I've been like one of those yellow smiley faces slamming its head against the wall learning how to do lost foam aluminum casting. And it is looking like I just might have it down without any hydrogen porosity in the castings. The metal even sounds different, if you drop it it rings unlike a dull thud of before. We're talking a huge amount of experiments to get everything to work. I got a wood stove temperature meter to make sure I'm not cooking it too hot and feel like the back seat engineer of an old fighter jet staring into an 8" dia aluminum tube to read the numbers on bright sunny days.
Made a jig for machining the eventual castings and put graduations around it. As described here at least a decade ago by using the locking pin and holes on the back gear and putting the tool bit sideways and shaping the lines by hand driving the carriage.
Sunday I finally hung a large mirror in the master bathroom. Was putting that off for a long time cause the whole house feeds off that one wall. Should have designed the house just 2 feet bigger, but it's a bit late now. Anyhow the back of the main electrical panel is right where a mounting point should go, so I devised a plan to mount something metal across the back of the mirror and hang it by special cabinet screws put into the wall. The only thing I could find was EMT, so I flattened the ends and bent them so they would set flat like the edge of the diameter of the tube and drilled for two screws per side. Then I milled a 1/4 or a bit less of the dia. below the center line so the heads of the screws would capture the mirror. Well, must have gotten distracted or something cause right when I was mounting it I realized that I machined it exactly opposite, stupid! It is amazing how fast things go when you have to do them multiple times compared to the first time.
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Mounts kinda offset like above, sides are missing. Took a bit of work to get the screws level, but I foresaw that one coming. That and making sure they where secure in the slots.
There is more, but time to get at it again.
Oh, and between the slamming I go to the river and play sea otter and contemplate the next move.
SW