Hobbies beside SketchUp

Happy to hear that worked for you.

There was a time biking was my hobby.
Then someone decided it’s my job to be their chauffeur.

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All sorts of odd jobs. I had to do some “woodworking different style” lately.

And the reward:

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I didn’t have any woodworking to do. So I skipped straight to the reward.

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I can almost hear “Born to be Wild” playing in the background. :wink:

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One of my favorites.

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Primary hobby is everything regarding music - discovering new bands, playing in a band as a guitarist, producing another band, home audio production (primarily rock/metal), currently testing out some new Neural DSP stuff.

And while we’re at rewards after a hard day’s work - here’s mine:

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Writing - even more poetry - www.mikebellpoems.com - design work dead so this is my Parkinson’s treatment!!

I do regular Tai Chi - both alone and now ‘virtually’…
I do gardening - having a sizeable walled-garden in town is a boon.
I mow our back lawn [now too frequently].
I recently finished putting a new shingle roof on our summer-house [posh-word for ‘shed’] - done single-handedly - ~18 m² - my improvised scaffolding platforms etc was a bit ‘hairy’… The roof hasn’t blow-off yet…
I also completed a 2 m³ log-shed [designed in SketchUp]…
I also enjoy long walks along the beaches north of here - but that’s ‘verboten’ at this time…

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I do yoga but if this carries on i wil start restoring my Laurent Giles ketch and if it really goes on i may finish it by spring 2021 !!!

HighPower One of my hobbies is High Powered Rocketry. (this Rocket stand about 8’ 6") My other hobbies include Back Packing (every year since I was 4, I’m 60 now) and Scuba Diving. (although to be honest haven’t gone diving in 5+ years. Really miss it.)

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Ah yes, I remember rocketry when I was a kid. You put together a few cardboard tubes a plastic cone and fins and slipped in a solid rocket engine and off you went to the park carrying all the bits, launcher and bloody heavy battery etc.
So, 15 minute struggle to the park full of anticipation, 10 to 20 minutes wandering around finding just the right spot to set up, 5 to 30 minutes to set up and check you’ve got the igniter in properly and wires connected securely. Bit of pause just to be sure and shoo the dog away, deep breath, 10 second count down, hit the button… nothing… check the connection, looks ok… look at rocket from distance…hmm wait a bit incase the igniter is delayed… tell group of jeering neighbourhood kids that seem to have materialized from nowhere that it is normal and you meant that as a test run… if you are lucky you find the wire has fallen off the igniter (if not you discover the battery is flat and you’ll need to run home and get a new one while someone guards everything from the increasingly nosy onlookers) you reconnect it.
Take 2, herd everyone back to a safe distance, which can be anything from 2 feet to the other end of the park depending on the ratio of need to show off weighed against the fear of facial burns.
Another pause to remove more stray paws, then the count down begins again, this time echoed in various states of synchronization by what seems to be the entire neighbourhood… oh god let it work this time… 2, 1, hit the switch and whoosh up she goes for about 5 seconds of rocket burn, then pop and the parachute opens. The gathering is awed into silence as they crane their necks to see it… the more active run to follow it’s drift dying to be the first to touch it, the rest sort of quietly wander off back to their worlds now the excitement is over. The wind has caught it now and it is heading well beyond the extent of the park out over the houses, even the most avid followers give up when it disappears among the clutter of roofs and back fences.
You pick up your launcher and battery and head off into the streets to knock on doors and look in back yards for the the next 3 hours until you finally locate it either on a roof well out of reach, floating soggy in a pool or clutched in the jaws of the most terrifying animal that can almost be called a dog.
You trudge home wearily with or without your plastic cone, tail fins and something that may have once been a cardboard tube. The sun is almost down and you wish it would hurry up and be up so you can do it all over again.

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Amen!
Great story.

I somehow cannot picture you walking down the road, towards the park, carrying a rocket.

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Ours weren’t as extravagant or quite as exciting as that. We used cylindrical washing up liquid bottles filled with water. Sat in a little saddle we connected a mini air compressor in such a way that when just enough pressure built up the bottle would bust off the airline and take off. No aerodynamics so they’d just spin around hopelessly before the inevitable fall back to ground.

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Pretty much like that but on a much bigger scale, with Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant motors (APCP like the solid fuel propellant used on the Space Shuttle) instead of the black powder motors used in the little model rockets. These motors can be purchased but I make a lot of my own. Much more affordable and besides chemistry is fun. Some purchase kits for their rocket (and there are a lot of great ones) But I design and build all of mine. The body tube of the rocket pictured is carbon fiber, as is the nose cone. Also there are electronics that control deployment of drogue and main chutes (as well as ignition of second stage motor if a two stage rocket) to name a few. And typically walking or running for retrieval isn’t an option, get in the recovery vehicle and drive a few miles. We need to get an FAA waver that gives us a no fly zone for aircraft over the area that we launch.

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WOW! you guys are really productive in your free time :smiley: I watch anime when I’m free :confused:

I did model rocketry as a kid. As I recall, there was “model rocketry” and there was “amateur rocketry” and yours sounds like the latter; serious rockets and FAA clearance.

Honey-Do’s, remodeling home, with no budget, and SketchUp Model of home.

I do stuff like this!


It’s a 1:24 scale model of an RAF Typhoon, WW2 ground attack aircraft. Chose to build with the engine totally exposed. It had a unique 24 cylinder Napier Saber engine. It was essentially two flat 12 cylinder engines arranged one on top of the other, with two cranks geared together to turn the prop. It also had sleeve valves… another unique feature. It was originally designed as a fighter, but had troubles at higher altitudes. It was, however, and excellent ground attack craft and was instrumental in the success of the D-Day.

I’m also heavily invested in 3D printing architectural parts for my next model railroad project, a 3D rendition of Edward Hopper’s “House by the RR”. I’ve put this building onto the 3D Warehouse

The parts are a combination of elements taken from the 3D Warehouse and parts that I drew. All the windows are my drawings. Regardless, all the drawings needed editing to make them effective 3D printed parts.

As a result of all this work, time is flying by for me. Can’t say the same for my spouse. Not being an avid hobbyist like I am, time is not flying by. Everyone keep safe and healthy.

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Nice to see what people get up to in their spare time. Great post. I do a bit of photogrammetry in my spare time. Here’s some of the results.
Beagle dog on Sketchfab.
It gets pretty tricky trying to photograph external objects in the right lighting conditions - diffuse light / no shadows when you don’t have access to a studio. Bit hard moving rocks & trees into a studio too…lol. So if I get the right cloud conditions, say alto stratus clouds, where the light is nice & diffuse, I go get my camera & tripod, set up the shoot, start taking photos & sure enough…out comes the sun or down comes the rain…9 times out of 10…guaranteed. But it keeps me busy, & occasionally I have some success running it through Meshroom to get a decent but extremely high poly model to use in S.U. But then I wade into the murky waters of retopology & baking on textures…another topic for another day…say no more. Cheers.

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