Stephen (Perandex)

Building and unravelling.

[Tim Cash @timcash]

Training ground for electromagnetic code generator

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

Pittsburgh sports are very on-brand 🦾

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@cosmicjake37 That’s pretty cool! We should chat

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

When you’re a welder but your heart is 100% aerospace republic

[Angus (dirtman) @dirtman]

Cooking with the fellas

@masch_services @Perandex

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@ethanmclark1 We're building them in the US. Let's chat sometime.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@netcapgirl @dirtman @JulianFried @timcash Standing on the shoulders of giants

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

Turned up early this morning and found 2 new TVs. I see building dashboards that give executives actionable insights into critical business functions in my near future.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

Everyday living in a world where Onion headlines are becoming more true. All our critical infrastructure needs perfect welds.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@TAGG_ART @deadbeatregular Lol me too

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

When the only lasers you’ve got are class 3B but you haven’t got any blue safety goggles, so you quarantine the laser in its own room and trigger it from the other side of the shop.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

POV: you’re an IPG Lightweld and me and @masch_services are running some weld tests

[cnc masch buddy @masch_services]

reindustrializing with @Perandex @dirtman and @JulianFried

if you once the fence about laser welding just imagine how cool you’ll look in the glasses! 😅

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@Elliott_EcomMfg @masch_services @dirtman @JulianFried Yes, but laser welders and cutter beams are in the NIR spectrum so you don’t actually see the laser itself, only the fiery aftermath.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

Yes, I like the sound of this.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@dirtman @masch_services https://t.co/gyajaJ5Xf3

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

😭

[Daniel Franke @dfranke]

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.

You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.

You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.

You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.

You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.

You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

@dioyasu @P33SOUP lmao

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

Robo ears or Mr Krabs? 🤔

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

4/It's a worthy problem and I’ve been working on the whole lifecycle of high welding quality, from predicting quality in real-time to eventual verification in post.  Gecko Robotics does cool work on the post-inspection front!

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

1/Depends on the type of inspection (metallography, NDT, visual, destructive).  Visual is a simple vision problem, but once you get into post-weld verification like the cross-sections you've got here, the bottleneck is a more boring problem of integration, data infra, and linkage

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

Who is training AI to do weld inspections?

We have robot welders, we should have robot welders inspectors by now, where are they?

Why can’t I give a robot an X-ray gun and have it check the welding its little friend just did?

A lot of robot welding is very high quality, but the autonomous inspection is lagging behind.

Also, who has a robot that can check simple weld preparations? This is pretty simple stuff, but we need robots to do a lot of this low value donkey work and not just the highly repeatable process stuff.

Also also, why are laser scanners still expensive?
We should have quality inspection bays that look like a laser disco and report the position of every surface to 50 nm.

Where is this?

I’m sure it exists and someone is making 5 units a year, but that doesn’t count. Who is making 1,500 units / year?

Do 1 process extremely well, scale into it.

[Stephen (Perandex) @Perandex]

3/Unless you're out to be a camera sensor company, if you want higher accuracy (sometimes to the micron level), the bottleneck is probably the sensor and you're might need to pay for it.