One week later we got some trophies

Just the other day I got a call from Red Bull's Central California guy Rico asking for some help quick on a throphy project.... Not a big budget and nothing super crazy but something fun.. and 3 of them...

Here it goes and really quick...

My buddy Paul Troutman and fellow fabricator was saying to me, you should make Red Bull snowglobes for this event.... so I am not going to lie.... I used his idea... with a week until they were due I didn't have much time to think about it and I really liked it anyways.

My first sketch was to mount the globe to a little plate with a mountain cut out.

So I ran one quick on the CNC plasma cutter without any fine details to see how it looked with the globes I had rushed over.

It looked good but after talking with my buddy Matt we both said the mountain needed to look like a mountain... So back to the computer...

I then did a more mountain design

I am good with Solidworks but theres little things I don't know like how to do Jpg to drawings and such and so I called in Matt Carney because he a machine on design programs and a hell of an engineer. He did a bunch of the tune ups on the bulls to make them ready for the laser cutter.

 

 

Ryan of Seaport Stainless in Richmond,CA does all my laser cutting

He really makes it happen for me when I get in the time binds.

Ryan and I dig thru the bottom of the laser to find some of the best things... like the cut outs of the bulls.

Back in my shop bending away on the DiAcro an hour later...

 

With the first one looking right on the money...

I decided to use a big 1/2 radius die to give it a nice smooth bend.

Next, I had a friend Kyle Fvk hammer out these rad little mountains with 2013 cut in the side of them.

The kid is a hell of a sculpter and has a blast doing it.

 Mocked up in a few days since the order came in from Red Bull
  I had to get the final go ahead from Red Bull.

All systems are a Go...

2 days until the event.

Loaded with snow, water, clear coated and bolted down, these little creations are ready for the slopes of Tahoe,CA

The event is really neat... Heres a video.

 

For my birthday... my gift.... making it another day....

Everyone always asks me ... Hey Jeff, Where does your Aerospace Party Animal name come from?

Well, I am a licenced Aerospace welder for a start and my love is airplanes and the second part is I love to party and wreck things...  Its as simple as that!

The last months I have been working extensively on projects for the Science museum in San Francisco which is to open to the public in days (I will be posting picutres ), I have also been working on some big projects for Red Bull and other big companies and finally I have been flying back and forth from LA about a possible TV Star deal which I hope comes true ( I will show some of that as more becomes avalible).

In between all that madness of the 5 months I had a birthday, I don't even know how old I am otherwise I would tell you... Or maybe its better a surprise... But this was when the " party animal" came out along side 60 of some of my closest Los Angeles friends who work in some of the coolest industries and trust me everyone brought a little piece of what they know and love to the party and made it unforgetable.

Every year this group plans a trip to Salton Sea located just miles north of the Mexico boarder in California. The place is very very odd.... to give you an idea of its history; it was a place that was to become a resort city in the 1960s next to this crazy salt lake in the middle of the desert which was fed by the Colorado River and as the city was built so was the need for water being tapped off the Colorado, so as soon as the resort city was built the river wasn't really feeding the sea anymore and the sea started to shrink by a lot leaving a resort city in the middle of a desert on not on the water front.

The smell of sulfur, fish and death fills the air and theres something amazing about this place, its a wild place to camp with really no limits on what goes.... The only catch is your miles from the Mexico Boarder Control and HomeLand Security doesn't really dig explosives very much....

Gabe and I didn't really plan to go early in the week, we talked about, but it was just a dream...  so Wednesday night we decieded we were going to go the next night and drive the 11 hours south in the truck with our gear and party for the weekend, complete last minute thought...

That night .... I recieved a really odd text messaged with a huge flame picture and it said " get ready, we got a flame thrower"

That sounded like a challenge - Build a flame thrower in hours notice... to battle the friend Larson in LA... using nothing more then a 100 dollar trip to the store and the help of baby Jesus to make this bad boy shoot.

Gabe and I collected everything we could find to build with around the shop.

An old NASA Stainless Steel Pressure Cylinder ..... became the holding tank for the Napalm

A tank of Argon from my little TIG became the anert pressure for the thrower as not to make the cylinder in to a bomb.


I had built an exhibit for the museum with a fan and didn't need the legs it came with so it became the back pack straps to weld to.

And a last minute run to the BIG BOX store supplied me with the valves, pressure washer sprayer and tubing needed.

We had already wasted 2 hours collecting the junk in to a pile... we were working in to thursday already and we wanted to leave.... Like normal ... My heart was broken by a girl and I decided not to go and throw it all away.... But knowing that Gabe needed to see the madness that the Salton sea could provid and knowing I needed too, we pressed on ....

Some people get to see me when I get in these almost like posessed fabrication states and its makes me wonder how my hands can keep up sometimes..

4 hours in to the build we took this picture to send as a scare to the other crew that had built a flame thrower.... it was about 4 AM when that text went out....

With the Napalm in the cylinder in the rear we decieded that it would be best to balance out the weight by putting the argon tank on the users chest on the front, it would make it easier to control the pressures as well.

From when that text came thru .... 5 hours later we had the design mocked up and most stuff welded. Its kinda not my best work... but I kinda expected it to blow up on my back so I didn't want to make it too nice...

With the sun just coming up and Gabe and I loading the truck, we decieded we needed a complete shot of the mocked up flame thrower.

 Gabe modeling it here with thee BLACK ON BLACK ON BLACK ARMY STYLE

While he was standing there, I applied the SKUNKWORKS and MLS stencils

With none of the fittings tight we rushed to the welding shop for a tank of argon and got on the road headed south... Zero leak testing and Zero testing.... Whoops... Maybe next time.

 

 

While driving south in the desert, there was a place I needed to stop and show Gabe, Its one of the places that really inspires me no matter how many times I go there.

 

Lockheed Blackhawk Park - Palmdale, CA

This place is amazing..... Home to SR-71s - F-117s, U-2s B-52 and tons of other stuff,

 its all there for you to stare at...

But we were in a rush and we had to cut it short.... But I think Gabe got the point ...

 

We showed up at the Salton sea Friday at 5 AM ready for a full day of having fun...

Our friends had taken a old car and cut it up and created " the Shit Box " a sweet ride with no glass, no seats, nothing.... just a unibody, motor and wheels.... We all decieded to cruz to the aquaducts that morning for a quick swim... With about 50 people on 2 vehicles we cruzed there...

 

My truck seemed to be perfect to haul a good 30 people...

 

The other group took the Shit Box

America!!!!!

Home of the Free....

 

 

That night everyone rested up good...

With the plans for Saturday to be a complete hell raiser...

 

 

Gabe and I tested the flame thrower with water to check the fittings and function.

Who knows.... It would be the next night we would find out....

 

Saturday.... My birtday.... How I didn't Die.... Thanks Baby Jesus...

My buddy Larson and I decided to put down some Hot laps in the shit box....

With basiclly 2 teenage boys sharing the wheel ... we jumped and wrecked everything...

Challenge after challenge to have each other do something more dumb ....

 

I decieded if we were going to kill this car we need to drive it off a cliff...

The car has no seats.... I am sitting on a fold out lawn chair and hes sitting on a stack of cardboard

So I prep the lip for our jump..... I have spent a lot of time with my brother in the desert and as a test driver for Edelbrock and I didn't feel good about this idea at all.... but what the fuck why not...

So I drove the fucking shit box right off the cliff....

 Once over the drop off on the clif... i landed in the soft stuff below and stayed on the trottle Baja style and made the jumps before thrown a rod in the motor...

Thats Richie on the camera filming Gabe, Spencer and I about what would happen later that night...

 

 

So Larson did the honors of dead revin the simi blown motor it until she finally blew up....

We decieded to dig a hole and put in nose in first vertical...

The next part is when it gets good....

Gabe started to prep the flame thrower while the rest of the group was raising the car verticle...

Larson also when to prep his flame thrower...

I was loaded with Napalm mixture and larson was loaded with a diesel/Gas mixture....

 

LOS ANGELOPES | LA BIKE CULT | SS6 CAR + FLAMETHROWER from Richie Trimble on Vimeo.
 I always have my American Flag ..... 
Once we were done with burning the car.... Larson and I handed our flame throwers off to our buddys from TrenWay bike club to destroy thier beast....A  VeloDrome they had built about 2 years ago ... Heres the video

 

LOS ANGELOPES | LA BIKE CULT | TREN WAY | SS6 VELODROME + FLAMETHROWER from Richie Trimble on Vimeo.

The next morning....

yep... it got so hot it bent....

Gabe and I picked up our trash and packed out... we were trying to be out of there by 10 AM

As we start driving out at 10 AM we make it about 50 miles north when my F250 truck starts making noise...

What a ride and thank God for good friends... The whole bottom end of the 5.4 Ford engine blew apart throwing rods out of the engine and destroying it self 200 miles south of LA. Larson came to the rescue with the AAA long distance tow and my buddy Goose for letting me use his truck to drive back to Oakland...

 

Best birthday every.... Good friends, wrecking things, 3 visits from homeland security in military helicopters and drones, no deaths just hositptal visits, beer and pretty girls.... USA Baby !

 

JT

 

 

The 20 hour work day.....

Tired...... But its worth it......  I will show you real soon.....

 

“Find what you love and let it kill you.” ― Charles Bukowski

 

 

 

 

I am not an Artist .... I am a machinist....

It happens a lot....

People call me an artist and think I live in a studio....

NOPE.... Wrong.....

I am a machinist that lives in a cold machine shop that smells of coolent...

But every so often I gotta venture in to the art world and throw it down for the kids using some metal...

This time days before the opening, I was asked to make a mini art exhibit to be placed in to the wall, that would serve as a mini art gallery for people to peek in to a hole and see something fun in miniature

( the cool part is - the small window in the wall is a lens that makes the mini gallery appear even smaller, so it looks to be 2x2 inch, but really is about 6x6 when you build it.)

The Compound Art Gallery located in Oakland asked me to do the wall piece, so like normal I waited until the day before the show and then had to rush the concept...

So heres what I came up with in about 2 or 3 hours, didn't even take any pictures I built it so fast, sorry...

So the idea was to make a small stainless steel  cat that said " ART " so I could say I make art...

I designed the tail to make a loop so it can be put on your key chain without it falling off

With the 1 hour old design ready for the laser.....  about 3 minutes later 50 cats were cut....

To the shop to build the box and hammer it out.....

This was the finished product...

A mini power plant that is powered and is designed to be fueled off of " Art Pussy " 

Its designed using Free Range Vegan Steel so I can brag to Artist Chicks about being hip.

Overall .... As it didn't sell at the opening and offended about 40 people, I think it was a success !

Think more then anything I was stoked on the laser drop from cutting the cats...

Was able to make a sweet American flag on my weld shop door. 

That is the Puritan Stitch machine next to it... So damn rad ! 

All this art made me get wild and make some personal projects like this one....

I call it " Light Bulb Scrap "

Its a symbol of an American's boys dream to take over the world but is tragically denied due to fiscal troubles..... Its really to intense to try to describe on my blog.... If you would like to purchase this or other pieces described on this blog post contact my agent..... 

Dinner under the shuttle

Every once and a while I get to do something fun....

This was one of those things that I enjoyed. My buddy Art who worked with me for a while in my shop, got out of the Navy after 4 years and scored a cool job as a new prototyper at Applied Minds in LA, which is a super cool company that does just about everything.

They are a concept company with a lot of focus on Space due to some of the people involved in the company were either pilots on the shuttle or worked for Nasa. The team does all kinds of other cool stuff in the robotics and movie industry as well.

Artin has a good gig going and hopefully he can hold it down.

They threw a party and they did it big, Art ditched his date to take me with...


It was cool to hear the actual pilots of the shuttle we were looking at talk about it and all its weird things that made it a pain in the ass to fly.

Once I get some good photos with myself and the pilots I will post them up.

The beast - I LOVE NASA

The pilot spoke to the employees about the bad door that sometimes required extra love to close before take off.

The thing is kinda heavy and big so I could only hold the front.

 

Dinner under it make it hard to eat because I just looked up the whole time...

I have dreamed to be this close to it for so long that its crazy to get to see it now.

 

 

 

 

A few months back it flew past the Exploratorium Science museum where I work in San Francisco. Its such a big deal at the museum they shut down the museum to make sure everyone got to see it for its last flight, Science rocks!

The unknowing drive..... for something......

My life is an odd one somedays and leads me in odd way.... I think living day to day is the key to my sucess and not being alarmed by any suprises that I encounter because of this poor planning....

But on the other hand it makes for a fun and exciting road with so many corners you can't see around that your bound for consitant surprises with lots of ups and downs....

I love my craft and my dreams.... Sometimes I feel like a snowplow pushing anything that gets in the way to the side and moving forward...

 Its stressful....

Sometimes I see things get pushed to the side that I feel could have helped me keep in control or move forward faster but my brain is this agressive plow born to push and make new tracks.... where those tracks lead to on that crazy road is still unknown, as life is full of surprises.....

I set a bunch of goals every year and write them all down on a piece of paper, then cover them with clear tape and put them on my wall leading to my bed room so that I have to look at them everyday....

 This shitty looking piece of yellow paper covered with written goals for that year looks really nasty on the wall, but is totally needed ... I hit a few goals and they made me smile.

Time to set new goals for 2013.... Holy shit talk about raising the bar for myself.... I slept on average about 4 hours a night this year just to make some of the goals that I feel are totally worth it. This next year for the MLS company and myself personally are going to be setting the bar even higher with some bigger projects that are going to twist some brains...

Get ready ....

When I get super busy working on stuff that feeds my shop, I sometimes forget about why I do this stuff and the need to stop take a moment and do something for myself....
Sometimes it takes someone to tell me that... Someone I actually listen to and respect..

Tom Lipton is a dude that I respect.. Hes done the time in the shop and knows his shit! Its good to see these crafters out there and know that after 20+ years in metal crafting you can still do the same thing for your job as you do for your hobby and not get them all mixed up. So when he told me, get back to building that espresso machine because you need to hammer it out and finish it, he was right, sometimes I need that kick in the ass from someone that knows its value to remind me I got it I just gotta hang in there and finish it.

Some background on Tom ( if you want more info check out the rad blog "Nothing to strong ever broke "). Hes one of the best metal crafters I know and the US government thinks so too and thats why hes in charge of some big concept projects at one of the coolest US Gov. labs.

His metal working background leads back to making some cool stuff, such as the first prototype Independent trucks for skateboards, to crazy machines that produced products that are most likely in everyones houses reading this. Doing 20+ years of work in just about every industry leads to some really cool storys too, some of these are on his blog... I first heard about Tom while doing work for Clorox and all the stuff he and the crew built, so like expected it was my job to hunt him down and ask a million questions about making stuff...

His blog might give MLS a run for its money.... We might have to get more half dressed girls around the shop to get the hit counter going again...

The espresso machine has been my personal project for the last months.... I am not going to show you all of it yet because thats some of the surprise in it... But how about some teasers.

All the sweet USA made parts

from left to right

Copper - USA Pen - 800 watt heater - theromstat - high temp float switch

I go off of whats in my brain and what shape I want as I am spinning it

 

Because copper is such a crazy conductor of heat its super important to get rid of a lot of the material so it doesn't require so much amps to weld and also just reducing the weight and making more volume is a bonus for the little extra time spent machining it out.

Using a big 1" NPT tap, I put the treads in for the heater.

Notice using the tail stock to hold the tap straight... Just a tip... Thats why they put the dip on the end of the tap, just for the exact reason.

The spun copper parts of the boiler are 8 inch diameter but I don't have a hole saw that big so I will have to make a bunch of notches with the biggest hole saw I had. I love doing this work on the K&T mill.

still in the quest for more material removal ....

I decieded to mill out.

I did a quick mock up of the legs and everything to figure out where the best place for the heater,float and stuff would be before making the cuts in to the spun parts.

Windows in it and LED light ports ready to go.

 

One problem that welders do all the time

when preforming very important welds....

 

CLEAN THE DAMN FILLER ROD !!!!

 

Good way to mess up a million dollar project... or make something fall from the sky and hurt someone...

 

CLEAN IT !

 

 

Part safety is very important when you get to a point like this on a project..

One drop of the boiler and your done...

Tricks I have learned over the years in medical and aerospace work, is working inside shop traveler boxes so you don't have parts roll off your bench.

Tom has tricks too for doing small stuff by working in clear bags so you don't loose screws or small parts.  

I do a lot of the tacking and fit up with the part in the blue box for safety.

 

Old Timer photo of the copper welds

 

Getting stoked on it....

100% USA made so far and proud of it.

 

Is a job suppose to be fun?

The last months I have been working my normal 16 hour days and like normal having a blast doing it. Gabe has been building all kinds of stuff as well, prefecting his skills to someday take my job and my fun.... Until then.... I will try to keep in the lead...

One of the major things in the last months has been the big project of working full time at the Science Museum in San Francisco, otherwise known as the Exploratorium. Its one of the most reconized science museums in the world for not only its amazing exhibits but for its vast amounts of knowledge that the valued employees carry.

Its so cool to get to work around these people everyday and learn their strong points, its truly the first job where I can't even predect what people do for hobbies or for a trade. The people are so cool and friendly and its been a pleasure to work with them. Like normal, I am under a contract to be around until about the end of January, mostly to help hammer out the big projects before one of the biggest projects.... THE MOVE.....

The museum is moving to a new location across San Francisco to a more easy to acess location, the place will be double the size which means.... More exhibits needed to be built to fill the space. The other cool part is its on a pier now so we can build all kinds of cool things to go in the water and hang off the railings.

I will keep more updates coming in but I figured these pictures would do the trick and give you a quick glance in to the normal day to day and how much fun it is.

 

Why wouldn't you want a picture like this?

Jesse one of the engineers took this sweet photo

A look from the shop window....

Nice view..

To teach kids and adults about the Golden Gate Bridge, Dave Fleming ( the main ring leader )

built this little 1/400 scale model to teach about earthquakes and wind and how the bridge moves.

 

Easy parts  +  the CNC Bridgeport Mill + sippin coffee + Friday

=

The perfect Friday....

 

Bending up mini bridge decks on the DiAcro press brake.

These little pieces will become the Bay Bridge 1/500 scale model

This is my sweet office complete with a broom

Those are the little Bay Bridge towers

The floors in this early 1900s building are amazing redwood planks.

This is my first time working on wood floors and its really nice.

 

As if its normal...

The lathe has plastic covers to watch the gears in oil and spindle speed controllers with some classly name plates to get a good laugh ...

World Champ downhiller Greg Minnaar had to come visit me at work before heading back to home for the holidays...

So we put him to the test to see if he really knew how to ride a bike, on one of the " How to ride a bicycle " exhibits teaching kids about how your legs work when riding a bike.

Its so rad to see kids everywhere being super stoked out on everything they see.

Jen brought this back from the Midwest, some of Minnesota's finest.

On a normal day...

I love to race these things...

I ride my 1937 Schwinn Superior to work everyday.

Lunch time is perfect to work on the espresso machine...

 

Once home....

Its time to work on other projects.
Getting the new MLS weld shop all dialed in, its looking really nice.

Building an Exile gas tank on the floor there, for Russells new project....