60 Days in 20 Minutes

Wow so it's been like two months since I've done an update video. I try to make the content I put out questions I'm answering about gear. I'm trying not to vlog every little thing about my life because there's a lot of stuff to answer and I don't want to take up the channel with that. But it's been about two months since I made an update video and I checked the last video was filming over there. It's just my crap in this room right after I moved in and then showing this machine when it was still at Steve's after we just had the rough thing done and before well it's in the condition it is now. So I've been doing a lot in the last 60 days and we're gonna update you with that. I'm kind of excited and try to keep this to a minimum. First thing I'm pretty excited about is I get to present the Sweden film Lapporten Skyline at the Boulder Film Festival. I didn't produce the film that's being shared. Emil is in Sweden and he wouldn't be able to make it and so I got to step in for him which is not something they normally do. I'm pretty excited about that. After they present the video on March 5th at 3 p.m the Boulder Film Festival then I will do some Q&A and I'm excited. I don't think I've stood in front of that many people in front of the theater. I don't know what to expect but if you guys are in that Colorado area come join. The other cool part about that is Cinder Films is also getting to present their film in the same showing and so that's surreal. But anyways, lab updates. The lab is officially super good enough. I obviously have a dozen things on my immediate wish list and a dozen more on my future goals wish list but the latest thing that I finished was foam on the ceiling and these lights because I wanted it to sound less echoey in here. I'm still using a mic when I narrate. I do want the sound to be pretty good but sometimes I just want to film with my cell phone kind of like we did at the other lab where the ceiling was insulation and so it actually sounded okay in a cell phone but I'm trying to make this more more better. The whole reason we have carpet on these plywood panels is for sound and for the pumps for the hydraulics. It has foam in order to minimize how much noise they even make but there's a lot of way to skin the lights cat in a studio and Steve Gregg's Highliner really helped me narrow down what I needed to keep it simple and still also be something that I could install myself because there is a lot of sweat equity that is in not just this space but the house that we moved in to rent. We got a decent price and that's because we had to work pretty hard on it and that's mostly what I've been doing last 60 days is moving in, getting stuff organized, getting this space worked and I reused a lot of the racks that I had from storage and even at the lab. I kind of cut them in half and turned them into all these tables that I have and put some of this carpet on there and I hung up a lot of the carnage that we had in the other lab which also quite doesn't really fill up this new space. There's a little bit more space for that but what's great is as I break stuff it kind of goes on the wall and eventually if I, not a priority, but I'm gonna put numbers on everything and then there'll be a story behind each one and each one has a meaning behind it not just the the result but like what we learned from it and how it steered us to the next thing and stuff and that's kind of the about section of the website which has not been released yet but is going to include things like Monday updates because this is not evergreen content but if you want to see where we've come and where we're going and the history of stuff that'll be on that so the main channel is usually the the premium stuff but both my hydraulic pumps are working, both pistons are working, the load cells are working and I'm going to have a place to do like belay samples up there. I've got my practi bolts, I've got some whiteboards but now I'm able to have people over and host other experts who are going to help give more context as we break stuff in the machine. I have Alpine Savvy scheduled in a few weeks and he has been collecting questions and things that the audience has given him for us to and I had Andy and Sylvan here and we've talked for an hour and a half about rope swings. It's kind of nice to be able to have a space that I can do that and it's officially super functional enough. Some of the new stuff that we kind of have now and am working on is a rigging on steroids and this is a bolt adapter and what's nice is I can put a big shackle in there and install a bolt this way or this way and pull on it. You can heat it up with the flame torch and typically get the bolt out and this allows us to test two-point anchors if we're going to test girth hitch master points. I have some weblets that basically need to be at a two or three-point anchor and that's kind of what this is. What's cool is we just put out a hanger video and this little jib here allows us to grab this with a shackle and pull on different hangers. As long as we have a good bolt here you can actually test the hanger and isolate that if that's what we want to test. Sometimes the bolt comes out right because some hangers only have like a quarter inch 3 8 5 16 hole and the hanger is stronger and what's cool is we can start isolating this stuff down and I can do a lot more tests in this machine with these jibs including some rope diverters or bollards where you can wrap the rope four or five times around this thing more like a frictionless hitch and get full strength out of the rope because knots reduce the strength of ropes and sometimes we actually want to know the strength of the rope. A lot of the times I do like having a knot in there to compare if let's say deet is worse for a rope than a knot because if the knot's still worse for it then like who cares but it's nice to have these tools which I'm working on which one's the best one to use and how not to get it to caw-caw since I kind of have a free-floating slack snap machine and not a track system to just like force this to stay straight. I have a few people helping me build a fatigue machine not for cyclic loading like aluminum fatigue but ropes some aramid fibers you bend it back and forth enough it's like bending a steel cable and they actually break a lot lower even just after a thousand bend cycles and then if this thing is moving ropes back and forth like a foot then I could put a rock against it and we could test abrasion so that would be super cool and then I have some trees in my backyard and I got some 10 pound weights I'm going to bolt together and we're going to do some miniature mini drop tests nothing crazy at the beginning but I'll be able to shock load some stuff which being able to shock load here at this lab is going to be pretty helpful. I still have the drop tower I'm still going to use it but spoiler alert it's outside and it's winter or it's hot or it's dusty so like I'm limited on when I can use it and when it's worth going down there and spending a week breaking stuff but I'm actually working on an episode right now where we did static rope whippers and the forces that the quick draw saw and the climber and pretty interesting I just wrote the script for that and kind of got burnt out on it so I decided to just make this Monday update instead this evening. I'm also trying to get full control over the hydraulics and getting my computer to talk to the pumps and control the pumps that way I can take a sample up to like eight kilonewtons back down to two down to eight like a couple times and then pull the destruction or hold it at a certain point or not do large cyclic loading tests like a million cycles but like it'd be nice to just have a little bit more control than the in or out button. It's kind of fun to see how far this lab has come over time because like I've collected shackles I just got some more the different diameters of ropes that I have different types I've got some high-tech ropes upstairs we're going to get a whole plethora of six mil ropes that are something that you can rappel on and test those so it's kind of kind of cool to have like enough tools in order to properly answer questions as either people come over or you guys ask them. I have three flavors in which content comes out it's long form like YouTube like I have here or it's like short form Instagram YouTube shorts and kind of get used to YouTube shirts and written form which is the blogs and website which some some things are better in that form a lot obviously more data you can have all the numbers there it's really hard in a narration to keep interesting like the micro attraction video it was really hard to like throw that much data into one video without it kind of either going over your head or becoming boring and so having this combination of short form written form really helps and I think I came up with a way in the last few weeks to solve my long form problem which is now that I have more subscribers and more views I kind of want them to be better and better and so I have a lot of pressure to turn everything into a masterpiece which is not realistic and and so I have my clips channel now which is basically quickies they're either going to be let's say five minutes or less or the six break tests or less or something where like the the rope swing podcast we kind of did for an hour and a half it isn't a main channel quality and so it needs to be on the internet I need to in the written form where we have the rope swing uh ebook that I'm writing I need to be able to point to it it needs to live somewhere I just don't want on the main channel it's kind of cool to have just kind of like an overflow channel that I can throw stuff I'm and doing a lot here especially uh the send us your stuff program that we're doing people send us stuff we break it not everything deserves to be a big main episode but what's cool is as I'm breaking let's say dog bones that's the number one thing I get after I break two or three hundred of them I can make a main video next year summarizing everything I did in 10 minutes or less and so they kind of like uh work together and same with instagram like I did a video today where I pull tested a three millimeter dynamic cord uh and frictionless hitch around a carabiner because I made a video on the clips channel that talked about knots in them and and I can just chase the rabbits that people ask right now I have set up frictionless hitch around two carabiners because the rope access channel asked what about two and I'm I'm not able to make another full video about that right but I can chase a question one question like that on shorts and then I post on instagram and youtube shorts and the written content is pretty cool because I'm uh for lack of better title I'm making an ebook like the bolting bible and the big wall bible trying to get away from bible um but those are trying to be all-encompassing right and a lot of people contributing to that that's the reason it's called bible but I'm trying to make a couple other ebooks which would be spliceology and knotology and that is just our study of these things as we uh learn things and as we break things I will have basically a playlist on steroids and as I collect information I will be able to just add and add and add and add it's not a comprehensive thing today um actually I'm making the covers for them tomorrow but it is something that will be amazing in five years the bolting bible wasn't really that good five years ago right now it's only medium I'm actually going to be rewriting that as well and it's as nice as it would be to just have this beautiful polished video or blog or ebook it's not just how it works around here I just keep chipping away constantly and after years and years and years of doing this we're going to have 10 or 20 ebooks and we're going to have thousands of videos and I'm going to try to keep it all organized on the website so it's easy for you guys to find we've been back blogging the uh videos I've already made in the past and uh Scott Duskett has been helping with that and it's like hard to put out a bunch of content throughout honestly while I was doing all this I don't know why I was putting out eight videos a month but it's hard to go backwards too and so once all those stuff's retro added and I've been taking like all the long ads and plugs out of videos because they were way too long I was trying to figure out how to do that and retitling and thumbnailing and adding the data on the website that takes time and uh I can't edit a video on YouTube by the way I can delete sections but like if I make a mistake it's kind of you kind of have to make a new video it's one of the downsides of long form we're almost at 100 blogs like that's pretty cool uh like most of last year I spent trying to make like a good filter system which kind of looks dorky unless you have enough blogs in there to make sense of why you click different things after I get over 100 blogs I'll make it a little bit um a little bit easier to understand how to find things in there but I've built the website for 10,000 pieces of content not 100 pieces and so it's going to look really cool over time I've also been dabbling in another ebook of and it talks about kind of how to do this stuff on a budget how to do your own pull tests with a car what the line scale 3 is good for and what it's not good for how not to break the stuff you're not trying to break there's a lot of things I've learned just doing backyard science and the definition of backyard science and uh I'm basically just writing down everything I know and what I've learned through this process and um hopefully that helps the few people that want to do this stuff their own now the send us your stuff experiment has been working uh I have I think five or six things to break now I'm trying to stay on top of things as they come I get about one or two things um a day emailed to me and I receive in the mail one or two things every other day and I can't say yes to everything but sometimes if people make it really easy and the variables aren't too crazy I can uh receive a bag of something open it up read the story behind it break it in pretty quick manner and have a little bit more data out there for you guys to just uh make decisions off and what's cool is it's the seeds for like main episodes and uh real questions that we try to answer with larger data sets and the stuff that takes me 20 30 40 hours to edit uh it's it's kind of cool like it's working because without this in the past it was like nine months to two years turnaround time because like when people sent me cams originally I had no way of breaking them and I didn't realize how hard that was I mean it's not rocket science now that I understand it but that's what how not to break stuff's all about is telling people don't make a cam crusher for every cam size make one for small ones microbes anyways another thing that I think really helps is changing the a little bit on how the patreon model is we have a little over 600 people doing one or two some three dollars per episode but that puts kind of a lot of pressure on me to put out like a masterpiece every time then I wasn't quite sure how to to do that and I think a big reservation for patrons is it's it's an unknown every month of like am I gonna be like posting a ton or if I'm only gonna post four times I've never missed a Wednesday in six years so uh I'll always do that always have a great video on Wednesday what's cool now is that I select eight pieces of content and I only credit those for donations and then I just pump out the rest and I update them when I post those on patreon so it's more reliable for patrons it's eight times a month and and I can post 30 times a month and I'll always post four really great ones but like but I can just post so much more now and not feel like I have pressure and then I know that I can afford to do the stuff that is behind the scenes right because they're not paying for that one episode and what went into that there's costs associated with every video there's soft cost that goes on behind the scenes there's infrastructure costs as I keep improving things but what's nice is I can I know what I can invest in either machines or the next video or even renting this lab space so it's a phenomenal thing to have people donate regularly to the channel it is super helpful some people donate like a hundred bucks at a time super helpful but knowing that money's coming in as the month goes through allows me to drop a thousand plus dollars on this and the machines that we're we're doing for fatigue testing it just uh it helps me know what I can invest in because I'm and so I appreciate my patrons and I want to make sure like that's out there that I'll be posting 20 30 times a month either short form quick form long form written form new ebooks but I'm only going to credit eight of the pieces of content per month in order to keep it consistent and uh give me the freedom to go nuts Andrea my girlfriend helped uh make some more stickers and so we actually have stickers that are a little bit more normal size stuff that goes better on a bottle I have one on my load cell now we got breaking gear fear and super rough enough super good enough and you can pick which one you want if you buy from extremegear.org you can select which one you want we give one away for free every time you order something there and or visit the lab one more random thing and then I'll let you go I am absolutely addicted to sugar uh I would love to not be my day is just a roller coaster of energy and it's really hard to focus and work and just live like that and I've been living like that for like 39 years now and so I really kind of want to make a change and uh I'm not trying to be like all or nothing but like I'm so addicted that I just kind of need to eliminate it and reset my taste buds and and learn how to be healthier there's a lot of sugar added in uh everything we eat it's not just grabbing a cookie or Snickers which I do plenty of so Andrea cooks pretty healthy and so we're trying to create a meal plan a snack plan uh I'm in a hurry I need to eat real quick I'm out and about what can I eat plan and I'm gonna kind of journal that journey and I'm not gonna take over the channel with it I might post some stories on Instagram if I find that it's going to be helpful for people and and I find it as hard as I'm thinking it's going to be I might put together a single video because I think that'll be uh really helpful for like a health aspect of being able to do all these sports that we cover on this channel it's one thing to know that you're like gear is going to keep you alive but if you're slowly killing yourself with poison in every meal well I think that'll be nice if I can overcome that I have no idea how hard this is going to be I'm assuming it's going to be pretty hard I'm hoping I can stay productive during the few weeks that I come off of it but either way um can follow along probably on Instagram as I post some stuff might on the website just kind of journalism going might just make one package if it turns out to be helpful for anyone but thanks for watching I try to keep these updates to a minimum as I'm not trying to vlog every detail of my life but I'm trying to just pump out answers to the questions you guys have thank you for being a community of nerds that uh ask the questions support what I'm doing and give me feedback that allows me to keep doing better science cheers