Category Archives: Hardware

Waterjet pastries? Edelweiss Patisserie Plant Visit (April 2015)

Did you know your trader joe’s brownies in Boston are cut with a waterjet?brownies

first, youtube

On the internet, I watched a video about waterjets containing a shot of a waterjet cutting pastries.
A few more (well, a lot) youtube links later,
Inline image 1
Inline image 1
turns out that right in Medford, MA there is a waterjet being used in production at a bakery called “Edelweiss Patisserie”.
Inline image 1
Based on their website, they are essentially a contract manufacturer for baked goods. So cool!

        We produce more than products that fit your business needs—we create pastries that enhance your product line.

Our customers are category leaders in the food industry, including supermarket and club store chains, restaurants and cafes. They demand innovative, unique products to meet the needs of their sophisticated consumers and their own margin and turn standards.

We invest in product development and have the manufacturing flexibility to create almost any dessert our customers could imagine. Our business is driven by what our customers want, and we deliver! When we say we offer only the highest quality products, we mean it.

I emailed the contact email, and lo and behold, a few weeks later, the very kind owner of the place replied! He was held up by the Easter holidays.

plant visit

Thus, one spring day we drove over to Edelweiss.
edelweiss_outside
We got a sweet tour of the place by the owner himself. The place is gigantic (the pictures don’t do it justice). Here, the owner talks a little about the supply chain and inventory management needed to run the place.
tour
There was a recycling machine that crushed boxes
recyclemachine
into neat cubes, WALL-E style 🙂
recycle
Industrial quantities of strawberries
strawberries
and trash bins full of tapioca starch put the batch ingredients we use for putz’s (where I lived during undergrad) liquid nitrogen ice cream event (cryofac) to shame.
tapiocastarch
Vat of oil half as tall as me.
oil
There were horizontal bandsaws used to plane pastries
planars
horizontal_bandsaws
Here’s just a few croissants
croissants
croissants_closeup
The ovens were pretty cool because
oven
they had this mechanism inside that would lift an entire rack of pastries up so that they could be rotated and evenly heated while baking. Sort of like an industrial version of the toy vending machines with the claw you use to try to grab plushies.
ovenmechanism
 Giant chocolate machine, chocoma (I think the name is funny)
chocoma

waterjet machine for baked goods

Note: This waterjet uses water only (at 60kpsi), no garnet (it’d get all over your cake! :P)

Finally we came to the highlight, a waterjet from ?Spain? that cuts baked goods (and is in use all the time when the plant is running).

waterjet

machine_side

Here’s a closeup of the interface.
bats
The designs are pre-programmed, there’s a simple shape editor, and then other designs are emailed in to the manufacturer to be converted into DXF or whatever

video of it cutting

in more detail

what was cut:

hearts

filters

filters

right side (pump?)machine_rightside

left side (intensifier?)machine_leftside

They told this awesome story of the seal on one of the components breaking, and then they cut it themselves on the machine. Secretly, they are engineers now too 🙂
Here’s the part they fixed (maybe a water trap??), which is to the rear of the machine on the left side:
watertrap
chiller
chiller

 

The mechanism

waterjet_mechanism

mechanism

The grille
grille
The grille was a little worn!
worn_grille

misc. technology

 face detector for a high-tech version of punching in and out
 face_detector
labelmaker
labelmaker
wrapping
wrapping
all ready to be shipped!
croissants_shipready

and our going away present

brownies

The end.

edelweiss_box

gallery

same pictures in more modern webdesign look (idk what is google doing with all their photo services):
https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipP4l6DjOm33q_sNXtFdvoF0heVceXYI27uKR_BQ

Infinity Dress Attempt in 8 hours

dressback

I wanted to replicate a dress I have for Open Hardware Summit (which I’m using as an excuse to start and finish a lot of projects, from heels to dress to earrings), but found it too difficult. Instead, I found this super-easy dress, which consists of just four pieces:

4pieces

http://www.instructables.com/id/Infinity-Dress/

It is called an infinity dress because of all the ways you can wear it

il_fullxfull.302124536

il_fullxfull.403294097_pzws

My attempt came out more like a miniskirt due to some errors I made and lack of additional cloth. It also falls strangely on the front due to the lack of cloth pulling it down. So it goes.

 

dressfront

To remedy it, since I have no more of that cloth and the store that sold it (Sew Low) is now closed (owner retired), I can 1) sew a different color underneath 2) wear a slip underneath 3) wear dark tights.

Additionally, the stretchy orange fabric causes… issues when it’s stretch thin. Ala wet tshirt problems. 🙁

It was all pretty straightforward. I’ll just document my measurements and cloth dimensions here.

  1. height 64.5”
  2. waist 31.5”
  3. chest center to armpit back 10.5”
  4. bottom of ribcage to top of breasts 6”

For the circle, my inner radius was 4.25” and my outer radius was 19.75”. Here is a picture (with the inner circle unfolded to show that the cloth is folded into quarters). I made the waist smaller than intended and it fit fine on my waist without falling down or being too small (although it did get on the smaller end of acceptable after I finished sewing everything to it).

skirtfinaldim

I mark it, I used a piece of chalk and a tape measure, then anchored my right hand at the center of the circle and swung the tape around.

radiusmarking

Unfolded

skirt_unfolded

My rectangular cloth was 10” by 28”.

rectangle

My long straps were 10.5” by 97”. I pinned them extensively down their entire length and the cutting was straightforward, although extremely tedious. The mat actually helped a lot, since I could line up the clean edges on the mat and actually see through the fabric to the white lines on the mat and mark down the entire length.

straps

I used a single stitch, the straight stitch, no zigzag stitch needed (the second row on the machine), because the orange fabric was super stretchy.

sewingmachine

The only part I found tricky* was which side to sew the rectangle (turned into cylinder) on onto the dress. I almost sewed it on the wrong side. It should be sewn with the top part of the right side is facing you and the bottom part of the right side is facing the mat, and the wrong side is facing itself on the inside. That way, when you put on the dress, the right side is facing out. The right side of the cylinder is facing the wrong side of the straps. The right side of the straps is facing the right side of the skirt. The bottom part of the right side of the skirt is facing the mat.

rightsidedown

rightsidedown-closeup

*I messed up on the skirt mostly because I wasn’t really paying attention and was listening to a podcast 🙁 I folded it in half and cut out the quarter circle, instead of folding it into quarters. Unfolded, I got two useless halves of cloth instead of a circular skirt.

All told it took me 8 hours to go from first reading the instructions to wearing the dress.

[the end]

Nails Sept 2015

I played extensively with gradients (ombre) this time around. I think I need to find some China Glaze, a lot of the nail polishes were very dilute, so I had to go back and dab more on to fix the gradient.

I also used a nail polish pen to draw summer / water themed decals on top of the background gradient colors. I’m most proud of the one with the conch shell, though you can’t see the colors too well in this picture.

Left

2015-08-25

Right

20150825_094942-whitebal