I can think of. So many potentially catastrophic failure points!
But on the other hand, it probably makes more sense to trust something I put together myself than deal with otherwise really low-quality parts and worksmanship that I would expect from a similarly-priced pre-built machine.
Yeah, I can understand that point of view. If I wasn't the person building this I'd probably think the same.
However, this grinder kit was all pre-cut by the guy who designs them, from 10mm steel plate (the whole thing weighs maybe 40kg), and it was pretty solid to put together even before adding
big lumps of metal gluecarefully placed welds. It's not coming apart even if I wanted it to.Additional to that, the belts aren't even under that much tension - I do have to lean on the tension arm a bit to get it to move, but if it all fell apart in use, the most likely worst outcome would be the belt flying off, which might give me an abrasion wound on it's way past but probably nothing worse than that. The main body is bolted down to the work surface, and I'll check on the bolts holding everything together every so often (I probably should have invested in some thread-lock but they're done up pretty tight).
I trust me on this kind of thing. I've driven cars I've taken to bits and rebuilt. The grinder lives in a building I built from scratch. I have quite a few tools I've made myself and use regularly with no issue. This is the most powerful though, but only just.
Long story short I was able to see 4 different partners this weekend, ended up starting an unintentional sex party, saw a wonderful place in SF that I'm trying to get in contract on and had a relaxing day at home on memorial day. All in all a great weekend.
Wife's birthday weekend so gifts, dinner with the two of us, lunch with friends, and a new tattoo.