Sweet Jesus! It's actually coming together!

I've recently gotten some time to work on the lighting portion of the wagon. I have spent some time playing with microcontrollers so I decided to go one step down the food chain and play with ICs. I'm taking some 555s to trigger cycling in an RC circuit. The oscilloscope is displaying the voltage in the capacitor over time. I'm going to build circuits with different adjustable resistors so the timing is slightly off between them. Each one will power a different color in some RGB leds. It should give me a nice color cycle.

The wavy lines means it's working.

Alcohol is the solution to all problems.

Moving from the breadboard to a prototyping board.

Close up of the prototyping board with RC circuit components mounted. 

I also joined Chris last Sunday for some metal work. Chris has been busting his ass all week and it shows. We finished the last piece of sheet metal, came up with the initial cooler layout and did a fair amount of powder coat work.

Cutting the initial hole to access the cooler. Note how rough the hole is at the lower right hand side.

Really wishing we had used the water cutter to make the hole at this point.

The sand blasting "protective" glove had gaping holes in the thumb and forefinger. Considering this was Chris' hand I figured duct tape was an acceptable repair mechanism.

Dear God, please let me stop sanding this aluminum...

The first step to powder coat aluminum is to sand blast it. In theory this greatly increases the surface area and removes most blemishes. Since we never actually tried powder coating without this step this might be the metal shop version of a snipe hunt.

2,000 volts + paint = awesome sauce[0].

[0] For definitions of awesome sauce which involve a nice even coat of pigment.

Putting the metal in the oven. I wish I had a picture of all the melted rubber in this oven where people used their shoes to keep the door from searing their elbows.

First batch done! It actually looks professional as well.

Stay tuned for pictures of the assembled wagon.