I’m slowly becoming aware that the whole of my life – this go-round on The Rock – has not been about how much money I can make.
It’s really about “How well can you balance your Life?”
Throw in a decent IQ, serious work ethic that never quits, and an easily distracted (ADHD) mind and the Balance in Life really does become the hardest part.
Take today, for example. I was going to write a simple column on how important it is to move the lights in the lean-to greenhouse far enough above from the tomato plants to keep from burning yet keep them growing well. Again – that “balance” thing.
Here lately, balance has become the “whole, all consuming deal” in my life. Any problem that appears now, I put on the “engineering cap” (an odd digital deer-stalker mash-up from a British horror film) and go looking for the (best, cheapest, fastest, longest-lived) answer. In other words Kaizen but I can’t use that without checking IP and tariff rates… Oh, wait:
The Japanese art of kaizen—literally “change for the better” or continuous improvement—embodies a powerful philosophy for achieving better, cheaper, faster outcomes in design, manufacturing, and product development.
More time for beer, Grasshopper!
Which the over-active ADHD will do now and then. BUT: that’s how I started buying those cheap metal chains that you see on the lights. No cutting, reusable, and readjust in seconds.
Storage Rules
Now we’re warming to the heart of today’s pre-medicated concerns. G2 will be fleeing back to the Republic shortly, to rejoin the last of the sane after discovering liberals in Yankee Land are neither as ethical nor righteous as they try to pretend.
For now, with The Prodigal considering “flight to sanity” there’s the little matter of whipping the home shop into something that won’t cause him to jump back in his rig and hightail it North again.
By the way, his “little server farm” build? It’s now a full 3/4th’s of a mile long and nearly that wide seriously! When completed it will be a whole square mile of servers with a plug and play module direct into the Columbia River near Wenatchee, WA.
Time to Shop!
You don’t think the (adhd) Tool Slut in Chief was going to get through the weekend without buying something, did you? Ha!
See, what’s not in the PPE Area picture above is the rest of the crap. Great Jackson shatter resistant flip down mask (and spares) for using on the big Evolution wood and metal-cutting table saw. And there’s an assortment of masks and respirators (I will have to color-code and date check them, I suppose, lest he waves the OSHA regs at me. So humiliating. Consider George2 was born in 1980 and OSHA was set up only nine years previously!
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (also known as the Williams-Steiger Act), was signed by Slippery Dick Nixon on December 29, 1970. The Act itself became effective on April 28, 1971—that’s the date OSHA opened its doors and began operations as the federal agency responsible for setting and enforcing workplace safety and health standards.”
OSHA really does good stuff – and I have thought about doing a matching cert – just so G2 won’t be able to say “My list of meal tickets is longer than Ure’s, old man…”
My response is already built: OSHA doesn’t apply to me – I got here first. You didn’t.
Now We Get to the Construction
We’ll circle back to the shopping spree in a sec. But I do have a new construction project in the works that sums up in three pictures.
In the first picture, we see how my welders (2 small stick rigs, including that $40 IGBT rig I told you about, a handheld stick job ($100-class Chineseum and it’s become my favorite welder here, lately), along with the Lincoln 135SP (real MIG rig with gas bottles), the Lotus 4000D plasma rig, and the big roll-around oxyacetylene rig with the aging 25-foot hoses on ’em.
The problem with all this goodness is that I didn’t have a rod oven. Which – strictly speaking – I don’t need for 6013 (unless you’re a total tooltard). But when you start sparking other rod – especially up into hard-facing and such? Well, that was this week’s fiddy that wasn’t nailed down. On sale. Vevor. Blue.
Picture 2 is where you can see what will be a “welding lean-to. All long-term readers know that other than being obsessed with (blondes, Beechcraft, Hunter sailboats, and Porsches of the 944T or 930-wide body stripe) I love lean-to construction.
The way I figure it: You’ve got a foundation line and one wall already built. Given every “box” as six sides, that’s like God reaching down and saying “Here’s the first 16.6 percent of your project – on me.” thanks, The DUDE.
After a few thankful moments of prayer (that leaning table works on a hill – what kind of slicker are you to have to inquire of such obviousness?) I concluded that I would build east from the shop door because then the bright northern sky, (favored by artistes and old-timey draftsmen (before women were in the trades) losing some light would just make the instrumentation in the power center easier to read because it’s already too light in there, anyway.
Picture 3 is evidence of superior long-range purchasing plans. Somewhere under here is a pile of 30-odd treated full 8 ft. 2 by 4s.
The picture? To remind you of another of Pappy’s old firehouse dictums. “Buy your material and if you can, put sheet roofing on top for storage to keep your wood dry and out of the elements.
Pappy was a Seattle boy – hopefully down here in the Cottonmouth Belt none of them will have moved in, due to the obvious “open door policy…”
Last point is we keep a dozen, or so, ground screws around. Figure with 30 pounds of screws, ground screws, electric chainsaws, and freeze-dried foods, we could rebuild something after damn near anything that comes along. Went to far as to pick up a one-hour post grad CEU whizz for architects. They asked if I had a degree – I told them yes – but I might have skipped the part about long wave economics isn’t a strong launch point for ground screws… Oh well – post grad work in Architecture, right?
Anyway, they have been in use since the 1840s when they were used for mooring and lighthouse foundation-building in England…
“What About the PPE Project?”
What? Did you read-past the big ADHD reveal?
OK – so over at the model-making and gunsmithing bench I have this gem of a little roll around cart.
This was DFC (dirt freaking cheap) and it works great. The best part? I mean compared to the big $250 industrial-strength roll around for big tractor bolts, lynch pins and such? The one that collects shop dirt and birds nest in?
This is perfect for the smaller stuff. And I have vowed that before another thing, I will organize everything I have into some kind of logical sequence.
Honestly, the mind is much more suitable employed figuring out how much cementitious board will be needed to “box in the welding” are so that shop doesn’t go up in smoke. Best stuff in the world cem board (know in lay circles as tile backerboard) is fireproof, water resistant and (best part!!!) cheap.
I know – building a covered welding booth you would think a metal covering would be fine. But see, after having made as many mistakes as I have over 75+ years, you begin to look at Black Swan events more closely.
Would a cheap layer of even used aluminum printer’s plates black a spark? Yes,; I suppose so. But would it stop a white hot glowing end of 1-inch bar stock fresh from under the plasma cutter? See, this is what ADHD really does: It gives you enough “processor overhead” that you can worry about hot welding fire ignition sources, write mindlessly about tomatoes, while debating whether I should mention the breakthrough technology that is coming to replace 3D printing out on the edge of state of the art fabbing?
That’s over here. 3D Genesis Technologies – Next-Gen Manufacturing and it’s all about APIC: No, I didn’t know what APIC was, either, so I sicked the AI stack on it:
“Why this really could overtake and replace a lot of conventional 3D printing (especially metal additive manufacturing):
Traditional 3D printing (powder-bed fusion, binder jetting, DED, etc.) has well-known bottlenecks: expensive virgin metal powders, slow build times (hours or days per part), massive material waste (unused powder, supports, post-processing), single-material limitations per build, and high energy use. APIC flips those problems on their head:
- Cheaper — Uses cheap or free scrap feedstock instead of specialty powders/filaments. No waste means near-100% material utilization.
- Faster — Induction fusion is dramatically quicker than laser or electron-beam sintering; the company highlights parts in minutes instead of hours.
- Better/more capable — True multi-material printing (like copper + steel gradients in one layer) and opens up functionally graded parts, embedded electronics, or hybrid components that are extremely difficult or impossible today. Smoother surfaces and less post-processing reduce finishing costs.
- More sustainable & scalable — Zero-waste + scrap-to-part workflow makes it greener and easier to scale in small shops or distributed manufacturing setups.
APIC isn’t just an incremental tweak — it’s a completely different workflow that solves the biggest real-world complaints about 3D metal printing (cost, speed, waste, material flexibility). If they execute on the prototypes and scale the hardware, it has genuine potential to disrupt or replace large chunks of the current additive manufacturing market, especially for jewelry, tooling, prototypes, small-batch production, and high-value multi-material parts.
Your friend’s team is still in early development (bootstrapped, 1–5 people, seeking seed funding), but the core science (nano-particles + inkjet + induction) is proven individually — they’ve just combined it into one elegant, patent-protected system. Super cool project — if you want me to dig into any specific claims, compare it to a certain 3D printing process, or help brainstorm applications for their tech, just say the word!
No – this is one of those “way cools” that is almost “obvious” when you think about it. Like our recycling of old appliances into “food reactors” right?
But these are multi-materials and they can print both a circuitboard and traces at the same time. Here I thought the Hermes Lite 2 ham rig was grown up – Wowzer.
Like I said, didn’t know if I should mention that there is still a future coming. And we are blessed knowing some of the people who are getting it ready for delivery right now..
Yeah, the new direct-drive heads are sitting in boxes for the CR10’s, but there’s the PPE station problem and where to put the welders first.
And that’s the Big Shop Secret of the Week: Life balance begins with where to put the welders.
Write when I catch up with myself, (or I will say hi as I pass myself?)
George@Ure.net