Son of Patch Jacket!

Okay, this is one final hurrah before the big one. I got two patches for the project I work on, so I put them on! I only managed to stick myself a few times with the needle, so I guess that's an improvement?
And on the actual jacket!

Glider! Okay, the propeller just fell off.

I decided to make a plane, but this time with actual airfoils instead of crappy balsa-wood flat wings. I sketched out a pretty simple design, square wings and rear stabilizers, and set up a little assembly line.


Then I put the wings onto the previous plane I'd built, and gave it a try, and it turned out that it had a little too much lift, and would stall out really quickly. So I stripped those wings off, made some smaller ones for the rear stabilizers, and before I put it all together, I figured I may as well use them as canards to prevent the stalling problem. And it actually did stop it from stalling! It did not, however, prevent it from flying like a rock. Seriously, this thing followed a pretty newtonian curve, it was like high school physics all over again. And since I'd gotten impatient and used hot glue to attach the wings, I could not now remove them, and thus I was about ready to scrap it when the propeller fell off, and it turned out to be a pretty fair glider. Observe!


I'm planning to do this again with larger canards and a little bit more math backing me up. Then again, I think I always say that.

UCSD Rocket Project

This is the launch of my senior-class project at UCSD. It was a hybrid rocket, burning nitrous oxide and a rubber grain. It was supposed to measure pressure as it went up, or something like that, I don't recall. I do remember that the nose cone only ejected because the engine shut off and it started decelerating at two gees, instead of our incredibly reliable ejection charge. This was the only class in college with which I got to play with explosives. Go aerospace engineering!


I'd like to note that this is actually filler, but I've got three things going on at once right now, and they'll all be up shortly. I hope.

Halloween Costume: The Finale

Halloween has come and past, and I managed to wear the costume a couple times (and also slept in it, but that's a separate matter). I also managed to get the sonic screwdriver working, after I figured out that I couldn't actually make the sound thing work (it turns out that capacitors don't work as I'd thought), and I also couldn't use AAA batteries, so I had to make use of some smaller batteries I had in a flashlight. But it worked! I used a cigar tube for the main body, glued on a washer on top, a quartz crystal on top of that, and put a blue high-powered LED inside, with a push switch on the bottom. I also put on some paint black strips of balsa wood to break up the silver tube, and give it a little grip.

This is the whole get up:

And this is the embarrassing video I promised: