The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Custom-trimmed icicles festoon a tree trunk lodged over the crumbling Red Oaks Mill dam:
Last September those logs were in the same position:
The lighter debris comes and goes at the whim of the waters.
The sprayward side of this branch must have an inch of ice wrapped around it:
A quiet day for a walk…
These guys looked completely disgusted with the situation:
They’re about 130 feet away in a heavy snowstorm that eventually deposited about a foot of wet snow on the area.
The top rail really does slant downward: the tenon on the right end broke and fell out of the mortise.
The DSC-H5 carries the 1.7× teleadapter, zoomed all the way tight through two layers of 1955-ish window glass, hand-held, braced against the pane.
The day before that snowstorm, we biked 18 miles out-and-back over the Walkway in beautiful, sunny, mid-50s (°F) weather:
We ride when we can and shovel when we must!
A length of aluminum hex bar became a nice 10-32 screw trimmer:
The hex neatly fits a 5/8 inch wrench, so I can tighten the jam nuts enough to run the lathe forward, part off the screw, and clean up the end just fine.
Unfortunately, the second test cut didn’t work nearly so well:
With the cross-slide gib adjusted to the snug side of easy, the cut put enough pressure on the parting tool to lift the way on the tailstock side about 4 mil = 0.1 mm. The parting tool submarined under the cut, dislodged the fixture, and didn’t quite stall the motor while the chuck jaws ate into the aluminum.
Well, that was a learning experience.
After tightening the cross-slide gib to the far side of hard-to-turn:
Like this:
Turns out that angling the bit by 10° dramatically reduces chatter. If I had BR and BL turning tools, I’d be using them with the QCTP set to 0°, but they weren’t included in the set that came with the lathe.
It’s a good thing I’m not fussy about the diameter of that cylindrical section:
I knew the craptastic lathe ways needed, mmmm, improvement and it’s about time to do something.
(*) By concatenating all my ¼ inch socket extension bars into an absurd noodle capped with square-to-hex adapter holding a Philips bit.
Those ugly square cable clips cried out for a cylindrical version:
Which prompted a nice button:
Which suggested the square version needed some softening:
Apart from the base plate thickness, all the dimensions scale from the cable OD; I’ll be unsurprised to discover small cables don’t produce enough base area for good long-term foam tape adhesion. Maybe the base must have a minimum size or area?
I won’t replace the ones already on the saw, but these will look better on the next project…
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
| // Cable Clips | |
| // Ed Nisley – KE4ZNU – October 2014 | |
| // February 2017 – adapted for USB cables | |
| Layout = "Show"; // Show Build | |
| Style = "Button"; // Square Round Button | |
| //- Extrusion parameters must match reality! | |
| ThreadThick = 0.25; | |
| ThreadWidth = 0.40; | |
| HoleWindage = 0.2; // extra clearance | |
| Protrusion = 0.1; // make holes end cleanly | |
| function IntegerMultiple(Size,Unit) = Unit * ceil(Size / Unit); | |
| //———————- | |
| // Dimensions | |
| CableOD = 3.8; // cable jacket | |
| Base = [4*CableOD,4*CableOD,3*ThreadThick]; // overall base and slab thickness | |
| CornerRadius = CableOD/2; // radius of square corners | |
| CornerSides = 4*4; // total sides on square corner cylinders | |
| NumSides = 6*3; // total sides for cylindrical base | |
| //– Oval clip with central passage | |
| module CableClip() { | |
| intersection() { | |
| if (Style == "Square") | |
| hull() | |
| for (i=[-1,1], j=[-1,1]) | |
| translate([i*(Base[0]/2 – CornerRadius),j*(Base[1]/2 – CornerRadius),0]) | |
| rotate(180/CornerSides) { | |
| cylinder(r=CornerRadius,h=Base[2] + CableOD/2,$fn=CornerSides,center=false); | |
| translate([0,0,Base[2] + CableOD/2]) | |
| sphere(d=CableOD,$fn=CornerSides); | |
| } | |
| else if (Style == "Round") | |
| cylinder(d=Base[0],h=Base[2] + 1.00*CableOD,$fn=NumSides); | |
| else if (Style == "Button") | |
| resize(Base + [0,0,2*(Base[2] + CableOD)]) | |
| sphere(d=Base[0],$fn=NumSides); | |
| union() { | |
| translate([0,0,Base[2]/2]) // base defines slab thickness | |
| cube(Base,center=true); | |
| for (j=[-1,1]) // retaining ovals | |
| translate([0,j*(Base[1]/2 – 0.125*(Base[1] – CableOD)/2),(Base[2] – Protrusion)]) | |
| resize([Base[0]/0.75,0,0]) | |
| cylinder(d1=0.75*(Base[1]-CableOD), | |
| d2=(Base[1]-CableOD)/cos(0*180/NumSides), | |
| h=(CableOD + Protrusion), | |
| center=false,$fn=NumSides); | |
| } | |
| } | |
| if (Layout == "Show") | |
| color("Green",0.2) | |
| translate([0,0,Base[2] + CableOD/2]) | |
| rotate([0,90,0]) | |
| cylinder(d=CableOD,h=2*Base[0],center=true,$fn=48); | |
| } | |
| //———————- | |
| // Build it | |
| CableClip(); | |
A turkey flock forages through the bottomlands along the Wappinger Creek and, at night, roosts in the trees at the far end of our driveway:
I’m a sucker for that moon:
It’s rising into the eastward-bound cloud cover bringing a light snowfall, so we missed the penumbral eclipse.
If you’re counting turkeys, it’s easier with a contrasty IR image:
Mary recently counted forty turkeys on the ground, so that’s just part of their flock. I think their air boss assigns one turkey per branch for safety; they weigh upwards of 10 pounds each!
Taken with the DSC-H5 and DSC-F717, both the the 1.7× teleadapter, hand-held in cold weather.
Searching the blog for turkey will turn up more pix, including my favorite IR turkey shot.
By and large, when you follow the recipe, you get the expected result:
That’s another length of the same aluminum rod, this time with a full-length M3x0.5 thread down the middle, and a screw with a neatly trimmed end.
Running the lathe spindle in reverse prevents the screw from loosening the jam nuts on the left:
Running the spindle forward does move the screw enough to loosen the nuts. Perhaps I should put wrench flats on the big end of the fixture so I can really torque the nuts.
That front nut was mostly decorative, rather than tight, because I didn’t expect the first attempt to work nearly as well as it did. A bit of filing to taper the end of the thread and it was all good.
That was easy…
Three more knockoff Neopixels failed in the last few weeks, including one that can’t possibly suffer any thermal stress:
I wrapped the halogen bulb in a shop towel, laid the ersatz heatsink against an anvil (actually, it was a microwave transformer on the Squidwrench operating table), whacked a chisel into the epoxy joint, and met with complete success:
Having epoxied the PCB and braid in place, there was nothing for it but to drill the guts out of the brass cap:
Which produced a pile of debris in addition to the swarf:
The brass cap emerged unscathed, which was just about as good as I could possibly hope for.
The base LED in this 21HB5A also failed:
Soooo I had to unsolder the plate lead and Arduino connections to extract the bottom PCB; fortunately, that was just a press-fit into the base.
I should mount a 3.5 mm stereo jack on the platter and run the plate lead into a nice, albeit cheap, knurled metal plug, so I can dismount both the tube and the plate lead without any hassle. Right now, the tube can come out of the socket, but the plate lead passes through the platter.
For whatever it’s worth, all of the dead WS2812 LEDs pass the Josh Sharpie Test, so these failures don’t (seem to) involve poor encapsulation.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 