weight of a beer-box

As some friends and me are thinking about creating a remote controlled VTOL-beer-box (VTOLBB??) I needed to measure the weight of a standard 24X0.33l beer-box. Lacking a scale, my engineering skills were needed (*grin). Using a chair, the stick of a broom, a small garbage-bag, some pieces of string and 1l of water I build this improvised scale.
Not caring about the weight of the strings (should be roughly same on both sides) and the garbage-bag (nearly no weight) I compared the beer-box to 1l of water (~1kg if it were 4deg celsius in my room, but negligible less at 20deg celsius, which, I guess, is outweightened by the solved minerals), measuring the distances from the point of momentum-equality.

The result was roughly 2.11kg for an empty Jever 24X0.33l box. By getting rid of some of the inner material we should be able to lower this down to ~1.5kg.
Using four impellers it would be possbile to lift this weight. The biggest problem will be to stabilise the whole thing! Another option might be to use two counterrotating rotors, either with cyclic control or some kind of flaps mechanism.

New backend and modified design

Phhuuuu … been quite a piece of work.
Well … as some of you might have realized, there were no updates since I got back to Germany, this was due to some problems with the backend of my website. So after looking around quite a bit, I chose bBlog as my new engine as it’s quite easy to personalise and modify.
After migrating all the old content to the new system (all pictures are now stored in the gallery) and modifying the layout for the new needs, everything is up and running again.
The old website (tim.oh7eleven.de) will be closed and forwarded to the new address (tim.jagenberg.info) the next days.

Leaving Sydney

Afer over half a year living and (very succesfully) working in Sydney I left the city I fell in love with. With a short hop to Melbourne I start the backpacking-season.
Sitting at the gate, I’m sipping a “Tall Long Black” (a small one would have been a “Short Long Black” 😉 that happens when americans don’t care about local specialities (Starbucks)).
Guess this is a fine time to recapitulate. The things I liked most about Sydney were it’s multicultural lifestyle and it’s live-music scene (Cheers to all the Ska-people and “Waiting For Guinnes”).
The major small things I’ll be missing are the nice walks through the park to the uni, the beatiful glimpses at Sydney Skyline in the sunset from Glebe and the probably friendliest pizzeria around the corner (Boost Cafe Glebe).
In this rather short time I met so many nice people, had heaps of interesting conversations and made lots of new friends (hope I’ll be able to stay in contact with them).
Working at the Uni Sydney was a pleasure and interesting. I enjoyed helping the firstsemesters with their catapult and like to hear what hapened to the hovering platform.
The talks with profs, former students and the staff were really inspiring and I hope I can set up my own small workshop to work on my ideas.

Well, enought of the past, I’ll be boarding any moment.
On the road again, taking the long way home.

Thanks everybody for this nice time,
Tim.

Niceeee …

New homepage is up and running!
Even if you don’t see too many changes, all the structure behind what u see has changed!
The last few days i completly rewrote the whole page using PHP and a mySQL database.
As there’s quite a lot of data from the old version, it’ll take some time to add all the old images and texts to this new version.

Greets and bye, Tim.