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Lineage and the Nobility of a Trade
My dad passed away on June 14th at the age of 90. He was a civil engineer and a building contractor. He was an engineer in the Air Force during the Korean War, building runways. His father, my granddad, was a talented jack-of-all-trades and a clever, whimsical inventor (he made himself a pair of convertible pants and a shirt several decades before the concept was patented). They both instilled in me, from the earliest age, the do-it-yourself ethos. When I was 5, I almost electrocuted myself when I tried to take the kitchen toaster apart with my Handy Andy tool set to find out how it worked – while it was still plugged in!
Here’s something I wrote in my first Tips book (which was dedicated to dad and granddad) about watching my dad seemingly effortlessly build things when I was a kid:
One of my early memories was being with my dad while he worked. I remember riding in a Gradall Excavator with him when I was a wee one. I thought my dad was basically the coolest guy on Earth because he could confidently pilot such an impressive, intimidating machine. As a pre-teen, I remember watching him swing a hammer while he was adding some rooms to the basement of our home (which he’d also built) and realizing how regular and perfect he was with his swing. It usually took him the same number of strikes each time to drive and countersink a nail – one swing to set the nail, one to drive it most of the way in, and a final whack to counter-sink it. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but it was probably the first time that I instinctively understood the nobility (and the efficiency) of perfecting a trade. If you do something enough, you get impressively good at it.
Tools are an extension of our bodies, our intentions. Like specialized “end effectors” on a robot, they instantly give us special abilities; superpowers. Combine the right tools, the right materials, and the proper know-how, and human beings create worlds. Tools are the physical interface between our dreams, our imagination, and their real-world realization. But our tools are not only powerful extensions of ourselves, they also contain stories (see above).
My dad (and my granddad) taught me about both the power of tools and the power of storytelling. Little did they, or I, know when I was growing up that my job would end up combining these two powers.
Knurled Knob Generator
Who doesn’t love a handsome and grippy knurled knob? This OpenSCAD script on Thingiverse allows you to generate knurled knobs of various sizes that slide over bolt heads. The script requires the OpenSCAD compiler to generate the 3D models.
Using Syringes to Clean Out 3DP Resin Vats
Back in January, I wrote about Daniel Herrero‘s “hack” of using a peristaltic pump to clean out his resin vat for his 3D printer. And then, based on comments to his post, he got a better idea: using large syringes to suck out the remaining resin. He experimented and determined that a 150ml syringe works best. Once again, YouTube comments to the rescue. He complains in the video about the hard plastic syringe head scratching his FEP film at the bottom of his vat. Commenters suggested adding a short bit of rubber tubing to the tip of the syringe. He also mentions the resin scraper that comes with printers scratching his FEP and viewers remind him that a silicone plastic spatula (I got mine from the dollar store) won’t scratch the film.
Do Different Formulations of Motor Oil from the Same Brand Really Behave Differently?
Todd at Project Farmwanted to know if different formulations of oil from the same brand (Penzoil) perform differently, and is the high-end oil all that different from the cheapest one? The formulations tested were Pennzoil Synthetic Blend, Full Synthetic, Platinum, and Ultra Platinum. He sent the oils out to a lab for analysis and also tested them for evaporative loss, lubricity or film strength, and cold oil flow both new oil and after exposure to heat. Additionally, in a final test, Pennzoil Ultra Platinum was exposed to 10% gasoline and another sample to antifreeze to test the impact it had on lubricity and oil performance. Bottom line? This looks like a “you get what you pay for” result. The most expensive of the lot, Ultra Platinum ($28 on Amazon at time of test, $14.22 currently), definitely performed the best. That’s actually lower in price than the cheapest one at time of testing (Synthetic Blend, at $17). And, if you buy 6 quarts on Amazon, the Ultra Platinum blend is only $8.60/qt.
Fantastic Free Class for Learning Arduino
Via the always-informative Maker Update comes word of this really wonderful series of beginner educational videos on the hardware, development environment, and code used for the ubiquitous Arduino microcontroller. If you’re interested in getting into Arduino, there is no better gateway.
TOYS! Liquid Chrome Markers
I recently saw Adam Savage use these chrome markers in a video where he was weathering a prop that he’d built (the motion tracker from Aliens). I immediately bought a set and man do I love them. If you have a need to faux chrome anything…
FrogPod is Now on Kickstarter
I’ve been a big fan of Thomas Baisch‘s Instagram page, InfiniteCraftsman, for a while now. He posts one innovative shop solution after another, most of them 3D printed. One of his most brilliant creations is the FrogPod, a flexible, magnetized three-legged camera mount that you can slap onto metal surfaces. He recently launched a Kickstarter to raise an army of FrogPod users.
Maker’s Muse
Figurengruppe Theater Schwäbisch-Hall, Germany, Karl Henning-Seemann. H/t Vickie Jo Sowell.
Shop Talk
In response to my piece on witness marks, my ol’ pal Steve Roberts sent me a photo of these fascinating marks inside of his Waltham pocket watch.
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The White Rose (1929) is a novel by B. Traven, the mysterious author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. An American oil tycoon wants a Mexican family’s hacienda because it sits on an ocean of oil, and the owner won’t sell at any price. It hasn’t been in English print for decades, so I made a new translation from the German.
This is the fourth Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.
About The White Rose
The novel moves back and forth between Jacinto Yáñez, a farm owner in Mexico, and Chaney Collins, the president of an American oil company who wants Yáñez’s property because it sits on an underground ocean of oil. Yáñez refuses to sell, even for millions of dollars. The hacienda is called the Rosa Blanca, and it has been passed down to him through a long line of ancestors. He feels he has no right to sell the land, and he believes the farm is worth more than any amount of money the oil company could offer. It is literally priceless. Yáñez feels responsible for the many interrelated families who live on the hacienda and make a living growing crops and raising livestock. He thinks it’s ludicrous to trade a food-producing homestead for a sack of gold coins.
Collins is enormously rich but spends a fortune on four mistresses, and he thinks Yáñez is just holding out for a higher price. When Yáñez keeps refusing to sell, Collins sends one of his henchmen to Mexico to bring Yáñez to San Francisco, where Collins believes he’ll have a better chance of making him see why he ought to take the deal. I won’t spoil what happens next.
Collins is widely considered a stand-in for the oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny, who in 1921 sent $100,000 in cash to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, in what became the Teapot Dome scandal. Doheny’s son delivered it in a black bag. (That’s about $1.8 million in today’s money.) Fall then leased Doheny the Elk Hills naval oil reserve in California without competitive bidding. Fall went to prison for taking the bribe. Doheny was acquitted of paying it.
Who was B. Traven?
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of my favorite novels, and John Huston’s 1948 movie, starring Humphrey Bogart, won three Academy Awards. A few years after reading it, I read Traven’s The Death Ship (1926), about an American sailor who loses his ship and his papers in Antwerp and gets deported from one country to the next until he ends up shoveling coal on a rotting smuggling ship. After that, I wanted to know who Traven was. The more I tried to find out, the more confused I became.
He used multiple pseudonyms, including Hal Croves, Traven Torsvan, and Ret Marut. Most Travenophiles agree that he was a German actor and anarchist who fled Germany in 1919 after he was accused of helping establish the Bavarian Soviet Republic and threatened with execution. When British police questioned him in 1923, he said he was Hermann Otto Albert Maximilian Feige. When Huston tried to meet him before filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven showed up claiming to be Traven’s agent, a man named Hal Croves, and worked on the set as a consultant.
Traven didn’t think his identity should matter to anyone. “The creative person should have no other biography than his works,” he said.
The Mexican director Roberto Gavaldón made the novel into a film, Rosa Blanca, in 1961. The Mexican government decided its oil politics were too touchy and kept it out of theaters for eleven years. It wasn’t released until 1972.
About this translation
The White Rose wasn’t translated into English until 1979, 50 years after it was first published in Germany. Cedric Belfrage's translation is now out of print. I found a copy of the German edition at Project Gutenberg, and as an experiment I used Claude to translate it into English. I told it to stay close to the German and avoid smoothing it into idiomatic English, and to build a glossary so the names stayed consistent. I was surprised by how well it did the translation. It’s a hell of a good read.
Download the Book Freak Edition
This is the fourth book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club, a benefit for paid subscribers. Every month, I take an interesting and obscure public-domain book and turn it into an ebook in EPUB and PDF formats, with a short introduction.
You can access a copy ofThe White Rosebelow.
If you’re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5/month or $45/year). Join the club here. And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.org, and I’ll comp you...
Figurengruppe Theater Schwäbisch-Hall, Germany, Karl Henning-Seemann. H/t Vickie Jo Sowell.
