A Tour Of The Lab

[Music] hi so quite a lot of people have asked me to do a tour of the lab as it were and it's exactly what I'm going to do now we have downsized we did have two units and now we're all in this one unit and that's actually been good for us but it is a result of the current experience which is a bit a little tough but hey ho you sold your on through don't yet so I thought I'd do a tour of the lab and show you what kind of things you've gotten where we've got it but it's actually what a very big space in fact what you tend to see obviously is this men desk where I do the presentation work the video quality has improved and it's improved predominantly audio because the unit were in now has a full-length mezzanine which means a similar floor as as the ceiling just above me so it doesn't echo around so much anyway let me start by showing you what's out of that what you looking at here is the Twizy the Twizy actually is still an ongoing project I'm very stubborn with these things my problem with the Twizy has been cracking the BMS there is a github thing available that is supposed to help you replace the batteries with the led acid battery I've tried that I can't say I've had any success with it and what I'm thinking at the moment is I have to buy a whole lot of equipment in order to do it and to be honest I don't have the money so I'm waiting for enough money to burn able to buy the bits and pieces and get back on with this it also takes an awful lot of time and I don't really have the time either if I stop doing what it is that I'm doing to concentrate on the Twizy what what happens is my income drops to zero so I stop having money coming in to be able to work on the Twizy and by working on the Twizy so it keeps it - is he really quite slow but it's still here and it's still something I'm working on in the minute I get a chance to be able to get back to that that's why it's here I'll be getting back to it now I have had a couple of offers of help and they haven't really crystallized in any particular time which is a shame but you know I don't expect to the the work is more than you think it is it might seem pretty easy it isn't it's actually quite complicated and takes quite a lot of time and I understand that and I think when people get involved with it they understand that very quickly too but it is something I'll get back to so the Twizy is actually just sitting at this end of the lab waiting for me to be able to get back to it so we have literally just moved in here we finished the move actually about two days ago so here's the big kill just sitting there waiting to find it space this is a project a friend of mine is working on I gave him a section of space he stopped working on it and it's still there he's been in today to tell me that lets me be moved and that's where the kiln is actually going to go when that's moved the kiln I'll swing round in there and that'd be where the kiln spaces well then we have a set of work benches here with various presses on them so there's a click of press right there and then there's a large circular saw sitting right there now what we're doing really is that all I'm going to turn the camera around so instead of looking at the Twizy and the kiln as you were you're now looking down the length of the actual work room so in the work room we have this large bench here it's five point two meters by 1.2 meters and this is where most of the work gets done so be working on projects here even in a space to work in about three or four projects at once yeah I tend to clear an area and then do the video on the area which is why you've been seeing sections of the back wall as we go up there because I'll be working on the project video it and put it as a video and then I'll continue with that project for the next video but move on to the next project which you'll just be sitting here so you can see that we've got the Newman motive project here incidentally is the wind project they don't get the presentation space because I did the balance today there's the pinwheel generator next door to that is the computer that we worked on and then of the other end of their what you can see is the hydrogen generation because we're still working on the hydrogen generation it just takes a little time and to prepare those sheets to continue that the hydrogen generation is right at the far ends then if we look on this side what we've got is the is the layers here I think I'll just change the angle for you soin going down this side of the ledger got the laminator there's some electrochemistry sitting right there and there's the drill and there's the combination chop saw table saw at the top so this is my under there under the stairs area and here's a little bike actually so we did done by the battery Oh years ago now actually probably bout three or four years ago I took the back in the battery out an autopsy to see what kind of condition it was in so this doesn't currently have a battery in it so it's another one of those that when I get around to it I'll stick another one of our backers in there there's our little electric motor bike waiting for something to do with that here's the actual kiln in fact that we made I'll give you a better view now he's in the motor bar this is my cooking area so to speak so we've got the kiln that wretched mare does the kiln project it's now actually my favorite kiln to use it's quite small so when I do small jobs in here heats up quickly and it doesn't cost very much to run it which is kind of cool since I started using this kiln actually I've sinned by electricity drop a cost drop by about half because I'm now using a much smaller kiln here's the original lab kiln that I always used to use as this much bigger kiln obviously not as big as the big kiln but this is the lab kiln that I used to use all the time and it's about twice the power rating of this this is a a vacuum oven so I can and dry things really rather quickly in there then we've got our analytical balance sitting right there and under here we've got all our welding gear so there's a the oxy lamp that we looked at when we were making hydrogen first and we disassembled it that sitting right under there and then there's an arc welder that we use through the arc exfoliation of graphene and that's sitting right there as well and this is a big materials area as well under this tables take a lot of sheet materials here like sheet plastics and steels that and that's sitting under the tables there so this area is just the corner area and here we've got a filing cabinet and that's full of wrongs of metals actually various metals sitting there so that's where the raw copper mesh rolls is the copper rolls of titanium rolls the zinc rolls the ledge rolls the Tinh there's also Tynan there there's rolls of magnesium so there's just lots of metal rolls sitting in that filing cabinet and then right next to it I don't use these that much but I still use them there's the injector there is the plastic mold injector sitting right here and then next to it we've got heat press that gets used quite a lot so I can just move the brushes that's the heat press sitting right there and then we saw and we have the three roll mill that three roll mill incidentally here gets used a little off there we got that three roll mill gets used a lot for ink making so it makes very good inks and pastes the three rolls turn at different speeds and so we get different shear between them and that's what that getting used for never get a whole load of cupboards up the top there which is just storage so not for a lot of glass quite a lot of the bits and pieces that I pull off and want to save I actually stick in those little plastic containers and keep them up here incidentally is that hot wire machine that we actually just finished making there is some good comments on it actually you know turn this into a bench power supply as well as a hot wire cutter I really like that so I'm going to read adapt that and make that a bench power supply I've basically put in a three point three five 12 minus 12 minus 5 volt outlet so I probably put those under here so it's combined power supply and hot wire cutter but that's actually got its own place now because I really like that machine now I made this not to cut polystyrene foam it cuts that Builders board which is why I made it because I can cut fancy shapes out on the builders board with this and there's gonna be a video up and coming on that for sure but that's why I actually made this machine in order to cook those chips on builders board and make something more intricate than just the straight line cuts that have been chopping out on the table saw behind is a whole lot of storage where I keep things like electronic components Bessy stuff that I use all the time knives scissors laser pens motors induction coils a bit of safety equipment measuring equipment that all goes in this here then we've got some spare sheets of stuff like graphite and graphite and zinc sitting here and there's a big roll of stainless steel sitting right there on the corner here we've got our jeweler's roll so that thing is meant for wire so we could thinned warrens and sheets out on that there's a roll of fire conductive HDPE the busy lives here this actually is a battery making press it's a cr2032 press that and it's cutter sit right there oh I should point this out that's our combination chop saw and table saw it just flips down and becomes a table saw oh it flips up it is a chop saw this one's actually a rage and what that means is it'll cook wood plastic aluminium and steel so it's a really good combination saw and I use that a lot actually and I'm leaning on this thing and this thing is the cheap Chinese 40 watt laser cutter and use that for cutting a lot of acrylic actually but that also will cut the builders board which is very cool and it'll be another video up and coming when we've got some builders board to mix something with this not quite sure what but something up with that is this part one of the plan now actually in a separate room now and this in fact is the Ken's door so this is just loaded with AA ton of stuff actually and there is such stuff here that you could pretty much do anything with it's our pride and joy actually there is an absolute ton of really useful things from just everyday stuff and there's some seaweed over there for instance I collected off the shore to some really really bizarre stuff so right here is some bought-in vanadium boride remember this stuff is the stuff that has about 8,000 what hours a kilo so that's stuff you can make a battery stronger than petrol out of it's a bit expensive so that's why there's only 100 grams of it but it's an example of the kind of stuff that we keep so we keep a whole range of materials in here that we've been using to make batteries that we can do the battery research with and this is where we store everything it's all super super organized and it isn't down to me it's actually down to Mandy who is in fact no longer with us Mandy went on to a new job but before she went she organized this and she did an awesome job of gob actually everything's got a location number and everything is in that location number and there's a record of absolutely everything and how much we've got of it so every time we take something I have to write down how much you've got taken and then balance it out so we know how much is left at any one particular time it was a requirement of the accountants as well actually because you are looking at quite a lot of money and then at the bottom here we've got a microscope this was actually donation a friend of mine sent that through in fact so it's been tremendously useful and obscene discovered and then we use that quite a lot for looking at some of those smaller structures there might be interested in if we want something like a nanostructure then we send it out for electron microscope imaging it's a little expensive so we don't send that much out who would you send it out this is the carbon nanotube film HDPE incidentally that's that stuff that I've done some stuff with about 20 kilos and sitting right there I use that every now and then when we want to do something but this is really like I say it's our pride and joy and to a degree and the envy of universities this one we do get people coming down from universities to to talk and to do some stuff with us and when they come for anything get quite jealous because if we want a need at Eric chemical we can come in here and just get a few grams they have to order it and have to wait three months and a whole lot of paperwork and here you can just come and get it so we do get a lot of chemistry Envy whenever we have people visiting because of what we've got in this cupboard and I could say this cupboard is just full of stuff we really could just do anything with what we've got in here anyway I thought I would show you that because it is really quite awesome so there was the work room area which is the downstairs area we come to the upstairs area and have done some videos up here because there's test stations up here so this is the lab area now you can see yet more storage which storage is just endless really then at the bottom we've got our electronic station we keep all our electronics bits and pieces and make up our circuits you can see the CNC machine and that I made in a video that one's a saga machine so there's a silo machine that's a post station on that side where we post all the orders out actually so this section here but chances are you've probably seen some of this on previous videos what you're looking at is the electrochemist ation at the bottom and behind that computer so that's the Princeton EG&G machine the KX 8000 is there and then in front of it we've got the little station that I used to do all the video editing on so that's the video editing and then there's a electrochemist station you've actually seen in the videos sitting right here where we do some of the best excel demonstration stuff and just behind that we've got this little kitchenette because this is the driving source of everything in the lab I drink a lot of coffee really without this there's not a chance I would do anything to be honest so then we have this office area so this is my desk here and there's a shared printer table there that Steve's desk actually in that corner Pat that's Patty's desk and then Luke actually is just behind so this is Luke's desk he's actually on furlough at the moment although the further entrants are a Ren are ending so I think he comes back in about three weeks actually so three weeks Luke will be back and he'll be sitting right behind me actually this is an important board for me what I do here is I write down all the projects occurred to me so projects I'm thinking about doing your projects that people suggest because obviously I get a lot of suggestions of projects and want to do is I write them on the board and then when I get round to be able to do they might take them off sometimes they never get made because they're not practical in which they get taken off but when people suggest a project it gets written upon the board and then we get a chance to mull it over and see how well that project would translate into an actual video but we are much smaller than we were before and that's not a bad thing it's more compact it's a bit more crowded with stuff that is certainly for sure but I think we've got a nice little setup it's taking a little while to get to here but we're quite well proud actually of what we're is that we're doing and a lot of people have us to see this and I hope it was of interest to you and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 7,278

Keywords: lab, tour, robert, fwg, murray-smith, laboratory, workshop, science, equipment

Id: hnzsPqVum2U

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020