Daniel Vogel

I am currently growing Ace which has not been a producer of large fruits. Previously I have grown Intruder which did produce larger fruits for me.

I am also working with a passive kratky hydroponic system this year (only hot peppers) and I may never grow peppers in the soil again. It is working very well.

Do you mean that this is a c. maxima species? What is the cultivar?

I assume that you can eat winter squash without a full cure and that the eating quality just isn't as good?

I'm also looking for ways to keep the bug pressure down. Mine got torn up last year even when covered with row cover.

A few ideas that helped me to understand heat pumps. Caveat: These ideas are not exactly correct in terms of the science and engineering.

1. You'd think that the best efficiency possible to heat a space would be to dump energy into the volume that you want to heat. You'd think that this would be 100% efficient because all of the energy is being converted to heat. However, with a heat pump, you are exceeding this efficiency by not 'creating' heat, but rather by moving it ('pumping' it) from one place --outside, or underground (geothermal) -- to another place (the space you want to heat).

2. A heat pump and an air conditioner are theoretically the same system except the space you care about is opposite. In an air conditioning system you care about the place the heat is being pumped from (your house). In a heat pump system you care about the place that the heat is being pumped to (your house).

3. The closest thing to an air conditioner that you typically interact with are those Air in a Cans for cleaning keyboards. If you turn it upside down and hit the trigger, you will see a fluid (refrigerant) come out of the tube (thermal expansion valve) and evaporate (evaporator) and get very cold. In an air conditioning system this evaporated gas is recollected and recompressed into a fluid (condenser and compressor) and the cycle repeats continuously.

Home shop machinist here (milling machine and lathe). The right fluid does make a difference.

I keep a spray bottle filled with WD-40 for cutting aluminum.

I keep another spray bottle with a 10% strength of a water-soluble cutting oil like Kool Rite and water. This is good for removing heat when cutting steel and adding some lubricity.

I keep a small bottle of good tapping fluid for tapping threads.

I have a little aquarium pump/ 5 gal bucket setup for water-soluble oil flood coolant but I almost never use that since it makes a mess. It is good for flushing out chips when milling deep slotting or pockets.

Cast iron and brass are often cut dry.

What I do to locate parasitic drains with a cheap multimeter is this:

-Disconnect the negative battery cable
-Set the the multimeter up as an ammeter
-Put a 16mm socket over the negative battery terminal to give the alligator multimeter clip something to grab onto
-Connect one of the multimeter leads to the 16mm socket and the other to the loose negative cable so the multimeter is the only path from the battery to the car ground
-Do not start the car as this will blow the fuse in your multimeter.
-Note the baseline current draw. Make sure that you don't have any doors open or any other current draws. My cars are typically <100mA if nothing is wrong.
-Start pulling fuses from all the fuse boxes. After you pull each one, check to see if the current draw has dropped significantly. If it has not, replace it.
-If it has, you've found your culprits. Investigate depending on what circuit that fuse was for.

Awesome! You need insurance to sell at a farmers market?!

Hi,

I'm new to sweet potatoes. What is the best way to manage a sweet potato plant with the main purpose of producing a large number of slips? I was given a rooted slip a few months ago and it has grown into a vine crawling over my mulch. I don't think I'll hurt it at this point.

Should I be burying the new growth? Or waiting for tubers and then harvesting them? Or clipping and rooting the new growth?

Thank you for your time,
Daniel

Scott Weinberg wrote:

Daniel Vogel wrote:Hi,

Not a Structural Engineer and no experience with arches, but:

Both arches will put the same amount of vertical load into the base. The flatter arch will carry more put more outward lateral ('thrust') load into the base. You may want to reinforce the sides ('abutments') to react the additional thrust. How much? I could help with this, or there may be tables online.

Think of it this way: Arches are effective because they carry load in hoop compression (which is efficient) rather than bending (which is inefficient and produces tension - bad for brick). Depending on how rigid the structure is, as the arch gets flatter it will either generate more thrust or start to behave like a beam in bending (bad).

Let me know if you would like more help!

Thanks Dan,  here is my plan
AS most have seen, I can draw up just about anything (view) to calculate the needs. That way I can verify it can be built. (most of the time) Then onto the calculations for loads and so on.   If I can make the suggested T-bars work, that would be the simplest, but because of the size of this stove bell, I was in great hopes, someone has done and used extensively over the course of a full season or more.  As of yet, I have not found this to be true for a single bell, 7" size.

So in the mean time, I will keep laying up the bell and batch stove, as I know and trust the specs for both of those.

cheers
Scott

I attached two images.

In the first one I indicate in blue a few likely points of potential failure.

In the second I calculate the lateral thrust load as a function of the applied load, FY, the arch height, h, and arch span, c.

Not powdery mildew. You'll know powdery mildew when you see it without having to look it up. It just took out my peas, but they were tapering off anyways.