travel

What Are You Thinking?

This old asymmetric face almost never gets asked that question. It seems nobody really is cares what I think. I have written hundreds of little stories here and have only received a handful of comments. Still, I like to write. I write for me. Most of the time I write about something because someone else has mentioned something. Typically they cannot see an alternative point of view. So if they actually cared about listening they could find something here.

The last time I remember being asked about what am I thinking was a few years ago. I think it may have been about personal relationships. I was too shocked to answer. I did appreciate the question because relationships are precious. Today though, I was asked in a questionnaire about my goals in school. That is really the same thing as asking what I am thinking. So let me tell you.

Some times when a student asks a specific question I may say “The truth is not allowed” for frequently the truth is not a part of the narrative. Some of the time these questions may be political or politically related, and I will not take a political stand in school. I try not to disagree with the curriculum, but I have strong feelings about what is taught. I will summerize and expand on what I wrote in the form today.

Manufacturing is an art. It may be the most important art of them all. Without manufacturing we wouldn’t have the other arts as we know them. Sure we could sing, but we couldn’t record the music. We could bang on a log, but we certainly couldn’t amplify the sound. We could paint, but we couldn’t hang it in the Louvre. All the good things in life wouldn’t be here. I do enjoy the arts.

So why are we in the 17th century? Sure the art of spindle turning was invented in the 17th century. One of the handcrafted chairs in the above image has turned spindles. Most of the other chairs have hand drawn spindles. The bench in the foreground is what is used to shape the spindles and other parts with the draw knife shown. The wood is split by hand with wedges on the log that is in front of the chairs. These individually hand crafted wood chairs are made in the wood shop. The priority here is given to the feel of the cutting tool.

Whoever designed the wood shop gave it an epoxy floor. It is easy to clean. My shop is the metal shop, whoever designed my shop gave it a concrete floor. People in my shop spill oil. People in the wood shop spill wood chips. If oil were to spill on a epoxy floor it would be easy to clean. If wood chips were to spill on a wood floor it would be easy to clean. But no! They gave me people that spill oil on a concrete floor. That is impossible to clean. Life is unfair.

We should be teaching people the art of digital fabrication. That is a saleable skill. How many people want to hire someone who knows how to make a 17th century chair. Yet the decision making priorities have been given to the person making 17th century chairs. Like the 17th century we have empowered a completely feudal mindset.

This is not how to build the future in the 21st century. The key is digital fabrication. Learning the language of the machines. Machines will speak to you if you know how to listen. Listening and communication, that is how to learn. We need to know how machines think and work. How to manipulate software to create things. We need to teach machines how to see with vision systems. How to program robots to do things we cannot. We need to remember everything is alive. We need to know how to make the recipes that make things better.

When people are stressed they tend to stick with the things they know. If they have old ideas, that is what they stick with. They believe in what has worked for them in the past. This is true especially if they think they are the smartest people in the room. Myself, I have had to reinvent myself a number of times. I know that I am not the smartest person in the room. Because of that I listen, and identify who knows what they are talking about. Then I help them. It also works the other way around. The smart students listen to everyone in the room. They then evaluate the relative intelligence of the people, and listen to the smart ones. Those that stand in feudalistic judgment are unhappy.

My objective is simple. Have a student define a thing digitally, then produce the thing digitally. Then define digitally how that thing relates to other things. Finally, collaborate with others how to make better things.

Things may not be as bad as I say. We have some new diamond lathes. They are incredibly accurate. We also received some machines that can measure form and finish down to the nanometer. They are machines for the 21st century. They are properly modern.

Here is a view of one of the new machines working. The little diamond on the tool is making a perfect optic. You can see it just to the right of the small disk that will become an optic. Lots of opportunity to learn. The students running these things are doing a wonderful job. My job is to drag those stuck in the 17th century into the 21st century. Not an easy job. Sometimes I think that it would be easier to get cats in a row. That is the challenge.

The Golden Bonnet

Presidential debate night tonight and I have the TV on. Typically I write about what I see, this time I will tell a story. Back when I was 16 years old, through luck, persistence, gifting, work and prayer I became the proud owner of my first real car(The Studabaker and Dune Buggy don’t count). A gold 1963 Jaguar XKE convertible. At the time it was nine years old and a bit rough. It needed brake work and a few other things. As a teenage boy I had chosen the car because it was the fastest car for the money. Like now, American muscle cars were a lot more money. I thought I was being practical and efficient. That was my logic.

I may have been a little unhappy with my home life. I just wanted to hit the road. Drive and drive. I drove all over the place. I took the car on many road rallies. I went looking for the Jersey Devil in the sand. Set records going to Syracuse. Spent more time with the Jag at Lime Rock than at home. Went on parades through Newport RI. Plus it was my favorite ride to the family farm.

I may have mentioned in some other writings that the car started with four bias ply tires that were four completely different brands. When I drifted through the corners each tire would have its own pitch. On a winding road drifting through different phases of brake induced understeer and throttle powered oversteer different tunes would emerge from the tires. Winding roads without much traffic could be extremely entertaining. With the skinny bias ply tires the cornering speeds were not that high. I spent my summer working at a bicycle shop so I could afford some new Michelin XAS tires. The car cornered much faster, though not as quite entertaining musicly with a single pitch from the squealing tires.

Speaking auditory entertainment, I worked a bit more and bought an Ansa exhaust system. I needed to do this because one of the problems the car had was the brake fluid would boil during spirited driving. Surprisingly when the fluid boils there would be no brakes. So I would turn of the ignition key off to slow the car down with engine braking. When the ignition was off the exhaust system and beyond would be filled with unburned hydrocarbons. When the automobile was sufficiently slowed I would turn the ignition key back on. Turning the ignition back on would introduce a spark that would ignite the hydrocarbons in the exhaust system with a loud bang. The explosions actually split the mufflers. The split mufflers not only let the noise out, they let the heat out setting the carpet on fire. That was a surprise. So I put out the fire and went shopping for a new muffler. I went for a good one. The exhaust was, and still is music to my ears.

I used to like to do all night road rallies. Illumination was important. Because the headlights are under glass there was not much side Illumination so I added three axillary Marchell 8″ lights to a light bar protruding from the grill. There was a spot light in the middle with a fog light on the right and a driving light on the left. I had switches under the dash so I could turn the lights on individually, the car wasn’t capable of providing electrons for all. However I liked the lamps so much I also replaced the headlights with Marchal Amplilux halogen headlights.

My old E-Type was almost a complete and proper sports car. The shocks were a bit soft and I wiped out the drain sump on the fuel tank over an intersection hump. I lost all the fuel and had to repair the tank. At that point I was broke. My dear mother then bought me new Koni shock absorbers.

Another modification I made was to install racing harnesses that came from J.C. Whitney, I believed in safety. One time when I was at Lime Rock Paul Newman’s mechanic borrowed my racing harness for Paul to use in his new racing car. I had to ask for it’s return. I still not really trust those actor types. Yet I will still tell the story.

During my time with the car I put five high school students in the car to drive them home in a blizzard. I had a collection of hats in the car, so if I gave anyone a ride they could have a hat of their choice. I almost always had the top down. Hauled wood for the Boy Scouts campfire, and drove myself to work and school. I even had murder of crows poop on me. Poop landed on the steering wheel windshield and even the shifter. I sacrificed one of the scarfs I had for cleaning.

The most distinctive feature of the car was its long hood. On hills and intersections it was sometimes hard to see where you were going as you were sitting so far back. Yet historically a long hood was a symbol of power. Think of the prestigious cars of the 1930’s, Dusenburgs and Packards come to my mind. Some people would say the long hood is simply phallic. However this is an English car with French illumination and an Italian sound track and a Dutch vibe. So I should say that it is not a long hood, properly it is a bonnet.

So this is a story about memories, I have so many memories about my time behind the long golden bonnet. I sold the E-Type after 50 years, and bought the Mark V. They both have long gold hoods. On the Mark V it is actually called a hood because the car is American. Still the effect is the same. The E-Type may be gone, but it’s essence isn’t. Even the auditory experience is replicated by the Miata from Asia. Even though the NA Miata has two fewer cylinders the revs are proportionally higher at the same road speeds giving an equivalent tone to my ear. Even the stupendous halogen lighting is met with equivalence by the LED illumination in the Cadillac ELR.

So many new roads to explore with emotion and feelings of the past.