Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.
Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.
I am a self-educated Programmer-Analyst, and since you’re here reading this, it would appear I’m also now a Web-Designer & Server-Administrator. I am a self-reliant, self-starting do-it-yourselfer, which is I supose, the purpose of this site. I built it from scratch to showcase my abilities in the digital realm. No fancy, pre-configured AMIs here, I used my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner skills to launch and configure an EC2 instance, install & configure a web-server & CMS (WordPress in this case), then I built this site. It contains examples of data analysis projects completed on various platforms and also tutorial videos from my Youtube channel. I gained most of my skills through online research (Youtube, Udemy, Stackoverflow & Google mostly), my Youtube channel is my attempt to give back to the community responsible for providing me with the tools I now possess. Please feel free to have a look around. This site also contains a copy of my resume if you’re interested.
Below I’ll show you a bit about some other skills I’ve learned on my own (with the help of a great deal of online research of course). I like to learn new things and then put those things into practice. I think our greatest learning is contained in our failures, our experiments gone wrong. You get better at trouble shooting the more you encounter trouble.
It started with a simple idea, if I cut the bottom off of a bottle and attached it to the top it looks like a stemmed glass. So, I bought a kiln and a wet saw and got to work. It took a lot of tries. Funny thing about glass, when you heat it up it tends to slump over. I finally figured out a way to hold the glass upright with some kiln wire with a bit of wash to keep it from sticking.
This left me with quite a lot of scraps. That was where the jewelry making came in. I started shaping the scraps on the saw & firing them in the kiln to remove the sharp edges. Then I had all these “stones”, what to do?
This is what happens when one hobby leads you down the rabbit hole to another hobby. All that left over glass that I had to find something to do with, why not jewelry? And so, I learned how to work metal with fire, bending it to my will! Most of the work is fairly primitive, but I was always refining and learning new techniques. I really enjoy making jewelry. The process of taking pieces of metal and turning them into wearable works of art is very satisfying to me. I’ve experimented with everything from etching metal, engraving it, to forging it (Mokume Gane is of particular interest to me. And I’ve tried it a few times with varying degrees of success). I think my next undertaking will be setting techniques. Anyway, jewelry lead to a bigger project.
To say this was a much larger undertaking than I anticipated would be an understatement. I hand fabricated every piece of this jewelry box. I custom made two piano hinges for the doors, created a knob and it’s latching mechanism, I even made the windows by cutting them from a bottle. The structure of the piece was designed and laid out in Adobe Illustrator, as well as the templates for the etched doors.
This project took five months to complete. This was largely due to the scale of it and the learning curve from soldering relatively small pieces of metal the quite large pieces seen here. It is much easier to evenly heat a small piece of metal than a larger piece, and things will begin to warp if you’re not careful. I had to use a series of clamps to hold things in place so they would cooperate. Also, soldering one piece of curved metal to another piece of curved metal can be quite the challenge particularly if their curves don’t match exactly.
The wood-working in this piece was by far the easiest part of the build. The interior of the box is constructed from purple heart pinned together with copper pins with the ring holders being made from cherry wood dowels.
My girlfriend has a degree in costume design and a Masters Degree in Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon, so when she said she wanted to go to the Renaissance Festival I should’ve known there would be more to it. Not only did she want to go in costume, she wanted us to make them. So I watched a lot of cosplay videos on Youtube, bought some EVA foam, fake fir & paints and went to work.
It was fun, I learned some new skills. I also learned that EVA foam is not particularly breathable and an excellent preserver of the wearer’s body heat. And while I don’t think I’ll be winning any Tony Awards for my costume, I’d definitely give this another go in the future.
Also, I think we make quite the fetching pair in our picture.
