Anthony douglas log

Sun Mar 9, 2014

• Pulverizer and mixer design session in the morning.
• Afternoon work included cutting plywood sheets w/ table saw with Coltan, painting the boards, then helped mud up the cracks in the micro house, moving some scrap metal and helping with the dishes. One interesting thing was the difficulty of stuffing the mud into cracks and against the wall due to it's failure to stick well, then the discovery later in the day that mud near the fire was far stickier and would have been a great labor saver. It shows the importance of a brief practical exploration period. Another thing that made a huge difference, which I expected probably existed, was the technique Marcin showed us to get the mud in the walls; take a trowel with mud piled on it and force it against the wall with another, with the first trowel held underneath.

Monday, March 10

We made good progress in the design of the pulverizer/mixer, essentially settling on the high level design and finishing the 3d sketchup model. Going out to see the stuff was a great aid, and seemed to inspire and catalyze thinking in the group. In the afternoon I and some others focused on finishing the microhouse interior walls, with the chicken wire and plaster/pearlite mix. I returned in the evening and did another batch, timing myself it took 28 minutes to mix and apply a batch of the plaster mixture, we will certainly be done the lower layer tomorrow, then there is a final finish layer. I am going to bed now immediately after this, entering the log entry and eating, I think, as I have been getting increasingly sleep deprived over the past week. Yesterday and today I tried to remove the ton of malware on this computer with avg free, malwarebytes and the online trendmicro software, which have helped, but there is still something interfering with the browser severely.

Tuesday, March 11

Morning design. Eric and I measure the tines modules and the more critical rotor dimensions, so he can model it in scad. I document the process itself, in Process_used_march11_2013_to_model_an_object_for_concept_sketch_in_scad [1]. My abilities in Inventor are too limited for now to do this in a reasonable time frame, I think, but I will download a copy now so I can try to draw things tonight. I decided to focus on other things until now, since there are others in the group who can draw well, to be the most effective team player I can. I still need to get the pictures I have taken up non trovebox, I was hoping to do so this morning, but the internet connection was down.