I'm not much of a self promoter. This isn't a conscious decision mind you, just the way I'm wired. At work it's a different story. At the point it was made clear to me that I would not advance from where I was at I began actively downplaying my various skill sets. Feeling, as I do, that I'm grossly underpaid for the work I currently do, I don't really enjoy the idea of doing more for no more pay. There's a problem though. I'm not good at not working. Again this is just something about how I'm wired. Some people might be ok with sitting around doing nothing when they know they've done all the work that they have.
I can't stand that shit.
I would much rather be doing something than sitting around counting seconds off the clock. It's like a chaos theory thing. If you put me in a situation where it's clear something needs to be done, I will eventually just do it, even if I'm never specifically told to do so. This is how I wound up building shit at work. When testing vacuums we often have to build fixtures to test whatever specific thing. Since each vacuum is slightly different we can't have stock fixtures that work for everything, rather they have to be built to order. These tend to be unsightly things made out of 2 x 4s that have a hundred different holes in them from past tests. These tend to be things I could build in my sleep, but I don't point that out because I already do enough there. The result of this is that when it came time to build a test fixture that needed to look good and last, I was not consulted. Of course, since I had no work to do at the time, I started helping the guy who had very specifically been tagged to build it. He had some other work come up and I didn't, so I kept working on it and it eventually became 100% my project. This exact thing happened two more times and now we're at a point where my boss will come to me and say:
"So here's this idea I have...now make it real."
For example. The test we do to determine the suction power of a vacuum requires us to use this clay stuff (known colloquially as permagum) to secure the nozzle to this box. Permagum is pretty sticky and kind of a pain to work with. To mitigate that, we have something like this:
It's what's known as an arbor press. The one we have has a little canister on the bottom that you fill with permagum, then when you pull the lever it forces it out through a small hole in the bottom which extrudes a nice half inch or so thick rope. That, apparently, is too much work. In fairness, when it gets cold in the lab the stuff is really hard to work with and I have had, on at least one occasion, to hang my entire body weight on the lever to get the stuff to extrude. Still didn't seem that hard to me. But what do I know. My boss had apparently, from day one (ten or so years ago), wanted to have a fixture built that would use an air cylinder to force the stuff out. Problem was to buy an air cylinder that would work for this would cost well over a thousand dollars. No way anyone was going to agree to that. Recently however, my boss was given an air cylinder that he had his eyes on (again from day one) but for some reason could never get, despite that fact that it hasn't been used in ten years.
So he comes to me and says "Mike, here's a giant air cylinder, I want you to make a machine using this that extrudes permagum."
Wow, that DOES seem like a compelling use of my time.
It seemed especially compelling when, after explaining to some of my co-workers what he wanted me to, they said "so you're making a play-doh factory?" Huh, guess so. To ramp up the degree of difficulty for this project I put some rules in place.
1. I had to do all the work myself. You might think this would be a given, but we have a machine shop in house with two very talented machinists. In the past when I've built fancier fixtures like this, a lot of what I did was draw up a schematic and then work with them to get it built. Not so this time. Any metal work or fabrication that needed doing, I would do myself.
2. It had to be made from found parts. Normally when building something from scratch we have some leeway to order parts. I didn't think I would get approval to buy anything for this, so from the jump I said fuck it.
as far as the design was concerned.
3. It had to have some clear improvements over the current system. Not having to the lever would be an improvement, but that by itself wouldn't be enough. If in making this any ease of use was sacrificed compared to the current system, there would be no point. This meant it had to be just as easy to load as the current system (which, again, consists of just putting the permagum in a small canister).
4. Safety was a concern. This is a powerful cylinder. It can output upwards of 3,000 pounds of force. If you got your finger caught in this machine, it wouldn't just pinch it, it would rip it off.
Well, better get to scrounging for parts.
The Cylinder:
This was pretty much good to go from the start, but given that it dwarfs any other air cylinders we have, we didn't have fittings for it. This meant I had to scrounge together a motley collection of pipe reducers/enlargers to fit the ones that we had onto it.
The Valve:
I should, perhaps, explain the workings of an air cylinder. The idea is that you feed compressed air into one end and the shaft gets pushed out. If you feed air into the other end the shaft retracts. Were you so inclined you could sit there and manually shift the air feeds yourself. That doesn't seem like a good use of anyones time. To fix that, we have valves that you feed air into and then they can switch which end of the air cylinder is getting air at any given time. This particular valve was apparently bought by my boss when he first started and had no idea what he was doing. I'm told it cost a couple thousand dollars. It has never been used. It's way too big for most of our normal applications. Of course for this project it was great because I needed something that was going to be able to get a lot of air to the cylinder. This had the same fittings issue that the cylinder had, which meant wandering around looking for more things that I could use to force the fittings to work.
The Chamber:
Next I needed something I could attach to the cylinder that could be filled with permagum. It had to be something that would be able to take pressure. I also wanted it to be big enough to hold all the permagum we had in the lab as that seemed like something that would be a nice improvement over the current system (current one can only hold about half at a time). This particular pipe came off of some test fixture we inherited from sweden. It has never been used in the entire I've been there and is stored in an area we call the freddy krueger room. There's a dead bird next to it. I had to cut a bit off the end of it as well as cut an opening into it.
The Mounting Plate:
Well the cylinder wasn't made in a way that I could just attach the chamber to it. I originally made a mounting plate out of wood, which worked perfectly and I thought looked fine. My boss apparently hates having wood on test fixtures so he shot that down. Luckily we have all kinds of scrap metal from whatthefuckever things. This was nice as it was just a bit bigger than the cylinder and already had that giant hole in the middle. I had to drill out the holes to mount the chamber to it as well as the holes to mount the plate to the cylinder and the plate to the test stand.
The Plunger:
For this machine to work, the cylinder needed to be fitted with a plunger that would make an almost air tight fit with the chamber. If it was too small the path of least resistance for the permagum would be to back up around the plunger instead of going out through the extrusion hole. I found this in one of our many cabinets, it was a touch to big, so I ground it down until it was the right size.
The Extrusion Plate:This was another piece of whatthefuckever metal that I drilled a hole in. This would be fitted onto the end of the chamber using four pieces of ready rod. (ready rod is like a bolt with no end, just a long piece of threaded metal).
The Flow Control:
I wanted a big ole button that you would press to make the machine go. This had the added bonus of if you were ripping your finger off, you could just stop pressing the button and maybe there'd be enough finger left to sew back on. We for some reason have all sorts of random control things like this lying around, so it was just a matter of getting fittings on it.
The Valve Control:
The valve has four wires coming out of it, two white and two black. If you apply 120 volts to both the white wires, it shifts one way, black, the other way. To make sure you didn't have to switch a plug every time you wanted to change direction, I had to rig up a switch that would change the current for you. I tragically couldn't find any good switches so I had to make a thing. I got a junction box, a junction box cover, a cover for THAT cover, a switch that I thought lit up (it didn't) and a relay. Using some wiring that I assume none of you care enough for me to explain, I wound up with a switch that accomplished what I wanted.
The Cable Management:
But it would look pretty fucking terrible if I had four loose wires coming up from the valve into this junction box. Luckily there was another swedish castaway that had this sweet black thing, so I took it!
The Test Stand:
A number of our test fixtures are built out of this steel strut stuff. It's basically a giant erector set. We have a ton of it sitting around, it was just a matter of me cutting pieces to the sizes I wanted. With a dremel. Cause that's what winners do. It's worth noting that while we have a ton of the struts around, we don't have a ton of the connectors, which meant it took for fucking ever to dig up enough connectors to build that.
The Feet:
Dremel's aren't really precision tools. As a result the frame ended up being slightly uneven. I was already terrified of the tipping hazard this represented as the cylinder weighs close to 100 pounds and would be at the top of this five and a half feet stand. Remember the swedish castaway that donated the black thing? It also gave it's feet to this project. These were nice as it gave the stand an even platform and they could be adjusted to negate any rocking.
In the end this was kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, only if instead of coming in a box the pieces were spread out over a 15,000 square foot area with no sorting method and instead of just fitting together you were given a pair of scissors and told to make it work.
I'd include a picture here of the finished product, but it wouldn't do it justice. It wouldn't do it justice because even with a picture it's hard to fathom this giant machine, over 6 feet tall, 300 or more pounds. A triumph of scavenging, a device so throughly convinced it's something more than what it really is. Perhaps the most shining example of my ability to figure shit out.
People will on occasion ask me what I do for a living. It's a bit of a tightrope walk when answering this as it's difficult to give a good explanation that makes it clear what I do, but also isn't boring as shit. In the future I might just show them this:
Interesting note, the one handed permagum bunching technique shown there earned me the nickname one hand gum (note, one has ever called, or thought about calling me, one hand gum). Had I not changed the soundtrack you would have just heard me laughing hysterically in the background, because when you do something like this, I think laughter is the only proper response.
2 comments:
Awesome! Loved the video.
This is the most epic thing ever. EVER.
Post a Comment