At 09:58 PM 5/19/2010, Kyle Mcallister wrote:
Back home, when I was a kid, I was into model rockets. But it seemed
boring making something from a kit. So I set about making my own
rockets and engines.
For fuel, I had a few different things. The most common was common
sugar and potassium nitrate, melted together in a 40/60 ratio, then
cast into PVC pipe lengths, which were then capped and provided with
a nozzle cast from Durham's water putty.
I used that same substance, different mixture. More sugar, I think,
and I used it for smoke bombs, it burned slowly with copious white
smoke, basically harmless. Except a friend of mine was melting down
the stuff on his stove and pulled a spoon out of the hot mixture,
which apparently caused a thread of it to fall down into the gas
flame and the whole thing blew up in his face. No eyebrows, but not a
lot of permanent damage. One freaked-out mother when the house filled
with the smoke, fire department, the whole messs....
A teenager at that time, I had this ragtag collection of assorted
hangers-on from, of all places, the local Baptist church. These
guys, and sometimes girls if we were lucky, would come over and
help manufacture rocket engines. We had this test stand, if you can
justify calling it that, which was a highly technological device
consisting of a piece of 3" steel pipe set vertically into concrete
in the middle of the yard. We'd drop an engine in, lit, and run for
cover. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes..........
You didn't use a fuse? I made fuses with matcheads next to each other
wrapped up with masking tape. They always worked.
I guess one of the worst incidents was an experimental engine
composed of potassium nitrate, magnesium dust (!) and a binder of
polyurethane. The geyser of fire and oily, acrid smoke that issued
from that test stand was ungodly. If I remember right, it was me and
Jerry who were there when it happened. When you see fire flow like a
liquid... time to make an exit, stage right.
It's amazing that I survived. In fact, though, I was never injured.
> Anyway, I'm an American kid, still, I'm just older....
Ditto.
The good news and the bad news.
> Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that.
> Heathkits were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built
> quite a few, but assembly costs are now so low that a
> Heathkit to do what I can easily buy fully assembled and
> tested, etc., would be much more expensive.
Yes, assembled is cheaper now. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if
that's really better. Where's it made? In the USA? Or by someone
slaving in a third world nation, with no chance of anything better?
Whether it's an improvement for them or not depends on local
conditions. I favor using our buying power and choices to cause
improvements in conditions, not to prevent buying from "third world
nations." That means developing information about the actual impact
of these operations, about wether or not good working conditions are
provided, compared, not to what exists in the U.S., but to what other
conditions exist. It's hard to say that we have improved working
conditions if the alternative that we force through a boycott is starvation.
Generally, what we need, in just about everything, is reliable information....
My dad told me stories of taking the tubes from his old TV down to
the drug store and testing them. He'd replace the bad one, and back
to The Honeymooners it was. Now, you just go to Wal Mart and buy a
new TV. In some ways, this is good... an electronics cannibal such
as myself finds garbage day to be a great boon to my assets of
stuff. On the other hand, I think we're instilling a sense of
nonappreciation for what has been made. "Screw it, it's cheap, I
don't care if I break it, I'll buy another one."
Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all
hard-soldered. There are no VCR repair shops any more. Nothing is
repaired, just discarded and replaced. What is the environmental
impact of this?
Harmful. But the repair labor is the problem. So ... ship broken
stuff to third-world countries for repair/recycling. Yes, that shifts
some problems to them. Pay them for it, they may be better positioned
to find positive uses. The economics should be such, though, that if
all they do is dump it, they lose money. They should make money by
maximizing usage and minimizing waste. I don't want to trade
pollution here for pollution there, kids are the same to me, their
kids or our kids.
I sell Persian carpets on Sundays. Woven by kids in Iran, these are
hand-knotted tribal rugs, not factory rugs. Out in the boonies, this
is a way for a family to make some extra income, the kids have a loom
and they spend some time knotting rugs. Is this a good thing?
Probably. Can it be abused? Sure. Anything can be abused. The biggest
problem, right now, is that the market is shot. These are truly
beautiful creations, mostly Gabbehs, and they are selling for what
might represent well under fifty cents an hour for the labor. Figure
the middlemen, it's well under that. They are selling -- or, more
often, not selling -- for less than factory rugs, a mystery to me.
As economic conditions improve in Iran, I expect these kinds of
traditional crafts to disappear.
> I'm selling the material, $27.80 per 9x12 cm. sheet. Be the
> first on your block....
Interesting stuff. If I had the money and time, I wouldn't mind
doing a few CF experiments here.
Hopefully, though I'm moving at a glacial pace, because of other
involvements, I hope to have a standard experiment ready within a few
months, everything needed but the power supply, for roughly $100 for
the heavy water cell and about $70 for a light-water control cell,
otherwise the same. But, then, once this is widely enough tested, it
becomes possible to try all kinds of variations. One at a time!
This experiment will, hopefully, demonstrate neutron generation using
a gold wire cathode and deposition of palladium and then evolution of
deuterium. I have called this a codeposition cell, as have others,
but that is probably misleading. What it is, instead, is the
formation of a palladium-plated cathode, a complex fractal surface,
perhaps, which is then loaded with deuterium. The initial voltage, I
believe, is below the threshold for deuterium evolution, so deuterium
isn't evolved until the palladium is plated out and the voltage rises
(constant current) or the current is raised (and thus the voltage).
There are indications that some kinds of results are better if the
initial voltage is increased so that there is true codeposition, but
I'm trying to reproduce the Galileo protocol. (With a gold cathode
instead of silver, and with a shorter cathode, so less current needed
for the same current density at the cathode, and less heavy water
needed as well, as well as less palladium chloride, lowering cell
costs. If it works.)
Because I'll putting the LR-115 detector chips outside the acrylic
cell, I'll only see proton-knock-on radiation from neutrons, pretty
much nothing else could get to the detectors, and chemical damage
will be ruled out (a real objection to some of the prior work), as
well as the preposterous claims for some kind of directed energy from
mini chemical explosions at the surface blowing a hole in the other
side of immersed CR-39, Shanahan's last-ditch attempt to hold on to a
shred of denial about the neutron reports based on the back side of wet CR-39).
Anyone know how I could get or borrow a fast neutron source? The
level could be tiny. Commercial sources are normally way out of range
of what I could afford, AFAIK. Farnsworth fusor?
I put photos of the LR-115 detector response to an Am-241 alpha
source on the yahoogroup. Unfortunately, I've realized that the
archives and photo albums of this list are not accessible except to
subscribers. But anyone can subscribe and set their subscription on
yahoo to web only, for example, if they don't want to get the very
light traffic from the list.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/coldfusionproject/?yguid=40611328.
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