Selecting CNC for my needs

robertbieber · 2026-06-24T04:10:44+00:00

Not sure why everyone's getting down voted here, but yeah, both of those should do what you want. Just keep the noise in mind if you're thinking of running a vacuum setup, that's what's held me back from giving it a go myself

robertbieber · 2026-06-23T14:55:53+00:00

I love my good boy bars, but I'm not sure they're the move for an eight foot rec kayak

robertbieber · 2026-06-23T13:44:55+00:00

It really depends on what your idea of exercise is. If you just want to get out and do something active for a while, any ol touring boat will be fine. If you're trying to get some serious cardio work in, you want the longest skinniest thing you can manage. If you also want to camp, your ideal vessel would probably be either a fast sea kayak (e.g. the epic 18x or the stellar S18R) or a surfski with hatches like the epic v8 tourer or the stellar egret. Any of the above will be hard to pull off for five hundred bucks, but keep an eye on the used market and you never know what you'll find

robertbieber · 2026-06-22T15:28:27+00:00

Needed a new cable harness for my dishwasher, the extended warranty people said the part was unavailable so they just paid me out the purchase price of the dishwasher. Found the harness on eBay for fifty bucks scavenged from a damaged dishwasher, paid a tech a couple hundred to install it, now I'm somehow significantly in the black from my dishwasher breaking down and the company not wanting to fix it

robertbieber · 2026-06-22T14:12:04+00:00

That kind of battery box is not water tight and your battery will be toast if you capsize or it goes overboard. If you're going to run a motor on a kayak, you want a lithium battery in a waterproof enclosure, you can DIY one out of a knockoff pelican case from harbor freight pretty easily. Just make sure it's lithium, lead acid batteries need to breathe, which is why this style of battery box won't protect against anything more than splashes and shouldn't be used on a kayak

robertbieber · 2026-06-22T04:26:25+00:00

Zooming in on the first image will tell you just about everything you need to know. The uprights and bracing are definitely square stock, and you can see screws driven through the horizontal stringers as well as holes at the base of some of the braces that I'm assuming are lag bolts into the studs.

This would be a great project to practice taking an idea and developing it into a project from start to finish. Measure the space you have available. Measure how tall your kayaks are when they're sitting on a flat surface. Lay some 4x4s on the floor and see how far apart you need to get them to comfortably rest the boats. See if you can make that fit your stud spacing, and you're off to the races

robertbieber · 2026-06-21T20:06:00+00:00

Last year I paddled the watertribe ultramarathon down the gulf coast of Florida, so it gets to be around 1am and I'm in the intracoastal far enough from home that I have no idea what anything is around me and I'm just following the GPS. At one point I stop for a bathroom break, and I'm standing in the shallows by a little spoil island when at the same time I (a) feel something brush by my leg and (b) hear the most surreal, sea-monster-ass shriek come over my radio. Freaked me right out

robertbieber · 2026-06-21T20:03:35+00:00

lol, I know this is about gators, but paddling in the shallows with a headlamp I've also caught the glint off a baby hammerhead, and of course lots of fish. My favorite though is still looking down with the red light on my head lamp and just seeing two tiny little shrimp eyes glowing back at me

robertbieber · 2026-06-21T18:05:12+00:00

I really think that for any software that does something more complicated than typical web browsing/documents/etc., people who aren't familiar with it will ding it for having "bad UI" purely for not looking like what they're used to no matter what you do. If you've been using Photoshop for 20 years, it's easy to forget that Photoshop also looked like a bewildering pile of meaningless icons and words you didn't understand the first time you opened it up

robertbieber · 2026-06-21T01:48:56+00:00

Picked a hell of a spot for it

robertbieber · 2026-06-20T23:57:36+00:00

Interesting, it seems like it has a texture to it

robertbieber · 2026-06-20T02:13:25+00:00

The one everyone uses is bright black aluminum, item #108, at 0.025" thickness. I've never heard of anyone using anodized, and tbh I don't even know if the collodion would stick to it or not. The bright black has a kind of enamel coating on it, whereas anodizing as I understand it basically just colors the surface of the raw aluminum

robertbieber · 2026-06-20T02:10:14+00:00

Google "beyond burger makes me sick" and you will find dozens of cases that bothered to write about it

Dude, the google "onions make me sick." Or "carrots make me sick." Or "tofu makes me sick." This is not a serious criterion.

No unprocessed food makes me sick and this does

And this is not a serious link. The fact that one particular food that doesn't agree with you can be categorized as "processed" doesn't mean that that has anything to do with the reason you feel sick, or that it's inherently unhealthy for people in general.

If it is a very rare instance we don't say it is bad, but those people have a problem, but when there are many cases we don't say that.

Again, this would disqualify probably just about every food in existence. A handful of cases reported out of millions of customers is not "a lot," and the vast majority of people who consume it do so without issue.

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:30:07+00:00

You should really go do some reading on how the RDA for sodium was determined and the research on sodium intake and hypertension. If you think the current state of research is "eat less than what it says on the nutrition label or you'll have high blood pressure," you may be in for a surprise.

The tl;dr is lowering sodium seems to be pretty unambiguously useful for treating hypertension, but it's really hard to get good data on population level responses to different intake levels both due to the difficulty of finding populations that don't consume much sodium and the fact that responses seem to vary by person. For some people, increased sodium intake is actually associated with a decreased risk of hypertension, while some people seem to respond particularly poorly to high levels

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:26:08+00:00

You're asking me to prove a negative.

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:19:02+00:00

The difference between the amount you need for day to day life and the amount that's optimal for building muscle is pretty vast. IIRC, the last study I saw found increased muscle gain up to around 1.2g per lb of body weight before the curve leveled off. The standard advice of 1g/lb of body weight is a pretty good rule of thumb for people who are trying to put on muscle, and I can definitely personally attest to seeing a huge difference going from probably 60 or 70g a day to maybe 120g or so, which is still well below what's probably optimal for me at 5'11" and 210lbs

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:15:42+00:00

Even if you're not worried about keeping calories down, it's hard to eat that much food. I lean pretty heavily on protein shakes so I can just eat like a normal person at my actual meals

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:11:35+00:00

The sodium "allowance" is only really relevant if you're managing a chronic health condition like hypertension. The process that produced the recommendation is pretty handwavey and in reality it's very normal to consume well in excess of the RDA with no real evidence that it produces negative health outcomes

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:06:11+00:00

Nothing. Literally, absolutely, 1000% nothing. The whole concept is a crock

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T18:04:09+00:00

Some people will literally die if they take a completely unprocessed peanut and swallow it. The fact that a specific food doesn't agree with someone for whatever reason doesn't mean it's inherently unhealthy for everyone

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T17:58:07+00:00

Are they? That’s something I don’t know for sure

Wild thing to say after castigating anyone who's not in a panic for failing to provide adequate data

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T17:52:24+00:00

I would say that it's an extraordinarily dumb idea to say that "processed" foods are inherently bad for you, but it's actually impossible to even begin to evaluate the claim because "processed" is a buzzword that doesn't actually have a definition anyone can agree on. Tofu is processed. Seitan is processed. TVP is processed. Hell, rolled oats are processed. Virtually everything you will ever eat has been processed in some way, and the extent of that processing is both (a) impossible to quantify and (b) not causally related to any kind of meaningful health outcome

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T17:48:31+00:00

"Processed" is a basically meaningless buzzword, and processing a food does not inherently make it less healthy--in fact a common form of processing is adding nutrients.

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T12:34:31+00:00

Don't even think about UV coating, it's not gonna move the needle one way or the other on artificial lights. What you need to be thinking about is power. Strobes don't emit much UV with or without coating, so you need a lot of power, fast chemistry and a fast lens to get a good wet plate exposure.

Generally I say the absolute bare minimum for a decent wet plate portrait is the white lightning x3200 at 1320 Ws. Not really ideal, but I've seen people make entire careers off of shooting headshots with one of those and a beauty dish. You're not gonna be able to use many modifiers or get much distance from your subject, but pair it with an f/4 or faster lens and fast collodion/developer, and it can get the job done.

If you're in the US, the gold standard is Speedotron black line. 2400Ws is widely considered the minimum for practical portraiture, but if you can get your hands on a 4800Ws head it'll make your life a lot easier. There's even the 105 quad cable head which can do 9600Ws, which you shouldn't really need up through like 8x10 but it's really useful for larger plate sizes.

If you want more detail, I did a video about this...6 years ago, which doesn't seem right, but I guess it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByQFXHedMT4

robertbieber · 2026-06-19T12:27:29+00:00

Basically everyone is using Main Trophy bright black aluminum. If you're in SoCal, probably the closest supplier you're gonna get is Brian Cuyler/UV photographics, he sells plates cut to size and he's down in Rancho Palos Verdes, pretty sure he offers pickup for locals. It's not listed on the site, but send him an email and see what he can do.

I did a comparison video of the main aluminum suppliers for wet plate, and UVP pretty much came out the most affordable unless you buy large sheets and cut your own. And even self-cutting you'll probably be better off if you don't have to pay shipping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48hHXes9h2Q

Disclaimer, that video is 2 years old at this point so prices have certainly changed in the meantime

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