Blooming daisies....

mwezell

mwezell

Mike Ezell
I'm finally able to get back to work on flags and tuners. Here's a good start but still a long way to go toward having a couple of hundred in stock and ready. Feels good to get back to working on shooting "stuff". There's about 80 pictured.

The pinwheel and vane are made of fiberglass. I get the fiberglass in sheets, then apply the vinyl. After the vinyl goes on I send the material to a local laser cutting shop to be cut into vanes and pinwheels. Of course it's flat at that stage. Then, I go back to kindergarten..and fold the material into pinwheels! The disk on the back is Lexan. Lexan doesn't cut well by laser, so I make them with a circle cutter, after putting the vinyl on a sheet of it...then chuck them up, a bunch at a time, in the lathe to turn to final diameter. Once this is done, I assemble the pinwheel.

Next step is drill and ream the hole to size in the pinwheel, put the axle assembly in, and balance them by hand.

I'll try to post a few pics as I go. After the pinwheel is done, next will be to machine a flat and drill the holes in the fiberglass shaft, after cutting them to length.
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alinwa said:
Awww so perty......looks like my granddaughter's toybox
Click to expand...

Yes they are, Al. Actually, the pink and yellow outsells the green/orange color combo by at least 2:1. It shows up very well and is still in the same basic color spectrum range as traditional red/green flags, so it's very natural in use. IOW, it's not at all like seeing green in a red condition, but just the opposite. FWIW, cameras don't seem to pick it up well, but the yellow is florescent and more of a chartreuse, which is at the very top of the visible light spectrum. I can tell ya, a 4x8 sheet in the sun will make your eyes squint. The pink is also florescent. It's very bright..think "hot red", and gives excellent contrast vs. say, orange.
Admittedly, pink flags aren't for everyone, so I offer the traditional green/orange as well. A lot of thought went into these flags but not much of it was pointed at emasculating, nor nurturing the male ego. Rather, it was toward making them as visible as possible, in terms of the colors, while still indicating a "red or green" condition alongside other makes of flags on the range without confusion. IMO, they work very well in this regard. So, if you want the most visible flags you can get, the "hot red and chartreuse" are tops. If you want flags that are the same color as the guy next to you, the green and orange works too, and are otherwise identical.
 
Boy...between reading Rick and LW's comments, and watching Obama board Marine 1....What more could I want? Thank you both!

The pinwheels, being muti-colored, do a good job of showing even very slight angle changes and they start and stop on a dime. But it's the spinning that makes them work...i.e., in a given condition, the pinwheel will be a ratio of say green or orange. A slight change in wind angle and the ratio changes. It's quite visible and good for detecting small changes in angle, almost instantly.
 
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