Maker Faire Part 2.

After seeing the fire breathing cycle dragon thing, I saw that the guys were taking the steamroller for a spin.




I wandered off and found the largest paella pan that I've ever seen.


They were only using the small ones to actually cook the paella...


For some reason I felt like eating a cupcake when I saw this guy.


I found a couple of different flavours ...


And more importantly, how they work.


There was a very cool CNC wood router that was cutting face profiles out of MDF.


This guy passed me as I was wandering along the displays.


He was slow but steady.


There were lots of big funky bicycles around.






This one was very cool, with one huge wheel and two smaller wheels.




They had a circular angled track that you could ride the bikes around and above a certain speed climb up the track. Apparently it was a lot easier to go counter clockwise than clockwise and they didn't have an explanation of why.


Remember the mouse trap game ? There was a life size one on display.

Ok, ok, I get the message.

Maker Faire 2011 #1

I rode up to Maker Faire this morning. Saturday morning.

The first thing I saw when I walked in the gate was this assembly of gears and cranks. The orange belt on the right was turned by the red wheel which was turned by the nearest young person. The belt turned the various gears and cranks to pull pistons in and out of the black boxes to push air through the organ pipes.




Next door this guy was sewing patterns on a solar powered sewing machine.


Down around a corner was the colossus, a 70 m high dynamic scuplture, with three 10 ton rocks that could be pulled around.




There were some motorcycles.






And some steam... with belts.


They were running a stationary engine off the steam boiler of a 1924 Buffalo Springfield road roller to power the belt to run various machines.


They took the roller for a run while I was there.


There were a lot of wacky bikes.




Including a couple of cool wooden ones.




And an electric one.


A new electric car.


There were awesome fungi that you could buy and grow at home.


This is a wind machine that can go downwind faster than the wind speed. It does this by using the propeller to drive the wheels faster than the wind.


And another fire breathing bicycle.

Before.

Fresh organic broad beans.

After.

Mmmmm, Middle Eastern broad bean dip.

Criss-cross

Obviously a game of noughts and crosses.

Coffee shop table.

Called in at the local coffee joint for some coffee for work and
spotted this painted on one of the tables.

Slow. Deal with it.

Flag

A rather large flag I saw on the way home from Maker Faire. For scale,
my bicycle is leaning against the pole.

Letting off more steam.

We had some more fun with steam today.

Letting off steam from the inlets to the Stage 3 engines. We had a higher pressure in the tank which made it a bit more exciting and a lot noisier.



We also had to blowdown from the bottom of the tank. We rigged up a pipe to outside the door, yes there was duct tape involved, and blew hot water through it.


The hot water was above atmospheric pressure and when it came out it flashed to steam, similar to your car radiator.

Tetrahydrocannabinol

Blood orange.

Citrus lunch.

Ruby grapefruit, orange orange, tangelo, blood orange, orange juice.
And bananas.

USA #1