Archive for March, 2011

A friend pointed me to a link on MNN with some amazing treehouses. That led me to Romero Studios. They have built some quit amazing treehouse structures, such as the screen shot below. Check them out on their website!

How about a tour of my garage shop? Grinder: Work desk and tools hanging on the wall: The fan in the window is used to exhaust fumes from welding and other things: Nuts, bolts and Bengal cat: JET drill press: Metal stock: MATCO welder (I bought it used) and oxy-acetylne setup behind it to the left: Grizzly G0555 wood bandsaw. Works well for the small shop, although a few times I have wanted a wider throat. Grizzly 8″ jointer; I bought a good large jointer, but I have only used it a few times so far: The dust collection system... [read more]

One of the problems with the electric motor is that it is exposed to the elements underneath the car. I don’t want to get water in my Warp9 and have it fry, so I needed to do something about it. I first enclosed the area with plastic, and completely sealed it off; definitely water tight, but it seemed to cause the motor to run quite a bit hotter than it usually did. I didn’t like that. I investigated what other people have done with other bugs. Some solutions involve not driving in the rain. Others are having half the motor... [read more]

I don’t think I posted this to my blog…my caption was “Sorry Tesla, I got to the Charging Station first!” \

My drive home includes ~1900′ of elevation gain, which takes a lot of energy. The car averaged 322 watt-hours/mile. So, what does the data look like coming too work where I drive *down* highway 17? The controller reported 29.9 amp-hours used, which gives 229.4 watt-hours/mile. So, for my commute to work and back roundtrip, the average is: 276 watt-hours/mile. That gives a 111 mile range estimate to 100% Depth of Discharge. At a more conservative 80% discharge depth, that would be an 89 mile range when driving conservatively like I did during my test period. If I considered it as... [read more]

I finally have the car running again! I got the controller back from Netgain Controls with an upgraded motherboard to fix some issues I was seeing. My Interface Module was also fixed to report the accurate voltage. Here’s some data from the drive home as logged by the controller. Total amp-hours consumed: 41.955 ah Watt-hours, based on my 48 cell pack at 3.2v nominal, for 153.4v: 6444 watt-hours Watts per mile, based on the 20-mile drive home, including highway 17 at 50-55 mph: 322.2 watts/mile. That is what the controller is consuming; the battery has some extra draw to maintain... [read more]

This is a follow up to the last post where I posted pictures.

The main part of my old treehouse fell down quite some time ago. however, the walls were left standing until a while ago when they finally fell too. Here’s a few pictures. I’ll post a walk around video soon. The old stairs and front deck (which still stands): The house, literally on its side:

Here’s a video from the Aerial Cube section of our show we did last December 2010, called “Left of the North Pole” Featuring Louise Lovelle and Allie Cooper.