Rejects

May 26, 2010
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It’s not all sunshine with the metal spinning, especially the larger chimney and outer-wall pieces. In order to make the kettle as light as possible, I have to intentionally stretch smaller blanks to the edge of their elasticity. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But most of the time it does. I have also had to scrap […]

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Soft goods

May 25, 2010
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Because I’m doing very loud work, outdoors, in a residential neighborhood, it’s a pretty good idea to limit my hours of metalworking. So I restrict anything involving powertools to Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, which gives me a lot of time to work on indoor side projects. Like this blog, and like the soft […]

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Obstacles and opportunities

May 24, 2010
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Obstacles and opportunities. That pairing has been the theme of this project. I couldn’t find an ultralight chimney kettle, so I decided to make one. The pieces of aluminum bottles that I hacked up to make one were too thin to weld, so I looked into this “metal spinning” thing. The shops I sent design […]

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Anodizing

May 22, 2010
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Earlier this week, I called up a local shop and they were nice enough to run one of the boilers through their hard anodizing tanks as a sample. Man does it look good! The treatment on this one is primarily on the exterior surface, for reasons I’ll explain, but I’m working up a small design […]

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Cleanup

May 19, 2010
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There’s only one thing that prevents every surface in my apartment from be covered in aluminum-impregnated lubricant: Gojo. And even that doesn’t get my hands completely clean. My wife and I went out for our two year anniversary last night, and along with cologne, a clean shave, and a crisp, collared shirt, I couldn’t help […]

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Paired parts

May 18, 2010
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This is the first time I’ve gone into assembly-line mode with the kettles themselves. I’m still finding that small differences in parts mean that some chimneys fit better with some outer walls, so everything isn’t completely interchangeable. Ramping up production also means that I’ve been trying different methods of assembly to streamline the process. They […]

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Numero uno

May 17, 2010
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After hucking a slew of ill-formed mutants from the lathe last week, I finally popped off the first finished kettle earlier today. This particular kettle is going to be the test subject for the anodization and etching finishing processes that I hope to apply to all of the kettles. A lightening storm has me back […]

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Production

May 12, 2010
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The fire bowls were a really good place to start. They’re small and manageable and helped me work out some kinks in my technique before moving on to the far more difficult outer-wall and chimney. This pile of 37 represents two days of part-time work. They’re what’s left from the 45 blanks I started with. […]

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Rainy day, hot tea

May 12, 2010
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I try to see the open air of my shop as a “feature,” but in bad weather it sure doesn’t feel like it. So I took the opportunity of yesterday’s rain to make some tea and fire up my old prototype. * Two notes about the video: 1. You don’t have to blow into it […]

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Metal spinning…

May 11, 2010
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… is like making love? Not really, though there are whole host of lewd comparisons I could make, but won’t. Actually, it’s most often compared to throwing pottery. Thanks to the power of levers and the amazing ductility of aluminum, the metal miraculously flows over the mandrel. But just like throwing pottery, all this plasticity […]

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