Welcome to Gaia! ::

I turned in an abstract for my research to the Geological Society of America. It will be officially published on their website in a week or two. This is my first published piece of work. I am very excited!

That's fantastic! Good on you. heart


Yea! We got two housing updates - October 11 and November 17. Because they updated the code, it cleared your home. (My home is here.) Make sure you visit here to get the staff ornaments. Hopefully the grants still work.

That's awesome about your bike!

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I did YogaX today. Was a bit frustrating as my wrists, flexibility and strength isn't what it used to be. Only myself to blame as I could be doing it nearly daily. Space is really tight at the moment, we have three people in a one bedroom and it's starting to really irk me. (Clothes all over the place, dog hair all over the place, one bathroom.) Also annoying that I'm constantly asked really silly things, like, today, "why don't my tweezers work?". rolleyes (Pro tip: I am not a tweezer manufacturer. I do not know why your tweezers don't work.)

I defrosted the sliding glass door and fed the birds again today. Took some pictures, but the glass is scratched and the images always turn out dark. Grr.

My hand plow came in, going to use it to cut through that nasty crab grass out front and put in a new garden bed for a three sisters planting

That's crazy. We're getting something like 30cm of snow and the ground frozen solid and you're getting ready to plant a garden. x3


Which plants?


My aloha lily is growing like mad. I saved it from a house at the start of the fall. (It was just left outside, dry as a bone, and totally uncared for and wouldn't survive the winter.)

I also found out how racist and privileged a friend of mine is. emotion_facepalm

i was researching succulents heart and what to do about root rot crying . what is an a aloha lily question . and about the friend that sucks sweatdrop

Today's list of things being done is a nice short one
Laundry is the priority of the day.

Warning this is very long and i don't know a shorter way of describing it without being far too vague.
@pirhan: I work for a heat treating company so basically people send us different kinds of metal and parts that need to be hardened or softened for various applications, like drill bits that need to be made super hard so they stay sharper longer when your drilling holes, or the blades for the jaws of life that they use to cut people out of cars need to be hard but not so hard that they get brittle and they need to be super tough so they don't bend or break.

So we take all the parts and heat treat them.

Dental tools made out of titanium need to be age hardened (also called precipitation hardening) what we do is heat it up to a certain temperature and hold it at that temperature for a certain amount of time depending on the size of the part, the changes the customer wants to occur and whatnot. Its called a solid solution at this point (the parts aren't molten and don't lose their shape or anything but the elements within it can mix together more completely). While the part is at temperature we get molecular grain growth within the atomic structure which helps strengthen the metal by bonding inside of the structure. Getting just the right grain size within the structure means we can increase the tensile strength or if we want we can make it super soft with a super fine grain structure which makes it very malleable.
Copper, aluminum, titanium, and some very exotic stainless steels all require age hardening because they are non ferous.

Ductile iron (iron alloys that don't contain enough carbon to be considered steel) is hardened by heating to specific temperatures above the point at which they become nonmagnetic and then taken from a very high temperature (between 1400-1600 degree's) and dunked into a quenching medium such as oil, water, or a brine. That cools them at a specific speed until they drop below 200 degree's when the metal stops having changes within it. Then it is immediately tempered at a temperature between 300-900 degree's Fahrenheit depending on how hard/tough/malleable/shock resistant the customer wants their product to be.

Low carbon steels are heated to a temperature above non-magnetic and quenched in oil because they have a very low carbon content they don't get as hard as higher carbon steels and need to be quenched faster to get the maximum results out of heat treating.

high carbon steels need to be heated up to a temperature around 1575 degree's and quenched in oil or a brine (water can be used but usually will crack the parts) to harden them sufficiently and then tempered back (pulling some hardness back out of them so they don't become brittle) to the specified hardness.

Really exotic alloys require super complicated stages to the process that i don't know enough about because i don't handle them.

My specific title is Ipsen department furnace operator (ipsen being the brand of furnace containing its own self contained quenching tank so the parts run from the front of the furnace into the back and then are lowered into the quench for a set time and then raised up and i pull them out onto an unloading cart grab them with a forklift and put them into another furnace to temper them) I run 2 furnaces that have internal dimensions of 25x30x50 inches with a maximum weight allotment of 1100 pounds, They are capable of running at temperatures up to 1750 Fahrenheit (actually they'll get much hotter but they are only certified to run up to 1750 and its considered unsafe to run them at temperatures beyond what their certified for).

All the materials come through my department, i sort them based on the appropriate process that will get the results the customer wants and then if i have 10 different orders that all have the same process i find a way to get them all into one furnace load to save the company and customer money.

I make up the loads for the furances, i load them into the furnaces, Set the temperatures and the atmosphere, monitor them until their done running through their process, set the furnace to quench them, then i pull them out of the furnaces, hand them off to the tempering guy who deals with them after that. Currently learning all of the furnaces for tempering as well.
Basically its a lot of heavy lifting in a very hot room. Loading the furnaces and unloading is the worst though because when you crack the door open to load the furnace the air coming out of that furnace is around 1500 degree's give or take and i'm standing about 3 feet away from it.
Basically we're changing the mechanical properties of metal with heating and cooling which changes the molecular structure into a more desireable one for specific applications each structure has a different name, martensite, pearlite, cementite, austentite, and i think i'm forgetting a few but each structure has different properties that suit it to specific applications such as cutting tools, shock absorbing tools (jackhammer bits), driveshafts for machines need to be able to take tremendous stress and torque. So we do what needs to be done to make the metal capable of doing what they want. Going into further depth would require me to have a degree in metalurgy and then i probably couldn't explain the crap either. Hell i need a degree in metalurgy just to understand my own job.

Like i said it is hilarious the two of us talking about this stuff at work because number one neither of us look like the sustainable living sort of folks, number 2 the environment is totally opposite of sustainable healthy living. Its the kind of environment where if people heard you talking about sustainable living they'd call us a homo or a hippy and some other names and whatnot despite knowing that we're both straight males. But they'll call us names just because the topic makes them uncomfortable somehow.

Got a sidejob lined up for the summer.

Going to be helping maintain beehives with the guy i work with. He's going to be buying an additional 200 hives from someone getting out of the business so he needs a second set of hands to maintain them during the spring/summer/fall so in exchange for my help i will be getting a full education in beekeeping (everything from honey extracting to requeening and whatnot) plus 10 beehives and whatever honey they produce. What will Plague do with 500-1000 pounds of honey...well most of it will get sold so that i can reinvest the money into buying a bunch more hives and knifemaking supplies. But i'll probably set aside 10+ pounds to brew a big batch of mead i think.
Assuming i toss in more money and get more than 10 hives i could make a decent chunk of change on the side in cash this year if there's a good yield out of the hives here's hoping for 20+ hives that yield 60+ pounds of honey each. I figure that's enough to reinvest next year and expand to more hives.

@Lyric: Interviewing is always a hit and miss sort of thing to me.
Don't worry though you'll get a job eventually just keep at it.

Went to the bank for the first time in a couple of weeks without realizing it and was shocked when i saw the balance of my bank account. With my newfound wealth i made my way out to the china tool store (harbor freight) and proceeded to buy some clamps, a big roll of butcher paper, cheap scissors for cutting nasty things that would destroy regular scissors that i don't want to destroy. Looked at welder's and lathes for a bit and then decided i didn't have enough research so i didn't buy either one. Eventually.

Looked at some stuff on youtube about building a vacuum forming press (i guess thats what it's called...its a frame that holds up a sheet of plastic and you heat the plastic and then place it over whatever you're making a mold of and suck all the air out and it forms the plastic around the object) I think i can make some pretty cool soap molds with the process. Found some recipe's for homemade mead and played some games on the wii.