the coolest machines you´ve played with

[wherethewild]

As Rigger brought the gift of technology to his post...I thought now might be a good idea to show off your cool toys. So it can be anything vaguely technological, can go PING, or be the most expensive machine in the hospital, but it´s got make other tech geeks wet their pants in excitement AND you have to have played with it personally somewhere somehow.

So here´s mine: a synchrotron.

Ok, so I´ve never played with the WHOLE synchrotron, just beamlines coming off it. To prove it here´s some pics of me showing others around and working on a couple of different beamlines in Hamburg.

[Mr. Tweedy]

...I have a Mighty Mouse^®...
 

[Leon Kensington]

So, how much does one of those cost?  I'm thinking I could really have some fun with one. 

[wherethewild]

So, how much does one of those cost?  I'm thinking I could really have some fun with one. 

If you´re asking about the synchrotron... I think the new Australian one is meant to cost about $200 million to build. But if you just want beamtime on an established one, that´s usually $5-20,000 per 8 hour shift (depending on the synchrotron).

If you´re asking about Mighty Mouse, I have no idea.

[Rigger]

Well, I think this would fall under the more pseudopod line of thought & experiences, but I have had the "wonderful" work experience of dealing with one of these beasts.



Of course the funeral home that I worked at had a model that was a good 20 years older than the one pictured (and brick red), but you get the general concept.

The front door acts as a decent insulator and weighs roughly 500 lbs. The heat generated when the door is open a crack (part of the process... you have to um... "check") when it is at a full burn of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit was pretty incredible. We also had a smaller pet model, but the door and temperatures generated by that machine were considerably less.

Perhaps my most interesting summer job. I have some entertaining stories if there is interest, but I don't want to squick the boards.

[Rigger]

Okay, I'll admit. The crematorium was only kinda cool.

 Drag racing the hearse with my co-workers was where the real fun was. Those babies can MOVE. 

[Alasdair5000]

Okay, I'll admit. The crematorium was only kinda cool.

 Drag racing the hearse with my co-workers was where the real fun was. Those babies can MOVE. 

You are now officially my hero:)

[wherethewild]

Those babies can MOVE. 

Yeah, but how do they corner?

[Russell Nash]

Those babies can MOVE. 

Yeah, but how do they corner?

You can't really corner, because the body rolls in the casket.

[Rigger]

Okay, I'll admit. The crematorium was only kinda cool.

 Drag racing the hearse with my co-workers was where the real fun was. Those babies can MOVE. 

You are now officially my hero:)

Woohoo!

Those babies can MOVE. 

Yeah, but how do they corner?

You can't really corner, because the body rolls in the casket.

As Russell points out... it all depends on the cargo load!

But honestly? Like an over-sized Cadillac; coincidently, that is what it was. It was not too terrible to parallel park, but if you have a coffin? No rear visibility.

[wakela]

But honestly? Like an over-sized Cadillac; coincidently, that is what it was. It was not too terrible to parallel park, but if you have a coffin? No rear visibility.

No rear visibility of the road.  Depending on what's happening in the coffin, you could have some very interesting rear visibility. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have our point man.

[Rigger]

Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have our point man.

Should I be honored or ashamed? Either way I am pretty sure I don't understand yet.

[Planish]

On the low-tech side, a gizmo that looks vaguely like an upside down skateboard made out of a length of 2x6 wood. It had a slot down the middle and two bars of metal that were articulated in some way that I forget the exact details of now.
You would chop a hole in the ice and push it under the ice, where it floats to the top. There is a lanyard passing through an eyelet in the underside of the "stern" and attached to one end of one of the bars somehow. Give the lanyard a quick tug, and it lifts the bars up without being pulled backwards (this is the detail I forget how to accomplish). When you give the lanyard slack, the bars drop in such a way that a a sharpened end digs into the underside of the ice and pushes the entire gizmo along a foot or so. Repeat this for a while and the gizmo is many yards away. You go to it and chop a second hole near it and drag it out. Now you have a messenger cable under the ice, which you may use to place fishing nets.

On the higher tech side, back in the early '70s one of my roommates borrowed an Arp 2600 Synthesizer (all analog, mind you - http://www.vintagesynth.com/index2.html ) for a weekend and taught us all how to operate it and get really cool sounds, in about half an hour. We weren't musicians or anything, we were Art students who just liked to play with cool toys. Portable synthesizers were just getting popular among musicians then, so it was still fairly cutting-edge technology as musical instruments went. It was an inspired design, once you got the idea of the vertical sliders doing one thing and the horizontal sliders the other thing. It just made intuitive sense. Many of the internal connections could be over-ridden by a patch cord. Which is why you needed a paper facsimile of the front panel so you could pencil in the slider settings and patches in order to reproduce the same effect at some later time. This then leads to the notion of a "patch change" as a name for a type of MIDI event, because changing a synth's sound used to often involve actually inserting or moving patch cords.
Sadly, the only ARP 2600 emulators for Macs require $$$ to obtain.

[Chodon]

It's the engine that goes in the F-22 (the Pratt and Whitney F119).  I used to be the mfg. project engineer for the components on each side of the nozzle.  We called them the "boat assemblies" because when they are sitting on a surface plate they look like a boat.  They are made out of some weird stuff I probably can't tell you about, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was reverse engineered from crashed UFOs.

[Chodon]

This was pretty cool too.  It's a plasma nitriding machine that actually plates nitrogen to steel to make it hard.  They use it on fuel injectors and all kinds of cool stuff.  When it's running the inside of the machine looks like a big neon light.

[Leon Kensington]

Anyone have a link to the new particle accelerator that is being put built in Sweden I believe?

[bolddeceiver]

On the low-tech side... to place fishing nets.

Wow, I saw one of those in action on a public television documentary at three-thirty in the morning once, years ago (I was staying up because I had a 6-o-clock AM flight the next day, and I was exhausted).  I was amazed by it at the time, and had completely forgotten about it until now.

[Russell Nash]

I worked on these for three and a half years.  It's a Walter Helitronic 400 CNC grinding machine.

CNC is Computer Numeric Controled.  You program the sucker up and put in the numbers and it starts moving.

Grinding is how you shape hard metals.  We worked with mostly carbide steel.  The tools we made would cut through the steel in your car's engine block, but would break if we dropped them on the floor.

When running this machine would normally move along five axes, all at the same time.  The machine normally had four diamond wheels on at a time.  The wheels would then grind off (wear away) the metal they touched.  To keep things cool each side of the spindle (two wheels on each side) had six high pressure oil hoses that sprayed directly on the parts of the wheels doing the cutting.

The tolerances were measured in "tenths".  That's 1/10,000 of an inch. 

It was cool.  I got to do math, program a computer, get oily, and have a finished product I made out of a chunk of metal.

[Chodon]

The tolerances were measured in "tenths".  That's 1/10,000 of an inch. 

That is awesome...my suppliers have a hard time holding a tolerance of .010.  I seriously had a machine operator call me to ask me to accept a part that was severely weakened by a 1/4 inch cut taken out of the middle of the thing and was in a primary load path (so it would totally break).  When I told him no he said,"Please?" So I just hung up on him...

[Russell Nash]

The tolerances were measured in "tenths".  That's 1/10,000 of an inch. 

That is awesome...my suppliers have a hard time holding a tolerance of .010.  I seriously had a machine operator call me to ask me to accept a part that was severely weakened by a 1/4 inch cut taken out of the middle of the thing and was in a primary load path (so it would totally break).  When I told him no he said,"Please?" So I just hung up on him...

We were making the cutting tools for firms like that.  Our tolerance had to be so small that it didn't effect the product if they switched out an endmill for a new one. 

The bitches were the custom profiles.  With one pass the endmill would do the major cut and leave steps or grooves or ridges.  Normally something you'd do with several passes with different mills.

[Rigger]

I have serious envy over the grinding machine. I wish I had something like that in my garage to play with.

[Russell Nash]

I have serious envy over the grinding machine. I wish I had something like that in my garage to play with.

I found that picture on a site that sells used machines.  That one was $86,000.  Ten years old, but good condition.  The guys I worked for bought it for $250,000 in 1996.  You can swing that, can't you?

[Rigger]

I have serious envy over the grinding machine. I wish I had something like that in my garage to play with.

I found that picture on a site that sells used machines.  That one was $86,000.  Ten years old, but good condition.  The guys I worked for bought it for $250,000 in 1996.  You can swing that, can't you?

I'll get on it right after I buy and set up that Tesla coil.