Monday

• Called my machinery supplier to try to figure out the bandsaw, as I broke another blade. It really seems like my problems are due to the guide adjustments, which aren’t actually documented anywhere in the owner’s manual.

Tuesday

• Productive day. The saw worked flawlessly, and cut through the steel like a hot knife through butter. It really seems like the saw works better dry for this gauge of pipe. Had fun interlude as a pair of amorous bluetongue lizards pursued each other around my workspace.

Wednesday

• Discovered I had actually finished all my cutting yesterday, so ordered some new cover shields for my welding helmet’s window, and grabbed some odds & ends at bunnings.
• Also, picked up some HDMI cables in preparation for the new display that’s arriving tomorrow.

Thursday

• New display arrived, and a loooong day of rewiring my entire computer for a three display setup.

Friday

• Troubleshooting new screen setup. Its not as easy and troublefree as it should be, but it seems to have settled in ok, once I figured out that the physical ports on the graphics card do in fact have to be used in a certain order for things to work correctly.

Saturday

• Fired up the air compressor for the first time – everything works great. A little disconcerting that the red zone on the pressure gauges is the normal operating pressure, but that aside, it’s quiet enough to chat next to while running.

Sunday

• Down day, but the computer seems stable.

Monday:

• Bandsaw blades picked up from Brisbane.
• Mountainbiking shorts ordered from Victoria (which involved confirming a sizing guide has mistakenly listed inches as centimetres).
• Spoke to my welder supplier in NSW and sorted out the plumbing for all the hoses supplied with the machine and regulator.
• Spent a bunch of time researching mountain bike tyres.

Tuesday:

• Cut, Cut, Cut, Cut. The new saw blade went onto the saw nice and easily, and I was able to get through 7 more lengths.

Wednesday:

• Cutting continued, with 11 more lengths processed. Some real issues came up with the saw, however. Another blade snapped, and it seems to refuse to stay on the drive wheel, slowly working its way off, until it starts cutting into the cover. Each time you need to stop to figure out what’s going on, it requires removing the rear cover, which is 6 screws etc.

Thursday:

• Partial rest day. Got the last couple of lengths processed, the saw seems to be behaving itself. Got about a third of the chopped pieces labelled with their unique identifiers.

Friday:

• Finished labelling the cut sections, and started the process of adding the 45 degree ends to the interior fitout sections. Ran into problems with yet another saw blade breaking. Really not sure if this saw is viable in the long term.

Saturday:

• Sat by the pool and read a book for a while to get some sun exposure – I think I’ve spent too much time indoors the past couple of weeks. Then went to do battle with the bandsaw. Found a bunch of adjustments that aren’t mentioned in the user manual, and might have gotten it a bit more under control.

Sunday:

• Sat by the river, ate some takoyaki.

This week saw the beginning of my stART Grant, and it’s been preparation – getting a handyman over to install vertical bike racks in order to get the bikes out of the way, and free up space.

Thursday was a trip up to Gympie, ~40 minutes north, to visit the large Bunnings store which has all sorts of stock my local one lacks. I managed to pick up a plastic trestle table, which I’ll use as a temporary workbench, as well as some lifting feet, which I can use to level the whole cabinet once it’s done.

Friday was a day off(ish) to rest my back, but a significant discovery was made – mirror-effect spray paint. This is a huge deal because one of the materials I work with sculpturally is a mirrored type of glass, that isn’t normally used as a mirror, and it seems that custom mirroring of glass isn’t done anywhere in Qld. The afternoon was spent filing bevels on the steel for my welding cart.

Saturday some serious cutting got underway, until my bandsaw blade snapped, and then the replacement snapped, so I was out of bandsaw blades. Replacements will need to be ordered from Brisbane.

The steel arrived, and I spent some time chopping it all down into half lengths. I think at 30 lengths, I’ve officially achieved “steel stockpile”.

I also had a sheet metal merchant I asked for a quote a couple of weeks ago to no response, email me to let me know the job was all cut up and ready to collect.

There are some strange people in trades.

Intense concentration on CAD models and quantity-surveying has resulted in a finalised cutlist.

Studio In A Box is going to consume 14 6.5m lengths of 25x25mm steel. I’ll have to cut those in half, into 3250mm lengths, so I can manage and store them, and from there they get chopped into 105 separate pieces, to be welded back into place, like a jigsaw puzzle.

Spent the week working on the Studio In A Box, locking down the external form, and trying to get quotes for the cladding material.

A big achievement of the week has been to make some decisions about placement of the major components of the cabinet. There was a whole bunch of physically placing the gear again, but I’m pretty happy with the result.

Part of the process was to decide to build in a dedicated drill press station, and to interleave it with the bandsaw table while it’s all packed away.

The GOOD NEWS: I received a grant through the Qld Government / Arts Qld stART Grant programme. This is a great boost that’ll more than make up for the stuff that was cancelled due to Coronavirus. The funding is going to allow me to construct my Studio In a Box project, so that’s my time spoken for until the end of September.

Other news, I finally bit the bullet, an bought a third monitor for my computer. After much tooing and froing over what display to get, an fretting over how to deal with 4K resolution, I decided to just stick to standard 2.5k non-retina and pick up a 1440p 27″ display. It’s another BenQ, to match my twin 24″ models, and will give me the desktop Battlemech setup I’ve craved for ever. More importantly, it’ll give me more room to stretch out my palettes etc onto side monitors, while keeping my main content front & centre. The other thing it gives me, is yet another welding project, as I’ll have to build a shelf for my desk to support the new display over where my Graphics tablet sits.

Working on administrative stuff, a bit of time chasing down bugs in software (maybe I should be a paid QA person). I managed to put together a .cbz version of The Metaning, which seems to have worked out well – and I’ve got ideas for how to solve some of the other issues that are cropping up.

In other news, GOOD NEWS. However, it’s embargoed until Monday, so I can’t say what the good news is, but it’s good news.

The great metal-cutting happened.

Twenty lengths of steel, measured and cut. Going to take a couple of days off to recover, but it reinforces how necessary the studio-in-a-box project will be to alleviate the setup / packdown time.

While chilling I took the opportunity to rework the EPUB of The Metaning, to pull out all the interactive functions, and make it a more standard fixed-layout book. I’m pretty happy with the result, it’s a little less 2013 in style, and includes details about the exhibition, which almost makes it an exhibition catalogue. It kinda makes me think I should make the big art book version as an EPUB as well.

Related to that was a need to recreate a couple of webpages from the Australian Comics Journal, one of which was an interview with me, which seemed to have disappeared from the internet, as the ACJ’s website no longer resolves. it’s amazing how difficult it is to convert a .webarchive from Safari, into a normal webpage.

A bit of admin on Monday, then ordering some roller-stands to support material going into the band saw.

Tuesday, they arrived – sneaky delivery guy left them at the front door, and was gone by the time I came downstairs upon hearing the truck. The rest of the day, indeed most of the rest of the week was spent on tax paperwork for the end of the financial year.