Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Shop space...

I spent the last weekend and most of Monday evening working in my Garage. Prior to this weekend all of the CNC tools were sitting in the middle of the room. I've now got them in their proper places.
The Lathe ..














And the Mill are in place...






















There is still much to do all the welding stuff is still stacked in the corner.




In addition to working on the shop I've been having a lively E-mail design debate with a number of people. At one point it spilled over on Arocket.
I really enjoy the arocket discussion group, it a valuable resource that sometimes drifts off course...

Todays arocket topic If you are an American living in china and have some Chinese shop machine rocket nozzles out of oak logs have you violated ITAR and will you go to jail? Don't laugh it is seriously debatable that oak would make a good cheap ablative nozzle for a short burn solid rocket.

The "go to jail" part is not debatable ITAR is deadly serious and is slowly choking the life out of American space technology. Many European space projects have specific rules saying you can't use American parts because they then impose ITAR on everything.

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