because every apartment with cats needs a fiberglassing workshop

[adularia]

I bet 11:00 at night is the wrong time to start trying to work-harden some wire the percussive way.

I'm not actually sure what I should use for this project. I am, as usual, trying to make a bunch of metal frames for slug-shaped... erm... organic hollow forms out of wire. If I can find heavy-gauge chicken wire that I can bang on mightily, that

Comments

[adularia]

85th Street in Manhattan. I make less than several million dollars a year. I'll let you do the math. :)

[adularia]

There are houses in Manhattan, but they're rowhouses, not detached buildings, with a very few odd exceptions (like I'm sure I've seen one or two recognizable houselike buildings around Gramercy Park, but it's about as odd as random green space in the middle of a block.) And they tend to be either much further north or much further south; maellenkleth knows better than I for the extreme north end of MNH, up 200th St way, but 85th is in the middle of infinite rows of apartment buildings all squashed together

[randomdreams]

percussive hardening of wire is a ... er, drawn-out process. Have you considered a drawplate? It'd be a lot faster: a single pull and you're done. Two and it's so hard it's difficult to work with, and four and it's ready to snap.

[adularia]

I did! I don't have one. I pulled it through the super-cheap, crappy pair of pliers I keep around for finesse-free gripping purposes. It's a moot point because I just wanted some stiff wire to test out the soldering ideas, and the gauge is way too thin for the final product.

Visually transparent, but also RF, I s'pose, because I don't want it to interfere with the contents. And yes, I like that very much as a litmus test.

[randomdreams]

Also: translucent/transparent visually or RF? A neat way I've found to determine the latter is to stick it in the microwave for 10 seconds and see if it heats up.

[dymaxion]

Yes, actually. I think we've figured out a reasonable solution.

[tcepsa]

It also occurs to me that making a metal cage for an RF emitter/receiver might just be a silly notionWithout knowing more about what you're trying to do, it does seem counterintuitive to me. With the transmitter/emitter in essentially a Faraday Cage (see also: Ice Pail) then while it might be able to send signals out, I am pretty sure that it would not receive anything (i.e. the mesh would be approaching RF opaque rather than transparent). On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the mesh "resolution" also factors into that, so if you're using something with wide enough spaces in it then it might work just fine (the gaps need to be a certain size with respect to the wavelength that you're trying to broadcast/receive, though I can't remember off the top of my head what that ratio is). For example, consider a microwave oven: most of them have a mesh in the front that you can see through (so visible-light photons can pass through), but due to the sizing and spacing of the holes the mesh is microwave photon opaque (so things inside the

[adularia]

Faraday cages were exactly what I was thinking about, yeah. See, I've had these ideas for soft "pod" lights for a few months, and I'm starting to actually make them. They are meant to be hand-felted/stitched wool over a thin framework, like Japanese paper lanterns. For the normal, plain lights, that's fine, but dymaxion and I are now working on a tricked-out version that involves (what else) some interactive signaling. If it's worth doing, it's worth making it glow, y/y?

I was almost about to go buy chicken wire, to be formed and soldered*, when I realized that this was established not to be a good idea for the ones that will be doing signal processing. Thanks, Physics 122.

*Buying chicken wire in Manhattan is more difficult than in suburbia. The guy at Home Depot asked me if I was planning to fence off my front stoop. Yes, heinousbitca, just before he suggested that I need to check a real hardware store. LOLgramercyhomedepot.

[tcepsa]

Ah, right, I remember previous posts about felt-like materials (and just had a flash of insight of "Tyvek!" but I suspect there are reasons that that wouldn't be practical, such as it would look or feel too artificial or thin, or the fact that the name is printed on it every four or five inches...)

And yeah, if it's worth doing, it is absolutely worth making it glow! ^_^ (though gipsieee apparently disagrees on me with this one, at least as it applies to building computers...)

One thing that might work, if you can't find a good alternative to chicken wire/metal-cage-of-some-kind for the support structure, would be to use infrared for the signaling. Or put the signaling transceiver on the base outside the mesh (if there's a base). Or on the outside of the mesh, if it's a discreet enough widget. Or not; I'm just brainstorming ^_^

(Home Depot not carrying chicken wire?! Isn't that some kind of violation of their corporate policy?)

[adularia]

I'd sooner think "Home Depot actually carrying everything you thought might reasonably be purchased from a hardware store" would be a violation of their corporate policy.

OH SNAP