<font color=blue>What's next?</font color=blue>
The mind has been working harv, working.
Here's a sample.
In my youth I had to have a trailer that would haul my racecar. I didn't have any money to buy one so I made one. One of the problems with race car trailers is the car starts out real close to the ground. And often they are damaged racing and must be loaded and unloaded with even less ground clearance. So I made it a tilt trailer. It was ugly but trick. So I'd like to find some old pictures of it and put them here along with a description of how it was made so some folks can venture into uniqueland. It's not a bad place, rather fun really.
I see there's a real desire amongst some of the folks that let their fingers do the walking to TBN for a demonstration on how to bend heavy wall tubing for say like ROPS. I've figured out how to do it where the handier types can duplicate the process at home or in the shop of their new very best friend.
One of the problems with wagon design, your old standard little red wagon or old farm hay or grain or cotton wagon is you have to allow for the swing when doing a turn. A bud of mine loves to restore and work on old cars. So he needed to have a buggy to walk through the old car swapmeets to haul his new found treasures. So he designed and built one. It has no swing problem. The back wheels trail exactly in the tread of the front wheels. I'm sure he wasn't the originator of the design but that doesn't mean the design isn't the trickest thing since putting pockets on shirts.
I'd like to do a thing showing how to make such a wagon. If we get around to it about next spring it'll be perfect for a Mother's Day gift.
I want to do the receiver thing for the FEL I've talked about. I've even arranged for a Kubota tractor for my demonstration (he gets to keep the thingy dingy, nothing's free it seems anymore).
I'd like to build some home made forks and hay spears.
And you know in the old days the farmer's number one bud besides the bank was the blacksmith. I'd like to get with some local smiths that are up on the old ways and do a demo on how they shaped and made plows etc. Just the other day a friend whose dad was a smith called to find out if I could resharpen and shape the blades on his brush hog. I have all the equipment and bud remembers as a kid all the farmers bringing in their blades for his dad to tune up.
That would be fun.
I'd like to build a project green house. I already have one. You see about eight years ago I poured a slab for my little building in the back yard. At one end I poured a section lower than the building slab five by ten, building ten by twelve. I shaped a drain and ran the drain out to the edge of the slab and capped it.
Then about three or four years after that I put in all the french drains in the back yard and ran a drain to the street in front. At that time I picked up the drain from the future green house and put it into the drain system.
A couple of years ago I worked on a multimillion dollar house of one of the biggest jerks to ever walk the face of the earth. He put both "R's" in SORRY, almost added a third. But his master bath was being remodeled by some buds of mine. I told them not to break the glass when they removed it. That glass and some recycled redwood planking facilitated our green house I built this year.
But I know there are some guys out there that would love to build a nice green house. I think we can build one that's economical and durable. Mother's Day again comes to mind.
I've been watching the thing up there on pipe pulling. For the life of me I can't remember the details but I made a little machine for a friend's company for burying cable tv and telephone drops. It worked real well. But it just wasn't enough better than the old way to justify converting over to it. But it was a total original design. I just can't remember the details. That's a problem I have, remembering, gets me in trouble all the time.........
I think we could have some fun with different ways of doing things like feeders and furniture too. I'd also like to do some rock stuff.
On that fountain in the project at the photo web site I use we get to see what happens when a mind does it's own thing and a customer goes with it. I put that fountain together with epoxy, big rocks, little rocks, and stainless steel. The main rock, sorry boulder, it was sensitive about that, weighed four hundred pounds. The way I put it in there it's actually this large coffee table with a hole drilled from the bottom.
In this hole fits some clear plastic tubing attached to a pump. I went through three pumps to find the one I wanted, that did what I wanted to happen without me knowing exactly what I wanted to happen but I knew I would know it when I saw it, get it?
At that point I placed a big rock on top of the boulder, the one with feelings about names. I turned on the first pump. It was like the spray bar on one of those big water buggies at a construction. That dog mighta hunted. But not in a nice neighborhood like that. So I studied a bit. I needed the water to come out with some volume but not straight out all mad like.
I made a bowl in the bottom of the top rock. I figured that bowl would confuse the water under pressure just enough that it'd come out between the two rocks more like a staggering drunk than a sprinter with the devil on his tail. It worked. Never ever doubt the power of confusion.
Then I decided that we needed a little water coming out from the bottom of the statue standing on the rock above the boulder with the inferiority complex. So I drilled a smaller hole in the bowl. That worked.
But we had some splashing. So I drilled some smaller rocks an epoxied some half inch stainless pins in them. I drilled corresponding holes in the boulder to break up the flow and cut back on the splashing. That worked.
I have a saying about luck. "I'd rather be lucky than good. Anyone can be good. That only takes working at it."
With the fountain I got real lucky. I'd picked out the rocks at the landscape products vendor. They were just rocks with a color approximately the color we had around the place. But when the water got going it turned out there were these really neat lines of quartz running through the rocks that were like chrome on a Mercedes. You wouldn't think it'd be appropriate but when you actually see it sometimes it's alright.
I gotta go.
Someone's complaining right now about me chewing up all this bandwidth meandering.....
