Flywheel

Saturday, December 11, 2010

When I was young, I spent time helping on the family farm. This mostly involved driving.

Baling

One of the tasks involved baling straw left behind the combine during harvest of wheat or barley. The modern baler is an interesting machine pulled behind a tractor. Mechanical fingers on a belt pick up straw from winrows, feed it to a chamber, where it gets compressed by a piston to a tight bale. A clever part of the machinery ties twine in two places along the bale and even ties a knot before the bale is ejected onto the ground. Later strong farmboys in a truck follow and pick the bales up and bring them into the barn.

Our baler had its own Wisconsin engine that powered the mechanics. Because the piston that compressed the straw took such a load, there was a flywheel that helped even out the load for the engine. The engine directly drove the flywheel that was attached to the internals of the baler.

A Flywheel

Now when I say flywheel, I don't mean a flywheel like you might see at the front of a car engine. This thing was a good three (or was it four) feet in diameter and weighed who knows what. Once, Dad had the flywheel come off at speed, rolled some distance, and teetered over on its side. Thinking he would simply right it and roll it back, he discovered that it was heavy enough that he couldn't tip it back up, much less roll it.

There was kind of a safety mechanism built in to this system to prevent the innards from being destroyed if something caught. This was a pin, a bolt actually, that was softer than a regular bolt. The idea was that the bolt would shear before something else was broken.

Well, this shear bolt would eventually wear through in normal use, and generally one would fail each year.

Flat out

For some reason, I decided to kind of speed the baling process. So I cranked up the tractor throttle to where I thought the baler could handle it.

This seemed to exceed normal use, however, and these shear bolts would fail every other day or so. Dad pointed out that he could make it last a whole year instead of all this breakage. I ended up with the reputation of pushing things to their limits.

New job

So in March of this year, I started a new job with the outfit Matasano. The idea is that we are called in to large companies to see where their software will break. These are companies that it is likely your elders have heard of. The idea is if we find security flaws in your system, you can fix them before bad guys find them.

Tool breakage

As part of the job, they give you this nice laptop and a bunch of very dangerous tools to work with. In fact, these tools will get you in trouble if you are found carrying them into some European countries. The tools are used to test particular types of systems our customers want us to look at. Tools like bkb, plugsrv, rbkb, wwmd are built to explore a particular scenario.

On my second project, we had occasion to engage certain tools from this bag. So we pull out rbkb and start it up. "So feed it this startup data", my boss says.

We power it up and boom. "What the heck? Ok, let's try plugsrv."

It needs a little configuration. We tinker that into shape

I managed to break every tool in the bag. Thomas said "Bill, you are supposed to break the customer's stuff, not our tools". We had to write some from scratch to solve that particular problem.