Showing posts with label Bullwinkle III. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bullwinkle III. Show all posts

Epic Adventurer - Thinking - something actually happened

Something actually happened!

I did something.

I secretly fed a duck and a turtle in a park near a hospital (Where there are "please don't feed the wildlife" signs, but I picked at the bark and leaf litter on the ground, and fed other bits of the wildlife to the other wildlife, so I figure...

Where's the crime?

anyway... they looked hungry and made pleading sounds, so I fed them some other things

but I guess I DID feed them things that (if I could read exoskeleton facial expressions) looked very frightened, and screamed in utter misery the entire time...

But anyway...

after that, and more importantly, I have more stuff in my brain that I did the other day.

and that feels a little odd

It's been a while.

I've had a tummy ache.

They thought C17H19NO3 might help so gave me lots of it for ages.

Lately it feels like there's been a eighteen month slow leak of stuff from my brain rather than the thing I was going to say but forgot a bit...

So I've got that going for me.

But today I continued on from the other day, and actually finished some work on my solar boat that may have actually got me a little closer to something.

Which is nice.

It doesn't sound like a lot. To anyone who hasn't tried to make a trailer's wiring communicate with a car's wiring it wont sound like a lot, but if you have, and you know either something, or nothing about electronics, you'll know that having your brake lights strobe when you turn left is actually a reasonabe outcome. At the very least, the person behind you knows that something is about to happen, and they should probably change lanes and get as far away as they can.

Not such a bad outcome as far as safety is concerned.

But what works even better is a system that uses the correct lights where they are appropriate!

Who knew!

But the best part, is that I wired it up, hot glued it in place, plugged it in...

And it actually worked.


Today at least, physics does my bidding.


120ThingsIn20Years - Bam!




Epic adventurer - New solar panels

Bullwinkle III is about to be born.

Bullwinkle was the first incarnation of my little boat. It was originally a SunDance 4.3m one man racing catamaran.

I went halves in it with a friend.

It was old and slow but built solidly.

We broke it.

We fixed it up, but it wasn't strong enough to put it under the kind of strain that a boat sees when it's under sail, so the sail had to go.

I put a 1.8m square of marine grade plywood on it and turned it into a fishing barge. I added a large deep cycle battery and an electric trolling motor. This gave me a range of around 6km which is surprisingly enough to catch lots of fish and more importantly, lots of blue swimmer crabs. This incarnation was Bullwinkle II. With the aid of some rope, and some plastic hand reels as pulleys, two empty milk crates as seats, and a pram wheel as a steering wheel, it was quite comfortable. the only downside was that people kept boating up to us to see if we needed help because we looked like a sinking dingy. A sinking dingy with two people standing on it fishing.

Then came Bullwinkle II.V which was essentially the same as Bullwinkle II but it also had a 3hp two stroke motor, but that was just annoying.

So today I spent the money I've received from you nice people clicking my blog's ads on two new 180w solar panels. They have apparently been built, and are now being put on a ship in China.

Thanks clickers.

Thanks China.

Thanks boats.

So now I can finally build Bullwinkle III.

I have the hulls, the decking, a motor, the frame of my 1.8m grow house (the one that let the sun dissolve it's cover), and an office chair.

That should be plenty enough junk to solar boat the length of the mighty River Murray.


120 Things in 20 years just remembered that I hadn't ever gone camping alone, so the night before last I drove to the river with my swag, and tried it. Nothing bad happened.

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