statuses

 I still have not finished the outriggers for the hoist cart, mostly due to lack of money.  I need to go to the scrap yard and buy steel after December or January.

 The cross-slide and compound rest of the lathe are still disassembled and spread across my workbench, waiting for me to be sufficiently clear-headed and non-achy to work on the gibs and a new end-screw doodad, with confidence.  Grateful to the fellow Mad Scientist who showed me the way with the gib screw improvement / repair gimmick.

 I have mice in the shop / garage.  They are wary little bastards and have ignored some bait, but I got one yesterday and I will get them all eventually.  'Tis the season, annoyingly.  The very old design of Victor mouse traps - the ones with the metal bait pan, NOT the plastic bait pan, work best; they are humane, and the body won't poison wildlife / cats / raccoons if they somehow get at it, or when I put traps outdoors... poison is super-effective at getting them all, but aside from the above problem, I dislike the notion of dead rats hiding an moldering in walls or in inaccessible crannies.  So traps it is.  Also, F live traps, the world is not short on mice, and I'm not going to the effort to release them in a park every time I catch one.

 The bikes are out of the shop now, for better or for worse.  Mostly better.  Can't ride in the snow and cold anyway.  Nice to be able to use the mill again. >_>

 I'm pondering building a larger discone antenna, but a used Diamond or Tramm might be a better use of my time/money.  The first one I built isn't terrible, but is just as wildly uneven in VSWR as most other discones.  I think I have blogged about DIY antennas here before, not sure.

 It turns out, if you make the active element top AND the ground radials from a bunch of resistors in series, you can have nearly flat response from a discone in both reeive and transmit.  You can also build it such that it will handle 200w xmit, too. 

 Granted, the discone is a "unity gain" antenna with no directionality, but I like them for the wide bandwidth.  Still pondering this project, and the two options.

 Also radio, I really need to get more / larger air variable caps for my MF/LF loop.  Right now, it only goes down to a little below the AM broadcast band.  I need to go to more ham swap meets I suppose.

 And some time this winter, I intend to attack the 3D printer which is currently inop from upgrades, oops.  Fixable, just needs some time and patience and hopefully no expensive parts... winter is the best time for 3D printing for me, because we do not have air conditioning, we have an evap cooler in the summer, which means very high humidity.  Despite having a full tent for the printer, humidity is problematic and bad for any exposed filaments.

 I think that's it for all the open projects, not counting neglected art projects. :(
I still owe this blog more entries concerning the lathe work I'm doing, I'll get to those soon, I think.