frobzwiththingz

Yay! First print with ABS that didn't warp it's way off the print bed within the first 5 layers.
In fact, it finished, and came out great!

Still in the realm of "black magic" until I can make it happen repeatedly, though.

The first aerial rig i built for someone *else* has just left my hands and entered the customers hands. It was taken home this afternoon after an orientation session with the new owners.

It has 19 foot high mount points, and breaks down into pieces 6 feet 8.5 inches long. Total weight about 230lbs. Can be set up to a lower height of 14.5. Goes up and down quickly and easily with 3 people.

( It's the 4-legged structure on the right here )

Now to start hunting down prospects for more orders...

So, i'm currently in the process of building Aerial Rig number 3. It's another aluminum rig, that will be capable of being set up in either a 4-leg 19-foot height, or a three-leg 24-foot height. The 4-leg configuration will be able to be set up by three or four people in less than 15 minutes. the 3-leg configuration should be able to be set up with only 2 people, in about the same time. Possibly single-handedly with a special tool i'm thinking about. The 4-leg configuration will have much more open space at the top. [a full construction writeup will eventually appear on this LJ...]

Anyhow, the most recent thing i needed to do was to do a *lot* of plug-welds, to join tubes to internal sleeves. 96 plug welds, in 11/16ths holes, joining an inner .375 thickness sleeve to the outer .25 thickness tube.

Doing this in aluminum requires a pretty hefty arc voltage, and produces copious amounts of nasty welding fumes. I've got a pretty decent exhaust fan located a few feet above my welding table, that is sufficient for most things, but in this case i would need to be welding on the floor, much farther away from it. Especially since my plan is to attempt to sell rigs of this design to aerialists far and wide, i decided i really want to have a better system for dealing with the welding fumes. Professional welding shops can spend enormous amounts of money on air handling equipment to move the nasty gases out quickly. But I've been in shops with really good exhaust systems, and still, your head is *right next to* the arc. You're still going to get bathed in some nastiness no matter how good that fan system above you in the ceiling is.

( I decided to attack the problem from a different angle entirely. I thought about SCUBA divers, and then did this: )

almost a year ago I wrote about This. Well, there is still a fair amount to do until it is complete, but as of yesterday, it managed to produce its first test part! Nothing too complex, just a simple pocket cut out of mahogany. But that pocket was modeled in Solidworks, then run through VisualMill to generate toolpaths, then handed off into The Machine for production.

( Tool Porn Cut For Those Who Care )

It has a long way to go, but the form is starting to take shape.

So i finally got around to upgrading my trapeze. The previous one i had built did not have bar ends, and i eventually decided that i really wanted them. So finally one night i went down into the shop with the intention of cutting and grooving a new replacement bar, and then disassembling my trapeze and swapping the new bar in. But the original trapeze had been a prototype design to begin with, and in the time since i had built it i had come up with several design improvements. Plus, the original bar was 1-1/8th inch, and was pretty darned heavy already. So instead of simply swapping the bar out on the original trap, i decided to do a complete do-over and produce Trapeze Design Rev 3, with a 1 inch diameter bar. (Rev 2 was only on paper, and never built.)

The new trapeze is a cable core design, which uses a two-part donut-like assembly which acts as both a rope thimble and a captive collar for the wire rope core. The cable passes through this assembly, around a groove in the bar, and back out again. The rope is then passed around the thimble part of the donut and backspliced into itself, about 6 inches away from the thimble (so you can undo it and inspect the cabling without needing to undo the splice). Rope eye is then lashed together and down to the bar. Cable is 3/16ths 7x19 construction, vinyl coated. Rope is 3/4 nylon 3-strand laid.

Much of this process i took photos of. So, much like the recent entry about the hoop, here is a photo log of its fabrication. Some of the assembly was done at craft nights at other folks houses, which is why there are so many different backgrounds in these shots :-)

( Construction log follows )

( Assembly )

Finished product here:

So, for the past 2.5 months or so i've hermitting in the machine shop, barely seeing anyone and occasionally emitting streams of expletives from the depths of the basement. I feel intimately familiar with all of radioIO AMBIENT, and have pulled enough all-nighters in the machine shop to have heard their entire inventory. I've been working on Aerial Rig Mark 2, a rig of a very different design as the one that has been in my yard. Object was to design a rig that needed much less people to erect, could be transported using the two vehicles we own (both scion xBs), requiring minimal extra support tools to erect, and most importantly, require *NO* external guy wires and be able to be put up somewhere without any ground anchors needed. I wanted to bring this new rig, if ready, out to Burning Man, and guy wires are a danger to the public at night. And this one should be lighter, and made of aluminum instead of steel. And i wanted a swiveling mount point integrated into the rig, so that we could make our silk rigging simpler.

Anyhow, this project has eaten all of my spare time since early May. I thought it would be much easier than the last rig. I mean, what could be so hard about building an equilateral pyramid, with a tension cable network at the bottom to keep it in place?

Of course, as it turns out, the devil is in the details. And boy were there details. I won't describe them here; ask me in person if you have any interest. And as the deadline for having things ready for packing onto the Boston Burning Truck approached, i began to think that i had bitten off way more than i could chew in time. Thats when the weekend all-nighters started. And then the stints in the shop on a work night until 3am. At some point last week i crawled into bed around 3 and said to klingonlandlady, "I don't know how much more of this i have in me."

Today, however, all of the work has seen fruition, as we did a successful full-height test raising of the not-final, but good-enough to be functional rig. It only took 4 people to raise and lower, as opposed to the 8 or so the square rig requires (or the *30* you need to raise the square one in an open field)

I was sort of dreading the test today, worried that we'd find *some* fatal problem in either the design or raising method. But everything worked! Lots of thanks to klingonlandlady, sensesurfer, and doze_e_fish for their help in the project today. More thanks to sensesurfer for the use of the Multicam 1500 CNC Machine Of Doom. Onward to the Playa! much much much thanks and love to klingonlandlady, who has put up with me during this long episode of hyperfocus. Hoping to relax a bit now.

( More details and pictures behind the cut )