What was I thinking...

Just to finish the pulley rant, I created a template to drill the round wood pieces that I bought (99c/bag) at the local craft store. They seemed perfectly round in the bag...



Much to my surprise (am I new? or what!) they were far from round, I found out when I tried to fit them in my template. To make it short, I sanded them enough to fit, drilled and glued them together. As I was venting my frustration for not finding proper pulleys, my wife who works next to me in the studio, asked why I did not use the spools that she uses for her beading or the ones that I use for stringing (fish line) the marionette.

DUH!

I must be very tired, been sleeping 4 hours max for months now. why didn't I think of the spools which were in front of me? So, here, I have a steady supply of the perfect size/weight spools.


I only needed to create bushings to adapt to the servos, real servos that is, not the modified ones by Vex which of course have a "proprietary" square shaft that only fits their kit stuff, I still cannot get over their lack of foresight and integration with the rest of the world. So much for Open Anything! Dean Kamen, you know much better than that!

I created the bushings with an aluminum rod that happened to have the right diameter.
I drilled the shaft hole to attach the Hi-Tech servos I will probably use, notched them to hold the adhesive better and epoxied them to the spools.

patterns in the weather

A nonsense name for a nonsense week. I feel like I am under my own non-disclosure agreement since for my own protection I must keep quiet about a change in the weather. Can't see a safe haven yet...

So as it is true with all our daily activities, some things take precedence at the expense of our own life. And that to me is very expensive indeed.

On the banal but also symptomatic stage of the general deterioration of ethics and quality in our world and in particular where I live, I received a large package on the mail that I had no clue as to the contents, since I did not remember ordering anything as large...

Since I don't have a lathe or access to one at the moment I thought it would be easy to find the small pulleys that I urgently need for my project. As it happens, one of the most difficult things to find have been the pulleys or sheaves needed to raise and lower the marionette's articulations.

Why this is I don't understand. No robotic store or company, specially at the "hobby" or craft level carries such a useful and logic device. Can someone explain?

After much searching I finally found a place that purportedly had what I needed. Based on their description I bought 6 little sheaves to test. Here is what I got!

A ridiculously large box with 6 little pieces of crappy malformed plastic. Supposedly this place, whose motto is "Leaders in Education" wants to lead students, in step with the current government mandate to the lemmings paradise.

I imagine, they consider children or students simple ignorant people who do not deserve to touch anything decently made that might, just might teach them something. That way they learn to accept as a fact of life the terribly poor quality of life that education (with few exceptions) in this country provides to the millions, ground and trained through the system to accept mediocrity as the norm.

After all mediocrity and ignorance make good cannon fodder.


I ship the crafts I or my wife make all over the US and the rest of the world. One pound, Priority Mail costs $US 4.80 ...the shipping of these few ounces of bad plastic which cost US$ 1.50/each, cost US$ 7.oo for a total of US$ 16.00 I guess the huge box accounts for the "handling" fees.

I understand this post is a waste of everyone's time. But it is also part of the project. SO back to a more positive track I decided to build my own pulleys with wood. I will have to shape them with a sander given the lack of a lathe, but that will be OK.