Journal entries for August, 2008

After three months of unquestionable reliability, my motorcycle suddenly started acting finicky last week, being hesitant to start (though it would start eventually). Finally, last Saturday, I was riding down a two-lane, unlit, hilly, windy road with no emergency lanes (at night), when suddenly the bike lost about half its power and all the lights became dim. A second later it sprung back to life, but a few seconds after that it died completely, and this time it didn't come back. Finding a safe place to coast off the road in the dark with no headlight (nor other lights of any kind to warn other cars of your existence) is a fun challenge.

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I've been reading a lot about the Large Hadron Collider lately, since it's so close to finally being turned on after decades of planning and 13 years of construction. Some people worry that it will create a mini-black hole that will swallow the Earth, though there have been repeated, exhaustive studies performed to disprove those fears. Just like it was safe to push that mysterious crystal into the beam of the anti-matter spectrometer at Black Mesa.

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Last week I finally got around to ordering the first four of a set of seven books I'd long been interested in, written by a machinist and inventor named David J. Gingery. He published these books back in 1980, showing you how to build a complete metal-working shop entirely from scratch. He starts with a simple charcoal foundry, made for $25 using a 5-gallon pail, a vacuum cleaner, silica sand, and clay. He describes the usefulness of this simple foundry:

You can melt aluminum, pot metal, and even brass with a very simple home built furnace fueled with grocery store charcoal. In a very few minutes you can melt beer cans, your wife's pots and pans, the siding off your neighbor's house, the pistons out of your car, and anything else you can beg, borrow, or steal. It costs very little to build, and it works incredibly well.

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