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.
The base of that case makes a good protector to keep an Arduino board out of the conductive clutter on a typical electronics bench. I stopped the printer shortly after it finished the bosses atop the mounting posts:
That yellow filament means I can’t lose it!
Our Craftsman lawn mower has both a deadman grip for the motor (the Operator Presence Control Bar) and a Drive Control Lever that engages the rear wheel drive. The latter requires a death grip to keep the belt engaged, which means you (well, I) spend about two hours clenching the grip.
I’ve long since flipped the control to the left side and added thick foam padding, but there’s no adjustment that reduces the death-grip requirement: you can change the engagement distance, not the spring constant.
Evidently the Sears engineers have much stronger hands than anyone in our family.
The doodad hose-clamped to the upright part of the mower handle is a basically a hinge that applies force to the tip of the red handle. The hinge axis lies far enough from the handle’s pivot so that holding the hinge against the handle requires very little force; at least it’s no longer a death grip.
It’s not an ideal solution, but it engages and (more importantly) disengages easily. I still don’t like mowing the lawn, but at least I don’t return with a crippled-up hand.
The hinge is actually a lock hasp, so it has a slot that slides neatly over the Drive Control Lever’s tab. I beat both sides into a more-or-less cylindrical form over a piece of pipe, while miraculously not bending the hinge pin.
Evidently the Sears engineers never actually used the damn mower for two hours at a time.
From our Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
We read the original document in DC a few months ago, while doing the touristy thing. These days, that means submitting to a search on the way into each museum; Mary lost her forgotten-in-the-bottom-of-her-purse Swiss Army Knife to the Smithsonian guards.
We left town feeling that something has gone badly wrong in the last decade or so.
The Casio EX-Z850 camera living in my pocket finally developed a problem. Two buttons on the back select the Review and Camera modes; the former stopped working, which means I can’t see pictures after I take them. The Camera button may still work, but because I can’t display pix, that’s pretty much moot.
Taking the camera apart require a Philips 00 screwdriver bit and some care, but eventually you’re confronted with this:
The buttons and the mode selector dial all connect to the same flexible PCB substrate, which ends up in this connector. You should ease the black pressure bar (seen edge-on here) upward to release the flex PCB:
As it turns out, the two buttons have a common contact that’s the second trace from the top in the flat cable. Both buttons have good snap action, good conductivity, and seem to work fine. That puts the problem deeper inside the camera, where I don’t see much point in going; I can certainly make things much worse and likely not make them any better.
In fact, it turns out that the two buttons on the USB/charging cradle don’t work now, either, which implies that the camera buttons run in parallel with those. So there’s something blown in the camera’s guts, which is definitely Bad News.
Back in the Bad Old Days, you used to take a picture and wait a week or two to get the results back from the drug store. Perhaps it’s fashionably retro to have a digital camera without a Review mode?
That comment prompted me to rummage around for one of my favorite photos: a much younger version of my Shop Assistant helping us shred leaves in the front yard.
She thinks it’s entirely right & proper to:
A parent can’t ask for more, methinks…
Printing went smoothly after two preliminary passes to work out the sizes and alignments; this is the second pass, which you can tell because the mirror shoulder has three supports instead of the two shown in the solid model:
One view of the parts, with the mirror shaft in place:
Another view, showing the bottom of the Elevation Plate with the recessed nut:
Assembling the two glue joints required an overnight clamping:
Then a layer of double-stick foam tape affixes it firmly to the helmet:
It’s a bit too big and way ugly, but works pretty much as expected.
Two lengths of heatshrink tubing now lock the mirror shaft sections in place; they tended to rotate slightly under normal vibration.
The OpenSCAD code and model have a few modifications from this object. The next one won’t have the third section of mirror shaft, which makes the shoulder and Az Mount smaller, and the Az Mount is 1 mm closer to the El Body. That shaves a few millimeters off the whole thing.
The mirror clamp out there on the end is much too large and has too many fiddly parts. I think a little printed doodad would work, but that’s in the nature of fine tuning.
Courtesy of John Rehwinkel.
A long time ago, I read this in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space:
He could study safeblowing fifteen minutes and be top man in the field
Even back then, I knew knowledge didn’t work that way. If your fingers haven’t done it, you don’t know how to do it. The more you do it, the better you get.
Go fix something!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 