Haven't buttoned up the Libert yet, and the weather has resulted in a discontinuance on my Private Pilot check ride, so I decided to put some time into my shop office this week.

I got a bunch of steel-frame windows and a door from Bauer Brothers Salvage in Minneapolis, plated the hollow sides with 12ga sheet, and welded them into the containers.  The long skinny one on the bottom container will be in the bathroom, so I media blasted the glass in order to frost it for privacy.

Here are some fancy steel awnings I built for the outward-facing office windows, kinda to set the tone going forward.  I'll try to carry this theme into the staircase banister and railing around the deck that will sit on top of the white container, etc.


Bunch of instagram stories spliced together (sorry about the vertical format.)

Nice !

Right back at ya!

ADHD update:  built a deck frame and railing for my office.  Framed it up like a truck flatbed, going to build the deck surface from shiplap apitong hardwood trailer decking.  Haven't decided how I'm going to paint (or blacken?) the metalwork yet, so it still has to get blown apart before final assembly.  Next step is to teach myself to build a steel stringer staircase, and to build a scroll bender so that I can make ornamental ironwork for the staircase railing (since I ran out of container wall scraps and can't carry that theme into the rest of the railings.)

Passed my Private pilot checkride back in November after a whole bunch of weather and maintenance setbacks forced the examiner and I to reschedule the ride four or five times.  I've been trying to fly every 7-10 days since that time to maintain proficiency, or at least let it not atrophy as fast as it otherwise might.

Took my girl on a night flight down to Holman Field in St. Paul a couple weeks ago and got dinner at the on-airport restaurant.  Good practice talking to air traffic control and getting cleared into the Minneapolis/St. Paul bravo airspace.  The restaurant is neat, too... you taxi right up to the restaurant apron and walk in the back door while all the diners gawk through the big runway-facing picture windows.  

Trying to take as many cross-country (50+ nautical mile) flights as possible; I need to have logged 50 hours cross country as pilot in command before I'm eligible for an Instrument rating checkride, and I had an impacted ass full of the 25nm radius surrounding my home airport during training.  Currently starting to familiarize myself with IFR via free resources on YouTube and elsewhere - I want to come into ground school having a good familiarity with the curriculum, power through it, and get my written exam out of the way.  After I pass that, I have two years to meet all the rest of the criteria, actually learn how to fly IFR, and pass the checkride.  If I don't earn another rating within two years of my Private, I'll need to do a flight review with an instructor to maintain my legal currency.  Probably go do a weekend float plane class or something if I'm too dumb to pass Instrument in that timeframe.

Been pretty swamped with actual farm work, grounds & facilities maintenance, fleet repairs, etc.  Snow removal has been a massive time sink this year, barely leaving me with the time required to bore expensive holes in the sky or build needlessly elaborate junk out of steel.

Here's the office stairs.  I've never designed or built a staircase before, much less a steel stringer one with a bend in the middle.  Real head scratcher, and kinda tricky to assemble without a helper.  I think I got it licked.

Gotta build some tie-ins to mount the staircase to the container and deck frame, and fabricate some support legs under the first landing.  I'll probably make them look like riveted bridge girders so they match the stilts under the second story of the office.  Railings, too... maybe ornamental scroll work, which means I'll have to build a scroll bender.  We'll see.

I thought using dimensions in the ten thousandth decimal place for stairs was some NASA grade shit!

It may be needlessly elaborate, but your attention to detail is awesome.

Hah!  You can see on the staircase drawing, I reduced the dimensions to the nearest sixteenth.  Not really hip to the intricacies of my CAD software, I bet there's a way to make it express dimensions that way all on its own.

This is a cool thread, glad I stumbled onto it.

Thanks.  I wonder if we have any mutual acquaintances - I know some CNC guys in the twin cities, one of whom is in the firearms business.  (Unless that's you, Jon? Dan?  )





Finished welding out the staircase today... brushed up on my uphill MIG technique.  Ugly as ever.  Moved the assembly into place, more or less.  Now there's a ton of positioning and fine adjustments to do before I can build brackets and legs.

I'm taking the rest of the evening off for aviation shiiiiiit.  Trying to force myself to study the Sheppard Air written exam prep for Instrument rating.  Started training for High Performance and Complex endorsements in a retractable gear 182 yesterday.  My wallet is smoking.

I'm down between Hastings and Red Wing.

Gotcha.  I'm a little west of St. Cloud.

Right, I hope so.  I'm able to conceptualize an object in 3D, kind of unfold it in my head, and then draw it in 2D CAD before reassembling it in 3D with my hands.  I think my spatial reasoning skills are above average, but I'm completely ready to be humbled by instrument flying.

Right now, I'm trying to learn as much theory as possible by watching all the free resources on Youtube like the Pilot Edge and Flight Insight workshops and Fly8MA's content.  I want to have a deeper understanding than rote memorization, but I do want to knock out the written before I get in the plane with a CFII.  So far, I'm feeling pretty comfortable interpreting the symbolism on plates and en route charts, but I know it's a whole different ball game reviewing them in my office chair, versus briefing them inside a cloud at 120+ knots.  I have dabbled with some basics in the desktop simulator, like flying ILSs and DME arcs and practicing hold entries, but I don't want to get too far ahead of myself and instill bad habits until I've had some proper instruction.

I think passing the written exam and starting the 24-month clock (before the written test results expire) is a good place to begin.  It's always difficult to motivate myself without any real consequences - I know the training is going to make me a better, safer pilot, but I'm not on a career path and I can already go take a 172 sightseeing on any day with pleasant weather.  Giving myself a deadline should help me achieve the goal.

This is kind of what I mean by that... I drew this piece and cut it out of sheet metal on the plasma table, then brake-bent it across various planes to create the rear bulkhead for my truck's flatbed.  It has a recessed lip along the top to capture the decking, and I had to figure out the correct length and spacing of the taillight openings so the portion cut out of the hypotenuse would be centered on the lights after bending the assembly into shape.  I'm sure there's an experienced Solidworks operator laughing at this amateurish work, but it was pretty satisfying to watch it take shape from my imagination and a 2D drawing.  I never really build assemblies that are complicated enough to benefit from proper 3D drafting, it's mostly basic stuff I could do in a notebook, but the computer is saving me a ton of time and making the dimensional callouts easier to read.  Occasionally I screw up and have to fill a gap with weld or do some hand tool touchups, but every project seems to get a little less hack than the previous.

get a kit plane!?!!? zenith series can be cheap?


rube goldberg much?! lolz


my brother in law had a fun name for that, 3rd arm type contraption.  you get a lot more satisfaction doin it aaaaaaaaaallllllllll yourself, and youre not yelling at some booger picking moron to hold it vertical

Hah yeah... I'm too far along in life to take a couple years off work and go back to school to become an A&P mechanic, so an experimental is probably about the only way I'll be able to afford aircraft ownership.  I'd love to build an RV-15, but I already have about 300 years of projects lined up.    

Bad ass thread and awesome work!

Definitely.

I used to be pretty sharp with AutoCAD, but I don't get to use it much any more.  This probably won't be much help, but here's the basic steps that I was taught 20+ years ago to tweak dimension display styles: click Dimension tab; click Dimension Style down towards the bottom; click on the style you are using under "Styles"; click Modify; click the Primary Units tab; adjust the Precision to whatever decimal place you want.  Hopefully that helps ya the next time around.  If not, just build everything to the thousandth and rock on!

Appreciate it.  I use this basic 2D software called QCAD, just because the majority of the stuff I draw is intended to be cut out on the plasma table.  I should learn to draw in 3D someday, it would definitely open me up to designing more complex assemblies.


Working on some support legs for the staircase's middle landing now:



I teamed up with a line service guy from the airport to build some time - he wants to reach 500 hours for insurance purposes and I need a safety pilot to sit in the right seat while I fly under the foggles.  We went out to Sioux City, IA on Saturday... I did the takeoff, put on the foggles, got trimmed out and contacted ATC and got on flight following.  Few handoffs later, we're a couple miles from KSUX and I get clearance to land, set it down nice and smooth, and then on rollout the nosewheel starts to shimmy.  I slow down more and it gets worse, take the turn onto the taxiway and almost end up in the grass, felt the telltale sensation of a flat tire sidewall rolling over.  My safety pilot peeked his head outside and sure enough, the nosewheel tire was off the bead.  Notified tower and they said 'say intentions' and I told them I'd wheelie it to the FBO.  They gave me a taxi clearance and I kept the front end floating all the way across the airport.  Found an A&P mechanic who replaced the tube for us, and off we went.  

Gotta build some railings pretty soon.

Love your work my man!!!

I like working with metal…….built a couple bridges out of it
Some tables
Lots of stuff at work.

I saw your plates with slots in them and smiled…….I hate making slots!!

Easy-peasy with the vintage Strippit Sonic 15 turret punch!  

Is that the same as a drill press, hole saw and a grinder?

Scored a job setting some steel tubes and related stuff
I had to make 4” long 7/8” wide slots for knife plates for the tops of the tubes where they tied to the structure.

I remember those days.  I finally got fed up and used my truck as collateral against a loan from the credit union so I could buy a bunch of metalworking tools.  Zero regrets.

Staircase gusset ended up looking like the main sail on an eighteenth century Chinese junk.  I wasn't really in love with the way it turned out, but I've gotta keep moving.  Railings up next.

That weld has some inclusions from the mill scale I left behind.  Whoopsie daisy.

Shop staircase railings are almost done, just waiting for the steel supplier to get another ~200ft of flat so I can finish the decorative scrollwork.  I blasted a bunch of 5/8" holes in a plate of 1" steel I had in the shop and used some plasma cut laminated dies from an eBay seller to make a simple manual scroll bender.  Works pretty well.

I figured out how to make QCAD express dimensions in fractional form, too!  

Lookin Dam good !

That's a nice scroll/bending plate.

I have a cheap one somewhere, not sure why I bought it at the time, I don't really like scroll work, but I appreciate the trouble someone would go to do it.

Scrollwork has its place, but it's easy to overdo it.  Just like dimpled holes, which I tend to put on everything.  

Scroll bending will resume this weekend; I got another 200ft of flat yesterday afternoon.  Taking today off to focus on studying for my Instrument rating written exam, which I scheduled tomorrow at KROS.  Gonna scoot over there in the Cessna 182RG and hopefully crush the exam.  Feeling reasonably confident with the Sheppard Air test prep program.

Not perfect, but I'm pleased with it.





Got a 98% score on that Instrument written exam on Friday, missed one stupid question that's going to haunt me.  At least now I know one thing the examiner and I will definitely be discussing during the checkride oral.  

I'm not on a career track in aviation, so I'm trying to impose deadlines on myself in order to stay motivated and advance into further ratings.  With a passing score on the written, I need to log all the training experience criteria and pass a practical exam by the last day of May 2025 or I'll have to retest.  It's a low bar to achieve, but now I hear the clock ticking.

Do you have a cheat sheet? Bearing A in hole 23, bearing B in hole 26.

Or you just make X number of pieces all at the same time and that's it?

I made one assembly that flowed pretty well, duplicated it about 50 times, and then placed it in all types of orientations to fill the majority of the space, and added some spare twists to fill the spaces in between and tie everything together.

It would have been a lot more difficult if I had tried to lay out everything geometrically and create a repeating pattern.  Chaotic fill was pretty easy.

Just realized you were asking about the bender.  I found that I could complete a small scroll with the stem bearing in the wider position, but it contoured the die a lot better if I left it one hole tighter for the initial tight radius.  Sometimes using the wider bearing position it would run so wide around that first bend, I wasn't able to fit the outer shell of the die around that part.  No cheat sheet or anything, I just assembly-lined most of the pieces.  Everything starts with the smallest, tightest-radius bend so it made sense to start there and come back to hit some of the parts with the wider radius bends as necessary.

I screwed up.  

Got some tailwheel training in June, then went and found this little Fisher Celebrity, thinking it would be a fun time builder and low-and-slow summer cruiser.  Attempted to perform a wheel landing and facilitated an up-close introduction between my beautiful Culver prop and the touchdown zone of runway 31 at KSTC.  I don’t know what I was thinking, that thing was clearly only set up to land in a 3-point attitude.  Long story short, tore it down and followed the Lycoming service bulletin for a prop strike.  No damage.  Replaced all the recommended parts, sealed all the oil leaks, fixed all the iffy wire and hose routing, built new gear, added a charging system and intercom, and built a new panel.  Still waiting for the new prop (which is pitched a little speedier (72x44 inch) and hopefully won't over-rev the engine on the takeoff roll like the Culver 72x39 inch.)

There's metal working down below, I promise.

Unrelated... went camping with my girl on Madeline Island.

No waterjet here.  100% carved out on the old manual American iron.








Started to dabble with waxed lacing on my harness, I like it more than zip ties so far.






The hula girl is actually required by 14 CFR 91.205 for day VFR if you look closely.

Got rid of the rubber ducky and mounted a nice dipole antenna with a doubler plate in the wing root fairing yesterday.

And because this is the metal working subforum, I just fixed an old shit spreader.

Hey, if no one bothered to fix the old shit spreaders, we'd all be in trouble when it piled up.

Regardless of your metal working fabrication skills, I would recommend you not stand behind your manure spreader repair work.

Just got home today from New Mexico.  Drove a (hateful 7.3L gas F-650) U-Haul truck down there at the end of last week to help my sister move into her new place.  Got a UPS delivery notification for my new propeller the day after I left, so that lifted my spirits.  I powered through all the unpacking of the truck and trailer, knowing I'd be taxiing around the farm in my stupid biplane in a couple days.

Get home today and find a 7-foot-long rigid plastic mailing tube with its end blown off and nothing inside.  So there's a really nice prop laying on the floor in a UPS sorting facility somewhere out there in the world, and it has no identifying marks to link it back to me.  Even if I can somehow find the thing, I bet someone has backed over it with a Linde and I don't really feel like trusting my life to it anymore.

So much for not standing behind the shit spreader.  



View from her back porch is very decent.  Far enough from all the riff raff of the city.

Going back to the connex boxes, you just welded a steel door frame into it? I found a kit for $1500 with a steel door, but I didn’t know if I could get away with cheaper for an exterior rain tight opening.