Stuff-mo-tron

Sun, 24 Aug 2008

I forgot how much fun it is to play around in CAD programs. I decided to model (approximately) the new camera mount, pictures of which appear below.

The real thing ended up a bit more mangled than that. In order to relieve stress on the hose clamps, the corners of the ears got rounded over with a file. The camera wouldn't angle far enough up, so I ended up cutting down the top edge of the 3-fingered mount in an ungraceful way.

I finally sucked down some CAD goodness in the form of brl-cad, and made a basic model of the bicycle cargo trailer I want to build:

That's just the rough outline, and not terribly well done, but it shows the basic idea. That'll get a plywood deck to complete it, and some rings and tubes to accomodate strapping things down and adding a temporary wall with dowels and something between them (rope, webbing, netting, whatever).

The deck will be two feet by four feet, and the tongue will be one foot long. That makes it big enough to carry my cello, which was the real goal. It should also be sized appropriately to carry 100-150 lbs of whatever else -- boxes, cider blocks, bags of heavy stuff. The frame (based on simplistic calculations) should weigh about 10 lbs, and by the time it's all put together, it should come in under 30 lbs.

The trailer hitch on the bicycle will be composed of a heim joint attached to a bracket welded to the back of the Xtracycle frame. It should be pretty robust, but I'm still trying to figure out how I can continue storing the Xtracycle up on its tail with the hitch in place. Given how often I'm likely to use it, I suppose I could just remove the hitch from its bracket when it's not in use... That would certainly be the easiest solution.

Given that The Enormous Room is available electronically, and the copyright date on this introduction is 1934, I'm going to guess that it's safe to reproduce here. This is from the Random House "Modern Library" edition, published, well, some time after 1934. There are no other dates I can find.

		INTRODUCTION

  Don't be afraid.
  ---But I've never seen a picture you painted or read
a word you wrote---
  So what?
  So you're thirty-eight?
  Correct.
  And have only just finished your second novel?
  Socalled.
  Entitled ee-eye-em-eye?
  Right.
  And pronounced?
  "A" and in a, "me" as in me; accent on the "me".
  Signifying?
  Am.
  How does Am compare with The Enormous Room?
  Favorably.
  They're not at all similar, are they?
  When The Enormous Room was published, some people
wanted a war book; they were disappoitned.  When Eimi
was published, some people wanted Another Enormous 
Room; they were disappointed.
  Doesn't The Enormous Room really concern war?
  It actually uses war: to explore an inconceivable vast-
ness which is so unbelievably far away that it appears
microscopic.
  When you wrote this book, you were looking through
war at something very big and very far away?
  When this book wrote itself, I was observing a negli-
gible portion of something incredibly more distant than 
any sun; something more unimaginably huge than the
most prodigious of all universes---
  Namely?
  The individual.
  Well!  And what ambout Am?
  Some people had decided that The Enormous Room
wasn't a just-war book and was a class-war book, when
along came Eimi---aha! said some people; here's another
dirty dig at capitalism.
  And they were disappointed.
  Sic.
  Do you think these disappointed people really hated
capitalism?
  I feel these disappointed people really hated them-
selves---
  And you really hated Russia.
  Russia, I felt, was more deadly than war; when nation-
alists hate, they hate by merely killing and maiming
human beings; when internationalists hate, they hate by
categorying and pigeonholing human beings.
  So both your novels were what people didn't expect.
  Eimi is the individual again; a more complex individ-
ual, a more enormous room.
  By a---what do you call yourself? painter? poet? play-
wright? satirist? essayist? novelist?
  Artist.
  But not a successful artist, in the popular sense?
  Don't be silly.
  Yet you probably consider your art of vital conse-
quence---
  Improbably.
  ---To the world?
  To myself.
  What about the world, Mr. Cummings?
  I live in so many: which one do you mean?
  I mean the everyday humdrum world, which includes
me and you and millions upon millions of men and
women.
  So?
  Did it ever occur to you that people in this socalled
world of ours are not interested in art?
  Da da.
  Isn't that too bad!
  How?
  If people were interested in art, you as an artist would
receive wider recognition---
  Wider?
  Of course.
  Not deeper.
  Deeper?
  Love, for example, is deeper than flattery.
  Ah---but (now that you mention it) isn't love just a
trifle oldfashioned?
  I dare say.
  But I dare say you don't dare say precisely why you
consider your art of vital consequence---
  Thanks to I dare say my art I am able to become myself.
  Well well!  Doesn't that sound as if people who weren't
artists couldn't become themselves?
  Does it?
  What do you think happens to people who aren't
artists?  What do you think people who aren't artists
become?
  I feel they don't become: I feel nothing happens to
them; I feel negation becomes of them.
  Negation?
  You paraphrased it a few moments ago.
  How?
  "This socalled world of ours."
  Labouring under the childish delusion that economic
forces don't exist, eh?
  I am labouring.
  Answer one question: do economic forces exist or do
they not?
  Do you believe in ghosts?
  I said economic forces.
  So what?
  Well well well! Where ignorance is bliss...Listen, Mr.
Lowercase Highbrow---
  Shoot.
  ---I'm afraid you've never been hungry.
  Don't be afraid.

 				    E.E. CUMMINGS
New York
  1932

I endeavored, as much as possible, to preserve the formatting and spelling. Hopefully I don't have too many typos in there.

I finally got my new mill squared up and ready for serious work a couple of days ago, so I decided to christen it with a job that absolutely couldn't be done on the lathe: a new, steadier mount for the on-bike camera.

I had these crazy plans for a very complex clamping assembly that would clamp onto a fork tube. Very swanky. Very nearly impossible to do given the facilities and skill I have at the moment. Then I was struck with inspiration for another way to do it: a much simpler mount plus bog-standard hose clamps. It worked perfectly:

Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.