I’m BACK!

[set2stun]

Wow! I haven’t logged into this awesome forum in 13 years (if my math serves me right). I joined in 2012 after my nephew begged his lazy father and tone deaf mother for a go kart to no avail. So, knowing NOTHING ABOUT GO KARTS OR ENGINES, i decided to build him one . And let me preface that I’m a female who is fairly knowledgeable when it comes to electrical engineering but prior to building the go kart I didn’t even know how a small engine worked nor how a go kart was assembled (like I pondered how to fabricate a drive shaft ).

I was a cavewoman then. But a cavewoman who loves her nephew and he wanted a scale replica of the bad guy’s car in the original Road Warrior. So I joined this forum and you guys taught me everything. I went from not even owning an electric drill to becoming obsessed with tools and mastering their functionality in about 6 months. In fact i loved welding so much that I started with a cheap Harbor Freight flux core mig until I realized how much it sucked. So I bought (OVERBOARD ALERT) a LINCOLN RANGER 10KW GENERATOR WELDER! Yes! And on top of that I bought the mig and tig attachments for it. BTW - BEST PURCHASE EVER!

Then came the engine. I feared engines prior to this project. Guys talk about them as if they are mini Manhattan projects. I learned that they are not only very simple to understand but infinitely modifiable. To this very day I worship at the throne of the Predator 212 .

Sorry for the long post but I’m so excited to be back and to realize how far I’ve come (I have a FULL pro level shop in my backyard just for hobby building - including a home brewed 150w CO2 laser CNC (i work with lasers professionally so this was an easy one), a CNC plasma cutter with belt drive, several 3D printers, a Bobs router CNC, a home brewed pick and place machine for manufacturing my own pcb builds, lathes, etc . . .).

Oh, how did the first go kart turn out? Not so bad for a first ever build. Here are some pics from 2013. Do you see “Mad Max” in my design?


The pic of the predator on a pressure washer was interesting. I drove it so hard that the rod shot out of the block and is sticking out of the moon at this very moment. And for reference, the person - well, that’s me! Not bad for 51 yo

Anyway I want to build something new and epic. Has anyone built a hydrostatic go kart with tracks? That’s what I’m dying to build. Message me if anyone wants to collab

 

[Hellion]

I am not certain but that kart seems to be replicating the Lone Wolf car from the Road Warrior. It wasn't a bad guy car for very long as Papagallo drove it in the climax.

The Lone Wolf

The Lone Wolf is a marauder's vehicle captured by the Compound and later driven by Papagallo in the final chase of The Road Warrior. Early version of the script called for a vehicle as fast as Lord Humungus' and Max's vehicles. Its name "The Lone Wolf Machine" is a reference to lone scavengers...

madmax.fandom.com

What is your next project?

 

[Denny]

Oh my God when you were talking about the equipment you owned I fell in love with you! You never did say but how did your nephew like it? Did he get to help you on it any? How awesome!
Start a build thread on here I’ll follow along and help if I can. When I can. Anyone who goes overboard on buying tools and equipment like I did at one time deserves all the help I can give! I’ve often thought of my own tracked project. AND A BIG WELCOME BACK TO YOU!!!

 

[Whitetrashrocker]

So are you from South Carolina or California.

 

[set2stun]

I am not certain but that kart seems to be replicating the Lone Wolf car from the Road Warrior. It wasn't a bad guy car for very long as Papagallo drove it in the climax.

View attachment 156631

The Lone Wolf

The Lone Wolf is a marauder's vehicle captured by the Compound and later driven by Papagallo in the final chase of The Road Warrior. Early version of the script called for a vehicle as fast as Lord Humungus' and Max's vehicles. Its name "The Lone Wolf Machine" is a reference to lone scavengers...

madmax.fandom.com

What is your next project?

Oh yeah. You’re right. I still love the original Road Warrior. I can’t imagine how fun it would have been to build the props for that movie. Dream job!

 

[set2stun]

So are you from South Carolina or California.

I’m in Myrtle Beach, SC

 

[set2stun]

Hey Denny! Thanks so much! I’m really excited to be back. I have this tendency to go on myopic manic tangents that can last a decade or more. After building the first go kart I became the coolest aunt in the world (and my nephew is such a great kid - and I don’t just say that because he’s my nephew. He is so thoughtful and kind to everyone around him. To this very day he thanks me for that go kart. I also built him a mini bike after ).





So like I was saying I fell down the go kart (metal fabrication, etc) rabbit hole. And then I became laser focused on a new hobby (or three related hobbies to be more precise). I love the sound of Moog subtractive synthesizers. The sound is so gorgeous and the PCM modern synths can’t replicate it. So I started attending synth building conventions and before I knew it I was building full synthesizers in modular form. I love anything analog and eschew everything digital. For example i have a video wall in my living room comprised of 19 CRT televisions that form one image when the original component signal is split up by a Raspberry Pi 3B video processor i designed.



And then came video . . I love live music performance - JAM SESSIONS! So I thought, what if I could build a playable synthesizer that instead of producing sound produced video. And I’m not talking digital video samples. I’m talking true video shapes and colors that you play by combining xy oscillators that you control via -5v through 0 to 5v control voltage from any modulation source (lfo, ramp, envelope generator, audio, etc). And then I learned that there was a community on the west coast building exactly what I dreamed of. So I joined their movement and started building better and better video synthesizers.





Then came lasers. Video is cool but lasers are wicked. I decided to build rgb diode lasers but design my own galvanometers so that I could project the beam at a rate now exceeding 135 kilo points per second (imagine watching a movie but in reality it is one dot of light moving so fast that your mind sees 16 million colors and a landscape as opposed to the one dot).



Here is my video synthesis:

My Laser wave art (read the description in the video):

 

[Sparkwizard]

I like fun projects. My parents live in Murrill's Inlet, and I am about 120 miles north.
I might be able to contribute some components to your next project.

 

[set2stun]

I like fun projects. My parents live in Murrill's Inlet, and I am about 90 miles north.

I LOVE Murrells Inlet. In fact I wish I had bought there when I moved to the area. There are some great art studios in the inlet as well. Are you in NC?

 

[Sparkwizard]

Yes, near Jacksonville, NC

 

[set2stun]

Yes, near Jacksonville, NC

That’s a great area too. I love to drive up to Wilmington on occasion for the great restaurants and eclectic vibe. It’s a super chill town.

 

[Sparkwizard]

Go visit Eagle Island Seafood on 421 in Wilmington. It's an old school, wood floor general store.

 

[Sparkwizard]

That kart you built is a really interesting looking vehicle.

 

[Grizzlymi]

Welcome back. Any pic's of the pro level backyard shop?

 

[set2stun]

Welcome back. Any pic's of the pro level backyard shop?

Sure do. I’ll upload a video tour of it tomorrow. There are some interesting features that really need to be explained and seen in motion to be appreciated. i actually built the shop building myself to my own weird specs. I wanted to go overboard in terms of amperage supplied to its sub panel, i wanted pneumatic piping with outlets in the walls, I wanted careful placement of air vents so that dust was directed toward the dust and fume collectors, I installed a fire suppression system, I installed a pneumatic cylinder lift that I fabricated that sinks flush to the floor when not under pressure (similar to fancy elevators with piston lifts) - i excavated a chamber for the cylinder to descend into. Then there is a motorized gantry crane on t track. A “clean closet“ with temperature control for computer systems. A wazer abrasive jet. Racks upon racks of carefully organized parts and salvage.

trying to think . .

ohhhh, coolest new toy is a robotic arm that I bought that is totally open source when it comes to input protocol. The arm is not a toy. It has the dexterity of a cellist. It can be programmed to perform delicate tasks that are repetitive and require dexterity and steady hands that I lack. And it’s easy to code in python. Not to mention that the arm is the geek invention of the millennium and every body on GitHub has released cool software for it.

anyway, I’ll do a walk through tomorrow.

 

[Grizzlymi]

Sounds very interesting and look forward to it.

 

[Denny]

Wow, I’m blown away by your talents and toys. Your play pen sounds amazing. I hope you stick around because I’d love to assist you on your project.

 

[set2stun]

Sounds very interesting and look forward to it.

Sounds very interesting and look forward to it.

PART 1
I’m excited to show you guys. I know I must sound insane when it comes to my obsession with tools and tinkering. But I have to admit that I love every second i spend in my shop. EVERY SECOND! I even love cleaning up and constantly making sure parts are in their proper bins so that I can always find them.

i‘m not a hoarder in the common understanding of the term. To my knowledge a “hoarder” is someone who keeps EVERYTHING regardless of its utility or potential future utility. Hoarders (who i actually deeply sympathize with as it is a mental illness that they can’t help - my grandma who I worshipped was a hoarder and wouldn’t throw away anything. But I hypothesize that her “hoarding” was not a component of her natal brain structure. Instead, as humans the morphology our brains (the very structure of our brains) grows based on environmental factors. And this isn’t armchair psychology babble. I trust the scientific method and consider the liberal art of psychology to be pseudoscience. But psychopharmacology and biological studies that involve imaging of the human brain over time or on cadavers is reliable. Anyway, my grandma grew up during the depression in a small mill town in North Carolina. God bless her for the hardships that even middle class Americans faced back then. But grandma was especially affected by the depression because her family was indigent even before the depression. Like most rural Americans during that time, her entire family including her farmed cotton from sun up to sun down. Imagine a little girl picking cotton for every hour that she wasn’t in a classroom that thankfully my great grandparents permitted her to attend. And the farm that my family worked wasn’t theirs. They were itinerant farmers. So essentially they would farm someone else’s land and whatever they successfully grew was owned by the landowner with only a fraction of the proceeds from the agriculture going to my family.

[BTW - I write stream of thought and I apologize for the excessive run ons, typos and lack of cohesion in these replies]

Anyway, my point about grandma’s form of hoarding was certainly biological, but not natal. In other words, grandma literally starved during her childhood. The idea of owning a toy of her own was the stuff of dreams. In fact the only luxury that grandma ever had as a child was a snow suit that she had to share with her sister.

Poverty, starvation, long durations of mental/physical abuse during one’s formative years, radical indoctrination and the normalization of cruelty and abuse toward other beings LITERALLY alters the structure of the developing brain. We are evolutionary creatures and we are biologically programmed to prioritize the development of certain areas of our brains in order to ensure our success in the environment we are born into. So grandma’s hoarding was caused not by the typical OCD of, say, a middle class millennial who grew up with adequate food, shelter, etc . . . Grandma’s hoarding derived from the PTSD from those years when she had nothing and couldn’t afford to throw so much as a jug away as it would need to be repurposed to carry water from a well or . . .

Now my “hoarding” is organized. For example I don’t throw away appliances, motors or stuff like the metal frames that stuff like cat 3 farm equipment ship in so that they don’t tear through the shipping carton. I repurpose this stuff. So let’s say i have a broken microwave (), i carefully dissect it and separate the valuable innards so I can repurpose them at a later date. I don’t keep the plastic shell or useless parts of the microwave. But the capacitors and electrical components are carefully removed, thoroughly tested on my electronic bench test equipment to ensure proper function and then stored in bins with other stuff. I have hundreds of diode modules and driver boards from old cd drives. I have hundreds of old mechanical hard drives that have been stripped to preserve the magnets, drive circuitry and even din connectors. And, of course, I go to work on anything metal that is going to the trash. For example i owned an old hyster forklift that was beyond repair. So I removed the cylinders, salvaged the power head and then spent several days with an acetylene torch cutting the entire machine up into dimensional scrap metal (metal is so prohibitively expensive so I never throw it out). When I save metal i do so methodically. First I try to identify the type of metal alloy (and obviously separate out aluminum and stainless so that it isn’t stored with ferrous iron based alloys). I try to grade the alloys by using several primitive methods. The first method is visual. If there is excessive rust on a product (like a modern Weber grill that should be stainless) I can safely assume that it is an alloy with a high nickel content. And then it’s pretty easy to spot galvanized metals by either look or by the sparking when oxygen is added to the acetylene. And then mild steel can be cold rolled or heat treated which is also fairly easy to identify.

So after I cut up the metal from the salvage machine i then blast it or use a burnishing tool to remove any rust or enamel. And then, finally, I flatten the metal with my shop press. I like to rub mineral oil on the scrap metal to preserve it as well. And then I store the metal on racks.

**** I almost forgot why I started this rambling post. But it came back to me. Why am I so weird and atypical for a female who studied engineering and then attended law school after which I worked in the admin legal field of “Space Law” (i specialized in helping firms navigate the administrative domestic and international legal hurdles required of any state that is sending a launch vehicle into low earth orbit or beyond. And then I worked with the ITU to broker the purchase or sale of the orbit real estate that a satellite would reside for its roughly 5 year life span. And when I say that I assisted “states” i am referencing the International Launch Treaty that holds countries liable for any private party launching something into orbit.

So I’m weird. I tried the whole yuppy picket fence life. I got married to a great guy who was an absolutely brilliant computer scientist and worked on the architecture of modern GPUs (he developed a complex algorithm to enable curve etching on smaller and smaller gpu’s - an essential and previously elusive technique that now is responsible for the most advanced GPUs on the planet).

So we were married and we loved each other. But like a carpenter, my husband left his engineering mind at work and didn’t want to be creative at home. He didn’t even enjoy talking about technology. It’s just like great carpenters. My grandfather was a finish carpenter and worked on fabulous houses. But his house was a wreck.

I am hyper, as you can tell, and always want to create. I have adhd and television doesn’t hold my interest. I want to be building something every waking hour.

My ex and I amicably divorced when I was 40 yo (we didn’t have children). It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other. It was all me. I can’t cohabitate with anyone else. I love life so much and being legally bound to another human decreases my spontaneity and ability to do what I want when I want. I hate codependency. I was a fairly normal teenage and college girl. I loved to date and experience the rites of youth. But I like to compare life with a vacation to an exotic location. One time my husband and I spent a summer teaching at University of Hawaii at Manoa on Oahu. And we were really excited - who wouldn’t be? We bought surfboards the day we arrived. We couldn’t wait to see pipelines, Waimea and Pearl Harbor. BUT AFTER WE SURFED A FEW TIMES AND SAW PEARL HARBOR, ETC . . . I was ready to leave. So, comparing this to the rites of youth, “been there, done that, ready to move on.”

 

[set2stun]

Part 2 (character limits )

I recently dated a Dutch artist who creates amazing kinetic physical works of art with complex circuitry. And their purpose is to explore shadows via methods of altering light (google Ryoji Ikeda to get the idea - but Ryoji wasn’t my bf). My bf and I had the greatest relationship ever. We never wanted to spend time together and only zoom call each day. We dreaded vacationing together because we both enjoy losing ourselves in thought. And we both find marriage to be, albeit, necessary for perpetuating our species but otherwise a total buzz kill. WTF would anyone want willfully indenture herself to a single person for life. Don’t people ever run out of conversation topics.

So now I live alone. I am fully retired (thanks to living frugally and carefully investing). I own my house and an apartment in Bangkok outright. I have zero debt and will not spend beyond my limits. I shop frugally. I could care less about labels or fancy cars.

My advice for anyone younger than me would be to vet convention. Social constructs aren’t necessarily established for your benefit. Decide for yourself what makes you happy. It’s very important to prioritize education (hands down). And educate yourself formally until you absolutely must start working. Understand that anthropologists don’t make sh*t for a living. So if you love anthropology then minor in it. But as far as majors go I would strongly advise you to choose a core science. Engineering is ok but it’s subject to obsolescence with the advent of AI (Chat GPT can program better than most software engineers and for a fraction of the price). So my advice would be to choose mathematics, physics (if you have the brains), chemistry (super difficult but enormous payout and not likely to be replaced by AI) or ECONOMICS (not finance). A double major in economics and mathematics will make you a multimillionaire (program trading is like printing money)

Wow - my adderral is really giving my money’s worth this morning .

And again, sorry for the long post. I just enjoy writing and the length of this post is on par with the length of every post I write.

Please message me if you have questions, want to collab or need help with anything (i work for free when it comes to fellow enthusiasts and will gladly help you with cad renderings, pcb layouts in eagle, 3D modeling for use in printing, anything related to arduino or raspberry pi, python and pretty much any one of the primitive LAMP elements to and their newer counterparts). I quit being a capitalist. I love capitalism. But I live frugally and don’t need any more money. I don’t mind living frugally. So now I enjoy helping others with their projects and never charge for anything. I encourage others who have the means to give of their knowledge for free to do so. Sites like Thingyverse.com and GitHub are metaphors for how society SHOULD BE! By providing open source resources for free we actually grow the actual economy from the derivative fruits that originate from our open source soil.

Christina

 

[Denny]

Smarter than me and as crazy as me. I think I’m in love! So what are your thoughts of how to do this tracked vehicle? The only problem with using a hydrostatic drive is a slow ground speed. But it will have plenty of power. Using an open rearend (non-positraction) from a golf kart or a small car would give it a higher ground speed but would significantly increase size and weight.