NYC Parking Map

I’ve always said that the primary challenge of construction work in a city can boil down to one word: LOGISTICS. In the city, getting stuff from point A to point B can be a royal pain. Not only that, but once you’ve arrived at point B, you have all new problems. Getting into the building and then up to the job-site is a completely different set of hurdles. Does the building have a work entrance? Does everybody on your crew have ID? Does all the stuff fit into the elevator? Did you bring a dolly so you can easily get the stuff TO the elevator? Did you arrive when the elevator operator is at lunch?  Now say you are taking care of all this, what are you going to do with your vehicle? Did you bring enough people so one can sit in the vehicle, or do you have to find parking?

Need to know ahead of time what kind of parking rules you will find? Check out NYC’s DOT map portal. You can search for any address in the city and show parking signs in the neighborhood. For those of us with small to midsize projects, knowing stuff like this helps, especially when the cost of a parking ticket can easily cost above $100 per pop.

Dog Update

Yep. Georgia’s still awesome.

Reference Poster

I got tired of searching for the right tables online every time I needed them, so I put together this poster a little while ago based upon individual tables I gathered. It still needs a few tweaks (not sure I need the density of Cobalt on there…) but it covers the basics pretty well. Feel free to download & enjoy.

Chem-Sharp

Been doing some job-site TIG welding of stainless lately and it’s a pain to have to sharpen tips all the time with a grinder or whatever, plus theres all sorts of nasty contamination from the grinders. Just saw this video on a chemical product called Chem-Sharp which will chemically do the sharpening of a TIG electrode. Pretty bad-ass method. Heat the electrode, and just dip it into the jar several times to create a beautiful tapered tip.

via weldingtipsandtricks.com

Amazin Blaze Welding Service

Just saw this video at the fantastic Welding Tips & Tricks. A welder by the name of Glen David Thornton ( “Amazin Blaze” to his friends) pitches his skills. Enjoy.

Hurricane Sandy in Red Hook

Although Wilsonbuilt is now in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I still know many folks with homes & businesses in Red Hook who suffered massive amounts of water damage during last week’s hurricane. Floods swept through the neighborhood, filling basements & buildings with briny water and large areas are still without power, telephone, heat, or plumbing.

On the water’s edge in particular things are very bad – with flood waters in excess of five feet sweeping through businesses as though walls & doors did not exist. Lots of beautiful equipment was destroyed in an instant.

Nevertheless things must go on and folks are cleaning up & sorting through the remains to see what can be salvaged or thrown out. I myself have been wrestling to restore to life a forklift that was submerged. Each day ends in some sort of success (it starts!) and the next begins with a setback (it doesn’t start anymore!). New item for Hurricane checklist: disconnect batteries from equipment….

Despite all the depressing events, I was amazed the other day when a crowd of fantastic volunteers organized by Red Hook Initiative swept through the building, helping to clean & sort & dry. A gang of super nice volunteers from all over the metro area, they got right down to the dirty work & were such a great help in helping move forward! Hooray!

Solidworks & CadJunkie

Many CAD packages I’ve worked with seem to approach 3D models from a geometric approach – simply mapping the geometric shape of objects within space. In my mind these are the Swiss Army Knives of CAD – they do 2D, 3D, etc. Then you have software like Rhino (which I have little experience with) which takes a more rigorous mathematical approach to modeling called NURBS to generate shapes in three dimensions – but these shapes are still not solid but are shells which have no material properties. Solidworks, by contrast, is a solid modeling tool – all operations are done on fully realized 3D models of solid objects which behave like real materials. It uses similar mathematical tools to generate curves but implicit in everything is material – everything you create is from real stuff. Add to that is that all parts relate to each other parametrically – there are mathematical relationships between shapes & objects – be they dimension based (length = 2x diameter) or constraint based  (keeping things parallel, for example).

As someone who takes creative ideas from others & makes them real, I love Solidworks – I first got introduced to the software by designing some architectural elements for Gratz Industries a few years ago, and life has never been the same. I use it on nearly every project these days, and I’m beginning to do nothing but Solidworks modeling for some clients.

When you start making big assemblies, or even medium sized ones (like the stairs I designed for Gratz) the incredible capabilities of the software can become pitfalls –  you can really waste quite a bit of time if you are not aware of all the features. So I’ve been working through some of the tutorials over at cadjunkie to try to hone my skills. I’m really impressed with the video content over there – there’s a lot of free tutorials, and their “premium” package is priced quite reasonably ($19/month). Also, since they are Industrial Designers, they cover a lot of the different software packages that ID uses and helps the user determine which software is best in different situations. AND – they are helpful at sorting out cross-platform issues, like cross platform importing/exporting etc which can be tricky & time consuming.

Check it out!

President Awesome

Check out this video of President Obama geeking out with 14-year old Maker star Joey Hudy. With an impromptu request for a demonstration, the President helps Joey shoot a marshmallow across the State Dining Room with the homemade shooter, the ‘Extreme Marshmallow Cannon’ (which Obama helps power up with a bicycle pump).

The event was to showcase student winners of science, technology, engineering & math  (STEM) competitions from across the country. Obama announced new policies to recruit and support science, technology, engineering and math teacher programs, including requesting $80 million in his upcoming budget for teacher preparation, with the goal of training one million additional STEM students over the next decade.

Rebranding Teachers

I’ve often thought that one of the great tragedies of the teaching profession lies in how teachers are perceived by the general public. So I was excited when I saw these great images at the Hyperakt website. WNYC’s Studio 360 asked them to create new visuals to help show teachers and teaching in a new light and I think they’re wonderful.

Back to the Blog

Been busy over the past few months but I’m kicking back now with the dog to write a few blog posts.