shelbinator.com

Call me the Silver Surfer. You might start thinking I break death and destruction everywhere I go if my research were any indication. Before I call it a night, let me recount the delicious saga, for posterity, because as I get closer to actually accomplishing anything, fate throws monkeywrenches at an ever-increasing frequency like I’m approaching the event horizon of a productivity black hole. I wouldn’t be a damn bit surprised if I went to leave here tonight and the doorknob came off in my hand, trapping me and the pooch in here while the building burned down.

It started, of course, with the Titanium Rods of Suck, a box full of rough-cut, not-round, not-3/4-inch pieces of expensive scrap with holes in them.

No, wait! It started, really, with the Hydraulic Pump of Suck. Our test machines run on hydraulic pressure to generate bone- and metal-crushing forces, provided by a big hydraulic pump in the basement, a pump which for several weeks last year decided to burn out and not come back on. After a time, the contractors got around to repairing it — mostly — and it worked when it wanted to, kicking off again when it got too hot, rendering any kind of long-term testing impossible.

The HPOS got finally-fixed-for-real just in time for my 20-kip Load Frame of Suck to fall apart. Literally. While I was trying to tune it for my first experiments on control plexiglass specimens, it began behaving more and more erratically and jerking around and vibrating and buzzing and snarling until ultimately, with a terrible noise that almost made me moist myself, it shook a number of its screws right out and became a rather ugly, expensive bookcase. A bookcase that would have liked to take your hand off, but useless nonetheless. Thus endeth Summer ‘06, with the 20KLFOS.

Then we got the TROS’s, and spent the fall contemplating how to make them un-suck while I moved over to Gigantor (a 100-kip Load Frame of Malfeasance) to test my Plexiglass Specimens of Suck — a material which would much rather have been tested on a 5-kip load frame of gentleness, mind you. Gigantor ripped through a couple PSOS’s in short order with his Claws of Death, growing some highly inappropriate cracks along the way. Meanwhile, I had a couple of the TROS’s re-worked at the machine shop and a set of Steel Ring Grip Adapters of Suck made to cover the distance between the 0.7-inch TROS’s and the 1.0-inch COD’s. And then, after growing a couple more inappropriate cracks in the first TROS and sending me back for another round of computer modeling, the 100KLFOM ripped the Jesus pants right off of the TROS and that was the end of that approach.

Enter May. My committee (60% of it anyway) gives the green light to the backup plan, and I set about making some new specimens out of a nickel-base superalloy (sending the TROS’s out into the wilderness to go F themselves into some wedding bands). This is an expensive endeavor, and it’s quite possible that we’d have neither the time nor the money to get the job done right, so I kick off a backup-backup plan to make some specimens out of aluminum (or alumMINium for you limey Brits); it won’t make a pretty dissertation, but a passable one, and on the serious cheap. The superalloy rod is shipped from Texas, and my advisor and I manage to beg another lab in the department to loan us some furnace time to bake the material into its final condition (like Shrinky-Dinks, a good alloy isn’t quite done till you bake it). Then the advisor leaves for two weeks.

The superalloy arrives, but then a grad student in the other lab tells me their Argon Furnace of Suck is, well, sucking, and not so much furnacing. Sorry. I call a buttload of vendors in the Atlanta area that might be able to cook my rod for 18 hours in 1325-degree argon, but the only place with such a capability is managed by a guy who’s already gone for the long holiday weekend. Thus endeth last week.

Oh right. And then there was that whole thing with a car kind of killing my bike. Total sideshow.

On Tuesday, local AFOS vendor informs me that if I want to jam my rod into his workflow it’s going to cost me twice as much as the superalloy itself did ($1500). Verdict: send the rod to the machine shop unbaked and hope the GaTech AFOS is working by the time they’re done — and doesn’t FUBAR the Superalloy Specimens that Don’t Suck in the process. Meanwhile, keep working on the Seriously Cheap Half-assed Aluminum Specimens. The aluminum needs to be baked before it’s worked as well, but at a measly 375F, and in regular old air is fine. Funny, but I was a cold beer away from cooking these suckers up in my gas stove at home tonight.

We have ourselves a Tube Furnace of Suck (oh yes, you know it’s coming) in our Lab that Time Forgot that regularly gets a coworker’s crap up to a blistering 650 degrees Celsius. However, at a patlry 190C like I need? It gets confused. It gets so bored not being hot that it has a tendency to wander through a wider temperature range than the SCHAS’s would like. So today I fired it up to test its stability, and while doing so, I thought, gee, why is its outer metal casing wide open like this? I needed maximum thermal stability and figured, hell, every little bit helps, so I started to close its outer case down around its big ceramic core and POP! and a spark and then one of the three heating elements stopped heating.

See, the metal casing was propped open because a couple of the wires inside were very old and stripped bare, and in closing the casing I managed to touch the metal to the wire and short out one of the elements or perhaps the control unit, and for this I was given a stern talking-to by our lab technician. Yes! You’re right! I’m sorry I so carelessly almost electrocuted myself on your piece-of-shit TFOS that nobody bothered to put a freaking Post-It note on saying Don’t Close the POS FTOS or You Might Die While Making It Suck More! How stupid of me!

I went back to my office, dejected by not being able to get my rod in the tube, to ponder my own stupidity (and mortality) only to hear a funny noise emanating from the computer at the next desk. Another labmate was trying to take some digital images from our Big Fancy Microscope — which is controlled by finely calibrated software on the Desktop Computer of Suck — and upon turning on the DCOS found that the hard drive was not so much hard driving anymore, but rather stuck, for no apparent reason (as the DCOS does not exactly lead a hard life under its desk and all) in a kick-on-kick-off kind of loop for the rest of eternity.

It must be me, I thought; I am radiating a suck-field. So be it.

Back in the lab, having satisfied his need to chastise me for the day, the lab tech showed me how to run another, much more suitable Circulation Oven (yes, of Suck) to bake my specimens, lest I wind up with burnt-pizza-flavored SCHAS’s at home. I still wanted to test its thermal uniformity, so I grabbed a spare steel rod (it really never gets old) and headed to the Sample Prep Lab to chop a two-foot section off to cover in thermocouples and bake in a trial run.

Except when I got to the SPLOS, the cutoff wheel I needed was broken, and the smaller abrasive wheel in the drawer wasn’t big enough to cut through my girthy rod. Back to the LTS to find some scrap aluminum.

Another few hours and thousands of small metal shards all over my arms later, I had a dummy specimen all thermocoupled up and stuck in the oven. At first I was rather disappointed by the +/- 15C range of temperatures I was getting, since I can only afford +/- 5, but I figured it was still just warming up and I needed to give it some time to “equilibri-ize,” as they say around here, so I took a walk and got a snack. Upon my return, all of the thermocouples were reading within a degree or two of each other, a nice, uniform…280 degrees C. When the oven was set to 190. Mm-hmm.

Not a problem, I thought. As long as it’s a stable offset, just set the oven to something lower until you get a 190 reading back from the thermocouples. Not the best solution, mind you, because who knows what such a tweaky oven control unit is going to do when I’m not looking if it’s already being a total COOS. But ever the optimist, I leaned over to dial down the COOS and bumped the thermocouple reader that was monitoring the dummy rod and voila! Now my scrap aluminum was chilling out at a balmy but survivable 45C. I gave the TC reader another Fonzy-like smack, and it finally agreed that the rod was all “equilibri-ized” at about 189C. As long as I didn’t touch it — no wait, 105, oops I mean 350, or how about 58?

Seriously? Can anything else please not work?

Blessedly, I remembered where a newer, nicer, TC Reader that Doesn’t Suck was, dragged it out, hooked it up to my hot rod, and all is kosher in the oven indeed. So now I can get these three other rods in there to bake overnight, while I wake up in a panic attack every 90 minutes to wonder if the COOS has kicked it out of spite. Fortunately, thanks to Ustream.tv and my own terminal nerdity, hopefully I won’t have to drive all the way back to the lab to calm my nerves. This web communications dork is going to let the laptop here stay and watch the COOS and stream the TCRTDS over the internet in my stead.

Goodnight. And for Christ’s sake don’t touch anything.