Author: Ed

PolyDryer Humidity: 30 Days Later

A month after the last desiccant change, the silica gel looks like this:

Polydryer - 30 day beads — Polydryer – 30 day beads

The top cup contains fresh-from-stock dry (regenerated) silica gel beads and the others, left-to-right and top-to-bottom, come from PolyDryer boxes:

Material	%RH	Weight – g	Increase – g	Water gain – %
PETG White	14	26.8	1.8	7.2
PETG Black	20	26.8	1.8	7.2
PETG Orange	13	26.8	1.8	7.2
PETG Blue	15	26.9	1.9	7.6
PETG-CF Blue	19	27.4	2.4	9.6
PETG-CF Black	28	27.3	2.3	9.2
PETG-CF Gray	27	27.1	2.1	8.4
TPU Clear	13	26.8	1.8	7.2
Sum of weights		215.9		8.0
Measured weight		216.3		8.1

I expected some correlation between the indicated humidity and the weight of adsorbed water vapor, but that’s not the case.

The bottom row suggests there’s also little-to-no correlation between bead color and humidity, at least at this low end of the scale.

The indicator cards tucked into the boxes roughly correlate with the meter reading, but they’re much easier to interpret in person.

The old chart of adsorption vs. relative humidity suggests the results are plausible, with the 27-ish %RH being higher than you’d expect from 9-ish % adsorption:

So they’re all set up with 25 g of fresh silica gel, although the boxes no long have the same humidity meters they started with. This likely makes little difference, as I have no way to calibrate them.

2025-08-01

Polymaker PolyDryer Desiccant: Trust, But Verify
The startup ritual for a PolyDryer box’s humidity meter includes:
- Opening a small sealed bag containing …
- The DO NOT EAT desiccant, to be cut open and …
- Poured into the meter box
Which looks like this:

Polydryer – 14 pctRH – meter – white PETG

However, the desiccant packets for the most recent pair of boxes (intended to simplify changing the desiccant in the collection feeding the MMU3 atop the Prusa MK4 3D printer) produced this:

Polydryer – as-received desiccant

The silica gel in the left cup looks OK-ish, maybe a little dark, but the fresh-from-the-bag beads in the right cup are crying out for regeneration after having adsorbed about all the water vapor they can.

If you were using that silica gel in its original DO NOT EAT bag, where you can’t see what it’s telling you, you might wonder why it wasn’t doing such a great job of drying the box + filament. The same could happen with a bag of non-indicating gel, along the lines of what I was using a decade ago.

So I dumped both in the Needs Rgeneration bottle and filled both meters with 25 g of fresh silica gel.
2025-07-31
Renovations Gone Awry

Spotted on the way around one of the myriad strip malls (different from “strip clubs“) sporting a “Recently Renovated” sign out front:

Renovations – overpainted sign

You just know what those signs said, right? Must not be important any more.

Around the corner, the painters couldn’t get to where they needed to go:

Renovations – paint underspray

A Streetview image from seven years back tells the tale:

Renovations – Street View 2018

So the most generous interpretation would be something like overspraying those signs was a mercy killing. I’m impressed they could get that much paint behind the UPS drop box!

Out front there’s another triumph of hope over experience:

Renovations – damaged pillar

If that pillar looks familiar, here’s what it looked like a little over two years ago:

Fake Stone Pillar – Impact Damage

Even in a recently renovated building, there’s never any money or motivation for repairs.

2025-07-30
Bicycle Mobile Rebuild

A long-lost repair finally made it to the top of the list:

Bicycle Mobile – bottom view

The original string had long since rotted out, but everything else was in a plastic bag just waiting for this occasion.

The colorful cylinders are stacks of laser-cut 6 mm disks with a 2 mm hole, held to the wire & string with a tiny dot of high-viscosity cyanoacrylate glue at each end:

Bicycle Mobile – detail

The disks came from acrylic leftovers:

Bicycle Mobile – laser-cut acrylic

The motion you can’t see makes the shiny bikes much more visible out there:

Bicycle Mobile – side view

The string came from dismantled badge reels providing spiral springs for the auto-retracting spools in the PolyDryer boxes.

The weight ball had a 2 mm hole filled by a wood plug which I cleaned out piecemeal with a 1.5 mm drill bit in a pin vise; a short length of wood skewer holds the new string in place.

Because the upper arms support more weight, their disk stacks need fewer disks for the same leverage. The original mobile had (at most) four 6 mm chromed plastic balls at each level, so I started with eight 3 mm disks, adjusted the stack length as needed, glued them in place, then removed the surplus disks by crushing them with a Vise-Grip.

I should rip off the design (“© otagiri 1979”) to build another with recumbent bikes.

2025-07-29
Busted For What I’ll Never Know

An email from Electronic Arts arrived in an email account I haven’t used in over a decade:

Welcome to your EA Account!
Your EA Account serves as an all-access pass to everything EA, from websites and mobile apps to console and PC games.

Seconds later:

Your EA Security Code:
<<< redacted, not that it matters >>>
If you didn’t request this code, please go to your My Account page and change your password right away. For assistance, please contact EA Help.

Thanks for helping us maintain your account’s security.

Not ever having had an EA account nor being in the process of signing up for one, I did nothing.

After a few more seconds:

Dear EA Insider,

Thanks for signing up. We’re looking forward to bringing you the latest news and information on your favorite games.

All the emails look to be genuinely from Electronics Arts, not scam emails routed through the usual sketchy / compromised servers.

Four days later:

Dear Customer,

We are contacting you regarding your EA account.

We wish to notify you that we have found your account to be in violation of our User Agreement or our Terms of Sale, and due to the nature of this violation we are left with no option other than to permanently close your account with immediate effect.

Which looks much more impressive in email HTML:

EA Account Closing

Although I did not respond to the Security Code message, the scammer surely used a phone number under his (it’s always a he) control, because “2FA” really means “pick an authentication method that lets you in”.

Just for the amusement value, I fed that email address into the EA sign-in page, hit the “Forgot my password” button, and got a Security Code just like the scammer didn’t. I suppose I could change the password and discover / change the phone number, but that would put me in full ownership of an account used for nefarious purpose.

I sometimes wonder what else happens using my identity.

A good prosecutor could nail me for Third Party Retro-associative Complicity and, if I didn’t already live in Poughkeepsie, send me up the river.

This likely came from the old Thingiverse compromise, although that address also appears in the recent dump of a thousand dumps.

2025-07-28
Solar Garden Light

I salvaged a solar garden light from the Vassar Community Gardens midden heap and stripped it down:

Solar garden light – internal

The single IC is a YX805 “solar lawn light boost control chip” and the resistor-like thing is a 82 µH inductor setting a 13 mA input current.

Cleaning off some minor corrosion, charging the NiMH cell, and soldering an amber LED onto the pigtail wire brought it back to life.

It’s now perched on the porch railing where it catches some afternoon rays:

Solar garden light – deployed

Maybe we can think of something better for it to do …

2025-07-25
Sewing Notions Drawer Pull Rethreading

A small sewing notions cabinet, once my mother’s, now holds some of Mary’s supplies and, a few days ago, had one of its drawer pulls fall off. While preemptively tightening all the screws, I found one no longer held onto its pull:

Notions drawer pull – parts

They don’t make drawer pulls like that any more!

As I see things, it can be forgiven for losing its grip after nearly a century.

Thread the screw in as far as it will go and lay the pull flat on the bench vise anvil:

Notions drawer pull – hammering setup

A few gentle whacks with a pin punch on top and bottom, plus a tap on each side, compressed the pull’s remaining threads around & into the screw:

Notions drawer pull – reshaped

Put it back in its drawer, snug the screw, and it’s all good.

That should suffice for at least the remainder of its first century …

2025-07-24