metals student accomplishments

The Chair of my Department made this poster to highlight student accomplishments from the past year. 18 of the 25 exhibitions on this list came out of the Metals area. Alissa Goble had an exceptional year. I'm really glad the students are making good work and being recognized for their efforts.

 

silver soldering organization

Yesterday, I spent some time in the campus studio working on more organization. Our soldering bench has several shallow drawers and for the past year each drawer had a different item in it related to soldering. The drawer space was underutilized and honestly a mess. Plus students never put things back in the correct drawers. We used to get some nice pieces of multicolored HDPE donated by a company that makes kids playground equipment and so I used a piece of 3/4" HDPE and made a layout for all of our main silver soldering tools. I spent most of the afternoon tweaking the design while to piece was still on the router only to take the first piece off and discover that my containers of flux were not inset deep enough to close the drawer..ugh. Oh well, the torch tip recesses were over cut by the time I nailed down the outline, so I fixed the depth of cut and recut a new piece at the end of the day. I test fit this piece this morning and I am cutting a second one for our other soldering bench top drawer. Now we'll have more storage space in the rest of the drawers. I need to start my Metals studio improvements and tools website with file downloads for all of these things so people can have the files to modify and use for their studios. Someday...

Also, side-thought: these kinds of projects are super gratifying. Maybe it's because I feel like this piece should be around for a while and be used at least for as long as I am teaching here. It should also help with teaching and I'll feel better when I'm not hunting for a tool when I'm trying to demonstrate something. Over the years it feels like these kinds of jobs are the filler between personal projects. Regardless, it's good to do these things.

 

studio improvements summer 2026

This summer I've been working on a few projects in the Metals studio on campus. I have a technical assistant, Sandy, who has been painting all of the ventilation hoods in the studio. When the building was remodeled, we moved back in about this time last year and the hoods were still the old brown that they had been years ago. We gained a few new hoods with the expansion of the studio, but for some reason some of the hoods were painted and some were not. It had been bothering me, but there just wasn't time to fix it during the school year. Well, with Sandy's work, we were finally able to rectify this. The large soldering hood, the chemical room hood, the enameling room hood, and the casting room hoods are all freshly painted. She also painted our forming table metal legs, and some shelving for me. What an improvement!

I also worked on the wall of hammers at the start of the summer by hanging metal pegboard and getting out hammers all hung. I still need to make some vinyl silhouettes but at least it's up and the hammers all have a home. I was able to purchase a new Bonny Doon press with electric pump. I am super stoked about this. And we were able to get a really nice Neutec JR-2 casting machine. I still have some work to get the proper wiring on this, but we are really starting to expand the tools that we have. We'll have a new Vcella kiln for our enameling area coming soon as well. I received a grant from the Enamelist Society for this new addition. 

We only have a few weeks before the new semester starts, but I've been working on getting everything ready. This sure beats last summer at the same time. We still weren't sure if we'd be moved in before classes started and we received occupancy the weekend before classes started. It was kind of a mess, so I feel like I'm finally getting things where they should be. I also rewrote all of the curriculum last year and the new Metals concentration starts this year. I'm thankful that our new leadership has a vision for what we might become and that things are improving for our students through the new programming and facility improvements that are happening. I can't wait to see what the new year brings.

 

3d scanning: reverse engineering cast iron parts

A few weeks ago I purchased a new 3D scanner. Adam had someone reach out to him to see if we could reverse engineer a part for a Ford Model A woody. He had one bracket from the right side, but he needed a left side bracket. I 3D scanned the bracket and then Adam took the model and mirrored it and scaled it to allow for shrinkage via iron casting. the owner will make a mold to pour in iron. I printed a version from the raw scan and it's crazy how much texture is picked up from the scan. The reduced mesh model I gave to Adam actually printed better, but its amazing the amount of info the scanner can get. The scanning markers are awesome for aligning the model and I am in awe of how much better things have gotten with 3D scanning.

I really enjoy this kind of work. It makes me think that I should start a business recreating hard to find parts for automotive and motorcycle industry or at least make one off parts for people restoring old cars or bikes. I just want someone else to run the business and I'll do the work.