Out of hiding for a bit... Good to be back...

The last months have been a wild ride that I wasn't expecting....

Its been just a good old around the clock of building rad stuff to make people smile... My year long full time term of working at the Exploratorium Science Museum ended the other day and but was kept on as a builder/designer part time to keep the fun going so I am super thankful they see my love for building the joys of science. The coolest part of that museum is when they find people like myself and others they really like they give you freedom to do other stuff without any pressure, its really what makes the place such a special place to me and what keep me wanting to bring new concepts and ideas to that place. They see the true benifits with having me more as a freelance dude without the pressure and they really notice the results when they get my true love of my craft in every project I work on for them.

The last months I have also been working on a TV show for a major network as a lead role as a designer/fabricator designing stuff to make peoples lives better that have lost limbs - thats as much as I can go in to detail about ...

The other projects have been for Red Bull and all the events they have been hosting such as the Training Grounds Media events they have been holding, which are Red Bulls enter in to the Esports Online gaming such as StarCraft 2 and other games... They have really just given me freedom to be creative and design some of the most rad trophies for them. The big event for me this year is the America's Cup sailing race, where Matt and I will team up to build one of the most rad trophies Red Bull has seen for their Youth's Cup race using the AC45 boats Red Bull bought... Stay tuned its going to be so rad.

Check out some of the projects ... heres some pictures

Welding away on the Exploratorium's " Bay Window Exhibit " 

There is 5 of these in stainless and 3 in mild steel... 

Its a lot of work... thats all I really want to say....

After the 2 pieces of glass, inner race and bearings are put in the mud samples are put between the glass and its closed up. Once installed on the railing the water is put in to the exhibit and then....

You give it a spin and you get to see how rocks and sands settle from the river deltas in to the bay...

Heavy rock lands first then the swirl of light sands show how it travels.

This photo is Erik Diamond " El Jefe " giving it a spin without the covers on it, so we can see all the bearings spin freely. Overall Adam, Shaun, Erik, Herb, Brice and Jesse and who else I am missing really nailed it with this exhibit, it really fills the side of the museum with some rad learning fun projects. 

After hours I have been working on my Espresso machine

I have found that its not worth risking it by using hole saws and other cutters trying to cut holes in the spheres because of damage, so this is how i do a lot of the bigger holes about about an inch in size. Don't risk your hands or body by trying to drill it with the big sizes. Gabes figure pictured in the top left. 

When setting up the small stainless steam generator I purged it with argon and used lab clamps for the torch and did it on the welding positioner. The foil is set up to cover the other 2 inch NPT fitting but not to hard because i want the argon to escape slightly so it doesn't pressurize and blow out the weld. 

I machined some parts for holding the gauge on the stainless steam ball, still got a lot to do but its a start.

Went out for a ride with Steve Pete, Greg Minnaar, and RatBoy Josh from the Santa Cruz downhill team

Gabe driving me to Oakland Airport so I can fly to Hollywood to film the TV show... 

I feel cool on these days....

The shop truck is like a limo that leaks gas and is missing windows... 

I have been filling orders for Exile Cycles Gas tanks and Gabe has been watching and following along on his personal projects. Hes building a tail for a cafe racer out of a little honda gas tank. 

Its 4 AM does your mom know where you are?

Mine does....

CNC ? yeah right.... I can make it from hand almost just as fast...

Getting wild on the Excello Mill with a big block of aluminum 

Throw it on the old K&T Model H mill for a clean up around the outside

In under a week with the help of Matt Carney on the computer and Seaport Stainless laser cutting we had a custom Giant Hard Drive Trophy for Red Bull Training Grounds in Santa Monica

I weighted the platter disc so it always had the logos perfectly level 

I was so stoked when the kid that won it held it and the logos stayed correct.... Everyone was stoked...

So they asked if I would do the next event in Florida 

So this is what Matt and I came up with in a afternoon .... The event is this weekend so I will show more pictures soon

Red Bull Training Grounds - Orlando, FL

Built this trophy with Matt Carney in under a week turnaround... Custom Billet aluminum keys and full sheet metal construction ... sick !!

A new customer of mine is Boasted Boards

I have been running the prototype production of their wireless Electric Skateboard...

Its so rad.. I got to take it out for a afternoon .... Talk about fast !!!

.000 on the money.... sheet metal parts ! 

I bailed out to Cheyenne, WY the other day to go visit Union Pacifics Steam div. 

So rad...  

Why wouldn't you jump the fence and climb UP's BIG BOY.... 

Back from World Cup Mountain Bike Racing,  Greg Minnaar, His lady Laila , Gabe, and myself made up some good old Sushi... I had to take this photo to show Gregs family and friends hes all grown up and can clean up the kitchen all by himself...

Figured I should learn to make a worm gear....

its hard.... If you want to waste a full day and lots of money on tools I will tell you how to do it...

the Plus side is ... My cold saw is fixed now...

I will have more details on it soon but this is one of my new shop aprons I designed with the help of John from High Above Bag company out of Seattle, WA. This bad boy is so damn sick with the removable pockets and all the goodies... If you really need one... Send him an email... I will be making a post about the design and details about it and how to buy it but if you can't wait... hit him up... Best apron you will buy, the quality and details are so well done....

Espresso boiler time...

Tom the owner of adams and chittenden Glass in Berkeley made me such a rad Lab style sight glass.

These guys make some of the Gov. Labs most crazy glass experiments pieces. Lucky for me, Tom is a huge fan of the Exploratorium and also just down the street from my shop, so he was stoked to help on the project and make this wild glass tube for the water level. 

Top view of the details of the glass and also the fab work

Steam generator... Figured I can get it up in the 50+ PSI safely ...

But who knows... I am just a welder not an engineer....

This is the table I started building for the machine...

Don't ask how my brain got on this one. 

Sometimes it works in a wild way... All freestyle design

Ryan at Seaport cut it for me off some drawings but who knows what it will look like

0% CAD on this project... All in my brain...

Still figuring out how to take a picture of the table... 

Just wait to see how wild the table is going to be ...

Never seen anything like it...

Well enjoy some of my joys in the last months.

Theres more to come but I figured all the piles of emails asking if I was dead or gave up on the MLS site forced me to do some updating and letting you all know I am still here turning the handles making chips and sparks..

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