I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.
Today I decided to figure out how snow machines work, you know, the kind that the ski resorts use to make snow when its cold but not snowing. I found this cool site, http://www.snowathome.com/ which has several different plans for making snow machines of different kinds. I chose this one because it was the only one that didn’t require a pressure washer, only an air compressor. On the down side it doesn’t have the highest output but we’ll see how it works, that is of course if we get another cold enough night. I’ve setup the air compressor in the sound room so I can run it at ~4am without disturbing anybody while I make my snow.
I found most of the parts at The Home Depot tonight with Matt Jeff and Jeff. It cost me ~$34 including a new garden hose and seems to spray the water in a fine mist that will hopefully make nice snow if it gets cold enough outside. The only issue with this method for making snow, at least with the way its currently built, is the possibility that water will push back into the air hose and into the air compressor. This would destroy the air compressor and would most likely cause other problems since the air compressor is practically inside. The weather report says it wont be cold enough tonight so all I can do now is hope it stays cold for a while. You can see my pictures of this build on flickr
This week has been very cool. So cold in fact that the driveway at my house froze over and I am now unable to park my car in the garage (down the hill) for fear of not being able to drive up the hill when I need to be somewhere. Yesterday the ice on the driveway didnt melt because the house blocks the sun from the driveway all day. This picture was taken at about 1pm and only some of the ice had melted.
I remember as a child during a big freeze year we would run the hose all night to create an ice hill to sled down in the morning. I think I’ll try it again tonight and see what happens in the morning. There are sill a few more days of sub-freezing temperatures at night on the forecast and I hope to bring back some memories. Now if it would just snow so I can take some friggin pictures!
I spent a few days in sausalito last week. Alfonso helped me work on a few projects on the boat including cutting all of the uprights to support the floor, as well as fabricating the boards to cover the floor. He was also kind enough to let me crash at his place overnight. It was very stressful as usual driving the trailer through 19th street and across the Golden Gate Bridge. As I was pulling into sausalito, I went around a sharp right turn and the car made this awful sound like I had hit something, and the boat looked crooked on the trailer. My first thought was that one of the bunks had broken a and punched through the hull, but after careful inspection, nothing was wrong with the trailer or the boat. I had to drive to west marine down the street from his office once, and while turning sharp out of the driveway of west marine, I heard a big pop again. After returning home, I dropped off the expedition at our mechanic and there are two different problems with the suspenssion. Both problems are being fixed so we can tow the boat up to huntington.
Below is a video of some of the things I worked on in Sausalito.