I love Adam Savage for his enthusiasm and his energy. He probably makes more stuff in a day than I make in a year. This 'playset' is just glorious. It sounds like Factory Entertainment is planning on building these for sale, how many they are going to make is yet to be determined. I suspect the price is going to be something like a car, maybe ten grand, maybe twenty-five. Who knows? With the way inflation is going it might be a hundred. Whatever, this thing is beyond cool.
Let's Build a Locomotive! Pennsylvania A3 Switcher, Part 1
Blondihacks
Jack recommended Blondihacks to my attention a couple of months ago and I finally got around to looking her up. I picked this video because I posted about a live steam model train not too long ago. In this one she spends a lot of time laying out the ground work, including sourcing materials, which turns out to be a bigger problem than I imagined. Very entertaining, if you like obscure technical info.
House of Guinness | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
It's 1868 in Dublin Ireland and Guinness is a thriving operation brewing zillions of gallons of beer, putting it in barrels and shipping it all over Ireland and England. The old man dies and his kids have to pick up the slack. Only one of them has the will and ability to do so, the others are variations of flaky rich kids. Most of the show is about the contortions they go through to maintain their façade of 'respectability' in Victorian high society. Thinking about this for a bit, I realized they were just playing the Victorian version of political correctness. Now, thanks to the internet, everyone can play. Live by celebrity, die by celebrity.
The show has all the regular drama you might expect from a Netflix show about rich Victorians along with some fabulous sets. Talk about the divide between the rich and the poor, the Victorians had it in spades. It also has some bits of history and if you look a little deeper, trains.
Ireland has just endured a famine, and there are hard feelings about that.
The Trinity College harp, also known as "Brian Boru's harp", is a medieval musical instrument on display in the long room at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. It is an early Irish harp or wire-strung cláirseach. It is dated to the 14th or 15th century and, along with the Queen Mary Harp and the Lamont Harp, is the oldest of three surviving medieval harps from the region. The harp was used as a model for the coat of arms of Ireland and for the trade-mark of Guinness stout. - Wikipedia
Brian Boru (c. 941 – 1014) was the High King of Ireland from 1002 to 1014. - Wikipedia
The Train within a Train & the Railway Built for Beer - Guinness Brewery Railways
Train of Thought
Somewhere around the late 19th century the brewery was expanded to 50 acres and a narrow gauge railway was laid down to serve the plant.
The business about having a carriage that allowed the narrow-gauge engine to run on standard width tracks might be unique. Someone thought it was worth building a live steam model.
This guy (at least I think it was this guy) eventually got a model rocket to take off and then land vertically, which is cool, but this video showing all his failures is cooler.
Ordered this very cool model of a movie camera from Temu, $20 for 600 pieces. The parts are just like Legos, but smaller, like 2/3 the size. The whole model is only about six inches long. It has all these dials and knobs that look like they ought to do something, but such is not the case, it's just a static model. Legos are nice, but they have gotten kind of expensive, and they seemed to be aimed at more main stream markets.
The endlessly rising pitch (Shepard tones) along with turbine in motion really gave me a feeling for what a jet engine is. Yeah, might be kind of weird, but that's me.
Saw GIF of this but I couldn't figure out just what it was supposed to be doing. Awful lot of monkey motion for a clock, and it wasn't clear that it was made of LEGOs. A little digging turned up this video. Very cool.
One of the more clever parts was the design of the 11:1 gear reduction. He needed this because of the output speed of the LEGO motor.
I hate to think how much money he spent on this, but I suppose it's like any hobby. If he spent a thousand dollars on it, and then spent a thousand hours building it, that's only a dollar an hour, which is pretty cheap entertainment.
I did not find a parts list, though this video only came out last month. Akiyuki has provided parts lists for other projects, so we may see a parts list sometime soon. The motorcycle kit he referenced costs $230, though you can apparently get the same kit from a vendor on Etsy for $100. Don't know how that works. LEGO made too many? China cloned the kit? They fell off the back of a truck? Who knows, certainly not me.
This showed up on YouTube and I thought 'cool, a sailing ship', then I started watching it and I realized that this Juan Sebastián de Elcano lived during the same time period covered by The Verge, the book I have been reading since Christmas. Yes, I'm a little slow.
Then I find that, once again, propaganda trumps reality. Magellan may have got his expedition going, but then he got killed. That often results in the expedition failing, but not this time. Our boy Juan managed to bring at least some of the crew and one of the ships back to Spain and in so doing completed the first circumnavigation of the world. Magellan started the expedition, but he wasn't attempting to sail around the world, he just wanted to get to the Spice Islands.
Flash Gordon Official Trailer #1 - Max von Sydow Movie (1980) HD
This rocket is from the movie Flash Gordon which was released back in 1980. I loved that movie. I mean it was silly and nonsensical, but as long as you didn't let that bother you it was a great story. I remember wishing we could see more of this rocket, but like most science fiction movies it was just background to the story. There was one very cool / silly scene where this rocket glides up to a landing platform much like a limousine glides up to deliver celebrities at a red carpet gala. It even made burbling exhaust noise like a Cadillac. Totally ridiculous but totally cool.
I imagine the rocket was named after Ajax, the Greek hero from the Trojan War in ancient Turkey. Arch villains always are up on their history. Surprisingly I couldn't find any images of Ajax being heroic or warlike. Everyone seems to want to focus on his suicide, which is supposedly what he is contemplating in this sculpture.
The sculpture was evidently constructed by Glyptothek, a museum in München. I couldn't find anything about how it came to be. I suspect they took a couple of old pieces and then imagined the rest. The museum was built by King Ludwig I. His grandson, Ludwig II, built Neuschwanstein Castle, the famous fairytale castle.
We used to build all kinds of Legos here, but then the kids grew and the bricks got shunted off into storage. Then the Saturn V appeared on Christmas and I've been poking around in Lego land again. I keep threatening to set up our Lego train, once I find it. It's probably at the bottom of the pile.
Cleverly done, scene changes just like a real movie, close ups and distance shots. The landing sequence made me realize that disaster was just a hair's breadth away. That first trip to the moon could have easily ended in disaster at any point along the way.
Since I got the Lego version of the Saturn V, I was curious to see what this one is like. First off, it's not a kit, it's fully assembled. It is highly detailed and liable to be fragile. I mean what happens if you drop a Lego model? You have to snap it back together. I think I would a little worried about dropping the Bandai model, especially since I know it costs almost $1,000.
Bonus phrase of the day:
Otona no Chogokin - found on the Big Bad Toy Store page - means Adult Superalloy.
Chogokin (超合金, Chōgōkin, Sometimes Chougokin or Cho-gokin) is Japanese for "Superalloy" and is a fictitious material which first appeared in Go Nagai's Mazinger Z manga and anime. It was later adopted by Popy in 1972 as the name of a new line of die-cast metal robot and character toys sold in Japan. The first of these toys was the "GA-01" Mazinger Z, which, in spite of questionable engineering that led Popy to offer a free replacement campaign, ignited a craze that changed the face of the Japanese toy industry in the 1970s. Bandai, the parent company of Popy, continues the Chogokin line to this day, branded under their own name.
My kids showed me a little love this Christmas. I just finished assembling the rocket. Nothing like handling the pieces to give you an idea of the proportions. Note the 4th astronaut standing on top of the booster.
They also gave me a bottle of fancy sherry since I was curious about it. It's little stronger than wine which I like. Bourbon is like 45% alcohol. I can't drink it straight so I cut it water which makes it about 20%, which is about what sherry is. Strong enough to feel warm on the way down, but not so strong as to burn you.
My new toys are sitting on top of the 300 pound desk that oldest and I hauled back from Colorado many moons ago. I don't recall how we got it in the basement, but it's been sitting there, unused and unloved ever since. Until now. Now it makes a great workspace for assembling Legos.
Iaman had so much fun putting together the pick and place machine that he went looking for other kits and came across StirlingKitwho have a variety of tiny engine kits, some of which actually run. Well, they could run if you can assemble them correctly. They are a little spendy, the one shown above runs $400.
I like model trains and I like pop music, but I would never in a million years have suspected that Rod Stewart was building a King Kong sized model train layout in his attic.
I like this picture because it shows just how big a wind turbine is. It's hard to show how big they are because there is never anything around them that you can use for comparison. A picture with a person doesn't work because by the time you zoom out far enough to get the whole turbine in the picture, the person is reduced to a single pixel, which doesn't really help.
Some people think this picture indicates that wind turbines are stupid. Time will tell. The rapid proliferation of wind turbines is due to government policy in the form of tax benefits. It's kind of like ethanol (from corn) that way. It might not be the most economical way to produce electricity, but it's a worthwhile experiment. Even with the vast numbers of them being installed, they still don't produce a noticeable percentage of the electricity we use.
The problem with icing might be due to the get-er-done mindset which ignored the possibility of ice being a problem. Or maybe they considered it, and de-icing by helicopter is the most economical solution. Or maybe it's a freak occurrence that wasn't worth worrying about, until it was.
Small
F2A World Record - Control-line model aircraft speed.
Raddaddy watanen comments:
Some facts for you fellas: Only one-inboard wing, as the drag of the 2 lines are the biggest drag factor. One line is forbidden by the rules (monoline) also longer than 1 m wings outruled. Engine turns at about 40.000 rpm so the two blade prop is ineffective ( other blade falls in the slipstream of the other). The one blade prop tip travels in excess of sound of speed (Tip speed is +1MACH!) and the counterweight is inside the spinner. The 2,5cc glo engine delivers more than 2,5 horsepower. so if it would be a 2,5 litre car engine, the power would be 2500 horsepower. Now you MAY understand these "toys" are actually VERY HIGH TECH scale racers...
Could the engine really be turning 40,000 RPM? That's pretty fast. It is very small. I ran the numbers just to see, and it seems reasonable. 800 MPH is a little more than Mach 1.
I had a couple of control-line model aircraft when I was a kid. Only flew them once or twice. Not sure why. Perhaps it was too big a production for such a small person.
