3D Printing - Allied Nevada's Hycroft Gold Mine

Allied Nevada's Hycroft Gold Mine

I'm so excited. My first 3d print job is at the printers as we speak. For my first project I chose to do a topography of the Hycroft gold mine. The topo is just under three cubic inches of plastic and will take about 10 hours to print. The project is currently underway at the DeLaMare Library at the University of Nevada Reno.

I first learned about the 3d printer a couple of weeks ago as part of a whimsical search to see if there were any publicly accessible 3d printers in my area. I was shocked to learn that UNR was the first public library to purchase a 3d printer for general use. How convenient that this should be right in my back yard.

I chose the final topo from the Hycroft mine as my first project because I already had a complete triangulation. I didn't want to spend a lot of time creating a project just to test the printing only to find out that I couldn't get it in the right format to print.

It took a while to figure out how to put this in the right format to print. The big problem was that the Maptek Vulcan software isn't capable of exporting to the stl file format. Eventually, I found a program that will convert from vrml format (a format that Vulcan will export to) to stl format.

Once I had done that, I realized that my shape was too big to print. I already knew that I had to fit my topo to the 8x8 inch pad but my initial design was almost 15 cubic inches in volume. At $7.50 per cubic inch this was going to cost me more than $100. This was not in my budget.

In order to minimize cost, I spent a lot of time creating walls and a base for the model. This reduced the total volume to a little less than 3 cubic inches and put the cost at a more manageable $20.

I'm so excited to see the finished product I can hardly wait. The only problem is, I delivered the project at noon on Friday. The project will take about 10 hours to print and the library closes at 5 pm. The library is closed over the weekend and I am going on vacation next week. I will have to wait a week and a half to see my finished work. How sad.

Nevada Mining Tax

There’s been a big push in Nevada recently to increase the tax on mining. An article in Bloomberg Businessweek highlights some of the details. Basically, what is happening is the state is trying to replace the lost gambling revenue by doubling the taxes paid by the mining industry.

In Nevada there is no state income tax. In the past the mountains of money the state collected from gambling was sufficient to cover expenses and therefore there was no need for a state tax. When the economy tanked in 2008 all that nice gaming money went away and Nevada has been in dire straits ever since.

Frankly, I’m shocked that the gaming industry allowed the state to saddle them with paying so much in taxes and fees. In Nevada, the big casinos are the main industry. If they had wanted to throw their weight around and get some changes to the state tax laws it probably would have happened. The fact that the casinos were okay with single-handedly supporting the state implies that there was an enormous amount of money being made.

Now that revenue from gaming is down, state officials are on the lookout for an industry as profitable and 'evil' as gambling and they think they have found it: mining.

To state lawmakers, the mining industry is run by corrupt corporations in the far north regions of the state where nobody matters anyway. They refuse to recognize mining as a proud heritage of many Nevadans. Mining is providing jobs and revenue at a time when not much else is going well for the state. Rather than praise mines and mine workers for a job well done the state is branding them as the enemy and asking voters to punish them by paying more in taxes.

Companies like Apple are given huge tax incentives to build new offices in Nevada but the backbone of the Silver State is being burdened with huge tax increases. The proposed taxes are not a few percentage points or a statewide income tax like they have in almost every other state. These changes would double the taxes paid by mining companies from 5% to 10%.

If your job is in any way related to mining, now is the time to speak up. If your industry provides support to mines or miners this will affect you. If you are currently wearing any gold or silver jewelry remember where that came from and be proud of a state that is not afraid to work hard to provide the resources that make life a little nicer for everyone else.

Hide the Center of Rotation in Maptek Vulcan

I was trying to create a video for some co-workers the other day and couldn't get Maptek Vulcan to behave as I wanted. The video was just a screen capture of a new topography triangulation rotating on screen. Nothing too dramatic but it was marred by the big rotation center in the middle of the screen. From my days working for Maptek I remembered that there was a keystroke that would hide just the center of rotation icon but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was. I bet I hit every button on my keyboard a dozen times trying to figure out which key hid that silly icon. I switched to the alternate color palette (‘a’ key), I changed the direction of the light source (‘l’ key) and I even displayed the extents of all the data on the screen (‘e’ key) but I couldn't find the right key to hide the center of rotation icon.

Vulcan screen shot WITH center of rotation icon.

Vulcan screen shot WITHOUT center of rotation icon.

To make matters worse, I couldn't find the Vulcan help page that lists all the hotkeys. Maptek is just like every other supplier of software, they think that their help is the most intuitive thing in the world and that you can find anything just by taking logical steps. I've got news for Maptek and the rest of the software developers in the world, ‘Your help stinks!' It is crazy and backward unless I already know where to find what I am looking for, and if I already know where to find my answer in the online help, chances are pretty good that I remember how to use the tool and don’t need to find it in the help in the first place.

This is a really hard thing to complain about because once you have finally found what you are looking for it seems incredibly obvious and you can’t believe you didn't look there in the first place. For future reference, the keystroke to hide the center of rotation icon is:

alt+a

The complete list of hotkeys for Maptek Vulcan is located in the online help at:

Envisage 3D Editor > Keyboard Controls

Envisage keyboard controls. Also known as 'hotkeys.'

If you have never looked through the hotkeys in Vulcan you should really spend a minute to see what you have been missing. There are saved views that can be set up by using shift+number keys. You can change the color palette or enter a rotate mode without clicking on the screen. You might even realize that the dozens of straight lines that sometimes appear on the screen when you accidentally start typing on the keyboard with the Envisage window active are really just the extents of every object on the screen and can be turned off again by pressing the ‘e’ key.