Mondays...

This post coming to you live from Kumasi, on the evening of Monday -- oh wait, no it's not, because my T430 decided to fry in the middle of writing it. The flashing light pattern indicates a fried systems board, of course, when i'm 5500 miles from Lenovo support. Fortunately we brought extra netbooks for another project, and I've been able to borrow one of those.

As I was saying yesterday...

We got an early start today in the KNUST machine shop, crossdrilling axles and cutting out sheet metal components. Upon arriving, we were met by two Ghanaian students, Papa and Michael, who immediately took over the drill press in a merry fashion. This got a nice assembly line going, and we were able to finish all ten axle assemblies, as well as cut and drill all ten interface plates by lunchtime.

Aimee hitting metal things with another piece of metal

Engineery looking things

Papa and Michael hard at work. It's wonderful to converse in the universal language of machine shop.

Lots of holes.

In the afternoon, we piled into a KNUST van and careened through Ghanaian traffic to track down sheet metal and additional components for various projects. Our destination was a district known as "the magazine," where we found essentially a square mile chop shop. Roads were packed with small shops and customers alike, with each area taking on a distinctive flavor -- at one end, we found dozens of tractor-trailers and heavy equipment in various states of disassembly. On another street, the road was covered in 1" steel cable being sorted by dozens of Ghanaians. Yet another corner sold massive AC/DC motors, some the size of a keg -- you can see them in the corner of the photographs below.

Looking down one street in the maze of shops

Unsuspecting engineers in their natural environment, also giant motors.

Also a street

Might be a street. Not sure.

At one of the new-product shops, we purchased about 20 square feet of 1mm Steel, which we'll use tomorrow for the cases and lids. I'm optimistic that we can finish a few units by the end of this week, and then produce the remainder quickly, as most parts will already be prepared in quantity. Tomorrow, we'll head back to the machine shop bright and early, and begin cutting the first two cases.