"When I was fabricating the NightHawk, there were certain bends my shop just couldn’t do. So we enlisted a precision sheet metal shop in Brighton, CO. After the first prototype rolled out, one of the employees there couldn’t stop staring at it. But it wasn’t done yet. I was trained in fabrication by the master himself, Doc, at CSU. So when I had about 20-30 changes that I wanted to make to the prototype instead of starting a new one, even the best precision sheet metal shop in the state gave me blank stares. They didn’t know how. But I knew how. Doc taught me. God taught me the rest, by giving me this mind and giving me the challenges necessary to anneal my mind into a fomentation. You see, even before I knew Yahushua, God was training me.
So I knew that metal could be manipulated in this way. I drew on the metal with the marker, I made the notes, but the precision sheet metal shop didn’t know how.
I love the attached video because it is proof of concept. It shows that metal is in fact clay, if you will. The thinner the metal, the harder it is to work with in some ways, the more like clay it is in others. The sky is the limit.
I never did get to make the final version of the NightHawk. Those 20-30 changes collect dust in a file that I will soon release into open source.
That precision sheet metal shop sabotaged me. They employed a technique which the corporate-public partnership mecca knows all too well. They stonewalled me. You see, they had a corporate partner who knew about me. A corporation that knew we were going to turn the industry upside down, being about 10 years ahead of everyone else in concept. Back then we were just emerging from the beige box. All praise, honor, and glory belongs to the Most High.
So they stonewalled us, as our designers had stonewalled us, as our engineers had stonewalled us, as the publications I drove to California to present to would not publish my work, but were perfectly willing to clone it. I remember the entire PC Gamer floor gathered around the NightHawk when I brought it in. They asked to hold it a bit longer, took pictures of it from every angle you could imagine, and said ‘better luck next time, kid, this is not professional enough for our publication.’ Stonewalled, cloned, and placed under the fold.
Now this placed a great deal of debt on me. I didn’t believe in myself at the time. I didn’t know about the strategies these corporate public partnerships employed to do the dirty work. Now I do.
I did not feel called to build the NightHawk. I was stubborn and did it anyways. I took the $90k from the sale of my first house and sank $30k into debt. Additionally, a ‘reputation management’ company masquerading as an SEO firm stole a large sum of money. This is how I learned about reputation management. The corporations defeated my greenhorn ass.
But God took me from my wayward path. He used this opportunity to teach me design, metal, and how to overcome sabotage and censorship. He took broken me and my wayward self and turned it into optimal me. The work I will create is what excites me, as I know I can build anything I want. Even cars, boats, and airplanes….
Keep going! Trust in God. The rest is French bread."
