Notebooks of Scott

I posted a new picture to Flickr.It was taken at my grandmother’s house on the Fourth of July. To take it, I borrowed her tripod and used the fireworks setting on my camera. It took 15 shots to get this one good one.

Kobalt Six Inch Caliper

Yesterday, while at the hardware store, I bought  a small Caliper. I have been needing one to make building my models easier.

These things are pretty cool. Mine measures down to the thousandth of an inch, enough to register the thickness of a piece of paper. And because of the straight edged tines, it can measure the diameter of round objects easily.  It came from Lowes for roughly 30 dollars.

Related Links:
Lowes Listing for the Calipers
How to use Calipers

This week will be the last Science Friday workshop that Lorenzo and I do before taking a break to deal with the back to school rush. As such we want to go out with a bang and some of our experiments will actually do so.

One of the experiments that we are going to do deals with sodium acetate, an industrial byproduct commonly used in reusable hand warmers. It would be easy enough to go get some hand warmers and cut them open, but I decided to try making some myself first, if only to say that I had. I cooked the ingredients over a camp stove in an old coffee can as I couldn’t positively say that the experiment wouldn’t mess up my mom’s pots. The picture above shows the solution as I as boiling it down.

So far my attempts have failed, though this might have had to do with the fact that I miss measured the baking soda. I will try again tomorrow.

Related Links:

About.com – How to make Hot Ice

The Thematic Attic

Update:

It took me three tries, but I got a batch that seems to work. Unfortunately, it crystallized while cooling, so I had to melt it down again. Hopefully, it will still be good when it cools.

Update Again:

I remelted the sodium acetate that I had and it didn’t work after that. So Science friday went on without it. We did some stuff with baking soda and vineagar as well as Alka-Seltzer rockets. It was still a success.

For a while I have been using the Blogger service to hold my blog. I started the blog before I started my website and then simply used it after I had set up scottmckittrick.com. Now, however, I have decided to keep the service hosted with my website. So I have created a new subdomain, http://blog.scottmckittrick.com to hold it and set it up under Wordpress. So far I am very impressed with the program and am glad I switched. I will be working on a custom theme for my blog to go with a new theme I am working on for the main website. Check back soon for updates.