The Walking Machine

The Walking Machine

My son Nate has an uncanny ability to find things that fit my interest!  From flutes to coffee roasting he seems to strike notes that resonate in my brain!  (No, other kids, I am not saying that you don't resonate too!)   We have chosen as a family to not buy birthday presents and we exchange names for Christmas presents, but sometimes we do give gifts, make things or promise dates.  This year Nate did it again...

A few years ago we shared some web sites, pics and YouTube clips about amazing beach wind walkers called Strandbeests invented in 1990 by Theo Jansen  of the Netherlands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSKyHmjyrkA  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWK75_3S6Kg&list=PL199650F0D691ACD6
He makes most of his "beests" from PVC pipe, so that is right up my ally.  Nate gave me a small, injection molded kit to make one of the incredible works of "engineering art".

Here is the kit and the parts laid out.

With all the pile, it seems quite daunting, but really there are just 12 legs made from 4 parts each and hooked to a frame with ties.  Here are the 12 leg assemblies.

Once the legs are made, the frames are hooked to the crank shafts and then the legs are hooked on.

Once the 6 legs are added  to each half of the "beest" the halfs are joined.

I got a little confused about finishing a leg set.  I thought they were hanging the first legs on both crank sides and left off 2 of the tie rods!  After I got the whole thing done it was sort of floppy... I figured it out, what with all the extra ties duh, and I was able to slip the missing rods in without taking anything apart.  I also was having trouble with the slip together joints falling apart... that was much better once the movement was more limited by having all the ties installed.

Build the fan and add the gears...

I also had some trouble with binding at some points as it walked.  The instructions advised the builder to verify the order of the ties on the cranks, so I checked them and sure enough there were 2 where I had the order wrong.  Once I fixed that I could easily blow on the fan and watch the "beest" walk across the table!

I had hoped to build this with my 4 yo, but once I got it open it seemed clear that it was not a good project for him.  However... I am pretty sure there will be PVC models scaled up from these plans!  The little guy was installing bolts and nuts with me at 2, so I think he will handle that easily!

Thanks Nate!

Update 3/2/15...  I had a dream about a "beestbike" that I made out of conduit pipe.  I searched YouTube and found a few similar ones but then tonight, I stumbled upon this one... nailed it!  Then... from the sublime to the ridiculous...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzzAgVOsTKQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOKabtU3fDk
Nois...

Update 3/6/2015...  With almost forgotten CAD skills, being new to Google SketchUp and never having done an articulated model animation... I guess this did not turn out too bad!  Now I can play with different configurations without needing to cut 120 pipes!  (this shows one set of legs)

Siphon wick saves the day

Over the weekend the weather in Denver was very cold!  Wouldn't ya' know it, the heat in our house started acting up... that could fill a book!  So, let me just tell you about one problem... a dripping air release valve.

Over the years the little valve occasionally spits and sputters a bit, which is it's only job in our hot water heat system.  Last week it started dripping... oh bother!  I put a little metal lid under it to catch the water where it could evaporate.  I quickly found out that the drip was too fast for that and it overflowed the lid.  I put a larger lid under the valve and it only required a paper towel spunge and a few trips to the nearby sink to dump the lid.

Saturday night the drip got so fast that it needed dumping every 2 hours... it was 3:00 AM and how was I going to sleep???  I decided to try a siphon wick to see if that would save me from hving to try to seal a hole around a tube to take the water from the lid into the floor overflow drain.

Siphon wicks are often used around machinery.  Basically you have a cup with oil in it and a stand tube from the bottom of the cup up the center.  a wick is dipped into the oil, is fed down the tube onto a bearing and the top is allowed to fold over the lip of the tube and dangle into the cup of oil.  So, one end of the wick is in the cup of oil and the wick goes up over the tube edge then down the center of the tube and out the bottom of the tube above the bearing.  This configuration causes a slow steady drip of oil from the wick and can empty the cup!  Amazing!  It works by cappilary action.  If you think that is not strong enough, think about the fact that the same force pulls water up 200' to the top of a tree!  http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/mccoy/wick.html

For my applidation, I changed the configuration some.  Like I said, I did not want to punch a hole in the lid and try to seal it - if I wanted to do that, I could just install a tube drain.  So, I took some flexible clear plastic tubing with 1/4" id.  I tore a 12" x 3" strip of paper towel and rolled it up into a semi-stiff rope.  I pushed the dry towel rope into the tube while twisting it until only a tiny end stuck out.  I used some scrap copper wire to tie the tube end into a "J" and hooked that ofer the edge of the lid so that the wick got wet.  The tube went over the edge of the boiler case and down to the floor drain.

To my great amazement, the wick immediately pulled the water up, over the bend and started soaking the wick the rest of the way down the tube.  The next issue was whether the water would drip off the end of the wick and on down the tube to the drain.  It took a while and I was a little nervous because the water was rising in the lid!  Soon I saw drips going down the tube!  Woo Hoo!  Was it fast enough?

It was.  Actually, I got another surprise.  Every now-and-then the water would start to make little "plugs" in the tube rather than running down the tube.  That scared me at first until I saw that the plugs were slowly moving down the tube with new plugs forming above.  As soon as there were enough plugs, they would weigh enough to actually start a regular siphon that drained the entire lid very quickly.  Then, the system would go back into it's slow drip mode.  This tided me over until I could get my heater guy over to take a look on Monday.  He was very impressed by my siphon wick gadget and very glad that he was not called at 3:00 AM!

While snooping around for other examples of siphon wick applications for this post, I found the quintessential case... enjoy reading about a siphon wick used to dispense "bear repellant"...

http://www.ultimatesportsmen.com/stories2/curley.html  (0ops...  link is to a general blog and I can not find that specific post...  anyway... the guy said that when he camps he "marks his spot" by pissing on trees around the perimeter! Now, when he wants to be sure it stays fresh, he pees into a bottle and hangs a little bit of wet rope into the bottle and down the side.  That starts a siphon wick that produces a slow drip!)

The no-nap-cap

I have an amazing ability... I can fall asleep from being wide awake in just a few seconds... but only if I am driving.  ugh.

You can imagine that this skill has created some interesting times on long driving trips and even occasionally on my short commute to work.  What's a guy to do???  I had a sleep study done and found out that I have sleep apnea.  I got a CPAP and that helped tremendously with my daytime sleepiness... except as soon as I touch a steering wheel!

Driving sleepiness is a big problem.   http://www.drowsydriving.org/ is a site devoted to helping people be more aware of the dangers.  It is as dangerous as driving drunk! Here are a few highlights from the drowsy driving site:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 police-  reported crashes each year are the direct result of driver fatigue. (NHTSA)

• Each year drowsy driving crashes result in at least 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses. (NHTSA)

• Approximately 11 million drivers admit they have had a crash or near crash because they dozed  off or were too tired to drive. (2005 Sleep in America poll)

• According to NSF surveys, half of Americans consistently report that they have driven drowsy and approximately 20% admit that they have actually fallen asleep at the wheel in the previous year.

So, I am not alone.  Some states have moved toward serious consequences for sleepy drivers.  In Massachusetts in 2007, Senator Richard Moore pushed for a law to make it vehicular homicide if a sleepy driver causes a fatal accident.  If passed they would join with New Jersey in charging sleepy drivers.

I "got my wake up call" in a little nicer manner.  One year as we were loading up the car to start a long trip my wife set a cold spray bottle on the console between us.  She looked me in the eye and said "go ahead, make my day".  The fear of having my ear filled with icy spray was enough to keep me awake!  It also reminded me of a Japanese invention I read about that I can not find by searching the internet... weird.  It was a pair of glasses that had a small refrigeration unit - possibly electrothermal cooling - that cooled the g-jo acupressure points (http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/G-Jo_Acupressure_Instant_Relief_With_The_Touch_of_a_Finger.html) on the forehead to reduce sleepiness.  Try as I did, I could not find anything about the right g-jo points either!  ..maybe I was dreaming...  (Now the Japanese have a new thing with glasses.  They sense the tilt of the head and if you nod off they vibrate in your ear!  It interrupts the sleep inducing alpha waves!  They say it tickles too!  If I get sleepy in a meeting, I crunch on carrots! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1522985/How-the-Japanese-are-getting-a-buzz-out-of-falling-asleep-at-work.html, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/30/mydo-bururu-glasses-vibrate-your-dome-to-prevent-sleep/)

Anyway, here is what I did to significantly reduce my drowsiness - after working on my sleep problems of course!  I decided that I did not need some fancy glasses to cool my pate!  Instead, I would use a swamp cooler!  That is how I cool my house, so why not my head?

I got a cheap, light brown terry cloth towel and cut it into a long rectangle about 4" by 12".  I folded the short edges in to the middle, then folded it in half again.  Now, I had a nice neat 4" x 3" terry pad.  I got the pad wet and let evaporation do the cooling.  I put the pad on my head and enjoyed a very awake and comfortable trip -- no spray in the ear!

I sometimes put ice in the upper fold to jump start the cooling, but usually it is not necessary.  I keep the pad quite wet - just short of it dripping.  I now carry a pad and a re-filled bottle of water in my car at all times.  I think it has saved my life!  If I see a sleepy driver on the road, I want to roll down my window and tell him about the no-nap-cap, or maybe grab a spray bottle.  : )?

btw... One young person was bugging me at work about my cap idea and how it would not work for him.  I agreed.  He had a very thick head of hair!  I told him that memories are processed during sleep and that the more intelligent you are, the more your brain heats up and wants to sleep.  That is why God gave older and wiser men a bald pate to help keep their brains cool.  In some cases, the intelligence was so extreme that even the bald pate was not enough to cool the brain, so it takes a little help from a moist pad.  He just walked away.  I suppose it beats slapping someone.

Nois what....

You know... "nois fopro toa sutafo"!

OK,  don't strain too hard... it means nothing!  It is a shortened version of my favorite saying.  I wanted to be sure that it had no actual meaning... did not want to offend anyone... and it seemed vaguely Portuguese, so I sent it to a friend in Brazil to check.  He assures me that it has no meaning at all, expect that some of the words seem vaguely Portuguese as I thought.  If you are aware of any meaning that I should know about, please let me know!

So why, you may ask, would you pick that silly title???  Well, my favorite saying is "Nothing is Foolproof to a Sufficiently Tallented Fool!"  That is the story of my life!  I love to find a different way to break something that someone thinks is unbreakable!  Or find a way to do something that someone else says can not be done.  Or look at some idea from some crazy perspective.  It gives me endless hours of pleasure to look at a problem in some totally different light.

Then when I try to explain it to someone... their eyes glaze over... my voice becomes a drone...  My wife tells me to listen for someone to start saying "Ah-huh"... "Ah-huh"...  A sure sign that we have parted minds.

With this blog you do not have to say "Ah-huh"... just close it when it starts to drone in your head...