Hooboy. I just signed a $20k lease for a laser cutter at the hackerspace. This is ‘heavy’
Faraday motors .. the simplest motors
Michael Faraday created the first practical electric motor, but his first and most elegant motor was a Homopolar Motor.  It consists of a single piece of wire, a battery, and a magnet. These motors form the basis of many modern electric flywheel storage designs.  Here is an example of this elegantly simple motor:
Mechanically beautiful design
Mechanically beautiful design — The Fletcher Expanding Table.  It’s a table, with an expanding mechanism that belongs in a Steampunk movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ_AwFSWIPU
Break/fix/break/fix…
One of the more ‘fun’ tasks at the hackerspace is maintenance and repair.  A couple weeks ago someone broke the big belt/disc sander combo. Turns out it uses fairly common 6″ x 40″ belts… that for some reason are totally hard to find.  I finally got a few from Harbor Freight, and fixed the tool.  Ah, the smell of fresh sandpaper in the evening!
Protected: Four cores!
Works continues on Austin Hacker Space
Today marks a pretty cool day at the space .. we put in the ceiling joists and are framing up the rooms. One more day and the first four 8×10 workspaces are done! We also paid Les our deposits, and more material was bought for the buildout. Next week will be mostly about cleaning and getting some areas ready for having people come over.
A great day of hackerspace building
Today was _awesome_ .. Eight of us came to the space at noon, and really got a solid day’s work in building out our new hackerspace. Today lots of sheetrock got put up, and one of the workshop spaces was fully framed in (door, window, etc) and we’re getting ready to put ceilings in. What used to be a huge pile of pine studs is now down to a dozen or so, and it’s just another day’s work or so to finish up the other two workshop spaces.
It’s COOOOOOOOLD in Austin right now. Today never got over 40F, and tonight it’s going to be a chill 26 degrees.  BRRR.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still LOTS of work to do .. the classroom still needs to be cleaned, there’s still bunches of stuff all over the place, and the bathrooms aren’t finished. It’s just wonderful to make quick and steady progress, one weekend at a time.
So .. here are some of today’s photos:
Its soooooooooo cold!
Austin today is sitting at 26F… good gosh it’s cold. The hackerspace is a wearhouse with no heat, so I’m seriously considering renting a propane fan heater for tomorrow.
New Austin Hackerspace Under Construction!
Today ROCKED. We got a good ten people in, and put some serious work into building some partitioned rooms in the hack space.  Here’s a preview:
