Daniel Busby

Tinkerings of a backyard scientist

Lily Pad Pool Warmers

30th May. By admin. Posted in Sustainability.

For the past year and a half we’ve been heating our pool with a solar water heater.  It pumps the water to the roof, where it runs through black tubes, which absorb as much warmth from the sunlight as possible.  This solution has raised our pool temp by about 8ËšF.  But, it does nothing to …read more

An Intimate Look Under the Tablecloth

17th May. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

I whipped up a video of the engineering magic behind A Moveable Feast. Enjoy!

Taking it to the Streets

1st May. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

With all of the different elements of the Kinetic Sculpture in place it was time to do some laps around the parking lot to see what would break.  We’ve literally got lots of moving parts, so it’s important to see what we need to fix.  It’s much easier to repair a broken spoke in the …read more

Tidying up the details before Showtime

1st May. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

We had only had 14 days until the Doo Dah Parade, and we had a long way to go, so we stepped things up into high gear.  I started working every day and recruited as many helpers each day as possible.  I didn’t take time out of my day to blog, as I needed all …read more

Gliding Our Way to the Finish

12th April. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

We’ve been working two or three days a week on this thing.  This means we’ve been making a lot of progress, but I haven’t had the time to blog about it much.  Let me see if I can catch things up to something remotely current… We finally got started on the driveshaft.  We welded it …read more

Suspension and Drivetrain

23rd March. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

We cut out a large steel frame for the table top.  This will be a weight bearing aspect of the frame, so we used our beefy stuff.  We welded up a nice rectangle a few inches smaller than what our table will be and put it on top of our wooden jigs.  We just needed …read more

Syyn Labs on CNN’s Next List

19th March. By admin. Posted in Syyn Labs.

Syyn Labs was featured on CNN’s Next List. It’s a huge honor! You can see a short blog post here: http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/15/why-syyn-labs-matters/ Watch the clips here:

Sparkfire Featured on CNN’s The Next List blog

8th March. By admin. Posted in Sparkfire.

I’m definitely a little humbled by the attention.  But it was fun to come up with the answers for the questions.   Check out the rest here: http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/08/an-electric-triumph/

Drivetrain Work and Flea Market Hauls

7th March. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

Now that we had the basic frame in place, it was time to figure out how our drivetrain was going to fit inside.  My model had the transmission behind the rear pilot, but with the hardware in front of us we figured out that we could just barely put the transmission in front of him.  …read more

Framing Begins

26th February. By admin. Posted in Kinetic Sculpture.

After hacking up the bicycle frames to distill them into just the parts that we’re going to use, it was time to start welding the basics of the frame together.  I purchased 120′ of 1 1/2″ x 1/16″ wall chromoly tubing.  Alloy 4130 for those keeping score at home.  I’ve also got some 3/4″ tube …read more

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