apprenticemason

Ha! That’s awesome and super close to the same time I was working on this! My phone is dating my first “working” test as Dec 22 2013. Managed to swirl the water around a little bit and successfully transmit the pH back to my computer before the whole thing flooded and shorted itself out XD.

You guys were smart and went RFID (I went Bluetooth) which means you skip the whole battery and battery charging steps and also avoiding another flaw of my design which was it’s narrow working temperature range. Turns out sticking a lipo battery in a flask of boiling water isn’t exactly a good idea lol. It also gives you another product to offer as an “RFID enabled hot plate” as opposed to just working in existing hot plates. Temperature of solution is an important variable to determining an accurate pH reading so temp was more of an incidental feature for me.

My vision was having a whole tray of these stir bars: one for pH, one for nitriles, one for nitrates, etc. anything that already had an ion selective electrode that was capable of measuring concentration would, in theory, just plug right in to that form factor. Ion selective electrodes are essentially just tiny batteries whose output voltage varies proportionately to the concentration of the ion on the outside of the glass. They’re super cool pieces of hardware just by themselves.

I was a student at a local community college at the time working on my liberal arts degree and guaranteed transfer to a state school. It makes me wonder how many others in the world might have a working prototype stuffed in their closet too :)

It sucks Google killed it for you, I thought my little community college might try and come after me for similar claims if I used any of their facilities of faculty to help with the development so I avoided the place like the plague while working on it to minimize my perceived risk. I can’t imagine my level of paranoia if it woulda been Google.

If you ever want to reach out and commiserate about working on this project I’d love to hear from you :) I’ve got all sorts of funny stories associated with mine. After a couple of bad project demos we started stuffing our stir bar in condoms and tying them off to avoid leaks into the prototype. I got plenty of sideways looks when I pulled out a box of Trojans and crack one open while trying to show off what the thing does to people around the hacker space XD throwing my email in my profile right after I submit this.

I created a similar product almost 10 years ago, I had a provisional patent filed and showed it off to some very nice and smart people at Thermo Fisher. I wanted to license the patent to people that actually know how to build laboratory equipment (I don’t hold a higher degree in anything). I should’ve continued trying to license but they convinced me that was the wrong move.

I formed a company and got $50k in grant money from the state of Wisconsin along with incubator space and advisors. I did all the initial software and hardware development, the first one I built took components from a battery powered toothbrush to inductively charge so I didn’t need a charging port exposed to solutions.

I loved working on this project, I had the idea after having frustrating experiences working with 30 year old lab equipment that took up more bench space in the lab than my backpack did. At the end of the day that’s all it was. I had no idea wtf I was doing and the company eventually folded as real life became too much to juggle with my project. I figured I could use the same form factor to build tons of different sensors based on the many different ion selective electrodes already on the market. Eventually I needed to try and manufacture these sensors myself in a form factor that would fit inside flasks in the lab.

Letting this project fall by the wayside is probably the single greatest regret of my life. I often think back about how different things could’ve turned out if only I had made the correct decisions and executed properly and actually found someone to license my patent… so it goes.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RrBhliK1ryY&pp=ygUbUGhpbmRpbmc...

000-0000000 was the key I kept in my memory in case I needed to install Visual Basic 6.0 on a new computer back in my middle school days :) great memory I forgot about, thank you for sharing the link.

“I can’t imagine now, or anytime in the last 15 years, a teenager being able to walk into an office and be expected to show up and work the next day in a hard industrial job”

To be honest, in my anecdotal experiences, the teenagers aren’t asking for these jobs anymore. I’m one of the youngest people at the company I work for and I’m 32, I’ve been here for 3 years as an apprentice mason and 2 years as a laborer. We’ve had 2 people work for us (30-35 employees at any given time) that were younger than me. We are always hunting for new masons/laborers/operators but we end up subbing out work to other companies a lot because we just can’t find the help.

I got my job in a very similar manner as the author, albeit a modernized version. My cousin posted something on Facebook about the company he worked for needing help, and I naively thought my attention to detail and trigonometry knowledge would come in handy. I showed up the next day and was now the new bottom of the totem pole. My job for weeks was mixing mortar and carrying the heaviest things I’ve ever had to pick up in my life to the tippy-top of some 30 foot tall scaffold setups.

My first day I went to a McDonald’s down the road to eat lunch and was so exhausted I couldn’t chew. I was covered in mud and mortar, shaking from exhaustion, and mentally drained at the pace everyone worked and asked for things that I had no familiarity with. (I.e. “get me a <mud board> <16-foot level> <brick stretcher> <wall ties> <grass> <tuck pointer>” … I’ll let you figure out which ones are real ;) )

I contemplated never going back, literally leaving McDonald’s and going home. The only thing that made me go back was fear of embarrassment. I’d be embarrassed to face my cousin at the next family get together, so I went back. I went home and cried because I’d breathed in so much mortar dust I’d chemically burned my throat so bad that the one Dorito I managed to eat that night turned to sand in my mouth and felt like glass on the way down.

My second day experience was much like the authors; I hurt in places I didn’t even know were parts of my body. (That goes away after the first year or so) I asked for a mask while mixing and was told to “not breath” which is a method I still adopt on days I’m unfortunate enough mix my own mortar (think of it like the front crawl while swimming).

You’re right that transportation is looked at as a plus, but we’ve got plenty of guys working for us now that will never have their license again for various alcohol and drug related reasons. Some still drive, others get rides, if you’re good at your job, people don’t mind picking you up.

There are still places you can walk into in the morning and be working by the afternoon. Are you interested in learning more and live around Madison or Milwaukee, Wisconsin? I’ll text you an address just show up Monday morning 7am. Not a joke, this glamorous job can be all yours, no experience, drivers license, tools, diploma, prior experience, general knowledge, attention to detail or trigonometry needed.

That being said, 9/10 people we hire won’t last more than a week if they’re green. I don’t blame em, the work is hard, benefits are nonexistent, and prospects for the future pretty bleak. I started at $14/hour in 2014, took time off to found a company based on an invention I had a provisional patent for, came back in 2019 at $20/hr and worked my way up to $30/hr with maybe another $5-$7 worth of potential growth left. Which is okay, not great by the standards of most on this site I’m sure, but I genuinely enjoy the work I do now. We build some really cool stuff and I look at it as getting paid to learn. I’m not crazy about the hours, or working through the winter, or being away from my daughter so much now that she’s becoming more aware. But they’ve got me hooked, I’ve specialized my labor so much so that going back looks like a much worse prospect than continuing forward. I’ve got 3 years of a college degree that are worth their literal weight in gold but lucky enough the GI bill covered the costs. I’ll probably stack bricks until my body won’t let me anymore, or at least until it’s not economically viable; whichever comes first.

It would be interesting to see exactly how much CO2 was created in the process of creating a brick vs the amount of CO2 created during transportation. This tech seems like a good idea until you realize every brick is being produced in one spot in England... the real problem isn’t creating these bricks, it’s building out the infrastructure to supply a significant demand.

I work in the masonry trade, all of the materials we use are from brick yards and quarries that are local (~75-100mi radius) for the simple fact that transporting large numbers of pallets of brick over long distances is a logistical nightmare. Storing them can also prove to be a problem, so much so that we literally throw away thousands of bricks we have left over from jobs every year. It’s rare that two customers would use the same bricks and we end up keeping the extras until we know we’re not getting called back in to do additional work.

They’re right that reclaiming bricks as being labor intensive work. The real holy grail of this industry would be figuring out how to reclaim the trillions of bricks already in circulation without needing human intervention. There is often huge demand for antique bricks because a lot of the unique clay deposits used to create the bricks end up being totally depleted. Milwaukee, WI is famous for their Cream City bricks that were produced in the mid and late 19th century but once the unique clay beds used to create these bricks were gone, so were new Cream Cities. You can see these in just about every city’s downtown in Wisconsin. I’ve spent many hours reclaiming these bricks from old houses and factories because for one, they look incredible, and two, they’re worth about a dollar a piece once they’re ready to be laid again (Pretty good money if you’re good with a brick hammer). If there was a way you could dump a house worth of old bricks into one end of a black box and spit out reusable brick from the other end, you’d basically be printing money. Mortar is not easily removed from brick without damaging the brick. That’s kind of the whole point of the mortar being used as a binder in the first place.

Most of the freeway walls you’re referring to are made using concrete forms and not block. I would feel extremely sorry for the company and the masons that would need to create block walls that are miles long, in no shade, during California’s summer.

I’ve worked for a masonry company for about four years and recently started my apprenticeship to become a brick block and stone mason a year ago. Working in this sector has made me truly appreciate the amount of work (Work = force*distance) that goes into any masonry. You see brick block and stone EVERYWHERE but what you might not realize is each brick, each block, each stone, has to travel from their source to their final destination. Usually that’s done by someone like me; if we’re lucky, we’re using M2 mobile hydro units coupled with a boom lift to reach whatever heights we need to hit. If we’re not so lucky, we’re building scaffolding by hand, stocking everything by hand, mixing mortar (in a mixer) by hand and using buckets to get the mortar where it need to be. It’s truly mind boggling and back breaking work. I realize this is an emerging technology but some of the masons I work with could reproduce work very close to this, maybe not mm accuracy but close enough where you’d never see the difference. And 3 months to lay ~15,000 bricks is an INSANELY long time. To put that number into perspective, a crew of 5 guys with average skill (3 masons, a laborer, and an operator making mud), given no extra equipment besides a mixer could pound out about 1000 brick in a day. That’s including everything from setup to cleanup.

Some of the guys I work with have been a mason for 40 years and they posses some incredible skill and can create amazing things and damn they’re fast too. The sad fact of the matter is most blueprints don’t want fancy masonry work anymore. It’s too cost prohibitive. We charge about $25/square foot of stone that’s without added arches or keystones or corbels etc; that also doesn’t include material costs (mortar, stone, tar paper, mesh, staples, etc). One experienced mason can throw up 100 square feet in a day, sometimes more given the differences in material. I wish we got contracts to create the beautiful buildings like in downtown Chicago or Milwaukee but it’s too much of a numbers game with real estate developers now. No one wants to pay us to create art, just slap it up and go man go!

With all that being said, man I’d like to have some time to play around with this tech! Or at least get to be the guy that holds the camera all day ;) looks like a breezy job compared to what I do everyday.