summer at Sandhill Farm, Rutledge MO

This post has been a long time coming.  Guess I've got some phase lag to deal with.

I never did set up an engineering job for this summer.  Instead, I worked at Sandhill Farm, an agrarian cooperative and community in rural northeast Missouri.  I went there to learn about small scale food production.  Folks at Sandhill grow upwards of 80% of the food that they consume.  To pull in some income, they produce and sell condiments (horseradish, mustard) and sweeteners (honey, maple, and sorghum syrup).  I also went to learn about modern alternative culture.  It's been a while since the 1970s and 80s, when many books on natural building, alternative living situations and homesteading were published.

front to back: echinacea, green beans, and salad greens

overtone flute

Here's a video from June 2013 of an overtone flute I made.  It's a fipple flute (like a recorder or pennywhistle).  This one had a bore of 7/8" and was almost three feet long.  I regret having drilled holes in it to make it into a low whistle.

kitelandboard part two: the saga continues

after not one, not two, but three complete failures at composite layup, I decided to switch approaches.  Using some high-tech material which appeared in MITERS after a neighboring shop was being cleaned, I made a new deck.  The material is aluminum honeycomb.  It appears to be bonded with some sort of epoxy (does well under heat) to two sheets of ~2mm thickness.

I debated for a while whether it was worth bending up the ends to give the trucks the necessary angle, or if I should just leave the deck flat and machine some angle brackets to go between the trucks and the deck.  Bending the deck beyond its 'elastic' region crimps the material, leaving a very weak joint.

kitelandboard in progress

after almost a year of getting hauled around by a big kite or two, I decided it was time to get some wheels between the kiter and the ground.
Plenty of people kitesurf on the water.  Some people do it on land with large pneumatic tire'd skateboards.  They can be had online for upwards of $200 or so.

I want to make a laminated deck.  I decided to make a mold that could squeeze some layers of whatever together while the adhesive sets.

I scavenged some plywood from the N52 loading dock and cut them into rectangles of approximately the same size.