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burnin’ down the house

I stole the title from one of my favorite Talking Heads song/video.

A little background here. My youngest son wants to participate in the 2012 Science Olympiad. He and one of his friends want to build a trebuchet. I agreed to help, but only with the construction, the design had to come from them.

The axle for the throwing arm is 0.5″ threaded rod which had to be cut to size. I let my son do the cutting using a pneumatic die grinder, which is an abrasive wheel spinning very fast. As he was cutting, I was seeing sparks and photos.

After he was done cutting the piece he needed, I took the left over and clamped it to a stand. I covered the stand with my trusty black cloth. I took this photo of the setup with my cell phone.

A contribution to Macro Monday. I’ll be away for a few days, so I might not get to visit.

setup

Here’s a close up where you can see my hand holding the grinder against the rod generating the sparks.

sparky

Here’s another without my hand in the way.

sparky

Feb 05, 2012 | Categories: Blog, Industrial | 8 Comments »

taps and dies

This is probably going to be one of my more verbose posts, those that visit regularly know I’m a man of very few written words.

My dad was a machinist who could fabricate pretty much anything from metal. We had a pretty comprehensive machine shop in our basement and I was comfortable running all the equipment. My dad died a little over 30 years ago and I inherited some of his equipment which I find useful to this day.

This is a very old set of taps and dies, which come in very handy. For those of you not familiar, taps and dies are used to create threads for nuts and screws. The ‘dies’ are the circular cylinders which form threads on screws and the long pointy things are taps, which are used to form threads in bolts.

This is the first in a sequence of similar photo. I went on a photopaloza this past weekend, photographing all sorts of my dad’s goodies.

Converted to monochrome using Silver EFEX Pro using Kodak Plus-X 125PX Pro film emulation, hence the more harsh, overexposed look.

A contribution to The Weekend in Black and White, 3.Feb.2012

taps and dies

Feb 03, 2012 | Categories: Blog, Monochrome | 17 Comments »

dots

Another one to freak your eyes out; a large collection of little reflections. Where do they come from? The next photo should explain everything.

A contribution to Weekend Reflections #125

dots

Several years ago, I purchased an Altec Lansing iM600. It’s an iPod dock and a FM radio and it has phenomenal sound quality for such a small package.

To get this shot, I placed the iM600 so that ambient light would throw shadows across the holes for the speaker grille.

iM600

Feb 03, 2012 | Categories: Abstract, Blog | 12 Comments »

tree heart

The landscapers at work were busy doing their thing as I was walking at lunch one day. This unfortunate pine tree formed an interesting heart, so I’m putting this out there for Random Hearts. My co-worker thought I was nuts taking a photo of a dead tree with my cell phone, imagine that.