A Brief Resurfacing

I've been busy for the past week, but a good kind of busy. My advisor's consulting company has come up with the idea of building test walls into the sides of 40 foot ISO shipping containers, so they can be used as portable test huts that can be shipped to a client's site.



We're renting the trailer from the logistics company, so we modify the container at the farm we're working on. When we're done, a truck comes, hooks up, and hauls it away. I have suggested that we have a nautical-style christening ceremony when the container is shipped out--smashing a bottle of Molson Canadian on the prow, perhaps?

Our crew has been slamming away on it most of this week. It's a long weekend up here (Victoria Day), but we worked on Saturday, and we're back on the job tomorrow (Monday).

One fun part was attaching the wood frames to the steel structure. The slower method is to predrill a hole through the wood and steel, drill a countersink, and drive a self-tapping screw with an impact driver to connect them. But we also used a powder actuated tool (i.e., a nailgun that uses .22 blanks as a driving charge) to do it in one step--through the wood and the steel. Hearing and eye protection are a must; body armor is optional.

In case I haven't demonstrated that I'm enough of a geek, I find shipping containers really cool. For some explanation, see this Wired Magazine article "The 20-Ton Packet: Ocean shipping is the biggest real-time datastreaming network in the world." Also, the Wikipedia article on shipping containers has a cool quote about the disposability and alternate uses of shipping containers, due to the cheapness of manufacturing them in China (~$2500):

The abundance and relative cheapness during the last decade comes from the deficit in manufactured goods coming from North America in the last two decades. These manufactured goods come to North America from Asia and, to a lesser extent, Europe, in containers that often have to be shipped back empty ("deadhead"), at considerable expense. It is all too often cheaper to buy new containers in China and elsewhere in Asia, and to try to find new applications for the used containers that have reached their North American cargo destination.

Also, to me, there's something vaguely sinister about a shipping container sitting out on an isolated farm--it feels like it ought to be a black-helicopter-shadow-government outpost or a Mafia interrogation site:



Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, you stupid motherfuckin' sack of shit. Why did you EVER [CRACK] think it was FUCKIN' [CRACK] good idea to try to WHACK [CRACK] a MADE [CRACK] GUY [CRACK]?!

Hey, take it easy on him--you gotta leave enough left for Sal the Brick to talk to.

Yeah, well he don't need his kneecaps to talk.

[whispering] These are awful big cornfields out here Bobby. You're going in a fuckin' hole and disappearing... they ain't never gonna find what's left of you.

Okay, enough of the Goodfellas school of creative writing for now.