Jake and I started a new project on Saturday.  A floating arm trebuchet.  Here are some pics of our base.

Jake came over today and we were able to light up the furnace again. We were pretty confident we’d have some good results with our new design. Our last attempt fizzled pretty bad. We shorted out our fan motor and had to quit. It turns out that the fan isn’t powerful enough for our new setup any way. We went back to the vacuum cleaner set to blow.

We used cinder blocks to enclose the coals with a cookie sheet dividing the furnace from the plenum underneath. It got super hot this time. We were actually able to pour some decent ingets. We still have some things to work out but we are moving along.

We poured in to a plaster mold and that seemed to work ok. I think we might need to heat it or something to help the aluminum cool more evenly.

In other news, Kami is at her 2nd to last performance of “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown” along with my brother Alex and his girlfriend.  I’m going to go see it tomorrow with my friend Tyson and Jake and Carolyn.  I already saw a preview and it was really good so I’m sure it will be good tomorrow in full production.  I think she has a week off and then starts rehearsal for “To Kill a Mockingbird”  That should be good too.

This is going to be a little random.  A few cool things happened this week.

1.  We ditched our phone company on Wednesday.

A couple of months ago we  switched from DSL internet to Cable internet.  Verizon decided they didn’t want to disconnect it because that would disconnect our internet connection so they kept charging us.  I’m not sure why they didn’t want me to disconnect the internet but they didn’t.  So I was talking to a guy at work (Jeremy) and he was telling me that he just got VOIP (Voice Over IP).  I have always been interested in trying that but I haven’t heard good things about Vonage and that seemed to be the only option.  So Jeremy did all of the leg work in the research and found that phonepower.com had the best support, service and price.  So now we have phone through them.  We kept our phone number and have pretty much every feature imaginable and free unlimited long distance in the US and Canada.  Not a bad deal if you ask me.

I don’t know why the large phone companies suck so bad.  Maybe it is because they don’t have much competition within the regions so they don’t have to try very hard.

2.  Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.

I got my Father’s Day gift on Wendesday.   The new core rule books came out a couple of weeks ago and now I have them.  It is very cool.  I think I like the changes they made and I’m excited to play more.  I have done 3 sessions now but they were all pretty limited because we are learning the rules still.  We are also going to be running a couple of them on our rpg site, Alternating-Reality.com.

3.  Aluminum casting progress

We fired up the furnace again yesterday with some modifications.  We used a plenum to distribute the air evenly through the coals.  It worked fabulously.  We also used a dish washer dryer fan instead of the vacuum.  The dryer was very quiet and pumped plenty of air.

The furnace was much hotter this time with the new setup.  We need to redesign our setup now to be able to handle the heat.  The tin cans won’t work.  We destroyed 2 of the 3 cans we were using.  We also need to figure out how to get our aluminum shavings into the crucible.  Right now we can’t get them in fast enough.

4.  Wall-E

We saw Wall-E yesterday and it was awesome.  They did such a great job telling the story.  There was very little dialog and it was just visually stunning.  It really is a must see in the theater.