I'm coming out of the lizard closet. I love geckos.

Back in the 90's, Gecko clothing reigned. Everyone (in my very limited circle at 9 years old) had Gecko Hawaii tshirts, they were usually neon of some sort, and had a gecko wearing sunglasses. I'm having difficulty finding a good photo of the old Gecko Hawaii tshirts, but here is a pair of underwear that someone made from the kind of tshirt I'm describing:
(sidenote: this pair of undies comes from a girl that rosanna had a booth next to at a craft fair last year... wierd.)

The awesomeness of the shirts is probably what convinced me that I needed to get a pet gecko. I even hatched a plan to catch a gecko while on a family vacation but it turns out that it is illegal to kidnap and transport a gecko back to Washington. At least that's what my mom told me. Eventually, I forgot about my gecko lust and life went on.

Well, Rosanna and I just returned from a family trip to Hawaii and I'm happy to report that though Gecko Hawaii Apparel is difficult to find, the actual lizards are alive and thriving in Hawaii. Here I am hunting outside our rental house:


And here are some lizard shots that I snapped:




Upon our return I was overcome by an insatiable desire to work on mopeds. Last week, I picked up a 8/32" pneumatic fitting at a hobby store and set to working on my hobbit intake spacer plate (see my previous blog post).

Typically the smallest fitting that can be had at an auto parts stroe is closer to 1/2" threading which is much too big.
I picked up some 1/2" aluminum from online metals, who, by the way, are really nice guys, most of the time I dig through their scrap and they just give me the materials for free.
The downside to full time employment is that it makes it difficult for me to go visit Michael Mike at the Wizard Lair. Doing a project like this on his mill would take virtually no time at all, but as I can't get down there, I am forced to use a jigsaw, drill and dremel.



It's not beautiful, but it will certainly give me a clue whether I'm going the right direction.


Matt Smith has a plate of 3/8" that I may remake this plate out of, I think that 3/8" would be just the limit of how thin I can go and still have threading for the pulse fitting, If I do remake this one more time I should probably use a mill for a proper finish. In the meantime however, I now have a usable prototype. I just need to pull the hobbit apart and decide which side of the plate I want to tap in the pulse fitting.

UPDATE 3/4/2011:
A guy I know was recently spotted wearing this shirt. It's not Gecko, Hawaii, but the spirit is there.