Guardian Metalworks

I’ve been fascinated by CNC machines for quite some time now. They pose all kinds of great engineering challenges, as well as being very, very useful. For all that curiosity though, I only recently (last summer) stumbled on to somebody that had built their own. Turns out, there’s a rather large community of people who are building their own CNC stuff. cnczone.com is the best (and biggest) I’ve found. Here’s a video of a CNC wood router table that somebody built.

December or so is when I decided to build one for myself. I knew early on that if I was going to invest this much time in a project, it had better be worth it. I started compiling a list of features I wanted in a long term CNC companion… Big project.

Here’s (roughly) what I’m aiming for:

• 4′ x 8′ x 1′ cut volume
• 0.001″ repeatability
• router and plasma beds
• chip guards for minimal cleaning
• efficient dust extraction

I’ve decided on a bit of a different layout than most – more on that later.

I have servos, encoders, three axes worth of linear rail, one ballscrew, power supplies, a computer, software and steel…

About a year ago, I picked up SolidWorks. I intended to learn how to use it and transition all of my design work to the digital realm… but the learning curve was just big enough to make pencil and paper faster for getting actual work done.  Now that I’ve got a complicated machine in the works (more on that later), I wanted to do it right, so I’m back to learning how to use SolidWorks.

I’m using the SolidWorks 2007 Bible by Matt Lombard. Easy reading, but since it’s intended for more advanced users than I, the first few chapters are more than a bit overwhelming. I’ve done a few tutorials, but step by step instructions don’t teach me anything. Finally, I just decided to jump in and try to model something. This is (approximately) my favorite coffee cup:

rough coffee cup created in SolidWorks

Woot. I have a feeling I’m going to love this.

My friend Nathan, who works as a developer at Intechgra, and runs theViewFromHome.com on the side, recommended WordPress to me quite a while ago. gmw.com was originally set up with Blogger because I had some experience with it, but after seeing a bit of the WordPress interface, I decided to give it a shot with my wedding/personal website: beckyandhalsey.net. It was so easy to set up and maintain (much more intuitive and flexible than Blogger), that I made the decision to migrate guardianmetalworks.com. It took me a grand total of about twenty minutes to install wordpress and import all of the old posts. Another half hour of tweaking gave me a site that I am happy with, for now.

Stay tuned… I have literally dozens of posts photographed and planned, and now that I’ve made the jump, they should be much more forthcoming. Big things (literally) are coming.

So it’s been a bit more than a week. Here’s why: my modem stopped working entirely on Sunday. It sat there and scanned for signal for three days straight. I reset it multiple times. It started when there was snow on the ground, so I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved it around again. To no result.

I called tech support this morning, after the snow melted. The tech made me go through the standard process again. She gave me the same excuses. At one point, she suggested “holding the modem up higher”. Because that’s a long term solution. Because I want a pile of stuff in front of my window just so I can continue to have problems with your service.

So instead of believing me that the modem gets great signal when it’s cold and rainy, (weather “changes the way the ‘frequency’ enters the modem”), we did some more tricks from page one. She started to suggest that I try a new modem. I told her it was new. THEN she read my history. She had me reset the modem again, and told me to keep trying new locations.

Just for kicks, I asked her if my consistent problems and attempts to diagnose them might be related. Then she actually read my history. Silence for a bit, then she uttered “I’m not seeing you having lots of problems.” This is my third call in a week and a half. A bit more silence, then ‘ok,’ which I will assume was an assent that I have, after all, had problems. More silence, then “I’m showing you had two modems on your account.” Yes, we’ve already established that you sent me a new one. More silence…

Turns out that my modem had been disabled. Really? That’s information that should have turned up as soon as she brought up my account. I asked why it had been disabled. She couldn’t give me an answer. Warehouse, tower, support, billing… Congrats, that’s your whole company right there. Knowing why it was disabled might have helped the next time I have issues.

Read the serial, enable the modem, power cycle… Voilá. Works as well as ever. I am going to give it a couple days so I have some more data on the actual problem before I call in again. Data is power.

A few suggestions for clearwire:

• Fix your customer service attitude. I understand there are a lot of stupid customers, but when somebody calls in with several tickets on their account, it should be VERY clear that they’ve done the basic troubleshooting steps many times. Believe them when they say they’ve moved the modem around before calling you. Believe them when they say they get good signal when it’s raining. Allow your techs to skip forward a bit instead of insulting your customer and making them humor you with stuff they’ve already done.
• Train your techs to think independantly. A normally spectacular signal going to zero suddenly… might be related to weather, but it should come back when the weather gets back to normal. The modem is in the same place now as it was yesterday.
• Find a better UI developer for your support application. It’s clear that the disabled modem showed up somewhere in your application, but that’s such a simple thing to check on, that it should have been listed (probably color coded, too) very early on in the series of screens your techs go through. Simple querey, simple addition. Would have saved me (and you) half an hour.
• Keep track of how and why things happen: e.g. who/what did it and why did it happen? If it was the tower, that’s potentially relevant to diagnosing my ongoing problem. If it was just a tool at the warehouse clicking the wrong modem to disable, then it can probably be ignored the next time I call. If it was a technician, then why, and why wasn’t it enabled again.

So I am back to waiting for a few days.

I wrote the story in the last post with the intent of posting an ironic craigslist ad. I pressed ‘continue’ when it was done, and with every bit of ironic coincidence the universe could muster… Clearwire was, yet again, uselessly slow.

I’d already devoted close to an hour and a half to Clearwire this morning, so I figured I could burn some more time. I started a speed test (120kbps down), and called tech support. I got one of the nice guys who seemed to know his stuff. He checked some stuff, did some ‘provisioning’, had me power cycle the modem after the tower had a chance to reconfigure… Worked after the reset, as it usually does. Happily, he seemed to actually believe me that this had gone on for months, so he set up a high level support ticket. I think that’s been done before, but it would have been on one of the calls that they don’t have a record of.

The tech came ever so close to admitting that if the high level ticket didn’t result in change, that they had done all they could, and that I might be entitled to a clean release. Didn’t actually say so. I asked him to note that in my account so that the next ‘account specalist’ I talk to will believe me.

I am to wait and watch, like ever. I am going to give it a week before I resume my campaign.

NOTE: Please read the followup post before you conclude anything.

I have been a clearwire customer since about 7/07. In that time, I have gone from happy with my service to downright pissed off. I want out, and clearwire corporate is being downright assenine. They suggested selling of the rest of my contract on craigslist, so here I am. More to raise awareness than to actually get out. Here’s my story:

When I joined, I lived up in the south hills. I was tired of expensive comcast. I was a fairly early adopter, and never got great signal, but it was enough to get pretty good, reliable internet service. I moved in September last year to the flats near the fairgrounds. There’s a clearwire tower less than a mile from my house. After a few weeks of trial and error (mostly error), I found ONE (inconvenient) spot in my house where I got good reception (five bars 99% of the time) from the tower closest to me. Life was good for six months or so.

Then the dropouts started. Their frequency varies. I’ll go a week or two with stable (but slow) service, then I’ll hit a patch where I’m having to reset the modem every five minutes. Speed is also affected: I have speedtest.net results going back a few months that vary between ~2000kbps with 130ms ping (faster than advertised) down to 96kbps with 900ms ping.

Tech support has been less than helpful. I got the same runaround the first few times I called or stopped in: “cycle power, connect directly, move the modem, sources of interference.” I tried all that. Since it’s an inconsistent problem, the only real way to troubleshoot is to change something and use as normal for a few days to get an idea how often it would drop out after the most recent change.

Finally it got to the point where even if it was ostensibly working, it was so slow that I could hardly watch a video on YouTube. I’ve started doing half my surfing and YouTube watching from my phone. Months of this, calls to tech support… I was done.

I called to cancel about the middle of last month. I figured with a history of problems, it wouldn’t be a problem to get out without paying a cancellation fee. WRONG. The account specialist I talked to couldn’t find a record that I had ever called in. What?! Perhaps understandably, she stayed firm on not letting me out. I agreed to give tech support one last shot. One more run through the basic steps, and they agree to send a new modem. New modem, spend a few more weeks with the old crappy service just to be sure… No dice.

I called tech support again today. I gave them the saga, then the tech started talking about sources of interference and not using the modem near a router. Been there done that. Turns out he was talking about that because it’s the last thing they can do to troubleshoot a problem. I have a good signal, so they won’t send out a tech. At one point, he said that it was ‘normal’ to have to reset the modem once a week. I escalated the call, and the manager didn’t have anything else, either. He seemed (to his credit) willing to let me cancel over this. Transfer back to accounts… They still want the damn cancellation fee.

Here are the options she outlined: get somebody to take over my contract, pay the cancellation fee, take a discount and deal with the crappy internet, or continue going round and round with tech support. I am not going to saddle my friends with this service. I wouldn’t even do that to people I dislike. She suggested that I try to sell it on Craigslist. I won’t do that to a stranger, either. Finally, she offered to try to get a truck sent out, even though I had a good signal. I took her up on that, and talked with a local tech for a few minutes. More blah about interference sources and eliminating the router as a possibility… Best he could offer is that I should call in while my internet is acting up. I’ve thought about that. I would love to. When I am using the internet, I’m either trying to get work done, or hanging out with friends. It’s often after hours, and when it isn’t, I still don’t feel like wasting close to an hour on the phone with a company that has rightfully earned my ire!

So yeah. I am pissed at Clearwire. Even if my service magically starts working perfectly, I want out. I don’t want to deal with powerless phone tech support anymore. I don’t want to deal with account specialists that can only offer you a discount for living with crappy service.

There are a lot of people that would say “Tough! You signed a contract.” Normally, I would agree. I went in with my eyes open. To them I say, “Yes. I know I agreed to stay for two years or pay a fee. The other half of that agreement was that I would get acceptable internet service. As far as I am concerned, Clearwire broke the contract first.”

I am not saying Clearwire is a scam, either. I was happy with my service for a good chunk of the time I have had it. I have gotten crappy service for months. I have made a good faith effort to help them diagnose the problem and fix my service. They have failed to fix the problem, so I want to leave.

I am going to continue to fight. I am going to give tech support one last chance to send out a tech (apparently, the tech has the power to say ‘let this one go’). After that, I am going to take this as far as I have to in order to get out without my rights as a consumer being violated any further. That includes complaints on every blog and forum I can find, official complaints with the Oregon DOJ, the FCC, consumer advocacy groups, emails to the highest Clearwire reps I can find… You name it. I’m thinking of registering a domain and setting up a forum for people having trouble with Clearwire.

So yeah. Hopefully some good old Eugene Activism can convince Clearwire to do right by me.

I am pleased to announce that I am now accepting work from everybody. In short: building, design or repair furniture, machinery, tools… Check the next posting for a better description of what I can do for you.

If you have a project for me, please send me an email or give me a call to set up an appointment. Estimates are always free; so is talking.

Here’s a few reasons you should consider working with Guardian Metalworks:

• local
• independant
• ecologically sensitive
• low overhead

I realize that this website is a bit sparse. My portfolio is in progress. If you’d like to see more of my work, get in touch. I have a lot of stuff that I’ve built for myself and the shop. It will be cropping up here as I have time to write about it.

Guardian Metalworks is a small, independent woodworking and metalworking shop. I can design, build and repair a broad range of items from fine furniture, to automotive parts, to sculpture.

GMW is equipped to deal with wood from lumber to finished product.

GMW is not (unfortunately) a full service metal shop, though there are plenty of projects I can tackle with what I have:

• TIG welding (steel, stainless, and aluminum)
• Plasma and torch cutting (manual, not CNC)
• Light machining

I can provide a fairly extensive range of services, but there are a few notable exceptions:

• Houses. I am not a licensed contractor.
• Cars. My shop is not zoned for automotive work, but I can fabricate or repair parts that are brought in.
• Extensive paint jobs. I can do pretty much any kind of wood finishing and some painting, but I have to send out complex painting and anodizing.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

I made one of these when I proposed to my beautiful future wife. Everybody liked it, so I’m close to finishing a batch that I can sell and use to promote the shop.

E36 BMW coupes, like the one that my friends drive, have a rather notorious problem with the window regulators. Not sure what the root cause is, but one day you end up with a window out of its track, and a couple bent regulator arms. Anyway, I helped them fix the right side a couple years ago, and this weekend was a prime opportunity to work on the drivers side. The fix is well documented elsewhere; on to the good stuff.

The drivers side seat back had been getting progressively more loose. Not dangerous, but it would pitch back and to the right whenever you would lean back. Not exactly comfortable.

The local (and highly recommended, if you can afford them) German auto shop, Autohaus, found a replacement for something like $1400, and the cheapest wrecking yard find wasn’t an exact match, and still over $400. It was time to dive in and see if I could do better.

Tearing into a BMW seat is an experience. There’s no trick to the rear passenger access lever and the head rest. They just pull off. My usual hesitance about using force cost me half an hour. I recommend removing the back panel and all of the upholstery and foam before trying to remove the seat back frame from the rest of the seat. Here’s what I found:

Not an easy fix. The paint, to BMW’s credit, covers everything. There are plenty of nooks and crannies. It needs to be gone, down to bare metal, to get a top quality weld. I thought for a while about using an epoxy or some kind of splint. While it’s possible that a well made mechanical attachment could hold up, it would have to be a fairly complicated shape to take the torque applied around the tube.

Back to welding. I cleaned as much as I could along the break, and put in a couple of tack welds in the cleaner spots to hold the frame in place. They were fairly uneventful, and aside from some deposits a quarter inch or so away from the weld bead, fairly clean. I decided to try to weld the rest of the break in small chunks, cleaning between each. Decidedly not my cleanest or prettiest weld, but working in small patches, I was able to get decent fusion without heating up the remaining paint too much. Adding plenty of filler on the tube side, then coaxing to the sheet proved most successful.

At any rate, a couple of coats of paint and a half hour of reassembly later, my friends have a solid original seat. For a lot less than even a mismatched junkyard find.

This is a great example of the ecological value of repair. Had they purchased a new seat, this one would probably have ended up in the trash. Here’s a breakdown: ~20lbs of steel, two big chunks of automotive foam, a resin/fiber/vinyl seat back panel, a few pounds of plastic and a couple yards of leather. While welding isn’t exactly light on resources, a couple inches of filler, some electricity, a couple coats of paint and a small sanding disc is a lot easier to stomach.