Ed
By turns: tinker, engineer, husband, author, amateur raconteur, recumbent cyclist, father, ham radio geek. So many projects, so little time!
Homepage: http://softsolder.com
Engraving Guilloché Patterns
Posted in Machine Shop on 2019-02-14
Flushed with success from engraving a hard drive platter for the 21HB5A tube, I bandsawed an acrylic square from a scrap sheet and unleashed the diamond drag bit on it:
That’s side-lit against a dark blue background. The long scratch and assorted dirt come from its protracted stay in the scrap pile.
If you look closely, you’ll see a few slightly wider loops, which came from a false start at Z=-0.1 mm.
Engraving at -0.5 mm looked pretty good:
Despite an angular resolution of 2°, the curves came out entirely smooth enough. The gritty scratchiness resulted in a pile of chaff covering the engraved area; perhaps some oil or lube or whatever would help.
Rescaling the pattern to fit a CD platter worked fine, too:
Polycarbonate seems to deform slightly, rather than scratch, leaving the final product with no chaff at all:
In this case, the doubled lines come from the reflection off the aluminized lower surface holding all the data.
That CD should be unreadable by now …
Squirrel Exploration
Posted in Oddities on 2019-02-13
We spotted a motion twitch outside and finally figured out what was going on:
There must be something yummy down inside that branch scar, but you gotta keep checking your six:
Where’s a hawk when you need one?
Collet Pen Holder vs. Cheap Refills
Posted in Machine Shop, Oddities on 2019-02-12
The three collet pen holders I got a while ago came with ink cartridges:
So I bought three bucks worth of a dozen pens to get pretty colors, whereupon I discovered they didn’t fit into the collet. Turns out the locating flanges aren’t in the same place along the cartridges:
The flanges on the top cartridge have been shaved down perilously close to the ink, but it now fits into the collet.
Bonus: a dozen fairly stiff springs that are sure to come in handy for something!
Makergear M2: Z-Axis Platform Sensor Switch, Replacement Thereof
Posted in Electronics Workbench, Machine Shop on 2019-02-11
After nearly four years of dangling a bare millimeter above the nozzle, the lever on the relocated Z-Axis switch finally snagged a stray thread and got bent out of shape. I un-bent it, but finally decided it was time to get more air between the nozzle and the switch actuator.
The small shim reduces the actuation distance:
Prying the ends outward with a thumbnail releases a pair of snaps and the cover pops off to reveal the innards:
The spring-loaded innards will launch themselves into the far corners of your shop, so be gentle as you slide the lever out and reinstall the side plate with a pair of clicks.
I filed the screw holes in my homebrew brass angle plate into slots, so as to get some adjustability, remounted the switch on the X-axis gantry, and tuned for best clearance:
It looks a bit more canted than it really is.
There’s about 1.6 mm of Z-axis distance between the nozzle and the switch, which should suffice for another few years.
The view from the front shows a slight angle, too:
There’s a millimeter or so below the nuts holding the X-axis linear slide in place, because the original 18 mm M3 SHCS are now 16 mm long (having shotgunned the metric SHCS and BHCS situation some time ago) and the washers are gone.
They’re all nylon lock nuts except for the one just to the left of the switch, providing barely enough clearance for the Powerpole connectors on the hotrod platform:
With the nozzle off the platform to the far right side, Z-axis homing proceeded normally. Manually jogging to Z=+5.0 mm left 2.6 mm of air under the nozzle, so I reset the offset in EEPROM to -2.4 = (2.6 – 5.0) mm:
M206 Z-2.4
M500The first calibration square came out at 2.91 mm, so I changed the offset to -2.3 mm, got a 2.80 mm square with a firmly squished first layer, changed it to -2.5 mm, and got a 3.00 mm square for my efforts.
An array of five squares showed the platform remains level to within +0.05 / -0.07 mm:
I defined it to be Good Enough™ and quit while I was ahead.
The bottom two squares in the left pile have squished first layers. The rest look just fine:
The whole set-and-test process required about 45 minutes, most of which was spent waiting for the platform to reach 90 °C in the 14 °C Basement Laboratory.
Done!
It’s Flat, Jim
Posted in Oddities on 2019-02-10
Aaand this front-end loader will require more than the patch kit and CO2 inflator from my bike pack before it’s back in service:
The local yellow iron inventory spends most of the winter snoozing in shopping mall parking lots, waiting to clear the snowfall. It’s been a light year so far, which is fine with me.
Cart Corral Reassembly
Posted in Oddities on 2019-02-09
Apparently, cart corrals last about four years and, with this refresh, the assemblers got it right:
All the white-on-blue marker signs up on the poles seem to be top-side-up, too.
Of course, not many people bother returning their carts to the corrals, but the bewilderment factor should be lower now.
And, yes, the previous mis-assembly remained uncorrected. I can’t take credit for the replacement, even though it happened during my adminstration …
Home Key Tactile Bumps
Posted in PC Tweakage on 2019-02-08
It seems I do more typing than the good folks at Kinesis expected:
In round numbers, the keyboard is all of two years old and that little ridge is pretty much history.
The ultimate fix will likely involve a dab of epoxy, but a duct tape snippet should show me how much of a bump my fingers need to find the home keys without conscious thought:
Early returns suggest one layer isn’t quite prominent enough; some iteration will be in order.
And, yeah, I should yank the keycaps for some deep cleaning.
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