Questioneering

Keep up with the Orange Unlit Tour

My latest work project. I've been managing the design and development of the web components of a tour around the UK, with the proceedings being blogged, Flickred and Twittered to the world at large.

Hello Balloonists, please leave me a message!

There are plenty of you flying over the site, so if you're not in too much of a hurry it'd be great if you could write something. Leave the name of your balloon and I'll give you a boost.

Good luck!

The World's first internet balloon race

Please support my balloon. I'll be busy making sure this thing goes well, so probably won't have much time to actually play. Typical.

Maiden Voyage of my Krick Victoria

I finally got the chance to sail the boat today. Once I got over the anxiety of my winter's work ending up on the bottom of the lake it went really well. I've posted a quick clip up on YouTube.

Finished the build of the Krick Victoria

Updating the blog's taken a bit of a backseat while I've worked on building this model boat. It's been quite a mission, but very rewarding.

I'm planning a full write-up of the process, as there's not a huge amount of information available online, and I thought that the build was quite tricky in places, especially if you're not that experienced. It's the first time I've built a boat, and trying to make one when you don't know a strake from a gunwale offers some "interesting" challenges.

For the minute I've posted a set of photos on Flickr and made some notes against them, if anyone's interested in seeing the steps you need to go through.

The tank's finally done

I think I've taken the tank as far as I can now, so it's time to move onto a new build. In fact, for the last few weeks I've been working on building up a Krick Victoria steam launch, which is going really well.

Here's a video of the final model in action.

If anyone else is crazy enough to try this please feel free to drop me a line. If there's one thing this project has taught me it's that the internet is full of very helpful strangers!

Tank: revised and refined

Although the tank worked perfectly well from a functional perspective, I wasn't happy with the way it looked. To me it felt a bit jumbled, with a mix of steam and radio components jumbled together.

So I've revised the design, with the radio gear concealed underneath a metal deck, all the steam powerplant clearly on display and the engine exposed at the back.

The only thing left to do is spray up the model. I plan on a simple black and brass finish to integrate the components. And then it's on to the next project, a steam car.

Other things to make and do

Not a steam-tank update this time. I was going to post up a new video of the tank complete with the condenser but the weather has been so bad that it's not been dry enough to get it outside to film for what feels like weeks.

I'm generally pretty DIY-handy, so for the last couple of years I've been loaning myself out to friends to fix stuff in their houses as a birthday present. Seems to be quite popular. I think this counts for about 5-year's worth of birthdays.

Mechanics finally complete

I've not been doing much work on the model recently, having instead been out and about enjoying the marvelous English Summer. If only.

Still, despite the crappy weather dampening my enthusiasm for most activities I have completed the mechanics to my satisfaction. The condenser does a really good job of capturing the oil in the steam exhaust, and also means the exhaust comes out at much lower pressure, with a gentle vertical cloud of steam appearing, rather than the previous jet blast scouring the ground behind the tank.

In the end I redid all the pipework to get the components in the right place. My silver soldering skills are much improved.

So now I really need to think about how the final model will look. I've never scratch-built a model, so this might take a while. Some sketches are probably in order.

Small progress update

Tried some different gearing on the tank this weekend, using Mecanno cogs to double the input speed to the gearbox, the idea being to make the tank twice as quick.

Sadly, there's not enough torque in the engine to make smooth turns with this arrangement, so I've decided to revert to the original 1:1 engine to gearbox ratio. No Speedy Gonzales for me, by the looks of things.

Also, I've noticed that there's quite a lot of oil in the steam exhaust, so I'm going to fit a Condenser to clean up the steam output.