Yeah, the economy stinks and we’re all feeling it in one way or another, but we still live in a phenomenal day and age.
Nowhere was this more explicitly made manifest than last weekend at the Off-Road Expo. Even though attendance was down, there was still all manner of amazingly crafted hardware on hand to be seen.
As I type, I’m knee-deep in deadlines for our print magazine and I haven’t downloaded my Expo photos yet. That will change in the next 24 hours.
For now, I’ve attached a couple of photos of one example of the phenomenal times we live in. Computers touch every aspect of our lives, and that applies to metalwork as much as anything else. The cookie-cutter shapes were sliced out of a sheet of 4130 chromoly plate by a computer-controlled laser. Cutting all of this out piece-by-piece on a bandsaw would have taken days. It only took a few minutes of slicing by computer-controlled laser, and BAM! A precision-cut jigsaw puzzle ready for assembly. The fit was superb and close enough for TIG welding. These photo show part of a desert truck I’m building, but laser-cut steel builds all manner of trail-bound hardware as well. Jeep corners are just one example of a laser-cut piece of phenomena.
Real-live Expo photos coming next time…