Brooks Coleman

OK,a little about brooks coleman....that's me

Moving to Austin in the late 70's I started out living on freelance work in Photography, hang gliding lessons, wood carving, and general construction but eventually did a couple of years at my only two real straight jobs, the first was building electric cars at Jet Industries, where we pulled gas engines out of dodge omni s, and Fuji mini vans and replaced them with electric motors and huge battery packs. The second day job was making solar panels for Cole solar systems. It was fun and a good learning experience but my creative spirit will not be chained down, that and the first couple of weeks of allergy season gets me fired for missing too much work.

Oh well, I don't like alarm clocks anyway. Over the last 25 years I have been doing what I do with hopes of some day hitting big with one hair brain scheme or another, with some variety of success. Mostly, just really good press like the 2 page spread in Newsweek and several segments on the Discover Channel about my involvement with the robot group, and fifteen years with the psycho-avaunt-jazz-industrial-punk-classical-garage .....band. LiQuidMicE.

As of summer 2007 I finished the brutal dissassembly/relocation/reassembly of the two-12X24 foot and one-12X12 shop buildings as well as the JumboMachineTool from the piney woods of Bastrop, Tx to the Highland lakes of Kingsland, Tx.After thirtyfive 210 mile round trip truck and trailer loads, 5 transmission changeouts, 2 sets of brakes and way too much time stuck on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere fixing that little nickle and dime part or trying to find which of the wires in the rats nest is the one that came undone and which ones are just for art the move from hell is done. Most of the move was done all by myself with the aid of a boom crain on the truck and several comealong winches but all done by hand power. No doubt about it ,'07 was the hardest year of my life .If not for several loans from my brother and the $1500 I made in recycling all the scrap metal ,A/C units ,and junk cars and bus ,I would be dead now . Now that I'm done most of my income comes from the metal art bras I've been making for about 10 years now and the occasional design consulting and fabrication projects I do for my brother's company SignalysisInc.,a way cool vibration testing and monitoring company in Ohio that has been working with just about everything that moves or resonates . I've also hade time to get back into woodworking and just kicking back and spending time creating art. I'm still not done with the actual living quarters of the house but this time I made the shop first priority so I can take my time and build the house without the rush to survive. Having the land paid off before I even started makes a huge difference in my level of stress as well (a gigantic thanks to those that helped make that happen).Once the house is done I could probably get by just selling art but you know how us robot people are,mmuuussstttt.....mmaaakkke....tthhhhaaaatt....tthhiinnngg...tthhaaatss.....nneeevvveeerrr....bbbeeeennnn...mmmmmaaaaaddddee...bbbeeeeffffoooorrrre. As part of my work with Signalysis I spent alot of time putting together CAD drawings using mostly my own copy of Turbocad 3d but I'm starting to use the company's standard:Solid Edge as well as a few sessions in Solid Works .All with the goal of getting more involved with the online design community doing everything from product idea design presentations to CAD/CAM/CNC files for the real world as well as the just plain crazy fun design for movies ,the computer game biz as well as that totaly cool world of Second Life .