Hello, RPV.

Well, it's the rainy season now!

We have been busy with many orders from our business partners in various fields. We are truly grateful to all of our business partners.

This is the time of the year when we are not able to go out on holidays, so I would like to introduce some of Kumamoto's recommended izakayas (Japanese style pubs).

We have many clients from outside of Kumamoto Prefecture, and they often ask us to introduce some of our favorite restaurants when they visit Kumamoto for sightseeing or on business trips. At first, we introduced some of our favorite restaurants, but they were so well-received that we decided to introduce them again on our blog. Maybe we should make it a series?

The first one is an izakaya called Ken Happichaku (居酒屋), which is a blessing from the sea. It is located at 12-18 City 5 Building 2F, Hanabatacho, Chuo-ku, Kumamoto City, across from Family Mart on Nishi-Ginza Street. Of course, it is currently open for business.

 

This time, we would like to share with you a record of our staff's visit on April 13th, the day before the Kumamoto earthquake (pre-earthquake). The restaurant has a counter and private rooms. It is especially popular with people who come from outside of the prefecture on business trips.

 

First, let's toast to the hard work of the day with a draft beer. As indicated on the mug glass, it is Premium Malts. It is rich and delicious. Suntory has a brewery and restaurant in Kashima-cho, Kumamoto, where visitors can tour the factory and drink freshly brewed beer at the restaurant. The beer is very tasty with fine foam. There is a free shuttle bus service from Kumamoto's transportation hubs. However, it seems that it is not available yet due to the earthquake. I hope it will be restored soon.

Normally, I order what I want to eat by itself, but this time I ordered a course meal (reservation required) recommended by the restaurant.

 

First are three appetizers. From left.

grilled shibi tuna with isobe

Natural sea bream with sea bream mozuku

Hyuga Chicken sashimi sashimi on kelp

My memory is a little fuzzy because a little time has passed, but I personally found the shibi tuna to be an interesting flavor.

 

pottery

Nagasaki horse mackerel rolled with myoga, prefectural white onion and red eggplant

It is delicious to eat the horse mackerel you catch as sashimi.

 

food cooked by steaming

Steamed eel and lotus root in chakin-mushi

Soft and lightly seasoned conger eel.

 

food (meat, fish, vegetables, etc.) cooked separately but served together on one dish

simmered radish and horse bacon

Normally, daikon radishes play a supporting role, but this one has a nice bacon broth? The bacon broth is so effective that it is the star of the dish.

 

food cooked by boiling or stewing

Prefectural pork belly stewed in cubes

I don't like meat, but this has a light flavor and I can eat it without any resistance.

 

deep-fried food

Tempura of Masayu sweetfish and cod roe

The crispy texture and freshly picked cod roe and sweetfish are irresistible.

 

food

Fukagawa rice with prefectural asari

I was already full at this point, but clams (especially in miso soup) are my favorite, so I poured it over rice and ate it all at once.

 

It was delicious. I hope you will enjoy the wide variety of other dishes on our menu, such as Kumamoto's famous horse sashimi, kararenkon, fresh sashimi from Amakusa, beef from Aso, and many more. I am sorry that my memory is a little hazy as it was a while ago, and that I cannot give you a good description of the taste and texture of the dishes. So, as the restoration and reconstruction of Kumamoto is gradually progressing, many restaurants are regaining their vitality, and we hope that you will have the opportunity to visit them and other restaurants as well. I am sure they are looking forward to your visit.

Hello, RPV.
On Sunday, May 22, I went to the Kyushu 2-stroke meeting.
The location of the event is Kisotsukan (Oguni-machi, Aso-gun), and anyone who loves 2-stroke motorcycles is welcome to participate and feel free to join the event. The image below shows the scene around 10:00 a.m., before the event began, when about 110 2-stroke motorcycles were gathered in a small area. After this, the motorcycles continued to come in with high-pitched exhaust noises and fragrant? The motorcycles continued to gather one after another, emitting a high-pitched exhaust sound and fragrant exhaust smoke (^^;).;

Here is the greeting from the organizer. The organizer said that he was very worried about holding the event because it was right after the earthquake, but he made the decision to hold the event. In his greeting, we could sense his concern for the disaster area and the victims. I heard that Kikon Kan, which provided the venue for the event, will be open for business as usual from the Golden Week holidays.

The following are images of nostalgic 2-stroke motorcycles that we have gathered. Some of you may have owned 2-stroke motorcycles in the past, but they have been out of production for more than 20 years, and the riders who gathered here are having a hard time maintaining them because parts are no longer available. We have included near-as-as-is vehicles so that the nostalgia can be seen at a glance. There were also many vehicles that had been coolly customized.

Suzuki GN50

Honda Reed

Honda CRM250

Suzuki Hustler

Yamaha RZ350

Yamaha DT50

Honda NSR250

Yamaha RZV500 and TZR250

Suzuki RG500Γ

Honda MVX250F with stock seat cowl and stock dummy muffler tool box.

Yamaha TZR250

Yamaha RZV500

Yamaha TDR250

Honda NS400

Kawasaki KR250 at the far end

Yamaha GT50 I had a lot of my high school classmates on it. It was super nostalgic.

So, I hope you enjoyed it if you enjoyed it. By the way, I also own a motorcycle, and this time I scanned the muffler out of curiosity. The picture below shows the appearance of the muffler to be scanned by X-ray CT. The material seems to be composed of stainless steel sheet metal.

And the following images are the scanned images. The left side is a cross-sectional CT image and the right side is a 3D image.The 3D image is easy to see the internal structure. The structure is welded and bent, so there is a certain amount of stress left in the product itself. If the product is physically cut to check the internal structure, this stress is released and the internal structure may change slightly from what it was before the cutting. In such cases, it would make more sense to use X-ray CT for nondestructive observation and dimensional measurement. Click on the photo to enlarge.

The following are cut-in videos from the Y-axis and Z-axis directions, but we can also create cut-in videos from any direction.

 

 

I also wanted to visit the Shibasaburo Kitasato Memorial Museum, which is located in the neighborhood of Mokkonkan and is famous for its bacteriology, but unfortunately it was closed due to the earthquake. Shibasaburo Kitasato is also the founder of Kitasato University, where Dr. Satoshi Omura won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine last year. He is a great man, isn't he?

For lunch, we went to a restaurant called "Kitasato Baran," also just a short walk away.

We had a delicious curry cutlet with thick (red beef?) meat. We had a delicious curry with pork cutlet filled with thick (red beef?) meat.

On the way back, I dropped in at San-ai Rest House. If it is usual this time of year, it will be the effect of the earthquake though it is a parking lot of heavy congestion, but it is not that much. I hardly saw any tourist buses this time, not only in the parking lot.

This is a parking lot that often attracts motorcycles, but again, the number is much smaller than usual. On a nice Sunday at this time of the year, there will be an overflow of bikes. At this time of the day (after noon), you can see many kinds of bikes. It is a little sad because it is not as lively as usual.

I stopped by Ubuyama Ranch, but there were fewer than usual.

I also went to the Minamiaso side. Minami Aso is quieter and has a different atmosphere than before. I hope that Aso will soon be back to the lively and bustling place it used to be with many tourists. I would like to support them as much as I can by visiting them more than ever.

The photo below shows a place about 1 km from the Minami-Aso side of the Aso Ohashi Bridge, which collapsed due to the earthquake, and was closed to traffic and off-limits. Some people (including some with children) ignored the situation and entered the area, which was a bit nerve-wracking. Of course, I did not do so and made a U-turn and headed home. After returning home, I saw on Google's satellite image that the road had collapsed just to the right of the photo of this location.

After this, I went home through Mashiki Town via Green Road. Mashiki Town is located a few kilometers from my home and I used to use it as a touring and commuting route in the direction of Aso. I had seen the post-disaster scenes in Mashiro many times on TV, and was quite shocked to see the usual Mashiro town in ruins, but I was even more shocked to actually go there and see it with my own eyes. I had the impression that every part of the town I remembered had been deliberately destroyed by someone's will. My own house also suffered from falling roof tiles and collapsed walls, but the scale and level of the destruction was so different. I think for the first time I understood why a friend of mine who suffered from the Great Hanshin Earthquake once told me, "Come and see what a natural disaster looks like while you still can. Although what we can do is limited, we will do what we can to help Mashiki Town and other affected areas recover as soon as possible.

Hello, RPV.

Well, this earthquake was amazing. The past few days have been tough with cleaning up around the house and outside.

We would like to take this opportunity to again thank those who have expressed their sympathy and encouragement.

Well, as soon as possible, I went fishing in Amakusa before the earthquake.

We caught about 30 horse mackerels about 20 cm in length.

The best sashimi is freshly caught fish. Well, whatever the case, if you are going to eat it, you will have to dismantle the fish. So, what you need is a knife. Recently, stainless steel knives, which are rust-resistant and clean, have become the mainstream, but I use a handmade Japanese kitchen knife forged from iron. The image below is a handmade small knife made by a knife shop (blacksmith shop) in Kumamoto.

 

I am not familiar with the process of making interrupted Japanese knives, but it is said that they are forged by interrupting a hard metal (which is also iron) that will become the blade into the iron material that will be the base of the knife. I think the quality of the work is determined by how the different metals (though they are the same iron) are joined together by heat and pressure.

So I was curious to see if I could scan it with an X-ray CT scanner to check the internal condition. It will be interesting to see if the metals are distinguishable from each other in the work. I expect that it would be difficult to tell them apart because they are made of the same material, iron, and the amount of X-rays transmitted through them is about the same. It will also be interesting to see how well the metals are bonded (adhered?) to each other. It will be interesting to see how well the metals are bonded (adhered?) to each other.

In the image below, the top and bottom left images and the top right image are cross-sectional images, and the bottom right is a 3D image. The red circles are linked from three different directions and magnification rates have been changed to make them easier to see. The images are still the same steel, so no differences can be detected.

 

This is the upper left magnified cross-sectional image of the above image.

Next is a little more toward the middle from the tip. Similarly, there is no particular change.

Next is a little behind the middle. There is nothing special here either.

The last one is in the middle of the knife. An elongated void can be seen. This is an authentic interrupted knife, so the joint in this area must be tight. Well, the existence of this void is the proof of authentic interrupted forged Japanese kitchen knives. The blade, which determines the sharpness of the knife, was beautifully jointed in every part. As I said, handmade kitchen knives by Japanese blacksmiths are wonderful.

This is an enlarged cross-sectional image of the upper right of the image above. A small gap exists, perhaps to allow the blade to break in.

As a conclusion, as expected, we could not distinguish between the different types of steel, which was the most important thing to know, and the important joints of the knife were confirmed to be perfectly joined all along the blade without any defects. The X-ray CT scanner was able to detect voids around the center of the knife, which are inevitably present because metal is broken into metal in the production of knives.

If you are unable to predict whether or not an X-ray CT scan can be used for observation in this way, we would be happy to provide you with our free sample imaging. Although we can only provide you with one or two cross-sectional images, we think it will help you decide whether or not to request the service.

Japanese knives have excellent sharpness and rust can be prevented with simple maintenance, and if they are sharpened with a whetstone, their sharpness will be restored. Stainless steel knives are made of hard material, so it is said that it is difficult to sharpen them with a whetstone.

Of course, I used this Japanese knife to cut the horse mackerel into sashimi and fry it, and it was delicious. The quality of this knife is impeccable and will continue to serve me in my kitchen for many years to come.

*The enlarged image was created additionally later, so its position is slightly different from that of the quadripartite image.

To all of our business partners

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your immediate and heartfelt sympathy in the wake of the recent earthquake that struck our region.
Our company was also affected by the damage, and although we were unable to operate at first, we have been able to resume operations today.
From now on, all of our employees will work together as one, and we will be more committed to our business than ever before.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our deepest sympathies for your loss.
Thank you for your continued support.

April 19, 2008

RPV Corporation

Hello, RPV.

The image below is an example of internal observation using an X-ray CT scanner.

It broke the other day and I scanned it at CT for reference and found internal gaps scattered throughout.

It is a tool called a universal extension with a shaft made of carbon and used for windsurfing.

The scanned product is the lower product in the image below.

The upper product was actually broken and the broken part was considered to be unobservable because of the rust.

The gap was 0.3mm in the longitudinal direction at about 4mm when measured with the dimensional measurement function.

I don't know if this gap is good or bad, but as a user I would appreciate it more if it were not there.

We hope this will be helpful to you.