A Sad Day For Trike Technology
When I read something described as "Durable black PVC diamond embossed panels surrounded by sturdy aluminum frame," I expect said durable black panels to be made out of PVC. Stupid human!
When I drilled into my WT-166, I was rewarded with the toasty smell of curly wood shavings instead of the healthy fumes of friction-heated plastic. Turns out the panels are a thin layer of rubbery PVC over high-density particle board. The case was going to spend its life traveling on the trike rack, and puncturing the PVC layer meant the particle board would be vulnerable to moisture and, therefore, to rot.
I decided to go ahead with the build and make liberal use of silicone sealant...and the case turned out to be too small. It's perfectly-sized for all the components, but there wasn't quite enough room for all the thick bundles of 16-gauge wire that I need to run.
After more research, I finally discovered the blow-molded cases made by Platt. Many sizes, all constructed of double-walled, "prime, high-density polyethylene." None of that peasant-grade thermoplastic, no sir! Model 406 gives me another 33 square inches of panel surface to work with, so that's the one I've ordered.
Still...it's a blow to the program. I'd be perfect for a Government technology project: four attempts to find the perfect enclosure, each attempt costing more than the last one and putting everything else further behind schedule, so that I'll be hitting the road with an inadequately-tested unit that will probably explode and kill everyone within a twelve-block radius.
This afternoon, Pea discovered that her brand-new space-saving all-in-one HP printer/fax/scanner/cappucino machine is incapable of printing binary-encoded .EPS images, thus making it useless for her purposes. ("Binary?" I asked. "Isn't that the fundamental language of all computers?" Apparently Hewlett-Packard has dispensed with such primitive bullshit.) So Luddite revolution is in the air, and we've hired us a Mentat to do all our calculatin'.
And...well, no "and," really, that's pretty much the whole day in a few vaguely-proofread paragraphs.
