Indispensable, but ALWAYS IN THE WAY Featured

I would love to have a fork lift. Yep, they are not free.

---------------------- My manual platform stacker cost me $10, plus a rebuild of the hydraulic cylinder. After I overloaded and broke it I found that a lever chain hoist is a good substitute, with other uses. It's a locally built version of the Wesco lift. Mine effectively occupies no space because I store things on the platform.

At the auction the one that still worked sold for $125.

Here's an example, chosen for its short URL.

There are also fork versions for pallets.

It's heavy, but with the platform fully raised for balance I could hook the handle onto the tailgate and tip and slide it into the 7' bed of my Ranger to bring it home.

-jsw

I would love to have a fork lift. Yep, they are not free.

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I happened to stop at a couple of second-hand machinery dealers today. Compact manual lifts ran $2500 ~$3500 for electric pallet forklifts to ~$600 (half new price) for a hand truck with a hydraulic lift platform.

I do have slip on pallet forks for my tractor loader. The bucket is rated for 750lbs, easily manages 1000s, and can tilt back 1500-2000 after the main hydraulics are fully loaded. I unloaded my 1440 lathe and my 48" Tennsmith brake with it using that last method. Full load the main hydraulic, and then tilt back the bucket tilt hydraulic. The tractor is to big to maneuver in the shop. Usually I can lift off a piece of equipment and tote it around the shop on the pallet jack. It also doesn't really reach high enough for putting stuff up high in the shop (16ft eve height).

I do have slip on pallet forks for my tractor loader. The bucket is rated for 750lbs, easily manages 1000s, and can tilt back 1500-2000 after the main hydraulics are fully loaded. I unloaded my 1440 lathe and my 48" Tennsmith brake with it using that last method. Full load the main hydraulic, and then tilt back the bucket tilt hydraulic. The tractor is to big to maneuver in the shop. Usually I can lift off a piece of equipment and tote it around the shop on the pallet jack. It also doesn't really reach high enough for putting stuff up high in the shop (16ft eve height).

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When the clerk asked how big and how high I guessed you wanted to lift a mold on or off a milling machine table instead of a higher pallet rack. I was looking for more 3" channel iron to extend my sawmill track and also inquired for you about the current street value of used manual and electric lifts that can maneuver in tight spaces. I didn't mention that you were in Arizona instead of local.

I don't do many molds that big and heavy, although the bridge mill is intended to be able to do some larger stuff if I can make it rigid and accurate "enough."

I don't do many molds that big and heavy, although the bridge mill is intended to be able to do some larger stuff if I can make it rigid and accurate "enough."

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I had to give him a credible answer. The stuff I built for a living was so new and unusual and generally confidential that I learned to translate it into more familiar terms to vendors.

I don't do many molds that big and heavy, although the bridge mill is intended to be able to do some larger stuff if I can make it rigid and accurate "enough."

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I had to give him a credible answer. The stuff I built for a living was so new and unusual and generally confidential that I learned to translate it into more familiar terms to vendors.

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Examples:

"SpeakEasy, the military software radio was formulated by Wayne Bonser, then of Rome Air Development Center (RADC), now Rome Labs; by Alan Margulies of MITRE Rome, NY; and then Lt Beth Kaspar, the original DARPA SpeakEasy project manager and by others at Rome including Don Upmal."

MITRE Rome couldn't build it, so the project landed on my bench as manager of the Digital Communications Lab at MITRE Bedford, MA. Though I don't have an EE degree I had already demonstrated my extensive experience with A/D converters and computer hardware by designing, building and programming a 16 bit data acquisition board for a Macintosh computer for them.

We were buying and incorporating state-of-the-art components such as the ultra-fast A/D converters for digital sampling oscilloscopes and I couldn't described the actual military application to vendors who wouldn't understand if I was allowed to. Some of the exotic devices we bought had hand-written single digit serial numbers.

"The project was the first known to use FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) for digital processing of radio data." The processing to recover low power signals from noise is very complex:

early commercial application was the coding that allows scratched music CDs to play cleanly.

FPGAs are amazing. You draw a CAD schematic, simulate and compile it, store it in a PROM, and the FPGA reads it in at power-up and transforms itself into that circuit. Your thoughts become reality.

I was also a lab tech for the inspiration for 3D printing, which does that mechanically.

"In 1982, Robert Howard [who invented cable tv] had the idea to build a revolutionary small color printer system before he left Centronics Corporation. Two years later he formed a new company, Howtek, Inc., to carry out this mission. The Pixelmaster printer used "Hot melt" Thermoplastic ink jetted by piezo crystals that could spit out millions of small droplets of ink of each of the primary colors- red, green and blue - as well as black, on to a piece of paper."

Actually it printed the subtractive primaries cyan, magenta and yellow. Cyan is commonly called Teal. CMYK refers to the set, with K for blacK to print text with single instead of 3 color dots.

The ink piled up high on the jet test stand. It was too brittle to make things but the idea was obvious. The machine could print Braille and color-separated offset printing plates, though.

That article describes some of its many problems which greatly increased complexity. The running joke was about adding a Diesel generator.

"Some founders and many former employees of Howtek left and joined 3D printing companies." But I went to MITRE and then Segway. R&D is like building bridges, when the job is completed you look for another.

Another less tactful tech created this bumper sticker, "Technicians do what engineers can only dream of".