Monday

On friday last week I started to align the tailstock of the lathe with the spindle. This meant turning between centers and taking large facing passes on the material. To do this, You micrometer the ends of the bar, and then adjust the tailstock just enough to be half of the distance, because radius stuff can be funky sometimes.

I started on Monday just taking a pass and checking. To my surprise it was bang on. I wanted to double check this, but it was being weird so I called it good. It might not be absolutely perfect, but it is certainly much better than it was. If I were to do this agian I would want a different insert, that cuts a little easier. Something that is ground wouldv’e been much better.

Lathe Alignment

Tuesday

Tuesday was a bit of housekeeping. Tidying up my projects, and cleaning out my box. At this point in time Jonas Wirz, and Miles Hilliard have taken over as Stewards of the golfcart, but I am still here to answer questions and provide insight and consultation.

Wednesday

Aaron Bendaniel started to make a shop Windows 11 image. Now neither of us like Windows 11, or windows at all. We think windows is super bloated and normalized spyware. In our opinion, if it was possible, the shop should switch to some linux flavor that is easy enough for new people to learn. But since that isn’t possible and since we will soon need to use windows 11 ourselves for college, we decided it would be good practice and took on the challenge.

First we tried to use Rufus, which allows you to use a custom .XML script to run when installing, allowing you to configurate the installation automatically. This is really useful when installing hundreds of installations for a company or something. Unfortunatly that didn’t work for us and was leaving us with some funny errors. So we decided to go with the more brute force method. We installed the image without the XML file and then used Win11debloat.

Win11debloat is a custom powershell script that uninstalls lots of uneeded apps windows automatically installs. Unfortunatly this got rid of Paint3D but we can live with that. We also installed all of the Apps that we use as a shop.

Win11Debloat

Thursday

During 4th period we started making sure that all of the apps were installed for all users, and doublechecking that our configurations were working and had translated over.

Windows 11

During 6th period, there was the sumo bot competition and the Seniors ran that. There were some questionable strategies at play, but Tim Hunt and Benjamin Smith won. I beleive that there will be a second competition held in order to fix many of the bots that were broken and also the bots that were doing illegal things.