Playing With Real Boy's Toys

My family went to my cousins' house in Redding, Ca. for Thanksgiving this year.  My uncle designed and built his house, an energy-efficient straw-bale home.  He owns a concrete fabrication business called Universal Precast Concrete, Inc.  We went out to visit the shop and got to play with some real man's toys.  Below are some examples:

Gary brought out his shotgun and let us shoot some clay birds.

It turns out I'm terrible with a shotgun.

Below is a really large CNC (computer numeric control) machine that Gary uses to cut molds out of styrofoam.  Once the molds are cut, they're sprayed with polyurethane.

The cement is mixed with a variety of chemicals, shown below, in the 1.5 cu. yd. mixer shown further below, to create the concrete that is then pored into the styrofoam molds yet further below.

Now we get to the most exciting part for me:  MIG welding.  Gary has a MIG welding rig that he let me play with.  He showed me how to lay a bead and let me play around with some scrap steel.

Here we see Gary showing me how leaving space between the plates when making a butt weld allows greater penetration of the weld metal.

The two weldments below are the sheets I practiced on when initially getting the feel for how welding worked (right) and the butt weld that Gary demonstrated the beginning of and had me finish.

Gary eventually got fed up with his workers breaking the hammer handles so he replaced this one with some #7 rebar.

To see more, with more complete descriptions, see the facebook album I posted with these pictures.  And Happy Turked Day.

~KMarsh