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September, 2007

President’s message: If you missed the last meeting held at James Howard’s place, well, you are a fool. The weather was perfect, the garden was gorgeous, the company was excellent, Rick Chownik put on a great show, and our hosts made sure all of us had a good time. While Rick did his thing in the driveway with the men watching, Jame’s wife entertained the women on the porch. James tried a bold experiment: he offered sushi as a snack. While one person jokingly called it “bait,” another was adventurous enough to try it, declared it delicious, and went back for more!

    I put in a few pictures of my adventure to the Philippines . It was a success on several levels and I am working on excuses to go back.

James and Sally Howard were our hosts for this special meeting.   All of us in the Metal Club thank you for the work and thought you put into this very fine evening.

Rick Chownik is seen preparing for his casting demo. You know this shot was taken early in the evening: the women are still here. They later gathered on the porch to talk about us.

Erie glow. After fussing with my camera to turn off the flash, I almost caught the neat redness of the furnace in action. It didn’t take very long to melt quite a bit of aluminum.

Do not try this at home! Rick is pouring molten aluminum into molds. Don Foren has been involved in this, too. If you want to do this, ask them about singed eyebrows, steam flashes, fireballs and small explosions. The results, however, were very good. All 4 castings shown below were of fine quality.

The garden. James and his wife have created an urban fantasy garden with uniquely stylized fencing, artwork of their own design and manufacture and free-form flower placement. This is definitely award winning. I don’t know whether its James or his wife that does most of the work in the garden, but whoever it is, it shows and it looks like its worth it. What a fine retreat from the big city.

The punch. Here is the punching machine I was working on for more than a year. It is installed and operating in Manila , the Philippines . I went there for a week to install and commission it. Its 17 feet wide, punches an area 2 feet by 8 feet and can do 4 hits per second at 4 tons.

Manila . Downtown, these extended, stylized Jeeps are running all over the place, snarling up traffic that’s bad to begin with. But its how to get around. Then my host took me to the top of the island to see the world’s smallest volcano. Very scenic.

On a very personal note: At the American cemetery and memorial to the Missing, found the name of my Grandfather. I am honored to be the first of my family to be able to visit this place. It’s a 152-acre plot with 17,000 graves and names of 36,000 Missing.