Tim – Page 11 – Mechanical Sympathy

Exploring Jasper and Surrounding Area: some motorcycle ideas

I’m not on two wheels but it feels good to travel again. As I write this I’m sitting in a B&B as the sun cuts through early morning clouds on the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies.

We spent a couple of mad days in Edmonton, but cities aren’t my thing and giant malls even less so. Now that we’re 3+ hours west of Edmonton in the mountains, the adventure begins. Today we’re heading a couple of hours south to the Athabasca Ice Fields for an eco-tour of the glacier. We’re in Brule for the week and so far the landscape has not disappointed.

Brule makes for a nice, quiet base for exploring the northern Jasper area. It would be a 3700km odyssey across the Canadian Shield and then the Praries to get here by bike. We drove across Canada in 2018 and did it in Elora to Sault Ste Marie to Thunder Bay to Winnipeg and then kept going on the south route. To get up here it’d need a Saskatoon and Edmonton stop before pushing on to Brule. That’d be 3 days of 700-800kms per day and then a couple of shorter days into the mountains.

It has been single digit temperatures here in July in the mornings and sometimes when it’s raining. A warm day will get up into the low 20s, which is nice riding weather, but you’d want to dress for the cool. It has also been quite wet, so good rain gear is a must.

Coming back, Yellowstone is about 1400kms south of us, so a couple of days ride down there, a couple of more days riding around the park, then a scenic 2300km ride back to The Sault, then a final leg home. That’d be about 7000kms of getting there and back with shorter scenic rides on location, so perhaps 10k kms. Spread out over a month, this’d be one heck of a way to see a lot of North America’s middle.

***

I’m at the end of our week out here and this place is fantastic. Were I living out here I’d have my choice of epic rides on my doorstep. The big roads are sweeping, high speed routes with unbelievable views. It’s Canada so the tarmac isn’t smooth and you’re dealing with tar snakes and buckled ashphalt, but it’s never SWOnt tedious.

The Big Routes:

Brule to Jasper to the Athabasca Glacier: we drove this (in a car) on Wednesday and it’s a spectacular drive. You’re climbing from 979m (3200ft) to 2121m (6958ft) with another 618m is descents – the trip is seldom on the level and usually in a bend, especially on the AB-93 Icefields Parkway – one of the most scenic drives in Canada.

Every stop smells of burnt brakes and transmission fluid. It isn’t gentle on cars, but riding the Icefields Parkway would be a bucket list riding trip for any motorcyclist.

We hiked the Athabasca Glacier with Rockaboo Adventures – highly recommended!

This lot have the right idea – but pack your raingear, weather in the mountains changes quickly and often. On the upside, if you don’t like what it’s doing, wait five minutes.

Jasper to Tête Jaune Cache, British Columbia

You pass Mount Robson (the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies) on the way into BC. It’s worth a stop.

Mt Robson is as big as it gets in the Canadian Rockies…

The drive this way is fast-mountain-highway with lots of trucks. On the way out we had a bear stop on the side of the road to let us by before crossing. It’s that kind of ride.

Over the continental divide the forests get lusher and have a more Pacific rain forest vibe, though you’re still at altitude so it’s mainly coniferous. We went down as far as Valemount to check out the Three Ranges Brewing Co.. The place has a nice vibe with pictures of all the local high school grads on each light post.

Driving us back to Jasper, we observed some near disastrous truck passing. The people moving heavy goods through the mountains seldom slow down and the result is often passes on the shoulder and other high risk moves. Once I had a handle on how the big trucks rolled, when you see one brake take it seriously, they don’t slow down for much.

If you like the fast sweeping roads and views that never quit, along with the sudden animal spotting, you’ll love the highways in and around Jasper. Just one last note: speeds limits seem pretty tight in Jasper National Park, so if you’ve got an Ontario 100 means 140 mindset, you’ll run into problems. Alberta has a pretty reasonable 110km/hr limit and most people on the highway seem to stick within 10km/hr of it. In the park it’s usually 80km/hr but often slows due to high animal areas or other environmental factors. Park wardens can pull you over for speeding and other infractions and there are a lot of them about. Why rush anyway? The place is well worthy of a slower pace.

Technical Back Roads:

The Road to Miette Hot springs:

If you’re looking for interesting technical roads to ride, you want to hit some of the spur roads up to other areas of the park. We did Miette Hot springs one day and the Google map doesn’t do it justice. In addition to some gnarly switchbacks, the rest of the road into the mountains is never straight and always going in a new direction. It’s 17kms of really nice riding.

The road is Canadian (so no butter smooth tarmac here), but it’s well maintained and the views are spectacular. Once we got up there we discovered that Parks Canada runs noon to 8pm hours in the summer so locals can make their way up there after work for a soak. Nice, eh? If I were living near the north gate of Jasper I’d be aiming for 34kms of engaging technical riding with a soak in the hot springs to break it up many times a week during the summer.

There’s also a nice family run restaurant just down from the springs if you’re looking to eat.

17kms from the main Jasper highway up to Miette Hot springs.

The Road to Maligne Lake:

This is another wonderfully technical road with constant direction changes. It’s much longer than the Miette Hot springs road but you end at the lost world of Maligne Lake where you’ve probably got the best chance on the planet to see a dinosaur.

The road follows the outflow from Medicine Lake, twisting and turning with the raging river and then traces the shoreline before climbing even higher towards Maligne Lake. Stunning views frequent animal sightings and never dull roads meant this was one of the most motorcycled routes we saw. In the photos below you’ll see rain and then sun – they were taken less than a minute apart. You always want to be ready for rain but it seems to pass quickly up in the Rockies.

48kms from Jasper to Maligne Lake.

Oh no, it’s raining on the Harleys!

Is that one of the new Husky Norden 901s? Yes please!

It’s seldom straight!

Getting Dirty!

If you’re willing to get dirty there are a number of roads into the park that offer a more adventurous experience. I haven’t done these but a light adventure bike and living in the area would have me riding to the end of as many remote roads as I could find, like this one!

That’s 45kms but G-maps is saying it’ll take over an hour, so this ain’t no 100+km/hr road!

Pyramid Lake Road looks like a cracker too!

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When eLearning Evolves from Electronic Learning to Enhanced Learning via VR

I got into virtual reality way back in 2015, to the point where my secondary computer engineering program was making VR systems for other schools in our board and we developed a board-wide Ministry funded research project on it. Having worked with this emerging technology from the very first commercially viable system, I’ve watched with interest as the field matures and it has me thinking about how we can move beyond the prejudices in our very conservative education system and toward a mindset where the ‘e’ in elearning stands for ‘enhanced’ rather than ‘electronic’ and is considered a necessity for a superior pedagogical experience rather than an evil to fight against or an excuse to cut funding.

Back in 2017 the only way you could do VR was with the processing power of a desktop computer. We built those machines to spec and then set up a variety of fully interactive, high resolution headsets on them ranging from HTC Vives to Microsoft supported setups by Samsung through our board’s SHSM program. I’m still providing hardware support for those machines years later.

We travelled to other schools and conferences around the province demonstrating immersive VR for students, parents and other educators. In most cases they got stuck on the games, but games are often the early adopters, like the first-returners after a forest fire, they push technology and create systems that are adopted by later industries, like education. Many people turned their noses up at VR even as they were stunned by how immersive and engaging it could be simply because it’s ‘all about gaming’, but (of course) that isn’t the case.

At Skills Canada Nationals in Moncton in 2016 I wandered the floor while our IT & Networking finalist duked it out in competition. I came across a VR training system to operate one of the all-in-one lumber cutting systems (the kind that grabs the tree, cuts it, trims it and stacks the finished poles for transport). These complex mechanical systems cost millions and the only way to train on them was to train on them, before VR got involved. The VR training system they had cost upwards of $80,000 to put together, so it was far from cheap, but what it did was allow the company to train operators prior to putting them on the real multi-million dollar equipment and it reduced user-error in new operators by over 80% when they finally got into the real machine. The end result was millions saved in broken equipment and lost productivity.

In applying immersive VR in our classroom I’ve come across instances where students with special needs could suddenly express their genius and I’ve had students produce complex VR based games that gave them the portfolio they needed to move on into high-demand post-secondary digital media programs. It has also reframed for me how 3d modelling and emerging digital media have their own literacy requirements that many people are oblivious to. This ongoing work culminated this year when we won Skills Ontario provincials in 3d animation and then went on to win Skills Canada nationals to become the top 3d animation school in the country.

All of these experiences and development feels like it’s leading somewhere, and that somewhere is beginning to come into focus. A digitally enhanced classroom offers many benefits and improvements to pedagogical practice, but it requires staff and students who are fluent and proficient with the technology. This is an ongoing problem in an education system that diminishes the potential of technology and clings to old ways, usually to the benefit of the organizations involved in public education.

Things have been, let’s say ‘rough‘ during COVID as the system fell into repeat rounds of remote learning without any kind of plan or expectations of success. The new normal became to just do and expect less as the limited and atrophied format of elearning became evident to all, but any educator who approaches the job from that angle should probably be looking elsewhere for work. As things come back toward some kind of normal I’m hoping we can explore virtual and digitally augmented learning without the entrenched prejudices surrounding webpaged based/screen delivered elearning because this emerging media offers some powerful opportunities.

In the time we’ve been in pandemic-limbo VR technology has moved along. Those 2017 ‘coming soon’ stand alone systems are no longer lower resolution options and they are now pretty much where a desktop top driven wired system was in 2016, for one quarter the price. The evolution toward fully interactive, high-resolution virtual reality will continue and education needs to get over it’s e-prejudices to better understand and leverage it.

My son gave the Hololens a go back at the ECOO conference in 2016. It was very much a prototype-proof-of-concept device, but the idea of eye glasses sized headsets is where VR is headed. Along with a pair of haptic gloves and other IoT type sensors, we should be seeing portable, capable, fully interactive systems in the next couple of years that continue to expand the bandwidth between us and our rapidly expanding digital infrastructure. Interacting with digital information through a two dimensional low-resolution/screen will look as archaic as dot matrix printers in a decade.

During the pandemic I got to try Meta’s latest Oculus Quest 2 headset. These are completely wireless, have school-day long battery life and offer interactive, immersive digital media access for close to the price of a Chromebook. Early adopting programs (like mine) will be able to offer VR experiences much more easily with this gear, but it’s the next step that is most exciting: the convergence of virtual, augmented and mixed reality into a readily accessible digital media-scape for most subjects of study.

“Education will be transformed into something far more vivid. History teachers will transport their students to the beaches of Normandy or the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam. In biology class, the entire room will become the inside of a mammalian cell.”

– https://futureof.org/sports-2016/ar-vr-roadmap/2025-arvr-convergence/

We’re getting to the point now where the hardware engineering isn’t the limitation. The next few years will be about developing the software engineering in this new medium because having the tech in hand doesn’t help when the media isn’t there to make use of it. The focus I’ve placed on our game development program has always included a big push beyond games as students develop increasingly complex digital portfolios. It’s why we’ve crept into animation and 3d modelling in our engineering as well, because these skills are going to be in short supply to fulfill the needs of this emerging medium.

Our success with Skills Canada this year in 3d animation lies very much in the realm of digital media as this kind of 3d media is exactly what is needed for both virtual and augmented reality experiences to work:

Made over 2 days (2×6 hours), our team of 2 had to storyboard, script and animate an 11 second video. They were allowed to pre-model and rig 3d character models (the loon and the beaver) but the metal pot was a wild-card model that had to be made in the competition window. All sounds were prescribed for all teams, so the animation is storyboarded to fit them.

Our success at Skills (and the fact that it was 2 grade 11s who achieved it) means we’re integrating 3d animation into the game development training curriculum next year. This all grew out of me pushing for better narrative structure in last year’s game, Rigged. That led to several students (including our Skills competitors) branching off and forming animation teams to better frame the narrative in the game:

All the modelling, animation and sounds in that video were made from scratch in our classroom by grade 11/12 students in our TGI3/4M Software Engineering/Gamedev class. We were unable to develop a VR based game as we have in previous years due to COVID restrictions, but I’m hoping to get back to it sooner than later.

It won’t be too long until you see teachers asking students to take out their headsets and join a virtual classroom where avatars allow students to be whatever they wish and the level of interactivity means teachers will be able to know whether or not a student is engaged and present. Many online teachers during the pandemic experienced the ‘logged-in-but-absent’ student. That kind of low-resolution online interaction would be rendered obsolete once Meta and the rest of the industry has education-ready virtual reality ready to go. If you’re inhabiting an avatar online you can’t hide behind privacy as an excuse to not participate, and an inactive avatar in VR would look like an inactive student in class, making avoidance much more difficult.

This also means that the idea of a brick and mortar classroom as we know it is going to quickly become irrelevant and our schools as we know them will require rethinking – something that the drag-inducers in education (the vested interests in how things run right now) aren’t going to want to cooperate with. I fear the public education system in Ontario is going to need a hard reboot to make this happen. That may be the only way to break our ties with a past that makes little sense in the 21st Century and craft a ‘world class education system‘. Thinking that the way things were is the pinacle we need to get back to is a big part of the problem.

Instead of passive information delivery, interactive, immersive learning opportunities mean students will experience history, science and literature first hand, bringing formerly static information to life and allowing them to explore it rather than have it land on them. Living Lord of the Flies is much more memorable than reading it. I did a role play of it over a decade ago in an English class and former students still talk about it today. Interactivity is the key to engagement with modern students as this is the mediascape they live in when not in class. They will no longer be forced to step back a decade in terms of media in the classroom if we can engage with emerging digital mediums.

In the book (and film) Ready Player One, after the collapse of an oil based transport economy virtual reality becomes the default schooling option. A better future would be a bit less apocalyptic but the idea that VR would augment learning and help teachers produce engaged classrooms with interactive and powerful learning opportunities also suggests that we don’t need to burn tons of diesel every day transporting students to remote schools since any local school could provide digital enhancement. Even in augmented situations where students are building in technology classes or experimenting in science, augmented reality could offer insight and direction that would enable far more students to enjoy success while also making our schooling more green; yet another aspect of our ‘perfect’ system that never was.

From the early days up until now, virtual/immersive/interactive digital tools have offered the hope of a future that finally removes us from a static relationship with information and offers radical differentiation of learning for all students. In our increasingly information rich (or overwhelmingly information overloaded world, depending on how you look at it) we need to find better ways to find and make effective use of the information at our fingertips, and this augmented, virtual mediascape will be the key to that as well. That it also offers a solution to our current wildly unsustainable educational transport habits is icing on the cake. Now it’s just a matter of getting a system mired in political self interest to move forward.

RESOURCES

VR isn’t the only emerging digital technology that can empower our pedagogical practice. Artificial Intelligence is also opening doors to radically individualized learning opportunities that would benefit all students and make our rows of desks in overcrowded classrooms look positively medieval:

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/refocusing-ontario-education-on-student.html

Virtual possibilities back in 2016 (education has made little effort to engage in any of them):

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/virtual-possibilities.html

Our MoE grant research into VR in 2017. No follow-up there either:

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2017/07/replies-to-our-moe-experiential-student.html

Reaching out to industry at the FITC conference in 2018. Industry doesn’t know how to engage with the prickly world of public education either:

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2018/04/fitc-pitch.html

In 2016 I was looking to escape the staid and restrictive world of #edtech in order to try and explore emerging technologies. Six years later we’re churning out national champions in fields ranging from cybersecurity to 3d animation:

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2016/11/ecoo16-virtual-reality-diy-school.html

Meta’s Project Cambria, the next gen in VR:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/oculus/project-cambria-release-date-price-specshttps://www.pcgamesn.com/oculus/project-cambria-release-date-price-specs

Facebook is morphing into Meta in order to drive a more complex interface with digital information:

https://about.facebook.com/company-info/

VR in education:

https://www.classvr.com/virtual-reality-in-education/

10 best examples of VR in education (Forbes):

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/07/23/10-best-examples-of-vr-and-ar-in-education/?sh=4c2777871f48

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Gas Prices And Riding Your Motorcycle

NOTE: when gas was $112US/barrel in May this year, retail pump prices were $1.95/litre. Someone’s getting rich off climate disaster.

Petro-Canada is putting everyone
over a barrel charging 6¢ a litre
more for super than ESSO is.

I was out and about on two wheels both Saturday and Sunday last weekend. Because I live in one of the most geologically tedious places in the world, I often have to ride for 20 minutes just to find *any* corner. This has me juggling contradicting ideas when it comes to the latest round of record-breaking fuel prices. On the one hand, fuel is more expensive. Thirty bucks used to be as much as I ever put into a bike, now it’s over forty. On the other hand, after riding for twenty minutes to find a damned corner there are far few people driving around like gormless idiots on it so I get to actually enjoy the lean. I think I’m OK with the return on investment with strangely high gas prices: it’s expensive but the roads are nicer to ride.

This isn’t the first time fuel prices went this high. They did in 2012 as well due to Middle Eastern instability, but back then (with costs per barrel similar) fuel at the pump out this way reached $1.36/litre and had everyone apoplectic. A decade later the same crude oil prices have us paying almost $2.50 a litre, but hey, if you can’t get rich from declining resources and a climate disaster you were instrumental in causing, you shouldn’t be running a petrochemical company.

My son and I two up on the Kawasaki are averaging over 42 miles per gallon…

The Tiger is mainly doing one-up work now that the Concours takes care of pillions. With its new sprockets the RPMs have dropped a few hundred in any given gear and it’s now averaging over 60mpg on long, top gear rides. At this kind of mileage I can handle higher fuel costs.

LINKS

2012: “Retail pump prices rose early in the year, starting at $1.21 per litre, peaking at $1.36 per litre in April, declining to $1.23 per litre in July”

“Crude oil prices… ]averaged $703/m3 (US$112/bbl)”

https://www.statista.com/statistics/262858/change-in-opec-crude-oil-prices-since-1960/

It might be unpopular, but I believe we should be charging the environmental damage in each litre of gasoline.

The True Cost of Burning Hydrocarbons:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1343-0

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/heres-what-gas-would-have-to-cost-to-account-for-health-and-environmental-impacts-c0ed088e8f38/

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/domestic-and-international-markets/transportation-fuel-prices/4593

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Moto Art

Various photos from rides over the last month, worked over with photoshop into not-photographs!

Kawasaki GTR1400 at sunset (and below)

Triumph Tiger on a Sunday Ride

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Fireblade Fountains

I finally got the carbs sorted on the Fireblade project (sense of achievement!) and when I fired it up they felt very responsive… but then a giant geyser of oily water spewed out of the valve cover exhaust pipe and hit the ceiling (!). Never seen that before.

Rather than repeat the fountain, I put a pipe on it, ran it into a container and videoed the weirdness…

(it’s a 360 video, you can move the mouse to look around – like at the oily water dripping off the ceiling)

So the fountain happened both times I ran it, and the stuff that came out looked like watery oil rather than oil with some water in it. Next step: drain the oil…

… which looks like water. That’s not good, and it’s something I’ve never seen before. Why on earth would anyone ever put water or coolant in an engine like that?

I’ve done head gaskets on cars before and I’m pretty familiar with the consequences of oil mixing with coolant. It usually goes both ways (oil gets in the coolant, coolant gets in the oil, but the coolant looks brand new and the level is good. When running there is no bubbling in the coolant overflow (usually a running engine will force gas and oil back into the coolant reservoir if there is a blown head gasket). As amazing as this sounds, I think the idiot who owned this before me filled the engine with coolant instead of oil, but I really can’t understand why. It’s either gross incompetence or he sold me a bike with a known blown engine, which is a pretty shitty thing to do. Incompetent or nasty, not a great set of choices there.

Next up is actually putting oil in the engine and running it again. I’ve got some used stuff out of the Tiger which is the right weight. If it works, then the guy who owned this thing before me might be the dumbest human in history. Once I’ve run the old synthetic out of the Tiger and confirmed everything works, I’ll drain it and put some new stuff in.

My first sports bike has been a bit more baffling than the XS1100 (air cooled, nothing weird there other than the ownership) and the Concours sports tourer which had been through hell, but was owned by a guy who knew what he was doing.

The muppet who owned this bike before me will have me going top to bottom on it before I get it out on the road – I can’t trust anything that was done to it.

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May Motorcycle Photography

Motorcycle photography over the past couple of weeks.

Two-up sunset ride on the Tiger with a Ricoh Theta SC mounted to the rear view mirror with a flexible tripod:

Testing a new Theta SC 360 camera mounted on the windshield with a flexible tripod:

If you’re curious about how to do this, click HERE!

Kawasaki Concours 14 on a sunset ride (no 360 camera this time, just the phone):

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1997 CBR900RR Parts, Cables and Hose Routing

Notes for next round of work on the Honda. Doing it for myself so I can follow what I’m doing on the laptop in the garage, but might help out other ’90s Honda Fireblade CBR900 restorers too.

Missing tank mounting hardware:
BOLT, FLANGE (6X40) (missing bolts for front of gas tank)
COLLAR C6.3, MOUNTING

Throttle cable running under the right side of the centre triple fork

Vacuum routing – but not particularly helpful – air vent tubes probably connect to bottom of air cleaner box…

Upper and lower throttle cables are clear in this – they are over the handlebars now (wrong) – and like a burk, I put them together backwards, so you have to throttle off to throttle on – remove carb, remove cables, reroute and confirm on this before reattaching.

I tried a replacement LED in the neutral light – no joy – try reversing it? Light receiving voltage when in neutral. Confirm that? Trace that neutral switch wire?

Double check choke cable – seems good the way I had it, but bike’s in a choke right now, so no movement of front wheel to check routing when the handlebars are turned.

LINKS:

Online Microfiche for parts:
https://www.hondapartsnation.com/oemparts/l/hon/50541057f870021c54bede5e/1997-cbr900rr-ac-parts

’96 Technical Review Document:
https://mototribu.com/constructeur/honda/1996/1000cbr/doc/revuetechnique_900rr.pdf

Sub Air Filter Honda FILTER, SUB-AIR CLEANER Part # 17254-KAZ-000
https://www.amazon.ca/Honda-17254-KAZ-000-Air-Filter/dp/B00HPTLPEO
Looks to be a foam filter – might see if I can source an equivalent – take the plastic bit in an size a filter.
https://www.hondashadow.net/threads/sub-air-cleaner.300257/
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/hondashadowacetourer/sub-air-cleaner-what-is-it-39-s-function-t11508.html
https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/atlas-briggs-stratton-lawn-mower-foam-air-filter-0607024p.html#spc

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Signs of Spring 2018

The weather is fairly crap, but there are signs of spring as the sun returns more and more each day. All done with the Canon T6i. Macros are done with the 18-35mm kit lens, the birds are using the ‘kit’ 55-250mm long lens.

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Forging Moto-Maker Spaces

As a family we attended a blacksmithing day at Happy Knife Forge last weekend. Highly recommended, it’s money well spent. Jason will not only show you the basics, but is keen to get you up and running as a blacksmith. My granddad was a coal merchant back in the old country and the smell of coke burning on the forge prompted a sense memory from the crib; it smelled like home.

I’ve ruminated on fabrication and micro-manufacturing on TMD before from a digital perspective using the latest techniques. Given the space and tools I’d quite happily spend my time designing and creating using everything from medieval blacksmithing through 20th Century metal working and on into 21st Century digital manufacturing techniques. Connecting these processes separated by time but with the same intent would produce some genuinely interesting and bespoke combinations.

I’ve had the itch to get back into welding for some time, but a lack of space and gear means I’m not while I’m where I’m at. The blacksmithing experience has me wanting to expand my metal working beyond just welding, which means even more space and kit getting added to the wish list. You can do a lot in a tight space, and I am, but when it comes to storing the chemicals and managing the heat in some of these processes, there is no substitute for space.

A property with an old industrial building on
it would make for a fantastic restoration
leading to a multi-millenial foundry covering
everything from blacksmithing to digital design!

Given the time and resources I’d hit an intensive welding program, then set up my multi-millenial forge/shop/maker space with everything from blacksmithing tools through metal working and mechanical to 21st Century 3d scanning, digital modelling and printing. The forge would be in the corner of a repurposed, old brick building that also includes space for metalwork, all very fireproof. Across the floor in the same open concept.would be space for a paint booth/shot blasting station and plenty of mechanical workspace. Upstairs (open concept, with just a railing) would be digital design and manufacturing in a cleaner workspace. If I could walk out to that every morning to create, restore and repair, I’d hardly care if there were pandemics or anything else. Put it near some good riding roads (ie: not in Southern Ontario), and it’d be just about perfect.

I’ve been thinking about a digital workshop for a while now, but the blacksmithing experience has me thinking old school as well.

The future-garage scene in Big Hero 6 gets the digital side of it right.

Used Options:

Metal Working Tool Links

https://www.amazon.ca/Solary-Magnetic-Induction-Flameless-Automotive/dp/B08XTHTMZP

https://canadaweldingsupply.ca/products/metabo-5-variable-speed-rat-tail-angle-grinder

Digital Manufacturing Links

https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/car-sos-tv-show-uses-3d-printing-and-scanning-to-restore-classic-car-195222/

https://www.javelin-tech.com/3d/artec-3d-scanner-price/

https://all3dp.com/1/best-professional-3d-scanners-industrial/

https://all3dp.com/1/best-professional-3d-printer-small-business/

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Riding Through an Oil Painting

After a long day at work I found myself watching the sky change colours and jumped on the Tiger for a ride down the river. It felt like riding through a Van Gogh…

All photos taken with a Ricoh 360 camera mounted on the windshield, autofiring every 8 seconds.

West Montrose Covered Bridge: one of these times I’m going to ride through and find myself in 1881!

Photos are in reverse chronological order. Sunset was at 8:30pm – I was on the road from about 8:10 to 8:50pm.

If you want a breakdown of how to get on-bike 360 photos like this, check THIS out! If you really want to digitally flex, you can create a 360 ‘tiny planet’ stop motion film out of this kind of photography: