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Wednesday, August 16th, 2017

Picknick time at Boyd Lake State Park:

Boyd Lake beach is more clay than sand

The clay is easy to find and sample. Just watch out for various bird (and people) droppings. You might think the clay would be good for making DIY pottery, perhaps?

Clay test pieces

These are what I would call “Raw Boyd Lake Clay” in that the material was never processed to remove the sand and bird shit or whatever might be in the clay before rolling it into the shapes seen above.

Hot Kiln, up to 1800 deg. F.

This is a small kiln the HUB got free. It’s small, but it was free, so we took it.

Cooked out Clay

The clay samples are shown above, each taken out of the kiln at a temperature listed below (I needed to put this data someplace, and it shows how long it takes the kiln to get up to temperature.

Kiln test, start time 9:58 AM

TIME TEMP Dec. C Samples

10:04 200 one, band #1 greenware color

10:12 400 two, dand #2 red with dark spots

10:18 500 one, band #3 red, reduced dark spots

10:26 600 one, Band #1+, bright red, no sport

10:40 700 one, band #2+, as above

10:59 800 one, Band 3+, as above

11:39 900 two, unmarked, dark drown

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HUB Grand Opening

Saturday, June 10th, 2017

Hub Grand Opening

The link above gets you to the YouTube video of the FCCH Grand Opening!

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Another Beat Farm day!

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

Bloco made it out to the farm!

This pig greets all visitors!

New this year: A climbing wall in the barn!

A goat sings the blues

It’s always a pleasure to get out to the farm once in a while as long as we’re not put to work. We love the Laughing Buck Farm and all it has to offer.

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TEDxCSU

Saturday, March 4th, 2017

Lorie Student Center Grand Ball Room:

The CSU Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference

“Ideas Worth Spreading”; People from NoCO came to hear eleven unique speakers from the Colorado State University and Northern Colorado communities on a range of topics.

The Fort Collins Creator Hub was there

Here’s the secret: We sneak into these conferences for free as persons involved in “Innovation Alley”. We get a nice table to put our junk on (In this case, it was some of the things I brought to the Rice Elementary Science Night the night before) and then we get to schmooze with the conference goers and watch the talks on the big screen. We get to eat free too!

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Physics of Music

Thursday, March 2nd, 2017

Something called “Science Night” at Rice Elementary School

Banjo lessons

Making and playing home-made oboes

I bought some of my homemade instruments for display and had a table for making soda straw oboes. I would have liked to do the air rockets, but the school was using the gym for a dissection lab. I didn’t have to to find out what they wee doing…

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Aliens Like Us

Tuesday, February 28th, 2017

Not sure how we pulled this one off:

M.E. and Dave goofing off with the camera

As part of our advertising effort we made a phony “Behind the scenes” video for our 48Hour movie entry. For this idea, I made a cardboard 50’s era film camera, a clap board, a comical boom mic and a “director’s chair’. This ended up as a short B&W silent ad for the Lyric Cinema Cafe’s “48 Hour Film Fest”. It’s my opinion that our BTS (Behind the scenes) entry was much appreciated by the Lyric’s film judges as they seemed to use it extensively for the final showing on Feb. 28th.

A typical movie ad

By just Photo-shopping some of our big-head costumes that were used in the final film the above graphic and a few others were posted on social media to let people know about the experimental films that were being shown at the old Lyric theater (that will be torn down soon to make way for some apartment buildings). Our team name was “The 8th Bit Revolution” for reasons I can’t seem to remember.

Director, Producer, Actor #1, Actor #2

Not sure why the Lyric Theater didn’t want their name on the credits, but someone thought the name “Weekend Warriors” would describe the 17 teams who worked on making a 7 minute movie in 48 hours on a weekend in February. The rules were 1) Make a 7 minute film in 48 hours, 2) Include three props supplied at the start (we had 2 masks and a yellow hat) 3) Include “twins” somewhere in the movie, and 4) Use the phrase “That thing you just did; Don’t do that!” Simple enough! So we did “Aliens Like Us” and turned it in in the nick of time!

Wow, we won in three categories!

We though we would get a prize just for entering or perhaps “Oldest Team in the history of 48 Hour film festivals” and/or best effort advertising on social media, but I guess because we have a basement full of costumes, BEST COSTUME DESIGN does make sense in a way. The BEST ANIMATION no doubt because no other team used animation even though we had only 5 second of it. BEST CREDITS is a bit weird because we screwed up on the final credits but the title credits worked much better and it showed that some effort was made to mock Big Hollywood. Even if we would not have won anything, it was a hell of a lot of fun!

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Lights, Camera, Action!

Tuesday, February 21st, 2017

We entered a film at this year’s 48 Hour Film Fest…

Not a proper movie camera

OK,the picture above is a mock-up of an old ’50’s style camera made from a cardboard box and two smoke detectors. We used it to make a little promotional bit for the NoCo 48 Hour Film Fest. They will be showing our film on February 28!

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CBGSIG Display

Sunday, November 20th, 2016

Radiant Floor Panel tiles, cheap!

Found these at the Habitat store

These are radiant floor panel tiles used to guide heating tubes under flooring. The panel reminded me of the facade at the Institut du monde arabe building in Paris, France and it seemed that the repeating pattern might be useful for an art project or two.

Musical Instrument Display wall hanging

I attached some of my ‘guitars’ onto one of these panels and hoisted the panel up to about 2 feet from the ceiling on the South wall at the Fort Collins Creator Hub. I may need to take it down when the wall is cleaned and painted (soon?) and at that time I will add a wooden frame as the plastic panel tends to warp a bit (it’s intended to lay flat on a smooth floor, not hang on a wall!)

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Maker Movement

Saturday, November 12th, 2016

More stuff at the hackerspace!

A gift from B&N

The big maker fair robot display was given to us by the folks at Barnes and Noble for helping them this year with the maker fair. We also made some money from BN sales, but we don’t know how much yet.

New Shelving

The pallet racks are being stacked up and will serve as a temporary separation of the work area and allow for storage and work table space. This project is moving slowly, but it IS moving!

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HUB at the bookstore

Saturday, November 5th, 2016

It was yet another ‘Mini Maker Fair’, this time at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore on College Avenue. This event was sort of last minute, but we were able to pull it off with a number of musical instruments thanks to the Cigar Box Guitar Special Interest Group and the Air Pressure Rocket Launcher Auxiliary.

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Roadside Mysteries