My office is a little small and barely able to contain all the machines I’ve accumulated. The 3D printer I turned into an etcher for specular holograms was obnoxiously tall, and really doesn’t need much vertical range. I chopped the aluminum extrusions so it would fit in an unused corner of the room. I’ve been doing occasional tests here and there, nothing worth showing yet. Results are very hit and miss, and finding good subjects is hard too.
I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It’s fun and fast.
Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I’ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now’s not the time to think of what that could be.
Beyond the knots, we thought it’d be kind of a shame not to get a few boards out of such a special tree. It’s oak, it really stood out as a tree, it’s close to 200 years old, and we walked past it for 10 of them. So after researching possibilities, I bought a chainsaw mill with a 24″ bar and a ripping chain. The saw is a monster when fully equipped.
I haven’t taken it on its maiden ripping yet, all in due time. And now I’m dreaming of going deeper in the woods and building a cabin with lumber milled on the spot.
7 days, 47438 pen strokes :\. Lara’s work and a recurring dragon on this blog :). I sped up the machine to make it 7 days instead of 10, so it’s slightly more inaccurate, but more importantly I failed to anticipate that ink would run out faster. I used to have about 1.5 days between pen swaps, here it’s barely above 1 day. No harm done I got there in time, but I should have thought about it when I adjusted speed.
I lined it up with a big public event and tons of people got to see it.
No sure if there’s anything more to say about lasers & post-it portraits, it was the now usual formula. I’ve enhanced the pipeline some to do auto-face-cropping as it is a step we usually waste lots of time on. Esther & I rehearsed over the week end. She runs the operation during the event.
Some recurring questions I get asked at these events:
“What are the machines for normally?” Nothing, their sole purpose is to drag pens and shine cat lasers.
“Is this your job?” Nope, just a side quest.
“So how does this work?” I try to see what part they’re interested in before I launch into a 3 hour tirade :).
“Did you build this?” yes.
It’s very gratifying to see people stare at your work for a while. You can see the gears turning in their heads. I’ll sit by the big machine sometimes to watch people’s reaction to it. When I swap its pen people will come up and tell me how much they like it. I’m just glad for having the opportunity to do something cool in the world.