The Gear Clock

Kite’s Eye View

The mind tends to wonder rather a lot lately and today’s idea is actually a rather good one which I want to share with you all.

What if you had a couple of miles worth of kite line and attached it to a steady, reliable kite. You then took it to a beach during the day when the wind was blowing out to sea and set it free in the sky. In this instance I don’t think more kite string will necessarily mean more height but more a combination of distance and altitude – either outcome however would be favourable.

Ok, so we now have our kite attached to a couple of miles of string flying high in the sky above the ocean waves, now what? Regular readers will know I’m experimenting with kite photography at the minute (previous posts here, here and here) and wondered what photographs that lonely little kite could take looking back towards land. Unfortunately my rigs (bought and homemade) are really intended for short range situations i.e. one stadard kite line length. So if I was to have a camera on my sea kite it would require some sort of clockwork trigger.

I have a friend who is wanting to get into robotics and after tapping him up, hes keen to help me out with my trigger. I have alsorts of clockwork contraptions but they are all made out of Mecanno and as a result are rather heavy so a more modern approach is needed. Whilst he comes up with a hi tech solution to my problem, I rather fancy having a go at making my own kite for this project and have been looking into box kite designs.

Click here to see a guy whos got a similar set up working brilliantly although I wouldn’t trust the elements with my SLR.

Log Radio

I really love this log radio discovered whilst doing the usual blog rounds this morning. Click here to read more about it.

My Workshop Shelves

Here is a little peak of what my workshop looks like. My shelves are always in a state of change (rather like my noticeboard from a couple of years ago) as projects come and go, so I decided to record a couple of them this morning whilst working in there. My favourite thing has to be the framed photograph in the background 11 seconds in – Can you guess what it is?

Machinarium

A great little taster of a new game titled Machinarium.

Beat that NASA

Beat that NASA

Build Your Own Portable Trebuchet

Broderbund’s vintage papercraft software

Spotted over on Make, theres some really nice models here.

Check them out here.

Paper Models

The Folding Plug

Lets take something already in use and make it better.

The Drawing Board

We subscribe to the Free Cycle emails which drop into the inbox on a daily basis and list the items people are offering for free. Usually the items aren’t much to write home about and you soon begin to realise why they’re being given away for free but every once in a while a little gem comes along.

In this case the gem came in the form of a rather impressive architects wooden drawing board. Its quite a size, so much so that I’ve had to completely rearrange the workshop just to get the thing in.