More Wacky Things From the Mind of Me

Yes, yes, I know. None of you are interested in hearing about my dreams. I’m going to tell all about them anyway.

It was some form of Power Rangers/chemistry class/space opera/romance. The basic story was that the Power Rangers from the real PR world and their actors met up. Only not really, because the real ones didn’t actually exist but thought they did and they were having existential difficulties about meeting their actors.

Meanwhile, from Space, a giant hourglass-shaped Space Ship was approaching, carrying something that looks like Evil Aylee from Sluggy Freelance. It was here to take over the world, blow it up, or eat it. I’m not quite sure which. The PR, still having difficulties with the fact that they don’t actually exist and the actors all decided that they had to Do Something About It, so they sent Red Ranger up to taunt the alien while Yellow slipped in and was supposed to be sabotaging the ship. I don’t know why, blue was always the sciencey one, but anyway.

Red went back once Yellow was safely hidden, or so he thought. It’s about this time that I started being Yellow, and also where the plot vanished. Alien started doing a chemistry review with me. No, I have no clue. But it did, and so lured me out of hiding, where I think the original plan was to destroy me only I started asking about the ship’s propulsion . . .

The ship flew by making electrons turn radioactive, which apparently takes a lot of time if you run it forward but he had some kind of reversing-time field which made the property decay time into the formation time and vice-versa, meaning the electrons were radioactive enough to power the ship. (Yes, I know electrons aren’t radioactive. It’s a dream, just roll with it.) Then he demonstrated, which resulted in me looking down at a planet that wasn’t Earth and getting a very cool lesson on its history and economics.

(The history is that last generation, it had a really really great educational system, only it hasn’t been updated since so the planet now has sucky education. Also, it was half desert and half ocean, so a lot of planetary economics revolved around where the fresh water was. The entire planet serves as a major spaceport along half a dozen trade routes, but most of the planet lives somewhere between the Stone and Bronze Ages, despite the fact that they practically invented the FTL electron drive. It was very odd.)

Back at the ranch, PR are kind of wondering what happened to me and slowly coming to terms with the fact that they don’t exist. I’ve been gone several hours, and the alien ship is out of orbit, but they are wondering if I died to make that happen or what . . . and just about they point that they are getting over their Issues and kind of merging actors and TV show, the ship pops back into orbit, me on it. Alien has promised not to harm the planet because, get this, he’s in love with me.

The rest of the dream was spent overthrowing outdated imperialist dogma on the spaceport planet, like the idea the only one female in a house can be sexually active at a time because they’d overpopulate. In all honesty, this is true, except that there’s a better way to do this then giving horrible drugs that make them puke their guts up to keep them from having babies. Like, iunno, birth control pills, maybe?

I fell in love. Just about the time I was going to suggest that the planet use some of its surplus population to colonize some of the nearer asteroids, which they mine for minerals but then didn’t use the empty shells to make more colony ships out of (which, because of the fact that FTL-E drive is inertialess, makes no sense at all) the alarm went off. I was so incredibly disoriented.

Now of course, I have the urge to figure out how the FTL-E drive works, even though there is no possible way it can work outside of the Dreaming.

Update on my Recent Activities later today. I guarantee they are Cool.

And Now for Cool Things

Today, I learned how to weld.

I’ll back up. As most of you know, I work for Gigantic Car Corporation, which means that I see 6 AM from the front every single weekday, so that I can drive 33 miles and go sell my soul to corporate America. I work in a corrosion lab, which means that most of the time I do boring things like watch brakes rust (riveting) and sandblast rust off of things to see where the rust was.

However, Mr. Mike, the guy who has sort of taken me under his wing, tries to give each student a welding project. Mine is to make permanent metal stairs out of 1.5” angle irons, which will be able to carry several hundred more pounds than your average step-stool, important for when you and your buddy and half a car are all resting their weight on the stairs.

So I built it in the computer first, using the horrible AutoCAD. Actually, due to being yelled at, Mr. Mike did the half that didn’t involve getting down on hands and knees and taking measurements. Anyway, after that was done, we hopped off to Bldg 104 (I work in Bldg 70) and stole 24 feet of angle iron, in two 12-ft lengths.

Yesterday was spent chopping them up to the right lengths and angles. This is not as easy as it sounds, because these are eighth-inch thick pieces of steel we are talking about. It’s accomplished on a Large Spinning Saw, and it makes lots of glowy sparkies. They’re really tiny pieces of oxidized metal, and they’re really not dangerous: they bounce off of metal, fabric, plastic, even hair. But they look cool. I was afraid at first, and then got the hang of it.

Once we had them to the right length, we used a bandsaw. The saw in a bandsaw is about sixteen feet long and a half-inch deep and less than a sixteenth of an inch thick, and it’s a continuous loop, hence the “band.” The motor in a bandsaw moves the band really fast, and the teeth on the cutting edge cut through whatever it is. They cost far too much money, but you can do cool things with them. We cut 45-degree angles in pieces of steel, which cause no sparkies because the blade of the bandsaw doesn’t get enough friction to ever get so hot, and cools while it runs the rest of the sixteen feet around the loop.

Then I was indoctrinated into the ways of the high-speed grinder, which is what you do: grind the sharp edges off the steel so that you don’t get nasty cuts, and also so that all the sides are square or even with each other. This does cause sparkies, lots of them. When they cool, they look like gray sand on the floor only it’s gray sand made of metal filings.

Next was road trip. We went out and “liberated” 24+ C-clamps of varying sizes from other buildings. Mostly, we’re using tiny little 2-inches, with 4-inch ones holding the heavier joints together.

Today, we started by clamping together the angle iron the way we want it, and I learned to weld on a few pieces of scrap metal. I wasn’t very good; I kept either punching through the metal entirely (and thereby welding the practice piece to the table) or not holding the torch close enough and ending up with singed metal. Singed metal smells nasty. Once I got the hang of holing the torch head an even half-inch away from the weld joint, I got some welds that were (according to Mr. Mike) not bad.

A digression on welding: there are lots of different types of welding machines, from the heavy-duty industrial mechanized ones to the small handheld units you sometimes see on TV. We were using one about the same height as Mr. Mike and the same weight as a heavy dresser. To get it to move, you roll it on its own little trolley thing. The torch handle part is attached to the main body via a hose, which feeds it gas.

To my surprise, the gas was not what heats the metal up. The gas is, in fact helium. Helium is stable at welding temperatures and does not react. This is important. The gas is sprayed over the being-welded part in a steady stream because it does not react. The thing that heats the metal would otherwise set the air on fire and you’d have all sorts of ozone everywhere afterward because: the thing that heats the metal is a plasma arc.

That’s right. It’s a lightning gun.

Granted, it’s not a terribly powerful lightning gun over long distances. You could not, for example, zap someone across the room with a welding torch. But for metal-metal, you put current through the wire that you’re going to melt into wire and have it close enough to the piece of metal that the grounding wire is attached to (actually, this was the metal part resting on the metal table) and the voltage will jump hard enough to vaporize the weld metal and the welding-to metal and then cool quickly into a hopefully smooth layer. This is called MIG welding, short for Metal Inert Gas. Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welding uses a tungsten tip to cause the arc and you have to manually feed the weld metal into the arc. For a beginner, though, MIG welding is pretty good.

Other things: cover up. Welding releases lots of UV radiation, which means that unless you’re covered you’ll be sunburnt in the morning. Wear heavy clothing, welding does not give of sparkies, it gives of sparks (the difference is that a spark is a heavy piece of molten stuff, which will set flammable things on fire and melt through other things, and cook your flesh, whereas a sparky will bounce off of your hair) and you’ll need the protection. Yes, long sleeves and pants and closed-toed shoes are a requirement. Wear the bloody helmet. Not only does it protect your eyes from the sparks, it protects your eyes from the bright. And it is bright, like looking-into-the-sun-bright, as I found out when killing a bit of my retina today. Finally, wear earplugs when at all possible. It’s not a long sustained noise, it’s a series of very loud pops, which do the most damage to your ears. Yes, mine were ringing at the end.

Back to happenings: after having Mr. Mike do the first few “tacks,” welds used to hold a piece together so you can remove the clamps before doing the whole thing, I started doing it. It was massive fun, although I had a tendency to pull back and he had to keep telling me to get closer. After a bit, I think I got over that too and my welds, as I say, got better. It helps if I forget that I’m holding what is a potentially deadly weapon.

That was about four weld per corner on the corners of three step frames, or nearly fifty welds. By the end, I was all hot and sweaty, because you are wearing massive layers of protective clothing. While the parts cooled, I got out of the helmet, gloves, etc and then ground down the extra material, which I tend to layer because my welds are slower and consequently thicker. This made lots of sparkies and also made it shiiiiiiney.

Then we clamped the entire thing together, roughly. It’s not welded or even tacked together yet, and everything still needs to be squared, but still. I’m all happy and proud no. I have learned in a day what it took my father six weeks and an expensive class to learn. Woo! \o/

Afterward: you will get greasy. To remove the grease, pump the soap dispenser five or six times and scrub. Do not add water. Just scrub until your hands are covered by greasy slimy goop. Then turn on the water and rinse it off and wash your hands as normal. Repeat as necessary. Mr. Mike told me this, and it is indeed much faster than just scrubbing your hands again and again.

And, like everything else, it is a skill. It takes time to get good at it. I’m not very, but my work is passable and it holds things together, so I’m not complaining. On the other hand, the people who make massively cool metal sculptures of balance and beauty? They are masters.

That was fun :)