What A Weekend!

Yeesh. I'll tell you what, I work more at home than I do at work. If I got paid for all of this other stuff, I wouldn't need the day job. But hobbies are hobbies, and they rarely pay for themselves.

Friday was mostly spent doing secret squirrel stuff, and some work on my Stirling engine (we'll get to that eventually). Saturday meant working on my truck. Nearly 250,000 miles on it...it needs stuff. Then I drank beer and did stuff like cooking and more secret squirrel work.
Today was another story. I wanted to move the bikes out of the garage and do some cleaning. Set up the welder. Ya know, stuff every dude does on Sunday. Then I decided to fix the alternator on my chopper and shit got weird.

So...replacing the alternator turned into a full engine swap. It turns out that the key that drives the alternator decided to wipe out the crank shaft. A damaged crank means that the whole engine needs to come apart. Damn. The silver lining is that I have the engine from Organ Donor (the bike I crashed). I can swap that in and get back on the road while I rebuild kOOk's real motor. This is what she looks like right now. I'm at the point where I just need to pull two bolts and then get the motor out.

Uh...Houston, we have a problem.

I had a full delamination on this paper micarta. Good that it happened at this stage, before it was bonded to a knife! I need to figure out WHY though.

Another piece of paper micarta that I made. I summed up my strength and broke it. Chances are, this piece wouldn't have failed in use. However, sometimes destructive testing is necessary. What you see is blue paper. Notice the difference in color? I believe this is related to method. I wet one side of the paper and laid it against the next, expecting the resin to soak into both. The brighter blue that you see is (what I believe) a lack of absorption into the "dry" side of the paper. This, in turn, led to the failure. I will have to test this hypothesis.

This knife was supposed to get a white/black paper handle. With none to work with, due to the above issues, I switched to carbon fiber. This is a new design, that I am simply calling the "Mini."

Same Mine, with its Kydex sheath. I have two more awaiting their handles.