Random Nuclear Strikes

Why yes, I did have naughty thoughts at work last week.

All I could think of was threading and baffles and end caps, oh my.

Now silver.

Still in “light duty mode” untill the 21st, but I made a rolling floor. Kind of…..

That’s the better part of $10K in 2inch stainless steel schedule 40 tubing. The rest is either already fitted/welded or hasn’t been cut yet.

There are 120 assemblies requiring 175 cuts on a bandsaw, not including the 476 12 inch legs made of 1-1/4in stainless steel tubing, and some 225 stainless end caps, that need to be welded on, all so that the new Starbucks warehouse can have bumpers to try and keep the forklift drivers from hitting the walls.

I’m not the one who is scheduled to weld the assemblies together, which would make me unhappy except I have been told that the paint crew will be taking their sanders to all the welds until they look seamless.

I’m not so sure I want to have my stainless weld-porn to be erased. Though it would be nice to impress.

I am, however, going to try and get the welding gig when we build the door guards out of 4in and 6in diameter schedule 40 stainless.

Y’all may recall my liking of John Buchan’s early twentieth-century thrillers. One that’s a rollicking read but that I’d always thought more than a bit fanciful is Greenmantle, about a Muslim uprising in the Caucasus, instigated by the non-Muslim Germans, allied with the Turks as they were at the time, to tip the balance in WWI.

Well, here’s a Muslim prophet, Sheikh Mansur, who led an uprising in the late eighteenth century, wore a green shawl, and was secretly an Italian.

h/t: Isegoria.

After damaging myself on Monday last week, I stayed home on Tuesday to let the damage settle itself and went back to work on Wednesday.

To find a project someone else had started, gotten frustrated with, and set aside.

We are building the lot of stairway hand rail for a waste waste treatment plant in Hawaii. It has to be removable because it is of only occasional use and they cannot use mild carbon steel because, well, Hawaii.

So they’re using stainless steel for the occasional hand rail and bronze for the embedded rail pockets as well as the buckets that go in the pockets when the rail is not in use.

Because I know both how to braize bronze and TIG-weld, and because one of my hands is down by 20% and I’m technically on light-duty, I got to TIG-braize me some bronze.

There are 32 pocket fills to go with the 32 embedded rail pockets. These each got a 1/2in hole drilled in the top both so that they wouldn’t float out and so that they’d be easier to pick out of the embedded pocket so the stainless steel rail could go in.

I didn’t get a chance to photograph the pockets as the project was very behind schedule when it got handed to me and they were being swooped up as fast as I could get them finished.

For future reference: Bronze braizing is best done with Oxy-Acetelyne fire, but is very, very slow. Using electric fire is faster but not very pretty. Also, it acts very much like aluminum, except before it wets up, you’ll hear something similar to radio static and that is when you dip and move. If you wait to see the puddle, you’ll start blowing out. And lastly, there is beau-coup zinc in bronce. Watch out for metal poisoning.

Do you got the mad Do It Yourself skills?

Want to build a house for you and your family, but that sounds like a bit much to tackle?

Start here: Build Your Own Teardrop Trailer

Dave the RNS Photographer bought himself a very awesome one a while back, and I’ve envied it. But it cost a very pretty penny that I don’t have.

I’ve thought about buidling my own from the wheels up, until I discovered how much of a PITA it is to license a home-built trailer.

But these guys start out with one of those flat 4ft x 8ft trailers you can buy from a Chinese import store and build from there. I’d have to scale up, because that is what I always do, but the idea is the same.