posted
I was responding to a post about pounce patterns earlier today and remembered an event that happened a few years back in the billboard shop I worked in,...It was sometime back in the mid 80's and there was this article on billboard shop operations in a major trade magazine and there was a part in it about a homemade electro pounce that used one of those old big fat grade school pencils for a tip and you could actually draw with it as you pounced your pattern,..
It sounded real neat and looked really good in that article,....Well my buddy and I were feeling innovative one day in the dead of winter and things were slow in the paint shop that week in February.It was really a pain to have to go out and break the ice off of steel billboard ladders and catwalks that time of year,..don't ask me how we came by this scientific conclusion,....
Well anyhow we scrounged through the scrap pile and found about 15 feet of old gto neon wire and a 15,000 volt neon transformer with one side burnt out and got buzzed on the idea of making one of those "electropouncepencils" we had read about,....
Well after a few brilliant flashes of inspiration and after reading the article just one more time to make sure we'd gotten the desciption of this contraption down right we took off in different directions to gather the rest of the parts needed for our invention. I took off to the hardware store for some wire,the connecters,and a reostat switch needed to get 110 volts of electricity to this piece of junk transformer we'd scrounged,...My buddy went to the parts house for a spark plug boot and some heat shrink to make the pencil holder thingie that would be held in the users hand to draw and pounce with,..
We did good except for the heat shrink insulation part and my buddy in his infinite wisdom decided some standard black electrical tape would be a good substitute for the heat shrink,....well we took and grounded it to a 10'x4' sheet of paintlock ( another part of this contraption we'd scrounged from the fab shop,it was the old flat steel stock they used to fab neon boxes out of) then ran the lead off the remaining good side of this transformer with the gto wire,(neon cable that is about the size of tv coax,..only it has a multi-strand wire center and alot more insulation,designed to carry considerable more voltage than coax) and then hooked the reostat(dimmer switch like used in a house with big knob) inline with a plug so we could regulate the voltage once power was introduced via half of an old drop cord we had salvaged,..
Well to test it we just took a pair of old rubber handled pliers and touched the gto wire to the sheet of paintlok and boy would that baby spit fire!!!!This thing would spit an arch of electricity about an inch or more away from the board so we figured that distance would diminish once we put some paper in between the tip and the sheet of paintlok,....
The article said we could take one of those old big fat black grade school pencils about a half inch round and sharpen it on each end,then stick it into an old toyota spark plug boot so that the one side of the pencil contacted the wad of wire on the end of the gto wire inserted to the small end of the spark plug boot,Suposedly the graphite center would conduct the electrical current and draw like a normal pencil simultaneously....
Here is where we decided in our infinite wisdom to wander from the instructions in the magazine and substitute black electrical tape for two layers of heat shrink insulation,....this thing was lookin like an A-1 piece of do it yourself technology and me and my buddy were really proud of our inovative invention.
Well we drew straws to see which one if us would be the guinea pig to test this scientific contraption first,....Well I'm here to tell you this contraption would spit fire and burnt graphite like nothing I had ever seen,..I mean ya didn't have to touch the paper hardly, it would start arching about a half inch away from the paper and and spit graphite so fast it made making billboard patterns a breeze,...this thing was twice as fast as a regular electro pounce and you could not take your time or it would set the paper on fire,..at the time that seemed like a good thing because we usually spent at least 2/3 of a one day a week making patterns for each crew,...
The office at that branch of 3M had this fancy dancy phone system that had the junction terminal for the network to the huge mainframe computer the size of a small uhaul trailer and phone system in the front office that was located in a closet right just the other side of a wall from our pattern board which consisted some old steel tiffin panels that had been stripped by the blockout crew down to the bare metal.
Well my buddy decided to try out this new "Invention" the next time he had to make patterns and hooked it up in the main pattern room and went to work,..by the time he was finishing up his third 14'x48' set of patterns that day about noon, this phone guy shows up and the operations manager is showing him where the closet is,..this thing was creating so much electrical magnetic interference it had shut down 3M's mainframe,network, and was causing total static disruption of any phone conversations,radio reception, and any other type of communications that were taking place within about twenty-five yards.
Well about this time the heat from the probetip on this thing started to get to the electrical tape that we used to insulate it,..My buddy had never used it over three or four minutes in tests up until then,...Nobody had told us at the time they had just recently changed the pencil making process and instead of wood they were using a plastic compound that would start to melt when it got hot,..
I was In the main shop painting a face on the rack inside when I heard my buddy get zapped for the first time from this contraption,.I can't repeat here what he said but lets just say he was practiced at yelling from the ground five stories up to his helpers on the catwalk above and his voice carried very well,...needless to say he got our attention and a couple of the painters went back to see what the problem was and he was sitting on the floor looking kinda frazzled, sweating bullets, pale, and a little confused,...the new invention was laying on the floor nearby and it looked like the fourth of July anywhere within about six inches of the handle of this contraption,..I mean this thing looked like a telsla coil at a science fair and there were hundreds of 15,000 volt archs flashing anywhere within six inches of the handle onto the concrete floor of the shop,...
Well the phone guy was real cool and he kinda figured out what was going on once we explained the process of making patterns and he told us "You'd better not hook that damned thing up again within a block of his terminal closet or he wasn't gonna tell our boss,... he was gonna call the city electrical inspector and see to it we were fined and arrested if he could swing it",....My buddy assured him that would never be an option as he unplugged the contraption and headed out to the dumpster behind the shop,....
Gotta give it to that phone guy,...he never said one word to the shop manager or any of the suits in the office up front,...He just told them he found the problem and left,...
edited to correct the voltage,....
[ January 22, 2011, 08:33 PM: Message edited by: Tim Barrow ]
-------------------- fly low...timi/NC is, Tim Barrow Barrow Art Signs Winston-Salem,NC Posts: 2224 | From: Winston-Salem,NC,USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. — Charles Mingus Posts: 6712 | From: Mendocino, CA. USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
Like making signs, fabricating of some things are better left to the professionals.
-------------------- Harris Kohen K-Man Pinstriping and Graphix Trenton, NJ "Showing the world that even I can strategically place the pigment where its got to go." Posts: 1739 | From: Trenton, NJ, USA | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Not being so electrical or Telslic in my inventions, I was about ten years old, hanging out with my buddy, Tom in our kitchen one lazy afternoon, watching Major Astro, a cartoon program. We decided we needed to make a little sign with a magic marker. My mother had just left for the grocery store and we were home alone. I scrounged thru the kitchen junk drawer and found a green magic marker, but with the cap mysteriously missing. Probably my sister had left it off! It was almost dry. Not to be outdone, I figured some centrifugal force might cause the ink to come to the nib. I tied a 3' piece of string on it and began to twirl it around. After a few seconds, I tried it and it was better. Tom tried it another ten seconds and voila! We had a perfectly fresh magic marker. We made our little sign and were content and impressed with our innovativeness. Then I looked at the floor. There was a long series of little green drips from one end of the kitchen to the other. We freaked out and grabbed the clenser and sponge. In no time we had most of it removed, just as my mother showed back up from the grocery store and was impressed Tom and I had developed such a strong work ethic in cleaning the kitchen floor. Not really suspecting a thing, she praised us for helping out around there and all was forgotten fast. Whew! Almost busted.
My father took special pride in repainting the kitchen ceiling about once a year as they always smoked in there and that fresh white look was what he wanted. One night a couple weeks later, we were at the kitchen table and he looked up. From one end of the kitchen to the other were a series of little green dots. My father was incensed. He complained loudly that the paint he had recently used was defective! Years later and numerous attempts to repaint the ceiling, the spots kept coming back. I was never suspected of having anything to do with it and he passed from this world still mad about the paint company for selling him ceiling paint that had spots in it. To this day, I remember how to revive an old marker the same way, but reserve my centrifugal efforts to somewhere less prone to receiving the little spots. I may be no Tesla, but Newton would be proud of my understanding of centrifugal force.
-------------------- Preston McCall 112 Rim Road Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 text: 5056607370 Posts: 1552 | From: Santa Fe, New Mexico | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
So I guess I missed the voltage by about 13,000 volts,...go figure,..yea it looks alot like the contraption there Bill only without the reostat,..or is that one on the drop cord there just not too clear in the pic?
-------------------- fly low...timi/NC is, Tim Barrow Barrow Art Signs Winston-Salem,NC Posts: 2224 | From: Winston-Salem,NC,USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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posted
Tim, I haven't heard the term Tiffin panels in a long, long while...
-------------------- Jack Wills Studio Design Works 1465 E.Hidalgo Circle Nye Beach / Newport, OR Posts: 2914 | From: Rocklin, CA. USA | Registered: Dec 1998
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posted
Sonny the problem with that idea is that the stories are true and they resemble people still living out there and regularly doing the things I describe in those stories,.....the truth will make a person mad alot faster than a lie,..they can't dispute the truth,.....
I'm with ya there Jack,...ya had to be there to understand it,.....
-------------------- fly low...timi/NC is, Tim Barrow Barrow Art Signs Winston-Salem,NC Posts: 2224 | From: Winston-Salem,NC,USA | Registered: Nov 1998
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I am with Sonny, Tim you should write a book, you are a good story teller. Adding your voice would be a big plus. Bill
-------------------- Bill Riedel Riedel Sign Co., Inc. 15 Warren Street Little Ferry, N.J. 07643 billsr@riedelsignco.com Posts: 2953 | From: Little Ferry, New Jersey, USA | Registered: Feb 1999
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