Expo prep

One sweet piece of kit that came in the package was my welding mask from Canada. It is arc-sensitive and so is easy to see through until the welding spark hits, after which point it is like a normal welding mask... maybe with this advantage RV will get two things to stick together :PWith only two spares to go around, mirrors take priority during transportation:
Set up and ready to go. By go I mean clean, paint, clean, orient, test, reorient, test, adjust and expose.
Yusuf takes a break from painting and decides to endanger the paint job with some yoga:
To save time we test and paint at the same time:
It works! Our first baguette! It was really surprising, since the weather was bad up until we put the bread in. The oven was only at 125C when it should be at 200C. After 30 minutes the oven finished at 205C and we were left with a fine loaf:

Painting pretty much requires visual contact with the subject (go figure). The next day we had to go over most surfaces again (and again, something which leads me to believe that it was not only the darkness that prevented a good paint job... I'm looking at you Drisa!):
Finally, the day before the exposition, we have a finished product:
Despite strong winds, the occasional dust devil and really hazy skies, we were able to (almost fully) bake the bread seen here (it took a while, since the skies were hazy, but the bread came out pretty well):
It took us 3 weeks from start to finish. This is not a normal build-time, but a result of the chaos of the situation and the fact that I made enough adjustments and we improvised enough that it was as if we had never built one before. If we were to do it again it would easily take half the time, and if the workshop was equipped properly I estimate 1/4 of the time.

Over the course of the past 3 weeks I've been using a tactic I call the 'controlled chaos-slide' which basically means that on a daily basis you don't do all the little things which keep life organized and clean. It makes you more effective in the short run, but if you let it go on too long, all elements of the 'controlled' aspect soon become hard to discern and it eventually leads to cascade failure. No cascade failure yet, and the time sensitive portion of the mission is finished, so we should probably take care of:

I told you before to note the clean white T-shirt. Now I'd like you to note what 3 weeks in the shop has wrought:


I have declared a state of laundry emergency.

It has taken a considerable amount of will power to save a clean pair of everything for the demonstration/exposition tomorrow. Wish me luck (even though luck has nothing to do with it... except the weather).