THE FOREWORD
kleinbl00 summoned me. Apologies for being late - If ennui is a disease, I'm suffering from it right now. I realized that my surface-level emotions are stable, but the underlying emotional framework is Not Okay. I'm in a weird mental space right now, and I feel somehow unequipped to participate in Hubski? If I understood why I felt that way, I'd tell y'all. I hope everyone is taking care of themselves!
C'est la rona. What've y'all been up to?
THE AGENDA
Post updates to your projects, announce the beginning of new projects, or just show off what you've done.
THE TAGS
Foveaux, kleinbl00, zebra2, applewood, darlinareyousleepy, elizabeth, Dala, thenewgreen, ilex
I bought linoleum and paper for printmaking at Hobby Lobby on Friday. Why were they even open? Stolen antiquities don't illegally purchase themselves. I also got a bandana. I'm not sure I can even make prints with what I have on hand but I can carve blocks. I've been mulling what to do because of this which is a good strategy for printmaking so whatever I guess I also started to write a story about one of the many times I've been a gigantic dumbass but I'm pretty much at the first editing phase so I set it aside so I could watch videos and have mild panic symptoms over viruses and whatever the fuck has been happening in my apartment for six weeks or so
I heard the logo was shit but the text of the first link seems appropriate
Still... allowing for the primacy of science over good-feelings and woo-woo thinking is a slippery slope for institutions based on religion... this doesn't end well for them, regardless of the messaging on this specific issue. Wait until someone tells them about the multiple authors of the books of the bible...
I think you should let yourself off the hook. I think you are FAR from alone. I'm trying to forgive myself a lot these days. Everything is different - how could we expect ourselves to not be affected? Thanks for posting the craft fair.... I've been not in a good place emotionally enough to even look at the threads until now. Thanks for making the world a little better.If ennui is a disease, I'm suffering from it right now. I realized that my surface-level emotions are stable, but the underlying emotional framework is Not Okay. I'm in a weird mental space right now, and I feel somehow unequipped to participate in Hubski? If I understood why I felt that way, I'd tell y'all.
Hey man, we gotta push back the dark somehow. An old hubski sticker on a long-since retired journal begs the question, "What can be learned?" Not to box anyone into a particular interpretation, but the question has always felt ambitious to me - it's a guiding light of the discourse we have here, a fundamental principle from which all goals can be derived. It's also a question from a frame of mind that feels incredibly foreign right now, but searching for the emotional means to express myself...The incongruity of it feels nostalgic, and I think that nostalgia bears the mark of an ambition that I've set down for the time being. It was a guiding principle before, and I think that principle has changed meaning for me while we all search for normalcy: The goal is to return to the mindset that created this account in the first place. The ennui is dissonance between the goals that we made and the reality we're living, and "What can be learned?" is a lighthouse back to the person who made those goals. If I can stick with that understanding, I think I'll come out of this a little stronger. Sorry for rambling, I hope the purple prose doesn't eclipse my meaning.Thanks for making the world a little better.
It's been a while since a thread! I've been crafting away :) Made a little origami shape! It took longer than expected, but I like how it turned out. If i had some BIG piece of paper, it could look quite neat as a huge geometrical thing. Inspired by all the print-making on Hubski (but maybe not invested enough to spend 50$ on a kit just yet) I made a stamp from a potato! I actually quite like how it turned out, might experiment with more potatoes before pulling the trigger. The issue is not in the price of the kit itself. The issue is that I have lots of crafts I'd lie to try, so If i cave I'd spend 50$ on a kit every 3 days. For example, I'd really like to get some black dye/bleach and give a second life to some of my old clothes. Been giving priority to the things I can do with the stuff at home already or the super cheap crafts. Tried my hand at upholstering for the first time too. My friend sublets a room in a big mansion ( think they turned some X-man scenes in there), and the owners were throwing away the chair because the back was broken and the seat was not great. Re-glued the back with wood glue (a bit sloppily honestly, but who's gonna notice?) and re-did the seat using an old t-shit and a textured fabric from a skirt that was gifted to be, and too small. I find the bright green gives it a nice modern look. It took a few hours, but it's not as hard as I first imagined it would be. Gives me confidence to try some more projects of the sort in the future! Next project is to build a box for my gardening attempt this summer. I find it's a big too small as is, so i'm gonna cut the back wall in half and use the pieces to make the box longer. Will find some shittier wood somewhere for the back wall. My friend said it's still too early to even start the grain inside, so right now I planted some dill and got some green onion in water on the windowsill. Waiting a bit before starting the rest. I've also been enjoying doodling/drawing again.Mostly re-drawing from photos, or images on the internet to get back into it. It's fun, but I find a lot of my drawing really unoriginal and basic. I will need to keep going to evolve more of a direction or style, and generally go beyond the typical things everybody draws. Also on my potential crafts list is some papier maché stuff and to find a barrel to start composting in the back garden.
Been busy. So a casting furnace uses about 1400W (1450 according to the kill-a-watt). An enameling kiln uses about 1600W. I don't know what the vacuum investment machine uses because 3000W/110V=27A which is more than household wiring or a 110V circuit breaker can handle so it's time to get medieval on it. Fortunately we're in the garage and all the romex is surface in here anyway so we'll just continue a trend. Pretty? No. Done in 3 hours? Yes. There was a lull while I talked to my brother-in-law the electrician because those are 400A cables direct from the box with no way to turn things off. But the "mains", which are a pair of 30A breakers just sorta slapped in the middle of the box, do work as "mains" presuming you don't need to turn off the "furnace" (whose wires go nowhere ever since this place was switched from fuel oil) or "water heater" (which has long since been replaced with gas). So really what I've got is 60A service to the house, then unholy mother-of-god cables from the meter to the box, then I'm really only using half of the box which is okay 'cuz I've got like 12 slots to slap breakers in. But it was... dicey for a minute there. MOAR POWWWWWAAAAAHHHHH Worthy of note: I started with 100 feet of romex and this is what was left. Cut that shit close. Actually wouldn't have made it if I came through the bottom of the box rather than the top. So now I've got a handful of 12/2 scraps, 4 shiny new outlets, 3 shiny new circuits and a melting furnace I haven't used yet. Hmmmm.... So the way you make casting grain is by melting your shit, raising the flask to a reasonable height and then dropping molten whatever through water so that it turns to globules of glorious roundness before it hits the bottom, which is steel. Some of us have 1L vases. I sent a picture of this to my buddy when he asked if I had a 20gal steel bucket. I sent him this said "no LOL but I'm bored." He responded with "be sure to film it because it's going to explode LOL" "R U HAPPI NAU" "Fill it up to the top" So this is an after-shot because I'm not stupid enough to film molten metal with one hand and pour it with the other. Interesting discoveries: (1) Borax ignites in a burst of flame when you sprinkle it, causing you to spill (2) a carbon crucible raised to 1085c glows read-by-the-light-of-it orange (3) the difference between "not pouring" and "dumping immediately to the ground" is about 1 degree of tilt. But hey, when you're done? 114g of 99.95% copper! My buddy suggested that if I was feeling bold I could savage some old batteries for the zinc, melt it down and cast my own brass. I also didn't take any pictures of the excitement associated with savaging Costco AA batts for their zinc; suffice it to say that there was enough sparks, inadvertent heat and spitting electrolytes that I opted out. I did recall, however, that I had a fair amount of useless sterling scrap and my buddy has done a lot with shibuichi so let's melt some more stuff! I'm prolly gonna calculate how much 90/10 shibuichi I can make with what I have on hand and get goofy with it. I figure this casting won't need supporting, has limited surface detail and will take on a wicked cool patina if I cook it right and what I'll be left with is an awesome little keychain-sized keepsake to embolden me before emarking on bigger, badder stuff. 'cuz the real problem is a principle consumable in 3D printing is 99% isopropyl alcohol. Since I don't know when that shit will be available again, I'm having to be creative but this one? This one I think I need to do. Because reasons.
I am jelly. I've always wanted to be able to "melt stuff". Can one pour into a plaster or clay mold? You also reminded me of John's Grill in San Fran, and the amazing creamed spinach they have. Post-pandemic, I am getting a steak there.
Hell, you can pour into sand. I helped melt a lot of things in college but I try not to give casting advice on the internet because it's dangerous and I'm not an expert on the finer points. Wanna see an arrogant graduate student cause small explosions inside a large mold filmed with a potato?
My professor was a "badass biker" who wanted to kill that guy for that stunt. And other things. I can hear him at the end. Even badass bikers sometimes lay awake at night worrying about a student getting a third degree burn and shutting down every iron foundry program in the country I will check out your video when I get a chance. I like it when I force the YouTube algorithm to show me stuff like that for like a week
Yeah, foundry guys and machine shop guys have the stories that you don't wanna hear too much. half the machine shop stuff you can't watch because it trips Youtube's gore filter. Jewelers can't really compete but they can try; the kilns at my program didn't have peep holes because my instructor had someone in her grad program who peered through it while she shut the door, thereby puffing a couple liters of 1400 degree air right at her cornea. Autoplay on myfordboy is like a japanese meditation.
Melting stuff is easy. You need flame. Youtube thinks the way to melt stuff is put stuff in a stainless steel pan, put it on the stove and hit it with a blowtorch. Youtube is stupid. I'm fond of crappy Chinese melting furnaces that are ripoffs of crappy Italian melting furnaces that cost 4x as much. There are no non-crappy melting furnaces for less than $5k so the $250 one gets my vote. The "and solidify it in an aesthetically-pleasing and mechanically-useful shape" is where the artistry comes in. What we're tooled up for is called investment casting. You start by making your thingy out of wax or, in this case, stereolithography resin that burns away without ash. You goop it with wax onto the end of the rubber cap shown on the bottom of this thing: You then fill it with "investment" which is basically special plaster with some extremely fine porosity. You suck all the air out of it using this thing: Then you pour the investment in, suck the air out of it again, let that harden and take the rubber bit off and put it in this thing: You then program a "burnout schedule" that heats it up at the right speed to turn the resin into ash while leaving the investment magically delicious. Then after the 12 hours or whatever that takes you heat up your melter, add your metal, pull your drain plug back out, put it in the other hole of the casting machine, suck vacuum on it and add your metal. You let it stop glowing, then you pull the whole thing out and put it in a bucket of water, which causes a thermal shock to knock the plaster to bits. That will be the next step.
I doubt you need anyone telling you that, but make sure to not disturb the surface too much once you get those two molten together. Zinc is crazy eager to oxidise in those conditions, which, once started, causes even more disturbances and splashing. Plus everything around it will be covered in that yellow crap.My buddy suggested that if I was feeling bold I could savage some old batteries for the zinc, melt it down and cast my own brass.
Yeah I've kinda lost interest in savaging batteries. I've got eight pounds of Zamak 2 but I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm told that it doesn't melt hot enough to thermally shock the investment so if I want to make a rock with a nickel center I should try treating this shit like bronze and see what happens.
The Milicri Motorcycle Lives! My mid-life-crisis (mi-li-cri) motorcycle restomod project is back on the menu again. A pro Suzuki mechanic had encouraged me to dump it and move on, because an essential aspect of my design - removing the bulky and klunky airbox - was going to make it VERY hard to get the bike running right. The VX800 is a weird and short-lived sidenote in Suzuki history... which is kinda why I loved it. But part of why it is a side note is that the carburetors on it are just... weird. And finicky. And prone to odd malfunctions. ANYWAY. I posted to my VX800 list that I was going to part it out (sell it for parts) to anyone who wanted them, because my project wasn't going to work. That's when a guy posted photos and descriptions of his HIGHLY modified VX800 ... WITH NO AIRBOX! (And also commented that it isn't hard to get it running will without the airbox, and directions for how to do it.) So, emboldened by this one rare loony on the internet, I have decided to at least get the bike put back together and running. This will still serve my primary goal of the project, which was to get inside the engine and do work in a part of the motor I had never worked on before. So yay! The Milicri (will) lives! I'll post photos here for the two other gearheads on Hubski, so they can laugh at my efforts. :-)
Doin' the down-home cheap teach-yourself-don't-know-nuffin version of digitizing my cats. For a future cat-themed sticker sheet. Mostly just experimenting and learning more about making/drawing/coloring digital art and using a tablet and Clip Studio Pro. There's a crap ton to learn about coloring and layers, but I'm starting with what is familiar enough to be possible and we'll move on from there.
My wife and I made a little birdfeeder out of stuff I had laying around: Most of the wood is left over from our old porch step; it's rotted and split on the edges but the center is in good shape still. Someone local must have milled it 30 or 40 years ago. I need to go online and acquire parts for a clothesline-like contraption to hang this from so it can sit near one of our windows that's otherwise difficult to get to.