The $700 dollar bracket

As my love for my craft grows everyday, I ask myself whats the next level?

With my love for welding being my passion and having really locked it down and all its processes I start to look for new doors that haven't been opened in the metal fabrication world.

Machining is one of my newest sparked passions but one of the things I have been doing the longest, the quest to be one of the best all around prototypers pushes me to know how to be faster and more accurate then the average joe machinist/fabricator.

Thats what sets me apart from them, my speed, quick thinking, design and precision - all of these come with a lot of training and studying.

I watch Gabe work in the shop and it really shows me what I have learned the last 10 years of being a fabricator/machinist, when I turned 16 I got my first job running New Britain Screw Machines and CNCs at Mico in Mankato, MN.

These machines really paved the way and Gene and Matt in the Mico shop really were the dudes that seen a dorky kid with big black framed glasses begging to get on those machines. At age 17 I had already scored one of the dream job for most of the shop crew by being able to float from dept. to dept. running everything from parts for UPS trucks to John Deer tractor brake parts to brake calipers for Caterpillar's largest mining rigs.

The trust these dudes put in me and the machines they let me run now blows my mind, I sure as hell would have been nervous about letting a kid run every machine in that shop, I was practically hated by about 50% of the shop because of my love for making stuff on the machines.

Anyone that has worked at Mico knows the worst jobs are Pins, every foot pedal on every tractor, bulldozer,mining dump truck, and so on has them. Its Mico's baby they love to make, the pedals are Cast and there is a stainless pin that goes thur them.

 Somehow my love for being in the shop and running stuff always led me to making pins ( think it was because they wanted to see if I would quit).... Well the average was about 300 pins a day and that was pushing it for most of the crew, well I loved running these machines and some how I ran around 550 pins in a day making everyone look bad that was in the system for running pins. My hatred of employees grew to well over 75%, I can't say 100% because management had NO problem with me making an extra 250 pins in a day...

Either way, I have been dragging these Mico pedals around for 10 years now to remember what made me who I am and my love for just making stuff.

Plus the parts I made at Mico are used on the most badass things in the world, hell yeah I want to brag about that... I was 16 and having fun...

Somedays I find myself back in that mindset while making repetitive parts and I think " the best chefs in the world wash dishes, its a humbling experience and brings you back to square one, no one is too good to not have to do it"

Now when I look at what I am doing and where my brain is at I see myself moving so fast sometimes I can't keep up with my brain. I love it, but when I get that little bit of down time when you would expect to relax and sit around and watch tv, I find myself reading and practicing my skill. Who knows why, but it feels right.

My espresso machine has become one of those tests of my skills and there is a hidden reason I am building it not money related, mostly a test to myself and to others that have been watching me with doubt about my skills. Its a test to see how far I can push my design, fabrication and just skills to build something like this.

Its kind of like writing an essay about what you love to do.

 There is other people out there that really push for me to finish it and see its true value in what I am learning on it, people like Tom of Ox Tools Blog who has pushed for me to keep learning and progressing as an all around metal crafter. The crew at Autodesk like CEO Carl, Anthony and Al of HSMwork/Autodesk who provided me with the software to be at that next level of prototyping, design and fabrication.

These people will be the first people to get a cup of coffee from the machine ( I didn't say good coffee, who knows what it will taste like)

Heres a test of my skills to see what I can kick out, lets call it a quiz.

Mission - Build a cool bracket to copper weld to the side of the espresso machine

A big block of 110 copper

12" x 6" x .5 thick = $140 = not eating for a week

I started my tool paths with the pockets and the working around the outside.

Maybe not the quickest but I was worried about gumming up the cutter so I took small bites

My buddy Rodney at Roland Sands Design made me this MLS badge

I have wanted to use it for something... This is perfect

What happened here is I forgot to put the radius in the copper so the badge could sit in the pocket.

Using the handy Starrett radius gauges I was able to find it was a 7/32 (.220 roughly because of the casting) These little radius gauges are cheap and a really saver sometimes when your reverse engineering a project on the fly and need a perfect match up.

Without moving the part I adjusted the model for the radius and then did a new tool path on HSMworks 

Took me under 5 minutes to adjust it, repost the G code and load it on the machine.

Talk about fast, thats why HSMworks is perfect for prototyping stuff.

It didn't cut anything but the radius in the corners that I adjusted.

Perfect

Next was the flip over to side two and doing all the windows and match up.

If you look you will see a 1/4 hole in the middle of the plate, that was my Zero Zero Origin point.

That way when I flipped it all I had to do was put a 1/4 pin in the drill chuck and zero it off that point. Not the ideal way to do a high precision part but for what I am doing its totally OK, I know that there will be a need for clean up on the belt sander. 

So one of the great parts of having a CNC Knee mill and doing parts like this is I can slowly walk it around the part and raise and lower the knee leaving little web connections so the part doesn't just drop out, as you can see I left like 5 connections on the part, those I would just band saw out and drop the part from the copper plate. With the price of copper so high, I try to not waste any chunks of this 140 dollar piece of copper. 

I trimmed it out on the band saw and had to get a picture!

Over all it took me about 4 hours from design to finished cut out part, not bad.

Rodneys little badge looks great on there. 

Had to do a quick hold up on the boiler to see the fit up.

Should be fun to weld on this week!

I have way more plans for this bracket then just looking cool but right now I can't explain because I have to run out front of my shop and cheer on someone in a high speed car chase as they rip by my shop in Oakland ! 

I love Oakland !

Its back....

Maybe about 5 years ago or something my brother Jason Tiedeken and I wanted to build something to race Roland Sands ( our boss at the time and super fast AMA 250cc national champ) and Rodney ( fabricator and designer at Roland Sands Design also fast 1000cc road racer) to a little inter-company race called the "Canyon Carver Challenge"

All the bikes must be 500cc and less and " MUST BE BUILT BY THE RACERS", anything goes just as long as it can race in the canyons and not crash, mostly because we need you to work because the company relies on everyone so heavely and we can't have you crashing.

So the race was on, Roland started by modifing a Buell Blast 500cc in to a custom little road racer....

There was one rule also .....

You were not able to work on it at work or by paid employees not involved in the race... which for my brother, Rodney and I isn't even an option but Roland had the employees to do so, so we had to call him out a few times on that.

Rodney decieded his beast of furry would be a mid 1980s Honda XR500 which started to look cool and all super motoed out once he started chopping in to the frame.

I wish I had pictures of some of these old beasts.

My brother did the design of this creature and I helped team up on the build to fab and weld. The creature ended up being an odd ball due to its odd motor choice.

 It was a Honda cb360, these little motors have a good firing order and are very little compact twin side by side cylinder engines that just push enough power to get your fat girl riding the bike up to street speeds of 45mph and nothing more...

My brother Jasons design

The Canyon Carver Honda Turboed CB360

Back in the day when I worked at Edelbrock, I made these stainless turbo pipes on the Pines Mandrel bender. you can see the little 10mm turbo behind the motor kind of...

some of the detail on the front end and how the steering uses links

I like looking at my welding from years back and compairing it to my welding today

Still got it.

This is the side view of the where the center stand needs to go.

Jasons solidworks center stand down

and up

The front end needs to be a bit stiffer so I am going to make this front end support while its here at the skunkworks.

I will get in to more details about the bike in the future, but this week I have to hammer down and make the front end support and the trackstand before he arrives at my shop next week so I have to get to work....

Aerospace Party time

Well, I got to make something today that might fly...

Rodney's TOP SECRET parts for a Concept Remote Control Helicopter

Wish I could tell you more........ But I just can't

He called in the big guns to pull off this huge job !!  ( real penny )

The nothing machine

Some time back,   

Rodney asked if we would help him on a project he wanted to do.

The idea -   To build a crazy mechanical machine with gears, chains, links and motors. At the core would be a type writer, the gears, cams, links and chains moving everywhere but at the center the type writer typing over and over again the word "NOTHING" in all caps.The machine would be call the nothing machine.

We worked for about 3 weeks on the project, Rodney running the show, Wiggins making parts and myself doing what I do or something like that.

The goal at the end of the project was for the coffin sized machine to travel with Toyota's Art Tour around the USA, while generating donations for the various non-profits by the sales of the pieces of NOTHING. ( small framed pieces of the machine's output paper with the word "NOTHING" on it) Some greater sales came from the sales of wooden boxes filled with the NOTHING paper but also pieces of metal or parts from the fabrication of the machine, these boxes brought in hundreds of dollars alone. I am in the video loading a box with ball bearings from the little steel man, which later sold for 50 dollars, ha ha, not bad.

The video is a bit choppy, I made it a long time ago and used a ton of about 15 second clips I had on my digital camera. I am really surprised that I even had enough to make this.
First check out the machine then watch the movie.

All the little preloaded picture frames with a piece of NOTHING

You can see the motor at the bottom and the type writer

Enjoy.  It costed Rodney a lot of money !

Nitro Circus tonight

Well the showing of Nitro Cirus is tonight on MTV - Season 2 Epidsode 7

Some of my projects, stuff from the shop and Rolands will be shown - Check it.

Here is a picture of Travis Pastrana cruzin Rodneys Wheel of Death


Here also is a picture of the Tall Track bike Dan and I built one afternoon and Dans personal tall bike he built years back.

Part 2 of the Red Bull Soap box race

Well, it wasn't like I thought, nothing we built broke. If you watch the video you will notice the car goes so high on the berm that it grabs the right front wheel on the safety railing and as the car started to drop back down the wheel got hung on the railing and it ripped the spokes out of the rim.

The Easton wheels held up really well and it wouldn't have mattered who would have made the bike rims they would have all broke in the same situation.

So watch the movie and enjoy

Red Bull Soap box racer

So the job for the day, last week Thursday was to build Roland a Soap Box racer for the Red bull Soap box race. Watch the video, Rodney and I built the chassis and Roland and Donny tuned the body. Thanks to Easton for throwing down some crazy wheels for the project.




If anyone saw the race, trust me....... you know there is going to be a lot of BS talking at the shop. Lets just say the steering rods broke when the car caught the front wheel on the berm. More videos to come trust me and a lot more $#IT talking..........