“What the hell is burning in here?” my wife demanded.
She didn’t wait for my reply. She had smelled the block of wood burning in my home office all the way from hers. She left the room, retuned with a fire extinguisher, placed it on the floor, and went back to her office without another word.
A recent client of mine named David McInnis, (also an Wizard Academy grad), had just launched a startup company building parts via Stereolithography (SLA) and Selective Laser Sintering (SLS); two bleeding edge technologies designed to build parts directly from 3D-CAD files by using lasers. This technology enables users to create these renditions without using any additional tools.
I submitted a proposal to the Air Force outlining a plan for David’s company to make parts for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) using the SLS technology. The Air Force specifications presented an obstacle; they needed the parts to function at elevated temperatures of up to 270°F. This specification required that we use some new materials that Roger Spielman, the Director of Operations, and I had recently developed. We needed to test “tensile specimens” made from this new material, commonly called dog bones, at these elevated temperatures.
The problem was this: we were a startup company and we didn’t own or have access to any tensile testing machines or a way to test the specimens at elevated temperatures. The testing machines are very expensive, so purchasing one of these machines was out of the question.
A company intern, Mike Sherwood, informed us that the local university, BYU, had one of the tensile testing machines on campus. We figured that his idea was worth a shot. After all, we had nothing to lose. We picked up the phone and called one of the professors at the college. We explained our situation and asked if they would be interested in letting us use the machine at a reasonable rate.
Dr. Brent Strong gave us the go-ahead to start using the machine, and even said that the school wouldn’t charge us a dime right then. He added that down the road, if we needed to use the machine a lot that we could pay a very small fee.
Problem solved… or at least one of them. Now we had a machine, but still no way to test the specimen at elevated temperatures. The manufacturer of the testing machines does sell an environmental chamber accessory that would have allowed us to measure the effectiveness of the specimen at high temperatures, but the accessory cost thousands of dollars.
So, the next challenge was determining how to test the specimens at 270°F with no budget. What resources did we already have available to accomplish this objective?
I thought about my oven at home. The appliance reaches temperatures of up to 425°F - I know because I do all of the cooking in our family. The oven is more than twenty years old and we need a new one anyway, so I figured I could just cut the oven in half, and clamshell the oven around the tensile specimen while we tested them. That probably would have worked, but tearing my oven out of the wall sounded like a hassle. I know that your first idea is rarely your best idea, so I kept thinking, “What else might work? Is there another right answer?”
Then I thought about my photography lights. I wondered, “How hot will these lights get?” I know that they get pretty hot when I use them to shoot my videos, but I was doubtful that they could reach 270°F.
Since I am always curious, I decided to try the lights out in spite of my doubts. I’d never measured the temperature of the lights before, so I thought that maybe, just maybe, the lights would work.
I jammed a metal rod into a block of wood I’d found in my garage and stood the wood up vertically in my office. I went downstairs, got my photography lights, turned them on, and shined them directly at the piece of wood from about three inches away.
In order to track the temperature readings, I retrieved my laser thermometer from the closet. I know what you are thinking: “Ha-ha look at that engineering nerd and his laser thermometer,” but in my defense, the LT does have some real, practical uses like measuring the temperature of the air in my hot air balloon, checking the peanut oil temperature when I’m deep frying a turkey, and other things like that.
I pointed the laser at the wood to measure the temperature and watched the readings climb: 150°F, 200°F, 250°F, 400°F … When the wood reached 650°, the smoke started. I quickly turned the light off before I set my house on fire. I didn’t want to have to use the extinguisher my wife had placed on the floor.
Wow. A simple photography light can heat a block of wood to temperatures over 600°? I would have never guessed; and I never would have known if I hadn’t been curious enough to test the lights out. I’d found my solution. I simply turned the lights on my specimen, adjusted the lights’ distance from the sample until the temperature stabilized at 270°F, and voila: mission accomplished.
My plan worked like a charm, and best of all, it didn’t cost us a cent. What can you do with the IFR and zero budget?
