Poughkeepsie lies under the southbound airliner routes to the NYC airports, so we often see airplanes high overhead. With a few inches of snow on the ground, a sunny day turns them brilliant white against a blue sky:
Air Canada Flight 706 – Embraer ERJ-190 – snow uplight
Feeding “Poughkeepsie NY” into FlightAware produces a map centered over us with (in this case) two candidates, one of which was Air Canada Flight 706, an Embraer ERJ-190. The obvious search produces pictures confirming the ID.
Air Canada’s current livery shows white paint on the bottom, but plain aluminum bodies shine brilliantly, too.
Back when I used to fly, light snow highlighted the networks of stone walls around all the old farms across the Northeast, from back when this area was NYC’s breadbasket. Those days are gone, but the stones remain where those farmers hauled them out of the fields.
As before, I put the larger spool on the floor under the lathe and let the thread spill straight off the top toward the smaller spool. This time, I didn’t have a twist accumulating in the loose thread between the two spools:
Grab longer lengths of the loose thread
Absolutely no slippage between the fingers!
Put more tension on the thread at the takeup spool
As nearly as I can tell, the thread still has a slight twist coming off the larger spool, but grabbing longer lengths captures the twist and more tension lays it on the smaller spool. After cutting the thread, what was left had maybe three turns of twist, which was no big deal and obviously hadn’t accumulated.
The power switch in my trusty Fordham FG-801 Function Generator failed with an accumulation of oxidation / crud on the contacts. That’s fix-able, but the switch contained not one, but two powerful springs, and puked its guts all over the floor around the Squidwrench Operating Table. Even with (a preponderance of) the parts in hand, I couldn’t figure out how to reassemble the thing; the only way out was to replace the switch.
The OEM switch had a 0.360+ inch diameter pushbutton that fit into a ⅜ inch hole and, alas, my remaining stock of line-voltage switches had toggle levers and used ¼ inch holes. So I converted a bit of aluminum rod into a suitable bushing:
Fordham FG-801 Fn Gen – new switch hardware
The lock washer in the middle started with a much wider tab that I filed down into a tooth for the dent from a #2 center drill. Protip: center drills don’t walk off like twist drills, even when you hand-hold the front panel at the drill press with all the electronics dangling below.
The bushing dimension doodle:
Fordham FG-801 Function Generator – Replacement Switch Bushing
The internal wiring routes the 120 VAC line conductor to the switch, then to the fuse, then to the transformer. I don’t know whether it’s better to have an unfused switch or an unswitched fuse (surely there’s a UL spec for that), but I didn’t change anything. The new switch, being slightly smaller and mounting directly on the panel, required a new wire (the blue one) from the fuse:
Fordham FG-801 Fn Gen – power switch – installed
The OEM switch mounted on two round brass standoffs and, wonder to tell, the new switch fit between them!
From the front, the new switch looks like it grew there:
Fordham FG-801 Fn Gen – switch in action
The PCB mounts to the top of the case with one screw and four hexagonal brass standoffs. The standoffs have 6-32 tapped holes on one end and a 6-32 stud on the other; one of those stud had broken off. A 6-32 stainless steel screw secured in a clearance hole with a dab of epoxy solved that problem:
Fordham FG-801 Fn Gen – standoff stud
I stood it vertically and tweaked the screw to be perpendicular while the epoxy cured.
Memo to Self: The next time around, put a nut on the stud to make sure the answer comes out right. I didn’t do this time to avoid epoxying the nut to the standoff.
Foam blocks hold the ribbon cable in place and provide a bit of strain relief around the hard plastic edge:
Loop Antenna Splice – hardware
The brass inserts in the bottom block (on the left) got epoxied in place, because they must provide quite a bit of force to clamp the foam. Their larger knurled end sits flush with the outside surface and the smaller end has one thread thickness of clearance below the inner surface.
A last look at the wiring:
Loop Antenna Splice – wiring
I think the preamp must sit at some distance from the antenna to prevent feedback, but that remains to be seen.
The M2’s nozzle accumulated a huge blob of PETG that turned into a giant smear:
Loop Antenna Splice – PETG booger
Fortunately, it’s on the inside where nobody will ever see it. If you know where to look, it’s barely visible from the outside.
The solid model shows off the structure a bit better:
The Hobo datalogger buried in the dirt under the patio kvetched about a low battery, which produced this surprising result:
Maxell CR2032 cell – early failure
Cells from the same lot have been doing just fine in the other dataloggers, so I hope this is a one-off weak cell and not the harbinger of another run of dead cells.
