Rotary & Reality

I Need a Rotary

I need a rotary to hold steel barrels for engraving—barrels are heavy, and most rotaries for laser engraving are cheap.

The Creality Falcon 2 40W is all I have in this economy, but I am going to make it work.

I’m a pessimistic-toned masochistic optimist:

I can see all the ways I’ll probably fail, and I’ll still be back tomorrow wearing a dumb expression and asking for more.

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More Than Machines

This project—and everything I make—is more than machines, cutting boards, or just market-rejected stuff.

It’s my anchor in a world addicted to outrage, scrolling, and noise.

It’s proof that presence exists, that touch, effort, and consequence are real.

I’m tired of masks: the visionary businessman, the fan creator, the labels slapped on my ego like the kind of price stickers you can’t get off all the way.

None of that matters here.

Only the act of discovering myself in the shop, and how that self fits into the world, is what matters in the process of making.

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Editorial Correction

In my first blog post, I ended it with:

“And for the newbies to my writing style: don’t worry, I won’t always be this deep—or this astrologically inclined.”

Here’s the truth: I actually am always this reflective. I just usually know when it’s in my better survival interests to stay shut up.

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CAD vs. Reality

CAD is perfect. Precise. Virtual.

So is the past.

Reality—and the present moment—is messy.

Rods bend. Plastics warp.

Sometimes you break a $70 end mill and get that unmistakable vibe of failure layered over your already-nagging inner critic that made your hands a little shaky in the first place.

Modeling and adapting an obscure CNC rotary that sits on reused parts (Ender 5 Pro linear rods), I designed a live center tailstock to hold the workpiece steady.

Every step is friction, failure, consequence.

I haven’t finished yet.

Lockdown brakes to print, wiring to confirm, first Lightburn test still ahead.

But the design is done and the foundation is there.

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Audience and Purpose

This isn’t about money.

Probably no one who follows me, reads blogs anymore, or even knows what I’m writing about will even care.

And that’s fine.

If that is you—you’re the 0.001%.

We are soul tribe.

But in shaping the material world, I find meaning—

wrangling the perfect, virtual, and digital into a real and physical but divinely imperfect present.

Turning form into matter, confronting failure, observing consequences, discovering who I am in the clash of form and matter.

This is why I keep going, even when the world is full of the quick, the cheap, the AI-generated, the hollowed-out corporate garbage that outcompetes me.

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Nostalgia and Tactility

I miss Kmart.

Not the brand, not the business, but the world it represented: aisles full of things you could touch, explore, choose.

A tactile, analog place where reality and possibility coexisted.

Where the digital world was pre-emergent.

Smooth jazz in the background as we sipped our Icees, seated on the bottom of a cart, being pushed through aisles, blissfully naive to the actual cost of goods, and to how we would come to lose all but the most superficial artifacts and remnants of that time.

CAD and the virtual world are just another form of escapism—so is nostalgia.

That world is gone, but I can still try to build something as tangible and meaningful as that time was,

through the effort of my own hands—whether in the shop, at school, or really, anywhere I can.

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Presence and Creation

This rotary is just a machine—but there’s a statement behind the workbench.

I am present.

I am making.

I refuse to let the noise of this digital age erase the act of creation itself—

and the exploration of the self that comes with it.

—Sepp