Meeting the Makers
James from Monash Forge using a vice and modified spanner to add an aesthetic twist to a fire poker.
Photos by Bri Hammond
This story is brought to you by our partner Monash Mini Maker Faire
Melbourne is home to an incredibly diverse array of local makers. But they often fly under the radar, working tirelessly away behind closed doors. So we sent photographer Bri Hammond behind the scenes and into the workshops of three local makers, pulling apart pianos, raising the heat with blacksmiths and becoming best friends with a very sophisticated robot.
Pianos Recycled:
Pianos Recycled is a team of three (Peter Humphreys, Mike Hendry and Sandra Klepetko) based in Keysborough, with a vision to prevent all unwanted pianos from going to landfill. With firm devotion to the circular economy and environmental sustainability, Pianos Recycled aim to preserve the embedded narratives of high quality craftsmanship in every piano. While restoring pianos is their primary objective, they work with local artisans to recycle the different parts of the piano. And considering there are around 12,000 parts in a standard piano, a lot can be done.
The piano's cast iron frame being removed. This cast iron mass in the piano withstands 19+ tonnes of string tension and can weigh 90kg.
"Our first objective is to restore a piano to playing condition if it can be. However we're finding that only 10 percent of pianos can be restored, while another 10 percent are unsalvagable. That leaves 80 percent of pianos that are a really good source of old forest timbers. Half the weight of a piano is timber and veneer, and the timbers that they would select back in the day were between 70 and 120 years old. Now that we're getting the timbers, you can add another 100 years or so on top of that. So you're getting a piano where the seedling of that particular tree would have sprouted 200 years ago."
– Peter Humphreys
The piano strings are made of high-tensile steel wire. There can be as many as 236 strings in a piano and each string has a tension of 80 – 100kgs meaning it is best you know what you're doing before you remove them.
A piano without its outside panels reveals just how complex these instruments are. Imagine making one.
"There's the history of the craftspeople that crafted and made the piano, but then there's the history of that piano becoming the entertainment and a central figure for a family somewhere. All of these stories are embedded into a piano. We're trying to engender the respect of that history to make sure that it's not lost."
– Peter Humphreys
Mike Hendry, Peter Humphreys and Clancy Smith deconstruct a Schwechten piano made in Berlin in 1876.
"One of the issues is that the elephant in the room is literally the elephant in the room, because some pianos have ivory. The ivory trade needs to be stopped but what do you do with the ivory that comes from pianos? We decided that we would use the ivory in jewellery where the proceeds of the sale go to go to an elephant conservation group."
– Peter Humphreys
Peter Humphreys.
Clancy Smith carefully cuts the piano strings that are stretched tightly over a cast-iron frame.
"Australia was one of the biggest importers of pianos in the world, per head, up until the WWI. Some estimates say that we imported about a million pianos. Now, this year in Australia, there'll be about 2,500 pianos ending up in landfill."
– Peter Humphreys
Removing the piano “action”. The action is the mechanism that translates the depression of the piano keys into rapid motion of a hammer, which then strikes the strings to create sound.
Peter Humphreys.
"There are 7000 moving parts in a piano. When you look inside a piano – and at the Mini Maker Faire we'll have an exploded piano – the detail involved is extraordinary."
– Peter Humphreys
Monash Forge:
Monash Forge is the first student-run materials engineering team based at Monash University’s Clayton campus. The team is split into two teams: forging (blacksmithing) and foundry (casting). We chatted to one of the founding team members, Matthew Lucas, about the team’s vision for a more sustainable maker community and their progressive stance on intention in the workshop.
Monash Forge’s custom built coke forge.
“The day starts well before you light the fire. We've got a big focus on forging with intent. This is so before you actually go in and do anything, you've got an idea about what it is that you're trying to achieve that day. So you might have gone and watched some videos or you might have found some cool photos of your great grandmother's fence that someone has forged something in 100 years ago. So maybe there's something you want to replicate or there's a technique that you want to develop. Thinking like this means that you're coming in with a real plan so when you do get into the workshop, you're working with intent you're not just banging hot metal around for a few hours and then coming to the end of it not really knowing what you achieved.”
– Matthew Lucas
Two blacksmiths work together using a hot cut tool and a sledge hammer to cut a grove in a bottle opener.
“We have two fundamental sections. We work on forging, so this is the blacksmithing component of it where we heat metal up to below its melting temperature and hit it with a hammer to reshape it. And we also have the foundry side where we're doing casting, where we we liquefy metal and pour it into pre-prepared moulds.”
– Matthew Lucas
Toby waiting to hit some metal with a sledge hammer.
Seii pours molten aluminium into a Petrobond mould while Tim scrapes out the remaining metal.
“Quenching” a Star Wars Death Star ornament after casting. Quenching is the rapid cooling of metal to prevent the metal’s microstructure from changing due to the cooling process.
James using a vice and modified spanner to add an aesthetic twist to a fire poker.
"I think my story will be similar to many of the individuals in the forge of the moment. I started watching medieval movies when I loved the knights, the swords, the armour. All of that was fascinating to me as a young boy. Fundamental to all of that is how they were making these things. So my first experience with anything that could resemble blacksmithing is taking some barbecue forks that we were cooking sausages with and the hammer that we'd used to put the tent pegs in at the campsite and reshaping the barbecue forks. From that point on I knew blacksmithing was something I was interested in."
– Matthew Lucas
Johanes files a cast aluminium cog to its final specifications.
"So from the university's perspective, they're running this team because they want us to be able to develop fundamental and practical skills, technical skills as well as professional skills, and for us to represent the university by trying to inspire sustainability. A lot of our practices use recycled material or we're trying to optimize shortest furnace run times, like minimizing the amount of coke we're burning. Then we're also looking into novel heating techniques such as using electrically-powered furnaces or developing our own casting practices so that we can decrease the amount of energy that we're consuming."
– Matthew Lucas
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:
Priscilla is a specialized robot that is designed to be able to roam the vast Australian interior, monitoring the health of extreme environments. As it navigates through the red heart of the Australian outback, Priscilla collects important information using her special sensors. Built with a whole lotta love by J.J. Hastings, Mark Splittgerber and Luke Western, with assistance from Dr Tina Lam and Angus McCormack, Priscilla was based on open source plans made available by NASA.
Meet Priscilla, the environmental monitoring robot built for the Australian desert.
“Mark and I met on a lunar simulation mission. We were on a private mission in a decommissioned Air Force base, in an old bomber hangar in Poland for two weeks last July. Mark and I developed a strong partnership through that. We both started becoming familiar with rover technology and just had this crazy idea to start building our own rover because I'm a biologist by training and Mark is mechatronics engineer. The idea was to work collaboratively, first just starting with the open source specs that NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) have made available from the Curiosity (Mars) rover. So we were like, you know what, we just want to start building our own rover, for the funsies.”
– J.J. Hastings
J.J. Hastings and Mark Splittgerber getting Priscilla to “initialise”, which means getting Priscilla to move using the Xbox controller.
Mark Splittgerber.
“The goal is to make Priscilla completely autonomous. And for a whole set of these Priscilla's to be completely autonomous and be able to carry out environmental sensing and moderating in an autonomous way over a large area. Also in our in our dream world, we'd be able to have drones in the air, so aerial surveillance as well. We could use aerial information to give the rovers better pathways. That way the rovers could have an aerial view of the terrain, so that they could go to targeted spots and also know the best way to get there.”
– J.J. Hastings
Sophisticated rovers like Priscilla rely as much on software as they do on hardware.
“We kind of go back and forth about whether it [Priscilla] is a he or a she and the politics around what we call a machine is something that I could write an entire thesis on.”
– J.J. Hastings
"The Curiosity rover on Mars is meant to essentially serve the same sort of purpose as Priscilla, in that it does environmental monitoring. It's got a whole suite of different sensors that it carries around the Martian terrain, looking for signs of life, doing measurements on the soil, meteorology, keeping track of life and the signs of life on Mars. It's our way of, you know, being able to survey and explore remote terrains without actually having to be there in person. And we have the same sort of challenge here in Australia. Australia is actually a beautiful analogue of Mars in so many different ways, it's a way for us to start testing out and iterating through smaller experiments with the chassis itself, with the [Priscilla] rover."
– J.J. Hastings
“We're really committed, through xO.lab initiative, to make rovers accessible. So that means enabling others to do more rover projects in Australia. My interest particularly is in extremophiles and in environmental monitoring. So being able to identify and study biological life in extreme environments. Once we have this rover, now we can start to build on it – and this is where my side comes in – with the right sensors so that we can do environmental testing as well as collect and study the extremophile life that's present here in Australia. By extremophiles, I mean biological life that thrive in environments that human life would find too inhospitable.”
– J.J. Hastings
“In Australia we we work across vast distances, so much more than in other parts of the world. But the community, especially amongst makers, is what keeps us all sort of connected together across these vast distances. It keeps us motivated to keep going on these passion projects that we have.”
– J.J. Hastings
Light as a feather…