Running away from the weather moving up the Chamonix valley and retreating off the Aiguille d’Index.
Sometimes exterior forces change your expectations, hopes and plans.
IBM formatted. /
Cleaning out the office today.
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Argentina: A Skier’s Journey EP3
http://jordanmanley.com/blog/argentina-a-skiers-journey-ep3-season-2/
New Year's ice /
Continuing the tradition of bringing in the new year with ice climbing.
All the photos here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dacus/sets/72157628731878671/detail/
Dawn over Little Cottonwood /
After three weeks or so of inversion it is very refreshing to see blue skies again.
Work sanity: Swinging cold steel and hydroformed alumninum to start the day.
Pre-work view /
Got to see the clouds roll in and obscure the stars before dawn and then have the sun add a little bit of warm light to an otherwise blue cast canyon.
The second pitch of the Great White Icicle was in better than usual conditions too.
The Great White Icicle before work /
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Beautiful video. Lets the landscape and the scale be the story instead of just the skiing.
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“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
Chamonix photos /
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“Everything in life is a challenge. You can accept the challenge to improve. Or you can bask and distract yourself with success. It’s up to you. After all, sport is about personal growth. In the mountains you have the opportunity to challenge yourself beyond any means available in daily life.”
No snow? /
Without any new snow recently in any real amounts or on our way in the forecast, we headed up to just go looking around.
Don’t be fooled by the magic of photography, these were some of the only good turns of the day.
Definitely put some “texture” on the bottom of my skis after this outing. Looking forward to more (minus hitting as many rocks…).
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"The camera is the last thing that’s important… why is your voice {vision} special?"
Wish I had seen this sooner after discovering photography.
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Details matter: stainless steels /
Stainless steel, specifically 17-4, 304 and 316 are all grades that get used in surgical instruments all the time. But these steels are all fairly similar and when put two flat surfaces of the same material are in close sliding contact or load there isa risk of galling. What’s galling?
Galling usually refers to the adhesive wear and transfer of material between metallic surfaces in relative converging contact during sheet metal forming and other industrial operations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galling
A quick overview of stainless steels:
Image from: http://www.machinist-materials.com/stainless_table.htm and http://www.machinist-materials.com/stainless_table_two.htm
In a sliding-wear situation, a galling failure mode occurs first, followed by dimensional loss due to wear, which is, in turn, usually followed by corrosion. Galling is a severe form of adhesive wear that shows up as torn areas of the metal surface. Galling can be minimized by decreasing contact stresses or by the use of protective surface layers such as lubricants (where acceptable), weld overlays, platings, and nitrided or carburized surface treatments.
http://machinedesign.com/BDE/materials/bdemat6/bdemat6_5.html
Review of Wear and Galling Characteristics of Stainless Steel (.pdf)
Its hard to anticipate all the ways an instrument can fail, and galling is not a fun one to find out after-the-fact. The trade off between wear resistance and corrosion resistance in medical devices is very difficult because the parts will be cleaned and sterilized multiple times a week for the life of the part, so corrosion resistance is not really a negotiable item. Wear resistance then has to be solved by dissimilar materials or coatings. The above .pdf is the most comprehensive resource I’ve found so far.
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1 of 30 people in the world still making swords the old way. Craft, art and tradition still matter.
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"Its like snowboarding while someone holds a gun to your head. I don’t like it."
Update: the embed isn’t working so here is the link: http://vimeo.com/31572650
Sometimes you just have to start: /
CAD work, modeling, SLA prototypes can be helpful to getting most of the the way through the development of something, but its been my experience so far that until the metal chips start flying, its not real and you can’t really fully understand how its going to turn out.
Perhaps the hard way is the best way. I wish we had started directly learning about this part much earlier.
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November 6th turns /
Second day of the year? Not a clear definition of where last season ends and this one begins, but November is definitely not last season. This is also just 14 months of skiing in a row. Today was a fun way to get things kicked off: new bindings, the first tour with my brother and good to get out with Rich & Renee as well. There were plenty of rocks lurking under the snow and it felt like less coverage than what we found in October.
At these sizes its hard to tell which shots were from my DSLR and which were with the iPhone