2012-Spring project

I have an old tube framed tarp covered carport I had to replace. It has seen its better day. I managed to get three years of service out of it, but the wind had tore it to shreds. I started pricing the metal carports. For a 12' x 20'x 9 foot tall with a back and a cheap door they wanted $3300. I decided to go ahead and design and build my own. I started drafting late February and by the end of March I had us complete set of construction drawings and a materials list. Total cost- with the wooden front-double doors is $1600. I decided to use 2.5" x 2.5" square tubing with the wall thickness of .093 for the trusses and the walls. These will be strategically welded to a 3" x 3" square tubing with the wall thickness of .188 , 20 feet long. This 3 inch tubing would be the base that sets on the ground. Because I was doing this by myself I had to build a jig table for fabricating the trusses. To make the job easier, I built a jig square-true 90° that would hold the wall trusses on centerline. It made it a lot easier to clamp the already made wall trusses to the base tube on line, then weld in place. Next, taking all the parts lists, cutting every part I needed to fabricate the framework. Double checking all lenghts and angles and making sure all the parts are there at hand. The weather held out while I was cutting all the structural steel. Using the forklift to handle the structural steel on the saw has to be done outside. This part of the job is bust ass. Now I can move the jig table in the shop and fabricate the wall trusses. Kickback time, take my time, drink my tea listen to my rock 'n roll. Good thing now because the weather really sucks outside. Because this was going to be an all welded joint tubular structure it had to be fabricated level. So I fabricated a large legged angle iron framework as to set the base in and on centerline. Before I know it the framework was done and waiting for the metal sheeting. I chose a 36 inch deep Delta rib 20 foot lengths. This took a little long to do because at that time the wind was an issue. I left the metal sheeting off the bottom on both sides so we could tie to the structure to Drag it in place. Linda got recruited as the navigator. Good teamwork, it went well.

Well I'll be damned.  I can hardly believe this.  I couldn't get on the blog after they changed over their format with the old computer or the lap top, no matter what I did. After the HP went tit's up I went to the thrift store and bought an OLD 10 dollar computer with windows XP on it and and it has Chrome. I tried this thing and even though it took 8 minutes to load the blog, it worked.  Who knows for how long or how good but maybe now I can communicate again. I don't have any pictures loaded on it yet so don't know how many things it will support. Has plenty of ram but not a whole lot of virtual memory .  Any way we'll see.
Granny.

Whoops! I got the blogs mixed up

When Grandma started the "This and That" I thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread (and sliced bread it pretty cool in my book). Anyway, I was inspired to start my own blog with my snowboarding buddies. When I was typing up my last blog post I accidentally clicked on Grandma's blog rather than my snowboarding blog. The snowboarding blog is PG and there isn't anything on their that I wouldn't show my Grandma (if you can't show it to your Grandma, you best keep it to your self). So at first I cringed, and then thought "what the heck maybe I'll make dual posts?" So here is a post of the 'helmet cam' videos I mentioned in the earlier posts.

This past week was insane! It was the week before spring break (students coming into my office every 10 minutes wanting to know what their grade is) and I was trying to get a revised paper out the 'digital door' to Thin Solid Films, which is a journal that a lot of my fellow physics nerds publish in. So fun stuff like video editing had to take a back seat to getting work done. These videos are from my outing last week. Now that I'm on spring break, as Fred would say "yabadabadooooo!" I'm hoping to get some more pics and footy as I will be on a plane in a few hours bound for Oregon. I'm hoping to get some slope time in with my best man Woods and my Sis. Stay tuned for more posts. First run Barriers Headwaters