The pendulum swings

It has been raining cats and dogs. Or in Spanish, always more colorful, palos de escoba  y capuchinos de bronce. Brooomsticks and bronze capuchins. I assume capuchin Friars made out of bronze are extremely heavy. So with the rains. So since I can't go out and weed without getting soaked I have been doing some clock  stuff.

This time we will make a pendulum. The pendulum is an antique device. Galileo was the first person to document its workings, but it must have been known before that, because Galileo, smart as he was, did not invent it and never claimed he did. However, he did scope it out. He worked out the basic pendulum formula, which you can find anywhere and I will not repeat it. It is a curious fact that a pendulum with a one meter length will do a beat (the "tick" of "tick-tock") in one second. Almost. When the Frenchmen of the 18th century invented the so-called metric system (it should properly be called the decimal metric system) they considered using the length of a pendulum that beat one second as the length standard. They wisely rejected this, because they realized their time-keeping devices were crude. Instead they took a ten millionth of the Earth quarter-meridian as a length unit, AKA meter, and proceeded to measure out the length of the meridian -- a monumental undertaking by any standard. Especially during the Revolution, when surveyors were regarded as spies.

But we digress. Let us make a pendulum for the clock. We are fortunate that the major part of this is simply a commercial three-foot dowel from Lowe's. But a pendulum needs a bob. This is a heavy piece on the end of the dowel. I was fortunate to secure an offcut from one of John's projects, a piece of oak, intended as a stair riser. After a lot of staring at the drawings I finally figured it out (I think) and decided I needed a circle 80mm in diameter. So I got an offcut, marked out 80mm with dividers, and roughed it out on the bandsaw. Now we have to get it circular. This is lathe work, of course. You will soon find that if you need A you firt have to make B. In this case B turned out to be an arbor (lathespeak and not clockspeak) to hold the piece you need to machine. This took me an afternoon, but I do not feel bad about it because (a) I have an arbor for the future and (b) I learned a lot. I used a piece of very nice steel rod, taken from a defunct printer, to make the arbor. So let's put it on the lathe.

 The Taig lathe will "swing" a maximum of about 110 mm -- that is the center height is 55mm  or so(actually 2.25"). It is an RGU lathe. The bob is very close to the limit of the lathe. Wood or no. It is not only the swing, it is getting the tool to work. It took quite a lot of maneuvering with angles, tools, and general fussing around to get it down to where I wanted it, 80 mm diameter.

 At the end, we turned the thing. It remained to drill a hole 1/4" through it. This was a major undertaking. A "jobber's length" 1/4" drill can do the job. Barely. My drill press can drill 50 mm , but it is outclassed  by the 80 mm diameter. I finished it up with a cordless. And no drill goes straight, nor round.  More about this some other time.

So here's the pendulum:

 

The pivot is the circle on top. Then the 3' (about 94cm) rod, then a sleeve, and then a piece of hardware store threaded rod, below of which sits our bob. I will have to make up a stand, because as you can see, the pendulum is too long to clear the cart which John built for me. It's a few cm, that's all. Not too bad for a couple of rainy days. The reason for the threaded rod is rating. By adjusting the nut at the bottom of the whole thing you can adjust the beat to accomodate friction, weather, and other misfortunes.

Clocking the clock

This year the mosquitoes have been worse than I have ever seen. I have a head net. This is how I have been able to work in the garden, walk, ride my bike, and do a few other things. But it has also started to rain. Good for the garden. Bad for outdoor work. The long and the short of it is that I have some indoors time. I have spent it on the Wood Clock. You will recall that we had gotten it to its semifinal state, but time out was taken to finish the wood. So one rainy (or mosquito-y) day I put the thing together again.

Alas, it was jammed up tighter than the proverbial drum. It really looks pretty, though. Problem is, the finishing process destroyed -- or at least seriously interfered -- with the fit of the teeth. So begins the ordeal of refitting. First thing I did was to put a dial test indicator on the wheels. This gadget is cheap and amazingly accurate -- it can be read to .0001" ( thou) or .01 mm, one "cent". It took some doing. First I had to clamp the clock to the table. Actually to the super-cart that John made for me. It is fantastic. For this I used Jorgensen screws -- wooden clamps -- on the clock itself. Then I clamped a found piece of steel to the bench. That gave the magnetic base of the indicator something to latch onto. The British call the indicator a "clock" because it looks like a clock, so I was literally clocking the clock! Americans say "dialing the clock." Same thing. I like "clock" myself.
 

With  the "clock" I found  the wheel diameters varied between +40 and -40 thou (sorry, it's an Imperial Indicator) and that's a bit too much. Lots of reasons for this. One is that the shafts, or arbors, might have warped. Another is that the humidity is much higher. Another is that the arbors are probably off center. A real menace, but a drill bit drills neither round nor to size, and this causes wobble. Lastly, the plates themselves may have warped a bit.On the other hand the pinions were plus or minus 0.010" which seemed quite respectable. I went for the wheels, since they seemed to be the main culprits.

So I went wheel/pinion pair by pair and got them to spin freely again. This is a tedious task indeed. You have to sand until everything spins. On the third wheel I had to cut the teeth deeper, and I used the invaluable Dremel for the purpose. I did say it was tedious and I do not think it redundant to say again that it was tedious.

However, at the end...

...the clock is together again. Note that the finish is gone from all the teeth. It spins freely. Any binding would stop your clock. Mr Wilding's ideas on pivots are very good. But the adjustment is critical. What we have is little pointy things (pivots) running in brass bushings, and this is a Good Idea. But if the pivots are so much as 0.1mm too short they fall out of the bushings. If they are too long they bind. The pivots must have some slop, called endshake in clockspeak. About one mm. If this is not provided, once again the clock binds. The clock has to rattle a bit. In brass this is no problem; but wood is a cantakerous material.

All the wooden clocks I have seen on the You Tube videos use steel arbors (shafts) and I think this is a much better idea than wooden shafts, even with the steel pivots. Steel does not warp as much as wood. But I followed the original plans and the book, and I learned something!

Meanwhile, I notice that nobody, myself included, can resist spinning the clock as they walk by. It is a Zen contraption.

One month to go on the garden

The garden is growing. Not surprising, plants do that. What is surprising is that in spite of the very late start we are doing as well as we are. Here we are, August 1. August is named after a long-forgotten Roman Emperor. I digress. Let's have a look at the garden.

 Here we see the cabbages front and left. To the right, the turnips. I like turnips. John calls them "potatoes with an attitude problem." All right. I still like them. Mashed, with butter substitute. I cannot take butter any more, unfortunately. The turnips are ready and I pull them at need. Behind the cabbage is broccoli and we have little tiny brocccoli. Beyond them the cauliflower. No signs of cauling or whatever it is cauliflower does. Now looking southward we have more stuff.
 

On the left chard and beets. I checked the beets today and they are starting their beeting. Love beets, especially in borscht, which my daughter makes so very well.
Then the late potatoes. Then some summer squash. It is doing well. Then herbs. On the right, beans. Will they bean? I don't know. And some junior collards, a desperate last-minute planting. Don't know if they will get there.

In the first picture you see our greenhouse. I have some tomatoes in it, some Japanese cucumbers, some eggplant (an experiment) and some zucchini. The zuchhini threaten the world, like Godzilla. Got to do a post on that. Meanwhile, we are eating fresh lettuce daily; nothing better, all red-leaf but it was, as I have said before, a difficult spring. And the potatoes are doing just fine, thank you. Root vegs do very well in Alaska. I may have some mystery vegs somewhere here too.

For such a late start, I am satisfied. At least two weeks late. Nothing I could do about it. Us mini-farmers, and even Big Ag with their million-dollar machines, cannot modify the weather.

So we weed, and we water. And we mow the "lawn" which unfortunately today cut my hose into pieces. I really have to bury the hose, but then, what to do about the winter? Maybe some pipe; run the hose through it. Bury the pipe.  Got to think about this. How to drain it in winter? Food for thought. Meanwhile we are growing food. Nothing is more satisfying.

Spliter v2.0: batter boards

We learned many lessons from the collapse of our Snow Splitter v1.0. One is that a snow splitter is a Very Good Idea. The other is that is has to be not just strong but square. We put in the uprights by eye. Now John has a better eye than I will ever have, but even he is fallible. So I spent the weekend building batter boards.

These are devices probably known to the Ancient Egyptians:

As you can see, the batter board is not a complex creature. One board is three stakes hammered into the ground. On these stakes are nailed pieces of board. Strings run from our ground truth, the 4x4s on the porch itself, to the boards. There is one cross-string. The thing is, it is much, much easier to move a piece of string than to move a whole foundation. From the intersections of the string you can see where your corners should be. You can measure your diagonals. If these are equal then the thing is square. Euclid strikes again.

Making these things was, however, not a walkover. The mosquitoes were ferocious. They tried to eat me. Fortunately I had a head net. I do not like being a buffet lunch for mosquitoes, and I wore long sleeves and pants. I roasted in the heat. But besides that, I found a willow tree that was impeding my lawnmowing. I cut 5 stakes out of it. Some scrap tree gave me the sixth. Work for a bowsaw. Then I pointed the stakes with the axe.  Pounding the stakes in (with the maul) was difficult, because there is gravel on some of the area covered by the boards, and it had to be dug out.  I placed the stakes by eye (my eye is far from perfect). But it doesen't matter much because the strings tell it all. String theory, they call it in Physics. I did level the boards. Then I strung up the harp of strings. All by eye. Again it does not matter. The next step is to get two people on the problem and start measuring diagonals. Takes two, one at each end of the tape. Then we adjust the strings until (a) the proper distance from the porch is met (3 meters) and (b) both diagonals are equal. Then we drop a plumb bob from the intersection; that's the center (or edge) of our post. At the end I was wet and very tired. Hard work, but worth it. And I can see that even with John's eagle eye, the posts are way out of place. No matter. They will be replaced.

A turnip grows in Willow

I always start my tomatoes somewhere around march. So I dutifully stuck the tomato seeds into the pot, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. But after a while I noticed that the biggest plants in the pot (I use big yogurt containers, repurposed) did not look at all like tomatoes. I called them "Freds" after a Muppet's Christmas Special of long ago. Too obscure a connection to explain. "Classical Reference," as S.M. Stirling's Change novels say. Anyway, I had no idea of what had happened. In retrospect, I must have picked up a few strange seeds with my fingertips. So I stuck the Freds into the greenhouse along with the tomatoes. And behold, today I pulled up some turnips, because that is what the Freds turned out to be.

Surprise! Ready mid-july, even with the late planting. Well, the turnip has just gone up in my estimation. We had some of these turnips with dinner. Delicious. Of all the pleasures in life, eating food you have grown yourself has to be at the top.

As I bonus, my tomatoes have some room to grow now. Freds are fearful leafy veggies. They will choke out your tomatoes.

Sundials, and milling wood on a lathe

About a year ago I was into (as current argot has it) sundials. I made quite a few. Alas, one of them broke. It dropped on the floor, and the bottom portion of the dial itself broke. Sigh. Although the material cost on these things is zero, I have usually put in quite a bit of time carving the numerals and marking out the dials. The one that broke was an equatorial, too. Easiest to mark out,  hardest to get the inclination just right. The stylus (the pointy thing that casts the shadow) must be exactly parallel to the polar axis of the earth. That is, it must tilt at an angle equal to your latitude (62 deg in my case). Well, I decided to repair it. So the bottom part of the semicircle that forms the dial had broken off. I built a replacement piece out of scrap wood, and then I cut a groove in it with my tiny Lee Valley rabbet plane. Now I had to make the dial fit into the groove. So I set it up on the Taig lathe with a milling attachment.

The real problem with machine tools is not the machining itself. It is holding the blasted piece down while you machine it. The forces exerted by the machine are enormous, and will slew, jiggle, or skew your workpiece out from under you. As you see, I have an end mill held in the chuck of the lathe. Poor practice, by the way, but I have no collet big enough to hold the end mill. Bolted to the milling attachment on the lathe is the invaluable milling vise I got for Christmas. Thank you, my children. But to hold the dial still, I clamped a scrap board in the vise. This gives support to the dial. It is also clamped by the vise. There is a piece of paper under the vise. It miraculously keeps things from slipping, don't ask me why. Thanks a million to myfordboy for the tip. In the foreground, the slottted piece I must fit. Later I will cut it to shape. And to the scrap board I have attached a pair of very small C-clamps which (by serendipity) I found at a flea market a couple weeks ago. Very small clamps are hard to find. Now the dial is stable and I can mill it down to fit the groove in the slotted piece. I am actually routing on the lathe. Only we call it milling!

In the end it does not look so bad.

The stlylus now needs to be lengthened, or a new stylus made, because the shadow it casts is too short. Haven't decided yet what to do. But it was interesting, if not high-tech. And I didn't have to carve a new dial, which takes forever (art, not science).

Garden report

From a completely dry and overheated June, we have gone to a rainy and cold July. The weather is of course crazy under the best of circumstances, but this is unprecedented. The rain did not seem to hurt the garden outside.

 The outdoors garden is coming right along. The cabbages in particular, nearest to the camera, are doing very nicely. Cabbages do very well in this state; people routinely grow 40 Kg cabbages. I doubt that we will do so well! Of course, the monsters are freaks, grown entirely to win prizes at the state fair. That is not our objective. Meanwhile, a shot of the greenhouse.

Foreground two tomatoes bought at the remnant sale at Fred's Grocery store, when things looked desperate in the heat. They are doing rather well. Background, one of this year's experiment, eggplant. It is not usually grown in Alaska, most certainly not outdoors. One zucchini that survived the heat wave is next, and some new (seeded) ones poking up. Desperation measure, to seed zucchs, but no alternative.

On the left of the picture you can find cucumbers, peppers, and some strange root vegetables that crept, unobserved, into my tomato plantings. Godzilla strikes again. Much work yet to be done, but at least we are up and running. It is race with time.  We are at least two weeks late, couldn't help that, so what comes out remains to be seen.