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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.
