MetalGeek : Code, Metal and Cleverness

Big Aluminum Boxes

I recently had the opportunity to make some large display cases from 1/4" aluminum to house some of the Dead Sea Scrolls for an upcoming exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Aluminum tends to warp and move around a lot from the heat of welding, and the idea of welding all the corners and having it come out perfectly made me pretty nervous. But it all worked out better than I feared. There was certainly warpage to straighten out, but it wasn't so bad that a few whacks with a dead blow hammer couldn't correct it.

clamping the bottom frame

The underside seam here isn't seen, so it only had to be tacked.

I found that welding into a fairly shallow 45° bevel (at about half the plate thickness) was sufficient to join the corners without causing a lot of warpage. Since this had to be more flat and square than strong, it seemed like a good risk to take. The joint was strong enough that I could hammer a sample to about 30° before it would start to break. Keeping the bevel away from the corner kept the corner from melting back.

Mig welding aluminum isn't always pretty. But with my fancy Lincoln PowerMig and its push-pull gun and "pulse on pulse", it worked great. It's at least 5 times faster than Tig welding and it heats up the aluminum far less. Maybe not quite as pretty, but it didn't matter here, as it was all being ground and routed.

I used a 1/8" roundover (climb cut, for a good finish) and 100 grit orbital to even it out.

Gap for the gasket

2 of the finished cases

Windows 7: "display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

Let me get some bitching out of the way before I start. I really hate Windows. I have hated DOS, 3.1, 95, XP, Vista, and now 7. As far as I'm concerned, it's an operating system made in Hell by incompetent demons and why it sets the status quo for most of the world is beyond my understanding. I do still need to use it because not every program I need runs on a Mac or Ubuntu, but I hate it every time I use it. Now to some specifics.

I recently migrated most of my Windows operations to a new and cheap Win7 box (an HP/Compac CQ4010F), because my XP box was in pretty bad shape and the reviews have been mostly good. In my experience, every time MS comes up with a new release, a few things are less annoying, and many things are more annoying. Par for the course and still true.

But I wasn't ready for all the error messages with a brand new clean install, and apparently no solution from all the online answers I could sift through on Google. This was the message:

Display driver stopped responding and has recovered
Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 186.55 stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

In the error logs, the message looks like this:
Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

This happened every time I woke the display up. The error messages appeared after several seconds where the display was essentially frozen. I tried every solution I found including updating the driver, but nothing changed.

I finally found the solution that worked for me by accident. It was simply to turn on the screen saver back on. One can still set the display to turn off, but make sure the screen saver activates first. In my case, I use the screen saver that's a simple black screen, so not much energy is wasted.

The reason I had initially avoided the screen saver is that is what the setup script recommended, so I'd imagine a lot of other people have experienced this issue. I've been using it this way for a couple of weeks, and no more errors. If I switch the screen saver off, the error messages come back.

As they say, your mileage may vary.

GYWO

I never would have made it though the Bush years with my sanity partially intact without David Rees' brilliant Get Your War On. Caution - naughty word warning, but that's how we do.

Gerry

Anne, Joyce, and Gerry, summer of 1978

Gerry and Ellen watch as I hog the net and the rod. Circa 1966.

I really don't know how to process this news at all. My sister Anne called and asked if I was sitting down because she had some very bad news. Gerald Joseph Eckhart, 50 years old, my little brother, took his own life today.

Anyone wishing to moralize about the wrongness of suicide can keep their thoughts to themselves. They simply don't understand depression and the depth of the pain that can come unbidden into one's life. I have struggled with it myself, but managed to keep myself more or less intact long enough to move past it. Medications can help (and still do for me), but they take time to work and can be unpredictable long after you think you've gotten used to them and understand their effects. That Gerry's pain was too much for him to bear is almost impossible for me to grasp.

Gerry was always a stoic, and his ability to withstand pain seemed superhuman. As a child, he once rode his trike off the edge of the porch and cut his head open badly enough to need stitches, but he barely whimpered. In his "fights" with my sisters, I don't recall any of them getting so much as a scratch. But Gerry's arms were frequently a mass of long gouges from their fingernails. It didn't seem to deter him or even bother him much.

Gerry was a product of a very difficult childhood, as were all five of us. My father's undiagnosed mental disease was hard on all of us, but Gerry seemed to bear the brunt of his fury much of the time. My mother said that when my father first saw him as an infant, Gerry reminded him of a guy that he really didn't like. I'll never understand that. Even for my father, it was a loony thing to say.

My father teetered on the knife edge between sanity and madness for much of his life. The nearest I can come to an uneducated post-mortem analysis was that he was rapid-cycling bipolar. Two tours of duty flying bombers in World War II shattered his psyche in a way that I can never fully know. His extremely strict interpretation of Catholicism gave some order to his life, but he also spent a lot of energy trying to convince others of the rightness of that point of view. We, who were under his control, were his subjects. He taught us what he could, though we couldn't possibly live up to his standards or see the visions that he preached to us.

I think Gerry internalized a lot of the abuse, turned it inward against himself. When he was about 12, I remember that he'd put together a couple of models; big goofy cartoonish monster cars that he was very proud of. After a particularly viscous dressing-down from my dad, perhaps one where the models were used as an example of his childishness, Gerry stood at the trashcan outdoors next to our room, weeping and methodically breaking the models into pieces.

Gerry stood up to my father better than I did. Once, I remember how Gerry out-argued him in the middle of one my dad's long harangues where he usually delineated our failings point by point. My father was speechless and Gerry triumphant, but he was nearly throttled before my grandfather walked down the hall. Putting up a calm front for Grandpa saved Gerry's neck. My dad wasn't usually violent, but he sometimes crossed the line.

Driving could become a terror at any minute. Quarreling in the back seat could turn into a screaming lecture on the way to Sunday Mass, which could end with us careening down the road, thinking we were going to die at any second. I remember praying the "Our Father" out loud with Gerry in the shotgun seat of the family station wagon barreling toward certain death. Only to pile out of the wagon moments later and try to get ourselves together and pretend that everything was normal while we walked into to church with my mother and sisters daubing their red eyes. Fear of death morphed into fear that people were going to find out that Dad was nuts.

I haven't been in touch with Gerry much at all during the past 30 years. He found another path, another extreme vision of God and reality just as I was realizing that for me, the idea of Jesus made as much sense as Santa Claus or the Jolly Green Giant. I don't begrudge anyone their ideas, even if I think they are misguided. Many would think my ideas are loony, but so what? We all need to believe in something, and life can be harder on people than anyone can imagine possible. Anything that helps them survive the process is a good thing.

I can't properly describe the pain I've felt in depression. Metaphors can only scratch the surface of an understanding of it. That pain didn't even take me to the brink of death, but I don't know how much more or it I could have withstood.

I'll never know the horror that Gerry faced his last week, but I shudder to think how hard it must have been to face. Those of us left behind now have our pain to bear. I don't think Gerry disregarded that pain, but I don't think he could see it from where he was. The noise in your head can get so loud that you just can't hear anything else.

If you want to judge someone, then judge your own life. The rest of us don't need it. It's not easy to understand what leads someone to a place of such darkness. Understanding can come from experience, or from listening to the experience of others. I only ask that you take these words and know that they come from my heart.

Dragon Clock Tower

I blogged about building this corten dragon-head clock tower earlier (another project designed by Seitu), but I never got around to posting this picture of the piece when it was installed and had a nice patina on it.

Remote Control

Cheapo, no configuration solution for remote jogging and touch-off for my EMC-driven CNC plasma cutter. Six bucks at Amazon. I haven't tested the waterproof claim yet, but for the price, I'm not too worried. The USB cable cost more than the keyboard, and it was really cheap. The keyboard is flexible, so I put it in a frame to hang it on the side of the machine.

Coping and Bending

Here's a recent project utilizing bending and coping for The Science Museum of Minnesota. Mostly 1-1/2" schedule 40 aluminum pipe.

I modified the pattern to a 3-way joint.

I really need to get a new hand remote.

IFixit repair guides

It's so simple to change components in Apple's desktop computers that it usually doesn't require tools, a manual, or more than 5 minutes unless you're staring in slack-jawed amazement at how wonderful it all is. But laptops are a whole nother type deal, as we say in Minnesota. They are by nature 10 pounds of poo in a 5 pound can, and if you can actually figure out how to get them open, it's not easy to figure out which glued down ribbon cable you should pry off first to get at the component you want to swap out.

That's where IFixit's repair guides come in handy. I've now replaced 2 hard drives using their instructions, and it's really a lot easier than I would have thought. It took about half an hour and $100. (via Amazon Prime) to change the 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro to 500GB.

Before doing the switch, I cloned the old little drive to the new big one using a great little utility named SuperDuper! After the switch, upgrading to Snow Leopard went without a hitch and now I have a bunch more room for stupid cat pictures!

IFixit has repair guides for Mac laptops, IPods, and IPhones.

spring winding fail

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever
- David St. Hubbins

I'm reticent to post this, as it will remain forever as a testament to my stupidity. However, I do so for the benefit of humanity, because there is nothing funnier than watching a man blindly fall straight into a trap that he's dug for himself.

It's obvious that the little twisted bit of wire in front of the toolpost shouldn't be there. Yet I didn't see it, or see it as a threat to my skull. Or that since I'd just pulled the feed tube back to load the wire more easily, the uncoiling tail end of the wire would just reach the piece of scrap and bounce it off the splash pan and straight into my head. I was wearing safety glasses, but it could have done major damage if it had hit me more squarely. That I've survived into middle age with two intact eyes and most of 10 fingers is amazing.

What possessed me to record the process still escapes me.

In Memory of Robert Novak

FZ: �The biggest threat to America today is not Communism�it�s moving America toward a fascist theocracy. And everything that�s happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pike.�

Bob Novak: �Oh, Mr. Zappa...do you really think...I mean all kidding aside, in this country, with the permissiveness, that we are moving toward a fascist theocracy?�

FZ: �You bet we are, buddy.�

Before and After

I'm a fussbudget about my work. It may allow me to justify the prices I charge, but I can't seem to help myself, so I sort of have to go with it. To paraphrase Ben Folds, I don't like wasting time on metalwork that won't make me proud.

Of all the facets of metalwork, grinding is probably the one that I enjoy least (with the possible exception of hand unloading plate). It's tedious and often awkward, and it's hard to keep my gloves on because I have to keep running my hand across hot metal to see if it's smooth enough. Which leads to forgetting to put my gloves back on, which often leads to other unhappiness. Anything that makes this process shorter is a very good thing.

Flap discs are a much more effective way to do finish grinding than the way I learned 28 years ago, which was grinding wheels followed by sanding discs. I go through a lot of flap discs, and Lehigh Valley Abrasives (no, they don't pay me) seems to have the best prices around, so that's where I usually get them. I'm looking at a job in stainless steel that will require a lot of grinding and polishing, and they were kind enough to send some samples of their surface conditioning discs. But they included one type of disc in their sample kit that I didn't ask for, and boy am I glad they did. It's called an interleaf quick combination flap disc which "both grinds and finishes in a single step".

It's not really for any rough grinding, but once you get the surface pretty well cleaned up, it will smooth out minor bumps and also polish at the same time. It's sometimes pretty hard to tell if you've got the work smooth enough for powder coating, even with a regular flap disc. I've even resorted to taking a final pass with a brand new disc. This feathers out the grinding nicely, but it can leave grit marks which grab lint off rags like crazy. And that can sometimes leave visible blemishes in the final product, which I really really hate.

The results are really amazing. See for yourself. This is all 1-1/2" steel tubing handrails, with elbows by R&B Wagner.

Yet another bending video

Here's a grainy video from '05 that I just found. I think this was 2" 14 gauge, which is fairly easy to bend. It is a little slippery, though, as you can see. At 0:24 the shim I hammered into place goes flying. I don't have any good videos of me landing on my butt and slamming my head into a cart while the steel I was bending landed on top of me, but that's certainly happened a few times.

Big gear

This is a big DIY spur gear for a turntable. It's 12 feet of 8 pitch gear rack wrapped around a 1/4" disk. I had to anneal the rack just to get it to bend, and even then it wasn't easy.

Bending again

I just wanted to post some evidence that I can still actually do this.

Large-scale CNC tube cutting

I've toyed with the idea of CNC tube cutting for years, but didn't actually get anything done with it until now. I never would have thought that my first paying gig in this format would be four 120 pound, two foot diameter Corten steel barrels. But the CNC method sure did save a lot of time and pain over doing it by hand. My arms hurt enough already.

The big spur gear was made by simply wrapping a piece of gear rack around a disk. The small amount of irregularity is absorbed by the spring on the motor mount. I just swapped out my Y axis for the rotary one, so the cutting file was a simple 2D pattern.

The lids were made by pulling a flat piece of steel down into a doughnut shaped jig. The amount of force required to do this was amazing, and I had to use a 2 foot cheater bar on the wrench. I ended up using a 3/4" threaded rod, because I was worried the 1/2" rod in this picture might snap off and shoot through the roof.

The goal of the project was to create some artful recycling containers for downtown Saint Paul's tiny but beautiful Mears Park. One problem with recycling in public places is that the cans need to look different enough from trash cans so that people don't throw trash in them. These definitely look different. They were designed by Seitu Jones for Eureka Recycling and Public Arts Saint Paul. The tubes were rolled by Linders Specialty.