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Jun. 20th, 2018 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randomdreamsWe had a whirlwind east coast tour, and I haven't posted about it.
Portland, Maine, was lovely. I'd freeze to death, but it felt very comfortable.
Windsor, Vermont, is the middle of nowhere. It used to be the capitol of American high-precision manufacturing. They have a machine tool museum there, and it's pretty cool if you like machine tool museums.
Bridgeport milling machines are the standard by which all others are judged. They had the first one ever built.
Here's a watchmaker's lathe. I never managed to figure out how this thing even worked, much less what it was capable of making.
We got to drive over one of the world's longest covered bridges on our way out of town.
This gentleman watched us catch a Kyogre during a Pokemon raid in Boston.
We had dinner withfbhjr and malterre in a restaurant that used to be a movie theater. They'd done a neat job of decor.
The USS Constitution is a fine-looking ship, even if it is the floating embodiment of the Ship Of Theseus paradox.
We got to clamber about inside of it, for free! because it's still a US Navy ship. It had gotten tugboat-pulled out of port to shoot off a cannon that morning, when we first showed up.
In Providence, we walked into a giant party that stretched across all of downtown, the PDX festival. It was still going on loudly at midnight.
Rhode Island had more or less paved over the river and estuary that runs through town, and about ten years ago decided to unearth it. During that period, they dredged out the channel. This is a statue made of guns recovered during the process.
The Rhode Island School of Design has a pretty sweet museum, with a lot of amazing stuff, much of it classical and Classical. This was more modern.
This is the side of some random building in Philadelphia, that I liked because 95% of the details here are painted. There are four windows on the side of this otherwise blank brick building, and someone decided to faux it up.
We were out walking withtwoeleven and ran across a place that's a living monument to a guy who was REALLY INTO mosaic. He covered the inside of a building with it, and then continued on down the street.
We all had dinner on the Moshulu, which claims to be the only four-masted dining experience in the world. They'd done a pretty nice job building a fancy Victorian interior into what was a 1930's bulk carrier ship.
There was a chemical history museum. !!! You'd have to be pretty into weird old instrumentation to find it a thrill, but I loved it.
Here's a desktop electron microscope, for those times when you really need a convenient nanometer-scale scan.
Dogfish Head Brewery has the most amazing treehouse.
The USS Constellation is pretty cool, but it looks so dowdy and rinkydink after the Constitution.
MR. TRASH WHEEL.
MTW was sleeping when we were there. Usually, water flow down the river powers the paddle wheels, which drive a conveyor, which lifts floating trash into a dumpster that someone periodically empties. It's an off-grid trash scavenger, with googly eyes.
The Baltimore Museum of Visionary Arts was legitimately amazing.
This thing is animated and you can run it through its paces through a tiny handwheel on one side. It's about 30% Meccano and 65% fabricated from brass, with a real cat skull.
They have an annex, a second building that has a lot of entries from a Baltimore-based kinetic sculpture challenge (where you build a vehicle that can travel under human power across land and water.) I mostly liked the robots.
And then back home.
Update on the casting/oven project. I let the mold dry the whole time we were gone, got back, chucked it in the oven, fired it up, and the oven ran away. The commercial controller is measuring the temperature correctly, and the relay it's switching works correctly, but the controller isn't sending an 'off' signal when the oven goes over temp. So when I came back I found some of the steel I put in there to support the refractory glowing just slightly red, and half my aluminum drip pan melted. The wax and PLA I'd printed was good and burnt out, though.
The mold appears to be solid. I don't know how. It was at 550C, and at that temperature the plaster base composition of the mold should turn back to dust as the hydrates that maintain its shape burn off. I'll try casting it over the weekend, if the weather cooperates. It's been either blazing hot and risk of fires, or hailing, pretty much every day lately.
Portland, Maine, was lovely. I'd freeze to death, but it felt very comfortable.
Windsor, Vermont, is the middle of nowhere. It used to be the capitol of American high-precision manufacturing. They have a machine tool museum there, and it's pretty cool if you like machine tool museums.
Bridgeport milling machines are the standard by which all others are judged. They had the first one ever built.
Here's a watchmaker's lathe. I never managed to figure out how this thing even worked, much less what it was capable of making.
We got to drive over one of the world's longest covered bridges on our way out of town.
This gentleman watched us catch a Kyogre during a Pokemon raid in Boston.
We had dinner with
fbhjr and malterre in a restaurant that used to be a movie theater. They'd done a neat job of decor.The USS Constitution is a fine-looking ship, even if it is the floating embodiment of the Ship Of Theseus paradox.
We got to clamber about inside of it, for free! because it's still a US Navy ship. It had gotten tugboat-pulled out of port to shoot off a cannon that morning, when we first showed up.
In Providence, we walked into a giant party that stretched across all of downtown, the PDX festival. It was still going on loudly at midnight.
Rhode Island had more or less paved over the river and estuary that runs through town, and about ten years ago decided to unearth it. During that period, they dredged out the channel. This is a statue made of guns recovered during the process.
The Rhode Island School of Design has a pretty sweet museum, with a lot of amazing stuff, much of it classical and Classical. This was more modern.
This is the side of some random building in Philadelphia, that I liked because 95% of the details here are painted. There are four windows on the side of this otherwise blank brick building, and someone decided to faux it up.
We were out walking with
twoeleven and ran across a place that's a living monument to a guy who was REALLY INTO mosaic. He covered the inside of a building with it, and then continued on down the street.We all had dinner on the Moshulu, which claims to be the only four-masted dining experience in the world. They'd done a pretty nice job building a fancy Victorian interior into what was a 1930's bulk carrier ship.
There was a chemical history museum. !!! You'd have to be pretty into weird old instrumentation to find it a thrill, but I loved it.
Here's a desktop electron microscope, for those times when you really need a convenient nanometer-scale scan.
Dogfish Head Brewery has the most amazing treehouse.
The USS Constellation is pretty cool, but it looks so dowdy and rinkydink after the Constitution.
MR. TRASH WHEEL.
MTW was sleeping when we were there. Usually, water flow down the river powers the paddle wheels, which drive a conveyor, which lifts floating trash into a dumpster that someone periodically empties. It's an off-grid trash scavenger, with googly eyes.
The Baltimore Museum of Visionary Arts was legitimately amazing.
This thing is animated and you can run it through its paces through a tiny handwheel on one side. It's about 30% Meccano and 65% fabricated from brass, with a real cat skull.
They have an annex, a second building that has a lot of entries from a Baltimore-based kinetic sculpture challenge (where you build a vehicle that can travel under human power across land and water.) I mostly liked the robots.
And then back home.
Update on the casting/oven project. I let the mold dry the whole time we were gone, got back, chucked it in the oven, fired it up, and the oven ran away. The commercial controller is measuring the temperature correctly, and the relay it's switching works correctly, but the controller isn't sending an 'off' signal when the oven goes over temp. So when I came back I found some of the steel I put in there to support the refractory glowing just slightly red, and half my aluminum drip pan melted. The wax and PLA I'd printed was good and burnt out, though.
The mold appears to be solid. I don't know how. It was at 550C, and at that temperature the plaster base composition of the mold should turn back to dust as the hydrates that maintain its shape burn off. I'll try casting it over the weekend, if the weather cooperates. It's been either blazing hot and risk of fires, or hailing, pretty much every day lately.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 07:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-29 06:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 12:28 pm (UTC)It was very nice to meet the two of you and were happy to be part of your tour!
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Date: 2018-06-22 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 05:17 pm (UTC)So the drying oven here just failed and went over temp, but it's set up with a normal heating element, not high-temp, so it just melted a bunch of plastic and gunk onto the bottom of the oven. Looking at its thermostat, it's some kind of ancient-seeming bimetallic thermostat. After looking at the prices for brand-new drying ovens, I'm now thinking it would make sense to try and clean out and replace the existing thermostat in this one, maybe also adding on some form of high-temp shutoff. If you have ideas, I'm all ears!
But meanwhile: good luck with the casting! So exciting to reach that stage, even if the oven hasn't behaved quite as expected. I've been reading a little about kilns recently. I'm not ready to experiment with them yet, but it's fascinating to learn about.
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Date: 2018-06-22 03:11 am (UTC)There are also thermal cutoff switches. It's hard to find adjustable ones with wide temp ranges. However, if you can define the temperature you consider emergency-out-of-range, there are some pretty good options. It's likely you'll need to use a solid state relay, but usually those are supplied with temperature controllers anyway, so you could wire it across the relay in parallel with the temp con so either one of them can turn it off if it gets too hot.
In about a month or so I'll have my homebrew one finished, and it should allow stuff currently available ones don't, like reporting info as a webpage you can reach from your phone so you can see if there's a disaster going on or get a text message if it's over-temp.
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Date: 2018-06-22 03:49 pm (UTC)Also, once you get that homebrew unit finished, PLEASE make an Instructable. I cannot tell you how many academics would love to have that capability for incubators and freezers. (ahem, I mean, *I* would love to have that capability...)
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Date: 2018-06-23 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 01:26 am (UTC)We wanted to go to the Chemical History Museum when we were in Philly but didn't make it. There is a lot of interesting stuff to do in that town though! Good food too.
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Date: 2018-06-22 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 04:32 am (UTC)https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/63
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Date: 2018-06-25 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 04:03 am (UTC)Having peered closely at the full size image, I think there must be more than 4 real windows on that side of the building. All of the ones on the right-most section look real to me. Or at least the window frames look real; they may not all have glass in them.
I love the photo of the bunny on the guy's shoulder.
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Date: 2018-06-22 04:44 am (UTC)At least one of the windows looked real until I got up quite closely, as they'd done a good job of painting shadows around it. I think in retrospect that was in Poughkeepsie, not Philadelphia.
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Date: 2018-06-23 01:37 pm (UTC)I spent a couple days in Portland Maine when I was driving back and forth across Canada and the US back in 2005. I got a great picture of a girl playing a violin.
no subject
Date: 2018-07-14 04:28 pm (UTC)