185. Get in The Shop

Rose EP48: that's it. I'm a floating head. I'm like John Cena, you can't see me

Rose EP48: Everybody knows that that lull that's right in between Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day, where you're begging for forgiveness for not buying any chocolates, and then you're both hungover just saying, "Wait for the pancakes." That's, uh, Hank Hill. "Just wait for the pancakes."

Rose EP48: We often talk about what makes great radio, and we still don't know. But you know what? We tried to look up Mel P. Emily

Emily EP48: Yeah, geez, man. And if y'all wanna know what we're talking about, we're talking about when I did the Woman on the Street interviews at the, uh, Portland Transmission spring opener. And it was what episode? Couple

Rose EP48: We are on week 48 of pile upping. Yep. Which feels pretty good. We're rolling up on a year, and we've been talking about what are, what are we gonna do for 52?

Rose EP48: We saw that we are on a list. Somebody emailed us and said, "Wouldn't you like to know that you're on this list of automotive podcasts?"

Emily EP48: We were number 54 out of 100 on that one. Okay. Right?

Emily EP48: Yeah, Jess. Maybe Hailey? I don't know. No. Probably all Jess.

Emily EP48: I think on any platform you listen to us on, uh, 'cause we're on Amazon Mu- you can-- I'm pretty sure you can leave a rating on any of them.

Rose EP48: Okay, but Emily just took a picture of the car with the tent, so it just looked like somebody stole her wheels and was living under her car. It wasn't, like, a picture of me under the tarp. You couldn't see

Emily EP48: it was making a, not a good noise. It was pretty bad.

Rose EP48: I had- And then I let a bunch of air out Rose EP48: Sterritt are, are metrology ex-experts in the- Emily EP48: think about that. Because you had a really good point of they're just like

Rose EP48: Believe he said he connected with a Russian guy- Yeah ... and bought... The guy was selling cells.

Emily EP48: Well, they thought... Okay, first of all, we have to tell everybody, we did fall asleep while reading this. It was a very boring article. So we're not gonna

after government incentives. Yeah. But this guy, who's the color of a traffic cone, that lives in a white house on Pennsylvania Avenue part-time, loves to golf, said, "You know what? Your electric cars are driving the whales crazy. No more." And they got rid of the incentives, and the Slate truck is much less interesting because it is basically a $30,000 car.

Rose EP48: How many years is it, how many decades is it financed for?

Rose EP48: People are like, "Oh, it works," or whatever. I see new cars on the side of the road too. They're not exciting. They all look the same. Some look like a shoe Kia Soul looks like a shoe. It looks like a roller skate

Rose EP48: For losers like us. So- somewhere somebody's renting, you know, 10,000 a month and they're like, "Yeah, it's whatever."

Rose EP48: I think the Bronco II should come back. Fuck the Expedition, get a Bronco II. Uh, Megan, um, Megan and Andy, I can't... I'm like, can't-- I'm kind of blanking on what, uh, Megan's, uh, Instagram is at the moment. Uh, Megan Machine, and she had a reel that was like, you know, people say, "You seem happier. You look happier."

Rose EP48: Yeah, we made the EGR block off the other night.

And back then, if you wanted to buy a '60s van, if you were gonna find an early, they were still, like, pretty whipped. You know, they'd been ridden hard, put away wet most likely, and the engines were getting tired, and they were gonna need everything. And then that has progressed along to now you go buy a '70s van, and you're like, "It's whooped.

Rose EP48: you go, you go, yeah, you go high, I'll go low, and we just- Rose EP48: insane. That's inflation. So, like, a couple people have been like, "How much are the windows?" And I tell them the price, and they're like, "Holy bananas."

Yeah. And didn't know if I wanted to keep doing it. And I took about a summer off, and I'm ready to build some more. So I got it all going, made it happen, and, uh, super grateful for the people that made it for me because the quality is top-notch.

Rose EP48: So I thought about designing an extrusion that will hold the plastic, uh, and then screws to the, uh, under lip of the hood, and you can have a colorful acrylic bug shield with an aluminum, uh, extruded aluminum frame that holds it to the bottom of the hood Faye taught me material science. I went to him to learn metal shaping, changed my whole career. I learned so much from Faye, and his whole thing was like, "Do a drawing a day. Do a five-minute drawing every day." And his whole thing about that was that when you look at things, you may not be seeing them for what they are, and when you do a drawing, like photographs have too much information.

Or you make the part and then you're like, "You know what? We might have to make this again." And so you do a drawing and maybe accompany that with a paper pattern, and that's another key right there is like things that are metal, it's easy to pattern in paper. You know, metal and paper, you buy them in the same two-dimensional form. So you can put folds in the paper and find out like where shape is and... I mean, there's a lot to like quantifying shape and measuring a shape, which is important. Uh, and that's, I mean, that's a key I think if we were gonna talk fabrication, right? Yeah. Is accuracy

Rose EP48: W- they, they like go to like ma- Lisa has a math contest or something, and she's like, "If I g-" She gets second place and, or something, and she's like, "If I got second place, I would've won a protractor." And then Homer's like, "Yeah, well, that'd be great if we had a farm, but we don't.

And he's like, "Well, a shape is a true, a true radius. It's a, it's true... It's a precision instrument." He's like, "So if you can shape and fit a you're now shaping to the 10,000th." And I was like, "Oh, I see what you mean." So when you map out, like that's just like if we're just talking metal shaping alone, if you use paper and you map out where the, where the radius begins to end in both directions, it's a compound curve, right?

A three-dimensional form that you're shaping to, and you're setting the part back on it to see if it fits. You need to have some kind of a screw or a bolt or a tag of some kind that makes it constantly lock into the same place. You're not trying to find where it fits best. You need to be building the piece to fit that shape.

The part that's interesting to me is, is drawing it, getting out my Starrett radius gauges, and then fitting the radius gauges to the part, and then I draw it like I'm gonna draw it in QCAD. I'll do a point and I'll say, "Okay, from here to here, this is zero, zero," and I start from zero, zero and I make my way and draw the coordinates along.

Rose EP48: Um, it's, it's from a-- That's like a line from like a David Berman song, but I forget how exactly he words it. He might say analysis paralysis or something like that.

Rose EP48: Well, if you've ever met sh- a person, then you know they're shitty Uh, I mean, that's just sheet metal stuff. I mean, there's so much more. But I mean, y- it's just, you can do a lot with... You know, it's good to have woodworking equipment 'cause you n- need to make some w-wood fixtures and things to shape off of and box and... So it's good to have your band saws and sanders and y- you know

So, like, light the area that you're working in. If you wear glasses, wear your glasses. They do make cheater lenses for hoods. Uh, it's awesome to have an auto-darkening hood, and the Harbor Freight one is okay. Uh, you know, you, you can get into it cheap, but, you know, wear sleeves, wear gloves, protect your skin from the UV rays. I mean, there's no point. Protect your eye bulbs from arc flash. Don't, you know, don't expose yourself to dumb shit if you don't have to.

And I was like, "Look, man, like that's also casting. Like you can just go buy a different resin." So like in some ways I feel like sometimes people are like, "Yeah, but then you can just do this." And you're like, "Yeah, but we were already doing that." And like if you've got a... I think a 3D printer is great because you could make the positive.

If I had one of those, I could fill in the blanks of it with some clay, like one of the original plastic sliders. I could fill in the blanks of the clay. Let's say it's got a hole of it. I would dimple the clay in so I know where to drill next, and then I could take a silicone mold off of it. They have ones that cure in a half hour, silicone Uh, Mold Maker 16, I think, is a, is a... 15 and 16 is like a 30-minute cure and a three-hour cure. Okay? So like you can do 30-minute cure, and then the resin cures in five minutes like, I've seen people like,

And I think fiberglass is cool for that, and people have sort of moved on to carbon fiber. And same thing, I'm just like, I'm stuck in my old ways, and I just like, I don't have any need for the carbon fiber. I'm never like, "But it needs to be lighter." Um, it costs more. I'm usually focused on like, I gotta buy a lot of it.

Rose EP48: It's polyester, and that matches polyester body filler. Dura-Glass is polyester, polyester primer. Yeah. Just work in that same chemical family

It's still at Jerry's place, but like that thing still rocks. We'll go pick it up one of these days. I'm sorry, Jerry, by the way. Jerry got my, my Bridgeport. Uh, when we, when we moved the Polemax, it fell through the trailer. We were like, "That's it. That's the last heavy thing we're moving."

Well, you can switch it, EP or EN. No AC waveform, right? So basically, a mild steel welder off Amazon for $199.

Rose EP48: a pitched roof on your welder so that people don't set things on top of the flat sur- All flat surfaces are- Yeah ... dangerous in a shop.

Uh, y- you know, anywhere that there's just, uh, you know, uh, a sharp corner next to... Like let's say you have a hole that's near a n- a 90 degree you've cut in some kind of bracket. Well, vibrations are gonna wanna make their way to that corner and then towards that hole and crack across it. So you don't wanna build things like that in.

Rose EP48: that it's a, it's like an exhaust fan, and somebody put plastic in it, and the plastic threw the fan out of balance, and it, it basically destroyed this wh- entire, uh, like blister packaging, just like lightweight plastic- Oh my gosh ... destroyed this fan and vibrated a mild steel eighth-inch thick base and cracked it about six inches back.

Rose EP48: Uh, that's like the, that's the gun. That's m- metal inert gas

Some people struggle with the scratch start. It's just like it's for heavy stuff. And like most people are probably making... I mean, I don't wanna say what, what thickness it's for 'cause there's some badass that can weld whatever with stick. Like, I mean, my dad would tell me that story. He, he told me that he had tried to modify his friend's bike, you know, this is like the '50s my dad was born in.

Rose EP48: your grandpa? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you know, you know, but in my mind it's like usually the stuff you have around for stick is for heavier like quarter plate, eighth plate and up. So MIG is just makes a lot more sense 'cause you're gonna have like your three common like sizes that you'll find around town.

Rose EP48: And it's real life. Like, 'cause some people are like, "I just can't read and get it." For me, it's I get a book. I, I always like, I start with a book probably, and then I will watch videos now.

Rose EP48: But I mean, the basic hand tools are critical, but yeah, people are like, "Oh, I wanna get a planishing hammer," but they're not self-explanatory on what you do with them Rose EP48: didn't know they were coming. Time just ends, and it's like not when you want it to. Yeah. It's not how you want it to sometimes. It just, time just runs out or whatever. Things change or whatever it may be. So if you can find a mentor, oh my God.

I was like, "Hey, if you could recommend a book on winding electric motors, what would it be?" And he's like, "Hmm, I think I have one for you. Uh, you'll have to come back. I might, uh... It's not here." And he gave me a book and, uh, I study it all the time. I was reading the book last

Rose EP48: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you learn it, like, you learn it too late. Or like we did that on the Honda with the brakes the other day, where first of all, you couldn't compress the brake cylinder the normal way you do with a clamp. It threads back in. I've never seen that. But then it also has this little pin that has to line up in the piston, and we had to catch that.

Emily EP48: Yeah. And also, like he says, you don't have to buy new stuff

Rose EP48: I mean, I think that's like, those are just like basic ideas. I don't know. I guess, uh, I, you know, I like to do our fabrication check-ins 'cause I think I like to remind people to get out there and fuck shit up. Yeah. I mean-

Rose EP48: I mean, tons of it does revolve around, uh, metals, but, like, you know, one that I used the other night that I've-- I was following somebody that was doing a bunch of stuff where he was working on pre-forming hoses to get bends in regular hoses 'cause, like, it's a big thing. Like, sometimes you need a 90-degree bent rubber hose.

And I, you know, I was able to get through that no problem and have, you know, not tear up the hose and stuff because I was watching somebody else explore. Just a little tidbit, and when you get a little bit of skill, other little bits of skill out on there, you know, things like that, I mean, that's... Like I said, there's always risk and then there's reward.

Emily EP48: you have any questions for Rose. Um, she loves-- I think she'd love to answer them, or I'm gonna speak for her and

Rose EP48: Think about, think about the clever mashup of Frankenstein and Frank Einstein. You know? You can go out there and really be a Frank Einstein out there in the shop. Put some crap together. Who knows? Yeah, maybe it'll become your car. I mean, that's Henry Ford, right? That's his Runabout. His Runabout, he built it in the shop and he had to knock the wall down to get his car out. His, his, his four-wheeled bicycle.

Rose EP48: You're done been piled up.

185. Get in The Shop

Volkswagen Golf

Kia Soul

Ford Expedition

Ford Bronco II

Toyota A90

Original notes