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

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

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

A contribution to Macro Monday.

prickly

A contribution to Sunday Bridges XCVIII

support

She has these cool LED candles in many places.  They are remarkable in many ways;  they look real, they can’t start a fire, and they turn themselves on and off automatically.

I saw this one positioned next to a chrome candle holder in the living room. There were no other lights in the room, so the reflection was subtle.  While interesting in color, it was way better in monochrome.

Submitted for Weekend Reflections #123 and The Weekend in Black and White 27-jan-2012

simple

In case you were wondering, the definition of commercial is “concerned with or engaged in commerce”.

A contribution to signs, signs

permit required

A contribution to Macro Monday (I know, it’s a bit of a stretch).

zap

I went for the high contrast look and used the Iilford HP5 Plus 400 film emulation in Silver EFEX Pro.

A contribution to The  Weekend in Black and White 20-Jan-2012.

bumpy ride