Which means Jacki, our resident graphic artist, is out wandering the world someplace and pre-production on our next batch of books, like Composite Materials Book 2, has stopped entirely. So I’m left with time to wrap up a thousand small details at the bottom of the To-Do list. Items like finish and mail the author contracts, lock in some deals for books scheduled for late in 2011, and work with our web guru – Steve Delmont - on changes to the Wolfgang website (http://wolfpub.com). Once Steve finishes his tweak to the web site you will be able to buy Wolfgang books without registering and without a password. Just give us an address and a credit card number and buy the book. Waaaaay simpler and minimal BS.
|
|
Cutting an Ellipse
Saturday found me with a couple of hours to work on the Henry J, and mounting the steering column to the firewall is definitely Job Number One. Of course the column from Borgeson uses an outer tube made from Stainless, so I had to find a piece of stainless plate. Luckily, a friend by the name of Dave Spooner told me recently that he works near a couple of big fabrication shops in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, that use tons of stainless. I put in my order to Dave by phone, and he brought me a 6 X 8 inch piece of stainless, .050 inches thick, when he drove down for Back to the 50s.
If you push a round tube straight through a piece of metal or wood, you need a round hole. If you change the angle between the tube and the material, the resulting hole is no longer round. Drawing out the necessary hole on a piece of paper proved more work than I expected, but I did get it right the second time. And like most metal fab projects, once I created the paper template I could cut that shape from metal - stainless steel in this case.
[Image # 0306 Adjusted. Caption: One template and one un-finished mounting plate, the result of much careful cutting first with an X-Acto knife, then a Dremel tool and small cut off wheel.]
As I struggled to cut a hole of the right shape, I thought to my self, “I bet there’s a formula for this, or an easier way to do it, on the web.” But in typical bull-headed fashion I just forged ahead and got the job done. This morning I finally did a little research, and discovered two things: that an ellipse is definitely different from an oval, and that there are a couple of fairly easy methods for drawing a true ellipse.
All of which seems like a lot of words to describe a simple project – though maybe that’s OK as the project wasn’t quite as simple as I’d originally hoped.
|
|
