Some personal issues (and 100F degree weather) have had me offline for a bit.

Many apologies! More exploration, exploitation, and exposition is coming soon!

I finally got to play with PurEtch, a photopolymer etch resist film sold by Cape Fear Press.

It’s easy to use and uses no toxic chemicals: laminate it to your copper/other metal plate under “bug light” (the process is similar to applying sun-shade film to a window), dry it with a hair-drier, attach your transparency artwork, expose to sunlight (about 12-16 seconds at noon), then wash out the shadowed part with soda ash/washing soda solution and etch (see Cape Fear Press site for videos).

Instead of electro-etch, I use H2O2/muriatic acid at 2:1.

First impressions:

1. I’m still not up to the repeatability I’ve achieved with toner-transfer.
2. I think I’ll like this stuff once I get the hang of it.

The two recurrent problems I have (besides working hurriedly to keep cats/dog/family from flipping the lights on in the kitchen) are heating the plates/resist long enough to get the water out (I ruined first plate by over-heating), and leaving it to develop fully (I keep pulling it out early, then battling a transparent residual mask).

I’m sure this will get better as I gain familiarity/confidence with the new resist.

This is my favorite cartoon (like EVER) by Bernard Kliban [my early working years were haunted by this image, really].

From Wikipoedia:

“In 1962, Kliban became a Playboy cartoonist, contributing cartoons until his death. He is best-known for the book Cat, a collection of cartoons about cats drawn in Kliban’s distinctive style. The cat cartoons were discovered by a Playboy editor and the 1975 book Cat was born. This led to several other books of cartoons ending with Advanced Cartooning in 1993. Since Cat, his cartoons have adorned many products including stickers, calendars, mugs, and t-shirts.

The books that followed Cat consisted mostly of extremely bizarre cartoons that find their humor in their utter strangeness and unlikeliness. Many of these are cartoons that Kliban drew for Playboy. They often contained dysmorphic drawings of nude figures in extremely unlikely environments, as if to spoof Playboy’s own subject matter. Kliban also had a recurring series of drawings called “Sheer Poetry”, in which the page would be split into six panels, containing random images of objects whose names, when spoken in the order presented, would form a rhyming, nonsensical verse.

According to Art Spiegelman, Kliban invented the form of cartoon, popularized by Gary Larson and others, of a single panel with a third-person caption describing the action”.

To William Burroughs, wishing that he was still alive.

Thanksgiving is good, not all dark, but in memoriam of a lot of good things, gone like water under the bridge:

Thanks for you, Bill.
You are missed.

Odds & Ends
Odds and ends make up the majority of my bills ‘o’ materials, with most materials very cheap if not free.

Yes, certain “consumables” do require expenditures at the drug store or beauty supply (hydrogen peroxide, acetone), hardware store (muriatic/dilute hydrochloric acid) or (in the case of copper-clad PCBs, semiconductors and more “interesting” chemicals) even ordered in from the internet.

Still you can have a lot of fun by just becoming a “rational pack-rat”.

Maybe it’s the thrifty Scots-Irish genes on my mother’s side, but face it: junk is fun and very useful!
Recycling is very chic these days.  Remember: it’s only garbage is you don’t make use of it.

I’m not talking about old car parts type junk (though I wish I had space for more of that), I’m talking the more mundane items of everyday life that are free for the storage space.

Containers
I am a container freak, I admit this freely:  pill bottles, film cans, margarine tubs, the little plastic cases that doodads come in. There is nothing so useful as an appropriately reusable/disposable container. (Did you know that PET plastic pop bottles will turn into little gloopy boogers when sulfuric acid hits them? Know your plastics!).

Dead Appliances and Electronics

Wall Warts
I never throw away a wall wart, EVER!!! I’ve got a drawer of them, most with the plugs still attached. There are so many plating, etching and hydrolysis experiments that require you to pinch off just a little bit of the power on the Grid that I’m sure most of us would go to Hell for wasting such a resource.

Dead Circuit Boards
Always have a few sacrificial circuit boards (from a dead UPS, say, or last year’s VCR/DVD) around to play with.

Organ Donors
When your weed-whacker dies, keep the motor, switch, power cord.
Become a recycling Ressurectionist, a ‘Knox-doctor of Appliances’, a ‘Parasite of the Disposable Culture’.

My favorites are cheap inkjet printers. They usually cost less than a set of replacement cartridges, and every one of them has a power supply (usually external/wall wart), a stepper motor, a “regular” DC motor and at least one photointerrupter-type paper edge sensor.

A real “Cannibal Commando” can come up with at least a dozen ways to use parts like this to start his new Warlord Kingdom: “Every Person a Monarch, Every Home an Embassy”.

On Amateur Science

If you want to explore bad enough, you will. If you are lucky, you will find the tools &  supplies you need (beakers and stuff show up at brewing supply shops, I find) and hopefully, someone more experienced to influence your efforts in positive (not getting ARRESTED)  direction.  Mayhaps you’ll found the next Bose or Intel?

These  are the best of times and the worst of times. Drop me a line if you can find a chemistry set with anything stronger than dilute ammonium hydroxide solution in it. Then go to the grocery store and buy a pound of “household lye”: the world seems immune to irony, no?

I read the other day that prescribed drugs caused something like three times as many ODs as illicit narcotics… but don’t let me get on any soapboxes. I just LOVE Big Brother all over the place, in every mathematically conceivably way and every chance I get.

Whenever I check my blog traffic, I am amazed by some of the search terms I see (”steampunk babes”, “does water effect a zinc penny”, etc).

I’d love to give you answers to some of the questions not explicitly covered in the blog already, gang, so just email or comment me, and I’ll tell you/find out what I can share.

This blog is all about DIY. The more Doers/Makers out there the better I like it!

[Updated 02April09]

[Indian Territory is returning to temperate conditions for a few weeks, so I'll be able to continue the windmill work: hooking up a genny to the 75 watt S-rotor, refurbing the break-down HAWT, etc.  Lots of stuff's been going on lately, sorry].

What the… a portable windmill?” you may well wonder.
Well, my thinking is that I can’t make a very effective photovoltaic panel in my workroom, windpower has a lower cost per peak watt than solar panels, and I know I can make a windmill (see the Otherpower website).
The projected application is for emergency power (we had this ice-storm, see, and we were without power for 10 days, yeccch!) in a knock-down form that is easily stored and transported. I figured portability and cheapness would be ideal for disaster recovery and remote operations (I know this guy that does the ham radio emergency communications thang) and, hey, “infantry portable/field maintainable by indigenous personnel” has gotta be a plus for just about anything, right?

Besides, windmills are cool, especially if they are funkily home-brewed.

While perusing homebrew windpower efforts on the web, I came across an interesting approach by “Cowboywindmillbuilder” in his Instructable . Some of the key inspirations contained in his design were:

• Cheapness and simplicity
• Semi-rigid, fabric covered blades
• Downwind design
• Using a 90 degree drill adapter to bring the torque to ground level

Currently side-tracked with axial-flux generator stuff.

In answer to the musical question as to “Can a flat coil on PCB work for a wind/water powered project?”, the interim answer is a resounding “Yes!!!”.

As to whether this is the best use of engineering person-loading… well, I’ll get back to you on that.

Check out Otherpower.com for more information on this interesting alternator scheme.

I’ve had some synchronistic pushes toward additional work on bright copper-plate, recently. I’m going to take the hint. This is still in the works…

Finally finished a video set to the haunting and evocative tune “Nothing But Flowers” by The Talking Heads with video from a diverse selection of (mostly) science fiction films from the 60s and 70s(with the odd bit of Chaplin and Civil Defense abomination thrown in). I hope you enjoy it (or at least rate it, leave word of how much it sucks, etc)!