I've bought everything from andoullie sausage to dehydrated lime powder, fabric dye, walnut oil, op-amps, concentrated sulfuric acid, and sodium hydroxide crystals. Tomorrow I need to buy several blocks of tool steel.
I've heard of adding more fiber to your diet but isn't that a little extreme?
I have lot's of ongoing projects. Last week I alarmed myself when my old housemate (who's a few hours away from a physics degree) swung by with the new head-up-display/laser sight on his MP5 clone. The gun has a folding stock (felony), a vertical foregrip (felony), he's been doing trigger work on it to make it full auto (felony), and I was doing some machining on a silencer for it (felony). He also had a huge jar full of weed (which I've never touched). I said, "Dude, if some cop pulls you over he's going to wet himself with joy."
Anyway, we drank a few beers out by the pond and I mixed some bleach and sodium carbonate to evolve chlorine gas, which I was going to bubble through grain alcohol to make chloral hydrate (probable felony) and they dehydrate it by boiling in sulfuric acid. The choral can be combined with monochloral benzene to make DDT, which could possibly help with the bed-bug epidemic which is costing peope millions and millions of dollars. Unfortunately the bed-bugs might be DDT resistant, in which case the whole project will go out the window.
But the reason I was buying chemical the last few days is to set up for anodizing aluminum, which is done by dipping parts in sodium hydroxide for a few minutes to clean the surface, then in an electroyle solution (17% sulfuric acid solution) with the part as the anode (+) and an aluminum plate as the cathode (-). After 45 to 90 minutes the part is dipped in a dye, then boiled in distilled water. My friend needs to anodize a bunch of robot arm grippers. The grippers are mounted on robot arms attached to armed golf carts that are also equipped with single-barrel tennis ball cannons.
I've also bought 16 pounds of salt the previous week for an electrochemical maching rig, to try and bore and chamber rifle barrels in a single operation. For that I've got a 500 amp, 2 volt power supply, but have to build a simple current-regulated servo drive (thus the trip to Radio Shack).
Unfortunately my time has been taken up making a polished 2" diameter shaft for a telescope drive, but a couple of bearings on the lathe seized, which I had to remachine or replace. That involved a tear down of part of the lathe's headstock gears, which I finished yesterday. So this evening I started trying to polish a shaft for a bearing for an armored battle-bot when I heard a tinkling sound from the headstock. I swung it open and a nut and a washer had fallen off the shaft I replaced yesterday. I fixed those and then two minutes later a handle unscrewded in my hand, causing my friend an I to burst into hysterical laughter. Everytime I touch the lathe something seizes, breaks, or falls off.
Anyway, last night, I was working on that downstairs at my friend's house while a high-level political meeting on a US Senate campaign went on upstairs. The meeting broke up but not everyone left, so I ended up spending many hours drinking and chatting with the couple who runs central Kentucky's premier pair of head shops ("We have to call them 'water pipes'!). As it turns out I've worked with a bunch of machinists who the shop owner used to work for, and we had nice a very long discussion of medieval swordsmanship, wine making, the drug habits of all my various housemates over the years, and many other topics. I gave his wife season 1 and 2 of
Weeds, which they somehow haven't seen yet, which I like to watch because I find it relaxing to see how normal people live.
Compared to the crazy things I've got going on, they're like
The Brady Bunch.
If anyone in the UK tried doing any of that stuff, they'd probably get locked up pronto under the antiterrorism legislation.
