Update – Fishing Report – Video

I’ve just been busy.  In addition to making molds and working on my own projects I have been helping the NAU Mini Baja SAE Team make a gear box for their race cart.  All of those engineering students have finished their classes, gotten their degrees, and moved on to bigger and better things.  Hopefully they will all make the world a better place.  Not just make change for change’s sake.  Oh, Yeah.  Rob got his engineering degree too.  He was part of that crew.  He is hunting for an engineering job, but he is also considering going back for a masters.  He’s also already planning to teach when he retires from wherever engineering takes him.

I did get out fishing once on the canal bank for an hour or so.  Not a single bite.  I think the East Main near town has just gotten way to much pressure since the COVID lockdowns.  To be fair the time before I caught some dinks and lost a big one, so there are still some fish out there.  I did see a giant (40 lbs maybe) white amur that wound up in the ground water recovery ditch.  It probably went over the over flow.  YCWUA should probably go catch it and put it back in the canal.

Today I am working on custom molds again.  I’m actually all caught up on stock mold orders, but I’m still leaving cut time on those at 1-2 weeks so I get back on schedule for custom work.  That gear box project tied up one of my machines for weeks.  The one I use to prep a lot of molds to go on the smaller high speed machines.  I was prepping blanks in the back on the big manual knee mill by turning handles and reading the DRO.

When I get the current custom mold I am working on cutting I plan to do some experiments with big heavy extended reach indexable mills to see about a little more material removal rate and a little less chatter.  I learned a lot helping those young engineers with their gear box, not the least of which is how much I don’t know still about machining.

Oh, yeah.  Not sure if I have mentioned it before, but I have been inspired to get The Tin Can Back on the water again.  I’m going to eliminate the live well in favor of more room in the boat.  I’m also planning to try some trim tabs to see if I can trim the motor up a little more and get a little more speed out of it… No, not crazy fast.  Just as get it as fast as it used to be I hope. I’m not going to go full hydraulic.  Just make some manually adjusted tabs to see if it makes a difference.  For a while I was thinking about scrapping the boat, but now I’m not so sure.