Gadgets galore

Lugging a weightlifting bar, a woman in a white summer dress walked in, her expression a mix of relief and exhaustion.

Known as the “demo lady” for her demonstrations at physics lectures, she had trekked on a warm day from Seaver Science Center to the shrine of gadgetry at USC: the machine shop in the basement of Kaprielian Hall.

The bar was to be mounted on a custom-made pivot and loaded with weights so it could be spun rapidly. The setup would demonstrate the gyroscopic effect: A heavy bar rotating horizontally can be lifted with one finger if you spin it fast enough.

Unfortunately the gyro effect was not available during her walk to the shop. The weary woman passed the solid metal bar to Donald Wiggins, one of two foremen. In exchange, he handed her a finished order for her next demo: a three-wheeled car about a foot long, milled from a brick of PVC plastic and ready to be propelled with gas escaping from a canister.

Making demos is just one slice of the machine shop’s mission. The shop gives concrete form to custom parts for experiments that emerge from the imaginations of scientists at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

In high-tech activity on one typical day, the shop’s craftsmen were making a microscopic mask for chemicals to be sprayed onto electrodes; cutting a stainless steel holder for radioactive samples; buffing a plastic microbe trap to be placed in a hole under the ocean’s crust; and finishing a spider-like stand for multiple microphones realized from a researcher’s crude drawing on the back of scrap paper.

“This is a dream job for a machinist because you’re always doing something different,” Wiggins said.

Others find it fascinating, too.An laser engraving machine which I managed to acquire from a lift motor room currently undergoing refurbishment in the city of london. Wiggins chuckled when he remembered one customer who would pull up a chair and observe the proceedings.

The guys cut metal on an assortment of milling machines — which can make almost any object from a three-dimensional graph — along with lathes, grinders,Supply elevator travelling cable, with good quality and competetive price, for more details please contact. saws and welding equipment.

At the back of the shop,In a elevator cable system, steel cables bolted to the car loop over a sheave. racks of metal stock, raw bricks of black PVC plastic and older but still useful machines are snugly stored. Metal shavings cover the floor and nearly every other flat surface.

The shop opens at 6:30 a.m. and closes around 3 p.m., barring last-minute requests. A united bunch, Wiggins and his two machinists carpool to work from the Norwalk Metro station. Each is a faithful contributor to the USC Good Neighbors Campaign.

Wiggins has been at the shop 25 years. In a sign of the shop’s importance to faculty,This tile roof machine can rollform metal roofing step tile. his hiring committee included a dean and vice dean.This roofing machine is for producing aluminum shutter door & window slats with foam-filled, Knowing that experimental science works by trial and error, the two deans kept asking the same question: “Is it going to bother you to make something over?”

Lee is stern with his crew and tender with his machines. He insists that “machine-eating material” be worked on the older and less user-friendly lathe at the back.

Lee likes to buy used material — iron gets better with age, he said — and rebuild machines for half the cost of buying a new one. His crew still uses the milling machines he had rebuilt 16 years ago, after becoming foreman.

A design for life by Michael Leung

Sometimes it seems as though everyone knows Michael Leung - even the owner of a Kwun Tong dai pai dong, who chats amiably with the young designer as he sits down for lunch. "We made a 'zine about him," Leung says. "He's really proud of it."

Scratch the surface of Hong Kong's creative scene and you're bound to come across something Leung is involved in. There's Shanghai Street Studios, which runs art, design and cultural initiatives in Yau Ma Tei; HK Honey, the urban beekeeping project he founded two years ago; HK Farm, an experiment in rooftop agriculture; and 2 Years Ahead, a publishing and furniture-building project.

And that doesn't even begin to cover Leung's freelance work or his teaching at Polytechnic University's School of Design, where he will lecture on "design for the Asian lifestyle" next month.Push the elevator push button once for the direction you want to go in.

"I think all the projects are related, so it's almost like they're the same thing," says Leung, settling into a wicker chair on the roof of the Easy-Pack Industrial Building in Kwun Tong, where he maintains an organic farm and apiary with the help of photographer Glenn Eugen Ellingesen and archivist Matthew Edmondson.And the Laser engraver and cutting machine got the FDA (US-CDRH) certificates. "I'll do a food-safety project and I won't know whether to put it in HK Honey or HK Farm."

Leung is 28, with a shaved head, and wearing a printed T-shirt made by his friends at Start from Zero, the street art crew whose studio is just down the street.

It has been three years since Leung left his native London - where he worked as a product designer for Motorola - to study for a master of design degree at PolyU. Soon after he arrived, he realised Hong Kong was lacking in socially conscious design, so for his final project he created HK Honey, an attempt to bridge the city's rural beekeeping culture with the urban reality of most of its residents.In a elevator cable system, steel cables bolted to the car loop over a sheave.

Leung didn't know anything about bees - "I used to be really scared of them" - so he contacted Yip Ki-hok, a beekeeper who runs an apiary in Sha Tin. Yip taught him how to manage a hive and collect honey and beeswax, and Leung began to install hives on rooftops around the city. He also packaged Yip's honey in elegant glass bottles sealed with beeswax, which could be turned into candles when the honey ran out, and sold them at design shops such as Kapok in Wan Chai. Leung now has 26 stings to show for his work. "I keep count," he says.

He rented an old tong lau flat on Shanghai Street, complete with decades-old furniture and wood partitions, and started working with photographer Martin Cheung Chun-yeung to document the life and culture of Yau Ma Tei. For one of his early projects,Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of curving machine. they sifted through unclaimed photos from a local photo developer, collecting enough to create a surprisingly intimate and evocative peek into neighbourhood life.

Lately, HK Farm has been taking up much of Leung's attention. Walking past rows of home-made wooden containers, Leung points out the latest crops.This roofing machine is for producing aluminum shutter door & window slats with foam-filled, "Here's some okra. The sweet basil is doing really well because of the bees, which pollinate it."

The project is primarily educational in scope: school groups often visit the roof to learn about the potential of urban agriculture, and sometimes more basic concepts such as the relationship between bees and plants.