February 28th, 2011

Today’s June’s birthday.  Jenny and I got up and took her to Disneyland for the day.  Jenny’s mom, grandma Rosie, also spent the day with us.  It couldn’t have been a better day at the park.  It was Monday and the park was completely empty.  I don’t think I remember seeing it so quiet there.  The longest wait in line for a ride was 20 minutes.  Junie had a great time.  At around 4pm we had lunch and I left June with Jenny and Rosie.

I drove off to the hardware store to pick up more binding posts.  I was hoping to get started on building this larger version of a previous project called the Pinto-graph.  The binding posts are what I use to connect the arms together.  The arms I’m using are from a mirror I picked up from ikea.  These arms are about three times as long as the arms from my original Pinto-graph so the drawings it makes should be about three times the size.

I arrived at my parents house and began assembling the arms together.  I had to drill out the holes a little larger to make them big enough for the binding posts to fit.  After that I had to grind the surface around the holes with my dremel tool to remove some sharp shards of bent metal.  Once all the pieces had been smoothed over I assembled the arms together with the binding posts.

After it was done, I made the arms extend and retract and I was shocked to feel a large amount of weight pressing back.  I became concerned whether my motors would have enough torque to handle it.  My hope was to have the drawing surface mountable on a wall as you watched the drawing take place but with that steep of an angle the weight might be too much for my motors.  I’m sure the motors could handle it if the drawing surface laid flat on the ground but that takes up a lot of space and isn’t as cool as having it on the wall.  I was hoping to get it done in time for the art show but I began to realize that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

I could’ve run some tests with my motors but I didn’t want to burn them out only a few days before the art show.

I called it a day and went home to continue the printing.  I still had over a hundred more days to get printed.  I stayed up pretty late in the studio printing my images.  I made a patch on the modular as I printed but I was too lazy to setup the recording equipment.

I went to bed after a few hours of printing.  Tomorrow I move my stuff into the gallery.