WVU Story Archives - Page 39 of 39 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

How To: Portable Iron Pour with 'Sputnik' the Iron Furnace

“Anybody who wants to carve a mold, we have some right here,” WVU sculpture area coordinator Dylan Collins said to a crowd who gathered. “It’s going to be just like a cooking show! You see your ingredients there, art will get made here. So don’t be shy! And, Welcome! Let me know what you need!”

The inaugural iron pour of ‘Sputnik,’ the portable iron furnace, was both very cool and very hot at the same time…

It was a cool day—downright cold in the shade when the wind blew, but the iron furnace, pet-named Sputnik, fired up pretty quickly and was soon melting iron. The event lasted well into the darker hours, with pour teams pouring some 1,500 lbs of iron.

“This kind of started with myself and my friend Jeremy Entwistle, the sculpture program coordinator at Fairmont State University,” Collins explains. “We’ve been working collaboratively for the last year, going to cast iron conferences, getting our students together to work collaboratively together casting in iron, and we thought it would be a great idea to make a furnace where we could get a lot of metal out.”

Entwistle already has a furnace at Fairmont State but it doesn’t have as much capacity as Sputnik. So the idea was to create a larger furnace that would also be portable and go on the road for various iron casting events in the region.

They set to work, and the beauty of getting sculptors to build, well … anything, is that they consider beauty while designing. And Sputnik is certainly a fun thing to look at!

http://youtu.be/JbgGutA3jGM

**video courtesy of WVU alumna, Emily Walley

“It looks like a machine that has landed from another planet,” Collins said. Thus the spacecraft-based nickname.

Graduate sculpture student Megan Gainer said many sand molds were in the works for weeks leading up to the iron pour. She said invitations to collaborate were also sent out to other schools and community members.

“And we’ve invited a couple other universities, I believe there’s Shepherdstown, Fairmont, and even Virginia Tech here,” Gainer said, “as well as a couple other people from the community, and later today there will be a couple people from the Tamarak Foundation coming to see what we’re doing.”

Local businesses, including Construction Supply Company (CSC), 3 Rivers Iron and Metal, and Jack’s Recycling, contributed to the WVU Iron Pour event by donating materials and supplies.

The Iron Pouring Process:

Heat furnace with coke to get it up to temperature. (Coke is coal that has been cooked in an anaerobic environment.)
Once up to temperature, begin filling it with charges. (Charges are buckets of premeasured broken up iron, and more coke.)
Repeat. Continue to feed the furnace and the well inside starts to build up molten metal.
Tap out the little bot that keeps the metal held back, and let ‘er flow down a trough into ladles (high temperature cups)
Pour teams distribute hot metal into premade resin-bonded sand molds.

Collins says the sand molds are the handiwork of students, faculty, alumni, and members of the public. He says and that the object of the day is not only to make art, but also to celebrate history.
“We’ve kind of merged the past and the present,” Collins said. “We’re bringing together these two different eras and helping people engage with this really rich industrial history which is a real mark of the culture here.”

Collins hopes to be able to take Sputnik around the region, celebrating history and art, beginning with a trip to Fairmont State in the near future.

Festival of Ideas lecture to focus on WVU’s struggle to self govern

As part of Mountaineer Week at West Virginia University, WVU’s Festival of Ideas lecture series will host the author of a new book about WVU’s history over the last six decades.

Ronald Lewis is Professor Emeritus of history at WVU and the author of the new book, “Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II.” In the book, Lewis focuses on three significant factors that influenced the university and others like it across the nation:

Growth
Diversification
Commercialization

“These are actually transformative periods of higher education,” said Lewis. “Where after them, higher education is no longer the same than the period before.”

In his book, Lewis explains that federal programs after World War II, such as the GI Bill, allowed millions of people to attend college and led to WVU’s expansion.

The expansion forced WVU and other schools across the nation to expand facilities, create programs and hire more faculty. But Lewis says the usual pipeline of middle class white males who went to college dried up in the 1960’s and diversification of WVU’s student body came into play.

“I mean the United States was transformed by the civil rights movement,” Lewis said. “…the university has changed but I think it is because the country has changed profoundly.”

This expansion and diversification happened so dramatically that it revolutionized WVU’s infrastructure and ideology. Lewis also explains how one trend led to another, and that’s where we come to his third theme: commercialization. As public funding for public institutions, including WVU, has decreased in recent years, universities are looking at other sources for revenue, including grants, tuition and fundraising. Lewis also says this time period has universities thinking more like a business.

“It’s not really a business even though it kind of has to run like one. We don’t manufacture things, we generate knowledge and technology through research so that’s why we have to find a way for it to work for us,” said Lewis.

But according to Lewis, there is a fourth influential factor to WVU’s aspirations to be a great university. The struggle for self-governance is the focus of Lewis’s Festival of Ideas lecture Tuesday, Nov. 5.

“Self-governance is recognized by most higher education experts as one of the key ingredients in becoming a great university, that distinguishes a great university,” Lewis said.

According to Lewis, WVU struggled to govern itself in the 1970’s when the Board of Regents in Charleston controlled some of the university’s operations. Lewis will discuss more past and present-day issues that impact WVU’s quest to be among the great universities in the country at the Festival of Ideas lecture in the Mountainlair Ballrooms at 7:30 p.m.

Diane Jeanty is a Journalism Student at West Virginia University.

WVU students exploring the world through others’ perspectives—Literally.

Google Glass. It’s a new computer right out of a James Bond film or a science fiction novel. You wear it like you would wear glasses, but you peer at the world with technologically reinforced eyes.

Like Iron Man.

…Without the suit.

Maybe the suit will come next, but, in the meantime Google Glass is being tested by thousands of people including students at West Virginia University. Professor Mary Kay McFarland got wind that Google was looking for ‘Glass Explorers’ and now she’s incorporated the technology into her class.

What Iron Man Sees

McFarland explains that basically, you’re wirelessly tethered to your smartphone. So instead of burying your head in your lap, you can walk around—head held high, taking pictures, rolling video, text messaging, calling someone, sharing what you see-live, getting directions-and following them, and of course, you look up whatever you want online—and all with voice commands or with a flick, tap, or nod.

“So it’s really responsive to questions like, ‘Do I need a sweater today?’ It’ll give you the weather. They’ve sort of thought about making mental leaps. You might say, ‘Ok, Glass, I’m hungry.’ And it’ll just list all the restaurants in the area.”

McFarland also points out that the design is fairly intelligent—the screen that you look through which projects whatever you’re looking at on the world in front of you, hovers just above your eyebrow so as not to actually obstruct your vision.

Testing, testing 1, 2, 3, 4… 8,000

McFarland is one of about 8,000 so-called ‘Glass Explorers’ who responded to a call for tweeted proposals to test the device.

Mary Kay McFarland made this proposal: It's not WHAT you said, it's HOW you said it. – Couples get counseling to understand the other's perspective. What if you could see it? I would use Glass to make documentary video about the misunderstandings in relationships resulting from unconscious body language, choice of phrase and tone of voice.

She explains that once chosen, testers had to go to NY, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, to one of the Google offices, to pick the devices up and get an explanation of how to use them. So off she went to New York.

“It was very simple ass I was just playing with them, to take pictures of the people who were sleeping across the airplane aisle or in the waiting area. And I thought, you know, if you had a camera out here it would be very obvious what you were doing, people would shy away or say, ‘I don’t want my picture taken.’ But it just looks like I’m fiddling with my glasses.”

Enter Elephant in the Room

“It just changes the complexion of life on the street if you can be being filmed all the time, without your knowledge, and have pictures taken of you without your knowledge. So I think most people are excited about the Glass, because they think, ‘Oh, it would be like wearing a computer around; I can just ask it questions and get answers.’ And that is absolutely true, but what they haven’t considered all the implications of privacy and that something that records and then uploads directly to Google who has the capacity to do facial recognition… ”

These are ideas that McFarland is introducing along with the device in her journalism classes at West Virginia University.

“This is not a new issue, however the technology makes the invasion of privacy possible on levels that it probably wasn’t before.”

Classy

But McFarland is embracing the technology nonetheless and students are eager to do the same. She’s asking students to come up with journalism and documentary projects where, instead of recording their subjects, they record their subject’s point of view.

“One student in my multimedia reporting class is in the WVU marching band—the Pride of WV—he actually used them to tell the story of Game Day from the band’s perspective as they go out on the field and what they see from the field, how the formations look.”

McFarland also points to examples like a student who wants to explore the effects of sequestration on Head Start, and a student who is interested in the implications of possible marijuana legislation in the state.

“In those stories they’ll have to find the people for whom those issues matter. And then we can talk about the implications of actually seeing life through the eyes of the people who are living through those issues.”