I'm a polymath inventor/engineer/musician/artist living in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I've had the priviledge to get to do some interesting thing in my life, and made this blog to share some of them. I welcome collaboration and invite you to say hello if you like anything I've done.
A succinct summary of how learning to weld affects your ability to think outside the box. Forgive the language please, it spices the point.
I frequently describe learning to weld as one of the most empowering breakthroughs in my growth as a designer. All new fabrication skills open new opportunities to dream a little (or a lot) bigger, and welding suddenly let me see much more of the sorts of things around me as achievable by my own hand.
In general, I like to work on a principle that if I can find a way to enjoy the practice, the result will be both better and more authentic. (This is key not only to welding, but any skill). So I set out to find fun little excercises to practice welding on.
One of these excercises was making rings from square and round tubing. If you have a saw that can cut accurate angles repeatably, it’s easy to turn out a set of parts that will fit into a nice ring, with lots of seams to practice welding together. Below are the first such rings I undertook, when practicing TIG-brazing mild steel rings with silicon bronze filler metal. Along the way, I realized with delight that here was a great excuse to destructively test something, too. Thus, the video at the bottom, which shows one frame per hydraulic-pump-stroke, as I crushed the first ring and observed its failure modes.
Tacked at ID and OD. The fit of the bevel cuts is sublime! not a sheet of paper could be inserted at ID or OD of any joint. Spot on 64.3 degree (=90-(180/7)) bevel!
I’ve been playing with a new process in which I remove the silvering of mirrors in detailed patterns, leaving optically clear glass.
A zone plate made of mirror and optically clear glass zones will focus images in both reflectance and transmission. The focal length of this plate, at visible wavelengths, is too long to be practical though. I’m experimenting with shorter focal length, finer ring spacing, zone plates.
My first experiment was to make a Zone Plate, but my current process didn’t have enough resolution to make fine enough lines for a zone plate of short focal length at normal visible wavelengths around 600nm:
However, the process is fantastic for barrier grid a.k.a. moiré a.k.a. ‘strip’ animations, and for an afternoon project this has borne incredible fruit: only about a dozen promising directions to go from here! I decided to focus first on making an animated cautionary text and moving image safety sign for vehicles, especially bicycles, especially helpful for night-time visibility.
Mary Shaw is a gem. She is a fantastically interesting, diversely competent, engaging, and modest person who I befriended and formed an immense respect for while completely ignorant of her great eminence as Carnegie Mellon University’s Alan J Perlis University Professor of Computer Science (where she has taught since six years before I was born). As we met she was to me simply an engaging, creative, person who’d engage in conversations over a workbench, ‘soldering iron in hand’, on subjects spanning LED lighting, investment casting of custom metal drawer-pulls, glider piloting, glider construction, hot air balloon piloting, critical path analysis, vortex rings, bicycling, bicycle touring, bubble blowing mechanisms, bubble blowing while bicycle riding, tensegrity sculpture design, math, physics, engineering, relationships, photography… everything.
Mary introduces my puppy, Watz, to riding a bicycle.
When I proposed organizing a group bicycle ride for Bike-Fest here in Pittsburgh, for which riders would be equipped with bubble blowing equipment to produce large numbers of bubbles in the air we moved through, she and her husband Roy enthusiastically participated on a tandem. They made the cover of the local paper, riding that tandem and blowing bubbles, during the Pedal Pittsburgh Ride.
Mary and her husband Roy, who I will occasionally assist as part of his Hot Air Balloon chase-van and recovery team (Mary is a pilot too, of rigid winged gliders), are a marvelous couple. They give a great model of what I imagine a happy seventh decade might best look like. They are frequently seen about Pittsburgh riding their tandem bicycle, or working together at Techshop. They ride the 330 mile Great Allegheny Passage bike path 330 miles between Pittsburgh and Washington DC every year, revising their trail guide and publishing trip reports which have proven very helpful to other riders. Their guide book is available for minimal cost, and their earlier trip reports can be found online.
Sometimes I organize giant bubble blowing flash mobs. It should not be surprising that immensely creative, intelligent, and eminent folks like Mary Shaw and Roy Weil, or Lowry Burgess, embrace these sorts of whimsy. This one was attended by about 400 people. An excellent video was produced by Ben Saks at http://vimeo.com/68497111
I found out about this award today after just talking with her Monday – she did me the huge honor of recommending me to the Autodesk Pier 9 Artist Residency, which l have applied for – and didn’t even bring it up. Not that I’m one she’d brag to, but I think it’s representative of a quality I admire very much, of understated but immense competence.
Mary Shaw, Gordon Kirkwood, and Pittsburgh’s new mayor Bill Peduto outside of Whimsy Engineering’s office at Techshop Pittsburgh, after President Obama’s address there on the subject of innovation and entrepreneurship in America.
Grey Iron and Ductile Iron Pipe are the dominant conveyances of water and sewage in American infrastructure. These types of iron have carbon and iron constituents whose relative distribution and crystal sizes determine their mechanical properties. Over time, this material are susceptible to ‘graphitization corrosion’ in which either graphite particles migrate and aggregate (typically at temperatures above 800F) or in which local electrochemical corrosion at room temperature results in preferential loss of the iron / ferrite constituent of the matrix. When this happens, the pipe becomes brittle, and mechanical insults like vibration or thermal stresses can exceed the flexibility of this now brittle material, leading to brittle failure and cracks. However, this corrosion can be invisible, because the remainder graphite particles are cohesive and the pipe appears physically unchanged.
Illustration from the patent, indicating changing composition of portions of a grey iron pipe wall, in cross section.
During road work, construction, and maintenance operations, these pipes are visually inspected, but because pipes experiencing graphitization corrosion often look physically unchanged – the graphite material remains in the same contour as the original material, a method of detecting the change in properties of the pipe was needed which did not depend on visual changes, or subjective “bang on it with a hammer” subjective methodology, as was the state of the art previously. We needed a non-destructive method of detecting the changing properties of the pipe.
The insight of this patent is that the changing microstructure of the graphitized material has reduced magnetic properties due to the loss of iron. This could be sensed by measuring the magnetic permeability of the pipe, or it’s consequential magnetic measurements like inductance or the force developed within a fixed magnetic field. At the urging of my mentor Dr. Mehrooz Zamanzadeh, President and Principal Scientist of Matco Services, and with my assistant Sam, I developed a prototype sensor and confirmed that magnetic flux concentration, magnetic force, and inductance measurements are all viable methods of non-destructive detection of changed microstructure and ferrite loss in grey iron and ductile iron pipe. US Patent 8154279 was issued on April 10th 2012 for “Non-destructive testing apparatus for the detection of graphitization of iron”
I was honored to be invited to perform as the soloist and featured performer for the Moth Mainstage event at the Byham theater in Downtown Pittsburgh.
from the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures writeup:
“The acclaimed storytelling group, The Moth, based in New York City, will return to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, for a sixth annual appearance presented by Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures. Consistently a sell-out event, The Moth Mainstage is a two-act show featuring five true stories, told live and without notes. A mix of celebrated raconteurs and storytelling novices from Pittsburgh and beyond, this year’s lineup will explore the theme “Don’t Look Back” in wildly divergent ways.”
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The Byham theater has 1300 seats, and it was sold out. As lights dimmed at the beginning, then after the intermission, I walked on stage and played my own compositions on unaccompanied Cello. I then sat on stage through the whole event, in the best seat of the house, eight feet from each performer.
The theme was “Not Looking Back”.
Kate Tellers told a warm story about her 85 year old mother’s last hours, with family and friends gathering around, sharing cheeses and familial warmth, paying their respects as the old lady felt her death approaching and called a loving family near.
Vanessa German told a wrenching story of the most positive perspective shift, on the occasion of the recent death of her abusive schitzophrenic mother, and the moments and words surrounding her death, and the perspective she found to forgive her mother instead of resent her, and give her in dying the sort of comfort and tenderness that she and her 5 siblings so long sought themselves.
Richard Price told a fascinating story of his 15 year old great grandfather, born in 1900, as a short 110 pound napoleon-complex russian jew in the bronx with not much sense, taking on a gang of killers and thugs, the fein gang, in their lair to secure their release of a girl to her mother. And of how that gang got back at him by praising his courage, welcoming him, then initiating him by sending him to beat up a girl in a picket line who turned out to be his cousin, who he begged to play along, but would not. The gang saw he betrayed the intent of his initiation (he did not cripple his cousin) and he fled to the docks to save his life, got hired by a merchant ship (despite the sailor’s tale that a jew on a boat is bad luck), and then having further problems of similar origin when he confronted (on the third day of the journey) one of the rude sailors who demanded coffee from him, by dumping the pot of coffee on his head. His grandfather was then KEELHAULED, and survived. When they got to Algiers, his grandfather was again duped by the villains, and the sailors made peace with him and offered to take him out for a night on the town, visiting a brothel, and eventually slipping him a mickey finn, knockout drops, and tattooing this jewish boy from the bronx with a large christian cross on his arm, before abandoning him in port of Algiers. He was told that tattooing over a fresh tattoo would kill him (infection?), but replied to the tattooist he’d rather return to his mother dead, than for her to see a christian cross on his arm-he wanted the tattoo transformed to an anchor. He was rendered quite sick, but had the second tattoo, and then as a penniless teenage boy, made his way back from Algiers to New York over 6 months in or about 1916.
Horace Sanders told a story about his divorce and reconciliation with the mother of his third through eighth children.
Cole Kazdin told a story about how she broke up with her boyfriend of several years, amiably, then was rendered amnesic in a stunt she was roped into as a TV actress (being thrown in the air in a cheerleader outfit amongst people who were supposed to catch her, but didn’t). She forgot the breakup, and doctors asked her boyfriend to play along for the first few days. The details of how she would make post-it notes to collect details of her life, foreign to her, were fascinating.
Sold out crowd of 1300 holds their cell phones up to show themselves, upon the host’s request, after intermission. He pulled out an iPhone and I realized I had my Nikon and wide angle lens just offstage, and so I present to you here my 2.5 second exposure, handheld, on stage before 1300 people holding up cellphones. (C) Gordon Kirkwood 2014.The view from my seat
A great pleasure of the evening, in addition to talking to fascinating people all night, was getting to play solo cello for a half hour in the empty Byham before doors opened. It is a surprisingly live space, and there was no problem filling it with unamplified cello. Perhaps the highest point personally came shortly after I’d played at the beginning of the event, as the host chose to take the first two minutes of the event to tell 1300 people about how impressed he was with the other stuff I do.
Backstage just before going on, I got to talk to a stranger who turned out to be the executive director of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures Series, Stephanie Flom, who was to follow me onstage to introduce the event. She and her husband Peter, I learned later, met at Pitt, from which they graduated the year before I was born, in an experimental degree program in social activism. Her career has spanned arts management, social activism, her own artistic career, environmental education, and library and theater establishment. It also turns out we used to be neighbors. #talktostrangers.
