It's almost done! Updates...

Here is an official Monday update episode where I'll explain to you what we still have left on the drop tower, where I'm at with load cells, the audio stuff I'm doing, and more. Let's get started. So it's taking a lot of work to get to this point but we are... I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Right up here we're gonna add uh what I call wings that'll be even on both sides and then gussets from here to there so we can eliminate this guy and from there to there which means our trolley can go all the way to the end. Right now it doesn't go this way because the cables and we're gonna explain that in a minute but for about here to here we're gonna put gussets on both sides from there to there and so that'll keep a lot of this rocking from happening. We're gonna go from guy wires all the way to a footing out there and all the way to a footing over there just to give it a lot more stability even though I think what we're gonna do is gonna help. This we're going to laminate a beam on this side to put the force down the leg we're gonna take out the center part and we're gonna put a platform in this corner here and then we're gonna gusset this and we're gonna truss this and we're gonna go from here out to here. Lots of stuff yet to do but the light at the end of the tunnel. I just ordered my rubber mulch shredded rubber tire that's gonna go down here. I was gonna do drainage here but I found out there's a dry well right there so this is gonna be the shape down two inches from below the concrete two inches below the concrete and about four inches in the center with this landing zone being almost 12 inches and we need a pipe to go from here to there that is going to be lower than my lowest point here so I don't get water built up into this area and then we can chop off the things here that are too high. There are steel blocks under this by the way it's not just grout and so we got the perfect height lifted it up put steel blocks set it back down so it's it's on steel blocks and then reinforced by these these corner pieces but I'm going to put some climbing hanger on here and on the bolt of the tiny gusset we have up here I'm going to put cables x on three sides and that'll give the bottom rigidity. I'm going to be screwing climbing handholds up all four legs and then across here and all the way up there and I'm going to have a perfect descent mounted right about here and that way if you ever fall off of any of this you have a free clean perfect descent get it back down to the ground and we'll also have it on this side as well so basically I just built myself a climbing gym and I think that's pretty rad. The handholds I'm thinking about putting on here are gray and are kind of easy to grab they're from Rocky Mountain Climbing Gear and they seem pretty affordable and they're from recycled material so they hold up good outside so they kind of meet all the requirements. Talking to them about what my options are I'd like to have easy easy 5-0 access up to wherever I need to be and then between each one have some harder stuff so I can actually like just run laps if I want to exercise in between editing stuff sit in front of a computer way too much. An update on my Lodestar load cell is right now it's working and the other day I came out here break some more cave stuff and it didn't work and literally nothing's changed and there's a fan running in the attic right now that is not affecting it right now so this morning was okay 0.08 kilonewtons noise is perfectly acceptable but I was getting some crazy stuff I even got this cord here so I could take a battery bank and power up my interface to eliminate just the electrical source coming in entirely and sometimes it worked great sometimes it didn't so maybe there is an interference I can't imagine what it is between here and the interface. I'm also trying to change computers and get it up to just be on this guy to see if it's the computer I also plug this in with an extension cord in the other room just to see if having this plugged in next to this changed anything I also spent an entire day driving out to Lodestar sensors office and spent hours with them and of course it works when you're at the doctor's office but then it didn't after we did some tests and put it back in the main room and come to find out the macbook charger that we plugged it in next to a macbook pro charger specifically threw it off gave us some crazy noise and then we unplugged that and it worked again so we were able to create the problem and solve it there so I'm trying to create the problem and that's the frustrating I think is I can't create the problem right now there's nothing I'm doing different than I did two days ago when I was trying to break some of the caving stuff how not to canyon comes out on Wednesday and it's basically just me going down a canyon Brent Ross shows us a few tricks and tips but it's a great introduction to the new canyon series pretty excited about it but the audio obviously I have a river behind me I don't have a waterproof audio solution but because the videos I've been editing are got they got wind and stuff totally trying to fix that now I have lapels that go directly into the iPhones that I have I have more than one iPhone now so now I got the road go mic two as well and that has two transmitters so one on each person goes to one receiver that will plug into the phone gotta get a special cord like they all take work and our third solution is an actual stereo a mic that plugs directly into this so if I am filming how not to poop and there's seven of us I can't mic everybody I can put a wind sock on that mic and just not have the wind because I want to film a lot of big wall videos but the logistics behind that is the audio so I'm working really hard on that working on three solutions simultaneous and I definitely want to have a waterproof solution so when I play in the water this is some of the cave stuff we broke uh some of the stuff was only in there for 10 years and it crazy looks like this but um through all the bolts we broke this is the table that Steve made from scorpion acres and Bobby got his table um that was super cool to have Steve make these and finally get these and it's gonna go here and what's interesting is every time I go to like decorate like with my wide-angle lens this looks normal but if I film straight on that looks dumb and small now maybe I can put this here but then I want to have like a second video so like I can change scenery and just have more stuff on the wall but do I put it this way do I put it this way trying not to show too much of the ceiling and the mess underneath so decorating I'm gonna put all the stuff we've broken pretty much on the wall and um we're gonna change this since we're at how not to now probably get a different laser cut thing and uh add and take away things if you guys want a tour of what's on this wall let me know especially when I add the rest of the stuff everything's oh so special to me it's a whole box of full of stuff even the cup actually not the cup speaking of Steve look what he made us those forms go inside of this and this can either hang from the drop tower or we've used it in the slow pull test machine and we can change the width of this and test nuts and cams in real rock literally real rock this time and no more uh slippery cam crusher this is another set of things I still need to break um there is so much good stuff we got some clown hangers if you've ever seen those in caves uh so there's lots of different things in order to break some stuff without having to go do um actual and real rock I can actually put the hanger on this adapter and nut that down and be able to at least test hangers in our slack snap machine and that really helps us get to test sooner because we only do bolt breaks about twice a year we just spend three days just busting them all out this was just me fooling around testing the dynamometer but that was 2,200 pounds of force in case you're wondering I did not use the nut I just clipped end to end here is a bunch of arborist rope that was sent to me pinch it and the core is shot and the sheath is still on there but inside you can feel the damage between there and being using it normal I got a whole bunch of this stuff to test still and I've got four millimeter soft shackles for highline loops in order to double wrap and get them awesome a whole thing on this is great look at this tool I found it's hilarious this is called bolt buster uh because if you don't know we bust our bolts and we call it bolt busters anyways this is induction heating and you basically can just heat up bolts more or less problem is it doesn't work super great on stainless but I am kind of able to get it to work you just kind of put it over the head the idea is you heat up the whole thing and after about two minutes of heating it up you can pull it out of the epoxy replacing glue ends but I still got some uh testing to do and it doesn't work on titanium so I'm gonna try to wrap steel that uh does work good with this and wrap it around the bolt like a wire and a cable so that gets heat up and then the heat transfers to this I don't know something uh something I'm working on to help organize everything and just not have it all in my brain I ended up writing down every step of every episode I'm currently doing in actually a google doc not a spreadsheet every episode is a little bit different and it's helpful to write down in more of just a paragraph version of what I'm doing I'm actually going to put that link in the description below so you can see the 22 episodes that we currently have all the steps how they're all kind of in different stages things I need to do to like supplement break tests for things I've already done preparing like this stuff sitting here ready to go it's a and when an episode is officially going to be one it gets a number and then it goes at the bottom of the list and it works its way up to the top the top item not necessarily the the youngest number but the top item is going to be released next and that's uh working great so far I don't feel like I got to carry it in my brain anymore and it's going to help my workflow and if I ever add more people to the team I think that'll help everybody see on board what we're doing I don't need any special software it's a one and a half man show right now pretty easy for one or two people to manage that then I can get into fancy software in the future to keep track of workflows and stuff but you don't need that for a small team it's also on my ever expanding to-do list to update the financial stuff on on the hownotto.com website and let everybody know kind of where we stand financially with this I don't know yet that's kind of what I've been waiting for pretty much everything else is I've spent money on but donations in September a couple people have donated super appreciate it kind of dried up I think people are out playing but uh yeah I still still got bills to pay for so um let me know if you can uh help me get over the hump of this project and then it's you know whatever comes in it will just guide what we're able to do but um yeah I don't know I don't want to beg for donations and videos all the time because that's kind of annoying I'm trying to do it like quick and subtle in videos so it doesn't kill the continuity of break tests and stuff I still think at least with what I've got so far that I've spent uh more over the last five years than I've received over the last five years but uh we're really really close we'll get through it we'll get done and um if your business wants a tax write-off there are two ways I can do that just hit me up ryan at slackline.com and I can explain to you how we can give you a tax deduction for your donation yeah Cave Exploration Society sent me this rope which is awesome it is a 10.5 marlo static rope and this is going to allow us to do a lot of knot tests when we do our knot series in the videos I want to make sure that I'm using the same rope throughout all of them I don't want to add too many variables in it especially if they're gonna be short and concise this way we can just you can binge watch all of them and um they flow together I'm trying to project 30 episodes as a continuity than just whatever's interesting on that day squirrel but uh seriously I'm gonna actually include um probably a 9.8 dynamic and maybe a six millimeter accessory cord or something that's a little bit thinner to see if uh thickness and changes with thin of course like with European Death Knot I would test two different dramatically different diameters to specifically get into the niche of that knot but if we're just testing one knot over another we'll just show you how to tie it I'll show you where it could be used in different applications and then just do some snap snap snap snap snap break tests with the whole data thing speaking of data on the sailing episode we just released uh she didn't get that many views surprisingly I don't know if the um topic is too off from the climbing stuff we normally do and the algorithm doesn't like that or if everybody was out on a beautiful weekend and wasn't home to watch video I don't know but uh I definitely think the value is there to break test stuff for all these communities but in that video because we ended up having so many data points we ended up putting the numbers on the graph so like right here the whole thing would have all the the data from what you just looked at and was relevant for the conversation we were having because we did two millimeter and three millimeter tests so let me know if you like that too much data in one video the whole thing just gets lost on you but if I can make it easy to understand the conclusion then it's not that bad but then if I'm trying to kilonewtons and pounds of force because sailors usually use just pounds of force then yeah it's just it's too much data I'm trying to keep this stuff small and all my episodes are turning out to be like 20 30 minutes which is just more to edit slower to get out but I can put out a lot more easier to watch videos if they were shorter so that's it for today's update video try to keep it short and sweet I just have a lot going on if you want to know more details let me know and I'm open for suggestions on the drop tower as soon as I'm doing stuff nobody likes usually showing off what they're doing halfway through but I like to just share everything so be gentle in the comments it's not a finished product but Larry in the middle of his harvest still helped us make a lot of progress big kudos to him this is this is crazy the amount of work that just the activity that goes on around here and yeah he helped us make just an enormous amount of progress in the last two weeks and honestly in the last six months I think I built the prototype in March it's only September it's not bad oh and I get a possibly a line scale three in the mail in a week the investor units aren't out yet I'm just getting one of the like ones I shouldn't be getting just so we can pump out some stuff that I have planned for it and uh that'll be that's like a crucial part of the drop tower as well it's all actually coming together all together at the same time load star sensor line scale three drop tower all gonna go boop and be done and we're gonna be cranking out drop tests oh going to Yosemite scouting and planning some even more rad stuff cheers