One of the projects from a weekend in August 2026 was moving the big HVAC unit in the robotics area. Due to a miscommunication, it had been plunked down in the middle of a space we need. So I went in and helped knock a big dirty hole in the wall. Here's one of the other coaches on a ladder, drilling the hole that the vent goes through.

The prior hole just had a flexible tube jammed through it, but I figured I could do slightly better, so I designed an inside and an outside plate.

I fabbed up the inside plate on Sunday (plasma cutter FTW), then spot welded it together and powder coated it. It's a square steel plate with a rolled, slotted flange around a big round opening, powder coated white.

The outside was the next job: a laser cut grate with our logo on it, which I would also powder coat later in the week. That's the rest of this page.

The big round field is a honeycomb of small holes so the air can get through, with the gear and bulb left solid. That's a lot of holes to cut. Here's the laser head at work, close up and then from farther back.

The sheet on the bed of the laser with the pattern cut, and the bed afterward, with the little cut-out slugs scattered over the bed.

The pattern burned into the firebricks shows how serious a 1200W laser is: it did that even when out of focus by almost two feet!

And the finished cut, bare metal, before any coating went on.

I powder coated it in two stages. First a zinc primer, which should give it even more corrosion resistance than the topcoat alone.

Then the white topcoat.

And here it is finished, lying on the workbench.

It's on the outside wall, in an alley that few people go down, which is too bad. I still enjoy seeing it whenever I do.

It looks especially cool when it's backlit at night. I'll have to get a picture of that one of these days.

First, the pattern for the casting I hoped to do that weekend: a tree of a dozen small open-frame pieces on a central sprue.

And a single piece, which is what each keychain will be.

A partially successful casting on the morning of April 27th. This is the robot part in the crucible, melting.

Breaking the investment flask open to see what came out.

And the aluminum tree itself. I only got 8 out of 12 pieces to come out, so I need to do another. I think maybe the graphite gasket I made didn't give a good seal, and I didn't get as much vacuum as I could have.

After fettling, the pieces got powder coated, and here they are curing in a toaster oven.

I finished the senior gifts on May 15th. I still have a largish brick of the aluminum left over from the melted-down part, since I didn't use much of it. It's a part we removed because we were over weight, and I plan to bring it in to show people just how much aluminum it was.

The plan was to melt down some of the broken parts from that year's robot and cast keychains in the shape of the game piece, and maybe laser something onto them if there was time. This project was way more of a pain than I thought it would be, but I learned a fair amount, so I'll call it a win.

here's the finished keychain, presented to the seniors at the wrap-up banquet on May 19.

The Charlottesville office's version came first. It started on the computer in June 2022, where I was playing around with the design and wondering about proportions. Here's a render of one of the versions I tried (this one has Durham, NC in the corner).

In July I kept playing with the nesting software, which figures out how to pack the letters into the smallest space on a plate. It's kind of fun to see what it comes up with.

Then I cut the logo out of quarter-inch aluminum on the plasma table. The first cut failed, so I recut over the failure. It wasn't perfectly aligned, hence the slight irregularities, but it's a very good cut given that.

Here's the lowercase k after powder coating. I obviously put a bit too much powder on, but generally I like the way it came out.

I came back to the Charlottesville sign in the fall.

The Kevel logo, plus "Charlottesville, VA", on a navy panel: white aluminum letters, and a K made of two folded orange aluminum ribbons. I built it in the last days of September and the first days of October 2022, and finished it with a few minutes of sneaking away to the shop on the morning of October 3, since I was going to Charlottesville the next day. It still needed hanging hardware, and perhaps a few touches of paint to fix the flaws that probably only I can see.

More than a year later I made the one for James. In September 2023 I cut the parts on the plasma cutter, and here they are fresh out of the water table.

In October I put together a full-size layout out of taped-together sheets of printed paper on the floor.

Later that month I was at the makerspace and used the laser, the one tool I didn't have at home (I fixed that later), to make a hardboard template to help with aligning the pieces.

In November came the bending, and having done it before helped, though there were still a couple of things I had to remind myself of. The test bend went fine, shown here next to one of the laser-cut template pieces.

A second attempt a bit later that day went fine too.

The next morning it was coming along, with a single bent and polished k mounted on the navy board and still a bunch left to do.

I got the mounting hardware sorted out, so there are no more fragile 3D printed standoffs like the ones on the Charlottesville sign. Next up was powder coating.

And on November 26, 2023, it was done. Sorry it took so long, James.

This is where it started: my first attempt at a sheet metal project, in January 2022. Meh. But it's a start.

Achievement unlocked: spot welding. The spot welder itself is in the background. These units aren't too expensive, and versions that run off of 120 are available, so this capability is pretty accessible even to a modest home shop.