Happy New Years !

Hope everyone has a blast for the New Years!

 MLS is throwing the big ball bash tomorrow night and I am getting ready but like normal something shows up to throw me off from my task and get me all fired up about building something.

Bear from All Power Labs in Berkeley, CA decided it would be perfect to push in to my shop the 500 watt PEM Hydrogen Fuel Cell for my next project during my party set up...

And like normal the party planning and set up stopped.... because I had to get my hands dirty and check this thing out.

Bear wants to be a model for Sears so bad! 

Its a really cool set up made in the early 2000s by a company called Avista Labs, I don't know a ton about it yet and I will be doing some research about it but I do have some fuel cell experience and I think this is going to make a cool electric race bike project. I need to decided should it use 36 inch wheels or 29 inch , Coker wheels or Velocity wheels, that is the question ????

12 PEM Cells all packed in to a crazy brain of controllers

Either way - Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all - Its been a good time in 2011 and 2012 is looking very bright already ! 

Discovery Channel

In the good old days, some years back I was on a few Discovery Channel shows.

I happened to run across this one tonight while surfin the web.

Blake and Jake are in there too, Blake and I were both new to California while filming this...

Had to capture the screen shot for the blog, a must have.

Clean cut back in those days

Imagine being a kid taken from your cold Minnesota home and thrown in front of a TV film crew in warm & sunny Southern California a week later and told to not get in to trouble.....

Yeah right, it was only the start of the fun for years to come....

Its a long show but you can fast forward thru that dude Billy... ha ha 

There is the complete bike with those pipes I am still proud of.

Dylan and I did them in like 4 hours because it was a rush

Maybe someday I will dig up some of the other TV shows and post them..

Enjoy 

100,000 people and counting.....

First thing .....

Thanks to the readers for making MLS a fun project for me and being interested enough to come around and check it out. For a lot of people 100k people viewing my blog doesn't seem like a lot of people but when your from a small town in Minnesota with population of only a few thousand people, 100k seems like a lot! 

well for you electronic nerds, a 100k resistor, kinda like the amount of page hits but not really.

Its getting close to Xmas as well so happy holidays to everyone and that means my normal quick escape back to Minnesota to make me realize how cold the earth can be for 5+ months of the year.

It was the Fwod' girls bicycle club's Sadie Hawking bike ride.

Classic style for Sadie Hawking dance or ride, 

the lady asks out the dude so, 

I got asked on the ride by Sanja and had a blast riding Oakland and Alameda. 

Oh Boy....

One project at a time, but this one ended up in my hand 

and I couldn't say NO

Hydrogen Fuel cells all ready to go...!!!!!

Did someone say Futuristic BoardTracker from 2050?

Expect some madness no one has ever seen with the

 titanium sheet metal.

I started drawing it in Solidworks... Electric 36ers front and rear ??

You are going to have to nail bite for a while on this one... 

Saturday Night Delight

Theres nothing more peaceful then good music and a welding torch on a Saturday night.....

Its out of the fixture table and ready for welding!

Day in the office.....

The Pullmax

This machine is straight up one of the coolest machines out there. 

Designed really in the early days for one task - to cut circles out of sheet metal..

It holds a piece of sheet metal on a pad or point located deep in the throat of the machine, 

 next the operator spins the sheet around that point or pad, the machine eats the square piece in to a perfectly round circle ready for metal spinning or what ever.

This machine is set up for cutting circles with the yellow holder, this is the center of the circle for the cutter. 

Later down the road in the 1950s or something like that, the aerospace monkeys started thinking what if we made shrinking, stretching, doming and all kinds of weird dies for it,  the goal not trying to not cut the metal but to crush it and move it around.

It became a very important tool in every aircraft factory from then on... Thanks guys

I started out with a flat piece of copper 16g and just started doming it in to a bowl, the final product is ___________, maybe I will fill in the blanks later. Sorry I didn't notice the saw in front of the machine. 

I think Jesse James really put this machine on the map when he decided to show it on Discovery Channel while building a gas tank, well, he at least did one thing... He made them so in demand, that no one could afford one anymore, so I have to go over to my friend Darrel's shop down the street to use his Pullmax machine...

Thanks Jesse