I appreciate the kind words and support. I've kept it off the forum mostly, but the past 18 months have been by far the toughest in my life. First a baby and major sleep loss (I love sleep!), closing down volt riders, and then every possible problem between workers and equipment. Get into a good groove, and lose a worker unannounced or have some key tool fail. Fight back for a few weeks or months working 60 hour+ weeks, get another worker trained or fix a machine or deal with whatever, get the shop back in order, get ready to take on new tasks, and as soon as things get smooth the process repeats. I've really felt stagnated with my own personal progress, I've not been able to study electrical power engineering very much and have a hard time working out frequently. Just not enough hours in the day to work on my own improvement.
But then I have to be reminded about all the other important matters in the past 18 months. My son is growing fast and learning like a maniac. My house is comfortable and we don't want for food. I employ people who all enjoy working for me, and the last guy that quit left a position that people were fighting hard to fill. The fellow that we hired took almost a 50% paycut to be part of the team! We have a production turning center, not just a little single tool 0.002" floppy Chinese lathe. We are steady on 20% growth per year since 2005. Finally getting into brushless systems, although its annoying that we are forced into china or Taiwan mass production to meet sustainable market pricing. And although I have tough days or months, I love what I do so much that getting burned out isn't in the cards. So I try to keep my struggles to myself, they are first world problems that I both create and solve.
In regards to the compressor, it's the starting cap. After 15 or 20 cycles the temp breaker in the motor trips. And evidently rebuilding the motor is more expensive than a replacement for Ingersoll, and they don't want me doing it for liability reasons. They said it is because im running a 230v motor on 220v. But then they are sending another 230v motor instead of a 200v one, so it sounds like hot air. New motor should be in tomorrow. And I'm probably going to order a 120 gallon roll compressor. Bringing the noise from 95db to 65db will really improve my day, and we will have a better backup compressor.
One day I'll share the $100 portable microscope project we are working on. Basically taking a cheap 7" tablet and turning it into a tool inspection device. It's tedious to remove tools for wear inspection, this allows inspection in the machine. This device has a remote handheld microscope and 4x the screen size and resolution of anything I've found, except for tabletop $1000 laboratory systems. Right now the hangup is getting the camera output displayed, Jonathan is writing a little android app for it. Once that is done we will strip down the OS for just a few tasks and longer battery life.
Andrew has been gearing up for restarting my dyno project. We have a few little ones to use, but this project is so close to complete and 100x the data quality of a regular toy dyno like the turbodyno. We can test batteries and ESCs with it too, a real workhorse of information. Really excited to kick that off again.