shikuto

shikuto t1_j9envmp wrote

I had half of a really long comment drafted up, but I decided to scrap it for something a bit more succinct.

My whole life - albeit only just shy of 28 years - has been around construction. My earliest memories involve working on buildings, either with my parents rehabbing homes, or with my father on job sites where he was a masonry foreman. Taught me how to fire someone when I was three, by having me do it myself. I then went to spend most of the last 10 years as a commercial electrician.

All that to say: yes, I have extensive experience working with steel framing members. I’m aware of many of their pitfalls, and I still think that for my application, they’re vastly superior. It would be all but impossible to find lumber straight and long enough to make studs for most of the rooms of the studio. And having to stitch multiple pieces together in order to get the height adds a ton of time and material costs.

Plus, I’m doing it all myself. Or, as much as I am willing to. Which pretty much means no concrete or Sheetrock finishing. I’ll do all the form work and trenching and rebar for the concrete, but I’m hiring professionals to pour and finish it. For one: concrete sucks. Secondly, that’s a job that I am certain they will do better than me. And the same goes for Sheetrock finishing - I’ll hang it the way it needs to be hung for a recording studio. From there, they’re taping, mudding, sanding, and painting. If the rockers don’t paint, I’ll contract that out as well.

Final pro: when I eventually go to make the structure mixed use, when I open the studio as a business, having steel framing will simplify the process. It isn’t flammable.

To assuage any concerns you may still have: one component of the process that I will not be handling (entirely) on my own is engineering and design. I’m drafting floor plans currently, and then I will hit the engineering tables and websites and forums until I have a solid plan for the structure. Then l’ll draw up a preliminary structural print and send it to some engineering buddies I’ve made over the years for criticism and recommendations. After a few revisions of this - for all of my drawings, not just the structural - I’ll be sending them over to different firms than my friends work at to get them reviewed and stamped.

Sorry for the still rather long response to what was in all likelihood a rhetorical question.

Tl;dr - Yeah, and I’ve taken the pros and cons into consideration, along with a healthy dose of planning for how I’m even going to plan it out.

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shikuto t1_j8m1s0f wrote

u/Grand-Tension8668

Sorry to tag you here in a response to myself like this. I can see the email that Reddit sent me when you made the comment response to my previous comment… but it doesn’t show up on any Reddit client I can find.

Anyhow, something to consider is that the fields that the waves are imposed on (there’s a lot to unpack in that statement) ABSOLUTELY DO exist in the three dimensions of space. That’s the only reason that we’re able to apply spatial dimensions to these waves in the first place. So yes. The things that are waves do exist, spatially.

That’s funky. What do I mean by that? Well… a photon is a particle. But it isn’t matter. It has no mass. It is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. The force itself. Now, electrons and protons that do have mass? They’re matter. They’re both carriers of electrical charge. Charge by itself isn’t a force.

This is all going to be over-simplifying things quite a bit, but bear with me. You need to understand at a simplified, incorrect level before you can understand at a less simplified, slightly more correct level. And that’s how it goes all the way up, since the way science works is that every scientific law or theory includes the implication that it may be wrong, and at best is a tool for providing predictions or analyzing observed data.

On one side, you have a hill of negatively charged electrons. On the other side, a hill of positive protons. In the middle, a flat plain of neutrons, with no electrical charge. The protons “want” to meet up with the electrons, just as much as the electrons “want” to pair with the protons. The power of the “wanting” on both sides is the force. That force is mediated/carried by photons.

That space between the protons and electrons is still extant, in the 3D world. The protons and electrons are both the result of excitations/waves in various different fields. The fields come before the particles, at least so far as we can tell.

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shikuto t1_j8ju7er wrote

I’m going to jump into the meat of what you really want to know.

>The question being, we're able to describe the physical wavelength in nanometers of these waves that apparently aren't oscillating in space so much as they oscillate between electric and magnetic fields. ...how do you assign a unit of length to that?

How to assign a length? Light has a speed. 299,800,000 m/s. Now take a frequency. Let’s say 60Hz, because electricity in the US. That means that one cycle has a period of 1/60s. Multiply the speed of light by the period of the wave, and you get the wavelength. In this example, the wavelength of 60hz light is 4,966,666 meters. That’s a super long radio wave.

Visible light? Let’s say 600THz. The period is 1/600,000,000,000,000 of a second. This gives us 2.988e8 / 6e14, evaluating to 4.98e-7 meters. This is 498nm, something blueish.

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shikuto t1_iy5de2x wrote

Yeah, fish tape is flexible, yet stiff enough that it should be able to make it through multiple bends. Additionally - at least in the US - code requires there be no more than 360 degrees of bend in conduit between boxes. For exactly the purpose of being able to pull wire through it. It gets to be exceptionally difficult to pull wire past anything more than 360.

Anything more than that, and the original installer hated everyone else anyway. I’ve seen examples of what you saw in that video. Works awesome inside a wall with no insulation in the cavity. Works much less well when there’s insulation involved. And the amount of friction that’s inside of a conduit would almost certainly overwhelm the holding power of the magnet. Also, if it’s steel conduit (EMT, IMC, or rigid,) the conduit itself would also get magnetized.

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shikuto t1_iy4p927 wrote

My advice in another comment was to take a shop-vac and run it as a blower, then stick the hose onto the conduit/h-box. Have someone else with the panel cover off listening/feeling for air coming out of any conduit.

This is a concerning one for me though. Removing/replacing the cover could be problematic. It’s residential, and I see spare data conduits being left by contractors as… a dubious event. At least outside the context of custom homes.

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shikuto t1_iy4o865 wrote

We use tools to help us pull wire/cable in conduit. The one that would be applicable here would be a steel fish-tape. Something like this, of a sufficient length, would be appropriate: https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/fish-tapes/steel-fish-tape-18-inch-x-50-foot

u/VanillianArt tagging you here so you see it. If you’re going to go this route, PLEASE verify that the conduit doesn’t terminate into an electrical panel. If it does, and the conduit is appropriately grounded the way it should be, you aren’t in much physical danger. However, the fish tape will probably explode inside the panel, causing far more extensive AND expensive repairs than just getting a professional to do the work from the get go.

If the conduit isn’t properly grounded and does terminate into a panel, or is non-metallic (PVC, for instance,) then it the fish tape will essentially turn into an uninsulated wire that you’re holding on to. Definitely not a good time.

One way of checking would be to get a shop vacuum and run it “in reverse” (blow mode) and put it up against the junction box. Go over to the panel, and if you have air coming out of a conduit, it’s a no-go.

I think you’ll probably find that the conduit goes to the panel. Residential electrical doesn’t tend to use conduit for very much at all, except when it’s absolutely required. It would be cheaper and faster to install for the contractor to have just ran plenum-rated Cat5/6/etc cable than to have ran conduit for it. It seems pretty unlikely that they ran spare, future conduits in anything other than a custom home. From my experience building custom homes.

Edit: also, if it’s at all possible, I would recommend completely removing power from the panel in question before removing the cover, and only restoring power after the cover has been replaced. Otherwise, something could go horribly wrong. Even as a professional, taking a dead front off of a live residential panel can be a bit nerve wracking.

Edit 2: a word, for clarity

Source: former electrician of 9 years, with residential, commercial, and industrial experience.

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shikuto t1_iwfsmbv wrote

Reply to comment by GustavSpanjor in How an engine works. by ooMEAToo

>Now both exhaust and fuel intake is open on a downstroke.

No they’re not… Watch it again. Blue (intake) is open on a down stroke, red (exhaust) is open on the up stroke.

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shikuto t1_iwfsfkn wrote

The lights (combustion of the fuel) happen at the top of every other movement of each piston. If you watch just the left-most piston, you’ll see the 4-stroke cycle (aka Otto/Diesel cycle, aka suck-squeeze-bang-blow.)

If you start watching the first piston right as the light flashes, the piston is at the top of the stroke length. This is the combustion portion of the cycle, or the “bang” part. This combustion creates rapidly expanding gas, pushing the piston down the cylinder.

Once it gets to the bottom of its travel, you’ll notice one of the valves at the top of the cylinder open up. Then the piston rises back up the length of the cylinder. This is pushing the exhaust gas out of the cylinder - the “blow” part.

After that, the exhaust valve closes, and the intake valve opens up. The piston is traveling back down the cylinder, due to the other pistons rotating the crankshaft. This pulls in air, and at the same time, modern internal combustion engines will spray the fuel of choice into the cylinder via fuel injectors. This is the “suck” part of the cycle.

Next up, at the bottom of the travel again, the intake valve closes. The piston travels back up the cylinder. Since it is now a sealed environment, the air-fuel mixture inside is compressed. This is the “squeeze” part. Then we’re back to the “bang” when the light goes off again.

In a diesel engine, the pressure and temperature alone cause the fuel to ignite, while gasoline engines utilize a spark plug for ignition. Ignition from pressure and temperature alone in a gasoline engine is referred to as detonation, and is a particularly bad thing to have happen.

It’s a little unorthodox to start the explanation of the power cycle at the ignition phase, but I think it’s useful to have the light as a good starting point when there’s a visual representation.

Hope this cleared something up for you!

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