Let's Build a House #4, Well Water

So, one of our learnings from this little adventure was about site selection. We have a beautiful view of the White Mountains and a nice wooded lot, but we ended up drilling 800 feet, mostly through granite, before we hit water in our well.

That translated into a much bigger expense than expected. Because the well is so deep, we needed a 30 stage pump to push the water up to the house. Because of the size of the pump and distance to the bottom of the well, the wiring was large gage and heavy. And to add insult to injury (financial), we had to buy 800 feet of 1" galvanized pipe to support the weight of the pump, wire and pipe.

Even then, we had a slow make up rate, but the good news was that the static level of the water came up to about 40 feet below grade so the well actually stored about 1100 gallons of water when full.

A few years later, a company came in to pressurize the well to pop/force open some cracks in the rock to let more water in. They added dry ice and capped the well tight. As the dry ice melted, the pressure quickly rose and did in fact blow open some more cracks and increase the flow of water into the well. A very interesting and effective way to improve well performance.

Let's Build a House #3, Framing with Timbers

The entire house has exposed beams in the walls. One large section of the house was completely framed using the hand-hewed timbers. In fact, The timbers were knotched out to fit together. Here is a picture of us standing on 4 layers of staging so we can put the peak up for the roof.

Because of the strength of the timbers, we were able to go we a very open design for the house. It is a tri-level and you can see from the first level right through open beams to the second level. The second and third levels of the house a basically hanging off of the beams.

The first level has a kitchen, dining area and family room with large picture window.

The second level which was entirely framed with the beams is a living room with fireplace, a full bath and a sleeping loft. The second level ceiling is exposed beams which span over sixteen feet and are the real structural support for the roof.

The third level has 3 full bedrooms, a 4th smaller bedroom with bunk beds and a full bath. Also, there is a full basement under the second level for utilities and storage.

Falling Waters by Frank Lloyd Wright

My family took a trip to Western Pennsylvania to visit Falling Waters. It is an amazing structure made of just 3 building materials - steel, glass, and concrete. It is literally built over the top of Bear Brook stream right where the stream goes over a waterfall and it is sitting on solid rock. The structure is 3 stories high and has adjacent servant quarters. this first picture looking at the main two floors from the upstream side.

This house has very little storage space and small bedrooms. The original owners wanted a place to get away to the solitude and beauty of the woods with total emersion in the environment. Almost the entire first floor is an open area with glass on 3 sides. There are balconies hanging out into space everywhere. Steps from the main living area lead directly down to the stream for bathing.

Behind this rather pleasant family portrait is a view of the house where it sits over the waterfall. If you're into architecture or construction methods...this is must see.

Therimage Labels - ink without the label

In it's day, this was the most popular way to label a plastic bottle and these labels are still very much around.

So picture this... a layer of wax is coated onto paper. Then the label graphics are printed onto the wax, upside down and backwards. Finally, a layer of clear heat senstive adhesive is printed on top of everything and the "labels" are made into rolls.

To apply the "label" to the bottles, the paper side of the roll passes over a heated platen which softens the wax and activates the adhesive. When the plastic bottle is rolled over the heated label, the adhesive sticks and the wax actually splits. You are left with the label image on the bottle (rightside up and forwards) with a layer of wax over the graphics.

You can still find many household products with this type of label. Look for a label with no paper or plastic label material and look for the faint edge of the wax around the outside of the graphics. Check out plastic bottles in your home - cosmetics, personal hygene, household cleaners, etc.

Just a little slice of technology you can find in your own home.

Do it yourself Airport Security Props

We built two airport security archs and faux conveyor belts for our travel themed AfterProm. It was great. After "signing in" for the night, the young adults had to go through Airport Security to enter the AfterProm area.

We made Securiy archways out of firring strips (my favority cheap lumber for props) and gave them a boxy top. Everything was covered (we have a free supplier of tyvek, but any covering will work) and painted. Inside the boxy top we installed a clanger bell with an out of sight switch to ring the bell. We powered the bell from a nearby outlet.

Our "airport security" led the students through a rope maze just like at the airport and then through the security archway. My wife sat near the entrance to the archway and randomly rang the bell.

Well, these kids acted like it was the real thing - "it must be my cel phone setting it off", "maybe it rings for anyone tall" and my favorite, "do have have too much glitter in my hair". Of course, my wife said yes to all of the inquiries.

Later that night, all of the rope mazes were down, two sets of double doors were wide open and the archway was just sitting in the middle of the lobby. A boy came out to the lobby to use the restroom, looked at the archway and went out of his way to walk through it again going both to and from the restroom. Obviously, he understood....don't mess with the high tech security equipment.

Making computer cable caps - faster, cheaper...

Not sure if I'm calling it the right thing...I'm referring to the little screw caps that hold the video cable onto the back of your laptop or desktop computer.

For many years, those were produced overseas, by machining the screw caps one at a time - very labor intensive. And, I have personally witnessed a propriety, automated, stamping machine that can make about 5 of those screw caps per second right from raw material to in the shipping box in one pass.

The machine starts with aluminum cylinders about the size of a pencil eraser and through about a dozen stamping steps, give or take, it extruds the piece and adds the threads. Good old yankee ingenuity at it's best.

Riding on yucky Soot...

Yes! Black, sticky soot is manufactured on a large scale. It is the primary filler in tires and the main reason why tires are black. Manufactured soot is called carbon black....a rose by any other name...

Believe it or not, there is a science to making soot. Oil or gas must be burned at exactly the right temperature and with just the right amount of oxygen to starve the flame so that soot is produced instead of burning cleanly.

And, this soot can actually be made with different physical properities. Those properties are tested with a bunch of highly sophisticated instruments (tongue in cheek) that measure how much the rubber will stretch before it breaks, how much the rubber will squish under pressure, and my favorite, how high a ball of the rubber will bounce.

Some of these instruments look like they are right out of a toy store but, they do provide measurable results and those measurements form the basis for some of the specifications for the soot (carbon black). Some soot is manufactured specifically to be compounded into rubber for tires to make them grab the road, wear evenly, and last for 40,000 miles or more.

So, in a sense, you are riding of a cushion of specialized soot every time you drive your car.

What's that black rubber in Artificial Turf Fields

It's ground up tires.

The tires go through steps to remove metal, grind and clean the rubber. It is transported in 4 foot square sacks on pallets and racked into the artificial turf.

This black rubber can get a little hot in the sun, but it is a safer surface than sand filled fields in general and don't get much harder over time.

If you have more insight onto Artificial Turf fields, lay it on me.

Semi-conductors are made from Chemicals too!

On average there are 300 - 400 steps to make a silicon wafer full of semi-conductor chips. Generally, one third of the steps are chemical steps done using "wet benches". Wet Becnches clean, remove particles, remove photomask, condition the surface and more.

15-20 years ago, 20 2-3" silicon wafers may have been put in a rack and lowered into a tank by hand or using a small robotic arm. There was a timer for how long to leave it in the chemical. These "manual" benches had one or more tanks per bench. There are still some in use today.

Modern wet benches are completely automated. They can receive a rack of 12" wafers automatically from the previous equipment, and automatically move the rack through 6-8 tanks. Each rack of wafers may need different times in the tanks. These "automated" benches know when they can hold back one rack to process another one so they can juggle 3-4 racks with different recipes at the same time.

Think about this. If there are 500-600 state-of-the-art PC chips on each wafer and 30 wafers in a rack, how much do you think that rack of wafers is worth when it's done.

Need Lightweight, Fake Rocks

In preparation for a stage production of Children of Eden, the parent volunteers were asked get some rocks for the stage. Six foot high rocks, definitely not a situation where the real McCoy would work. Some rather creative and artist volunteers had a great solution.

They used the cheapest foam board available and built the rocks by gluing layers of foam together. The pieces glued on got smaller towards the outside of the rock to save on materials. Then the rock was shaped with a hand saw and a coarse grit sander.

Finally, the artist then painted the foam with several shades of grays and browns. They came out awesome, thanks to the artist, and they were lightweight and cheap to make.

And I should mention, the youth group put on a great show.

Thermochromic Ink

Thermochromic ink changes color with temperature, usually from black (room temp) to clear (when heated) and back to black again when it cools down.

My favorite coffe mug showed the Star Trek transporters with Captain Kirk, Spock and Mr. Scott. When I poured in hot coffee, the three adventurers disappeared, or they were transported, one of the two.

Unfortunately, the thermochromic property tends to wear off in time and the ink becomes less responsive to the heat. So, as a product, it's not long-lasting. As a marketing gimick, it's pretty cool.

Have you had your Fumed Silica today?

Fumed Silica is chemically the same thing as sand, SiO2, but it is produced by burning hydrogen with silicon tetrachloride to form Hydrochloric acid and fumed silica. The acid is removed and the final product is white, fluffy and amazing. It looks like microscopic clumps of grapes.

It is used primarily to control the thickness of liquids, their viscosity. Now here is where it gets interesting. Fumed silica is what makes polyurethane "thixotrophic". Meaning, it is low viscosity (thin) under shear and then gets thick without the shear. That's how they make fiberglass boats - by spraying polyurethane (high shear spray gun) onto the outside of the fiberglass hull where it instantly gets thick and stays put.

It makes glycol rheopectic - thick under stress and thin without stress. So, the glycol with fumed silica in it will pour out of a glass, but if you try to stir it, it feels like it turned into a solid.

Which brings us to food. It is used in toothpaste and many foods so they have the "right" thickness. It is used in flour to keep it from getting too clumpy. So, you are ingesting it, probably every day. Have you had your fumed silica today?

Making the "Wheel of Fortune" Game

My wife and I support the annual "After Prom" to keep our daughters and their friends off the roads after the prom. It takes a lot of activites and prizes to keep 400 high school kids entertained from 11pm to 5am. So, among other things we built a "Wheel of Forture".

The design was quite simple, but effective. The wheel stands vertically like an arcade pin wheel and is made from a bicycle wheel with a plywood donut around it. The donut was cut out of a half sheet of 3/8" plywood. Then, the bike tire was deflated and re-inflated inside the donut.

The rest is just mounting the wheel on a frame with 2x4 posts front and back on a base that goes out 2 feet to each side and 2 feet back for stability. The challenging part is experimenting with different materials to find a clicker that will stop the wheel in 1-2 turns. We ended up using the lids from 2 Swiss Mocca cans (about 1.5 x 3 inches) with the edges trimmed off.

Our wheel has been used for a different game every year since it was first built. Just repaint the face and it's a roulette wheel or a pin wheel for prizes....anything your want.

Color Matching by the Color Blind

Color matching is an important aspect of the printing industry and something I got pretty good at after 8 years in the industry. Generally, when a color is not right it needs one of five colors to make it right - red, blue, yellow, black, or white/clear. 15 years later, I still describe colors as having more of one primary color and less of another (I have never been good at naming all the crayon colors).

Sometimes when we were stumped, we would ask our color-blind associate to help us. He could only see color as gray, but he could tell if one gray was darker (denser) than another and that would help us make the adjustments that to color that the rest of us couldn't see.

This was a surprise to me, that a color blind person could help match colors. When I asked around about it, I was told that color blind people were used to look at aerial photos during World War II. They did not see the camoflage. They could pick out hidden artillery or tanks that others wouldn't see.

Think about that the next time you are picking out numbers from the colored dots at the eye doctors office.

How to make an Ozonator

Two engineering students and I received EPA funding to build a portable nitrous oxide meter to measure auto emissions at busy intersections, etc. My job on the team was to build an ozonator.

It was fabricated from an outer 3 inch plexiglas tube and an inner 2 inch plexiglas tube both about 10 inches long. The outside of the inner tube and the inside of the outer tube were lined with metal conducting foil. The inner tube was grounded and the outer tube attached to an electrical current.

When the current jumped from the outer to the inner tube it looked like hundreds of little bolts of lightening and the electrical arcs generated the ozone. Add a small fan to one end of the tubes and a steady flow of ozone was created.

Let's Build a House #2, Hand-Hewed Timbers

This "chalet" is different because it was framed using 200 year old, oak, hand-hewed timbers. We found an old barn and the property owner wanted the barn off her property. For two months, we disassembled the barn to save any materials that could be reused.

80 timbers were salvaged, the longest were just over 40 feet. Our biggest disappointment was losing the siding on the barn. It was beautifully aged and colored, but only about 1/8 inch thick after 200 years in the elements. We could not find a way to get the siding off without damaging it. If anyone has had success getting very old, thin siding off, I'd love to know how it is done.

The house was framed with the timbers and 2x4 construction was used to fill in. The beams are exposed on the inside of the chalet and all of the original mortice and tenon construction and hand-hewed characteristics show through. The asthetics from blending 18th century construction and a modern layout is quite remarkable.

Let's Build a House #1, Deciding to do it...

Alan, his sister Julie and I built a house - hands on. We aren't carpenters, electicians, or plumbers. We just couldn't afford to buy a ski chalet in NH, so naturally, we had to build one. Fresh out of college and a little naive, we figured we'd be skiing from our new place in 6 months.

It actually took 4 years of weekends, a small loan, and a lot of friends who were willing to exchange time for...ahhh...our good company and a promise they could use the house too. Beer may have been involved.

We finished a 2200 sq ft house, it is still standing quite nicely thank you, and it was built almost entirely with our own hands and our friends. The whole story is a hoot. What a terrific learning experience and sense of accomplishment. I can and will share some great stories about what to do and what not to do.