During long weekends we prefer to stay off the busy roads and instead stay close to home. The extended time off is a wonderful opportunity to catch up on jobs around the house. My list of things to do was long. One of the many chores on my list was the front gate. It had been acting up and so I replaced one of the mechanical openers. It worked fine the twenty times I tested it. But as soon as I turned my back it acted up once more. After much testing and a close inspection I determined the fault was one of the hinges. I dragged out the welder, cables and tools to the front yard and cut off the top hinge on one side and welded in a new one. It swung perfectly fine by hand and during extensive testing it never failed. I congratulated myself on a job well done and then put all of the tools back in the shop. But when Becke dropped in last night to feed the horses the gate acted up once more. This morning I dragged the welder, cables and tools out to the front once more and replaced the remaining hinges. One hinge indeed did prove to be stiff when I tested it after I cut it off. The gate now worked perfectly every time I tested it (and it got a real workout this time). With the long, long weekend now pretty much behind us so too hopefully are the gate troubles. :)
MOA train
If you are ever passing through Minneapolis, Minnesota and have a chance to go to the Mall of America wander up to the third floor and you will see some of our work there. About ten years ago we designed the adventure golf for the mall. We built the features and signs in our shop. We partnered with a Minneapolis rock sculpting company to build the mountain and they also installed our completed work. The project had a tight timeline and in just over two months months we created enough features and signs to fill two large semi trucks. One of those pieces was this steam train.
The challenge of this project was to keep things light weight as we were building a literal mountain on the third floor of an existing mall. The engineers were worried. We used every trick in the book to make all of the features extremely strong but light weight. When we were done everything was loaded onto the transport trucks and sent it on it's way. The next day I jumped on a plane in order to beat the trucks to Minnesota. My job was to ensure everything was unloaded carefully, brought into the mall after normal operating hours. We then hoisted up the features to the third floor with a tall crane they had set up inside the mall. Over a period of weeks in three separate visits I art directed the placement of each feature and also the rockwork that the local team was building. This was my first installation where I could do no physical work but only supervise because of immigration rules. It was a tough assignment for this hands-on kind of guy. While everything may not have been done exactly the way I would have done it, the adventure golf turned out pretty spectacular.
A little peek
We've had an incredible project in our idea file for well over a decade. It's a fabulous idea that is begging to be built. We've worked on the story and ideas regularly through the years and developed multiple scenarios which would work in many different ways. We've borrowed ideas from the file a number of times to create other stories and projects. But the core idea has yet to see the light of day as a built out feature. Now at last, after a number of false starts, it may just get built. Sadly, nothing about the idea can be revealed publicly until we pull the curtain aside when the project is opened.... perhaps in late spring of 2017. But to not disappoint, I had to include one small clue... a new addition to the feature, just designed and sketched this evening as I work on some more drawings and details... This new addition would serve a functional and practical purpose. If you have to write a guess please do it via email. We don't want to let the cat out of the bag too soon. :)
