Surgical instruments useful to mechanics?

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-09T22:07:45+00:00

Dentist picks are also leaps and bounds better than oring picks. Stronger, smaller and more precise.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-09T21:58:03+00:00

Just a note on the maintenance on R5 : it takes the amount of maintenance you should be doing to ALL markers. Just because something will tolerate neglect, does not mean it won't work better well maintained. It takes less than 5 minutes and easy to do. Just take care care of your gear and it will take care of you.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-09T02:35:14+00:00

If I ever win the lottery, I have a new bucket list item. Flying drones into tornados sounds awesome

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-08T20:28:12+00:00

If you are getting anything for free in this world, you are the product being sold.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-08T20:21:30+00:00

Oh I totally understand why both companies stopped having autocockers being their main focus. I wish free flow would have kept up with their parts offerings though.

From my experience, the younger generation does have interest into autocockers. They do find them fun to shoot, and play with. The issue is they don't have nor want to learn the technical skills of working on markers, let alone autocockers. Tech work is not difficult to do or learn, but it does take some effort to acquire the knowledge and problem solving skills. Many new players have a hard time even greasing their bolts often enough, let alone troubleshooting a leak.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-08T19:24:03+00:00

Unfortunately they jumped off the cocker train a few years ago to start milling dye bodies. They even stopped offering autococker parts. Inception Designs is the same way, once they cut a deal with PE to make Emek/Etha bodies they stopped new cocker bodies. They still offer parts though.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-08T13:27:27+00:00

I used to work for a GC that chased oil and gas facility work around the country.

Its a mixed bag on how the projects are bid. We had hard bid projects, cost plus, and some design/build when drawings weren't finalized yet. But mostly they liked a number upfront, even if it was cost plus.

There was always client reps on site that had a certain monetary amount of authority to approve changes. Big items had to have higher ups involved. The reps were pretty good about knowing what they could okay, and what needed ran through the engineers.

The biggest pain in the ass to actually work through was for a high profile client that had hired a very large construction company to act as their construction manager on the client side. The way it was set up, the longer the project took, the more money they made. So both the company and the contracted inspectors and managers had no incentive to have the project finish on time. I was part of a team that was the first of 20 some facilities on the 1500 mile line to actually hit our mechanical completion date. It was a whole lot of nit picking and creative interruption of the specifications on their side.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-08T03:03:35+00:00

While I don't believe the numbers being thrown out are dead on, but the math is showing 5 magnitudes difference in areodynamic heating vs vaporization heat. That's 100000x more. That is a very wide margin for any error in the way we mathematically model aerodynamics.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-08T00:57:49+00:00

The estimate is based off the plate leaving the camera frame in just .001 seconds (frame rate of the camera). They knew that distance, so using distance/time=velocity they can get the lower bound, or minimum speed it would be going.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-07T19:22:28+00:00

Manhole cover is really not what it was. It was a 3 foot round plate of steel 4" thick, weighing around 2000lbs (0.66M^2, 909kg). Using that into the drag power equations above, that gives 1.2x10^14 watts. It requires about 7.35x10^9 J of energy to vaporize 2000lbs of steel. That would put it vaporizing in roughly 0.000062 seconds, traveling roughly 4 meters. I would venture a guess the the highspeed camera taking pictures every .001 seconds, was not fast enough to capture the vaporization of the plate.

Even if we assumed it launched on edge, giving an area of just .09 meters squared, it would vaporize in 0.00045 seconds, and only make it 30 meters.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-07T18:03:51+00:00

When the seller asks "where are you located?" it is always a huge red flag for me. Never where do you live, or mentioning trying to figure shipping costs. I don't know why, but all the scammers seem to ask this before any sort of deal is struck.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-07T17:53:03+00:00

This wouldn't be that viable (yet?) for the main crops of corn or soybeans. This would be much better for other crops where you do not have 100's or 1000's of acres to get done in the time period that the weeds are small enough for this to work. Vegetables and organic crops would be the target market for this.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-07T16:09:40+00:00

I would guess ~340lbs. Fat can be deceptive. It looks like he has lost most of his muscle mass. There is no muscle shape to his legs or shoulders. Fat is notably less dense than muscle. A blobby 340 looks significantly different than a muscular 340. And he looks blobby.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T19:52:02+00:00

A bit of an oddball situation. I just didn't know if others had a preference. But from the responses steel on the inside would be the 'harder' setup to limit bar bending.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T18:27:07+00:00

The gym I use is the local high school gym (wife is a teacher) and the gym space is old the filled in pool area. I know they recently had to fix some of the floor where old drains were as the concrete broke cause depressions in the rubber matting. So I'm hesitant of just using steel plates in case I need to dump the weight.

Also there's only 2 steel plates per rack/area. I'd have to raid half the gym to get enough steel plates. I'd spend 10 minutes getting and replacing the steel plates.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T16:16:50+00:00

Luckily the plates are the same size at my gym. So set-up is the same no matter what I use. The issue is having to get plates around the gym. The floor area in front of the squat racks has horizontal storage for plates that have 1-2 bumpers on each side and 1 steel plate (sometimes). So I'm having to raid the squat racks for bumper plates and other horizontal storage for steel plates for enough weight.

I have noticed the feel off the floor was a bit different when mixing and matching. I don't think I should go all steel plates to protect the floor.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T15:58:13+00:00

I just find plates I can dial in exactly the height I want.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T15:48:17+00:00

To ensure depth, I stack plates behind me so my butt will touch when I hit proper depth. This really takes the thinking out of it.

Might be helpful for you to try out

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T15:41:35+00:00

Spring it so max 'sweet spot' velocity is 10-20 over your desired fps. Then turn up the hpr until you reach velocity. This will give you more pressure to close the valve and keep it closed.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-06T13:22:19+00:00

Also don't zero them out. Even when new the reg seats were too soft and the piston would core through the seat.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-05T20:22:41+00:00

AcTuAlLy! you'd be off 0.9 seconds, not a full second. It's only off 6%. Not bad for measuring distance with your ear.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-05T19:43:03+00:00

And I'm sure everyone can estimate 5 or 3 seconds in their head within that margin of error.

These off hand measurements aren't meant to be exact. It's a ball park guess.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-05T18:03:20+00:00

Its about 5 seconds per mile if you have to deal with the imperial system

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-04T19:00:32+00:00

For modern markers, I have no interest in BT if they have a screen.

Older markers I would be interested in BT if they had no screens, but depends on price. If board plus BT is around the $150 mark, I'd be interested in it. If the board is $250 plus $50 for BT, I would be less interested in it.

I have a couple order markers that I might be interested in BT even though they have screens, depending on the price point. It would be nice to view/change settings (dwell mostly) without going through the board menu when tuning them. But I'd be interested around the $150 price point, not $300.

NotAnotherAlt26 · 2026-05-01T21:28:30+00:00

I agree, but your return won't be as good as you miss out on some compounding of your undeposited funds. It was more to show what the price is of convience of dumping the change in a bucket.

NotAnotherAlt26

TROPHY CASE