feathering life

a) collect a boatload of pennies

b) sell them back to the government…through a penny launderer or other respected means.

as it turns out, it costs the us mint 1.4 cents to make every penny. that means that they are GIVING you 0.4 cents in intrinsic value in every penny (because zinc & copper cost so much now), in addition to the monetary value of it. so, for example, this year 3.6 billion pennies have been pressed ($36 million), but it cost them $50.4 million to produce! that means there is $14.4 million worth of metal value for the taking! so, get some diving gear and get out there in those wishing fountains and get all the pennies you can find and dump them at the US mint and walk home pleased at the fact that you just duped the man.

diving a little deeper into the reality of this brilliant scheme, the lightest of pennies (1985 forward) weigh 2.55 grams. if i wanted to just make $1000 off the man by reselling my metal (which, by the way, i also think is illegal, melting down US mint property is generally frowned upon, but only if you get caught (splurge and get a book on the art of war, or some ninja book) ), that would require 100,000 pennies, and at 2.55grams a pop, thats 255,000grams or 255kgs, or roughly 550lbs.

in retrospect, maybe there are easier ways to make $1000 instead of lurking for 550lbs worth of pennies to illegally melt and sell to a metal launderer.

i haven’t been doing a good job keeping things updated. i took a leave of absence from my passively amplified, wind-turned, noise-inducing record player for the past 4 months. i came back during IAP and grabbed it off the shelf and realized how much reworking I had to do. if you haven’t seen the basic premises of the project, scroll to the top of the page and click on current projects and you can read more about the project from the get go. so, i got back and realized i had to turn and mill a new base because the old was was kinda hapharzadly slapped together to see if the concept would even work. spent some time redesigning it and now the base is less-complex (good) and more stable (good). i also took the top aluminum plate i milled on a rotary table that weighed 10^30 kgs, and surfaced it in a lightweight rotary indexing table with a flycutter and got a really beautiful spiral finish. while on the table i also pilot holed some holes for mounting clamps for the arms. i even made the measurements right and machined some clamps with set screws that the arms snuggly fit into now as seen in the image. last night i screwed on a resonator to one of the arms (its from an old space heater, really beautifully formed) and put a temporary needle to a record and gave it a spin…..and it sounded like scratching. bummer. but expected bummer. a) the coupling from the needle to the resonator is ENTIRELY bogus, hot glue will not cut it. b) i think i need to use something such as a speaker and the voice coil and amplify that through the metal as a better version. c) i need to figure out a way to weight the needle so that the needle is pressing firmly on the record and transferring sound efficiently to the resonator. last night i had an aluminum billet taped on the middle of the needle which most likely damped out all the sound to begin with but is also imprecise as all get out. anyways, a lot learned quickly, now time to adapt and figure out a better way to transmit sound.

working on a patching station for the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute (826 Boston). they had an old array of 1/4″ headphone jacks (25×2) that was just a display piece in the big audio station. daniel and i talked about riggin it up as a place kids could plug in headphones and hear all kinds of different bigfoot sighting reports, random noises of bigfoot, forests, snow, everything furry. i guess there’s a couple ways of doing this: a) having 50 unique audio inputs all looping to the different headphone jacks or b) detecting when a headphone is plugged into one of the jacks, having them all wired to the same audio source, and randomizing the audio source and starting it at a random time so the person feels like they patched into a random feed. i went w/ method b. this also creates confusion which is great, if the person plugs into the same jack twice, they probably will not hear the same track which is great. imagine hearing something amazing, telling your friend to plug into the headphone jack, then having it be something completely different! either the friend is going to think your crazy, or they will assign awesomeness to something that might not be that rad, bringing more awesomeness into the world. how do we detect a headphone being plugged in? turns out a lot of 1/4″ jacks not only have the 3 prongs for the audio feed, but 2 extra that essentially can be used as contact switches to detect a break in continuinty also known as plugging in a headphone. i wired these up in series to an arduino and then used processing to read the serial output from arduino and output audio at appropriate times. it is pretty awesome, its reminds me of an analog sampling setup. if only i could find the short that has recently come up in the maze of hundreds of soldering points…..

wanted to build something the other night at miters, but nothing very invovled. i grabbed some blue foam at a construction site that was laying around, used a nichrome heating wire and a variable ac power supply, cut out an airfoil from a piece of wood, and hot-wire cut 2 symmetrical wings which went well after help from someone else. it turns out when cutting a wing with non-constant chord, it helps to have someone moving the wire on the other end of the wing. i was movingn one end of nichrome along root, he moved along the tip and we would try and move teh wire to 25% chord @ same time, then 50%, 75% and finally reach end of chord at same time to make correctly shaped wings. the wings turned out nice, i fixed them together and added a tail for stability/cg. theoretically, flying wings are hyper stable, wing sweep is almost equivalent to dihedral in terms of roll stability. it is a little trickier placing the cg correctly as opposed to placing it to a non-swept wing (~1/4 chord-ish usually). it turns out my airfoil was too agressive/sharp on the bottom leading edge so as soon as the plane started gaining speed, a large vortex would be tripped off the bottom leading edge causing a huge downwad pitching moment (low pressure) and the plane would just nose dive. after realizing this, i sanded the bejesus out of the leading edge and got it flying really beautifully. eventually i donated it to my neighbors kid who quickly threw it as hard as possible straight into the ground. i should at least get some design/materials points for it not breaking right?