Not @ Work

Casting Wrapup

2026-06-03T00:00:00-05:00

When we left off at spring break, I’d started a bunch of assigned pieces and was playing around with castable 3D Printing filament. In the second half of the class I did several more assigned projects and cast way too many 3D Prints.

Obligatory “more images here” link: Casting 1 JLRY-1409 | Flickr

When ordering jewelry supplies, I always check the website for special sales. One of the things I noticed this time was a ridiculous 20mm onyx for something like $8. How could I resist? I started sculpting a ring to hold it. The base of the stone was hexagonal, so I tried to make the planes of the band smoothly transition into the faces of the stone. I don’t know how to set stones with prongs, so this would be set like the cabochons from last semester. I formed a bezel around the stone in wax. It cast reasonably well.

Unfortunately, reasonably well doesn’t really cut it for getting a stone to fit nicely into a bezel, so I spent a lot of time trying to grind out the recess to fit better. I went as far as machining a steel hexagonal punch to form the bronze around (this didn’t really help).

Once the stone fit into the recess well enough, I secured the stone with wax and tried tapping the bezel tight. My nemesis, work holding, reared its head again. This time I tried using thermo loc (a material that becomes pliable in hot water, but is rigid at room temperature) and a jeweler’s vise. For my silver bezels last semester, I was able to push the metal around with a tool, but the bronze was hard enough that I had to hit it. I used a small chasing tool and a chasing hammer.

I hit it too hard and damaged the bezel during the tightening. It was already marginal because of all of the grinding I had to do to get it to fit the stone, and I was striking too hard or the chasing tool didn’t have a large enough surface area. A crack spread along one side and there was visible denting elsewhere.

I think I’m going to pop the stone out of this ring and use it for something else (a pendant?). Partly because I’m disappointed with how the bezel came out, but also because it’s quite uncomfortable for me to wear. It’s just too large a mass on my finger.

I definitely learned a lot in this project.

The next assigned project was a sheet wax box. I decided to interpret this liberally and made a thumb-sized hexagonal vase. I designed the object in CAD, printed out a template, and cut the sheet wax to size. I used the wax pen to join the pieces together. In retrospect, I wish I’d worked a little harder on the surface of those joins, because I had a lot of filing to do after casting. I tried doing some of this at home with a Dremel hand-held rotary tool. It made me really appreciate the foot pedal on the flex-shaft rotary tools in ACC’s Jewelry labs. Being able to vary the speed as you go is very helpful.

There were some porosity spots and scratches in the vase, so my instructor suggested I try a rotary planishing tool. Planishing involves imparting a surface texture to a sheet by hitting it a lot (often a smooth texture or intentional faceting). I did a ton of this in the Art Metals class back in 2024 with a hammer. The rotary planisher is a piece of steel with corners that hit the surface as it spins. Definitely a lot faster to get a lot of hits in than with a hammer… I’m pretty happy with the finish I got on this.

Interlude: 3D Printing Miniatures…

I was pretty unsatisfied with the results of casting with filament prints, even with a 0.25mm nozzle, so I switched to resin prints. Resin printers promise a resolution about ten times finer than that (25 μm). I tried printing with a special wax-based resin so that it burns out with practically no ash. It turned out to be a giant pain to work with. I had terrible layer adhesion and parts would just fail in the middle. I’d be lucky to get a couple salvageable models out of a tray of a dozen. On the plus side, resin printing prints a whole layer at once, so it doesn’t take any more time to print a dozen models than it does to print one.

To see if I could, I tried printing a custom model of a Pathfinder (NOT D&D) character of mine that I’d worked up on HeroForge. Initially, I tried spruing it for casting using traditional wax. Predictably, this led to a globby mess because the wax didn’t stick very well to the print and I had to use too much.

Because of my abysmal printing success rate with the wax resin, I tried the same print using a conventional ABS-like resin. I got a terrible surface texture on that, probably because the resin didn’t burn out completely and stuck to the plaster. I went back to the wax resin and started focusing on designing casting sprues to be printed, rather than attached after the printing.

By the end of the semester, I did dial it in well enough to get a good cast of the miniature.

… End Interlude

We had a guest presenter for one of our classes. Chad gave us some tips for casting organics. Instead of sculpting plants or insects in wax, why not cast the actual plants or insects? I mean, besides the obvious: they’ll be immolated in the kiln. I bought some succulents, and cast some of the ones that the cats didn’t eat before I could bring them in to class. This worked really well!

A surprise: when casting, you need to know how much metal to use. Theoretically, you want to use the same volume of metal (with some to spare for the sprues and button) as your model. Measuring volume of irregular objects is a challenge (before you say “Eureka!”… water displacement is surprisingly hard at this scale).

Happily, the density of jeweler’s wax is well known, as is that of each of the metals we’re using, so we can get away with weighing with a conversion factor (ancient bronze is 9 times heavier than wax, sterling silver is 11 times heavier).

We guessed that the succulents would be about as dense as the wax, but it turned out they were significantly less dense. This meant that I didn’t melt enough metal to fill the whole mold. As a result, the bottom leaves of the succulent just… end… at a certain point. This does mean that the casting has a flat bottom so it sits on a table better.

Another surprise: just how hard it is to clean investment from between the leaves of a succulent. I ended up actually buying an ultrasonic cleaner for home and just running the casting through it in a beaker full of vinegar until the plaster dissolved.

The final assigned project for the class was a dome ring. This was mostly an exercise in precision wax sculpting. We were given detailed instructions on how to scribe certain marks on a ring blank and then smooth that down to a ring with a large domed crown and a hollow behind it. This was actually somewhat like my chunky onyx ring, but designed by someone who’d actually considered the ergonomics of a ring before carving.

I’m pretty happy with how my carving turned out, and the ring fit my partner’s finger, so I decided to splurge and cast it in silver. I hollowed out the ring to about a 2mm thickness throughout to minimize the weight.

The results were… weird.

I didn’t get an in focus picture of the surface of the ring, but it was very rough, with strange coloration. I took it to the department chair who suggested two things had gone wrong: I had gotten the silver too hot, and the silver hadn’t been pure. If investment isn’t fully cleaned off of a casting and the metal is re-used, impurities build up in the silver.

He pointed out another problem. There was a giant bubble under the dome. After going to all of the trouble to hollow out the dome, I sprued it so that it was standing straight up, meaning that air was trapped under the dome as I poured the investment into the flask. Oops.

I polished the ring anyway, hoping to smooth out the rough surface, and something extraordinary happened.

The surface problems weren’t surface problems at all. They were porosity throughout the metal. When polished, the pretense of a smooth surface dissolved and left a cratered texture. The ring looks like a piece of the moon!

What could have caused all of that impurity?

Interlude: 3D Printing dodecahedra…

I mentioned those dodecahedra that I’d cast in bronze from filament 3D prints in an earlier post. Well, I never gave up on that. I kept iterating. I was unhappy with the marks that the autogenerated sprues for printing left on the surface, so I modeled custom sprues… I wanted to add a bail so the dodecahedron could be used as a pendant, and rather than try to solder it on, I modeled that too… My instructor suggested that they’d make good earrings, so I worked on making them smaller… I couldn’t get the surface texture perfect, so I tried curing the resin prints under glycerin so they wouldn’t be exposed to oxygen during the cure…

At the beginning of the semester, our instructor told us we could expect to cast around 6 times in the class. I cast at least 24 times. My records are incomplete because sometimes I would cast multiple flasks on the same day with multiple prints of trees of dodecahedra, and only write down the weights for one.

The general rule of thumb is that you should use at least 50% “new” silver in each casting. But I’d only bought a certain amount of silver, and by the end of the semester, I’d utterly abandoned that rule and was casting 90% buttons or scraps.

So. That’s probably why the moon ring came out that way. And maybe I’d get better surfaces if I just used new silver. Good thing I’m taking Casting II next semester!

Advanced Fabrication

2026-05-27T00:00:00-05:00

Well, I totally failed to keep up with this journal during the semester, and this class was most of the reason why. Advanced Layout & Fabrication is a capstone class in the Architectural and Ornamental Metal program. I was hesitant to take any other classes at the same time, because I could see myself sinking a huge amount of time into this one. I fortuitously messed up my registration, so I ended up taking only one other class, which worked out well.

As usual, more and larger photos on Flickr: Advanced Fabrication WLDG-2435

The class is project based. Each student pitches something to the teacher, who acts like a “client”. We produce sketches, then full-sized plans, material lists, cost estimates, schedules, prototypes and samples for the “client” to evaluate. If all of that gets the nod, we try to build the actual thing.

I pitched building a front door. The project is supposed to have repeated elements, and our entryway already has a cephalopod theme, so the door would have a tentacle motif. Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided to make a “Dutch” door, where there top and bottom panels swing independently so that our cats don’t escape when we open the door. And, because it seemed like a good idea, I designed the door to have a thermal barrier layer rather than letting the metal transmit temperature changes from the outside in.

My professor accepted the pitch and told me that he was looking forward to having me in the class again next semester.

I spent the first few weeks sketching the door and then building a detailed 3D model, including all of the layers, fasteners, etc.

Tentacles

There were a lot of complicated parts of the design, but I started out by focusing on the repeated elements. I had designed the tentacle elements so that, while they had a lot of variation in length and positioning, they were all based on a single S-curve.

I used the fly press to make a two-piece “castle” jig. Like the crenellations of a castle wall, there are two levels to the jig. First the taller piece is used to bend one radius of the S-curve, then the piece is dropped to bend the reverse curve with the shorter piece. If the two pieces were the same height, the jig for the second bend would be in the way of the first bend.

I used my old friend, the fly press, to bend the basic curves. Then I welded the pieces together.

The jig ended up working quite well. I’d heat a steel bar in the forge, and bring it over to the jig. I’d use a large vise grip to clamp the hot bar on the far end, and then pull the bar into the curve. A second vise grip would lock in the bend. Then I’d remove both of those clamps, lower the piece an inch, reapply the first clamp, and pull the bar into the second curve. Finally, another clamp would lock in the second curve.

The bar is then taken back to the forge and the process is repeated on the other side to create a wavy bar (not an Ω shape, why would you mention that?). One key thing that I needed to work out was the length of the bar that would make the curves line up properly since I bent from the ends of the bar towards the middle (29”, if you’re curious).

To turn the double S into a tentacle, a single extra bend is made at the middle of the bar. I used induction forge to heat just that area. I made a jig with a couple of pins to do this bend, but I found it easier to just bend it by hand. The great thing about the induction forge is that the heat is isolated enough that you can hold the two ends in your bare hands and bend the middle. I don’t have any pictures of this because of my limited number of hands.

All of this bending is basically impossible to align perfectly, but the tentacles need to be planar to fit the sheet metal properly. To remove any twists, I took them back to the forge, got them good and hot, and then set a heavy plate on them.

Prototyping

To check the techniques needed for the overall project, I made a sample piece. I mocked up a corner of the bar I’d use for the frame and tested which corner style I liked for the sheet metal. I wanted the finished piece to show the frame, and I didn’t like the slightly rolled corner of the folded inset version. So the flush inset version won out.

Next, I tested setting a tentacle into the sheet. I welded in a short tentacle sample to a piece of bar. I roughed out the shape with a plasma cutter and used a die grinder and dynafile to clean up the edges.

Finally, an angle iron shelf is welded to the bar to support the double-sided tape that will hold the sheet metal in place. The result looks good. But it’s important to not get cocky, there’s a lot of work to go…

Frames

In order for the door to fit well in a door frame, the nearly-square frames of the panels need to match precisely. The first task is to straighten the .75” bar. You might think that steel fresh from the mill would be straight. It is not.

I used a large framer’s T-square as a straightedge to figure out where the bar deviated and then used a fly press to make small bends until I was happy with the alignment in each plane. I hoped there wasn’t much twist in the bars, because that would have been much harder to fix.

I cut the bars to length and mitered them using a horizontal bandsaw. I spent a lot of time trying to get a perfect 45° miter, but could have been less precise on this (foreshadowing!). This is done by making a cut you hope is right and then hold the two pieces so they form a corner. You use a square to check if they make a perfect 90° by looking for gaps on the legs of the square that let light through. If you see light, you figure out which direction to adjust the saw, and try to not overshoot. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any really trustworthy squares available. I should have brought a machinist’s square in from home.

Rather than welding the two faces of the door to each other, the plan was to use bolts. In the most ridiculous gesture in this project so far, I opted to use a CNC milling machine as a glorified drill press to drill and countersink the holes for the bolts, which go all the way through the inner frame and halfway into the outer frame so they are not visible on the outside of the door. The CNC mill lets me be sure I get the depths uniform, but just using a drill press would have been much, much faster because the mill doesn’t have enough travel to do the whole bar at once, so it needs to be repositioned in the middle. The important thing is not the absolute placement of the holes, just that they match the ones on the corresponding frame and aren’t off by enough to look weird.

But there are good reasons to use a CNC mill for some of this: the recesses for the hinge and the doorknob/lock box need to be cut, and this is quite difficult using other techniques. Oh, and while we’re doing that, we might as well machine the miters to be exactly 45°. So much time wasted trying to dial in that bandsaw…

While the frames of the door panels would be made of bar stock, the panels themselves would be made of sheet. But how to attach them? Welding them using traditional processes (MIG or TIG) would introduce a lot of heat and cause the sheet metal to warp. Instead, the plan was to attach small angle iron (0.5”) shelves to the frames with a small number of welds and use very strong tape to attach the sheet metal to the shelves.

It was finally time to weld each frame together. One of the challenges of welding is distortion caused by heat. Welding introduces enough heat to melt metal, so it can cause warping, and then as the weld cools it wants to contract, which introduces further warping. To counteract this, I fully constructed the frame, so that the bolts and the other panel would anchor the places I was welding. More importantly, I used “counterposed” welds, moving quickly through a sequence of welds that oppose each other as they cool.

There was one corner where I had trimmed the bars too much, and there was a slight gap. I tacked one face and then welded in a shim to fill the gap.

After tacking (two tacks on one face, one on the other), these welds were ground flat. They looked good, so the next task was welding it out, making a complete bead from the inside corner to the outside corner. These welds were then ground flat. Finally, the corner edges from the front face to the back face were welded out. The inside corners were never welded. Once everything was fully welded, it was all cleaned up one more time with an angle grinder and then fine-tuned with a file.

Sheet Metal Back

I mentioned earlier that the faces of the door would be sheet metal. One of them was pretty simple, just a sheet of 16 gauge (~1/16th”) steel in a rectangle, with a circular hole. Easy, right?

I cut the sheet with the big hydraulic sheet metal shear, which — happily — is back online. It was out of commission when I took Intermediate Layout, and we did all of the straight shearing with a stomp shear, cutting with body weight. Doing that for 16 gauge steel would have been really pushing it.

The hardest part of the shearing process was making sure the cuts were square to the edges of the frame. I couldn’t use the squaring guide along the side of the shear, because who knows how square it is? Also, maybe my frame isn’t perfectly square itself. It’s more important that the sheet matches it than that the sheet is itself square. In the end, this involved a lot of sighting scribed lines transferred from the frame along the blade of the shear.

The other cut in the back side is the circular cutout for the doorknob. I made this cut by putting the weld-in lockbox in place to establish the location of the hole, and then using a mag drill to make a straight cut using a hole saw. This was a fairly ridiculous operation because the drill didn’t have enough clearance for it to sit flat on the sheet. The whole point of a magnetic drill is that you can position it on the thing you want to drill, turn the magnet on, and know that it will stay aligned as you drill. I ended up clamping supports to the sheet, magnetizing the drill to those, and drilling down through the lock box. Needless to say, a different technique was used for the other sheet.

After the cutting, it was important that that sheet actually be flat. I did this with a sheet metal roller. I used this tool a lot in the lamp project in Intermediate Layout & Fabrication, but we’re not trying to get a cylinder or cone here, just a flat sheet. It took about half an hour of running it back and forth through the roller, tweaking the settings slightly each time, to get it flat throughout.

Tentacle Placement

The other sheet metal panel was far less straightforward. For starters, it could only be fabricated once the exact shapes and placements of the tentacles were established. Time to weld them in!

The tricky part welding them was again planarity. Welding oddly shaped pieces of metal to the frame would result in weird forces as the metal cooled, and any deviation from the plane would be noticeable. I took advantage of Asmbly’s fixture table for this. This table was one of the reasons I joined Asmbly in the first place, and I talked about it in one of my furniture projects. The table is a (reasonably) flat surface with a grid of holes every two inches that you can put fixtures in. In this case, I mostly used clamps. This let me secure the frame flat and then hold each tentacle securely against the flat surface while the welds cooled, hopefully freezing them flat. It worked pretty well.

With the tentacles placed, the front sheet could be sheared. Then the tentacles were roughly traced on the sheet.

I experimented with various ways of cutting out the tentacle shapes in the prototyping phase. Of the tools at ACC, only the plasma cutter could reasonably do the job. Freehand plasma cutting a big sheet of metal was pretty nerve-wracking, since there’s essentially no easy way to fix any mistakes. But at least it’s fast! It took less than an hour to rough out the shapes.

Fine-tuning the fit was nowhere near as quick. Over several long days at ACC and Asmbly, I worked to get the sheet to drop in cleanly around the tentacles, using die grinders, dynafiles (essentially finger-sized belt grinders), and the trusty angle grinders and files. A lot of the tuning could be done by working down to the traced outlines, but for the final fitting, I had to resort to repeatedly lifting up an edge, removing some material, and trying to fit it again. By far the most dangerous tool to use was the die grinder. It could very quickly remove too much material!

Like the back, the sheet metal was to be mounted with tape, so shelves needed to be welded in. Segments were welded around the edges, using the fixture table clamps to hold them down and vise grips to hold them to the frame. It wasn’t possible to roll this sheet flat because of all of the cuts, so instead, I installed cross-braces between the tentacles in places where I noticed they tended to buckle.

On this side, I skipped the mag drill for installing the lock box and just used a handheld drill with the hole saw. Much easier, and the flange of the doorknob will cover the edge and hide any slight misalignment.

Painting

Painting is my least favorite part of metal projects. I made life a little easier for myself this time by buying a “comfort grip” handle for the rattle cans, which was actually quite a bit more comfortable. I started with two coats of rusty metal primer. After rollering on a coat of house paint, I decided to get a paint sprayer. Definitely worth it. There was lots of touching up, sanding back, respraying, etc., but I’ll spare you the play-by-play.

The tentacle side of the frame was again more complex. I wanted the steel tentacles to show, but not rust, so I first polished the primer off of them with angle grinder scotch brite discs and then sprayed it with clearcoat. I masked that clearcoat with liquid latex. I then used black spray paint to finish the rest of the frame. Finally, I peeled off the latex mask… which mostly worked.

Taping

The final critical step was taping the sheets to the shelves on the frame. This is almost as nerve-wracking as plasma cutting because the tape is very sticky and it’s basically impossible to reposition once it has made contact. I enlisted my partner’s help. We did the easy, rectangular side first, and got it almost right on the first try. After a few days of stewing over it, I ended up cutting the tape through the middle and peeling it all off. Then I filed down the edges of the sheet so that I was really sure it would drop in perfectly. Lesson learned, I made sure the fit was as good as possible for the tentacle side.

Unlike the flat side, it was not a simple matter of making sure two corners were correct and then slowly lowering the panel down. The panel itself was slightly floppy, and a bow would be a problem. I ended up using my magnetic shim set to suspend the sheet above the frame, with increasing thicknesses of shim as I went. We aligned the sheet, and started pulling out shims in pairs. After each pair, we’d make sure the sheet was still aligned properly. We did a test run before exposing the tape and then did it for real. Amazingly, it worked!

Final Result

The door was almost too big for the backdrop for the final photos, so please excuse the tight crop!

How’d it turn out? Well, the real treasure is the lessons we learned along the way! I think it looks great for a prototype, and I feel ready to tackle the top panel in the fall. I’m definitely hoping to change up the approach a bit…

Spring Break Update - Casting

2026-03-18T00:00:00-05:00

This semester I’m only taking two classes. I intended to take three, but I got something wrong on the registration website and had to shuffle things around. One of those classes is Casting I, in the Jewelry department.

I’m continuing my attempts to learn as many ways of working with metal as I can, and casting is one I’ve been curious about. The focus of this class is on lost-wax casting. We sculpt the form we want in wax, “invest” it in plaster, burn out the wax, and then throw molten metal into the plaster form using a centrifuge. We’re primarily working in two metals: “ancient bronze” (an alloy of ~90% copper and ~10% tin) and sterling silver (92.5% silver and 7.5% copper to make it less soft). Silver is currently quite expensive, so I’ve been saving it for pieces that I’m relatively confident will come out well.

Wax is delightfully easy to work with, compared to metal. Filing or sawing quickly removes large amounts of material, you can do some smoothing with just the heat of your fingers, and it’s pretty easy to do additive work by using a “wax pen” (essentially a soldering iron) to join things or build up forms.

The first assigned project was a ring. I decided to make myself a chunky bronze ring. I roughed out the shape from a pre-formed wax tube and discovered that I really liked the texture of the roughest file in my kit, so I let that guide the style. So that I didn’t use up too much bronze at once, I hollowed out the inside of the ring.

The casting went pretty smoothly, without too much cleanup. Because I wanted to preserve the surface texture, the sprues were attached to the inside of the ring, rather than the outside. That meant that I had to do quite a bit of work to grind out the parts of the sprues that couldn’t be clipped off. But once that was done, the ring was ready for finishing.

In harmony with the roughness of the band, I wanted the ring to not be polished and shiny. I used a strong Liver of Sulfur treatment, which left the surface a deep black. Then I polished up the highlights by throwing the piece in a tumbler with coarse media.

The second project for the class was a wax buildup, taking a drawn template and using the wax pen to apply hot wax to build up a relief sculpture. The supplied template was a tree, but I wasn’t excited about how my tree came out, so I sketched a quick raven and built that up. Spruing this was easy, and the overall volume was small, so I cast this one in silver.

In what will be a theme in this class, I haven’t actually finished this piece yet. I attached a jump ring left over from last semester, but I want to buff out some scratches on the back and maybe apply a patina to this too.

The reason I have not finished a bunch of pieces is that I’ve taken a detour from the assigned projects and started trying to cast 3D prints. I did some experimenting with filament specifically designed for casting (supposed to leave almost no ash behind). Those who remember last semester might be able to guess what I 3D printed…

I also attended a talk on metallurgy for jewelers, where they had one of those 3D printed articulated dragons, made with selective laser sintering. That made me wonder if I could cast one (clearly not with detail that fine). So I found a model of an articulated hammerhead, and printed and cast that. It’s going to need a lot of fine-tuning the cast to get it to actually articulate.

Winter Break

2026-01-19T00:00:00-06:00

I have a month between semesters at Austin Community College. Time to work on the last project in a series!

As usual, more photos at Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/aneel/albums/72177720315236826/ and https://www.flickr.com/photos/aneel/albums/72177720326943829/

When we remodeled our bathroom, we bought a slab of pretty quartzite for the counter. The counter only needed part of it, but you have to buy the whole slab and we didn’t want it to go to waste. We had the counter folks cut the remainder into useful sizes and I’ve been slowly making steel table bases for them.

As my fabrication skills have improved, the bases have gotten more complex.

For the last of the table tops, I decided on a design with four X shapes around the outside. All of the angles in the two similarly-sized tables were either 45° or 90°. The same is true for the angles on these sides… if you hold the pieces at a 45° angle while cutting them. That’s a bit tricky on a conventional saw.

No problem! I just spent 6 months in a machinist apprentice program. I can do this on the mill! How hard could it be?

Cutting the corners actually wasn’t too bad, though I did learn some (expensive) lessons about how endmills react to the sudden pressure changes and vibrations involved in milling tube (by shattering). But I did some test corners and they fit together well on the fixture table. On to the welding!

Wait, what do you meant the joint that I want to weld is exactly where that fixture block is. No, of course I can’t weld the exposed angle. That’s the one everyone is going to see and filing it back to that crisp edge after welding it would take forever. Surely I can make a jig that lets me clamp that joint from the other side. Let me just 3D print up a model…

I can’t weld against a plastic jig, of course, so I just need to make that in metal… Hmm. But getting end mills in at those angles is exactly the “you need to hold it at 45°” problem. Let’s figure out how to do this flat… Hmm. Going to need to order some new shapes of endmill… And for clamping, we might as well just use a two-sided jig with bolts instead of trying to get F clamps in at those angles…

(Weeks of messing with tool paths later) Yessss, that should do the trick.

We’re ready to prep all of the parts. Hmm. these parts are longer than the travel of the CNC mill. No problem, we’ll just figure out some creative fixturing and do it one end at a time.

Finally welding time! First let’s make the X parts. Just the kind of thing a fixture table is for…

And the tricky part: welding using the custom jigs. It went well for three of the four sides. The fourth needed some “encouragement” from some ratchet straps to come together. It didn’t take too much filing to bring the interior 90° corners up to the necessary level of finish. Much easier than filing at 54.7 degrees!

One tricky thing is that the 1” tubing leveling feet that I have don’t fit into the corners of these. So let’s model up some custom ones and 3D print them. All that’s left is a few coats of flat black paint, leveling feet, and the final quartzite tabletop. Finished! Or almost.

Final quality assurance check? Passed! #cat

Jewelry Continued

2025-12-13T00:00:00-06:00

In an earlier post, I talked about finishing the assigned projects for my jewelry class and needing to decide what was next. I worked on three substantial projects and one quick one, and resized or repaired a couple of my partner’s rings in the gaps between them.

As usual, more and larger photos are on Flickr.

Dodecahedron

The first assignment in my 3D Design class last year was to make a sculpture composed of simple geometric solids in cardboard.

And I’ve had a plan to weld up all of the Platonic solids for years (I have the parts, I just need to spend the time), so I figured, why not attempt the most interesting of the Platonics: the dodecahedron. It is composed of 12 regular pentagons that meet at annoying angles (116.565°).

I did a test in copper and learned a lot about how not to do it. Don’t try to construct two halves and then combine them, because the error introduced in the construction will make joining them smoothly too difficult and leave lots of irregularities at the joints. And don’t let the work you’ve already done get too hot because adjacent faces that were previously soldered will fall apart. Which is hard, since each edge is quite a long solder joint and needs heat across the whole thing to solder. I experimented with various ways of trying to hold the pieces in the appropriate orientations, including a clay-like material that seemed like it had a lot of promise, but just crumbled.

Starting again in silver, I concentrated on adding one piece at a time, knowing that the last few would require a lot of massaging to fit. I mostly held them in place with the jeweler’s equivalent of the “helping hands” that I’ve used in electronics.

Along the way, I got practice drilling out sides that had been too badly damaged, patching holes with offcuts and wire, and filing things flat without filing all the way through.

Hawkmoth

After all of that fiddly geometry, I decided to do something bigger and more organic. I also decided to try brass as well as copper, and add some hammered texture. I found some reference pictures of hawkmoths, and made a template in software.

This whole project was surprisingly quick. Now that I’m fairly fast at sawing (and less prone to breaking saw blades), I was able to knock out the individual pieces in just a class period. I used chasing tools (tiny versions of hammer faces I used in Art Metals a few semesters back) to round the body segments and add texture to the wings.

Unlike soldering the joints in the dodecahedron, these joints just needed solder applied to one edge of each piece. Then I laid them all in their positions and heated the whole thing to stick them together.

I attached the wings and added a bezel. Along the way, the oxidation colors from heating the metal caught my eye.

I ended up using controlled heat to add color to the forewings in the finished version.

Spider

My last big piece was inspired by a necklace that I saw at the Texas Renaissance Festival that used amber for the body of a spider and silver for the legs. I decided to do something more geometric and use opals.

As is so common in my projects, work holding to keep all of the parts aligned was a challenge. This time I was able to tape them in place during the mockup phase when I was trying to align all of the bends. I placed them flat on a charcoal block while soldering.

Hammered Ring

My one-day last project was a simple hammered ring with yet another opal (maybe you see a pattern here).

Resizing and Repair

Early in the semester, my partner gave me a bunch of rings that didn’t fit, and I resized them as I had time (for example while something was pickling to remove oxides or in the ultransonic cleaner). I took a set of three rings and resized them from 5.5 to 6.5. And made some other minor ring size changes.

There was also this armor cuff ring which had one of the joints broken. It was a more complicated repair, but well within my novice skills.

Tongs

2025-12-12T00:00:00-06:00

I covered forging hammers in the previous post. We also spent a lot of time at the end of the class on making tongs.

As usual, more photos and larger versions are available on Flickr.

Hammers are relatively simple shapes: a block with a hole in it, and maybe one end shaped in an interesting way. Not so tongs. There are probably many ways to make tongs, but the one we covered is a long series of steps. If you make a mistake on one of the steps, it’s quite hard to recover, so we spent several class sessions just practicing making blanks.

The process goes something like this:

Take a piece of square bar, marked 1.25” from one end
Use a bar-shaped tool under the power hammer to make a 45° impression at that mark. This creates the pivot point around which the tongs will open or close
Flatten the long end to start forming the rein (handle)
Mark 1” in from the pivot using the hot cut on an anvil
Use a butcher to indent the side of the rein at the hot cut mark
Taper that down towards the end of the rein
Clean up the reins so that they’re tapered and break the corners
Use a butcher at the original mark on the opposite side, and forge the jaw down to that

This results in a lightning bolt kind of shape where one end is long and thin and the other is short and thick.

After making two of these—hopefully pretty similar—it’s time to fit them up and see where to remove material on the belt grinder. After roughing them in, the center is marked and a hole drilled. A rivet is placed through the hole and further refinement is done on the grinder to make sure they close properly and have even length jaws. This would be a good time to imprint them with a maker’s mark, but I didn’t realize this until too late.

The rivet is cut to length (the rule is 1.5 times the diameter should be sticking out) and then the straight end is heated and upset to form the second head of the rivet.

Finally, the jaws are shaped. They’re heated in the forge and then hammered into shape at the anvil. The first pair of tongs I made was for holding the hot tools that I made previously. This meant that I grabbed a hot tool of the same thickness and hammered the jaws with it inside, getting them to conform to it. Opening and closing the tongs while they’re hot makes the rivet move smoothly.

I had an extra set of blanks on the last day (having come in during a different class to practice), so I made a pair of flat jaw tongs as well. The last step of this was to imprint my touchmark (which I machined) on them. I did this by holding the mark in tongs that I had forged and hitting with a hammer that I had forged.

Satisfying!

Here’s the complete set of tools that I forged in this class:

round tool-holding tongs
flat jaw tongs
hardened cross peen hammer
unhardened hammer
center punch
weird center punch
cold chisel
slot punch
hot cut
round punch
leaf (not a tool)

I baked on a vegetable oil finish at home (like seasoning a pan) to make them less susceptible to rust.

As a bonus… last semester I forged a pair of fire tongs in my extra time in class. But when I tried to get them to come together, I realized that I didn’t know how tongs worked. I took some extra time after I finished all of the tools to use what I’d learned to fix them.

Jewelry

2025-12-11T00:00:00-06:00

I’ve been studying at Austin Community College for more than 4 years now. I started with a Continuing Education class in welding in 2021. I was working from home and never leaving the house, so I randomly signed up for a class taught in the parking lot of one of ACC’s campuses.

I unexpectedly discovered that I really enjoy working with metal. Welding, in particular, was a very satisfying practice that rewarded focus. I took the second continuing education welding course and then applied as a student (I had to get my first college to send them my undergrad transcript!).

Since then, I’ve expanded my metal-working repertoire from just welding to fabrication, brazing, coppersmithing, sheet metal work, and blacksmithing. This semester, I decided to branch out into smaller things and took the introductory course in the Jewelry department.

The Jewelry Techniques 1 class has a very open structure. We started with three set projects: a simple ring, a toggle bracelet made with jump rings, and a cabochon mount. Then the rest of the semester we could work on any jewelry projects we wanted, with the help and advice of a jeweler with 50 years experience.

These projects taught us how to cut metal using a jeweler’s saw and how to solder with a jeweler’s torch. These are techniques I’ve used before, but scaled way down. The saw blades are tiny and break at the slightest provocation, but offer really fine control and a very narrow kerf. The torch produces a flame the size of one of the cones in a welding/cutting torch!

I finished the starter projects in the first few weeks, which left me with a quandary. I didn’t have any idea what kind of jewelry to make. There have been periods in my life where I’ve worn a fancy (like $200) watch, tie bars, or cuff links. But I haven’t worn any jewelry regularly for a long time.

What to do…

Hammers

2025-12-10T00:00:00-06:00

When we left off, I’d made a bunch of tools. The last part of the class focused on two specific kinds of tools: hammers and tongs.

I ended up making two hammers, a practice mild steel hammer, and a tool steel forging hammer.

As usual, more photos and larger versions are available on Flickr.

A mild steel hammer is not terribly useful as a hammer, since many of the things you’d want to hit with a hammer are harder than the hammer head, and thus will leave dents in it. But it was good to work through the sequence of steps before trying to do it in tool steel.

I started with round bar (because it was what we had) and made it into a block with broken (chamfered) edges. I punched a hole in it on the power hammer, then used a drift to open the hole into a proper “eye”. Then the shoulders around the eye are drawn out a bit and the faces of the hammer are refined.

For the mild steel hammer, I just made two square faces, but for the tool steel hammer, I made a cross peen (for more directional hammer blows). Sadly, I did a pretty bad job of keeping the cross peen from twisting as I drew it down. My instructor said “Oh Lordy!” when he saw it.

The tool steel hammer also went through a heat treatment cycle. First it was annealed (no relation): heated to a red heat and then allowed to cool slowly by being stuck in a barrel full of insulating vermiculite. This allows the metal to relax and remove some of the stresses of forging. While it’s in the annealed state the metal can be sawed, ground and filed easily, so I took the opportunity to straighten the cross peen.

The final step before heat treating was to bring the faces to a high polish so that they don’t leave marks on the surfaces they hit.

Then it’s into the kiln for heat treating. The hammer head is brought back above its critical temperature and then quenched in oil (this is O1 tool steel). This leaves it very hard, but brittle. It goes back into the kiln for tempering, where it’s brought to a controlled temperature that keeps much of the hardness, but makes it less brittle.

The last thing to do is to remove any scale from the hammer by heating it and scrubbing it off. In the process of heating it, I re-tempered it a bit, making the straw-to-gold temper color visible.

It’s not a hammer until it has a handle. In a process that would probably horrify a woodworker, I shaped hickory handles on belt sanders. I used an oxy-acetylene torch to add some charred color to the one for the hardened hammer. To keep the handles attached, I inserted a wooden wedge through the top of the handle in the direction of the head, and then a metal wedge across it. The final step was to coat the handles in a mix of turpentine and boiled linseed oil.

Next: Tongs

Tools

2025-11-03T00:00:00-06:00

Power Hammer class has moved onto the toolmaking part of the curriculum. We’re practicing making tools in mild steel and then moving on to tool steel versions.

Hot Tools

We’ve used 4140 steel to make tools for hammering into and through hot metal. The process starts with forging the tool to shape, trying to do it in as few heats (trips to the furnace) as possible, to keep the number of heat cycles the tool steel goes through to a minimum.

Because 4140 is fairly hard, we “air quench” these by just letting them cool off. Then we refine the working features by grinding.

Finally the struck end of the tool is rounded off on the grinder so that it doesn’t chip when you hit it with a hammer.

These are a Hot Cut (for cutting a piece of hot metal by hammering a wedge through it), a Round Punch (for punching a round hole through a piece of hot metal by hammering a circle through it) and a Slot Punch (for punching a slot through a piece of hot metal by hammering a bar through it). We don’t heat treat these tools because they’re going to be subjected to high heat and their temper would be quickly ruined. Instead, we assume they’ll deform over time, and we’ll reshape them.

Cold Tools

Next we moved to W1 tool steel to make tools for marking cold metal. Again, we’re forging the tool into shape in as few heats as possible. Then we bring the tool back up to forging temperature and stick it in an insulator for a while to anneal it. There are tubs of vermiculite in the shop, and we bury our pieces in them until they fully cool.

This metal is in a very soft and workable state, so it’s a good time to clean it up by sandblasting, grinding, and filing.

Next it’s time for heat treating. We get the working end of the tool (which we want to be very hard) up to the temperature where it stops being magnetic, and keep it there for a few minutes. We learned two ways to do this: using the induction forge we can heat just the working end of the tool. Using the gas forge, we need to heat the whole thing on the “porch” of the forge.

Then we quench the tool. The W in W1 means that this alloy can be water quenched, so we dunk it in a bucket of water until it’s cool enough that it gets wet. This leaves a very hard but also brittle metal. We temper it to make it somewhat softer and much tougher. This is done by heating the struck end to red and then letting that heat seep through the tool until the appropriate temperature is reached at the working end. You can judge this by the color of the oxides that show on the surface.

We’re aiming for a straw-to-gold color for these. We then quench the parts again in water to stop the tempering process, and toss them in an oil bath to cool down.

Finally, we grind in the final shape and test the tools.

These are a Center Punch, used to mark metal with a point, and a Cold Chisel to mark lines.

Bonus: Touchmark

You may have noticed that my cold tools have circular marks near the struck ends. This is to identify them. This is essential when everyone is making the same tools and throwing them into the vermiculite at once. It would be cooler if I had something more distinctive…

I bought some 4140 at a near-ish metal shop (the one that’s actually nearby wanted to sell me 12’ when I only wanted 12”), and took it to Asmbly to do some work on the Tormach.

It took me a bunch of tries to figure out how to properly hold the piece so I could machine it, and I had to use a tiny end mill (1/32”) to carve the details. They sell these end mills in packs of 5, so that when you break one basically on first contact with the work, and break a second just loading it into the tool holder, you still have a chance of finishing your part.

Unlike the hot tools, which were also made of 4140, I want this to be quite hard so it leaves a good mark. Because 4140 is an oil quenched alloy the process is: heat until non-magnetic, quench in the oil barrel, then temper.

It works pretty well! If only I’d finished it in time to mark my center punch and cold chisel…

Why yes, that is a stylization of my name! You’ve got a good eye.

Motorcycle CarPlay Mount

2025-10-21T00:00:00-05:00

A while back, I got a no-name CarPlay receiver for my motorcycle. It’s been working well. I like being able to see maps, to control the music, and to operate garage doors without getting my phone out of my pocket.

It has been mounted on my handlebars with a RAM mount. I really like RAM mounts, and have used them for many things on many motorcycles over the years. However, I don’t need to reposition this device, so the flexibility of the ball-and-socket arm system is wasted. The mount is also a bit bulky, which is awkward because the place I want it is basically right over my handlebar clamp.

So let’s machine a new mount! The first step was taking off the original and measuring it. The only critical measurements are the placements of the bolts that hold the clamp on, so I used a flatbed scanner and a ruler to digitize it and took measurements off of that.

Next, I modeled up a minimal version and 3D Printed it. It fit reasonably well, so it was time to design a real one.

The back of the unit is frustratingly not flat, which you may remember from the mount for the other bike.

That meant I’d need a platform with some standoff. I realized that I’d want to be able to adjust the position of the GPS on the mount, so I designed in some slots. By tightening the screws that connect the GPS side, it would be locked into place against the handlebar side.

I 3D printed this to test, and quickly discovered the flaw… it is impossible to tighten the screws on one part after you’ve attached the other to it. Oops.

After some thought, I came up with a plan: the platform would screw onto the clamp from the front. This would require a third setup on the mill, but that’s not too painful. I printed a version of this using captured nuts and it worked fine.

Finally, something worth machining! I did this on a Haas Super Mini mill at ACC. This went pretty smoothly. I used a new-to-me toolpath (“Flow”) to run a ball-nosed endmill along the curve that grabs the handlebar. It seems to have plenty of grip. I manually tapped the bolt holes in the front.

I did leave the slots in the first version of the platform, so that I could find the optimal placement of the GPS front-to-back. Too far forward and it would make it hard to see the speedometer. Too far backward and it hits the keys.

I’ve been riding around with it for a few weeks and my handlebars haven’t fallen off, so… success!

Skull Forging

2025-10-11T00:00:00-05:00

Dan Smith, one of the blacksmithing professors at ACC who I haven’t had a class with yet, taught a one day class on how to forge a skull. It was a lot of fun. Most of what I’ve learned so far in Power Hammer has been utilitarian: tapers, tenons, tool forms. Obviously, we’ve worked on aesthetics. The taper should be smooth and even, the tenon shouldn’t be crooked, etc. This was the first time I’ve worked on a purely aesthetic object.

We started with a rectangular block, which we isolated part of to form the jaw, and then upset to get the rough shape. This was all done on the power hammer.

After the rough form was made, we started adding details with hand tools. Forming eye sockets with fullers and drifts. Marking with hot chisels. Imprinting features with dies.

The end result was pretty satisfying. I cleaned it up with a wire cup wheel to remove the flash rust and fire scale, and then clear coated it to keep it shiny.

Maker Chip Challenge

2025-09-30T00:00:00-05:00

Watching youtube videos, I came across the idea of a “Maker Chip”, which is a poker chip-sized token that shows off your skills and acts as a calling card. They’re apparently popular items to hand out at 3D printing conventions.

It occurred to me that it would be a fun to have a contest at Asmbly to make these things. Not just using the 3D printers, but all of the different tools and skills in use at Asmbly. I proposed the idea, and got general buy in… and discovered that it had been a few years since anyone ran a contest at Asmbly and there wasn’t really an established way to do it.

So I took it on myself to run the contest.

Here’s the forum post kicking it off: Maker Chip Challenge! End-of-summer contest!

We ended up getting 16 entries, which seems like a pretty good turnout. Some of them are really spectacular: Maker Chip Challenge Entries and Voting!

Of course, I didn’t even try to resist the temptation to make my own entries. I made a chip in every shop. I modeled my chips on a Sonic “Free Medium Drink” chip that I happened to have around, with an edge pattern with nine pairs of stripes. Each ship has the logo for the shop on one side and my signature on the other.

I started out designing them all in Fusion, but switched over to Affinity Designer for some of them by the end.

3D Printing

This is the shop that I’m the lead of, so I had to do something complicated for this. I ended up doing a 7 filament print: the two major colors for the striped edge (in this chip, it’s a spiral), the logo color (orange) and my signature color (bright green). When the spirals enter the logo/signature area, they change color. I discovered that the joins between the stripe colors had an ugly raised seam, so I added an outer perimeter of translucent PLA to give them a nice edge.

The challenge here is that Asmbly has multi-filament printers, but they can’t handle 7 filaments. Luckily, two of my filaments don’t share a layer, so I could put in a layer-based filament change. But that still leaves me with 6 filaments on the first and last layers. One of the extruders on the 5 filament printer is currently not aligned with the other 4, so I needed to do something extra.

I started out trying to do repeated prints without taking the previous print off of the bed, but that ended up causing problems during bed leveling, because the leveling test would bump into the already-printed material

Evan mentioned another approach: you can tell PrusaSlicer that your printer has more extruders than it actually does. Then when you generate the gcode for your print, you can edit it to change tool changes to those extra extruders into something else. I wrote a perl script to add an M600 filament change command and remap the tool number to a tool that actually exists.

Metal Shop

Since I am taking a machining class, I decided to do my metal chip on the Tormach. My biggest challenge here was work holding. To have a two-colored edge, I would need to use two materials (aluminum and brass), and each of them would have to extend the whole height of the chip and fit together. This meant machining both front and back of each piece.

Machining the front was easy enough. I could just hold a square piece of stock in the vise. But the front and back needed to align, so when I flipped the piece over it would need to be locatable. Also, I was going to cut around the whole edge of the part, so the vise wouldn’t have a flat edge to grip at the end.

My first attempt was to make a fixture that would function as vise jaws and locating pins in one.

The round edges would act as jaws making contact with the whole circumference of the part, and the pins would fit into the empty triangular shapes to keep the piece aligned.

Unfortunately, clamping on that 3mm edge didn’t provide a strong enough hold to prevent the piece from being pulled up into the end mill.

Next, I tried the tape + glue method. I’ve used this on the wood CNC routers, and everyone said it should work on the Tormach as well. The idea is that you put painter’s tape on both the stock and a sacrificial piece and super glue the two together. I could not get this to hold. My machining teacher suggested using double-sided carpet tape instead, but that didn’t hold either.

After talking with my teacher, I discovered that I was making three mistakes.

I was trying to do facing cuts with a 3/8” end mill to avoid having to do a lot of material removal with a 1/8”. The cuts were too aggressive
I was cutting too deep. I thought 0.020” was safe, but 0.010” was a better maximum
I was using coolant, which was weakening the bond

When I fixed those, the carpet tape worked pretty well. I used two 0.250” bores to locate the part when I flipped it over. By boring the same holes into the sacrificial support and using two end mill shanks as gauge pins, I could line up the second side without re-probing X and Y.

Once I could hold the piece in place I wasted a few parts getting the heights right for engraving. Telling Fusion to engrave the edges of the logo resulted in a cut that was way too deep. so I ended up setting the heights manually well above the part and creeping up on them.

The other trick was those pointy wedge corners where the two parts join. They’re easy to machine on the “positive” side, where the wedge material is still there, but on the “negative” side, it’s impossible to use a round mill to get a sharp triangular point. I had expected to use the set of jeweler’s files that I’d just bought for my other class, but that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. What did work well was a jeweler’s saw.

This was also my first time using brass on a CNC mill (I’ve done a lathe project, but not a mill project). It went beautifully, giving a good surface finish on the first try. This might be because I sprang for the expensive “360 Free Machining Brass”.

Woodshop

My initial idea for the wood chip was fairly similar to the metal one: two different materials, cut into negatives of each other using CNC, then sandwiched together. After a few tries on the Laguna iQ, I realized that there was no way I’d get the tolerances I needed. 40mm diameter doesn’t leave much room for error!

Happily, the circular motif that I had chosen was well-suited to another option: dowels. I did the edge cuts all the way through, engraved the rest of the circles on the surface, and used dowels of a different wood to fill the edge cuts.

This had the happy side effect of having built-in fixturing. The dowels were the locating pins when I flipped the piece over. I intended to mill right through them on the second side, but the side load was stronger than 3mm of glue could resist and they just popped out, so I ended up using flush cut saws to clean them up.

I tried a bunch of different wood combinations, but the wood I ended up liking the best was purpleheart, so I chose the lightest colored dowels I had picked up at Woodcraft to provide contrast.

This was my first time using 1mm end mills. I bought a 5 pack and was surprised to have 3 still intact at the end of the project!

Textiles

I’ve been trying to get the hang of the embroidery machine, and this project gave me lots of practice. My first challenge was figuring out the Affinity Designer → Inkscape → Ink/Stitch workflow. Inkscape’s UI is foreign enough to me that all of my actual graphics work happened in Affinity Designer. Figuring out the right options in Ink/Stitch was a lot of trial and error.

There was a careful balance between adding layers of stitching to stabilize the fabric (you can see some of the wrinkling around my signature) and taking them away to prevent the design from becoming too thick. It seemed like beyond ~4 layers, the bobbin thread would get pulled up to the front. I fiddled with the thread tension a lot, but it was challenging to avoid any white on the front. Maybe it would have been worth winding bobbins to match the top thread. Along the way, a screw disappeared inside of the bobbin case, so I attempted my first ever sewing machine repair… we ended up just replacing the part, though.

I also found that I got much better results with new thread. Asmbly has a lot of donated thread, but it’s unclear how long it has been sitting around.

Once I’d machine embroidered both sides, I had to hand stitch them together. I tried using embroidery floss, but the machine embroidery thread looked better. The only problem was the number of stitches to get a solid border. I tried doubling up the thread, but it led to knots, so I fell back on my usual hand stitch. Which turns out to be doubled! I had no idea that people typically don’t tie the ends of their threads together after passing it through the needle. What I’d been trying was probably quadrupling it.

Electronics

This one was a journey.

The poker chip form factor is a real challenge for electronics, not because of the 40mm diameter, but because of the 3mm thickness. Even coin cell batteries are pushing it, unless you do without a holder. So I decided not to try putting power on the chip itself, and instead opted to use a wireless charging coil. This meant that the chip would be inert until you put it on its stand, which is kind of cool on its own.

What should it do? I went with the old standby: blinkenlights. I did a prototype with an Adafruit Gemma M0 and a NeoPixel ring and it worked great. I had to turn down the brightness on the NeoPixels because the coils max out at ~500mA, but still got decently bright results. All done, right?

Not quite. The Gemma has two problems: it’s too thick, and it doesn’t have enough LEDs. I could desolder some of the taller components (the LiPo battery connector and the USB Micro port), but even the switches are a bit too tall. And the RGB LEDs are tall enough that layering them on top of the board or the coil would be a no-go. There’s also the small matter of the circuit for the charging coil, which is thin, but not that thin.

So I decided to do something I hadn’t tried since the days of etch-it-yourself copper boards and make a circuit board. Adafruit is a huge supporter of Open Source Hardware so the schematic for the Gemma M0 is freely available. I opened it up in Fusion Electronics (a first for me) and got to work stripping out everything I didn’t think I needed (foreshadowing).

The board that gets power from the coil was… less well documented. I was able to read the T3168 label on the IC and found a data sheet that looked plausible… in (I think) Chinese. I found some other references that looked similar so… I guessed at a couple of the values, hoping I’d end up with something that worked. I jammed the two circuits together and asked on Asmbly’s forums if it seemed reasonable.

I started laying out the board. I spent a bunch of time on Digikey, choosing particular parts based on how thick they were. I tried to get a design that put all of the power and logic on one side and the LEDs on the other, but that was just too thick with the 5050 Neopixel LEDs. Moving the LEDs to the same side created space problems. Luckily, I mentioned this to another Asmbly member, Steve, who pointed out that I could get smaller LEDs. I briefly looked at 2020s, but ended up jumping all the way down to 1010s.

I do not have the confidence in my soldering skills to do a 32 pin surface mount microcontroller, so I decided to get the boards pick-and-placed as well. This led to me trying to find the components I’d found in Digikey’s catalog (generally including thicknesses) in JLCPCB’s part catalog. Of course there were lots of cases where they didn’t have the exact thing, and didn’t list the thickness of their equivalent, so I had to go through the data sheets for each part and find the packaging specs.

After submitting the design, I discovered that a bunch of that work was wasted, because JLCPCB freely substituted other parts with the same footprint. I had to go through several cycles of “no, that won’t work, it’s too thick”, and ended up having to give up on pick-and-placing everything and source some of the critical components from elsewhere. Ironically, this included the T3168 power regulator for the coil, whose data sheet I’d originally found on JLCPCB’s website. I ended up getting some diodes from Digikey and ordered the T3168 from two separate sellers on AliExpress and one on eBay, just in case.

Having pulled the trigger on the order, I discovered that I was going to get hit with a 55% tariff on it, but I was too far down this road to be deterred.

Several weeks later, a box arrived with 5 boards. Remember how I took all of the chunky connectors out of the design? I’d planned to use pogo pin clips to connect to the contacts that I’d put on the board. This would have worked great, except that I got the wrong pitch of clips. Steve helped me build a fixture that let me hook up to the board and supply power and everything.

But, of course, the board didn’t do anything. Because the microcontroller on it was unprogrammed. I thought I’d read all of the Adafruit tutorials that I needed about getting software onto it, but things were just not working. The programmer would connect, it would write the bootloader, it would verify the bootloader, and then nothing.

I knew by this point that I’d made a mistake on the board. The schematic for the Gemma M0 says that the microcontroller is a SAMD21E, but if you look at other docs you discover that it’s actually a SAMD21E18A. I’d chosen the first SAMD21E in JLCPCB’s catalog, which was a SAMD21E17D. Oops. Saliently, the 17 series has half as much flash storage as the 18 series. But no big deal, I wasn’t going to write a complex program, right? Just blink some lights…

I spent days learning how to debug a microcontroller, single-stepped through the code, found the problem to be a memcpy call failing, started a thread on the Adafruit forums about it, tore out my hair in frustration, finally had it suggested that I try basing my bootloader config off of the only 17 board in the repo, rather than off of the Gemma’s. Lo and behold, there was a config “`

// This is needed because SAMD21E17A only has 128kB of flash
#define FLASH_NUM_ROWS 512

Building with this option worked! The green status LED I’d put on the back of the board lit up! The USB drive showed up on my computer! All I needed to do was build CircuitPython for my new board and I could start making fancy patterns…

Memory region         Used Size  Region Size  %age Used
FLASH_BOOTLOADER:           0 B         8 KB      0.00%
  FLASH_FIRMWARE:      184156 B      57088 B    322.58%
FLASH_FILESYSTEM:           0 B        64 KB      0.00%
    FLASH_CONFIG:           0 B          0 B
       FLASH_NVM:           0 B        256 B      0.00%
             RAM:        6848 B        16 KB     41.80%

Yeah, CircuitPython itself is 140% of the size of the Flash on my chip. Oops.

At this point, I resigned myself to coding in C. But how? I could have done it in the bootloader codebase, since I’d already single-stepped through a bunch of it to find that memcpy error, but it seemed more civilized to not mix bootloader and light flasher, so I set out to learn enough about the Arduino IDE to write a “sketch”.

This turned into another config problem because I had to define my custom board to make it a valid compilation target in the IDE, but I muddled through that. The tricky part was actually loading the code. I thought my bootloader was compatible with what Arduino expected, but I couldn’t get the IDE to find it. I ended up using the “Export Compiled Binary” and then using gdb to load that binary over a connection through the hardware debugger, rather than the USB interface.

Finally, the lights blinked!

The 3D print for the housing for this was actually a bit interesting. I ended up using the PET sheet trick from Modern Gridfinity Case by Matthew to create a transparent layer so that the chips can be viewed from either side, and I ended up printing the power transmission PCB into the frame itself, rather than make some kind of door.

After some testing to make sure that the coils were close enough through the PET sheet for effective power transfer, I discovered another fun surprise: the PET had started puckering because the Maker Chip runs too hot. I’m not sure if this is waste heat from the inductive coil being badly tuned (remember those values I just guessed?) or just the power dissipation of 10 RGBLEDs in a small space or what.

Anyway, a journey, as I said.

Ceramics

When I was a kid, a friend of the family had a pottery studio where he ran classes. So I have some history with clay. But I basically didn’t touch it for decades until taking 3D Design last semester. Happily, Winnie was able to give me some pointers, and I used some of the techniques from the Maker’s Mark curriculum that I once hoped to make into an Asmbly class.

My ceramics chip was made with resin printed cookie cutters/pattern stamps. I quickly realized that I had to make a set that made impressions on both sides simultaneously, because otherwise the second stamp would smoosh the first. And I also found out that I had to support the first stamp while stamping the second. And that I had to press out the resulting piece with even force. So this ended up being a 4 part assemblage of 3D printed parts. That took a few tries to get right.

I thought that Asmbly had a twice-a-week firing schedule, so when I submitted my pieces for firing on 9/22, I thought I’d be fine as long as they didn’t shatter in the kiln (very possible!). But I checked mid week and found them still on the shelf, so I grabbed one in its “bone dry” state and brought it home to paint. Happily, it came out okay. I’m curious to see how they fired…

Lasers

I ordered a bunch of fancy 2x2 samples of acrylic from Houston Acrylics. Multi-color, multi-layer, fun finishes. But with two days to go in the challenge before I started working on Lasers at all, I grabbed some 1/8” ply from the scrap cart, cut my design, and called it good.

One fun thing about this was getting the alternating color edge. I did this by extending half of the spokes like a gear and then trimming them off. So the laser burn is the dark color and the light color is saw cut. This was also handy for registering the parts as I flipped them.

Conclusion

Here’s a video of the finished set in its holder.

Some of the prototypes that I went through, and the finished chips stacked to show their striped edges.

I had a lot of fun, a lot of frustration, and learned a ton in this challenge. I’m happy I did it. I’m also happy that it’s over. Deadlines can be very helpful sometimes.

School Again?

2025-09-15T00:00:00-05:00

Well, I’d meant to write up some upgrades that I made to my home 3D Printer. I got frustrated with nozzle swapping the V6 nozzles used by the stock extruder, so I installed an E3D Revo hotend and got .25mm and .6mm nozzles in addition to the usual .4mm. And I upgraded to a Bondtech extruder. It’s ticking along pretty well now.

But I didn’t get around to that because I got distracted by school.

Machining

Machining MCHN-2031

I’d tried to sign up for a class in the fall semester that covers how to run a CNC mill, but the registration was really weird. It’s technically a Continuing Education class, but I couldn’t sign up for it without permission from the department. When I finally managed to get in touch with the program coordinator (who’d been on vacation, it turns out), I was told that the class was a partnership with an apprentice program and that apprentices usually took all of the seats, but that I was 33rd on the waiting list for an 11 seat class. Oh well.

Randomly, I was talking to someone at Asmbly who said they were taking a machining class at ACC, and I asked them how. It turns out that the class I wanted to take was actually part of a three class series, and they’d registered for the first class, which would seamlessly lead into the class I wanted to take.

After a few calls, I got department approval to join the class two weeks late, and am now in the Machinist Apprentice Program, which runs from the summer semester into the fall.

I’ve run through almost all of the required classwork for the three class series (which is more like a three class parallel, since the material for all of the classes is taught side-by-side), and have started focusing on designing and fabricating my own parts.

The class is taught on Haas Super Mini Mills and lathes, which are quite a bit nicer than the Tormach that Asmbly has. I may get spoiled…

Now that fall semester is underway, I’ve started two more classes…

Power Hammer

Power Hammer WLDG-2441

Sometimes, when you’re blacksmithing, you get tired of swinging a hammer quite so much. What if there were a machine that could do the hammering for you? Of course there is one: the power hammer. It uses a pneumatic piston to drive a heavy top die down towards a stationary bottom die. The ones that ACC has have pistons in the 40-75kg range, which is a wee bit heavier than a blacksmith’s hammer or even a sledgehammer.

I ended up doing a lot of work in the spring blacksmithing class using the fly press, which is a human-powered machine based on the same idea. The power hammers are startlingly faster at doing those same things.

We still end up using hammers and anvils, because there’s a lot of subtle work that doesn’t need huge amounts of force.

Jewelry Techniques 1

Jewelry Techniques I JLRY-1401

Rounding out my semester, I’m learning to work metal in yet another way. The introductory jewelry class had us start with a simple ring, a bracelet made with jump rings, and a stone setting (which I put onto another ring). The rest of the semester, we get to try to make whatever else we’re interested in, with a very experienced jeweler helping us figure out how to do it.

We’re cutting metal with a jeweler’s saw (my record for most blades broken in a day is 3), joining it by soldering with a cute tiny torch, and learning the basics of finishing and polishing.

I’m back to my usual geometric designs. I’m trying to make a dodecahedron pendant. I’ve done a prototype in copper and learned some things, and am now tackling it in silver.

I’ve also resized a bunch of rings for Adrienne and repaired one that had a broken joint.

Personal 3D Printer

2025-07-07T00:00:00-05:00

It may come as a surprise, since I’m the Space Lead for 3D Printing at a local makerspace, but I’ve never owned my own 3D Printer. My first experiences with 3D printing were all on company provided machines during the era of tech companies where they provided random amenities (juice bars! snacks! ping-pong tables!) to try to keep programmers in the office as much as possible.

More recently, I re-started 3D printing at Asmbly, making custom bins for my Packout Organizers. I was observed trying to dial in the settings for my bins and asked if I wanted to take on the role of Space Lead. After confirming that detailed knowledge of 3D printer maintenance wasn’t a requirement (a mixture of figuring-it-out-as-I-go-along and asking the right people for help has served me well), I said “why not?”

One of the folks there wanted to find a good home for their Prusa Mini+, which wasn’t getting much use since they got a bigger printer. I thought “why not?” again, and bought the little machine. It’s an older model, but from a brand whose manuals and support I have really appreciated over the last year (4 of Asmbly’s 8 active printers are Prusas).

I’ve been speedrunning the standard 3D printer owner gauntlet. Benchy? Check. The printer’s first owner had set up a light bar and the semi-official base, which lets you keep the filament spool under the printer during the print.

But so many mods remained to be done… The base is designed for Prusa plastic spools, but most of my filament comes on cardboard spools, which don’t rotate as smoothly, so I printed a lazy susan using a skateboard bearing. To make space for it, I printed some leg extensions.

Sneakernetting a USB stick the six feet across the room from my computer to the printer was unacceptable, of course, so I set up a Raspberry Pi to run Octoprint. Can’t just have that sitting around, it needed its own integrated enclosure.

And I needed to have a camera pointed at it, so I don’t need to turn around to check its progress, so a camera arm was in order.

Naturally it’s all hooked up to home assistant…

What about printing stuff not for the printer itself? It’s been quite nice to have a much shorter testing cycle. I’ve been able to rapidly iterate on things that previously would have had a day turnaround. I’ve printed a few cat toys for Simone, a custom phone & watch stand for Adrienne, and a bunch of hooks for the wire shelving in the garage.

My next little project is to try different nozzle sizes. We have standardized on 0.4mm nozzles at Asmbly, but I want to see how much detail I can get with smaller nozzles.

Side Table

2025-06-17T00:00:00-05:00

Adrienne asked me for a side table to fit over the arm of our couch, so you can set a drink or a laptop down without reaching over to the coffee table.

I did a design in Fusion. I had 1” square and 3” x 1” rectangular tube leftover from previous projects, so I designed around those.

I built the base in Asmbly’s metal shop:

I knew that I was going to have a problem keeping the frame square. I tried to clamp it and counterpose my welds to minimize that, but that wasn’t enough. The arms supporting the top were noticeably bowed outwards. To fix that, I had to add a strap across the open side of the top frame to hold those parts together.

The top is a piece of pre-prepared (glued up, brought to exact dimensions) walnut that I got at Asmbly. After cutting it to size, I stained it and applied several coats of polyurethane. Of course, one of the cats took a flying leap at it while it was drying, so I got to sand and add one more coat of poly than I’d expected, but such is life with cats.

Galapagos!

2025-06-06T00:00:00-05:00

I mentioned in the last post that I missed the last week of the semester. I had a good reason for that: for years we’ve been planning to go to the Galapagos, and we finally did it!

We spent about a week on a boat, visiting various islands and seeing the land animals and birds and going snorkeling to see the fish. Then we spent another week on a dive boat.

We got to see a lot of really fun birds and animals. The Galapagos are famous for the finches. The islands are very remote, and finches were some of the only land birds who made it out there. Finding lots of ecological niches empty that would be filled with other birds on the mainland, they speciated to fill the gaps. They’ve evolved into more than a dozen different species with adaptations like beak shapes that let them eat various different kinds of food. We saw many of the species of ground finches, and some of the specialized finches like the Cactus finches and Vampire finches, but we’ll have to spend more time inland someday to see the tree finches.

I was more taken by the seabirds, though. They are shockingly unconcerned about people, so you can get within a few yards of albatrosses, boobies, frigatebirds, and gulls without upsetting them.

Even the sea lions were chill. I wouldn’t get anywhere near a sea lion in California, but here pups frolic around you, adults come up and sniff you, and many mornings you wake up to find one lounging on the water-level deck of the boat or on the zodiacs.

I’m still working on processing my underwater footage. I have a good workflow for photos, and mostly kept up with editing down the photos each day. But I don’t have a good workflow for editing video. Because I’m shooting with an “action camera”, I take video instead of still photos. The fish or I always move too much for me to frame a good shot. With video, I can sometimes extract a decent short clip or still frame. But it takes work to find that clip.

We spent a few days not on boats. We’re in the habit of giving ourselves buffer days in case a connection goes wrong, so we had a day on the mainland before going to the Galapagos, a day between the two boats on the island of Santa Cruz, and a day in Quito at the end of the trip.

I’d like to spend more time in mainland Ecuador. Even taking altitude sickness medication, I didn’t have enough time to acclimate to the altitude in Quito. A few more days there and I would have felt much better.

Spring Semester Wrap-up

2025-06-06T00:00:00-05:00

The end of the semester was unsurprisingly hectic, made especially so because I left the country for the last week of classes, so I had to get everything finished a week early. I didn’t have time to update this journal along way, so…

Drawing 1

For our fourth project, we did an interior scene with figures on toned paper. I ended up doing two different pieces, both in colored pencil. The first was on purple paper and was a scene from the Kælan Mikla concert at the Empire Garage.

I did the second on gray paper of Bogart in the living room. I’m pretty happy with it as a portrait of a cat, but it didn’t look like Bogart, so I spent some time doing head studies of him.

The fifth project was an ink drawing. This was my first experimentation with ink washes (excluding the washes I did on Warhammer minis around the turn of the century), and with nib pens. Wanting something with deep blacks, I did a portrait of a Chihuahuan raven. I followed up with a cropped version. I wanted to play with the washes more and test out masking fluid, so I did a reverse piece where I masked off the raven silhouette and washed the background.

Design 2

After making tiles using my first plaster mold, I then cast the tiles to produce a relief. I stained this plaster piece with thinned acrylic gouache.

The final project in Design 2 was a stop motion animation. We had to pick two objects, one animal and the other technological and animate the transformation of one into the other. We did a 50/50 intermediate sculpture, and photographed the process of each of the “end” objects transforming into the intermediate.

I learned a lot about the process of sculpture in this project. We started with multiple angles of reference photos. We scaled them to the desired size (5” along the longest axis). Using calipers (the tong style, not machinist’s calipers), we took lots of measurements of the photos and transferred them to the sculpture, adding and subtracting clay to make it work.

If I ever need to do another stop motion animation, I’m going to find an onion-skin app to help with positioning. The project included building a light box out of cardboard and white paper, but I couldn’t really do the sculpture in place in the box, so I had to take it out and try to re-place it in the same spot. The result was unnecessarily jerky.

Metalsmithing

I made a candelabra for my final smithing project. I wanted to include some techniques that I hadn’t tried before, including collaring pieces together and twisting multiple rods into a spiral. My final result didn’t look much like my sketch, because as I worked through building it, I saw different things I could do and did them instead of sticking to my plan. I forged a ring and decided to make the “legs” candle spikes as well.

Both collaring and twisting turned out to be complex for work-holding reasons. The teacher demonstrated collaring two square rods together, but I had to make things hard for myself by trying to do three round rods. Unlike in the square case, you can’t use the flat of the anvil to hold the closed side of the collar closed while you hammer together the two open ends.

I ended up using hose clamps to hold the pieces in the right general orientation, and cutting a V block to hold things during the collaring.

Intermediate Layout & Fabrication

The papercraft raven project went well.

Cutting even complex flat pieces was pretty straightforward using the various shear options. I used the stomp shear for cutting down sheets to manageable sizes and cutting long edges on convex exteriors. The die shear was good for short straight cuts at the edges, like the feather tips and tabs for joining different pieces. The Beverly shear made long cuts (even curved ones) pretty straightforward. There were a few cuts, particularly between the feathers, that I used a bandsaw for, but later discovered that they were easier on the Beverly. And, of course, there were always aviation snips for the small things that had to be done by hand.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’d expected to use the brake to create precise angles, but I instead got them close-ish by eye, and then fine-tuned them once they were at least tacked in place. For folds shorter than 3-4”, the hand bender was great. For longer ones, clamping a straight edge and pressing worked. Some of the fine tuning in confined spaces was easiest with a rawhide mallet and a sharp-edged stake. I made one narrow stake out of a piece of bar, and used a folding stake for other bends.

Creating a closed form with the spot welder was, as expected, impossible. The contacts of the welder need to be on opposite sides of the sheets being joined, which would have meant one needed to be inside of the sculpture for the final connections. Instead of spot welding, I used rivets to close up the back.

I’d hoped to get a deep glossy black using a patina instead of paint. I tried a number of “cold blue” formulations, which result in black oxide coatings, but none of them were actually very dark and they didn’t have the deep luster I was hoping for, so I ended up spray painting the whole thing black. I’ve bought some iridescent coatings, but am going to have to figure out how to thin them down a lot before I’d use them.

Incidentally, I discovered that there are (at least) two metal finishing products called “Black Magic”. One is intended for maintaining firearms, and the other for sculpture. I tried the former, but maybe I’d have better results with the latter.

Camping

2025-04-11T00:00:00-05:00

Adrienne and I are camping at Lake Somerville State Park again this weekend (our second visit here). After we kept overloading our Honda eu2200i generator last year at Flipside, I got an eu2200i Companion generator and a parallel kit. The Companion has a 30A outlet, so we can directly drive the trailer off of it directly, with no adapter. The parallel kit means we can run the two generators together. Running the trailer’s AC, fridge, and our little Dometic drink fridge seemed easy enough for the Companion alone, but it’s good to know we have the extra oomph of the second generator, if we need it.

Fork, Lamp, Self-portrait, Wooden Sculpture

2025-04-10T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been quite busy. Classes are taking up a bunch of my time, but I’m also trying to sell the house we lived in while renovating the place we’ve owned for the past 10 years (!). The timing is spectacularly bad, since everyone is unsure what’s going to happen with the idiotic tariff flip-flopping.

Drawing 1

Our third project was a self-portrait on black paper. I got some chalky pastels, but didn’t like them much, and ended up doing my portraits in white pencil (sold as white charcoal) and Pasco markers. I did about a dozen drawings, but only really started liking the proportions in the last few.

Design 2

Wood was the material for our next project. We started with 4ft of 2x4, cut into weird dimensions. We could make square bars no more than 3/8” x 3/8” or planes not more than 3/16” thick. The brief was to construct something that addressed a volume of 24” x 24” x 24” and was not “finite”, by which the professor meant that we should run out of material before we finished the piece, and it should be clear how more material would be used if it were available. This suggested spirals to me.

I did a piece inspired by the fable of the Tower of Babel: people come together to try to build something that elevates them to the heights occupied by higher powers, but the powers smite them and sow division amongst them.

Next up is clay. I’ve used oil-based modeling clay to make a set of tiles, and cast them in plaster to make molds. Now I’m making water-based clay tiles from the molds.

Metalsmithing

We learned how to upset a bar (strike it along the length of the bar so that the material spreads), the reverse of the tapering operation that we focused on first. This let us create decorative ends. And we learned how to split a bar to create a fork. I spent a lot of time with the induction forge for this project. It’s great for applying a lot of heat to a specific part of the work.

Next, we’re focusing on joinery. Tenons, mortises, and rivets. After forging a couple of tenons, focusing mostly on the induction forge and hammering, I started work on a spatula. I used various dies on the fly press (and some hammering) to forge out 5/8” square stock to 3/8”, and flattened one end to make a surface to rivet the spatula blade onto. Adrienne asked me to make a bat, so I spent half of a class on non-blacksmithing sculptural work. Trent (the Art Metals/Intermediate Fab teacher) suggested using drills to rough out the bat’s wings, and using the bandsaw to remove more material. I did some cleanup with a die grinder. All in all, a much less frustrating than the belt grinder workflow that I’d initially thought about.

Intermediate Layout & Fabrication

Speaking of Trent, I have now finished the official coursework for the Fab class. The final assigned project was building an articulating lamp. This used a bunch of different metalworking techniques.

The lampshade and mount for the bulb were made with the sheet metal techniques we’ve been learning. We made a cone and cylinder, and some circular pieces to fit into the cylinder as the back and socket mount. The shade needed to be light-sealed, so we used JB weld around the join. I was unhappy with the lumpiness of the finish I got, so I additionally used Bondo to smooth things out.

We used a mill as a fancy drill press to put holes in steel balls and then using silver solder to attach those to thin tube.

We drilled holes in small bits of bar to clamp on the balls.

And cut heavy pipe stock and plate to make a base that won’t tip over when the arms are extended. We MIG welded those together.

After fabricating everything, I spent a weekend trying to paint everything to my satisfaction. I’m not very fond of spray paint at this point. Primer + color + top coat and it still chips and scratches with any excuse.

Now that I’m done with the assigned coursework, I have until the end of the semester (4 weeks) to work on whatever project I want. I’m going to try to make a papercraft raven out of sheet metal. So far, it’s not going how I expected. I thought I’d measure the angles off of the paper model that I built, and then use the brake to bend those angles. But it’s easier to just eyeball the bends and adjust them by hand.

Portugal (Non-)Update

2025-04-08T00:00:00-05:00

We visited Portugal in November to visit the agency that grants visas and have our photos taken. We were told at the time that we should have a response in 90 business days. That date has come and gone, and our lawyers are still not able to give us any clarity on when we might know.

Our construction project there is also in an uncertain state. We have invested in a share of an apartment building in the town of Alcácer do Sal, and it is running behind schedule and over budget. I’m not terribly surprised, but the lawyers seem to regard this as unusual and there are questions about how to move forward. We visited the site in January, and I’m optimistic about it overall, but would like to see more progress.

Portuguese lessons continue. We’ve covered the common irregular verbs in the present and simple past, though I need a lot more practice before those conjugations come naturally. We’ve had a quick introduction to the conditional as well. That is an easy conjugation, but it is not really clear to us where it should be used.

3D Printing

2025-04-07T00:00:00-05:00

Winnie asked me about a Ceramics/3D Printing crossover class at Asmbly. The idea would be that ceramicists could print a “Maker’s Mark” stamp, which they can use to “sign” their pieces. I’ve worked up a basic process. I was hoping we could include enough content to check someone out on the resin printers, but the consensus is that no, people should take the resin class. I’m trying to get my ACC classmates to run through the material to test drive it, since our next few projects are clay-based.

I’ve figured out some better techniques for putting text/logos on things in Fusion (emboss, not extrude!). I also got frustrated with the number of turns I had to make to screw on the top of my angle grinder holder, so I learned how to make custom threads. After a few tries, I got a nice 6 start thread, so I don’t need to turn more than 60 degrees to get it to catch.

The new thread version is up on Thingiverse.

Second Projects

2025-03-06T00:00:00-06:00

I’ve been stressed, what with the country of my birth being deliberately ransacked, but have managed to make some progress in class.

Drawing 1

We’re working on landscapes/atmospheric perspective. I chose a particularly difficult scene. Nighttime, illuminated from within the frame, and foggy.

This is a picture of the cathedral in Guarda, Portugal. We were having dinner at a restaurant on the square. After the meal, we walked out to find the square filled with otherworldly fog. There are lights set in the ground aimed at the cathedral, and they shone through to fog onto the building.

Design 2

The second assignment was to build an enclosure for our first sculpture in wire.

You may recall my first sculpture was a 5-fold rotationally symmetric collection of geometric shapes. I doubled down on the geometry, building a pentacular (five pointed star) base around the bottom of the sculpture with a hexagonal tower rising above it. I painted it “Venom”, a yellow-green to contrast with the magenta-violet painting of the first sculpture.

Metalsmithing

I finished up the hook.

Since last post, I decided to add a twist to the sections between the center hook and the outer hooks. This would have been wildly easier if I’d done it before bending the outer hooks. I also turned the spirals at the ends of the outer hooks upwards (this I had planned), and added rubbed brass to those sections before coating the piece in paste wax.

And made a bottle opener (two, actually). The bottle opener introduced a bunch of new techniques. I broadened a taper to make a leaf. I created a hole with a slot punch and then drifted it to a larger size. I also used a fuller to form the tongue.

Intermediate Layout & Fabrication

After a series of projects from plans, we’ve started projects where we try to copy something, making whatever plans we need along the way.

In addition to the shearing and braking in the first set of projects, this introduced rolling. I rolled simple cylinders and also conic sections. I used a bead roller to add edge details to make joins.

First projects

2025-02-14T00:00:00-06:00

The first projects for my classes are wrapping up. I’ve made three sheet metal containers, a geometric sculpture, a number of still life drawings, and have about one more class session to go on a wrought iron hook.

Drawing 1

Design 2

Metalsmithing

Intermediate Layout & Fabrication

Trapper Keeper Update

I’ve added my sigil/tag/logotype in iridescent scale.

School Underway

2025-02-06T00:00:00-06:00

It took a few sessions to ramp up and get the formalities out of the way, but my classes have started in earnest. I’ve gotten toned (paper), been instructed in the ways of gesso, taken up boxing, and learned the meaning of “too many irons in the fire”.

Drawing 1 is starting with a still life focusing on light and shadow. It feels good to have dedicated drawing time again. It’s been years since I just took the time to draw. I found some art supplies from my School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston days. It turns out that kneadable erasers that are 25+ years old are still kneadable!

Design 2 has me working on a cardboard sculpture made of “simple” geometric shapes. I’m a masochist, so I’ve included a truncated icosahedron, aka soccer ball. I cut the rest of my shapes with straightedge and utility knife, but I resorted to a laser cutter for that one. Chipboard lasers really well.

Metalsmithing is fairly intuitive after Art Metals and Intro to Fabrication. There’s a lot of technique, but I know generally how to hit the metal to get it to move the way I want for the simple tapers that we’ve worked on. So far I’ve only set my pants on fire once.

Positioning myself and the work so that I can hit from the correct angles is a new challenge. Offset tongs were helpful for working on the other end of a piece I’d already worked on, but it took me a while to figure out how to actually grip the piece with them (my teacher clued me in: use normal tongs to take the piece out of the forge, then grip them with the offset tongs).

Today I tried to work on two pieces at once (finishing a second Jelly Roll on a piece I started on Tuesday), and also working with round bar, turning it into square bar, then octagonal, then back to round (optionally tapered). It turns out to be exhausting. While working on a single piece at a time, you get a natural rest while the metal re-heats in the forge. But with two irons in the fire (at my skill level), the second one is ready to go when I’m done with the first, so I get no break.

My hands have been seizing up when I hammer things in Fab class (which is immediately after Metalsmithing). I’ll be in the middle of hammering down a hem (really light hammering compared to what we’re doing in Smithing), and I’ll get a hand cramp that locks my hand in position for a minute. I’ve bought a bunch of electrolyte drinks.

Intermediate Layout and Fabrication has already produced some useful items. We’ve made a tray and an open toolbox. Next up is a toolbox with a hinged lid. Sheet metal work is pretty similar to papercraft, but the papercuts are worse.

I’ve started stickering up my Trapper Keeper.

Back to School

2025-01-23T00:00:00-06:00

With a false start (the first day of classes was a snow day!), I’m back in school for the Spring semester. So far it’s mostly been going over the syllabus for each class, and figuring out what supplies I need.

My Design 1 class last semester worked on 11”x15” paper, which was just barely reasonable to carry flat on my motorcycle. Drawing 1 this semester wants 18”x24”, which requires a portfolio that acts as a sail (I know from experience). I’m going to try rolling the pieces and separating them with glassine.

Design 2 will have me make a website (!) with my progress. Stay tuned for a URL.

Both of my metalworking classes are light on equipment that I need to schlep back and forth (not bringing an anvil and forge to class or a sheet metal brake or shear!), so I will hopefully be motorcycling rather than driving most days.

The handout for blacksmithing includes this lovely sentence: “You will find a section at the end of this packet, discussing what to think about if you consider bringing an anvil into your life”.

Back from Portugal

2025-01-18T00:00:00-06:00

Having just spent a few weeks in more remote areas of Portugal (Alentejo, near Spain), Adrienne and I agreed that our initial foray into living in Portugal will be in one of the larger cities, probably Porto.

We’d like to make sure we have access to certain things (for me, a maker space, for her an aerial gym) that might exist elsewhere, but we haven’t been able to easily find them. It’s very possible that once we get there and talk to folks, we’ll figure out how to find them elsewhere in Portugal.

We have enough things to think about when we’re trying this out initially, so going somewhere “easy” to start with seems wise.

Portuguese

2025-01-08T00:00:00-06:00

15 hours of in-person language lessons later, I feel somewhat less lost in Portuguese. The thing this has helped the most with is sounds. Just hearing the language and needing to respond is very helpful.

I’ve been “ssh!”ed more in this class than since I was practicing with my heavy metal band in the high school library (which is to say: never). Remembering to turn trailing “s” sounds into “sh” sounds requires breaking a lot of habit from Spanish. Surprisingly, another problem is pronouncing the word e like the Spanish y. You’d think carrying over the “and” word would be easy, but the similarity between e (and) and é (is) trips me up when I’m reading.

The grammar is mostly familiar, and a lot of words are just a sound-transformation away from Spanish, if they’re different at all. But, of course, the words that have changed are the ones that get used all of the time.

I’m working on building an Anki deck based on what we’ve covered.

New Year

2025-01-01T00:00:00-06:00

Hello from 2025.

In August 2024, I left my job as a software engineer to become a full time student. Check out the previous post for my year in review.

Things I’m anticipating in the new year:

second full-time semester at Austin Community College
- Signed up for 4 classes. We’ll see if that’s too much.
  - ARTS-1312, 3D Design
  - ARTS-1316, Drawing 1
  - WLDG-1401, Metalsmithing
  - WLDG-1453, Intermediate Layout and Fabrication
getting back on a regular exercise schedule
- finish building weightlifting platform at Triskaidekaphilia and move equipment over
- bouldering 2x week
substantial progress towards living in Portugal
- hope to get residency permit in the spring
- continue language lessons
- visit again
more personal projects around the house
- build more tables
travel
- Galapagos in the spring

Old Year

2024-12-31T00:00:00-06:00

I didn’t have a place to put a 2024 Year-in-Review post, so I’m going to do it here…

“Retired”
- A real relief to get out of Software
- Miss some co-workers, but not the work
Started school full time at Austin Community College
- ARTS-1311 Design 1 Design I ARTS-1311 | Flickr
  - Started using traditional media again, ink, acrylic gouache
    - Learned to like liner brushes for painting straight lines
    - Learned that masking never works as well as I hope it will
  - Design/planning using digital tools (Affinity Designer, Photoshop)
  - Deadlines effective to stop me reworking things to death
- WLDG-1405 Art Metals Art Metals WLDG-1405 | Flickr
  - Expected this to be a survey of materials/techniques
  - Actually a coppersmithing class (with one foray into steel)
  - Almost dropped it early on, but ended up enjoying it
  - Got to a point in each project where I hated my piece and thought it was ruined, worked through that on 2 of the 3 pieces (still hate half of the third)
- WLDG-1417 Intro to Layout and Fabrication Intro to Layout & Fabrication WLDG-1417 | Flickr
  - Ended up being more artistic/expressive than I expected
  - Learned the value of simpler tools/techniques
    - Layout on paper - no math, just taking measurements off of 1:1 diagrams
    - Filing
    - Angle grinder cutting discs
    - Angle grinder sanding discs
    - F-clamps
  - New techniques
    - Transfer punches
    - Sandblasting
    - Torch welding and brazing
    - TIG brazing
      - This is tempting to continue with, but I’m going to need to invest in a PAPR if I do because of the toxic fumes
Got involved at Asmbly https://asmbly.org
- Joined so that I would not buy a welding fixture table for home
  - Instead, I have bought a bunch of tooling
- Ended up learning a bunch of machines
  - Lathe, Vertical Mill
  - Tormach CNC Mill
  - Wood CNC routers
  - Laser cutters
  - 3D Printers
    - Took class in order to make these bins
    - Learned a lot more about filament printers
    - Used resin printers for the first time
- Learned basic modeling & CAM using Fusion
  - Using the academic license. Thanks, ACC!
- Took position as 3D Space Area Lead
  - Woefully underqualified, but making progress
  - Technical part of it is fine/interesting, enjoying the people-wrangling part of it far less
    - Inconsiderate users monopolizing machines
Moved back into Triskaidekaphilia
- One year renovation turned into 2.5
- A lot about the place is great
  - Screened porch is awesome
  - Really good for entertaining
    - Nog Party/Rewarming
  - Little touches that I’m really enjoying
    - Washlet(s)
    - Sparkling water dispenser
- Endless projects
  - Strike plates
  - Weightlifting platform
  - “Smart” home
    - Finally have all of the locks/garage doors/cameras organized on Home Assistant
    - Bermuda tracking of the cats is… questionable
  - Bird protection film
- Frustrating imperfections
  - Things that will never bother anyone but me, but I know how this or that is supposed to be, and it isn’t…
- Cats are still not comfortable (except Tenzing)
Decided to sell Parkwood house that I bought to live in during the renovation
- Don’t want to be a landlord
- Don’t want to own more property in Texas than I need to
- Probably going to take a big loss on it, but it is what it is
Travel
- Hiking and bird watching in New Zealand (layover day in Sydney), Scuba in Indonesia, bird watching in Taiwan on the way back
- Total eclipse at Inks Lake SP, with an extended stay in Tourtoise
  - Work from park works
- Three other State Parks in Tourtoise
- Roatán with old SF crew
- Bay area hangouts around a Confluent offsite
- Fourth of July on Cape Cod with family
- Whirlwind trip to Lisbon
  - Sued Portugal and won
  - Finally had biometrics appointment for residency visa
  - Progress towards living outside of the US
- In Portugal for a longer trip over the new year