Skiing, a New Machine and Trouble with the Dino War Machine

They do weird things here. Dusseldorf imports a pile of snow and then lay out a track to ski on.

They take it serious too.

Kind of cold and wet weather. That don’t stop no-one round these parts.

Personally, I prefer my warm workshop on a Saturday afternoon.

Not that I actually had much choice. I had to be in my workshop most of the week fixing this gigantic fuckup.

I made three brass shelving brackets and glued them on the window. Note the picture has only 2 left on.

Then the next day I put my Dino War Machine out on the shelf. I was going to test the shelf first by putting a heavy weight on it first, but I got impatient to see what it would look like.

That proved to be a rather large mistake.

The glass box was completely destroyed.

Luckily my Dino War Machine suffered no damage. Quite amazing actually. The piece has about 230 hours of work in it so I was really not wanting to put more hours in. But the entire box had to be remade.

Trust me, retrofitting a case like this is a lot of schlepp work. For a long time I have been unhappy with the glues available to glue glass with.  So after a bit of research I came across a glue/resin that hardens with ultraviolet light in a few minutes.

It work like a charm. Here I am hardening a side with a cheepo black light bulb. Not the best light, but adequate for the purpose. It is the same stuff that Swarovski use to glue their together glass with.

I had to make a completely new brass frame for the box, and that took to most of last week. Work like this is just that—a fracking lot of work.

After everything had been sanded down and brush finished in needs a protective anti tarnish coat of urethane.

But fear not, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Dino War Machine walks the world again.

Fighting corruption, traffic cops, nasty dentists and putting politicians in jail.

Just watch out.--- He will find you.

Anyway, while I was working the Dino brass, I also made a little steam machine as a test model for one I want to make out of glass this month.

You see, all of this started with a glass blower that has a stall here in the Xmas market.

For a while now, I have wanted to make a machine similar to this out of glass.

But my glass blowing abilities are not as good as my other blowing capabilities.

So I made this one out of brass so I could show him physically how it works and I went and showed him last Friday.

So come Wednesday, he will bring me (to sell) all the necessary tubing to attempt this project. ( I hope )

Turns out he is Dutch, so the lingo went much easier. I was a bit worried, because technical terms are still difficult for me in German. That’s why I built the model in the first place.

Check it clacking along slowly on You Tube.  Just running on compressed air.