Awesome article! I love space news, I wish the mainstream media focused on it more than politics and war... Seeing the Cygnus being picked up by the Canadarm made me remember one time when I was a teenager and I worked summers in my uncles electroplating and anodizing shop. One day he gave me a piece and told me to be VERY careful with it, it was one of a kind and needed a very specific thickness of plating,down to thousandths of an inch. After I did the job he told me what it was for - it was job for SPAR aerospace, and it was a piece of a joint on the Canadarm going to the ISS! He joked with me that he picked me to do it because if I messed it up, he could kill me since we were family lol Pretty cool to know I had a small part in that with no science or engineering background to speak of! lol
Haha, that's a great story :D wish I had a tinkering uncle ^^ So you've held something that is now on the ISS? That's awesome!
Thanks for adding value to the post :)
I have! It was a piece that looked something like the pic, about 8-10 inches x 8-10 inches. I remember thinking it was so light for it's size! It wasn't so much him tinkering as owning an electroplating company. We did work for SPAR, Bombardier, Boeing, Nortel, and more. One I remember is Amphibico underwater cameras. Sometimes I see them in nature documentaries and I wonder if it was one I worked on! lol We mostly did electrical components.I also worked on lots of airplane parts, anodizing them to prevent them from conducting current and shorting things out lol I also worked on nickel plating pieces of the machine that puts labels on Molson beer bottles! It was an interesting job,but mainly physical labor and relatively low paying. lol