Category Archives: Deferred Procrastination
Kingsbury K-Drive
The video below of the Human Power Team‘s elliptical drive system is the first time I’ve seen a non-circular power system in motion. Functionally identical to the “K-Drive” of the Kingsbury Kingcycle, the mechanism is first described in 1890, so it might be more correct to call it a “Vietor Elliptical Drive”, it’s best known [...]
Making it Better—Open Source CNC
CNC routers and laser cutters are now common machines. Not ubiquitous, like a hammer, but they are common enough that I can send a pattern for cutting, or visit a lab and operate one myself. However, they still remain expensive, industrial machines. Makerslide took the idea of a standard aluminium extrusion frame system, used for [...]
LaTeX-SVG-to-PDF as git submodule
I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve got a large project in \(\LaTeX\) and while I was using Dropbox as a pseudo revision control and external backup. However, I’ve since been persuaded that a proper revision control system with meaningful commit message is a better way of tracking progress and changes. So I’ve moved the project to [...]
On the Creative Process
An upcoming deadline for my thesis rewrites in April means I’ll be reducing the time I’m putting into blog posts until then. There’ll be less original content, but I should still have something up every week. Before I started working on Atomic Duck I, like many people, didn’t fully appreciate the amount of background work [...]
Steering Assembly
I went through the steering pulley arrangement in detail last week, and here’s the whole steering assembly: There’s additional support structure around the pulley mount on the dash panel. As it was, the length of the steering column meant that the dash panel would be very easily bent out of shape. The additional structure from [...]
Solidly Mounted Steering
well, not solid, it’s no good if you can’t turn the wheel! Before I show the complete steering assembly, I wanted to show the detail of the steering pulley, where the driver’s end of the steering cables connects to the steering wheel and how all the parts clamp up around the dash panel to allow [...]
Is it a Car or is it a Bike?
The correct answer is probably: door number three — “neither, it’s a different vehicle that is somewhere between both of them”. I’ve had a re-read recently of Frederik Van De Walle’s Master’s Thesis “The Velomobile as a Vehicle for more Sustainable Transportation” (freely available to download from his site); and while I’ve never used the [...]
LaTeX-SVG-to-PDF now compatible with LaTeX Project Structure Guidelines
I’ve pushed a couple up updates to LaTeX-SVG-to-PDF that come from some changes I made to my largest LaTeX project file. Since I converted a long (>100 pages) document from Microsoft Word format to LaTeX, I’ve now split the file down into the separate chapters for easier editing that are all \include{}‘d or \input{}‘d from [...]
Bottom Bracket and Adjustment
The bottom bracket structure was not quite ready to show last week (although I put up pictures) but it’s much better this week. If you don’t feel there’s been much obvious progression from those images, you’re not alone, I keep putting in the hours on the CAD, and it doesn’t seem to change shape much! [...]
Chainline Progress
A hardware failure on my file-server this week has left me couple of days behind on CAD work this week, so where I expected to have a near-complete drivetrain assembly and instead, I only have the unfinished parts of one. However, I’m putting up images of the progress as it is for two reasons: 1. [...]