Freesteel Blog » This week’s kayaking and engineering update

This week’s kayaking and engineering update

Monday, August 10th, 2015 at 3:14 pm Written by:

What do you do with someone who broke their elbow six weeks ago?

Take them on a long 7 hour canoing trip up the Conwy river from the coast at Deganwy to the new inland surf station at the historic village of Dolgarrog, of course.

conwymap

Due to the lack of a waterproof camera, I don’t have any photos of our journey and of the many hours upwind paddling through miles of waving reed meadows and into the small dry creek leading to the hydro power station.

We parked on a bank full of thistles and waded through stagnant pools and along rocky river beds before we reached a road bridge where we could climb up and over the fence.

nwsurf
Down that road was the surf pond, already packed out on its 6th day of operation. We had our picnic on a bench watching the surfers, noted that it was already half past six, and then rushed back to the boats before we got benighted.

deganwy
In the meantime the hydro power gates had opened, causing a slightly worrying river crossing. The tide had also risen another metre (more than an hour after Conwy high tide at 5pm) nearly washing our boats away.

More engineering

Last Thursday I made a trip to the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in Sheffield. It’s a bit of a massive establishment with a lot of machine tools, so they ought to have people making special CNC toolpaths for them. On the other hand, I don’t think the development of yet more passenger aircraft technology is necessarily a good investment of engineering resources, given that the industry needs to shrink by 10% per year from now on as part of any strategy for us to survive on this planet with our species and civilization intact.

I decided I need some mechanical engineers to put to work on the triangular machine tool, and formed a theory that there were not enough of them around because they’d all got a proper formal education which put them on the conveyor belt into corporate employment where they were no longer an accessible resource. On the other hand, software engineers are often self-taught and therefore don’t begin their careers with much faith in the system, and so tended to be easier to entice into random start-ups that don’t have any rich person’s backing.

manchmf
Then I spent most of my Sunday in Manchester at the MakeFest in MOSI not helping on the DoESLiverpool stand at all. But I did find plenty of mechanical engineers who immediately contradicted my theories.

One of them had made a tiny wind tunnel model into which he let me insert my hang-glider wind meter for testing, which I’ll talk about in the next post rather than confuse everyone by putting at the bottom of this page here.

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