stormtrooperguy’s comlink

I went into the Rollins talking show last night half asleep, feeling like a zombie. I was tired from the last few days of water, cement, moving stuff, building walls, etc…

Once the show started though… that man never fails to impress me. At almost 20 years my senior he shames me with his energy, motivation and drive to do MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE.

His stories of world travel are always awesome. I love the thought of this punk icon sitting in Sri Lanka with a teenager saying “OK, this is Iggy Pop. Listen. Learn.”

By the end of the night it was all I could do to not go home and just build something. He travels, sings, talks, etc… My obsession is building stuff. Tonight I can’t wait to go back to operation “repair the basement”.

… has been wet. Very wet.

We had a massive rain storm here in MA. The sort of thing that, had it been a month ago, would have been a blizzard.

We got very, very lucky, in large part thanks to our cat Mal.

Mal gets lonely. He can only go a few hours without some sort of attention. So, he usually wakes me up at 5am. I pet him a bit, get out of bed and feed him, then go back to sleep.

The rain started on Saturday night. When Mal woke me up Sunday morning I figured I might as well check the basement.

Oh man.

Wet wet wet.

Not too bad yet. Maybe 1/2″ across the whole floor, but coming in steadily. There were spurts of water shooting up from the floor.

Checked the Home Depot web site and saw that they opened at 8. For the next 2 hours I vacuumed up water pretty much non stop.

We got to the Depot right around opening time. They had pumps! Yay! We picked up 2 automatic pumps. They come on and off regularly to suck up any water that may happen to be around. We grabbed the hoses conveniently located right on the same table, right inside the contractor entrance to the store.

It turns out that the hoses we got did NOT work with the pumps. We needed garden hoses for ours.

I cannibalized the one we actually had for our garden while Jodi headed out to get another. By the time she got there the pumps were gone.

Had we been 30 minutes later, we would not have gotten the pumps that saved our butts. Thank you Mal!!

The remainder of the day was spent chasing water. While at the depot I had picked up some epoxy putty to plug the biggest holes. I went with this rather than hydraulic cement since we were attempting to plug things that were completely submerged, and I knew the putty would do it.

That managed to slow the creeping water a bit, keeping us from floating away.

We found that we were getting between 1 and 2 inches of water per hour, even with the 2 pumps going.

Because our basement floor is crazily out of level, there were areas where the water would pool up pretty deep, but not flow to the pump. Jodi came up with a great system of pushing the water around with push brooms to shove it into the pumps.

Now, that part about 1-2 inches per hour? The way we held it back was to do this pushing dance every hour. Around the clock. Ugh.

Oh, and we had to strip the paneling and insulation off the basement walls to get access to the leaks.

Monday I called in wet to work. I went out to the Depot again right at opening time for hydraulic cement. Now that the gushing water was gone and we were keeping the levels low, I was able to go that route. They had 8 50 pound buckets in stock. Not knowing what I needed I bought 6 of them.

The next 24 hours was pretty much cementing the perimeter of the house with this stuff that you mix up in roughly baseball sized portions. It ended up taking 2 buckets to plug all of the leaks. Yup, 100 pounds of baseballs.

Today was another no-work day, as we still had puddles everywhere, pumps running full force, and a HUGE mess to clean up.

In the interest of mold prevention I spent the day cleaning, vacuuming, replacing shelves with new metal ones on wheels, and generally making sure that there weren’t hidden puddles to fester.

Later in the evening I picked up a 5 gallon bucket of Drylok, a paint for waterproofing masonry. Imaging painting a very, very rough surface with a 4″ brush. Now imagine that you are using pancake batter as your paint. Yeah, fun.

But, I was able to do 2 coats of Drylok on the wall where the bench lives and put the insulation / paneling back. This wasn’t so much for workspace benefit as it was to get access to one of the last big puddles… right under the bench.

Now, it’s bed time. And when I wake up tomorrow I will shower and go to work like a civilized person.

First, a quick overview of thermoforming.

This is how 501sty types make our armor. You heat a sheet of plastic until it gets soft, then pull it down over a mold and use vacuum to pull the plastic down to the mold. The plastic cools quickly and retains that shape, giving you a nice copy of the original.

For the last year or so I’ve been making clone armor at a friend’s house in Lunenburg, which is about 45 minutes – 1 hour from home.

For several months now I’ve been working on my own. Well, really this started even further back when we went from a 100 amp service in the house to a 200. This stuff takes a fair bit of juice.

Tonight was the first test of the machine, and it was a resounding success!!! There are certainly some tweaks to be done, but I did 2 pulls, and both look fantastic!

There are many ways to approach this sort of a build. At a basic level your home oven, a shop vac, and a box with a bunch of holes in it will do. As those of you who know me can attest, I tend to overdo things a bit.

I went with plans and a heater available from http://www.build-stuff.com. It was a good sum of money for both, but well worth it.

This system uses an “over/under” style of heater… you raise the plastic to the heater then lower it to the mold. Another approach is the “flip flop”, where your heater and platen (forming surface) are side by side, and the plastic flips between them via a hinge. To me, over/under makes more sense… instead of the hot plastic sagging toward your heat source it sags away.

For the vacuum, I got a good pump through Craigslist for a fraction of the retail cost. The pump sells for $700, I paid $100.

This pump uses 2 10 gallon air tanks as the vacuum chambers. The pump evacuates the air from the tanks. When I’m ready to form, I can open a valve that will allow air to rush back in to the tanks, taking the plastic down with it.

I haven’t tallied up the cost, and don’t think I want to. All things included, I’d say around $1500 – $2000 for the whole thing seems to be the right ballpark.

I’ve got a ton of pictures here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tk7602/sets/72157623135056391/

I’ll be working on captioning them better.

Last, I leave you with 2 videos. The first pull and the first chest.

The first pull is the very first time it’s all been on. The chest is the hardest part of the project, so I wanted to try that (it worked out fine!)

For now I leave you with 2 videos of the system in action.

Look at me, all coming out of the Evil Basement Lair for some blog action!

Long time no see. How have you been? Did you lose weight? You look great!

Anyway…

Tonight was the first night in I don’t know how long that I wasn’t slaving over some prop or another in the basement. I love doing that stuff, but even I need a break.

This Sunday is the infamous Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade. The 501st and Rebel Legion will be tromping through the wet streets in armor once again. Come see us if it’s not too bad out!

Tomorrow night is an NEG staff meeting. Fun fun!

Saturday is the pre-parade party. Sunday is parade time, then Sunday night: collapse!

I call this part one because, as of now, I am planning to visit again in October for New York ComicCon. But, that’s another story…

We went out to NYC to check out the Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. It was awesome seeing so much of his original work and some really cool props from his movies (Batman 89 cowls, Catwoman suit, Edward Scissorhands, etc… ). The layout of the exhibit was awkward… no real direction or path, which left people milling about in all directions. Put 500 milling about fans in 1 area and it gets tough to move around!

The other big part of the trip was seeing Rock of Ages. SO. FREAKING. GREAT! If you are of the era when Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister were the hot new ways to make your parents hate you, you owe it to yourself to see this. Come on, it even had the Hot 80s Chick Rolling Around On Hood Of Car.

As a total coincidence we went to see the Organ Beats while we were there! It just turned out that they were playing there while we were in town. Of course, we would see a Waltham band in NYC. Again.

I had fun geeking out with both total strangers and band members. The nerd never stops!!

While there we also went out for tea at Alice’s Teacup, an Alice in Wonderland tea shop. We had the Mad Hatter for 2. 2 pots of tea, 3 scones, 2 sandwiches and a plate of cookies and chocolate mousse. Mmmmm…. I wanted to run away with a box of berry lemon scones.

What else?

We stayed at the New Yorker, which is where we usually stay for NYCC (see prior tie in there about a second trip). They were doing promotional rates for the slow period of winter, so it was only around $130 a night, which, for a convenient Manhattan hotel isn’t bad.

Um… we had some very small cupcakes from a silly trendy bakery. They were about the size of a dollar’s worth of quarters, and cost about the same. Very tasty, though foolishly overpriced

Otherwise we did a LOT of walking. For example, our slow, relaxed day had us walk from 34th up to 78th. I definitely put some miles on my shoes this time ’round. The weather was fantastic for it… 40s and sunny.

The bus ride was uneventful. I was happy to see that there and back we had wifi on the bus and on the return trip had regular 115V power outlets at our seats. Yay Greyhound!!

After just a short time together, we had to say goodbye to our friend Breadman.

He apparently couldn’t handle another loaf of elegant oatmeal bread. He jumped off of the counter, dough in hand, and plunged to his death.

A moment of silence for the bread machine.

…

…

…

Having gotten used to the joy of home baked bread, we went out on a quest. We ended up with a $90 machine at Macy’s for $48. Not too shabby!

Nice subject, eh?

Fresca is the web server that my site has been on at Dreamhost for ages now. Bengals is the new machine. Yay more modern systems…

Fresca is a dual core opteron 2.2 ghz with 4 gigs of Ram. Bengals is a quad core 2.0 ghz Xeon with 16 gigs of ram.

The end result? More power!!!!! Er… less sluggish wordpress install? The DB server is the same, which concerns me, but we’ll see.

In other news, the world has been all abuzz over the iPad. More interesting is the discussion of Apple as a luxury brand. I’m not sure why this is even a topic of discussion, as it seems obvious. Apple is like, say, Lexus. Yes, the cars are very nice, and have all sorts of little details that a Kia might not. But there’s as much a status/brand recognition thing going on as quality.

That’s how I look at Apple. I REALLY like Mac OS X. I can get about 80% of my UI/environment matched on my Fedora laptop for about 5% of the cost of a Mac. I like the unibody aluminum chassis, the backlit keyboard… all those little things. Like the Lexus it comes at a price.

Happily, I’ve gotten my last few upgrades for free via employers, but prior to that I’ve bought many a new MacThing. I’m aware of the reaction to showing up at a coffee shop with a shiny new Apple. It’s a bit awkward, and I know that people make certain assumptions about you based on the presentation you make. But, that’s just something that happens, and I feel pretty neutral about it.

Anyway, back to the iPad. I like the idea. I’ll want to play with one in person, but it seems like it would be a fun system. It’s lacking a couple of things that I’d really like to see, and which I suspect will be in V2. My main gripe is lack of a way to connect a digital camera to it. This seems like a great thing to bring with you when you travel, and to use to upload photos. Then again, lately I use my iPhone more often than my Rebel XT.

In other other news, I had a sad molding failure… The thickened layer of Rebound 25 on my clone rifle never fully cured. I suspect the basement got too cold at night for it. 2 days later and it’s still sticky. So, I’m calling that side of the mold a failure and starting over.

I removed it, fixed up the clay barrier, and put a new coat down tonight.

This morning I drove out to Woburn for a company’s liquidation sale, and picked up a Gast 1023 vacuum pump for $100. These retail for around $700 new, so this was a BIG score and shaved a ton of money off the vac table bottom line. I was SO tempted to pick up a second one for a spare, but refrained. I’ll probably contact them again next week and see if there are any left. If so I’ll likely go back.

Then when I got to work, I found that my tonneau cover had arrived! It really was as easy to install as they claimed. It took me about 15 minutes to get it out of the box and on the truck. I wasn’t able to do the tailgate weather strip, since it was VERY dirty. I’ll have to do that later.

This will be great for a number of reasons. Like, for example, the $700 vac pump in the bed is not out in the open for the whole world to see now!

I also won’t have to strap in any small things I put in the back. I’m probably going to pick up one of the cargo separators for it next… it’s a rigid wall that installs into the rails on the bed and can be positioned wherever you need it.

With something like that, you can put, say, grocery bags, in the bed of the truck and not have to crawl all the way in to the back of the bed to get them back out.