Quakers - Kathy Sykes' diary

Production team Day 15 - Seismograph
Bright, cold, gorgeous day again. Around a fire - Kate tells us challenges. Mike B and Mike L to spend night in a tent - to seek gold in rock in mountains. Ellen to help make a waterproof tent … and it’s got so cold now! Rather them than me!

Jonathan and I are making a seismograph. We made amazing progress in a day. It’s built. But whether it will measure any tremor (or even a full blown mother of an earthquake) - we have NO idea. It’s all relying on trying to get something to move a different way - to something that’s jiggling in the moving earth. So a suspended bit of metal – with a huge weight attached. SHOULD move differently from the jiggling earth. But - if the earth only moves a few mm that’s about the distance we’ll have to detect … and 3 mm is a pretty big move, for something as heavy as the earth to make. Thankfully - Kate tells us - we’ll test the seismometer with dynamite … but even THEN I suspect we won’t do that much. Usually, for these challenges, someone somewhere has tested it out just to be sure it’s fair and feasible … but not this one. It’s possible dynamite moves rock very differently from the way an earthquake does. Quite likely really! Our seismograph reading detects motion in one plane - so we’re assuming there will be some motion in that plate!

To test it out - we’re “taking it to the bridge” tomorrow. The bridge is the jiggliest thing around …. When trucks go over it moves quite a bit. If we can get some reading tomorrow we can test out the sensitivity of our seismographs - and try to tweak it to improve it. But we may get no reading at all from the bridge, after all - it tends to move vertically up and down when cars go over - and we’re looking at a sideways move. But I’m worried our reading from the dynamite will be spectacularly underwhelming. So - actually - our bridge measurements - IF we get any! - may be the most spectacular we get!

Day 16 - Seismograph
Another beautiful day - and AMAZING PROGRESS. Spent the morning tweaking things - trying different lengths of steel string to use and trying different kinds of wire to suspend it in. We found a slab of concrete where we actually got a reading. What I mean is that on gravely ground the seismograph didn’t respond to us jumping up and down, or dropping things. But on a 1 x 1 m concrete slab in the ground - we got some results! Admittedly - only a tiny, 1 mm high, ‘blip’ on our paper - but still a ‘blip’. Funny how excited you can get from these things!

So once we got the tiny reading - it meant we could change different variables and see the effect. Jonathan works much more intensely than I do. We changed the hefty wire (with heavy metal ‘grapple’ - that neatly enabled us to change the length of the wire) - and put in nylon wire. We both thought it should really help. J almost immediately said it was much better. “But what’s your evidence Jonathan?” I yelped. The results from brick dropping looked almost identical to me. I still thought it was a better solution (I’d persuaded him that it was) - but I wanted to see the effect. But J is the one who produces beautiful machines that work. Intuition is quite a valuable thing! Then took the seismograph “to the bridge”, to see if we got any readings when cars passed over. Quite nervous - not so convinced we would see anything. The bridge movements were up and down but we measure sideways moves.

Kate drove the jeep over the bridge at speed - and we got a reading! Really pleased! We could even measure the intervals between cars going over the bridge - as we’d hoped.
But a problem - the pen kept drifting off to one side - even off the paper. It’s because the paper just wouldn’t lie very level . So we needed to build something to keep it properly flat … Really enjoyed working with Jonathan. We talk through things really well together and he is so good with practical things. It’s a treat to feel we’re both co-ordinating so much. And hopefully making something that works. He’s naturally less optimistic than me but neither of us are really sure we’ll measure the dynamite explosion tomorrow! And what’s happening to the 2 Mikes? Cold and windswept and water sodden on mountain?

Day 17 - Seismograph
I thought we’d wrap up the seismograph really quickly this am - but we spent AGES messing about, trying to make it better. Seemed to be missing the mark.
The problem yesterday was that the top of the clock wouldn’t carry a piece of paper around and stay level. So the pen would gradually slide off the paper, as the paper tipped in the weight of the pen. We thought we’d solved it by putting a wide piece of wood on top of the clock to support the paper.

We’d left lots of wood to glue together overnight, thinking we’d be sorted in the morning. Instead we were back to square 1. Tried out various means and eventually soldered extra wire onto clock on to support the wire. Ended up really running against the clock. Had to leave sawmill at 11.30 - to get to quarry. J and I running till 11.35 - screwing in screws, collecting tool box, sawing up metal pipes. Crazy. Ellen busy making a wonderful tent for the seismograph. Very funny! Made us all chuckle all morning. A better tent than Mike and Mike have. Drove in van to quarry. Ate lunch - and fell deliciously asleep. Dreams about … seismographs! The guys at the quarry were all for trying out lots of bits of dynamite to find what we needed and where to affect the seismograph. J and I much keener on doing it for real - first time.

Very exciting seeing the Mikes again and crew. They’d had a mad, lovely time. Relieved. Think they’d all got drunk and had a silly, ‘boys night out’.

Really nervous about whether it would work. And the seismograph was working beautifully - near perfect circles being drawn (better than any we’d yet had!). But would the dynamite make it move? The helicopter did - blew the pen right off the paper. But it’s much harder to move the arm - than move the whole earth. So … did it? Didn’t it? First go - it didn’t. Huge explosion - reverberating all around the valley. Not a blip on the seismograph. Damn! But - it’s HARD to make the earth move! An earthquake is a whole movement of two plates - an explosion is another thing entirely. So we tried again. Eventually - the guy Grant buried a stick. Duh! We should have asked for this from the start! - dynamite lighting on TOP of the ground will do little to have an effect. Ricky - our chef - later said “Obviously the dynamite should have been buried”. With a small, buried stick - we got a tiny blip - 1 mm high. By this time - it was a huge relief to get anything. Result!

But which version will Sophie (the director) use? The failure of the first go? Or the success of the last one?