Took a break from making a metal thing to making a wooden thing!

Turning wood on a metal lathe

One of my other hobbies, outside of rocket building, is gardening. Specifically, I grow hot peppers and not just hot peppers but crazy hot peppers.

The species I am growing this year are:

"Ghost Peppers"

Naga Morich

Bin Jolokia (sourced from Bangladesh)

Bhut Jolokia

Peach Bhut Jolokia

"Big Black Mama" -Naga Morich Crossed with a 7 pot Douglah

"Not Ghost Peppers"

Georgia Flame

Fatali ("Devil's Tongue")

Chocolate Habenero

Urfa Biber

What do I do with these peppers?

I like to make hot sauces. Favoring fermenting, I usually coarsely grind them into a pepper mash mixed with 2% by weight of an exotic salt like black or pink salt. A dash of kimchi juice is blended in to provide a head start for the lactobacillis culture that preserves the peppers as they age for several months in mason jars. This year I am going to be swapping out the mason jars for wooden barrels... or so I thought.

After scouring the tubes of the interwebs, I found that small wooden barrels go for around ~$50 each. Since I need a few of them, I couldn't find myself paying that much. Feeling down about my prospects, I had an epiphany! Maybe I could use some of the oak and cherry wood that has been seasoning since I collected it during Hurricane Matthew for use in my smoker could be turned down into some kind of fermentation vessel.

And so it began...

I also made a cap for it but I will get a picture of that added later.

So my lathe is a little too small to turn most of this so I ran to Harbor Freight and picked up a die grinder and some rasps.

To bore the inside out, I progressively center drilled a few inches of depth then reaming it with the die grinder until I could fit the drill chuck in to drill a few inches farther. Eventually it got too deep and I have to use my hand drill for the pilot holes. Eventually I got to the bottom and viola!

Now it is wrapped up in a brown paper bag to let it finish drying out slowly to hopefully avoid the splitting red oak is known for. I have also learned that is there exists food safe wood glue that I can use to patch up any leaks that I am sure I will find.

Though this turned out to be a fun weekend project I still feel that I will still buy one or two wooden barrels for some of the mashes that I plan to age for several years. I will post some updates as I go along.

Slow grind

Been building one day and one dollar at a time. Infrastructure is my new game. Couple grand in but still much to be done. Lathe and mill bought. Cylinders for brazing aluminum acquired. Materials ate in. Designs have been designed. My new rocket is going to be a 250lbf flyable model. It's a bit of a living mess for the time being but more to come.

And I'm back at it!

It has been a while since I have been able to get back into building rockets. After my career move down here to Cape Cavaneral, I have been rebuilding my infrastructure. Currently, my spare bed room in my apartment is has been converted to a rocket research lab and I have been aggregating all the tools that I need to continue development.

To date I have been able to equip myself with:

Grizzly 7x14 Lathe that I am upgrading with an arduino based power feed that will read the RPMs and move the tool at prescribed rates to give the best finishes and certain threads per inch.

90A flux core MIG Welder that I converted to DCEN with a 100 amp bridge recitifier, 94,000mF capacitor bank (40 individual capacitors), and a 40 turn torodial core inductor. The stock AC welder would barely even weld 1/8 in steel and even then it was very sporadic and popped slag//bb's all over the place. Since the conversion, the welder just sounds mean! A constant sizzling bacon sound with up to 1/4 in 4 thousands gap penetration with the settings only turned up ~3/4 of the maximum. I got the welder on sale for $80 then put $30 worth of electronic into the upgrade and its performance now is EASILY comparable to some of the $500-600 machines I have welded with in the past.

2 x 1000 psi regulators. One of which is oxidizer hardened.

I have also designed and started to build my thrust stand that will be able to host a variety of sensors, high speed loggers, and data acquisition instruments. I have been learning machine code and the fundamentals of optimization to develop my data loggers. So far I can get a sample rates nearing 5-7 microseconds which should be plenty of resolution for future testing.

My latests efforts have been focused solely on the building of my 3 axis CNC router. It will serve as the backbone for roughing out blanks and cutting out my injector plate stacks. Eventually I will upgrade it to a 4th dimension on the router head and install a 4th axis spindle.

It will be primarily steel construction. Bed size is 32 x 21 inches made of 2in square tubing with 1/8 thick walls and the red gussets are 1/4 in steel plate. Currently, I have the base frame and gussets made. I also have all of the linear rails, bearings, 1-1/2 hp router, stepper motors, stepper motor drivers, all 1/2"-10 acme lead screws. Its just a matter of time before I can finally get this put together.

Welding Machine and welding table

Lathe Lab Setup

Thrust Stand Front Frame (19x19 inches)

CNC base frame and completed parts

Assorted Rocket Stuffs



Sorry for the explosion of pictures but I should be able to keep a more regular update schedule now that I am getting into the swing of things.