Japan : ２０１４年４月２０日〜4月２３日

April 20th:

Happy 4/20 to all my friends back in California. I know some of them are celebrating. Here in Japan, pot is highly illegal.
Anyhow. 4/20 was a great day. It was the first time I had the chance to meet up with my friend Suguru. If you don't know, Suguru came to UCI as an exchange student for a year and we ended up hitting it off pretty well, quite literally seeing as he became my tennis practice partner. We also have a big passion for going to delicious places to eat. So it was only appropriate that we went to eat at an all you can eat yakiniku place, basically the equivalent of a Californian KBBQ, except the meat was super high quality and it was a bit a pricier. He brought along 5 of his friends, and I brought 5 of mine. Here is a picture after we finished eating meat ranging from raw fish intestines to fatty slices of bacon.

You may notice one of Suguru's 5 friends missing. He ended up leaving early to find a bathroom, pleading Suguru to take his 3000 JPY to pay for his meal. The expression of urgency on his face was so priceless. We were making jokes about it for the rest of the night.

I had a wonderful birthday weekend. Thanks again to all those who made it so special.

April 21st-April 25th:

The following week of research would prove to be quite frustrating. I started the week out by running Vicker's Hardness tests on my polished samples. First you need to polish the test sample to a point where you can no longer see scratches, even under the observation of a 1000x microscope. The metal sample ends up looking so polished, it has mirror like reflective properties. Here's a picture to demonstrate.

My titanium sample embedded in an resin billet.

The reason we need to polish them this finely is so we have as flat of a surface for the hardness test as possible. The way the hardness test works is you get a diamond, pyramid shaped piece and apply a measured pressure with it onto the test sample. Next you measure the size of the imprint left by the diamond tip, using a calibrated microscope equipped with markers. The larger the imprint left by the diamond tip, the softer the material is. Here is a shot of the diamond piece imprinting onto the sample.

You have to do this 20 times per sample in order to collect a summative amount of data.

After you left the imprint, you look through the scope and use two knobs to adjust the position of the lines you see. The microscope itself measures how long the distance between the lines is automatically. It's kind of a video game like process. How accurately can you measure the diameter of the pyramidal imprint?

Looks like night vision.

So! the data was very contradictory to the expectations. Also, there was a large discrepancy in hardness within the samples that were not extruded. Some points of the sample would be extremely hard, while others were the opposite.

Later in the week, I didn't get very nice pictures of the grain size of my samples, so I ended up having to redo that entire process once, which took like 2 hours of drawing. Funny how engineering can be like that some times.

As for the non-engineerings that happened:

On Monday, I went to an incredible ramen place with my buddies Felix, Gaurav, and Pramod. There is a station called Kandaimae right by Kansai University, one of the biggest private schools in Japan. The surrounding area is pretty hip, with lots of cool restaurants and stores. But before that, getting there was equally as fun. It was a rainy day, and I have now learned that when Felix knows the way, he doesn't fully know the exact route. Instead, riding places with him always turn into an adventurous guessing game, where we get a chance to ride through random neighborhoods in Osaka. This time we got to this extremely hilly, narrow pathway that winded between homes, over train tracks and even had a small pond atop of one of its hills. I didn't take pictures, but the scene, despite being rainy was pretty unforgettable. A gloomy, gray, dusky, skyline spotted with pulsing red beacon lights from the high rise apartment buildings throughout the neighborhoods, yet we stood, surrounded by lush green trees, next to this random little pond on a random, isolated hill. What a great moment.

Anyways, back to the food. The ramen cost 750 yen, and had free refills on the noodles. Here's a pic of the place/food.