Kansas Crimson

ousdahl wrote: ↑Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:52 pm Pop up tents and tow behinds are cool.

I like the idea of a bed topper tho cuz it’s not as obvious if someone is sleeping in it.

I could pull into the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel and discretely snooze without anyone looking twice.

That was the thing that made me decide not to get the topper. If I am out in the middle of nowhere I want anyone driving by to know I may be inside with my can of bear spray or my decapitation ax. I know guys who have had their topper broken into because no one was there and when they came back to camp their fishing gear was gone.

We looked at the trailers but in the end it came down to some of the "roads" we drive out west are barely passable with a 4WD Toyota, I don't want to be pulling anything extra when I hit a really tight switchback or have to cross a river. I buy the skinny version of trucks for the same reason. I recall passing someone on a narrow stretch of the road up to Cinnamon Pass outside of Silverton. We were on the cliff edge side and it was good that one of us didn't have a giant truck.

My preference has always been to travel light. If for no other reason it will be easier to winch myself out of a bad decision.

japhy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:44 am

ousdahl wrote: ↑Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:52 pm Pop up tents and tow behinds are cool.

I like the idea of a bed topper tho cuz it’s not as obvious if someone is sleeping in it.

I could pull into the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel and discretely snooze without anyone looking twice.

That was the thing that made me decide not to get the topper. If I am out in the middle of nowhere I want anyone driving by to know I may be inside with my can of bear spray or my decapitation ax. I know guys who have had their topper broken into because no one was there and when they came back to camp their fishing gear was gone.

We looked at the trailers but in the end it came down to some of the "roads" we drive out west are barely passable with a 4WD Toyota, I don't want to be pulling anything extra when I hit a really tight switchback or have to cross a river. I buy the skinny version of trucks for the same reason. I recall passing someone on a narrow stretch of the road up to Cinnamon Pass outside of Silverton. We were on the cliff edge side and it was good that one of us didn't have a giant truck.

My preference has always been to travel light. If for no other reason it will be easier to winch myself out of a bad decision.

Japhy, do you do any overlanding?

the wife and i inherited a single axle tow-behind camper

awesome, except it was too big to pull for any mid-size vehicle (truck or SUV). now, we’ve got a forester for day trips and tent-camping, but had to go with a tundra for extended jaunts or more serious forest service roads in the mountains

i’ve never driven a “new” (2018) car so little

Overlander wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 10:25 am

japhy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:44 am

ousdahl wrote: ↑Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:52 pm Pop up tents and tow behinds are cool.

I like the idea of a bed topper tho cuz it’s not as obvious if someone is sleeping in it.

I could pull into the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel and discretely snooze without anyone looking twice.

That was the thing that made me decide not to get the topper. If I am out in the middle of nowhere I want anyone driving by to know I may be inside with my can of bear spray or my decapitation ax. I know guys who have had their topper broken into because no one was there and when they came back to camp their fishing gear was gone.

We looked at the trailers but in the end it came down to some of the "roads" we drive out west are barely passable with a 4WD Toyota, I don't want to be pulling anything extra when I hit a really tight switchback or have to cross a river. I buy the skinny version of trucks for the same reason. I recall passing someone on a narrow stretch of the road up to Cinnamon Pass outside of Silverton. We were on the cliff edge side and it was good that one of us didn't have a giant truck.

My preference has always been to travel light. If for no other reason it will be easier to winch myself out of a bad decision.

Japhy, do you do any overlanding?

I had to look the term up, but it sounds generally like what we do on many vacations out in Colorado. If we don't see another person for more than 24 hours and there is no cell service, then we have gone far enough. We never go further than a full tank of gas will take us. No more than 4-5 days out usually. We have cut our gear down to the point of having one waterproof bag and a cooler and a couple of folding lounge chairs in the truck bed under the tent and the rest fits in the extended cab Tacoma. When I first met my wife she thought the skid plates, Old Man Emu shocks and ARB bumper on my Landrover was an attempt to make my dick look bigger. Months later as we were driving through a swamp in the Ozarks and find a tree over the road and I just drove over it, she got all giddy and wanted to know if she could run over shit next time. Turned out my environmental scientist vegetarian had also been a motocross racer as kid in North Dakota. She recently asked when I was going to put that gear on the Tacoma so we could drive into the Saguache Creek Gorge. So I may add some armor this year. We took the stock Tacoma over Cinnamon Pass and that got a bit hairy at times. An extra 1.5 inches of clearance and a skid pate would have made it less stressful. If the road takes more than that and a diff lock then I will turn around. I'm not a good enough mechanic to try and fix a busted drive shaft in the wilderness. I have hiked up to Holy Cross City but I wouldn't try to drive up there.

“...she got all giddy and wanted to know if she could run over shit next time.”

fucking awesome

I wanna party with japhy

solstice!

I look forward to the late night drunken heart to heart about design intent vs reality and buildability...just because you can make it work on paper doesnt mean it works in real life......at least not with that budget....

TDub wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 5:08 pm I look forward to the late night drunken heart to heart about design intent vs reality and buildability...just because you can make it work on paper doesnt mean it works in real life......at least not with that budget....

We can build anything as long as you have the money.

TraditionKU wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 4:18 pm “...she got all giddy and wanted to know if she could run over shit next time.”

fucking awesome

She's a funny girl.

We were in my old 4Runner one time looking at the Los Pinos River down near Osier CO. She wanted to cross the river and camp on the other side. I said I wasn't sure that was a good idea, the river was probably 24 inches deep and moving fast, plus the bank on the far side was pretty steep.

"Go on, this truck can make that."

Me: "You sound pretty confident, maybe you should drive it across."

Her: " Oh fuck no, if we get stuck you should be driving."

We did make it across pretty sure footedly. Then next day when we started to drive back a group of guys on their ATVs all stopped on the bluff above to watch and see if we were really going to do that.

She didn't want to drive back over either. I guess in motocross you didn't hear the sound of rocks scraping the bottom of your vehicle so much.

japhy- were you involved in either of those builds? Is the top one the neuroscience research/hospital in Las Vegas? I saw a documentary about the building of it on the Smithsonian channel. Really cool building!

japhy wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 7:12 pm

TDub wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 5:08 pm I look forward to the late night drunken heart to heart about design intent vs reality and buildability...just because you can make it work on paper doesnt mean it works in real life......at least not with that budget....

We can build anything as long as you have the money.

Right. Which is why I included "with that budget"

Bid documents seem to always expand and complicated from DD set to the 100%s....but we always have to argue for the associated cost implications fornthe multiple ASI's etc

TDub wrote: ↑Thu Apr 29, 2021 4:20 pm
Right. Which is why I included "with that budget"

Bid documents seem to always expand and complicated from DD set to the 100%s....but we always have to argue for the associated cost implications fornthe multiple ASI's etc

I was at the grand opening for the upper of the two buildings, the Experience Music Project in Seattle. I was talking to the structural engineer who was responsible for the shell, I was responsible for everything beyond the waterproofing. There was a room at the opening where they had all of the models that were developed during the design process. The first one was a series of cubes. And then it got more curved over the course of development. The guy from Magnusson Klemencic pointed to the second model and said, that's the one we made our proposal based on. I think mine was about next to last. His proposal was based on a $250M budget and his change orders covered the other $150M increase before it was done. By the time we looked at it the budget for the skin system was set at $50M and we only saw one change order.

Paul Allen indulged Gehry like no other Owner, and he went wild with it. In the end he got his money's worth. In some respects it may be the most geometrically complicated building ever attempted. In it's day it pushed BIM to the limits of what could be done.

But yeah, it can be a slog getting your fee increased "just because the budget increased". There is $150M more fucking building to build, goddamn right there is more work/fee involved for everyone who is not a contractor. In the end that building was fun to work on though. Gehry's people at the time were the best to work with.

The second project was with KPF out of NY. Their people are really good as well. The biggest degree of difficulty there was making the hundreds of seismic joints in the thing disappear. It looks like one big monolith but it is about 40-50 separate structures connected by seismic slip joints.

There are some benefits to working with one of the richest men in the world. Altho....Amazon isnt typically a similar experience

zsn wrote: ↑Thu Apr 29, 2021 3:48 pm japhy- were you involved in either of those builds? Is the top one the neuroscience research/hospital in Las Vegas? I saw a documentary about the building of it on the Smithsonian channel. Really cool building!

I was the principal engineer in charge of both of those building exteriors. The building you are thinking of is the Lou Ruvo Center in Las Vegas. Also a Gehry building, but we were not involved in that one. We worked on the Experience Music Project, Bard College Performing Arts, Pritzker Pavillion, Ohr-Okeefe Museum, Weatherhead School of Management and a few others that didn't come to fruition.

TDub wrote: ↑Thu Apr 29, 2021 6:04 pm There are some benefits to working with one of the richest men in the world. Altho....Amazon isnt typically a similar experience

It was interesting, there were some quirks you had to work around. We had half a million$ in invoices held up at one point for 3 months with no explanation. Finally they told us, "Japhy had a beer at LAX while waiting for someone's plane to arrive and we don't reimburse for beer." You can't just send a check for $499,993.00 and tell us that? We had to resubmit all the invoices with the beer redacted.

Usually we photograph buildings under construction to document progress and installation issues. Vulcan NW had their own photographers on site and they took photos so that they could control the images being seen by anyone of the building. They were paranoid about public impression and criticism. Which was funny because they were working with an architect who was often the butt of jokes and who gave no fucks what anyone thinks of him or his work. One of my senior engineers was there on a site visit with me, he is a photographer. He took some photos of the sculpture we nicknamed "the guitar tornado" during it's installation. There were security people mixed in with the construction crew and they saw him. We listened in the job trailer for 15 minutes while the security guys chased "someone" around the site trying to get his camera. I had a hunch who it was. Suddenly Tom came running into the job trailer, took off his safety vest and other identifying clothing and ran into a back office and shut the door. Minutes later security came into the trailer looking for "a guy" and we said we haven't seen anybody, "good luck finding that fucker". It was funny later over beers.

Cool! Must be very interesting work and very rewarding. Every time you drive by you have that sense of pride and accomplishment. Working in Pharma we often use a building analogy to what chemists do....don’t know how accurate it is.

We say that discovery chemists are like the designers who design a building. They can draw whatever they want and make small scale models (synthesize them on small scale for early development). We’re like the builders who actually have to make them on a large enough scale for clinical trials and marketing. Just because they did it doesn’t mean that we can.....at least not with that budget and timeline!

japhy wrote: ↑Fri Apr 30, 2021 9:37 am

TDub wrote: ↑Thu Apr 29, 2021 6:04 pm There are some benefits to working with one of the richest men in the world. Altho....Amazon isnt typically a similar experience

It was interesting, there were some quirks you had to work around. We had half a million$ in invoices held up at one point for 3 months with no explanation. Finally they told us, "Japhy had a beer at LAX while waiting for someone's plane to arrive and we don't reimburse for beer." You can't just send a check for $499,993.00 and tell us that? We had to resubmit all the invoices with the beer redacted.

Usually we photograph buildings under construction to document progress and installation issues. Vulcan NW had their own photographers on site and they took photos so that they could control the images being seen by anyone of the building. They were paranoid about public impression and criticism. Which was funny because they were working with an architect who was often the butt of jokes and who gave no fucks what anyone thinks of him or his work. One of my senior engineers was there on a site visit with me, he is a photographer. He took some photos of the sculpture we nicknamed "the guitar tornado" during it's installation. There were security people mixed in with the construction crew and they saw him. We listened in the job trailer for 15 minutes while the security guys chased "someone" around the site trying to get his camera. I had a hunch who it was. Suddenly Tom came running into the job trailer, took off his safety vest and other identifying clothing and ran into a back office and shut the door. Minutes later security came into the trailer looking for "a guy" and we said we haven't seen anybody, "good luck finding that fucker". It was funny later over beers.

I worked with Vulcan often when i worked up in Seattle. They are good, but always paranoid like they are the only ones capable of protecting the owners. I mean, i get it...but it got a little ridiculous

Japhy?

That was back when I dyed my hair.