by Doug Coulter » Fri Oct 10, 2014 2:32 pm
We've been looking at options, to be sure. I did jack the floor up, though. Good for the moment.
One would simply be to build another building, remote control, and in line of sight so I could still observe via a telescope (cameras just don't do it these days unless you can get full-manual exposure and find a way to keep the gammas out of the CCD).
That might have to happen, but those tend to be really spendy so far - I've not found a hack to use a generic auto-everything camera and make it all manual. The auto stuff just doesn't fly in a fusor - too much optical dynamic range is required, so it totally blooms out the light part trying to show me the dark parts I don't need to see. That is, when you get a picture at all - the gammas make a lot of "snow" in the picture.
Expensive and difficult to build another - not much flat land around here. And it's not like the fusor rack would be an easy thing to move at this point without breaking some really expensive stuff.
However, only about 25 yards away, I have a house trailer that I used to live and work in, that is now used for storage and reloading ammo. I could move back, and make this place "all lab" since it almost is anyway. The trailer would want to have a few small improvements to make it easier to heat...and it has aluminum wiring, mostly bad after being re-done twice (would have to rip out the walls to replace it, or just wire in conduit on the inside, which looks a lot easier) - every outlet box there has had a fire in it, even after I used the "magic goop" that is supposed to make the Al work out. It does, for a couple years, but no longer. If I build a bit of an addon, with another woodstove nearer the bedroom, and good insulation, it becomes a nice place to live, and then the square law gets me the attenuation I need for this. It's a dinky trailer and needs more space anyway...another room in front with a floor around 5 feet lower than the trailer "ground floor" is possible to build, about 8x20 feet, which could have a wood heater in it and it'd be really a nice place, though it has too many benches built against the walls now - easily fixed by removing them. Might be nice to have less of a man-cave 100% of the time, and that trailer is my only building with plumbing anyway. Looks like the lowest cost/energy solution at the moment.
We also do have what amounts to a cave behind that trailer - and would have 30 feet of rock between the fusor and us, but again - hard to get to, would need to be climate controlled, and would need a rather large amount of construction for the front wall (eg cover the "cave" mouth" which is partway down a very steep hill in the woods. Pretty hard to get people to carry cinderblocks etc down that hill when it's hard to even walk down it without grabbing trees etc to keep from going all the way to the bottom of the hill (160 feet). That just looks like too much work and expense at this point. I can't do it, and I doubt even an out of work Mexican would tolerate the conditions required.
The constraint is that I have to do all that, and along with that, increase the remote control/data aq capabilities a lot. Which I'm doing anyway, just a matter of time/effort. I could really use a full time lab or general purpose assistant!
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.