n_maher

Happy Birthday, Ric!

A very happy birthday to you, Ken!

Cheese and rice that thing is quick.

Holy crap Jeff, those look great!

Like Dan suggested, there are solutions is brewing at home is not. Honestly, I'd rather brew the night before and rely on latent heat and a little reheat at work to bridge the time gap than deal with k-cups. For me it's mostly the insane waste generated by k-cups that rub the most and if no other solution exists for you, maybe get a reusable one and bring good ground coffee in with you.

You lost me at K-cups at work. UNSAT. Make coffee at home, put coffee in thermos. Tell K-cup to fuck off, with prejudice.

Makes two of us. I can never open/view attached vids on HC. Weird.

Happy belated Birthday!

1. Not hardly in charge, but we’ll see what the next few months bring for change around here. I have full faith and trust in HR’s ability to completely fuck it up. 2. I think we’re giving the surplus to Australia so you might have to fight a dingo or a kangaroo for one. Does head control work on non-native species? 3. The cutting board came out beautiful, which makes sense given it’s deadly nature. I would love to have a shop big enough to house a planer and jointer but that’s not in the cards. So I’ll have to keep ping ponging for a while and having fun with that.

The last of retirement projects, at least for this week, are complete.

Tonight was a return to non-wood based making. One of the other folks retiring this year (good lord, please make it stop) is one of our electrical engineering techs who's just a cool guy. He's already retired once from being a full time electrician but has been with us for 5 or 6 years. He sits outside my office so we talk quite a bit and I wanted to make sure that he had a unique way to remember the island when he left. So I worked with our CADD department to isolate the AC electrical grid that runs underground on the island that Tom (the retiree) had to work with every day. I reverse engraved it on an acrylic sheet and also used the laser to cut it out before mounting it to a lighted LED base (it came as a kit). Pretty simple project, should make a fun light to have around the house. The worst part of it was polishing out all the fine scratches in the acrylic that were left by trying to remove the burn-off staining that was a result of the lasering. I'm happy with the finished product and think he will be too.

Carbide 3D released two in-house products under the name McEtcher (teehee) so I picked up the combo pack, conveniently one day before they announced it as part of their black Friday sale - insert *sigh* emoji. It takes some tinkering, and I'll be interested to see how it does on standard brass. I've got a sheet that arrived yesterday that I need to engrave for someone. Too many fricken people retiring this year.

Today's fun was working on the next two retirement plaques for our two longest-tenured employees who are both retiring at the end of the month, one of whom just happens to be my boss (John). They have 86 years of federal service between them. Anyway, I'd been working on a concept for him for a while, wanting to make the plaque something that would be unlike anything else that someone would receive. When Jackie, our Community Planning Liaison Officer, I seized an opportunity to talk to a friend who is the Director at the Naval History and Heritage Command in Boston, MA. For those that don't know, that's the group that is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the USS Constitution. So last week I took a few hours off one morning and drove down to Charlestown to pick up some raw materials that they were kind enough to give me. The hardest part of the day was spent machining copper that was taken off of the hull of Constitution during her overhaul in 2015. I decided to use a sheet that had significant patina and try to preserve that by engraving off a small portion to reveal the name of the person that the plaque will be for. I used a diamond tipped drag bit, I'm pretty happy with the results. My mill is unexpectedly struggling when trying to plunge into soft metal, I don't know if I've got the plunge set too fast or if it's an issue with my tooling, regardless it was way more of a hassle than it should be. Next up was using a piece of ash that was taken off of the ship recently. The maintenance detachment actually is pretty much working on the ship year round removing rotten wood and replacing it with new. Most of the ship is white oak, still grown in a specific forest in Indiana, but this piece of ash was pretty cool in that it had finish on two surfaces and had pegs that had been used to join it to other, adjacent pieces. Overall w/ one coat of finish Edge detail, w/ original finish. The top recess will get a command coin in it and the bottom pedestal will support the name tag. I've made two matching plaques which is appropriate since they are holding the retirement party together on Thursday and I figured it'd be weird if I made one substantially different than the other. There's not much left to do on these aside from apply a bunch of coats of finish. The end grain in particular is obscenely thirsty. I'll try to post finished pictures but I tend to be terrible about taking pictures of projects when they are done.

Outfrickenstanding work, Naaman.

Not nearly as exciting as some of the other entries here but I got the east coast ping pong table back up and running today, with integral dust extraction, for another retirement plaque. The plaque itself probably doesn't look all that impressive, but the multiple layers/depths, and clean up to have it look decent represent about 2-1/2 hours of programming - and that's after finishing the design. Upside is that I taught myself some stuff, downside is that I've got two more projects to complete this weekend due to the number of people retiring at work. I'll post some details on those soon enough as they use some truly incredible materials. Intermediate phase of cutting Raw (unfinished, but sanded) product

I can only echo the sentiments of others, shit, this sucks. RIP Steve.

Happy birthday, Todd! And cool news on the in-family space cadet.

The other option is to have the panel threaded to match the pitch on the switch so you literally thread it thru. I've had to do that in a pinch on a really thick panel but would avoid it if possible, it's high risk (fit). I'd opt for the back side recess which I've successfully done after the fact if push comes to shove.

The full squish rig is still broken (derailleur) so I decided to try the hard tail as a 29er today. Was a shit ton of fun and I think I may prefer it this way. Time to find a second set of 29" rims.

That, I would argue, is pretty reasonable. 😉

I guess I took this statement, "LeverCraft Coffee isn’t going anywhere, and we will be refocusing our efforts to provide excellent beans, tools, and education to our community," to mean that they would be continuing to sell coffee. Yes, they closed the cafe but that wasn't the whole business.

Failed how so? The online shop interface still seems to be working, not that I'm going to attempt to go all the way through the process to pre-order $200/lb coffee beans. I have my limits.

All of this.

We could probably print/machine an example so you could see how the switch fits, assuming you have the switch on hand already.

I'm incredibly slow and inefficient at it which is frustrating given how well I know 2D CAD. Still it was satisfying to design even a simple part and have it fit. There's no way on earth I could have designed the actual dust extractor, or put differently I probably could have it would have just taken a year. But all the required parts are printed now and the three main pieces of the body are permanently affixed. I'll get one of my homer buckets setup as the first extraction vessel and hopefully make some wood chips next weekend.