Wednesday, September 08, 2010 08:09

Archive for July, 2010

This Weekends Projects

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

I have three projects I’m trying to tackle this weekend.  The make and take earlier this month really energized me and I’ve been working on stuff pretty much every day since!

First task for the weekend was to rehab the toe-pincher coffin I built last year.  I had built it based on ScareFX’s plans and I had rushed through the process.  The coffin was used last year but it was extremely flimsy so I had to be careful with it when moving it around.  To remedy this, I re-framed the inside of it and used Gorilla Glue at all the joints to help make it more durable.  Task: Complete!

The second task this weekend is to work on the 3-Axis Skull some more.  I had found out this past week I had the servo linkages improperly aligned which caused the head to move in a less-than-optimal fashion.  This evening I re-aligned them and tested it out with Pololu’s Maestro Software.

Now that the servos are aligned properly, I need to get them working with the Pololu Micro Maestro controller via Brookshire Software’s VSA program.  As of this writing, I have not been able to get the software to talk to the controller properly.  Thanks to some help on HauntForum (from some more experienced than I) it would seem that my problem may be that I do not have the baud rate set correctly on the controller.  I will be trying that tomorrow some time and see if I can start programming the show once I get it running correctly.  Task: In-process…

The last item for the weekend is to re-paint my Romanian tombstone.  I originally built it back in 2005 and I have never liked the paint job I did on it.  I will be re-doing the paint tomorrow using a style similar to what I recently used to re-paint the obelisk earlier this month.

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Obelisk: Rehabilitated

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

I finished the re-painting of the obelisk this weekend.  I’m happier than I usually am with the outcome.  Typically I over-analyze my work and allow my compulsion to create perfection get in the way but this time I just set my bar low and came out with something I’m very happy with because of it.

When I first built the Obelisk in 2006, the paint job was just a bland, ordinary gray.  This time, I modeled it after an obelisk in Pembroke center that was painted white at some point in time and the paint had been worn away by weather from the top-down over the years.

Here is the progress I made this weekend with the last picture being the end result:

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Further Obelisk Progress

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

I had some free time tonight so when I got home from work I decided to quickly slap the base coat of paint onto the obelisk I’m repairing.  I used some Drylok on it since it has a rough, somewhat stony texture to it.

As you can see from the first image below, I have been experimenting with some different painting techniques before I put the base coat on.  I think my attempts at staining it and painting on some moss looked good, so I will probably go with that on the final product.

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3 Axis Skull Setback

Monday, July 19th, 2010

I decided to work on mounting my 3 axis skull onto a bucky body this evening.  To start, the kit I have has a threaded rod that is a larger diameter than the rod on the Bucky meaning a 3/8-16 coupling nut alone won’t mount the skull to the body because Bucky’s rod is a 5/16-18 threaded rod.  In addition to that, even if the coupling nut was the right diameter for both threaded rods, the head of the skull would be sitting a good 4 – 6 inches above the neck making the thing look ridiculous.

In a “hack” move, I decided to cut down the length of the two threaded rods by about 2″ each and would hammer the coupling nut down into the neck and hold it in with hot glue.  This worked except when I was screwing the skull down into the coupling nut, I over-torqued the rotate coupling inside the skull and busted the linkage.  It’s no big setback, but it is annoying enough I’ve decided to get in from the heat and call it a night.

Mistakes made in the heat of the summer make me 10x angrier than most other times.

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Rehabbing the Obelisk

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Over the winter some mice devoured a huge section of foam on one of the corners of my Obelisk grave marker.

So, in an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade, I am going to treat the chewed-away section as though it is a chunk of the stone that was damaged at some point in time.  This means sanding the teeth marks away and re-painting the stone.

Since I’m going to be doing that, I also have a little upgrade I will be making to the stone.  Back at the very first Massachusetts Make and Take meeting, we all made foam skull castings.  Mine had gotten a little deformed and was turned into a half skull.  I am upgrading the the stone by attaching this skull to one of the faces of the obelisk.

Here is the progress I managed to make today.  I sanded the damaged section, stripped the paint off of the portion the skull will be attached to, and glued on the skull.  I also patched all the gaps, dents, dings, etc with wood putty.

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A Roller Coaster of a Year

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

It has been quite some time since I last updated this site.  This is due to the roller coaster that 2010 has turned out to be as a year so far.

Back in February, I got some terrible news at work.  The company I was working for had made the decision that in November 2010 they were going to move from Massachusetts to Florida.  I made a brief assessment of my financial situation and took into account that I’d be moving away from my family and friends and promptly rejected their offer to me to move.  I did so figuring that I’d have until November to find a job.

A week later, I received a call from the COO that I would be laid off in June.

That put the quest for a new job into the fast lane!  I had already started looking anyhow, but now I really had to accelerate things.  The situation with the economy wasn’t helping very much and there wasn’t much in my field of work available.

Fortune did smile upon me and after applying at a number of companies, I finally got a call from a prestigious lab for an interview.  Just before I was to be laid off, I was hired at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and am happily settled in now.

The effect all this had on my haunt activities was that it put my haunt in jeopardy.  Unsure of my employment situation meant at best I would just set up everything from last year again with no new additions and at worst I wouldn’t be able to set up at all.

With three months left to go now I will be working to re-hab some older, decrepit props and complete a few unfinished ideas from recent years.  There won’t be much in the line of new items this year but I’m just happy to be haunting at all.

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