"Nothing but the rain"
This part of the Bucket Wheel Excavator is to build the power section. This includes a motor, battery pack and the gearing system to turn on and off different drives.
This was another hour after a few mistakes were made! Then I had to connect it to the main bucket wheel arm.
A top view:
Then this arm had to be connected to the main body.
Then the bucket arm was secured and the top superstructure was built.
Current total time: 9 hr 15 mins
The next section of this mammoth build was the conveyor away from the bucket wheel.
This was another hour. So current total time is 8 hr 15 min.
And, one more for luck.
I recently ordered a day-sack cover from a company using Amazon. It arrived and I was somewhat shocked.
The rest of the box had that paper-stuff in it to hold the rain cover in place. I have written about this before in this communication.
While this sort of packaging excess does seem a waste I’ve got some other ideas. Fuel use for transporting goods is largely dependent on the mass of the object. So although the box added something to the mass it was still reasonably light and so not a huge carbon drain. If the box is recycled then it doesn’t really matter about how much cardboard there was. There’s probably more carbon used in making the plastic wrapper of the item than in the box, as long as the box comes from a sustainable source.
So, upon reflection this excessive packaging may not be as bad a first thought.
I do think that eventually everything will be labelled with a “carbon factor” to make people aware of just how much carbon they emit and how well we are fucking the planet. Because we are. It is fucked. Utterly fucked. I am glad I will be dead in one hundred years. There are going to be wars over water, food and power. I am just very sorry that my children, or potential grandchildren, will be involved in that and the people to blame will all be dead. My parents’ generation and mine have screwed this planet over.
I could be calmed, I guess, by fluffy cat or dog pictures. But they don’t distract me from the bullshit. They reinforce our collective ability to ignore all that is going on.
This latest in the occasional series of the Bucket Wheel Excavator build chronicles my building of the bucket wheel arm, although only the first half. This took about an hour and an half so the total time so far is 7 hours 15, I think. I did make a mistake on this one, I put the buckets on facing the wrong way and was too tired to work out if it mattered and so I wasted about ten minutes refitting them correctly.
Another view, showing more of the mechanism.
Now, for completeness of record, here is a view of my working space:
And the reverse view:
I took a break from building the Lego monster to visit Rochester cinema and watch the film Life. I rated this film on IMDB and you can see a guide to my ratings within this communication.
I rated Life (2017) 6/10 #IMDb https://t.co/ppMEjkCAgP
— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 25, 2017
I spent a lot of this film wondering what to write. I’m still not sure. One of the ways I interact with films is to consider what I write here. It allows me to collect my thoughts and experience the film as something more than just a cinema trip. I am nearly at the point when I am going to take a pad and pen into a film to note down my thoughts as the film rolls. What is written here is normally a collection of illiterate thoughts after the fact. My musings are filtered through the cold process of entropy increasing. Occasionally I add an extra thought here or there when I realise I’ve missed an important point I wanted to make, hence a note pad would be a good idea. I don’t want to write notes on my phone because that’s likely to get me kicked out or would, at the very least, be quite anti-social in the darkened environment of the cinema.
You know what? I’m still not sure what to write. There are some science issues and orbital mechanics things that annoyed me a little but I don’t think they spoiled the film for me. Overall it was quite a good watch. This was essentially Alien but on the International Space Station. It wasn’t really as suspenseful as Alien, but then I do love Alien and Aliens. I did find this ultimately quite not-frightening.
Right [collects thoughts]. This film was fine. I like space stuff and this film had space stuff. Yep, that’s it. Fine.
Now, some bits a pieces with potential SPOILERS.
The ISS had to “catch” the mars probe? Not going to happen.
The life form was very aggressive, I don’t think this type of life form could exists on a planet. It would have to compete for food and resources and it would use them all very soon. Oh, shit, like humans on Earth. Wow! perhaps I missed that metaphor.
The Martian soil didn’t float about.
They found a single microscopic cell out of all the junk they brought in from the probe.
The Soyuz launched to boost the ISS to “deep space” would not have enough fuel. The film mentioned “deep space” a few times as though it’s easy to get there. It’s not. The energy required is immense. We have never, so far, sent a human to deep space. We haven’t even sent a human out of the Earth’s gravity well. We have sent some probes out beyond Earth’s grip but nothing that could sustain human life. I guess the film was set in the future so maybe they can have that one.
The Soyuz docked at a closing velocity that would have destroyed both machines.
There are probably other issues but I don’t want to come across as petty or pedantic. I am both. This film was largely: fine.
This next section of the bucket wheel excavator is the main conveyor belt from the body to the truck. This was about an hour to build. So far total build time is 5.75 hours. I think I’m over half way now.
I was really tempted to start the bucket wheel part of this but it was feeling late in the evening!
I think I’ll be sad once this has been finished. It really is quite therapeutic building this stuff.
This one marks a change as this is a model I bought from EBay from a charity. All money to good causes then. While I didn’t have all the pieces in this kit there was enough to make the orbiter.
And a view with the cargo doors / radiators shut:
This kit was released in 1993. It amazes me how basic it seems to be!
Now I have a working base unit for the Bucket Wheel Excavator it’s time to make the rotating base which serves as the connector for the conveyors and bucket wheel arm. This build took two hours. I had only really budgeted about ninety minutes of time and so I was feeling quite tired towards the end, but the result is gorgeous.
Here’s some detail of the build.
I’m about a third of the way through the instructions and not quite halfway through the separate bags!
Here’s the conveyor superstructure part way through the build:
This is the initial joining of the pieces but with more work still to do:
Another of the completed sections so far:
Caterpillar time! The big boy needs wheels (or similar). Build time for these was about an 45 minutes for both.
And here are the caterpillars attached to the base chassis.
This Lego model is being constructed in sections. These communications are in line with the numbered bags of legos in the kit. The first part of the kit was to make the dumper truck covered here, this took about an hour.
Here is my workspace:
I use pasta bowls to hold the pieces while I work. This saves them from dropping into the fireplace or bouncing under furniture on the floor.
This was the first main part of this part of the build:
More of the framework:
And this is the final part of this build. This section is the base unit with driver gears for the caterpillar tracks.
This took about an hour. So far, total time is two hours.