Bringing the Monkeys to Uncle Toms...

If your not following Toms YouTube channel.... Do it now...

Tom Lipton's Ox Tool YouTube Channel

You will be come a better machinist, fabricator or engineer attending Uncle Tom's YouTube University classes !

His tips and trips are gold !

How do I know Tom Lipton?

I started working for a company a few years ago that was developed and started by Tom and another guy Bob Switek in the San Francisco bay area.

 The company was really started in the early 1990s after Bob the mechanical engineer teamed up with Tom to develop an R&D machinery company for various industries with most of it being in the vegetable industry.

Some of the wild machinery was patented as well, like a machine that cut broccoli, really a first of its kind in the broccoli production world, some of these machines still run and are being built today.

 The two teamed up and built a really neat prototype company called California Vegetable Machinery, CVM for short, later the name just became CVM as more of the R&D work went toward Clorox and the tech world, the vegetable part would take a back seat.

The company is still around today and doing very well, with a very skilled team. Tom happed to be offered a job by the USA Gov. R&D Labs located in Berkeley and decided to leave CMV, that's about when I got hired in 2010 or so, just missed working with Tom by a few months. ( I was at CVM for a bit over 2 years and learned so much, vital to what I do and how I do work today)

But it was pretty fresh scar that Tom had quit when I started at CVM, so I needed to meet this Tom guy, so I tracked him down and we have been buddies since then. Its cool, not a lot of really precision mined fabricators out there willing to bounce ideas off with the experience.

Tom makes visits to my shop all the time but every so often its good to pay him a visit and so the Monkeys ( Gabe and Austin ) from my shop and I happed to call him and see if he was up for some tool trading.

it was also cool to show them Toms shop and see what projects hes up too, heres the video below
 

MLS in the news

A few months ago I teamed up with Bill working on that custom prosthetic leg and Autodesk was pretty stoked about us using new software they have out so they did a write up on the project. Check it out.

Autodesk - In the fold - Newsletter

 

This talks about the new Autodesk Fusion I am using - pretty rad.... Plus if your not making money using it and want it for personal projects... IT FREE !!!!

Autodesk Fusion 360 download

On the right hand side you can see its free for Hobbyist  

Trying is dying

Well.... I made it another year older and if you don't know I am 72 years old.... or maybe its 27.... either way I feel old in the bones...

Thanks for the birthday wishes...

I was standing around and I said to Gabe, lets build something really really rad that no one seems to think is a good idea or safe, something we can build in a day or two and take to Salton Sea to have fun with for my birthday and with all the friends from LA.

We thought about if for a few and we came up with a crazy idea to build a new flame thrower but making it powered by people to keep it more of a team builder and involvement...

Well, How would we tackle such a thing....

The more I stood there thinking the more I realized why not go backwards and build something that's suppose to put out the fire.... Like a fire pumper truck.... to shoot flames... now were talking....

But its just toooo easy just hooking up a motor to it and sitting back and shooting flames, one person can do that, and the idea was a team builder so the more I thought...

Got it!

Build something like a 1800s Fire pumper

With the fuel taking the place of the water

Some different examples of styles

It would take a full crew to make it happen back in the day, pretty neat to think of this beast throwing flames....

 

So we started with a new style of the hand pumper just freestyling...

I can't just build what has been built... that's no fun...

 

We decided what would be cooler then making it kinda like a engine and making the people the pistons and have it hand cranked as opposed to hand pumping vertically...

Heres what we tried...

First we did some sketches of what madness was in the brain...

Using some stuff laying around we made a fixture and started making a hand crank.

We used some laser drops from Seaport Stainless  = Free

 

Gabe is welding up some of the Brown and Sharp Cams we got from Edward Koehn Swiss Machining , these would be links to the tube we had left over from the Oakley Project = Both Free

Action shot for the ladies

We had these vertical steel tubes from a old Red Bull prototype ramp we built that never worked..

Free !!!!

Gabe did a sweet job cutting these holes in line...

Did you know hes in school to become a machinist now?

And is now CERTIFIED as a level 1 Machinist

I think I am a level 2 so I will watch the level 1 and ask questions....

Tacked up some sweet bearings and holders we got from

Performance Machine that get put in their motorcycle wheels, these were some leftovers from R&D

Ok... Well I didn't take many photos that afternoon because my camera went dead so heres where it went to next... A swiveling gunner seat and the Hawl Pump mounted..

Hes been waiting all year for photos like these so he can put them on facebook

He should have been a gunner in the Army...

That chair was in the trash.... so we welded it to a giant lazy Suzan bearing left over from a bar stool..

Both free 

Having a good stop for the swiveling seat I used the axle sticking out.  

Heres a side view...

 

Ok so that night I made some stuff on the gunner seat...

I was on one of the possessed fabrication nights where all I wanted to do is build... Wait... that's every night...  

 

That's some old garage door bearing rollers I cut apart and just welded the bearings on to make the gun have movement in 360 degs.

That pressure washer gun I found in the recycling at the Exploratorium because it had cracks in it...

FREE!!!

This is a shot of the wood chain guard which was a backup for a exhibit at the Exploratorium called Echo-Tube and the pump was found during the move out of the old museum, Dave Fleming and I found some really good stuff while packing up.

Close up of the brown and sharp gears that I got from the Koehn Machine shop and the big monster #50 sprocket was from when I did R&D work for Clorox, it got the wrong bore in it...

FREEEEEEEEE!!!!

Close up of that sweet pain job and pump....

Sweet 1" aluminum pipe over 1" steel tubing...

Perfect for a handle grip.

 

As you will see that's some left overs from Greg Minnaar's Bike Shop racks...

The propane tanks are held by a sample of an aluminum sail boat mass

You can see the sweet bearings in the gunner swivel at the top left of the photo.

both ----   FREEEEEEE

The seat was mounted on this giant Stainless Steel Gate Valve I found in the recycling at the Exploratorium.

I cut the back and shaped it so it didn't hang over - custom & FREEEEEE

Those are engine puller ( cherry picker ) legs at the bottom with wheels, Some one stole my cherry picker from my shop ( classic Oakland style ) but they forgot the legs.. so that week we decided it wasn't going to return so we welded the leg on the bottom, That engine puller was free so I can't complain... Making those Legs FREE too

Overall shes a sweet piece of scrap metal all welded together...

I can't say it was the best idea....

Gabe even painted his truck to get ready for the flame thrower... !

 

Then... I got a hernia and my intestines dropped in to my ball sack...

Fuck that.... I had to go get surgery for my birthday...

So much for going to desert...

and the dream of blowing minds shooting flames...

The healing process in California is styling... My titanium hand made pipe got used for a few days...

 

Well... I am resting these days but it was a bummer we didn't get to go to the desert and test.... Maybe soon...

Check out these videos to get a good idea of what we built.. 

 

This video shows us running the pump at full speed, its bypassing pressure and is not easy to pump...




We didn't have any water left in the tank for testing...

Enjoy - and don't get burned.... Until next time....

Oakley's Madness

Before I went to South Africa I made a post about teaching Gabe to build stuff and doing work with tubing...

One of the projects was that dirt bike stand I designed and Gabe and I built for Oakley....

Well they were stoked and the computer fit inside it and people love it...

Jump up on it and throw the helmet on for some Virtual Reality dirt bike riding...

It may not get as many chicks as riding a real dirt bike but its still super cool

Expectantly planning for the unknown

I look at things sometimes and wonder why I love to over complicate things...?

Other times I wonder why I make things so simple it almost lacks beauty....

Some days its a test of my brain and hands....

Some days its me being lazy or procrastinating....

Either way for some reason it seems to work and I don't ask why....

I needed a vacation because I have been hammering non stop on projects this would be my first vacation since the week before at Autodesk University ! ha really its all work but I love my work....

For my break over Christmas and New Years I decided to help a friend on his newest project.. My buddy Greg Minnaar ( known as the fastest dude on a downhill Mountain bike with a stack of world champs to prove it) has 2 bikes shops now in his home town of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

One of the shop locations a existing bike shop business his parents have run for 20 plus years and the other shop dealing with high end stuff being brand new that just opened up about 4 months ago near the base of the mountain bike world cup track ( perfect location for high end riders)

First class style... AKA using up miles...

I went to London for a day to party then off to South Africa 

The project Greg had me come to South Africa was to add some new style to the new high end shop and make those expensive mountain bikes look fancy and well displayed without making it a pain to access them or causing a risk of them falling over.

Arriving for my first cup of coffee at the new shop... as you can see in the background it was a bit bland

It was opened in a flash because of World Cup races so little was done on displays because it almost didn't even get opened during the race weekend.

The trip was almost a month exactly from mid Decemeber until Mid January and having never seen the shop it was kind of a freestyle mission of what I was going to come up with. I had a slight idea what I wanted to build but it was far from being locked in.

Christmas was cool in South Africa, just like the good old USA they eat a ton of food and wait for the fat dude to slide down the smoke stack and dump presents under some sort of tree.... I didn't feel out of place at the Minnaar family party as well, between the crazy aunt telling stories and everyone drinking beers it wasn't far off from my family.

New Years was really cool and we traveled up the coast towards the north eastern part of South Africa on the boarder of Swaziland, where we stayed for a week on a Rhino Reserve and game park called Hluhluwe. The place blows your mind and seeing how hard it is to protect the animals from poachers and just the day to day life is pretty crazy.

Either heart racing and almost scary to extremely dull.... but nothing really in the middle !

This place the game rangers had built up for themselves and others was so cool...

Perfect place to go hide and just think

Even had a visitor on New Years day!

Good luck !

I can't say I was not enjoying it but 

when you want to get your hand dirty and your far from the shop, 

you start to get a little crazy...

 I hadn't really spent any time at the shop looking at what I was going to build, I had some ideas in my head but I just needed to get back to really get rolling on it. 

People always ask me if I just sit around and dream up ideas.... I wish... I am a person that really needs to have something in front of me and sometimes a problem, if its not there in front of me or I am not dealing with an issue or on a mission my brain thinks theres nothing wrong, anything to do or change

I wish I had that ability to sit and look out in the horizon and dream up things that have never been even thought of with nothing to base them off of... that person is truly a special person and if they have the ability to make those things in their head a reality they are truly a unique creature that is extremely lucky.

Once we returned to the shop after all the holiday fun, it was time to work

about a week left in my trip..

I had some sort of idea to do something using all the fallen trees in the back yard of the shop

So, I just started cutting, my Minnesota heritage came out with my grace on the chainsaw.

I can't say I carved any bears or eagles but I handled doing the cutting.

I started thinking about the style of water pipes because its kinda like welding doing all the fit up and connections but without all the tools that I required, 

This was one of my early prototypes to show Greg's world Champ Santa Cruz bikes.

Some true mountain biking history sitting on those finely chainsawed logs... 

With that idea it was back on the scooter down to the water pipe store called Valverite in Pietermaritzburg and the man John behind the counter... 

If he reads this he will remember the long lost faces I made as I mentally cut and tread the pipes in my head and assembled the in my brain and then as if possessed by demented plummer I yell---

quantity 12 of 240mm threaded both ends 25mm..

quantity 54 threaded 75 mm nipples 

quantity 11 of 2000 threaded both end 32 mm pipe

and on and on as his pen runs out of ink...

Sorry John... we did it but it sucked...

These were the next displays I designed and built

The little aluminum rocker wheel holders I made in the USA and flew with them but didn't know how I was going to use them or where I would use them... I designed the geometry of that rocker for another company to use and found that it works really well so I just made a whole bunch of them at my shop in Oakland before leaving. 

This was using the 32mm water pipe and logs I cut down in the back yard 

The main thing with these displays was to keep the bikes neat and in order but also not to tight that you couldn't really see the high end bikes...

With the main focus on expensive bikes being in the back, the other plus is that the most expensive bike don't get messed with and adding to the risk of damage. 

I did a bunch of displays in different sizes and really focused on the racks and displays for products using the water pipes and flanges with wood. 

Really simple really neat looking...

I can't wait to see once all the other stuff on the walls is all adjusted for the new layout what the shop will look like. 

Over all it went super quick like under a few days to hammer out everything...

Put my first MLS stamp on it that says....

Met some really cool people in South Africa and even got met at the Johannesburg airport during one of my layovers on my return back home, one of them was a dude named Dylan - 4 year MLS blog follower/master mind RC airplane builder/R&D wild man and we burned away some hours drinking beers at the airport and chattin about building. Perfect way to get back on the plane...

 Hammered and lighter due to the unloading of MLS t-shirts on Dylan for himself and his buddies. 

 Greg took this picture because he wanted to make fun of me for taking back scrap from Waynes Scrap metal in South Africa.... "Dude thats a perfectly good cast hand wheel... You don't get it..." 

I not only told him that a few times but also airport security all the way across the world... 

Remember you don't always need to weld to build neat stuff...

You can do it with water pipe !

I can't believe I said that..

I take that back ... ok its pretty neat maybe half credit

 Back to the good old RED WHITE AND BLUE  USA ...

Enjoy... 

Red Bull Youth America's Cup Trophy Madness ....

About 9 months ago I was approached by the some of the big dogs at Red Bull asking if I would be willing to help design and build the trophy for the America's Cup Youth Race sponsored by Red Bull happening in San Francisco...

A tall order because there is a lot of eyes watching these million dollar plus boats. One of the main reasons I was asked is because I am close to the same age as a lot of the racers, just 2 years older then most of the racers so it would be extra special to have a young person design and build the trophy to really cater to our age group.

Let me give you some background on the racing and Red Bulls involvement in a nutshell.

There is 10 AC45 sail boats with the main sponsor Red Bull funding a lot of boat cost but the racers really have to step up their business game and collect the other sponsors to cover race fees which can be a tall order on itself.

The racers are all 18-24 years old and have to race for the country that they are a resident of, as opposed to the AC72 whose team can be built of racers not of the country they are representing

The MLS in a nutshell decription of the Youth Races is  - Its like giving a group of kids Corvette Rental cars and telling them... " its really expensive, don't crash it but don't forget to have fun with it"

One of my first tasks was just to not even think of the classic priceless 100+  year old America's Cup trophy because no matter what I build it will have no way to compete with something like that, so think different and think RED BULL .....

The original America's Cup Trophy

Anyone that knows me knows that one of my main goals in life is teaching the masses....  There is a reason I find myself at the Exploratorium Science museum about 60+ hours a week... I love teaching science and I have found I can do it well working with my hands.

 I may not get to build the rocket to go to Mars in my lifetime, but I feel like I might impact the little 10 year old walking in the museum and learning something so interesting and new that they have to learn more, they grow up and become scientist and push the limits resulting in the first foot steps on the Mars surface, maybe I will be alive maybe not but either way I do it for the love.

 Thats success to me and I may never know if I achieve it ...  even if its a super simple exhibit that I giggle about how simple it is ... It can make a impact, that can last a lifetime...

With that idea in my brain, I have this tool to get peoples attention... A trophy, not just a simple trophy for your uncles bowling reunion, this bad boy is across the TV on ESPN, ABC, NBC and don't forget the good old internet.

So I ask why not use it as a teaching tool, lets show people something they don't know because they have never seen it or maybe from out of town and just visiting San Francisco, just maybe it will be seen by that one kid or adult that realizes they want to know mOre .....

All that goes thru my mind everyday when I build so when I grabbed my sketch pad with the Red Bull crew watching, I said lets make something that shows the Bay and lets make it something that shows so much detail about where this race is happening but is so simple that it makes you scratch your head and say .... I know what it is, and man is that neat... ( or at you can replace " neat " with Rad or KickAss )

Using a piece of sheet metal and a parts bin I did a 5 minute mock up...

I always present this because its always the most photographed way the trophy will be seen so when doing a quick mock up its very important to make sure your happy with the look. 

I didn't really stray far from my design... I knew what I wanted to build and it was kinda final, sometimes I really like whats in my head when I am in the right place, about 16 Red Bulls helps get there quicker.

Some people think that because I am a pretty good welder and machinist, that I should be good at drawing... Ha ha ... Damn ... fooled you.... I suck at drawing unless theres a pretty girl around to show off to...

10 minutes or so in each sketch... Proof of concept 

Nothing crazy just making the point to draw it as we talk about it.

I know I shouldn't show these drawings because they are not very good but it proves a point it doesn't take a perfect drawing to make good work. More detailed drawings were done after the meeting with Red Bull and these would get sent off for rendering. 

Aaron at Red Bull was quick to make the call to his crew up at Roundhouse designs in Portland to do some clean up on my mess of drawings and make it so the main Red Bull crew in Austria had an understanding what we wanted to build... Always gets you pumped when you see your idea in your brain become more of a reality in 3D plus the Roundhouse crew threw a little extra flair on it to put the cherry on the top.

Roundhouse really put together a bunch of good drawings from my sketches

I was so busy working on other concept projects it was a real lifesaver for them to do this part of the project. 

With the OK from the crew at Red Bull to build it... The madness started... The stuff Roundhouse did was just a very simple model for selling the idea but now it was time to put it to reality and make some real CAD models we could build off.

Proof of concept I machined and testing the Acrylic on top.

Easy to get your results really quick... Prototyping full speed ahead....

Like normal I hit up Matt Carney the master mind CAD man that hides at either MIT or somewhere in the San Fran area,  I knew this one was not something I could tackle by myself because of the layout I knew it would be a costly mistake if it wasn't right. Matt and I watched and researched everything we could find about the San Francisco Bay using Gov. Data and other things, we came up with a very simple idea and how to give it a really smooth look without all the crazy details that over power the eyes...

With the little mini model and many cups of coffee Matt and I hammer out the design.

First we took the Google Image of the bay and made it in to a layered CAD drawing with each layer being 3/8 inches apart and the max layers to stack no higher then 4.5 inches. Next was to lay out how we wanted to machine it and how we would make the layered stack up, in the past doing things like this such as the Red Bull Rampage trophy we stacked layers of laser cut wood and metal and we got the height that way but this one needed to be a bit different.

The laser is almost to precise sometimes, creating sharp aggressive angles that are sometimes not very appealing to the eye when bunched together, it makes you think of things like SPIKE strips that the cops use or something you don't want to hold because your affraid of getting cut, so it became a backup plan to laser cut it if we ran out of time, we decieded it would need to be machined out of a SOLID block of aluminum...

A 110 LB block of Aluminum...

Scrap piece from an aerospace company that didn't need it...

Recycling...

As if my buddy Anthony from HSMWorks / Autodesk ears were burning or something, he called me out of the blue asking whats new.... I said " I am looking at a 110 block of aluminum and thinking about making something with it but I think I want to freestyle machine it on my manual mill because I am old school and I want to know if I can do it and make it look good "

his reply was great - " Oh F#^k NO, what the hell is wrong with you?  We are going to make some rooster tail aluminum chip on the CNC mill and run the hell out of one of our new super fast CAM programs and show everyone how easy it is, its 2013 buddy I can't watch you suffer like this"

I had to put a picture of Anthony up here so he could be embarrassed and you could imagine him saying that full excitement over the phone with tons of cussing...

Within about 30 minutes I was doing a online conference call with Anthony and Al one of their top programmer/developers for HSMworks talking about how their new FREE CAM software could tackle this mess of a machining job with about 30 clicks of the mouse and make it look like the most simple task... They were right.... about 30 clicks plus about 700 more in disbelief because I couldn't believe how easy it was compared to the thing we call Master something that I have suffered with for years...

\
That next day with the help of Liam from LightSail Energy, we loaded the 110 lb block in to the Haas and loaded up the G code we had just made using the HSMworks, next we loaded the tools and the rooster tail aluminum chips started flying minutes later.

Start

milling away..

You get to watch it upside down...

Finish

The next project after the base was done was the mini AC45 wing, this time Matt and I did the drawing and within about an hour of finishing the drawing we had the G code to run it on my Bridgeport CNC in my MLS Skunkworks shop. I hate to sound like a spokes model for the programming software but I am still amazed they are giving it away for free and it does everything so smoothly for Solidworks and for Autodesk Inventor, its worth testing if you CNC machine stuff.

Talking with the HSMworks crew on the phone about dialin in the Bridgeport Boss 10 for the next project which is the wing

running the wing on my new CNC

3D machining the sail - 159,000 lines of code per side

The wing ran on my Bridgeport CNC for a few hours as I slept above in my loft... I am good at sleeping thru a CNC running long cycle times... I dream of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$  ha ha or the YG*IU*(U*(Y*(YH*YH&AYF&^WT*FY&  as the spindle crashes in to the table..... lets hope that one I wake up and realize it was just a dream...

Ladies.... A key Chain model of an AC45 sail

With the main machining parts all done it was back to the crew up at Seaport Stainless who have mastered laser cutting just about anything that you can some how laser thru, Ryan and Jason cut some blue acrylic and a few other parts for the trophy like the compass and the little logo plate for the sail my brother helped me do the layout on, then the other side job was cutting some parts that I offered to build as a volunteer for the non profit group that restored the USS Potomac ( President Roosevelt's "White House on Water" Presidential Yacht )

Jason at Seaport Stainless setting up the laser to cut out blue water plus spares for sandblasting

The next stop was out to ACP Composites in Livermore,CA only to find that they were slammed with work on America's Cup AC72 parts for a few teams, making the lower fins of the boat due to rule changes but seeing the fins all over made me realize these guys are very good and I need to do more carbon stuff, I picked up a few chunks of Carbon to use on the trophy for inserts to add that carbon style to it. That crew out there is some of the best carbon fiber fabricators I have seen, Boeing calls them so I think thats all I have to say.

The main thing is with something of this level of expectations I really love very simple finishes and easy to clean, so all the land was sand blasted and Gabe did the blasting on the land and then I took over finishing off the trophy sandblasting with Ghost Red Bull logos all over it.... Ha ha no one even knows they are there most of the time.... Sneaky...

Then I sent the trophy over to the boys at MetalCo Anodizing in Emeryville because they specialize in Dye-less Anodizing which turns out very different from normal ano and gives it a very smooth and sleek appearance, I use them for a lot of projects. Its not for every project but they do a hell of a job when its the right finish for the job plus they do it quick and sometimes that means the world in the prototyping sector.

You don't even know how stoked they were to know they were doing the anodizing for the trophy plus all the other parts for the big AC72 boats from various teams.

Its really neat to see extra money and fun coming in to the bay area industry because of these races, its kinda like aerospace without the rules... They are like airplanes on the water....

Doing some of the details now... Late nights...

Remember in the early pictures - Holding over your head is one of the most important things...

LOGO HITS = Happy Customers 

Carbon Fiber = Everyone is happy

Its very important as well to make sure its facing the right way if they hold it up over their head

Perfect bottom that you will likely never see

I designed and a little compass with San Francisco cut in it...

Details ....

Time to put the wing on it and finish it

proud of it

I got a good team of people that makes it happen!

In exchange for building some stuff for a non-profit group that restored the USS Potomac they took Liam and I out to watch the Red Bull Youth America's Cup race... So rad...

The Potomac was built for President Roosevelt and was called the White House on the Water.

It was later own by Elvis ... And the story goes on... We had it for the afternoon and it was so cool

Cruzin full throttle 

President Roosevelt knew whats up with the 2 Chris Craft boats on board, someday I will get one

You can see the racers in the background and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Best parts of making stuff for the Potomac is we got to go down in the engine room while it was full throttle with is only 400 RPM but if your a boat/ship person you know how rad these 1930s vessels are with the crazy wood bearings on the drive shafts.

The bridges are both closed this week causing madness around the bay for driving

The span on the left is being tore down and the new span on the right is ready to replace it starting Tuesday after labor day.

The lead skipper of each team did a quick photo by the trophy for the RBYAC trophy

I was stoked to see it finally ready for someone to hold above their head because they are one of the best sailors in the world...

Enjoy...

The races were really rad with all 10 boats out at the same time. Watch this video and it gives you an idea whats going on.