Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
A stray sunflower seed decided that the spot just outside the garden gate was perfect and gave Mary’s garden an attractive marker. It will eventually have a dozen blossoms, each one serving as a buffet for the local bumblebees:
Sunflower with bumblebee
Each bee makes several complete circuits of the florets, draining the nectar and collecting pollen as she goes:
Sunflower with bumblebee – detail
Mary tucks the open gate inside the garden to avoid disturbing the pollinators, as wasps tend to have short fuses and multiple-strike stingers:
Sunflower with wasp
The bumblebee traveled clockwise and the wasp went counterclockwise, but I don’t know if that’s the general rule. I certainly won’t dispute their choices!
In a few weeks, long after the petals fall away, a myriad small birds will harvest the dried seeds…
An undrilled double-sided circuit board with the edges bonded together doesn’t look like much:
Electrometer amp – undrilled shield planes
Soldering a smaller hex to the center of the bonded plate produces an isolated plane:
Electrometer amp – finished shield planes
The copper fabric tape wrapped around a brass tube soldered to the isolated plane contacts the ionization chamber shell around the central contact and (should) provide complete shielding. Kapton tape around the edges reduces the likelihood of inadvertent shorts.
Working with a shield at +24 V gave me the shakes, so this one confines the chamber bias to the isolated hex and shell, with the larger hex at circuit common (a.k.a. ground). The isolated plane has about 275 pF to the ground plane, which isn’t a Bad Thing at all. In principle, the chamber bias doesn’t need a switch, because there’s no current drain, but I vastly prefer having cold circuitry before popping the lid.
If I had a small DPST switch, I’d use it:
Electrometer amp – chamber – shield planes
As it stands, one switch controls the +24 V chamber bias and the other switches +12 V power to the electrometer amp front end, with simpleminded connectors so I can separate the pieces.
We’ll see how well all that works in practice.
An alert reader will notice the tiny difference between the blue PETG shapes in the two pictures. The bottom one comes from the revised code, of course.
It has a number of shortcomings (notice the padding taped to the corner of the useless drawers), but the most pressing problem was that it didn’t quite line up with the table top in the Basement Sewing Room. After some pondering, we decided to shorten the legs and install leveling screws.
The first problem was figuring out how to dismantle the thing. It turns out the legs have completely hidden joint hardware:
Sears Sewing Table – leg joint hardware
They’re obviously intended as assemble-only fittings, but prying from the inside of the corners will put the tool marks where they can’t be seen:
Sears Sewing Table – leg removal
The legs taper below the fittings and require shims to prevent horrible saw accidents:
Sears Sewing Table – leg shortening
Another in my continuing series of Why You Can Never Have Too Many Clamps shows the square section of the leg aligned with the saw fence:
Sears Sewing Table – leg clamps
And when the cuttin’ were done, it turned out that the table had two different types of legs with (at least) two different lengths:
Sears Sewing Table – leg cutoffs
I have a bunch of 5/16 inch feet from some random industrial hardware, so I drilled a 5/16 inch hole into the legs, using a doweling jig and more shims:
Sears Sewing Table – leg drilling setup – overview
Normally, you’d bang a T-nut into each leg, but I thought those spikes would split the minimal wood remaining around the hole, so I turned the corners off a quartet of ordinary hex nuts and laid a coarse groove along their length:
Sears Sewing Table – preparing nut inserts
The modified nuts are 1/2 inch OD and you should drill that hole before the longer 5/16 inch clearance hole. I’ll eventually dab some epoxy in the holes, seat the nuts, and that’ll be a permanent installation with no risk of cracking the legs.
The snippet of tape on the doweling jig remembers the drill guide position, but the legs were sufficiently different that each one required different shims and some hand-tuning:
Sears Sewing Table – leg drilling setup – detail
I dry-assembled the table in anticipation of more modifications. Basically, you wiggle-jiggle the leg studs into their latches, then whack the end of the leg with a rubber mallet to seat it against the underside of the tabletop.
Slicing another half inch off the legs seems like a Good Idea that should better match the upstairs table. Mary also wants to round off the drawers and remove a bit of the front panel, which will require dismantling the entire table, but that can wait for a pause in the quilting.
Walkway Over the Hudson – Sturgeon Moonwalk – 2015-08-28
The view from the middle of the Walkway northward along the Hudson makes a nice panorama:
Walkway Over the Hudson – Sturgeon Moonwalk – North Panorama – 2015-08-28
The black rectangular lump on the left is a steel I-beam that I didn’t notice until too late.
Taken with the Canon SX-230HS, hand-braced on the rail, and stitched with The GIMP’s panorama tool. It’s surprisingly easy to stitch a decent panorama from five low-detail images with plenty of overlap…
After replacing that washer, the last step in the platform alignment required 1/6 turn on the front screw between the top two sets of measurements:
M2 Alignment measurements – 2015-08-09 – 2
The last two sets show the sample-to-sample variation with no adjustments, which didn’t amount to much.
Without changing anything else, I then switched from magenta PETG filament to cyan and ran off two more sets of thinwall hollow boxes (in addition to other doodads) over the next two days:
M2 Alignment measurements – 2015-08-10
A bit less than a month later, after producing several iterations of unrelateddoodads:
M2 Alignment measurements – 2015-09-07
The variation in the center box height from 4.94 mm to 5.00 mm shows that sensing the platform Z-axis position directly on the glass surface actually works the way it should: ±0.03 mm is as good as it gets. Given that my measurement error / eyeballometric averaging on any given box runs around ±0.02 mm, the far corners also seem rock-stable and certainly don’t justify automatic alignment probing and adjustment.
Thinwall hollow boxes make good handouts at 3D printing presentations…
The 12 in. ratchet bar clamp/spreader is a light duty tool that’s perfect for delicate woodwork or scale modeling.
Yeah, right. (*)
It’s an awkward, clunky, heavy steel bar with chunky plastic fittings, not at all suitable for “delicate woodwork”. In my case, I attempted to clamp a 4×4 block against a bonded pair of of 2×4 studs before drilling a pair of bolt holes, whereupon one of the clamps failed. I deployed a spare clamp (always have a backup) and completed the mission.
An autopsy showed the problem:
Harbor Freight Bar Clamp – failed handle pivot
The orange handle magnifies the applied force by the (more or less) 4:1 lever arm and applies it against two hollow plastic bosses on the side plates. The one just below the handle broke free, which is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
The through hole looks like it should pass a pivot, but that’s not the case:
Harbor Freight Bar Clamp – handle detail 1
I drilled out the hole just slightly to fit a snippet of brass tubing:
Harbor Freight Bar Clamp – brass bushing
If the tubing looks slightly off-center, that’s because it is. The two halves of the injection mold weren’t aligned, as you can see along the top edge of the picture, putting the hole off-center. The broken boss took most of the reaction force from the handle: a poor bad design compounded by crappy production QC.
I filled the empty spaces with epoxy, topped it off with a pair of washers, match-drilled holes in the side plates, and ran a stainless 8-32 screw through the brass tubing:
Harbor Freight Bar Clamp – reinforced pivot
The end-on view shows the misaligned handle halves:
Harbor Freight Bar Clamp – repaired – edge view
It’s not nearly as stylish, but the handle pivot won’t fail again. I should preemptively repair the other clamps, but …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 