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From one of my favorite magazines, Hot Rod Deluxe. I love this stuff – LOVE IT! I wish I had the money to put together some machinery like this. The pic on the right is a supercharged Hemi – the real deal, not the new version they make now – the legend. I can hear it in my head, and it sounds like awesome!
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A friend has been telling me about this new local band called Neon Love Life. If I could tell you where else to go and read about them I would, but last I checked they didn’t have much of a web presence. You can look ’em up on Youtube for some fan vids with really terrible sound quality. But that’s not what I was in for. These chicks rocked! Far as I know most of their songs were originals, and they just fired up and really gave it hell. I think I paid something like five bucks to see them, and I would have paid twice as much. Hoping I get to see them again.
Not a bad shot for being crammed in the absolute back of the room, really.
And, yes, I did post two pictures for this date. Too good to let them go.
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I wonder to whom this was originally given? I ended up with it when I asked the waitress to break a twenty for me last night.
…and now I’m wondering who I gave it to…
…probably some dude.
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I just found out about this place today. Greatest thing ever, right? Possibly, very possibly. It’s the only museum of its kind in the entire country. They seem to really focus on forging and casting, which is a bit of a bummer for a guy like myself, but it’s still incredibly cool!
I will spare you the words. You can check out this very nifty video:
In case you’re wondering, it is a seven hour and fifty-two minute drive from the door of my house to this magnificent repository of ferrous fantasticness (okay, they do non-ferrous stuff too, but I’m taking poetic license) in Memphis, Tennessee. Aaaanyway, I found out about this place today while hunting around for all kinds of things about metal working and metal fabrication, and I was really just thrown. You should check out the part at the beginning where they show off the gates to the museum grounds – so many cool little highlights!
It just looks so cool. The woman featured in the video is a student there, I guess an intern at the time it was filmed, and she’s just so jazzed about the whole thing. It’s infectious! I want to go! How do I enter? Where do I sign up? Do I have to sell my home? No problem! Sell my car once I get there? Okay! Live on macaroni and cheese for an entire year? Sounds great!
Seriously, dudes, there’s something wrong with me. I’ve been looking up metalsmithing, metal working, metal crafting, machining, and I’m dreaming of this awesome shop with, like, four bench grinders and a mill and a lathe and MIG, TIG, stick, and gas welders, and presses and punches and drills and….
*sigh* This is so weird, so very weird.
Here, here’s another video about what they call “Repair Days” where the museum calls in craftsmen and women from all over the world, and you just show up with your broken awesome stuff, and they fix it for you – fixed by some of the greatest artists in the world! This is so cool!
I wanna go. I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go. NOW!
Here’s a short piece highlighting Mary Catherine (whose name I may be misspelling, because the folks who added the videos keep changing it up):
I’m envious of how happy and excited she is here. I want to feel that way about something like that! I’d absolutely LOVE to be immersed in the learning process like that. How…how do you make that happen? I haven’t seen anything like that for the kind of stuff I like to do, at least not yet. I guess I’m looking for it. It’s an odd branch of study, but I suppose if you look for anything long enough, you’ll find it.
I also feel a little envious. She says she studied glass blowing in Europe, and now she’s here studying metal working. I wish I’d embraced those sorts of possibilities when I was younger. I can’t help but feel a little regret for not having spent my life doing things just a bit differently. On the other hand, I had no clue I was into this stuff back then, and back then I probably would have devalued my general feelings on the subject anyway. I have been repeatedly told that “things happen when they are supposed to happen,” so, even though this seems like a late start for me, apparently I’m supposed to have become interested in metal art many years after I received my diploma. I can’t help that. Maybe all this time doing other things has just prepared me to really focus myself wholly and completely on what I want to do right now. I can tell you that if I went back to school now I certainly wouldn’t be skipping classes. I’d be showing up all bright and energetic and annoying the crap out of kids who were hungover or just not really all that into it.
We’ll see where this takes me. I have no clue, I’m just reporting it as it happens.
Oh, and if you know of anyone with shop space on the north side of Indianapolis, I need some.
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This was the only picture I had energy left for after spending about two hours straight talking about my NaNo novel. The discussion was a lot more exciting than this picture, but not so exciting that you’d actually want to hear the details. I just got some feedback and ideas on what I might want to change for the rewrite. Ugh, I just backed up my commitment to the rewrite in that last sentence. Gah. GAH! Rewrite! AHHHH!
I should do this, though. I should rewrite it. I told myself I was going to, and, I don’t know, maybe it’s not such a bad story, you know? Maybe. That might not even matter, the good or lack of good in the whole thing. It might just be important that I go back and write the whole thing, you know? Might just be important to follow through, to get some practice at that, get some idea of what it’s like to do a rewrite, maybe confirm that I actually am into this whole thing. With all this metal stuff lately, it’s been hard to concentrate on other stuff, but that novel is out there now, out there on my hard drive, and I think I should give it some effort. It may not be awesome, but it’s not horrid, either.
Ugly
Less ugly
Today’s pic o’ the day brings with it – an extra pic! Woohoo! You’re welcome.
I usually try to limit it to just one picture to force myself to learn to make decisions, but today’s post simply wasn’t going to go over so hot without having a “before” shot. And, um, actually, the “before” shot is really more of a “already started, but still ugly” shot.
Shall I explain? I shall. In the top photo in the foreground you can see what looks like a pretty ugly piece of wire. In the, um, aft-ground a wire that looks kinda shiny. That wasn’t like that minutes before I shot this. All the wires looked blackened and scarred up like the foremost one. I wish I’d thought to take a picture before I started cutting things off. Pity. At any rate, there were two main wires for the track that were haphazardly connected to each other with two U-shaped pieces. They were all horrible welds, and some of the pieces were nearly cut in half rather than being welded together. It was a mess, and I didn’t think it was even going to stick together for long.
With my recent success in welding, I decided I absolutly had to fix that aberration. I picked up the bolt cutters and proceeded to remove all manner of nastiness. Then I fabricated new pieces to go in place of the dead ones. It took a total of ten welds to get everything back together, and I’m happy to say that only two of those were less than decent. Unfortunately, you can actually see one of them here (that black dot on the connecting piece is a hole), but an 80% success rate for me is ridiculously high. In short, it was a good night, a very good night indeed. I hope this streak of goodness continues, then we’ll be able to look at photos of me building stuff instead of pictures of welded spots like these.
Did I mention I wanted a punch press yesterday? I’d like one, thanks. And the vertical mill also, still want that. A lot.
Did I also mention that I was looking up geometry on line and CAD stuff and that I looked up the course requirements for a machinist? Yep, losing my mind here, folks.
Tonight I’m also going to meet with someone from my NaNo group and we’re going to go over the edits and suggestions we had for each other after swappping novels. I do still write, you know, lest that be forgotten amidst this morasse of machinery obsessiveness.
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Yes! At long last, a decent weld on the RBS! This single photo comprises my sum total of welding for the evening, but at least I have something nice to show for it. I butt-welded these two rods together (go ahead, laugh. “butt weld, butt weld, butt weld”) and they turned out the way I wanted them to! They’re together! They’re not all knotty and blobby and pitted! ‘Tis a Christmas miracle – or something!
Anyway, I’ve been trying to get the hang of this welding thing for quite some time, obviously, and I’ve been making mistakes right and left on the sculpture. Tonight it was a welcome moment of victory. I’d best hold on to this one. I may not have another for weeks to come. I mean, I totally hope that’s not true, but it’s possible.
On a related note, I’d like a band saw, a drill press, a punch, an arbor press, and a vertical mill. Just sayin’. I suppose I could get by without the drill press if I had the vertical mill. Don’t want to sound greedy.
This is what I did last night. I spent, I don’t know, about an hour working on this stuff. It’s improving little by little. Last night was pretty good. I actually made a weld on the sculpture last night, which I only screwed up a little. Better than that, I understand how I screwed it up. This is progress from a week or two ago when I was A) screwing up, and B) not knowing how I was screwing up. Now if I can just get “A” taken care of, we’ll be rockin’ like Dokken.
I know this stuff, these endless pics of pieces of metal with blobby, rusty lines on them are repetitious and maybe boring or annoying, but it’s kind of what I’m dealing with right now. This process is really important, the progress, the improvement. It’s even more slow and tedious for me to do it than it is for you to look at one picture of it per day, but this is the part where I am right now. This is the part where, if my life were a movie, there’d be this montage of me just sitting down at the workbench. I’d put on the welding shield, and then you’d see some flashes of light from the arc, and there’d be lots of images of burnt pieces of metal being tossed on the floor. They’d use some sort of rockin’, yet inspirational background music, like Doyle Bramhall’s “Big” or something, and periodically you’d see me lift the shield and make a face as if to say, “Damn! Failed again!” and then I’d get another look that would be all determined, and I’d wipe some sweat off my brow and go back to work. Then there’d be more pictures of steel bits being thrown on the ground, but they’d start to look better, and then I’d not look so frustrated, just maybe kind of tired but pleased, and we’d be all, “Look! He’s improving! He’s toughing it out! Killer, dude!” and then there’d be some shots of me working on real pieces of sculpture, and then a date would flash at the bottom of the screen showing the passage of eleven months and sixteen days and nine hours and thirty-six minutes would pass in about 2.5 minutes, and then they’d show me standing before a finished and unbelievably awesome sculpture, wiping my brow and going, “Whew! Golly! THAT sure took a lot of work, but, boy, did my patience and persistence pay off!” and then I’d grin and give a thumbs up or something. (I’ve been looking at too many vintage ads online. My brain sounds like a 50s ad for Lucky Strikes or something – “It’s Toasted!”)
Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of a montage here, or at least not so much of one. I guess I haven’t shown you every piece of burnt metal that I really did throw on the floor, so you’ve been spared that, and there really are a ton of them on the floor. Some of them I’ve picked back up again and welded more crap onto to save money – like this piece here! It has a weld on the other side, and I just flipped it over and used it for this test.
Anyway, the first weld is sort of decent, and the second one isn’t too bad. After that they start to get kind of squashed-looking, and some holes show up and some rusty coloring. I guess it’s better than some of the stuff I was doing two weeks ago. I actually like the top weld, even though I’d get thrown out of welding class for it, but it’s good for me.
On a slightly different/sort of the same note, I am really, really, REALLY trying to make progress on this stuff, and it is damn near impossible some weeks. This past weekend I got in one hour of practice on Friday night, and that was it! One. Hour. Over the course of the entire week that adds up to one hour and ten minutes. In seven days I got to work on welding for one hour and seven minutes. It is really difficult not to obsess about how long it will take me to improve if I only get an hour and ten minutes each week. It’s hard, it’s frustrating, but what else can I do? It’s really difficult many nights to find free time for it, and that’s even while I’m currently ignoring most of the rest of the daily crap that normal people don’t ignore – stuff like folding my laundry or sorting my mail (my couch has become a mail repository for months worth of unattended mail – good thing the bills are all on auto-pay). Lots of nights I just microwave anything that’s frozen, because sometimes saving that extra twenty minutes of preparing food is the only way I can make time. (I have become a conniseur of the frozen burrito.)
I’ve employed every other time-saving method I can think of. The only thing left to do is to quit my job, and I’m not that crazy. Motivated, yes, but not crazy. I’m feeling boxed in. Stuck. This is all I want to do, and yet I have so little time to do it. There are times when I decline invitations with friends just so I can do this stuff, as it’s the only free time I have available.
The other night, Friday night, the night when I can clearly hear many people in my neighborhood partying, I was welding and looking up basic geometry on the web. Why? Because geometry is the basis for machine work, and I’m interested in doing machine work, having a mill and building nifty parts for my sculptures, fabulously ridiculously unnecessarily complicated parts for my sculptures. I had a night off from the band, and I was looking up geometry. Clearly I’m either really taken with this stuff, or I’ve sincerely lost my mind. Given that my friends and family have not started avoiding me or continually asking me if I’m sure I’m feeling well, I have to consider the sincere possibility that I have not lost my mind, but am just really enthusiastic about building metal kinetic sculpture.
Still, what’s the point? Why am I doing this? Why am I exchanging all this free time and money and energy on this stuff? Well, simply because I like it, because it’s cool, fun, nifty, awesome – all that good stuff!
And that – that feeling of “YES! AWESOME!” is scary. I mean, do you ever have a “yes” moment? One of those times where you discover something or get into something and the only word in your head is “yes?” Those yes moments, those are when you know you’re doing something that is *exactly* what you should be doing in your life. I had moments like that when I first started playing music. It was all “Yes, let’s do that! Yes, let’s find out more about this! Yes, let’s practice more! Yes, let’s buy some records, lots of records and tapes! Yes, let’s get in this band and see what happens! Yes, let’s play that basement party! Yes, let’s record with those guys! Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!”
Here I am again, and this feels like one big “yes” moment. Nothing in my brain is telling me that anything about this is wrong for me to be doing. Aside from letting my spending get out of control, there’s nothing I could do wrong with this. It feels like a very natural thing to do.
But what the hell do you do with it? I mean, what are the practical purposes? If I want to devote so much time to it, how, uh – am I supposed to think I’m going to make a living with this or something? Really???? Have I lost my mind? I’m not at the point where I’ve just decided to throw all caution to the wind, go in to work, announce I’m quitting immediately, and saying, “I’m going to make a living as an artist!!!” Not that crazy, because I like to eat and have a house and all that, but I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve set many other things aside in life in order to pursue this. I mean, who was here when I announced that I had decided to sell my extremely cool and vintage guitar amplifier just so I could buy the welder? We do remember that, don’t we? That amp, I held onto it for YEARS not using it, but not being willing to let go of it, and suddenly it wasn’t even an issue. It was like, “Oh, I need to buy this welder…NOOOOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!! SELL THAT FRIGGIN’ AMP AND BUY IT YESYESYESYES!!!!!”
Like that.
I don’t know what you do with these things when they come up in life. Oh, scratch that – I know one thing to do. You follow them. They’re scary, but you follow them. If they’re positive and healthy and they make your life better, then following them is the thing to do. If they make you feel better about yourself and your life, you follow them. I kind of have to follow this. It just feels too good. Yet I don’t know where it’s going, and that’s a frightening thing.
I don’t know, kids. I just don’t know what’s going on here. I’d love to see into the future on this. Until I achieve that ability (and I’ll let you know if I do), I’m just going to keep welding. And probably being kind of scared as well.
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I don’t know what kind of tree this is, but it sure looks pretty in my back yard. These are flowering all over town right now. I’ll have to remember this photo next time I’m annoyed about having to trim it back.