My projects
so i guess this page is more like my vision board in progress
stuff i'm building
Basement Projects
here’s a small ongoing project i have in the works. i’m building a furnace for casting and i’m going to take my design from a modified version the very well thought out videos by the VegOilGuy which I was totally amazed by the detail of design shared by this guy. Kudos brother, thank you. The major difference, or mod that i’d like to make is a piston platform under the furnace to push the floor and crucible up through the top rather than a complete pulley lift system to raise the furnace off the crucible.
Also bought a TIG welder to help me complete this project and have been practicing on scraps of aluminum and steel….i still have a long way to go before i’m anywhere decent at it….might try to find a welder at work to come and give me some lessons on it to speed up the learning curve.
update 16/10/19 – been working on this in my spare time the last couple of weeks and have uploaded some new pics showing the progress i’ve made. Also wound my kanthal wire, but don’t have pictures yet of the heating elements setup,,, more to follow.
Here’s a little vid i put together to show the mod i put together for getting the crucible out of the furnace and the prototyping process i used. Not rocket science, but it was fun to tinker with different ideas and some mechanical widgets.
stuff i'm learning
Forex trading
Part 1
stuff i’d really like to apply myself to becoming good at. i’ve been giving the trading a go for a long time now….never fully been able to invest myself because i work full time and can only trade off the 4H charts (i set alarms at work for every 4 hour rotation to check for entry signals of about 6 fx pairs, mostly the majors. i’m lucky to get 2 to 4 trades in every week. I was really doing good for a while with a simple trend following system i pinched from Adam Grimes based on his book “The Art and Science of Technical Analysis” and his free course at marketlife. Out of the 4 trading entries he discusses in his book, I’ve only been taking the “pullback” and “anti” setups, and in a little over 2 months i was up over 5% taking only 1% risk per trade…..but i had a really bad run a couple of weeks ago and took 5 losers in a row which demolished my gains. The week after i had a couple of winners and now i’m back up 2.5% for the year in the 3rd or 4th month….doesn’t look good for my 24% goal for the year….but hey, it’s about process not product. I just need to focus on getting the mechanics right every time without fail (which i don’t because i regularly pull out of winners early when i get nervous, and often they would have gone further to increase profits.)
Back up to 4% for the year and i’ve been off the wagon for a while as far as high motivation to take any and all trades that might fit the pattern. Need to get back into it.
Part 2
Well, I’ve come to years-end and the scores are in. My account on the 4H MeanReversion, PullBack, and Anti plays went up to a max of 16% and then drew down to 12.5% before i added a TrendTrade and BreakOut play to the repertoire and moved it all to a 1 Hour timeframe, at which point it had a massive streak that brought me to years end of 40%.
So technically I had a great year trading. Around half way through (the year) my account was up maybe 8% using only a mean reversion strategy on the 4 hour charts that produced about 2 or 3 trades a week.
After taking Adam Grimes free online course and adding 2 more strategies (the Pullback and the Anti) to my repertoire, I got my account size up to 16% by 2/3rds of the way through the year adding a few trades a week. But it was a hard slog, and when i saw that i would be out of work for at least a few weeks, i tried supplementing my regular 3 strategies with a scalping system which i found i could not successfully trade, but taught me some useful strategies which i repurposed for the 1 hour timeframe.
This led to a huge increase in trades taken, and in profitability. My account increased another 28% in 9 weeks, ending my year with an amazing 40% ROC. And you would think I would be ecstatic. And part of me was. But another part of me was not. I was actually a bit disappointed.
I was disappointed because I trade like a nervous cat on a hot tin roof. Not on the losing side, but on my winners. I pull out of winning trades early when I have clear stop loss and target profits set to automatically take me out. And every time i fail the marshmallow test (AGAIN !!), the price continues on to my target like it was meant to go there. Deep in my heart I know that the 40% end of year ROC should be closer to 80%, and I commit again to becoming a disciplined trader.
Maybe part of it comes from the mean reversion system I traded for so long. It is basically a 1:1 risk to reward system, and this is where i’m closing out my trades nervously on my trend following strategy which has targets that are consistently 1:2.
It also comes from my overchecking my trades, and when I am in the black on a trade and it starts to linger, especially later in the day when I have decision fatigue, I sometimes get extremely anxious and spontaneously or impulsively close out the trade after checking it a few times.
So the goal this year is to become a professional. That means 1 mistake in 20 trades. Any more and I’m trading like a hobbyist and haven’t earned the right to increase my account size.
So this is the plan, which is basically a cacophony of rewards and punishments for getting from here to there. After listening to “In the Habit: Introduction to Changing our Behaviour” , i’m going to try to implement as many of the strategies in this series as possible to become the disciplined “machine “ trader that i want to become.
Stuff like “Precommitment”
stuff i'm doing
Learning Mandarin
Also, been spending a lot of time on my chinese audio tapes because i do a fairly repetitious construction job which doesn’t require much thinking or speaking with others. I use some of the michel thomas tutorials found here that i’ve also used while studying french. It seams like a really good way to build up my language skills, but i know that to take it to the next level (actually the first level), i’ll need to start speaking one-on-one with a native speaking tutor so that my brain can start the wiring process to actually speak it.
I’d like to come up with a simple python program that can take all the words i’ve been learning and come up with all the possible combinations of valid sentences- especially questions, which i could then record to myself and see if i can respond with the answers in one or multiple ways.
I’ve been pretty good about listening to the lessons about an hour a day or so. I REALLY need to take it to the next level if i want to see results….I’ll definitely need a tutor to speak Mandarin with me so my brain can rewire.
stuff i'm doing
Self hypnosis/ lucid dreaming
I’ve had some struggles with self discipline, mostly in trading ….i was hoping to use two methods to get myself over the line and on the path.
I’ve downloaded a few books and have started recording some self hypnoses scripts….pretty general stuff at the moment, but i want to start putting some specific stuff in there to help me achieve both mental/emotional discipline and maybe the focus needed to begin lucid dreaming, which i could use to reinforce the discipline and release more creativity.
more stuff
writing
yeah, been trying to do some steady writing, just to get into the habit of creative writing in general. I have some tutorials/ lessons by Neil Gaiman, and i backtracked to check out some of his work and was really blown away by Coraline and The Graveyard Book. I’m just loving his style, it’s really quite gripping – i guess i could only dream of being such an amazing wordsmith.
i subscribe to TTC (the teaching company) and started listing to a few classes on writing from them (Building great sentences) but i can only listen to very small chunks of that at a time……it’s overwhelming to think someone can expound for so many hours just on the intricacies of sentences. Anyway… I’d really like to get in the regular habit of putting some words down.
stuff to do
Camping
hey, i just love camping and wish i could do more of it.
