TEN Days to Maker Faire!

I'm going to be returning for the third year in a row to the Bay Area Maker Faire on the weekend of May 18th and 19th.  If you're anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, or indeed the entire West Coast, you really ought to head over and check it out.  The whole thing keeps getting bigger and better.  

If you've never heard of it, you should check out the website.  There will be art, science, and tech projects everywhere.  The organizers bill it as the "greatest show and tell on Earth" and they're probably right.  There will be giant bicycles, flame-belching sculptures, an electronic giraffe, and countless other things to see, do, and learn.  Heck, last year there was a guy who'd turned a DeLorean into a hovercraft. 

For my part, I'll be setting up my display booth and have a handful of characters walking around in costume.  I'll also be bringing a stack of molds, unfinished pieces, and photo albums so I can spend all day hanging out and answering how-to questions for anyone who stops by.  So this is usually the view I have while I'm there:


I'll also have a booth set up to sell some Combat Garden Gnomes:


So come out and see some awesome stuff, get inspired, and have a great time.  

Oh, and if you happen to bump into one of my Space Marines, be sure to apologize:
 

You Are What You Eat

Tonight I'm a cow. But the cow ate grass. So by extension, I'm grass.


After enough iterations of this reasoning, I am a ray of sunshine.
 
It's late and I should be asleep.

Sailing With Rich

Quite some time ago my friend Rich was bitten by the sailing bug. Some time later, I purchased the Heart of Gold. While he's asked several times to go sailing with me, he's been stationed in the Far East ever since I bought the boat and I'm not about to singlehand all the way to Japan just so we can dawdle around Tokyo Bay for an afternoon together.

Then a couple of weeks ago he called me and mentioned that he was going to be stateside for a bit. He planned to boondoggle a few days in the Bay Area and asked if I'd be up for going sailing. Given all of the little things that are wrong with the boat and all of the big things that are stacking up on my to-do list, I hesitated for a moment. Fortunately, reason found its way into my head and reminded me that I bought the boat for sailing and I never get to spend enough time with Rich anyway.

When I say there were little things wrong with the boat, I have to place emphasis on the word "little." The most significant concern was a dead light bulb in the anchor light. Fixing it meant going aloft all the way up to the tippy top of the main mast and unscrewing this little fitting:


It wasn't until I'd hoisted myself all fifty or so feet up that I realized that I went all the way up with the wrong size bulb. The bulb I had fit in the socket, but there was no way to put the cover back on over it. Good enough.

I was also having a few issues in the engine room. Here's a picture of me having issues in the engine room:


Other than that, the only things I needed to do before getting underway were replacing the little shackles along the foot of the main and mizzen sails and finding a new home for these little guys living inside the cover for my mainsail:


All too easy.

WEDNESDAY: Singlehanding to the South Bay

0630: Reveille

0720: Underway for pumpout station

0820: Departing Petaluma Marina under power

0850: Proceeding downriver under power/sail

1112: Passing channel markers 9 & 10:


1303: Moored at Loch Lomond Marina in San Rafael for fuel. I took on a total of 105 gallons of diesel fuel, so it gave me a few minutes to chat with the guy working at the fuel dock. Turns out he's a Vietnam veteran and he and his wife live aboard a sailboat there in the marina. Nice guy.

After settling the bill, I walked ashore to grab lunch. On the way I felt like somehow I was being watched:

The guy at the bait shop says this bird's name is "Nasty."

1400: Underway from Loch Lomond

1616: Passed the only commercial traffic I've seen all day:


As I passed Raccoon Straits, I got a good shot of the fog coming through the Gate:

1859: Entering Oyster Point Approach Channel

As I motored into the Oyster Point Marina, I found the guest dock completely full. With no other idea of where to go I went ahead and tied up at the fuel dock.

1914: Moored at Oyster Point Marina

When I had the boat tied up, I walked up to the harbormaster's office to find that there was nobody there. I called the number posted on the door and got a machine, so I figured I'd just stay at the fuel dock overnight and take off when they opened for business in the morning. At this point, the only thing I needed was a shorepower connection so I could charge my battery banks and call it a night.

For some reason it seemed that none of the shore power outlets that I tried were working. I was in the middle of trying to find a working outlet when I was interrupted by one of the more annoying phone calls I've received in years. It got me so spun up in fact that I completely failed to notice the rather simple detail that kept me from being able to plut in. Note to self: recognize the worth and value of caller ID.

At some point while I was messing up my shore power, I noticed that a harbor patrol officer had shown up at the harbormaster's office. When I walked over to check in, he pointed out that I needed to move to a different slip and it was time to cast off again. Somewhere in the conversation he expressed a bit of surprise/concern that I was moving such a large boat singlehanded.

"It's no big deal as long as you stay ahead of things," says I. I'm still convinced that's true.

So I shoved off and headed to the docks at the far end of the marina where the officer told me to find an empty slip. The only problem was that there was no empty slip. I didn't find this out until I'd turned into the 45-foot wide passage between the docks. This is where it's worth pointing out that my boat is 41 feet long. For a lesser mariner, turning a single-screw boat around in this kind of cramped space would be nigh unto impossible. For me it was just a matter of concentration and control.

Still, in the five minutes I spent backing and filling to turn the boat around, about a dozen residents of the marina started popping up everywhere to stand and stare and wait for me to collide with something. Several of them even brought out big rubber fenders just in case I crashed into their boats. I'm proud to say that I managed the turn without coming within 18 inches of any boats on either end. I rock.

Then it was time to motor to the other end of the marina where the harbor patrol officer emphatically assured me that there were in fact empty slips. As I turned down another row of slips I found him standing at the end of one of them. That's when he asked me how wide the boat was.

"She's thirteen and a half feet on the beam," says I.

"Oh," says he, "these slips are too small, but there's wider ones over that way."

So it was time to make another tight-squeeze-U-turn. Once again I ended up with an audience of paranoid boaters standing by to fend me off if things got too close.

As I headed back toward the main channel at dead slow speed, I was looking out for the officer to wave me into a slip. He didn't pop out anywhere until after I'd passed him. This meant that I'd have to back up, twist the boat to point toward the slip, and then keep control of the headway with the wind pushing me forward to prevent crashing into the dock. Meanwhile, another crowd had gathered on the dock, worried that someone with a big boat and only one person on board was about to wreck their floating homes. Fun.

Everything went well at first. I backed the stern into the wind, pointed the bow into the slip, and started creeping forward, checking the headway against the wind. In fact, it was all going perfectly. Then one of the marina residents "helped" me by grabbing one of my docklines and pulling my bow toward the dock on the starboard side.

With the unexpected spin, I didn't have time to keep the stern from swinging to port. Then the wind caught and swung me faster sideways as the stern was pushed. I ended up bumping the dock pretty hard amidships on the port side. It left a pretty noticeable skid mark, but at least there was no real damage.

2053: Moored. Again.

I can't really complain about the well-meaning folks who helped make up the boat once I was alongside. I had it handled all by myself, but I can understand why they'd be worried that something was about to go wrong.

Sometime later Rich called to let me know that his flight was delayed. His new ETA at SFO was 0045 on...

THURSDAY: Northbound with Rich

Rich got to the boat at about 2am. We sat and chatted for a while, but I can't for the life of me remember what we were talking about. I was well overdue for some rest at that point.

0400-ish: For no earthly reason, Rich is awake and alert.

0630-ish: The saner member of the crew wakes up to find a warm, calm, and overcast day with a bit of a breeze from the West.

0830-ish: Returned gate key to the harbor master.

0842: Main engine light-off

0851: Underway

0912: Main engine shutdown. Underway under sail.

It was a nice, calm day on the bay:

1410: Passing Under the Bay Bridge:

As we passed between the city and Treasure Island, we got a great view of the fog rolling in through the Gate:
The nice part about sailing the bay on a Thursday was that there were hardly any other boaters out there. Here's one of the very few (six at the most) sailboats we saw all day:
It was a great day to be out though, despite the whisper of fog:

It was a bit warm in the south bay, but the fog helped keep things cool as we crossed the slot. In fact, at some point we had to start adding layers of clothing to ward off the cold.

1543: Passed under the San Rafael-Richmond Bridge, to windward of Red Rock.


1759: Approaching Anchorage. We decided to end the day at anchor off of China Camp. Unfortunately the area is perilously shallow for a boat with the draft of Heart of Gold, so we had to make the tradeoff between potentially grounding in calm but water close to shore or in spending the night in choppy water farther off. We ended up with six feet of water under the keel when we set the hook, so I suppose we could've gotten closer in than we did.

For dinner, I grilled a couple of steaks. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to buy a set of steak knives for the boat. Fortunately, I still have my KA-BAR combat knives that I picked up in Afghanistan. Rich didn't complain:

I used the bigger one for myself:

After dinner we sat around in the cockpit, telling stories, trading jokes, and finishing off a bottle of pinot noir.

It was a good day:
FRIDAY: Up the River

07??: Reveille, a nice, gray day:


The day started with me cranking out a couple of omelettes. When making omelettes, I like to impress myself by flipping them over with a deft flick of the pan rather than using the more pedestrian spatula method. Because I savor the opportunity to impress people with my trivial skills, I made a point to show off my omelette flipping for Rich

ME: Did you see that?

RICH [smugly]: Yeah. It looked like you were about to float test an omlette.

Some people just find no wonder in the world.

With breakfast finished and the dishes securely piled in the galley sink, it was time to get underway. Rich took the helm and I headed forward to drive the anchor windlass. On my way up I snapped this pic:


10-something: As we started heaving in, it became immediately clear that we were going to have trouble. The wind and the current were running in contrary directions. This meant that the wind was pushing the boat one way above the water and the current was pushing the other way under the water. As a result, the anchor chain was trailing from the bow under the length of the boat.

The first idea was to turn the boat around by hauling up the mizzen sail and pointing the boat into the wind. This proved impossible and all we ended up doing was going in circles around the hook as the wind and the current took turns as the main driving force moving the boat. After the seventh or eighth lap, we decided to just lower the sail, start the engine, and motor the stern around into the wind so we could haul in the hook against the current.

Once we had the anchor in sight, we turned toward the wind, hoisted the mizzen, unfurled the jib, and shut down the engine. The plan was to sail across the current and into the wind until the tide turned, then follow the wind and current up the river to Petaluma.

Rich spent much of this time at the helm while I kicked back and handled lines:


1418: Passing Markers 1&2, Entering Petaluma River Channel

1612: Passed an unorthodox boater in the river:


1805: Enter Petaluma Marina

1819: Give up on holding tank pumpout system, underway for berth.

1823: Moored.

1830: Main Engine Shutdown

In the end we managed to get there and back again with no major injuries or damage to the vessel or crew. I can't express how nice it was to be back out on the water for a little while.

Now back to my regularly scheduled life...

Formerly Huge Hair...

After my triumphant return from Afghanistan, I decided to take a few months off from drills with the Naval Reserve. Not having any other real requirement to maintain grooming standards, I decided to see what I'd look like if I grew my hair out.

Reviews were mixed, but mostly negative. At it's best, my newly-long hair looked cool like this:


But the rest of the time it tended to look like this:


So after a particularly tedious day of pushing hair out of my eyes or, as often, doing that shampoo commercial head flip thing that always looked great when, say, Kathy Ireland was doing it but mostly made me look like I had Parkinsons or something, I finally decided to go ahead and get a haircut.

Halfway through this particular weight-loss program, my head looked like so:


I don't have an "after" picture because I started wearing hats just as soon as I was done getting my haircut.

Despite this clearly prudent precaution, I still ended up with a nasty head cold.

Oh well.

My First Month Back in the USA

Here's a bit more narrative about my first couple of weeks in DC...

Ana and I have been having a whirlwind tour of restaurants and museums and scattered states along the Eastern seaboard. She's been working long hours getting the Coast Guard's blog at http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/ up and running. So far she's doing all of the writing for the blog, so check it out sometime so you too can be amazed by the overwhelmingly talented, thoroughly literate woman I married.

With her being so busy, I'm left to my own devices for much of the day. For the first few days I made myself busy by occasionally wandering around town in search of coffeeshops, bookstores, scenery, and interesting-looking buildings. Fortunately, there's no shortage of these:



While I may have found it all fascinating, the little dogs spent a lot of time sleeping, drooling on the pillows, and just plain bored:


To change things up a bit, we made a trip down to Virginia Beach over a weekend so I could catch up with a bunch of old friends and introduce them to my relatively new wife. First on the list was Shawn Trulove. Shawn and I were classmates at the SUNY Maritime College and we both majored in Naval Architecture, so we had almost every one of our classes together after the second year there. After graduation, we were both commissioned into the Navy and were stationed in Newport, RI and Yokosuka, Japan together. Then he got married, transferred to Virginia, and became somewhat scarce for the next eight years.

We met up for dinner and I finally got to meet his beautiful wife and their absolutely hilarious little boy. Hopefully we'll be able to make it back down to their place for some grilling and whatnot before we're done here.

The next day we stopped by my old friends Ali and Greg's place to celebrate Memorial Day. Ali was also stationed in Yokosuka with me and then ended up being my roommate a couple of years later when we were both instructors at the Navy's Surface Warfare Officers School. While we were there, she met her future husband Greg. I spent my last month or so on active duty living in their spare bedroom with my two dogs and the nearly-immortal ferret (more on that some other time) while helping where I could with their home improvements.

Like an idiot, I hardly took any pictures of anything at all while I was on this trip. In fact, the only ones I got were a few goofy shots of Ali and Greg's bulldog Burlison, which Ali bought as a tiny little puppy when she was living with me forever ago:

Don't get me wrong, he's adorable, I just wish I'd've taken more photos of the folks we were there to visit and the amazing work Greg and Ali have done on the renovation of their current house there in Virginia. Blast!

I have since vowed not to make the same mistake again.

Ana's little dogs made this trip with us and it worked out fairly well. They were well-behaved and the hotel we were in allowed pets, but it was getting obvious that with all of the running around we'd have to do (much of it to places that may not be dog-friendly) we had to find somewhere else to ditch the pooches.

So the following weekend we set out for my brother-in-law John's place in Warner Robbins, Georgia to drop the little dogs off with him, his wife Brenda, and their full-sized dog Stella.

Along the way I snapped this winning photo of a random country road in Georgia:


Sometime during this trip I decided that Ana's wide open, mostly flat dashboard was a perfect place to start accumulating all sorts of odd little toys. I'm now on the lookout for every sort of movie tie-in promotional fast food kid's meal trinket I can muster. This is how it began. I'll post an "after" shot once the collection becomes more impressive/ridiculous:


John ended up stuck at work for most of the time we were there (he's in the Air Force) so we got to hang out with Brenda and Stella a bit and spend more time that I'd've ever wanted in Warner-Robbins, Georgia. While we were there, Ana bought me a giant gumball (which I still have mixed feelings about):

It took a concerted effort over the next forty-five minutes to figure out how to actually fit it all in my mouth:

Oh, and before anyone asks what flavor it was, I think it was what confectioners refer to as "gross."

After dinner (a proper meal, not the gumball) the three of us went out to see the Disney/Pixar movie "Up" in 3D. I think 3D movies are cool and I think they make me look cool too:

It was a great movie and easily in the top third of the list of movies Pixar has made. Now I'm really looking forward to James Cameron's "Avatar" which should be the next big thing in 3D. Fun!

Later that night while I was walking the dogs, we stumbled across a toad with glowing demon eyes:

The dogs were all sorts of intrigued by this, so I let them off leash so they could sniff it and chase it around on the concrete basketball court behind John and Brenda's place. Then Ru, the older and bolder of the pair, decided to lick it and get infected with the same demon eyes as well:


The symptoms persisted into the next morning:

Once again I failed to take pictures of any of the people we'd gone to visit, but Ana managed to snap this pic of their dog Stella helping her with her blog posting by tasting the wireless internet receiver:

After a fairly late start, we were back on the same Georgia country road headed back to Interstate 95, traffic, and Washington, DC:

Along the way I tried to change Ana's mind about letting me have an armadillo, but I guess she didn't think this one was cute enough to bring home:

I'm not sure what her problem was. It's not like an armadillo would be the strangest creature in the house:


Along the way, I did manage to get a lemur:


We decided to name it "Squint." But I still maintain that plush toys don't count as pets. One day I will have my lemur. In the meantime, we'll have to settle for Squint:

After a long day of driving, we managed to crash at the hotel back in the capitol at some ridiculous hour in the AM. The following morning Ana dragged herself to work and I returned to my various projects in the room:


Stay tuned. Sooner or later this picture will be made to make sense...

Project Background: HALO Costume

I don't think I've written this project up in this blog, so here goes.

A couple of years ago, I was brainstorming some ideas for Halloween costumes with a handful of friends. The plan was to save time and money by pooling our resources. After a bit of discussion, we decided to go as the characters from the online cartoon Red vs. Blue. The show is easily the most famous example of a burgeoning animation style called "machinima" which uses video games to render character action. In this case, they use a multiplayer version of the game HALO.

The beauty of this particular idea is that all we'd have to do is make several copies of the same costume and then just paint them different colors.

The end result should look like this:

With the internet in our lives, it turns out you can always find someone somewhere who has already done anything you can think of. In this case, I found an entire forum of like-minded geeks making HALO costumes called the UNSC 405th Infantry Division. These guys have come up with all sorts of creative ways to replicate this costume. Most notably, they use a Japanese shareware program called Pepakura to transform the 3D meshes from the video game into paper folding models.

Using this method, I started by building a low-resolution model of the helmet to make sure I had the size right:

Once I was happy with the size of the low-resolution model, it was time to crank out a more difficult, detailed version:

As you can see, there are a lot more folds and cuts involved in the high-resolution model:

The funny part is, I screwed up and printed a smaller version of the helmet and didn't realize it until it was 75% built. I figured it makes sense to go ahead and finish it anyway so I can have a rough-draft version of the helmet to experiment with before I waste time and mess up the larger one. Here's the three versions of the helmet I built:

Once the paper models were assembeled, they were coated with polyester resin (the cheaper laminating resin for fiberglass) to make them more rigid:

Once the polyester resin had set up, I coated the inside of the helmet with several layers of urethane casting resin for strength:

This left me with at stronger helmet that would hold up to the rigors of mechanical sanding and shaping:

After only a couple of days' effort, I had gone from nothing to having the smoothing and bondo work about half done:

If I had sculpted this in plain clay like I did with my last helmet project, it would've taken me at least a month worth of evenings to get to this point:

Just to get an idea of what it would look like, I had to test-fit the face shield:

And try it on:

And pose like an idiot:

With the initial shaping and smoothing done, it was time to add in all of the annoying little details, such as the recessed area under the brim:

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to forgo the bulk of the little problems on the smaller helmet:

The full-sized one got the full treatment and a quick shot of the final color it would wear:

I'm especially pleased with the details around the back of the neck:

The next trick was to come up with a workable template for the details on the faceplate:

Then the final fitting of the gold visor with it's clear styrene overlay:

So here's what in-game version looks like:

And here's my prototype:

The next step was molding and casting. When I was done, I was suddenly able to make lots of helmets to add to my stack of helmets needing work. Here you can see some of my HALO helmets in the left side of the pile:

Then I made a low-resolution model of the torso armor to test the fit:

Once I'd settled on a size that fit me properly, it was time to build the high-detail version. The high-detail version was filled with all sorts of tiny little bits and pieces and was tedious as hell to build:


Once it was assembled, I went ahead and set it up with one of my helmet castings to get an idea of the proportions:

And the side view:


The helmet looks a bit big on my size of torso armor, but it should look just right when coupled with larger sizes.

With the first one built, it was time to reinforce it by coating it with resin:

And another shot for size comparison:

Once the resin had set up, it was on to bondo and fairing:

After the first couple of rounds of filling and smoothing, it looke pretty good:

So I had to separate the front from the back and test fit the whole thing again:

Then prime, fill, sand, prime fill, sand, prime fill and sand it again:

Then it was finally smooth enough to be ready for moldmaking:

And the chest piece:

The paper model also included the abdomen plate, but I decided I didn't like the way it looked and had to fabricate my own from scratch. I made the basic shape in MDF and then added some urethane foam to build thickness:

Then I sanded and smoothed it a bit before adding some relief details to the surface:

Speaking of details, here are some of the smaller parts I added to the chest:

On to moldmaking, here's a shot of the detail coat of silicone rubber being applied to the armor. This picks up all of the fine parts on the surface of the piece:

After building up a few more layers of silicone, it was time to move on to building a mother mold. Here I've added some water-based clay to the surface of the rubber mold. Once the mother mold is built, the clay will be removed and more silicone will be poured in to fill the void it leaves behind. This guarantees a good fit between the rubber jacket mold and the fiberglass mother mold that will keep it straight. The plywood parts are the frame that the fiberglass mothermold will be built onto:

Proper Personal Protective Equipment is a must when working with fiberglass. I'm in a large, well-ventilated shop, so I can get away without a respirator. I must still wear rubber gloves however:

The mother mold after the application of several layers of fiberglass mat saturated in polyester resin:

And the first casting pulled from these molds:

For the next step, I assembled a size tester for the upper arm armor:

And just for giggles, I went ahead and painted the size tester to get an idea of what the whole thing looks like at this stage:

The forearm armor I picked up from another maker, but I have since made a few of my own. Oh, and it's not pink, it's light red.

Since then, I've fabricated two larger sizes of the chest armor, two sizes for the calf armor, two sizes for the forearms, and a whole host of other parts. Here's a bunch of pieces I cranked out while I was out to sea aboard the M/V Moku Pahu last year:




When I paid off the ship in New Orleans, Ana and I fiberglassed the insides of the paper models and then I moved them back to California where I filled them with foam in preparation for all of the sanding, filling, shaping, detailing, and molding:

Since I had a couple of weeks to kill in September of 2008, I decided I needed to make a custom pair of boots to go along with the costume. Here's a shot of the uppers that will go with them:


And here's the prototype soles:


Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the molds in time to have a wearable pair by the time I shipped out, so I was back to building additional sizes for the armor parts while I was in Afghanistan:


This includes a light red codpiece:
I've also made one of the older style helmets (as worn by one of the characters in the latest seasons of the show):


Finally, here's the middle sized version of the torso armor I've been making in the hotel in Washington DC:

This is the abdomen plate that goes with it:


I'm doing the fiberglass work on the roof of the hotel in order to avoid killing myself with the fumes.

Hopefully the staff here won't notice and I won't have to explain it. On the other hand, I suppose it's not the most unsettling project I've got going on in the room. There's also these other minor works in progress:

That's the captain's pistol from the sci-fi series "Firefly" and the movie "Serenity."

And here's my set of Wolverine claws which still need a lot of shaping and polishing:


More to come. Stay tuned.