What happened to ylab? It’s better than ever before! Read all about it here https://www.ylab.ca/about-us/. Everything on the site was pretty much written by one person, so the site is now TroubleMaker’s blog.

For a bit of outdoor practice welding, I made a wooden mount to securely hold a vise to an old workmate. First step: gather up some scrap lumber to make a nice base that the top surface of the workmate can really grip into. No movement up or down. It’s ugly but it’s solid. Yes, […]

Long-time members and readers may remember the Great Canadian Alligator Clip and how we put it to good use keeping some librarians nicely grounded. What could we do for a patriotic encore? The answer came to us from ylab friend John/VE3IPS. We were storing some old radios in a shed, and sent him this picture. […]

On Saturday November 19th, a few ylab members and friends met up at FireSword Forge in Guelph for an intro to blacksmithing with expert blacksmith David Brandow and our own Metal Master Miro. Braving the cold and snow was easy – we brought a lot of equipment, with four forges to warm the hands and […]

YES! OUR FIRST OPEN HOUSE SINCE THE COVID LOCKDOWN! We’ve finally mustered up the courage to let more people in. Our first post-COVID open house is scheduled for Thursday May 5, 2022 in our home at the David Dunlap Observatory. If you’ve been before, you still want to come out. We have lots of new […]

The bad news: back to the drawing board Easel We made more progress this week with our Shapeoko2 CNC machine. But first the bad news: we can’t use the Carbide Command software to run it. Carbide is the manufacturer of the Shapeoko machines. Their software doesn’t support anything older than the Shapeoko3. So… we’re still […]

Our latest equipment donation is a Shapeoko CNC machine. Thank you Jedi Jay! After an initial shake-town and successful testing by ylab member Craig and his accomplice Shari, they came in and gave us a quick overview of its operation. After some test use, we came up with some improvements. The first step was to […]

Everything is slowly coming back to life in our evil lair at the David Dunlap Observatory. As last reported, we spent the first couple of nights getting our popular laser cutter in operation. We have more equipment donations and loans, and we’re setting those up and shaking them down. In 3D printers, our reliable Qidi […]

18 long months. That’s how long we’ve been out of our home at the DDO – Richmond Hill’s David Dunlap Observatory. Mostly, it’s been COVID. But the DDO has not been idle during that time, undergoing a major restoration. We’ll post more about that later. The DDO is officially a community center of the City […]

Cygnus X-1, the first X-ray source accepted to be a black hole, is bigger than expected. Possibly the biggest astronomical claim to fame for the giant telescope of the David Dunlap Observatory is its role in the first observations confirming Cygnus X-1 as a black hole. We haven’t checked lately to see if that big […]