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John,
That's a very pretty sign!
That's a very pretty sign!
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Been out and about the last few days but still managed to find time to work on a better light source for the Westar at Ferrymead Park. I came across this old carbon arc unit down there the other day, and that started me thinking if I could use it. I gave it a good clean and boy did it need it, used some "free all" on the workings and gave the mirror a good clean with IPA, it came up not to bad. I hope to get back down there soon, and see if this might work. The lamp I will use to begin with is a 24V 250watt to set thing up, in the hope I can do a bit of arm twisting with the good folk for a 36V 400watt lamp
. I have a ready made power source for both 24V and 36V.
So will see... One if I can get it to fit,... Two get the lens/ gate and the center of the mirror to be dead center. If I can achieve those things first, then I can move on to the adjustments with the lamp and lens, there are certainly plenty that I can do, so will see what comes of it.
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​Oh...Deer!
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We went up to our local state park for a walk along the beach this afternoon. There was a crowd gathered along the boardwalk railing and we walked over to see what all the fuss was about. Then we saw these three deer (and at least two more in the brush behind them.)
These are a special sub-species of white-tailed deer you often see at selected local parks called "moochers": you see people were tossing apple slices over the railing and the deer were gobbling them up (-didn't even stop to wash the sand off first!)
Not all Long Island deer are moochers: you go to a park with a hunting season and you'd be lucky to get within 50 feet of them, meanwhile this bunch was lined up 10 feet away like an exhibit at a Natural History Museum. They were so close, that if they spoke English we could have talked with them!
Now, what you are seeing here is just a little-bit Jurassic Park. You see, deer went extinct on Long Island more than a century ago. Somewhere along the line some Gentlemen's Clubs decided they might like small contained populations to hunt on their reserves, so they ​trucked in some deer from the mainland and lacking predators (-also locally extinct) the deer soon got out of control and now there are thousands of them!
I'm a big fan of them, but I'll have to admit they are sometimes a nuisance. Some years ago a homeowner one town away from here was home on Halloween night. She heard a huge crash in her living room, yelled "Damn KIDS!" and ran in only to come face to face with the deer that just ran through her picture window.
Nature abhors a vacuum. We have this large population of deer without any predator to control their population. Meanwhile, there has been a gradual buildup of coyotes on the mainland. They can't swim across, but there are several railroad bridges between Queens County and the rest of the world and coyotes are crossing the bridges late at night when the trains aren't running. (Life will find a way!) Coyotes are now resident on western Long Island: tipping people's garbage cans and occasionally making them sorry they left their house pets out in the yard too long, and slowly moving eastward towards all those deer. They say the two populations will meet up in about 20 years, and for a change the top of the local food chain will be a carnivore once again.Comment
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Dominique,
Very nice. I'd wear ties more often to show that off!Comment
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If you've EVER wondered what's inside one of these:
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TODAY is your lucky day!
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Now, there's a whole lot more going on in there than just a tungsten filament in a vacuum: LEDs are low-voltage devices and there has to be some sort of power supply in-between the AC power line and these DC devices. The 8 little yellow rectangles are the LED's themselves: the plastic lens diffuses the light so it looks like a single source. What's nice is the harsh lighting the early LEDs often provided has been improved to something comparable to incandescent lamps of the same type.
To me these are an amazing technology. This lamp provides the equivalent illumination of a 65Watt incandescent lamp, but consumes only 11Watts of power. The reason is they produce so much less heat. I became very fond of them after I installed some in our Camper (-sometimes we are on batteries!). I've read that the introduction of LED lighting has at least slowed the growth forecast of electric power consumption enough that several new power plants have been canceled in the USA.
What's literally cool is when you go into the lighting department at a place like Home Depot. Ten years ago you felt like you might burst into flames from all the heat pouring off of several hundred incandescent lamps turned on at the same time. Today? You don't even need to unzip your jacket!
In our kitchen ceiling, there are five of these. We could operate incandescents with about the same power usage...If we were willing to unscrew four of them! (I say, keep the one over the stove!)
By the way, I've had this habit of busting open technical stuff (-nothing biological!...ewww!) ever since I was a little kid. It used to really annoy my parents, but they felt better about it once I could put it back together again, repaired! (sometimes educations come from unexpected directions...)Last edited by Steve Klare; May 27, 2023, 04:58 PM.Comment
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A Scot does breakdowns of these including working out circuit diagrams (also with many other electrical/electronic devices) on You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcomComment
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Fine by me!
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-I've heard stories of amazing technical abilities among them! 😊Comment
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Grandson Connor
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It’s a good job those wheels are anchored down! Ken Finch.😉Comment
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Well today it was back to film and after cleaning/splicing/inspecting the reels it was time to load "Sleepless In Seattle" onto the platter, hoping to run it very soon.
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Ironic?
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Some Adventures:
We spent our weekend camping at a favorite county park:
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-just a nice weekend away, but not too away: this park is maybe 25 miles from home. The great thing about that is we let our local friends know and one other family joined in, and several sets of friends that couldn't camp stopped by and visited a few hours.
We had all the standard camping must-haves: campfire, hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks, good hearty food and of course hot coffee on the stove.
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We've decided our kid is old enough to have a little a place of his own! (-VERY little!)
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At one point, somebody yelled out "Oh, LOOK! -a turtle!" Now, we get box turtles all the time: essentially a rock with head, tail and feet, but this was NOT one of those times!
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This bad-boy is a common snapping turtle, probably the fiercest reptile on the North American Continent for the last 65 million years. Our friend the box turtle will, if he dimly perceives a human being close by, turn in the opposite direction and "run" (a quarter mile per hour downhill with a strong tailwind!). If cornered, he pulls everything inside his shell and hopes you go away! This guy is entirely different: as I approached he turned and faced me. I got within camera distance, no closer (-zoomed in a little while I was at it!). These are famous for taking chunks out of canoe paddle blades and biting off human fingers! I mean: this is still a rock with head, tail and feet: he can't leap at me like Monty Python's rabbit, it's just in this case the rock has jaws like a hydraulic press and the disposition of a rabid pit bull!
I got my picture and took a step back, let him lumber his pre-historic self off to the lake next to the campground. (He didn't seem in the mood for sociable contact!)
-he's still out there,...somewhere!
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-Next:...something else!Last edited by Steve Klare; June 04, 2023, 10:29 PM.Comment
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An Amphibious Update
While we were camped next to that lake, I decided to have some fun with my amphibious Jeep model. This thing was actually conceived of with camping in mind. The first one I built (the pretty awful one that a kid would make) when I was 12 because that summer my family was camping at a state park with a lake. This second one at least got started because we were going to a really great place up in Western Maine, also with a lake.
So far, its adventures have been pretty sedate ones. Its first "voyage" was in the pool at the Ocean Holiday at CineSea (-although technically it had bobbed around in the kitchen sink for a while a few nights before for confidence: I didn't feel like diving into a cold pool if it foundered out in the depths!). It's thoroughly navigated the pools at the Ocean Holiday and Shalimar and every set of friends we know that owns a pool. It had seen hotel pools almost almost out to Chicago a few times.
Maybe it was time for it to venture out into the big world.
This is a very active model to operate. It is built from a set of instructions in a book published in the 1950s: there is no radio control. Most of the time, it involves one or two people running around a swimming pool and steering it inward when it approaches the edge. One "driver" is a challenge, especially when there is a diving board to leap over! We recently tried three in bathing suits in a hotel pool, and that was fun too. The plan for today was out in open water from paddle craft.
The Rules of Engagement are as follows: no salt water, no polluted water, no strong currents, no motorboat traffic. Hard's Lake at Southaven Park is as close at you are ever going to have all of these in the same place.
The lakeshore is muddy for the first maybe 20 feet, so I decided to launch and recover out where the water is clean and unobstructed. Here we are in pre- launch mode: (That hatch cover needs a magnet to hold it in place and maybe paint before I let it join in!)
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-Left "gearshift" back to spin the propeller (-no land drive right now!), put it in the water, and we are now free to navigate!
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The thing to remember here is even a 12 foot canoe is a decent sized cargo ship relative to this 14" long model, and while this thing is as reinforced as much as I could, it is still at its heart a little wooden box afloat in several million gallons of water: some gentleness was called for! We decided the thing to do was slowly paddle along side and either reach down and guide it by hand or gently let it graze the canoe or kayak hull and turn both (No paddle-pushing!)
The Approach.
The Return
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It was a lot of fun: the breezes out on that open lake made the Jeep particularly lively and keeping up with it took a little skill and teamwork. Later on I let it approach from astern and scooped it up and put it back in its "custom designed" "case".
It is remarkably seaworthy: there were some pretty heavy "seas" that day and when I tipped it out a little later I got less than a teaspoon of lake water back. The key there is the heaviest things aboard are two C cells and they sit very low and as far astern as possible. When a wave hits it, it tends to roll with the swell and settle right back after it passes.
For what it's worth, we may have started a whole new outdoor sport!
For the record: the snapping turtle we met earlier and several dozen friends and family were almost certainly in the lake with us. They are much more mobile in the depths and have the reputation of just slipping away when people approach. It's on land where they are vulnerable, that they get nasty! Then again, if just left alone to go about their snapping-turtle business they've never harmed anyone.
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On second thought: calling the snapping turtle "probably the fiercest reptile on the North American Continent for the last 65 million years" on continent with crocodiles and alligators may be thinking a little too locally!
-when we see one of those up in New York, it's certainly an escaped "pet"! (-and every so often it happens, too!)Comment
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