I hope everyone is having a great week, and if you are in the South, I hope you are staying high and dry. Terrible what has been happening in Texas and the surrounding areas. I have checked with my old college buddy who lives in San Antonio, and their house is on high enough ground, thank goodness. And oh, how I wish there were some way we could take all that excess H2O and bring it out here to California. That would solve two problems at the same time.

I am having to write this a few days early, so by the time you read this (if you read it on Sunday), we will be finishing our time at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with a 1916 version of "Sherlock Holmes." This should be amazing--it was a film that was considered lost for many years, but some recently discovered footage was added in, and now they have what is a largely complete print--and it is going to have its premiere at the Castro Theater on Sunday night. It stars William Gillette as the sleuth, in his only time on film. He was considered to be THE premiere interpreter of Holmes on the stage. We're really looking forward to that! We are going to be in SF all weekend long, and tonight (Thursday) we kick off our festival with "All Quiet on the Western Front" from 1930. (As this came out right around the time that "talkies" began, this film was prepared as both a sync-sound print and a silent--for those theaters that had not had a chance to switch over to sound equipment yet. So we are seeing the silent version, though with live accompaniment, as the kick-off to this year's festival.)

Last Sunday I turned the final screws on my Acetone Bath Vapor Chamber, and hooked up the motor to my lovely magnetic gears. I hooked up the power and flipped the switch. I think I am going to name my creation the SuperNova. No, it did not blow up...but it did remind me of a cautionary tale from long ago...

You see, in the annals of marketing and advertising, there is a cautionary tale--perhaps you've heard of it--that pertains to Chevrolet (the US automaker). In the 1960s, Chevy scaled-down one of their muscle cars and came up with a model to which they gave the moniker of the Nova. Now, I never owned one, nor do I think I ever rode in one, but so far as I know they were a fine little car.
Then came time to market these Novas to our neighbors to the south, in Mexico and South America. This caused some people to snicker. At first General Motors didn't get it, until somebody pointed out that in Spanish, the word "va" means to go. And "no" means no. So this car was the No-Va, which literally translated to No Go. Great--they named their car for a immobile object. Now, this story has been somewhat of an urban legend, and some say it has been debunked...but still.

And so my Vapor Chamber is a Nova. And given that I so grossly over-engineered the thing, I am going to call it the Supernova.

The motor I am using is underpowered, so I have to give it a spin to get it going. (Maybe I install a crank, just like the old Ford Model-T?) That's a problem, since it is supposed to be all sealed up. So I'd have to hit the switch, give it a spin, and then screw the access panel back onto the unit. And hope it doesn't stop...but it does stop. You see, it spins for a while, but it spins too fast. The magnets can't keep up, and they get out of sync. Soon the push and pull of the magnetic fields bring the whole thing to a halt. I think I would need a motor with a gearbox to reduce the turning speed. I have been tweaking and trying different things all week, and the best I have managed has been a sustained spin of about five minutes. But it always goes Nova. So I'm throwing in the towel. Going to direct shaft method. I'll mount the motor on top, drill through the cabinet and insert a long shaft to the fan. In the interface between inside and outside the chamber, I'll create a plug that I can pack with cotton or wool batting--that will prevent the fumes from escaping the chamber. It's the same technology that mariners use when building inboard motor boats. The shaft can spin, but the batting keeps the water out of the boat. It won't be as elegant as my original design, but I know this would work.

Oh, and I've got to try using gears instead of a pulley system with rubber bands. Clearly in the use of magnetic gears, the engineering tolerances are a bit more tricky than my "seat of the pants" approach could provide. If I spent several weeks on this, I could probably get it going (and I may in fact go back to it and try again later). But the fact is, I'm running out of time. I just need the fan to work. When I get back to it on Monday, I will be in my final week of the loaner period for the most recent printer.

Oh well. A few days of silent movies will help clear my head, and I'll be ready to jump back into it on Monday.

So anyway, have a great week, everyone--and I'll be talking to you next weekend, when we have the next installment of VacaChat! (June 7).