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r/Skookum

▲ 95 r/Skookum+2 crossposts

A Kaman K-MAX Twin-Rotor Heavy-Lift Helicopter Starting Up Viewed Directly from the Front ...

... which, incidentally, allows us to be clear about which way the blades rotate – whether it's forward @ the centreline or rearward there ... & evidently it's the former – ie forward @ the centreline.

 

From

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This Facebook post

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story\_fbid=10162702526975112&id=10162702527060112 .

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Forgot to put the attribution in, @first! 🙄 ... which is why I deleted this & posted it again ... although probably very few folk noticed that.

It's actually very generous of the goodly author of that Facebook post to allow downloading of the video so easily.

u/Frangifer — 15 hours ago
▲ 98 r/Skookum

500W on 2mm stainless made more sense once the setup was actually dialed in

i was a little skeptical about running 2mm stainless with a small portable fiber laser welder at around 500W.
not because the bead couldn’t look nice from the outside, but because thin stainless can be annoying in two completely different ways. too much heat and it warps or colors up. not enough control and you’re just making a pretty line that may not mean much.
what surprised me was how much the result changed once the setup was actually dialed in.
the biggest thing was fit-up. the joint had to be sitting tight, with no obvious daylight between the pieces. once the parts were clamped properly and the travel speed stayed consistent, the weld became a lot more predictable.
the finished bead came out cleaner than i expected. narrow heat-affected zone, very little distortion, and not much heat tint to clean afterward. for small stainless enclosure work or cosmetic sheet metal parts, that’s honestly the part that caught my attention more than the speed.
this was done on a small portable Denaliweld unit running around 500W. i wouldn’t call it a magic “point at anything and weld” tool, but on clean 2mm stainless with decent fit-up, it starts to make a lot of sense.
still want to cut and etch a sample at some point, because outside appearance only tells part of the story. but as a first pass for thin stainless work, the finished result was better than i expected.

u/Frustrated_Goat2 — 2 days ago
▲ 37 r/Skookum+7 crossposts

I built a turbine motorcycle using hydrogen peroxide

This is not a rocket bike.

The engine uses concentrated hydrogen peroxide decomposed in a chemical reactor to generate high-pressure steam and oxygen, which drive a homemade turbine connected to the wheel.

What started as homemade Unimoto ice racing eventually evolved into one of the strangest machines I have ever built.

This video tells the complete story:

garage experiments, steam engines, failed steering systems, frozen catalysts, turbine testing, Soviet motorcycles, and the engineering madness of the Snowdogs winter motorcycle festival.

The video is in Russian with full English subtitles.

Do NOT repeat anything shown in this video.

youtu.be
u/AleksandrLiutov — 3 days ago
▲ 126 r/Skookum

Six months learning on a manual lathe taught me more than I expected and humbled me more than I anticipated

I picked up a worn but functional manual lathe at an estate sale eight months ago with moderate confidence and significantly overestimated ability. I had watched enough videos to feel prepared. I was not prepared.

The first three months were genuinely humbling. Threading operations that looked straightforward in videos required a feel for the machine that only repetition builds. My first few attempts at turning to a specific diameter were consistently off in ways that taught me more about tool geometry, cutting speed, and material behaviour than any video had communicated.

What the manual lathe taught me that no CNC experience ever had was the relationship between operator input and material response. Every cut gives you immediate feedback. You feel when the tool is happy and you feel immediately when something is wrong. That feedback loop is genuinely educational in a way that automated processes cannot replicate.

Cutting speed selection took me the longest to develop real intuition around. I understood the theory from reference charts but applying it to different materials on this specific machine with its particular wear characteristics required time that could not be shortcut through research alone.

….Tool sharpening became an obsession fairly quickly. A sharp tool on a manual lathe is a completely different experience from a dull one and the difference in surface finish is immediately visible in a way that motivated me to learn proper sharpening technique properly rather than just adequately.

I spent one evening researching tooling options across various platforms including alibaba, comparing insert grades and geometries across different suppliers. What I discovered was that the tooling specification knowledge I had been building through actual use made me a considerably more informed buyer than I would have been six months earlier when I first acquired the machine. I understood what I was actually comparing rather than just looking at prices.

I am nowhere near where I want to be with this machine. But I understand now why machinists who learned on manual lathes before moving to CNC consistently describe that foundation as irreplaceable.

What skill on a manual machine took you longest to develop genuine confidence in?

reddit.com
u/useless_substance — 4 days ago
▲ 94 r/Skookum

12,000lbs Bobcat Forklift Side Shifter Cracked

Got a pretty serious issue with a fairly new Bobcat forklift and wanted to see what other people think.

The side shifter basically broke off after only a few months of use. Took a closer look at the welds and honestly they look pretty questionable to me. Doesn’t seem like something that should happen this early, especially on equipment that’s supposed to handle daily warehouse work.

We’re not abusing the machine or doing anything outside normal operation. This isn’t some 15 year old forklift that’s been beaten to death — it’s basically new.

To me this looks more like a bad weld / manufacturing issue than wear and tear. Curious if anyone else here has seen similar problems with Bobcat forklifts or side shifters recently.

Would you guys consider this acceptable quality or is this as bad as I think it is?

u/Dapper-County8414 — 9 days ago
▲ 27 r/Skookum

If you've ever seen those 4-in-1 ratcheting wrenches, I made a more skookum version of that.

u/tithtomata — 9 days ago