RC birthday car parts milled up and running. Pixel helped.

Garrick's birthday RC cars for some fun. Rear shock tower broke on one of the cars. I milled up a new one in aluminium 'cus replacement parts weren't due to arrive 'till after Garrick left to go home. It worked great. Spare parts arrived later. They're ready if the other car breaks next visit.

MJX 16210 and MJX 16207. Serious 1/16th scale 4wd machines. Power/weight ratio with modern brushless motors and lipo batteries with Electronic Speed Controllers is absolutely bonkers. Puts the old 1/10th Tamiya stuff with resistor speed control on brushed motors with NiCads to shame. Those ESC's were well over ~$250.aud when I was 17. Now they're a few bucks.

Unsorted images.

Strawbees Hovercraft

I got a Strawbees Hovercraft kit for Christmas. You can find videos online. It's pretty fun and very zippy. I was a little imprecise attaching the main platform to the skirt and it likes to favour one direction and turning that direction heavily, but it's designed for re-manufacture with easy to scrounge junk...so that's OK!!

Like all toys with a price tag, the box ultimately becomes the best part...for kitties.

Jana, Garrick and I went for a brief camp at Warnambool in the van (still in very early stages).

We saw a HUUUGEE ray at the pier, he kept coming to the surface and inspecting the seaweed on the pillars. His tail had been damaged but he seemed unaffected in his travels. He was easily 1.2m or more across. An absolute monster.

We played mini golf as is the custom on holidays. Jana and I got new high (low?) scores scores for our suburb and featured on their leader board! Awesome!

Old Speedster

I bought myself a few model RC planes to build for my birthday.

Flite Test Website here.
Flite Test Planes here. Plans are provided for free, but the laser cut kits are well priced and ultra crisp. This made the build ultra fast, but still rewarding.

I bought the Old Speedster, Baby Blender, and Racer. Plenty of build videos and flying videos of all the planes can be found throughout.

Here's a few pics of the Old Speedster. I'm yet to fly it as it's an indoor flyer...so ultra low, to no wind is a must. The Baby Blender and Racer are traditional outdoor flyers.

50cc Pushbike Motor Kit. Part 3

I needed to make some modifications to the motor-pushbike. Previous build info is here (day 1) and here (day 2).


You can see here the clearance for your foot is pretty lean. The gearbox sticks out a ways, and the other side is similar.



The vertical clearance is somewhat lacking...



I'd like to extend the pedal about "this much". You can import pedal-extender-bars, but they're a specialist product, cost about $25-$40 a pair, and only extend about 2cm.



I had a spare set of pedals kicking around (why? because I'm awesome, that's why.) so decided I could modify them to make some sort of super-pedal.



Aluminium cuts like cake. I really need a larger vice. The drill vice isn't really meant for this.



So I broke my last blade. Blargh Bunnings trips in the middle of a build are a pain in the bum.



With any luck I can just bend the leaves around the existing pedal, bolt it, and be done with it.



No such luck, cast-aluminium. Snapped in my hands, didn't even needs tools to break this. :(



So I cut the remaining leaves off, and got started on the other pedal.



Bunnings forced me against my will to buy das-uber-vice. It's a sweeet 150mm bar with who knows how long an extension, with offset clamp. I've actually never used a clamp this beefy before. It weighs 17kgs on its own. For scale, the hacksaw next to it has a 30cm (1 foot) blade.



The clamp is offset, so you can drop large pieces of product down to the floor while locked in the vice, with a full grip unlike most clamps. It has whacky MONSTROUS fins on both jaws to prevent any flex due to the offset grip. The jaw depth is much deeper than a standard vice also. It's huge.



Shelf-brackets have served me well for steel-strip requirements in the past. I'm going to cut these down and use them as splints to extend the modified pedal off cuts.



Aluminium drills so nicely!! I wish every metal work job was like this.



So this pretty much completes the picture of what I'm trying to do. A few bolts should have this job complete in no time.



This whole job was eye-balled. Yep, that looks about right...



They don't look too bad.



Plenty of foot room now.



Left and right, looks fine. Another victory to ad-lib workmanship. Also...I scored a new vice, so it's a double win. :-)