Fire pit!!

Well, after talking about it ALL of last year (despite not really having a suitable backyard for it), and talking about it for most of this semester, my roommate and I FINALLY built a fire pit!

We were having a fire at a friend's house on Saturday night when we started talking about it again. We decided to go to Menards and get some bricks on Sunday after the game. One of the people sitting there listened to the whole conversation and then said something like "I have something that might work..." and pulled out EXACTLY what we needed...four bricks that assemble into a 3 foot diameter ring.

We dug a hole, fitted the bricks, and then filled in around it. The dirt we pulled up went into the lowest spot in the backyard. We went to the city dump to get some firewood, and I think I tended that fire for about 8 hours on Sunday. Pretty excited to keep it in working condition all winter.

I was kinda surprised how fast we went through wood though...there's got to be an easier way! Hahaha.

FEF

There's a big FEF meeting in Chicago. FEF is Foundry Educational Foundation, and they fund a lot of the stuff the metals lab does. We are sending our professor and three or four students to the Drake hotel in Chicago for their big annual meeting. I did not sign up in time to go, it filled up quick!

In any event, we have been working on these aluminum pizza cutters for awhile. They are the big half-moon ones that you rock over a pizza to cut it. We went through a few prototypes and then made a design for a final. We got a giant chunk of graphite and set up our lab to CNC out a mold. After the mold was complete, we set up the foundry as an assembly line, with the intentions of cranking out as many pizza cutters as fast as possible! (We need something like 300 by next Wednesday!)

I guess there were some problems resulting in a lot of scrap and a lot of people working till 3 or 5 am on two different nights this week. Yesterday, everyone showed up at 8AM to start churning out cutters. I showed up at 4PM after class and helped out until 8PM...everyone else put in a 12 hour day, and when it was all finished, we had 159 cutters ready to be machined! I believe we'll be teaming up again on Monday night to finish them out. I believe they are machining everything we have done today. It looks like they're going to make the deadline! Wish I could go!

Another week draws to a close...

Well, I took second in the chili cookoff! There were five chilis entered, I got a lot of compliments and a lot of votes, but the white chicken chili entered by my cupola partner edged me out on the vote sheet. He won a prize, that he was supposed to cast himself...haha. Overall, it was a ton of fun and I got a bunch of tasty chili!

Met with the same person and a teacher to discuss the cupola. I've almost finished the drawings for our behemoth mini-furnace, now I just have to add in a transportation method so we can move it. I think tipping it over and rolling it might be our best bet...ha!

After some price shopping, I was handed the department credit card and finally allowed to order the steel necessary to complete this thing. It should show up early next week, which means I get to spend all next week welding in the lab! (Not sarcasm, I'm actually excited!)

Plastics Conference!

Last night was the SPE meeting held at UWP. It went pretty well! My presentation partner offered me a sport jacket to match his suit...we looked sharp! (haha)

From 4:30-5:30, there was a social hour kinda deal. We weren't told about it, so only a few students met the guests over in the student center. The rest of us kinda milled around the lab and got things ready. I brought my laptop in to show a powerpoint at our table, but I had forgotten I just formatted it, so I used this opportunity to download openoffice.org. Haha!

People started filtering in around 5:30, and there were a lot of people! Probably around 35 or 40 total. Alumnus, prospective students, people from local industry that wanted to check everything out on campus. We talked for a bit with some of the people from thermoforming industries that were really interested in our project. We had several people asking for a finished project...and all I could really say was that it's a work in progress and we're very excited to get everything set up and start playing with it!

After the presentations, everyone went back to the student center for dinner. I sat at a table with a few of my friends and a few people from an industry that have making bio-friendly plastic out of chopped up corn cobs! Dinner was catered, free for UWP members of SPE, and very, very good! (Another great reason to join SPE...free delicious meals that should cost you $15!)

After dinner, Dr. Tabrizi gave an introduction to the plastics program, why it is special, and what we are striving to do. He pointed out how dedicated the students are by asking Phil (my presentation partner) what time he left the lab last night (5 am!). After his presentation, the featured speaker spoke on bio-degradable lubricants, and it was all really interesting! The speaker was a teacher at Northern Iowa before starting some private research and eventually starting this company: http://www.elmusa.com/

Vegetable oil makes a much better hydraulic fluid than petroleum products for a number of reasons: higher burning/flash point, better lubrication qualities, obviously better for the environment, etc. However, it tends to begin polymerizing and turn into plastic if heated and cooled enough times. What really impressed me about this presentation...they made additives to prevent it from polymerizing and created a bio-friendly hydraulic fluid that they are selling...and then took that plastic, gooey waste and found a use for that! They got a patent by letting that soak into the wood, letting it sit for a month so that it polymerizes, and creating a plastic/wood hybrid that looks like wood, acts like wood, but is totally impenetrable by water!

Did you know train companies lubricate the train tracks? It makes sense..train cars don't have differentials, so around corners, one wheel has to spin faster. The tracks are lubricated to prevent squealing and promote long life of the wheels and tracks. There are special machines before curves that apply different amounts of grease based on weather, how long the train is, how fast it is going, etc.

Long story short, they convinced a fairly large train company (I forget which one) to switch ENTIRELY to their bio-friendly product! By greasing the straights as well, they registered a 10% fuel savings for the locomotives!

Even longer story much shorter, I learned a lot from an interesting presentation, I got to meet some industry people and create some invaluable networking, and I got a free dinner! It was a good evening.

Success!

Remember last week, when I was worried about our heating element not getting hot enough? Well, after a bit of thinking and talking to a bunch of people, we figured out a very basic flaw in our logic. We left the voltage very low and just let it sit for a long time with a thermal imaging camera trained on it to capture the temperature.

It got WAY hotter than I expected it to, and it's going to be absolutely perfect for our project!

Besides that, we took apart the thermoformer and removed the existing tooling so that we can make up a jig for ours and get it installed.

Tomorrow is that plastics conference. We won't have the thermoformer set up in time to make any parts, but we will have quite a bit to show off. Hopefully we impress someone enough to get some internships out of it!

Society of Plastic Engineers Meeting

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but for the sake of continuity, I'll mention it again! I am a member of the UWP chapter of SPE, which is the Society of Plastics Engineers. So far, it's really paid off for me! I've gotten some unique opportunities...I've learned a lot at the meetings, toured some plastic production facilities not open to the public (one of my favorite things so far...VERY interesting!), I even won a scholarship when I went to Milwaukee last year for the statewide meeting!

This year, the statewide meeting is in Platteville...there's going to be some higher-ups from all over the state touring the lab, watching student presentations, and then eating a catered dinner. I've been asked to present with my partner on our project.

I'm a bit nervous because we have just started to hit some potholes and I'm trying to do two huge projects at once. I mentioned on Tuesday about our heating element not getting warm enough. It seemed like, after a while, the element was only getting colder...today we found out we blew a fuse in the voltage regulator...that explains a lot! At the same time, I'm a little nervous...I think I remember reading that hot water heating elements are their own thermostat; they don't pass current when they are warm...which may have blown the fuse. If this is the case, we have either maxed out the heating element, or we just turned it up too fast. Hopefully we can figure this out and get at least some proof of concept by Tuesday, when we present!

Oh, frustration!

Tonight, in casting, we didn't get much done. Frustrating because that's a solid 4+ hour block that we can do some much needed work, but we need to plow through class stuff as well. We did get a list of everything we needed to complete our furnace, though...three different sizes of solid rod in various lengths, some scrap rebar, about 10 feet of 2" diameter piping...and the kicker...two 24"x24"x1/4" plates, and one 24"x24"x1/2" plate. I checked online, and the internet wants $125 for the big plate and $50 a piece for the little ones! I suppose it is about 160lbs of steel, but it seems ridiculous! I'm going to go to a scrap yard tomorrow and see if I can find something close enough. A scrap yard will charge me $.30 or $.40 a pound. After we have all the parts for this furnace, I think progress will be much quicker!

We've gotten a lot done already...we also got our shot blaster in the lab operational, so we threw the half of the furnace that would fit into the shot blaster...10 seconds later, it comes out shiny and looking better than new! Magic! I think my partner may be a little better with an angle grinder, so he did most of the work cutting this down, but I am the better welder, so it's going to be my job to weld 300 lbs of scrap together into something that will (hopefully) melt metal. I'm excited!

Oh, I'm posting from my laptop for the first time in forever...I decided to upgrade my desktop to Windows 7. Unfortunately, there's a problem involving the student version, and upgrading from 32 bit to 64 bit...so I'm going to have to burn it to a CD. I'm going to have to move all the stuff I want to keep off of the computer and do a fresh install of Windows. I'm currently moving all the stuff I want to keep onto an external HDD...there are 7 move operations going at once, moving about 750gb of data! My computer is also cramming windows 7 into a file I can burn onto a DVD...oh, and Photoshop is open. I love technology! A few years ago, any one of those tasks would have taken all the computer's resources...I'm doing them all at once! Muwhahahahaha!