Zanzibar (Pics galore)

[Slug Toy]

after much talk, much thought, and much delay, this worklog is officially under way. lets jump right into the deep end, only two minutes after eating, no swimming skills, and no life jacket, and we'll see what happens.

first, heres a small tour of the facilities:

this is my garage. maybe a couple hundred square feet, but it still gets messed up horribly.

my table saw. i wont be using it, but its there and its worth mentioning.

my drill press. ill be using that tomorrow if all goes well.

my chop saw. its retarded, so im leaving it alone.

my belt sander. it came in handy yesterday for my "dangerous metals test". look in the rookies nook at the feature thread and you'll see.

my bandsaw. that may come in handy for some curved cuts or something.

ok, another post is coming in just a few minutes with some good stuff, so sit tight.

[Slug Toy]

heres some action shots for you.

this is the aluminum i started with. 50"x30", and only $18.

this is what i got after some jig-sawing. a 20"x20" square. the picture's a little fuzzy for some reason. i dont know why.

i then proceeded to cut the square into 2" strips. two of the strips i cut in half to make four 10"x2" strips. you'll understand this all once i start assembly.

i then annealed the strips and ended up with some warped metal. nothing a rubber hammer cant fix. if you dont know what annealing is, refer to my "workign with sheet metal" thread in tips and tricks.

once i annealed the strips, i was ready to put them into a bending jig. it took me a few tries to make something that worked, but i eventually settled on this.

i bent the four 10"x2" strips down the middle and ended up with this. at this point though, it was dark and cold, so i called it quits for the night.

so thats what i was doing today. tomorrow, i plan on getting the rest of my metal strips bent, and perhaps i will start assembling them to show you what kind of madness this is. check back here tomorrow for more interesting things.

[Slug Toy]

hmm, i had an afterthought here. just looking back at some pictures, i noticed a fire extinguisher sitting outside my garage. i was going to avoid putting this in, but i might as well explain it for a laugh.

me and my brother like to do, um, dangerous things. the more dangerous, and illegal, and stupid, the better it is.

well today i was experimenting with a makeshift annealing apparatus coming off one line of a 10 pound tank of propane, and i had a small scale pulse jet (improvised from a wonky propane heater) on on another line, making pointless noise. then a leak at one of the valves burst into flames and started shooting melted plastic from the tap, and crap everywhere. i tried blowing it out... for whatever reason, and singed my hair a bit. then i tried slapping it out, and burnt my glove. then my brother got the fire extinguisher out, which was full of water and rust at about 250 PSI (it was empty so he "recharged" it with the water). so he blew rusty water all over the place, put the fire out, soaked me and himself, and then we decided to call it quits with makeshifting, and launched the annealing apparatus into the air with a parachute flare. all in all, i had some fun. thats actually why the siding is stained along the bottom in some spots too.

too bad i dont have pictures of that, but the camera was inside while i was doing that, and my first reaction wasnt "this would make a nice picture". i think my first reaction was "thats interesting" and then "oh crap".

so what is the lesson? dont improvise when dealing with propane tanks and fire. dont try to blow out a large fire, and dont try to slap it either. keep your fire extinguishers handy and full of something other than water. and finally, parachute flares are loud.

anyways, tomorrow brings on another adventure/catastrophe.

[DaveW]

Holy hell, i would kill for your setup. Have you seen what i have to work in? Check out Stage 1 of my worklog. I can't even stand up straight where i work.

I envy you.

-Dave

[xmastree]

I envy you.

You at least have some sort of workbench, with clamps and stuff. I'm working outside (ok, so it's warmer here) on top of a freezer. Or in my bedroom if the wife isn't looking...

[Rankenphile]

so what is the lesson? dont improvise when dealing with propane tanks and fire. dont try to blow out a large fire, and dont try to slap it either. keep your fire extinguishers handy and full of something other than water.

You know, I hate to say it, but someone has to.

Well, duh!

Lol, only kidding, of course. Neat stuff you've got going, can't wait to see what it shapes up to be. And I've had more than my fair share of dealing with the aftermath of dangerous, stupid and probably illegal experiments. Once, as a kid in my early teens, I was trying to carve and sculpt styrofoam to make terrain hills for a D&D adventure I was planning. I was using the beaded styrofoam stuff that comes in appliance packaging, in my room. The stuff kept falling apart, not to mention the horrible noise it made when I cut it.

I got a crazy idea - I remembered you could melt styrofoam with acetone, so I dug through my dad's shop and found a can of it and a couple old rags. I went back to my room, applied some of the acetone to the rags and started trying to sculpt the styrofoam with the acetone-soaked rags. It sort of worked, in that it made a wierd gooey mess that sort of went into the shape I had in mind, but it was slow, tedious work, so I decided to see if I could speed it up.

By lighting it on fire.

Probably the worst idea, ever. I was completely unsupervised, probably 12 or 13, and in my room upstairs at a crappy desk. I lit the styrofoam that was soaked in acetone, expecting to blow it out again, but the whole hill went up in a big whoooof and settled back down to a steady burn. I tried slapping it out with the nearest thing I had at hand...

...the acetone-soaked rag.

Okay, you know how I said lighting the styrofoam was the worst idea ever? Wrong. It was the second worst. Using fuel-soaked rags to put out a fire in your bedroom? Yeah, that's a winner.

I managed to put it out, however, by grabbing a big old green wool army surplus blanket I had on my bed right behind me and smothering it out. I stood there for probably ten minutes staring at the mess I had just made in my room before realizing a very critical notion -

My parents are going to kill me.

Both my folks were working, and not due home for a few hours. I opened all my windows to let the fumes out, wrapped the whole mess, blanket and all, in a huge ball, stuck them in a hefty bag and dragged it across the street to the train tracks and buried them a few hundred yards away form my house in the center of a huge blackberry bush. I finished, went home and cleaned the heck out of my room, getting rid of any evidence I could (the desk still had a few swolen stains and bumps from where the acetone soaked throught he white surface coating, but it was a mess already).

I never did get caught, but that's something I always remembered.

Sorry to get so far off topic, man, and I really hope I didn't derail your worklog, but I had to share that story - I had forgotten about it until I read your tale.

[DaveW]

Using fuel-soaked rags to put out a fire in your bedroom

Jees Rankephile, i've done some silly things, but can't hold a candle to that!

-Dave

[Slug Toy]

made some good progress today. i got the frame made up and i am now ready to move onto hardware placement.

ill move on to some work pictures in a second, but first the obligatory workshop cat shot:

four quick answers to questions i always get: yes she IS brown, she is a purebred Havana Brown, she is dumb as a post, and no you cant have her. she doesnt actually hang out when im working. the tools scare her, heck, her own shadow scares her. if its not loud, she'll snoop around though.

ok, work pictures.

im starting on the 20" pieces, bending them the same way as i did the four shorter pieces yesterday. oh, one side note, the purple crap that i have the metal clamped in is a wood called purple heart. beautiful stuff, but it is super hard and heavy, and it irritates everything.. nose, eyes, lungs, and slivers get very infected.

here im just showing how i start the bending process. i hit directly from the side to stay nice and close to where the metal is clamped. that way, i can keep the bends clean and crisp.

so here i have a collection of the bent metal, all done. now i can start drilling and rivetting. this is where my drill press comes in handy.

one hole drilled, just to show you the spacing.

one rivet done, to show how it looks.

heres one side done. still kind of flimsy, but that changed very quickly.

this is the complete frame. it measures 20"x20"x10".

so that is all the good pictures i have for now. ill explain a bit now.

the reason im going with a frame and not a proper case is that i believe i will have enough strength in the other bits ill be adding. theres going to be a fair amount of styrene, a few more metal pieces, and all sorts ofsmall little things i havent even gotten figured out yet. i also want to keep weight down.

so now, the hardware placement is going to get interesting. ill put my concept picture here, so i can refer to it.

as you can see, there will be the big windmill on the one side, so that would have had to be wide open anyways... another advantage of my frame idea. that thing on the front that looks like a gate will house two cd drives, and it WILL be off center.

unfortunately i cant really show where the motherboard will be, but ill describe it to the best of my ability. i plan to have it about an inch away from the right hand wall, unlike most cases where it is right up against the wall. this way i can get some air flow happening back there. ill probably fasten it by making some aluminum risers and only screwing the motherboard in at the bare minimum number of points.

i havent decided yet, but im toying with the idea of having the hard drive hidden in the imitation cliff, because it really wont serve any purpose visually, and probably wont need to be seen.

the power supply is probably going to be tucked away in the cliff too, and the only hint you will have is some wires coming out along with that spinning "power generator" that is in the base on zanzibar.

as for things like the power button, and the usb ports and such, well that is yet to be decided as well. i want them to be easily accessible, but out of view. i might slap them in just below the ramp coming around the front. that way they would be about half way up and reasonably out of sight.

well, i dont have a heck of a lot more to say right now. i have some things to take care of tomorrow, so i dont know if i can work on this, but sunday is a maybe. if you guys are lucky, ill have more pictures for sunday night. they will be of the back panel fabrication, and perhaps the motherboard mount. if im really productive, you may even see some drive mounts appearing. i just have to get everything placed before i can go about anything visual.

so, keep your fingers crossed.

[Slug Toy]

oh, and dont worry about taking this thread off topic. ill do my share of derailing as i work through this. its my random creative outlet to go off on tangents without notice.

by all means, if i remind you of something that is worth mentioning, throw it in.

[xmastree]

Nice Workshop, here's mine!

(See Dave, I told you I was working on a freezer!)

And here's the cat:

you should have seen her tail after the flash went off.

Anyway, what I'm about to suggest is pointless as you've gone beyond that stage, but...
For making the square frames, wouldn't it be stronger to use one piece, cut half way at three points and folded into a rectangle, then riveted?