Day 350: In construction…

I redesigned my extruder to make it beefier, this has nothing to do with the post, but I’m really proud of it and wanted to share. Haha

Well today despite feeling like refried dog poop I have to go do experiments. It’s part of the job and to be honest I want to do it even though I feel like dried monkey vomit. I could go on, but you get the picture. I do have some more good news not related to yesterday’s news. So that is the conversation for the day.

A few days ago I opined about the experiments I had coming up. I’m (FINALLY!!) about to do some groundbreaking state of the art change the fucking world experiments. Okay, maybe they won’t be that groundbreaking, but if all goes well it will be a baby step to what I envision will be a way to help people with spinal cord injury. It’s a long road, but even the first step is an exciting one.

Of course, technically I took the first step over a year ago. This is my second step since I basically leapfrogged to the end goal… and it worked. It really worked, it worked so well I don’t think people believe I have what I think I have. So since that was a pilot experiment we’re about to do some more rigorous testing to make sure I have what I claim (or rather what I want to claim, I can’t claim I have what I’m confident I do because science doesn’t work like that, which is a good thing).

To do that I needed to build a custom rig. One that will let me test in my Co-PI’s lab using the equipment from my main-PI’s lab. There’s a lot of piecing things together so they all work properly, but the bottom line is that there was a rather large test rig that I needed to build. My CO-PI who, after I shared some of the papers I used to come to the conclusion that this works, is on board and excited too. So when it came time to purchase the supplies to make the rig, he paid the bill without complaint (yay!) so a rather large chunk of change later and I have the supplies to build my test rig.

Yesterday I found the motivation to bring it in the house and assemble it. Luckily I designed it with minimal assembly required, so it was just a few holes to drill, some screws and nuts, and I had my test rig! Right now I had to glue some foam to it, so it’s sitting in front of me with basically everything in my living room that isn’t larger than the rig stacked on top of it. What I’m saying is that it’s practically done and testing starts next week.

I know I’m repeating myself, but this was a long time in the making, so I’m really excited October will be two full years since I had this idea and we’re finally going to make more progress. More importantly it will be something I can publish on, so I can share it with all of you once we get it out. I cannot wait!!! AHHH!!!