Quote:
Originally Posted by Gary Dillard
I use Andy Baker to build my drive trains. He's pretty dense  |
Andy is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound -- look, up in the sky ....
Back to FTC ballast -- I recommend
U.S. Pennies. You get 100 for only a dollar. They are 0.75 inch in diameter, 0.061 inch thick, and made almost entirely of zinc. A stack of 182 is just over 11 inches long and weighs about one pound.
If you have a bigger budget, try
U.S. Nickels. They are slightly larger in diameter (0.835 inch) and made mostly of copper, which is denser than zinc. Their larger diameter and density means you only need a 7 inch stack (91 coins, or $4.55 worth) to make one pound of ballast. This is 2.5 times the cost of Penny ballast, at 1.282 times the density.
__________________
Richard Wallace
Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
since 2003
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)