This is awesome and I love it! Congratulations, and welcome to realizing that once you can make things, you can make exactly what you want, regardless of whether it's practical or economical (as you discovered). If you have a partner, good on them for not joining the pool for 2034 or stabbing you with the aluminum partway through the project.
A couple notes:
The customary solution for hanging something on a wall such that you can hang and un-hang it is a French cleat [0]. They're best for flat-ish stuff, but they work pretty well for shallow cabinets as well. You have a cavity in the framework that you can hide it in, along with the electronics.
I don't have a huge beef with using aluminium for the frame, though I'd have used aluminum personally. I agree with others that wood would have been cheaper, but I'd be generally worried about the electronics in the cavity not getting enough airflow to stay cool. The brick wall should sink some heat, and the aluminum should help move heat better than wood would. Honestly, I see the aluminum as a pretty expedient solution to prototyping this. You don't need to save every penny if you're only making one of something.
Wood movement is a thing. I'd edge glue the two pieces of beech, and then follow the traditional solution of mounting to the frame with one fixed point and one floating point. Using a wood frame wouldn't have gotten you out of this: in practical terms, wood is constant in length, but has noticeable changes in width. Attaching pieces with the width running across the length is called cross-grain construction, and is best avoided. A common solution is table buttons[1].
For affixing router templates, double-sided tape works well. You want the stuff with the thickness and texture of duct/duck tape, sometimes sold as carpet tape. Don't use the thin stuff from the office supply. DON'T REUSE THE TAPE. It never sticks as well the second time, and a router can do a lot of damage in a hurry if the template moves. You can also just use a single sheet of paper glued between the template and the workpiece. This is called a paper joint[2], and it's commonly used for split spindle turnings and bowl turning.
Anyhow, the design is great, and it brings a lot more to the space than either of the commercial options. Keep on building, and please keep posting!
Now that you mention it, French cleats and other rail-based mounting solutions were on the table at some point. I discarded the idea because I thought it couldn't be made to work with the shifted center of gravity (I didn't have a solution in mind at that time). Well, I took an informative detour there.
Cross-grain construction is a new topic to me, thank you! I will take a look.
I love that La Fontaine is named in tribute to Marcel Duchamp[0], even if calling a splash-free urinal a fountain would seem a bit confusing on the surface.
I love that seemingly random trades that we largely take for granted have these case studies that result in awards for things us muggles never think about.
A garage I went to subscribed to a trade magazine for towing and recovery companies and left the issues in the waiting room. Sure enough, they had a recovery of the year type of award.
I suspect awards are one of the more profitable niches of the wider events industry.
They're cheaper to produce than a full-scale conference (needing just a 1 day hire of a hotel ballroom or similar) and are easy to sell - every business or team nominated for an award will pay for a table, as will various suppliers and vendors who see it as a great marketing opportunity.
I was at one committee meeting when the annual award ceremony came up. One person was considered for an award because she had a big family with many cousins and nieces. All the better to sell tables.
you know an award is actually legit when someone from a trade body contacts you the week before sounding slightly put out that nobody from your member company is flying to Europe to attend their event even though you did fill out an application form, you assume their event must be a bit short of attendees but reluctantly dip into the small startup budget for a single person to fly out there because "something something networking", and then your colleague gets surprised by actually winning it whilst surrounded by the teams everyone else sent.
on the other hand, I found it hilarious one of my father's old companies publicly sponsored a special new category of award at a legit-seeming construction event. You'll never guess who won...
It looks more like awards for events, e.g. "Most Creative and Engaging Event" and "Best Event Series (over 1800 attendees)," none of which seem to have anything to do with the quality of any awards given at those events. What am I missing here?
It makes me feel uninformed about the world, but in a good way. It leaves me mildly awestruck when I learn about some new invisible corner of our society that has so much more depth than I realized. I appreciate elevators more (both from a safety perspective and as a convenience) knowing there are people who care so much about them.
I feel like that sounds less weird when you really start to think about it. There is lot of chicken being processed. And the margins must not be great and competition between suppliers must be at least somewhat fierce...
So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.
Curious what? Residential wiring is just about the simplest building trade there is. Plumbing is actually far more complicated, you got to figure slope and elevations and make junctions that hold pressure for years or drain pipes that flow waste water for years. Electrical is prettly plug and play by comparison. Commerical and three phase gets more complicated.
I mean, you should... but there's still a lot of wiggle room on the way from doesn't meet modern code / never met code / shouldn't be done / is unsanitary or unsafe / will not work.
Residential electric is easier to do in ways that work but are either not to code or not to common best practice. The handier the previous owner was, the more new ways to do things you can learn. If a previous owner was in the trades and also heavily involved in the initial build, expect lots of weird repairs. :p
Again electric is not complex.I would say modern residential wiring is pretty fool proof. The majority of the work involves stripping wires and tightening screws. 120v is quite low vs street or transmission line voltage. Yes mis-wiring can kill you or burn down your house but it really takes some effort + stupidity. Nail into a wire, arc fault breaker trips, similiar for other faults. The electric code is far more nanny than plumbing code. Sure if you run a 40 amp dryer off 14 gauge romex with a 40 amp breaker you may have a fire but more likely the wire gets hot maybe melts the insulation and shorts and trips the breaker regardless. everything in wiring is over engineered to prevent fire and death even in the case of improper installation or damage. Meanwhile let's say you plumb a gas line wrong and gas leaks into the house and blows up or boiler explodes from lack of functioning pressure relief valve. Electric has defense in depth as it has layers of fail safes.
A Prius isn't taking off from a stop under strictly ICE power. The electric motor in the transmission lowers the load on the ICE, certainly enough to let the engine oil pump generate operating pressure before it's really under load.
Ground products are also what lets us make more efficient use of the animal. I took my first deer a couple years ago, and had it cut by a local guy. I got back 60 pounds of meat, of which about 30 was ground[0].
Supposing cows yield a better ratio of cut to ground meat (we've been breeding them for meat production and process them on an industrial scale), you'd still have to raise and kill a whole lot more cows to satisfy the world's current beef demand. I think good food safety practices and accepting a low, controlled risk of food-borne illness are justified by not having to kill as many animals.
[0] Not looking to start a discussion about the ethics of hunting. Not being in meat processing, this is an example I have first-hand knowledge of.
Of course there's some trim that has to go into the grinder, but we could do a much better, more respectful job of using the animal as it was instead of homogenized lumps of 80/20 or 90/10. More beef cheek in the butcher case and homemade cabeza, more lengua, more shank and round and plate, more heart and tripe and liver, etc etc etc. Buy a subprimal and grind your burgers at home from a single animal.
This is more a culinary and ethical argument than efficiency or safety. One should use the whole animal, in all its varieties, because they're delicious. Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
> Grinding otherwise edible parts of an animal killed on one's behalf because one disfavors (or is repulsed by) them seems to me much worse than the killing. Eat - and enjoy! - all of it or don't kill it.
Who are you to say that it's wrong for me to enjoy some parts of the animal ground up, versus in their original shape? Either way the entire animal is being eaten and enjoyed, so there's no reasonable moral basis on which to say it's wrong. Your position would make sense if people were throwing away the cheek, tongue, etc but we aren't.
It’s not “some trim”, it’s basically half the animal. I buy several whole cows a year and out of a carcass that yields 400 lbs of meat, I’ve never managed to get more than 60% with a very good butcher. Cabeza/lingua/tripa/offal/oxtails aren’t going to get few more than a few percent points extra. Once you’re deciding on which cuts you want, that trim is unavoidable.
It’s definitely better to freeze the left over bits and grind it yourself, but half the animal gets ground up regardless.
The modern meat industry makes more productive use of the animal than what has ever been possible before in history. It makes the famed Native American efficiency of animal use look laughable.
Fwiw venison leans heavily on ground because it’s so lean that it’s nearly impossible to cook it to be tender and cooked; even sous vide methods require lower temps. Grinding it with cheap pork fat allows it not to be basically jerky.
Oh man, I just listened to an episode of Decoder Ring about why making classical realist sculptures in the US is a challenge. It gives some interesting context about the rejection of realism in the post-war West:
Thanks so much for sharing this! I went looking for what I’d call modern “masterwork” statues a year or so ago and had come to this exact same conclusion. Glad that other people are noticing!
My partner's place of employment has a fiscal year ending June 30th and a use-it-or-lose-it vacation policy. We are hikers who live in the northeastern United States, which means we're inevitably planning a backpacking trip to use up her remaining vacation at the height of black fly[0] season.
We did a three week thru-hike of the Long Trail in 2022. We had shelters almost entirely to ourselves north of the AT/LT split at the Inn[1] because nobody hikes the LT in June/July if they can avoid it.
I think people save them up towards the end of whatever year just because you aren't sure if you're going to need them for medical leave or a sudden family trip or something. As you get close to the end you get more certain that you won't use them on something else and can plan a block trip
There's a crag in MA where the access is specifically conditioned on the crag not having a guidebook or the routes being recorded in an online database.
I don't know of any violence occurring over any of this, but I know there have been access issues and closures in the past.
Not by much. A mile is 1000 paces, or 2000 steps [0]. 10000 steps is 5 miles, 10km is 6.2 miles.
Walking on flat, paved surfaces, I do about 1850 steps per mile of distance[1]. I have a pretty long inseam, so I'm not surprised that I'd be under 1000 paces. Given that roads weren't paved with concrete or asphalt until relatively recently, I'm not surprised that the Roman mile is a little shorter than our current one[2].
A couple notes:
The customary solution for hanging something on a wall such that you can hang and un-hang it is a French cleat [0]. They're best for flat-ish stuff, but they work pretty well for shallow cabinets as well. You have a cavity in the framework that you can hide it in, along with the electronics.
I don't have a huge beef with using aluminium for the frame, though I'd have used aluminum personally. I agree with others that wood would have been cheaper, but I'd be generally worried about the electronics in the cavity not getting enough airflow to stay cool. The brick wall should sink some heat, and the aluminum should help move heat better than wood would. Honestly, I see the aluminum as a pretty expedient solution to prototyping this. You don't need to save every penny if you're only making one of something.
Wood movement is a thing. I'd edge glue the two pieces of beech, and then follow the traditional solution of mounting to the frame with one fixed point and one floating point. Using a wood frame wouldn't have gotten you out of this: in practical terms, wood is constant in length, but has noticeable changes in width. Attaching pieces with the width running across the length is called cross-grain construction, and is best avoided. A common solution is table buttons[1].
For affixing router templates, double-sided tape works well. You want the stuff with the thickness and texture of duct/duck tape, sometimes sold as carpet tape. Don't use the thin stuff from the office supply. DON'T REUSE THE TAPE. It never sticks as well the second time, and a router can do a lot of damage in a hurry if the template moves. You can also just use a single sheet of paper glued between the template and the workpiece. This is called a paper joint[2], and it's commonly used for split spindle turnings and bowl turning.
Anyhow, the design is great, and it brings a lot more to the space than either of the commercial options. Keep on building, and please keep posting!
Thanks also for listing parts/suppliers/etc.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_cleat
[1] https://www.popularwoodworking.com/editors-blog/attaching-a-...
[2] https://www.wwgoa.com/video/bowl-turning-paper-joints-000224...