So here I am trying to screw these in while my wife is telling me “more to the left, no too much, back to the right a bit”. My hands wee no match for the task, and using a pair of pliers didn’t help much more.

Then I thought; hey I’m a guy and I’ve got power tools so why am I ruining our Christmas spirit by cussing like a sailor while trying to put up our tree. So down to the garage to pick up a drill and what? It’s not like they make a tool for this that I know about. So I looked around until something jumped out at me.

Looking around my workbench I found an old allen wrench that wasn’t being used. I grabbed a wooden dowel I had, drilled a hole in it and popped it onto the end or the allen wrench. Boom, and there you go. Toss it into the drill and you have a quick tool that you can use to tighten and loosen those pesky eye bolts.

Good luck and enjoy.

Got the location and angles of the motor mounts set. They’re mounted and ready for the ball and screw setup to be attached. Now it’s time to find out if shifting these to line up with the vertexs was a mistake or not.

I’m happy with the design, but I’ve run into a small problem. In the second photo, you can see the screws connecting the two pieces of extruded aluminum. Unfortunately the tapped holes for mounting the motor are directly above them. no clearance for another set of screws. I’ve got a few ideas on how to solve for this, but I was bummed at first when I realized my oversight.

Oh well, that’s what I get for not following the recipe. This is too much fun.

Love this concept of small boats running autonomously through the ocean collecting data and powering themselves with solar and wave energy.

A promising set of extensions for google chrome focused on we’d development. Love the jQuery console. The more I work with jQuery the more I appreciate having access to a console. I’ve been using the console in Firebug, but I like the idea of a dedicated console for jQuery.