My Hollywood Days....

I found some of my old flash drives the other day and was getting a good reminder of the good old days when I was working for CVM / Clorox R&D building all kinds of crazy laboratory prototypes.


Kinda funny to see these old videos... well it makes it easy to remember where you came from and the fact that I still stand in front of a press brake all the time means I still got a strong love for it...

Bending sheet metal is my love.... Welding it together is my love and making shiny parts is my love....

Monkey Like Shiny was born from that love...

Enjoy some blast from the past...

 

Rockin Chairs !!!!!

People always wonder what I do to make money to stay alive because everyone thinks all I do is build crazy projects for myself all day.... Then I explain I don't really make any money and am poor because I am addicted to what I do and spend all the money on cutters and more material to build more stuff...

Then they understand and offer to foot the bill for dinner...

End of story....


But when it comes down to what gets me that little bits of money to move to the next personal project here is a good example of concept to reality and working with designers and engineers to make it happen.

I teamed up with Lukas of Shibuleru Designs out of San Francisco about a new type of outdoor chair he had designed. He had the design and drawings pretty much fully locked down but it was on to me to do a lot of the little tweaks in the prototype and to do all the parts to allow it to be broken down to fit in a box and lay flat.

Just a really cool example of putting the cherry on top working with the designer/engineer to make a product just a little bit more rad but not straying from the original design plus it kept me alive and building another month....

Turned out super rad and glad to be part of the building....

Bent up the first set of parts without the arm rests.

If Gabe is going to take my job then hes gotta to learn...

Plus I like taking photos..

Hes welding in the connector pieces

On to the K&T mill to put the holes in for the arm rest bars...

This is the first prototype so its all learning for everyone at this point...

Lukas showed up once we had the first prototype welded up with the prototype cloth.

Its kinda fun when you get to this point in the concept to see all the things come together...

Its always a guess if you got the number right and the feel correct....

This time... we were soooo close but some adjustments to the geometry would prove the perfect fix.

I started the next group of adjusted geometry chairs that would also break down for shipping to Italy

 

Lukas finished up all the arm rest design and then I realized he only wanted them on the inside of the frame ( as you can see in the photo they are on both sides of the arm rest) so I had to cut off the one side of the laser cut sheet metal arm rest... no worries, small details...

The bolt together design is really neat...

It is a total of 5 steel pieces per chair and the fabric, then shipping all flat in a box designed for bicycle frames makes it really easy for everyone.

This is a close up of my welding, root pass with steel rod and Bronze over for the big radius.

I put a long bolt in it to show the hardware location all hidden under.

SOOOOO COOL

Love the black!

Close up of the bolted together pieces..

can't even tell...

Also a close up of the aluminum pieces SeaPort Laser Service cut and Metalco Anodized in a flash for us. Looks great.

The yellow was really neat!

Took me a bit to really like the color but I was sold with the fabric on it.

Quick drawing of how the seats work with the fabric.

 

Enjoy!!!

heres the link again

www.shibuleru.com

 

CAM Mania... The 10 hour rush job....

When the phone rings most of the time for rush work there is normally a time line to get the work done like 2+ days or so... Like normal it was Anthony from HSMworks on the phone with the request to design and build a quick trophy to give away at the event the next day for the launch party of Autodesk Inventor HSM 3D ( the intergrated CAD/CAM for designing and then machining parts in the same program).... I just laughed and said " you got to be serious Anthony, you can't call me the day before, your crazy!"

So like normal I said let me give it a shot and lets see what I can kick out by tomorrow....

I really owe HSMworks, Autodesk and NextGen and all the kids tied in a bunch of favors, really when I look back, meeting this crew has truly changed the shape of my business, skills and built a good amount of my reputation in the concept world because of the ability to kick out crazy 3D machined masterpieces in hours not days or weeks, I can't even imagine what I would be doing, who I would know, and where I would be had I not run in to Anthony while filming a TV show in LA, oh yea, plus I stilled owed Anthony like 50 bucks from Autodesk University in Las Vegas when I ran out of money and needed to eat, so I kinda owed him some favors....

With the clock ticking and less then 20 hours to complete.... I started to round up materials at the same time as my brain was trying to process what I was actually going to build.

Here goes nothing....

This was laying on the floor in my shop...

3x6x12 block of aluminum

I did a quick model of the idea in Inventor and did all the tool paths for it

Roughing with a 3ft 3/4 endmill

Making "Roaster Tail chips"

Time for the 1/2 3ft ball endmill and a lot of surfacing

When making a trophy for a contest that involves toolpaths and the idea of machining you know "EVERYONE IS LOOKING AT THE MACHINING"

The flip to side 2... I tried to only have to use 2 tools

My design really could have been done with a 1/2 endmill but I figured to rough it with the 3/4 to save a ton of time.

I used a 4-5-6 block as my stop for side 2

Almost done then on to the other parts.

I like to do all the 3D contouring then make one final pass around the part with a trace to make sure all the faces look perfect.

Because I had no time to make anything special or time to send anything to anodizing and with the event less then 8 hours away, I searched my shop for anything that was black anodized. The only thing I found was... A test piece for Red Bull Rampage trophies, another HSMworks project a few months back around August.  

Before I cut out the circle on the backside I engraved the Autodesk logo, I knew that I could keep moving all over the part until I got the logo just right. Once I got the logo just right, I cut it out roughly on the K&T horz. mill and then turned it perfectly round on the lathe.

As you can see the sun is coming up and the event was at 2pm so my time was ticking.

I put the logo in with a .001 press fit and did some locking nicks with a small chisel to really lock it in without any visible hardware or glue.  I also put on the little feet that I had laying around from an only Exploratorium project.

 

I needed some blue Acrylic, then I looked up on the wall and seen a left over piece from the Americas Cup Red Bull's Youth Cup trophy I had used HSMworks on as well about 8 months ago.

Ghetto machinist style I put a 2x4 wood board in the vise on the CNC and made a quick 3D sketch of the cut out it needed to fit, screwed down the oddly shaped piece to the board and cut it out. Quick and dirty

This photo is at about 10:30am... Completely smoked... but it was done..

Truly the software and my drive are the only reasons this thing can get done in that amount of time.

Its a advanced piece of machining you can throw a calipers on and measure if you don't believe me, with a turnaround of less then 15 hours from start to finish...

 

I arrived at the contest...

3 people that had held the fastest time at Autodesk University in Vegas for doing Cam Mania, a timed contest to see who could cnc program on HSM the fastest. All 3 of these guys happened not to be machinist or even have any background in machining, they all were Autodesk users in someway but not really on the manufacturing side of things. Think that made the story way better!

 

Then I jumped in on the photo and photo bombed it...

Because I don't care....

 

Enjoy