Bits and Pieces

I called in dead on Monday and enjoyed having the house to myself in spite of feeling like crap. Today I came in and found my spacers waiting for me, so I spent a little over six hours spacing the stator barsets. About two hours into that task, Joe brought me the parts for the stator fixtures. I spent the last hour or two of the day assembling those, and started tapping (cutting internal threads in) the holes. The rest of the tapping will take at least an hour tomorrow, maybe longer, since it's done by hand, not with a drill. If I'm lucky, I'll get backing plates tomorrow so I can start welding the stator barsets.

Christophe the cute Canadian engineer visited today. (Seems like there's eye candy all over the shop lately.) He was excited to see rings and a shell built... until I told him that they were for a smaller model and had been back-burnered for a while. We talked about what I still needed, and then about English. He understands that I'm trying to help make things easier for everyone by improving his (and Luc's) command of the language. I forgot to ask him about the ring assembly for the smaller model... some rings need more holes, some need fewer, and he really needs to assemble a ring by himself to see what a pain in the butt his design is.

Off to school. Ugh.