SRL
On SRL
1976 GMC Suburban
When I was a young child, my dad bought a brand new 1976 GMC Suburban. Yellow. No extras at all – no head liner, plastic seats, manual everything, 305 V8.
It became my car in high school, survived that. Came out to California with me; ended up in the service of SRL, survived that too.
Eventually, it escaped.
Splish Splash, an SRL prop takes a swim
An SRL prop takes a swim…
This was recorded on my Blackberry way back in the ancient era and I ffmpeged it back to life. Fun times in the gold olde days when SF still had a thriving art scene. The post is backdated to the contemporary era, but these comments are 2023.
If the video doesn’t play, dump your iPhone for a non-walled garden device.
Encode parameters
ffmpeg -i splishsplash.MOV -vf vidstabdetect -f null -; ffmpeg -i splishsplash.MOV -vf vidstabtransform=zoom=1:smoothing=5:optzoom=2:interpol=bicubic:input="transforms.trf" -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -preset 2 -svtav1-params tune=0 -b:v 0 -crf 41 -pass 1 -an -f null /dev/null && \ ffmpeg -i splishsplash.MOV -vf scale=-2:960:flags=lanczos,vidstabtransform=zoom=1:smoothing=5:optzoom=2:interpol=bicubic:input="transforms.trf" -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -preset 2 -svtav1-params tune=0 -b:v 0 -crf 41 -pass 2 -c:a libopus -b:a 24000 splishsplash.webm
Lucien
“The best new restaurant” in Toronto.
And, indeed, very good.
Booty
One man’s misfortune is another’s booty.
FEA for DVR
Some pretty FEA output for DVR’s Parkfield project.
Stubnitz
Engine room of the Stubnitz
The SRL Show is Starting
The view from my gun.
The gun ran well – some good flare shots and 2-3 good diesel shots before the receiver froze solid and we couldn’t get any velocity out of it. I think the show went well overall.
Jet Is Running
Greg and I got the jet and the fuel spray running. Warms the space up nicely.
This is a Williams APU with a highly modified and quite deadly ignition system Greg and I built and installed after we found the stock one sparkless. The flame is much brighter than it looks – the dark windows at the top of the image are looking out on daylight.
Starting the jet.
Tonight I finally got the Jet running. Greg figured out a circuit repair using found objects, that we improved over a few iterations and got a suitably reliable spark, if a bit deadly to the problematically absent minded. Nothing like a joule at 10kv to wake you up. One last time….
The outboard sparkplug is the spark gap that sets the discharge point for the capacitor in the high voltage supply. Do Not Touch.
Robodock Starts
Robodock started tonight. La Machine was playing, interesting music but very typical of this sort of event. The kind of arty, house music inspired, alternate instrument playing thing.
One of our neighbors and new friends is an Australian guy with a flying ring. Apparently he makes a living going to events like this and flying around. He knew more about the history of SRL, who is in it and when, and what machines they had worked on than any of us did. And he knew it all from Australia and watching the movies over and over.
We spent some time just sitting around talking about the jet engine I’m working on bringing up while I was working on bringing up the 5th of these little ignitor boards to light various pulse jets and flame throwers.
Turns out our land lord from Cambridge is at the show. He’s helping a guy I met in Berlin more than 10 years ago build a giant explosive pipe organ. They’re doing an original composition for 7 tubas and tuned explosive pipe organ. It’s a bit like the tuned mice sketch on Monty Python except instead of mice and mallets there are gas filled pipes that produce variable amplitude, tuned, musically timed explosions.
So far I’ve spent time here on various details on the hovercraft, the shockwave canon, the jet engine, and the pulse jets. I still have to test the pulse jets, get the jet engine back together with it’s newly rebuilt ignition system and new flame thrower, and then build a recoil absorbing shoulder mount so I can shoulder fire the 3″ air canon without breaking bones.
The whole thing is the SF expats show – we constitute between 15-25% of the entire artist roster, and that’s bringing people from all over Europe and as far as Australia.