A visual aid for designing recumbent bikes.

Originally published at Bike-Recumbent.com

Some random experiments with front wheel drive bikes.

Originally published at Bike-Recumbent.com

Part two in my foundry furnace project, click through for more details.

[Yes, I do have a Persian rug in my workshop. What of it?]

This past Monday I finally got started on my foundry project!  I've been collecting material for some time so I was ready to roll once Maker Faire '09 concluded.  The goal is to built a foundry furnace capable of melting brass and perhape iron, if I'm lucky.  

I'm using Dave Gingery's Building a Gas Fired Crucible Furnace as a general guide, but I intend to fuel my furnace with gasoline and waste oil (both veggie and motor) rather than propane (that would be far too easy!).  The main reason for the use of this dangerous fuel is to gain experience with petrol burners for application in a future steam car project.

More after the cut . . . 

If you've visited here before you know that one of my long term projects is to built a fully road-able steam powered automobile.  In addition to requiring a great deal of research, such a project requires tools.  I will need machine tools such as a lathe and a milling machine.  I'll also need a flat bed trailer, initially to bring home the machine tools, but also to fetch the donor car that I'll base my vehicle on.

Sometime during the work on my school bus to RV conversion I developed an allergy to pine sawdust.  So I built this powered face mask filter so I could continue to work with wood in my shop without unpleasant effects.

Making nice photographs when all you have for lighting is a bunch of tungsten shop lamps can be a real challenge.  It is particularly hard to photograph polished brass under these conditions.  So this weekend I set out to build a flash diffuser to improve the quality of the photography on this site.

For many of my recent projects I have found myself in need of a lightbox so I took a couple of hours from working on my latest project to put together this one.