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.

Author: Ed

Improvised Table Leg Latch

While setting up the small table I conjured from scrap, I discovered one of the folding legs no longer had a latch to keep it from folding. Whether it never had one or the latch got lost along the way, there’s no time like the present:

Table leg latch – installed

The bolt I put there in place of the joint rivet precludes a smaller latch along the lines of the simple steel loop on the other leg, so I figured I may as well go large and, with that much surface area, plywood will work just as well as steel for my simple needs.

It’s a topless, bottomless box from the infinite supply at boxes.py, here seen with its halves being glued at right angles on an aluminum bracket:

Table leg latch – gluing

When those set, I glued & clamped them together in situ, then wrapped the whole mess with what’s basically high-strength friction tape to encourage it to not come too far apart under the inevitable stress when the leg tries to fold with a pile of stuff on the table.

We’ll see how long this survives; if past experience is any guide, it’ll be a while.

The WordPress AI image generator has a shaky grasp of both human anatomy and the blog topic:

Woodwork design by Escher. What is that interesting tool? So many arms, all with nightmare fuel anatomy!

2024-05-31
Sillcock Faucet Alignment Wedge: Getting the Angle Right
A pair of frost-free sillcock faucets arrived to replace the house’s leaky and un-repairable hose bibs. The faucet must be mounted at a 5° angle to let the water drain out when it’s closed:

Everbilt Frost-Free Sillcock faucet – installation

One might expect the Alignment Wedge included with the faucet to have a 5° angle. Because I can both measure and math, it has a 1° angle.

Well, I can fix that.

Start by scanning the bottom (widest side) of the wedge and apply GIMP’s Select by color tool:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – GIMP color selection

After a little manual cleanup in Quick Mask mode, apply a 1 mm inset to ensure it snaps around the pipe, convert the selection to a path, export it as an SVG image, and import it into OpenSCAD to cut the angle:
```
// Sillcock faucet alignment wedge
// Ed Nisley KE4ZNU - May 2024

MaxThick = 5.0;
Tilt = -5.0;

PlateOA = [60,40,MaxThick];   // XY = original angle plate size

difference() {
  linear_extrude(height=MaxThick,convexity=5)
    offset(r=-1.0)
      import("/mnt/bulkdata/Cameras/2024/Shop Projects/Sillcock Faucets/Sillcock faucet angle washer - outline.svg",
             center=true);
   translate([-PlateOA.x/2,-PlateOA.y/2,MaxThick])
     rotate([Tilt,0,0])
        cube(PlateOA,center=false);
}
```
The solid model goes into PrusaSlicer for duplication & slicing:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – PrusaSlicer layout

And comes off the printer looking just about like you’d expect:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – OEM vs printed

The far side of both wedges are 5 mm tall, but you can see the difference four more degrees makes in the front.

It’s even more obvious from the edge:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – on pipe

The wood siding where these will fit is perfectly vertical, so getting the wedge angle right isn’t really optional.

I must drill the existing hole in the sill plate out to 1-1/8 inch to clear the pipe fittings, plus the wood around the screws holding the current bibs to the wall will surely need some buttressing, but all that’s in the nature of fine tuning.

FWIW, this was the first 3D print after the move and I’m happy to say the M2 had no any need of adjustments.

The WordPress AI image generator apparently ignored the post text and produced a stylin’ picture of an arched bathroom faucet over a rimless sink, which I shall leave to your imagination.
2024-05-30
Baofeng UV-5 Wiring Plate Globbery

The weekly battery swap revealed the dismal state of the headset wires on Mary’s radio:

Baofeng wiring plate – loose wires

That’s after sorting & disentangling loose ends, ramming cables under their ties, and generally tidying things up.

Which suggested an improvement I should have done long ago:

Baofeng wiring plate – globbed

Verily, it is written: the bigger the blob, the better the job.

Gotta glob my bike the next time around.

Update: It’s hot melt glue!

2024-05-29
ssh_agent vs. The New Hotness
A recent Manjaro update killed whatever magic held the passwords used for public-key ssh access from my desktop box, requiring me to remember the passords and type them correctly.

After considerable thrashing around doing what I thought I knew about ssh_agent (which, yes, was being autostarted to no avail), it seems that thread applies and the fix now requires creating /etc/profile.d/gcr-keyring.sh with this burst of line noise:
```
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/gcr/ssh
```
Then tell systemd about it:
```
systemctl --user enable gcr-ssh-agent.socket
systemctl --user enable gcr-ssh-agent.service
```
Whereupon, after a reboot presumably causing systemd to make the right thing perform the right act at the right time, It Just Worked™.

I used to have some mild sysadmin mojo, but obviously if you don’t do it all the time, everything you think you know becomes wrong.

The WordPress AI did generate an image based on the above text and the prompt linux overlapping windows on monitor:

WP AI Image – linux overlapping windows on monitor

Which looks a lot like those stock photos filling otherwise empty space in spammy web pages, doesn’t it? In point of fact, the AI Feedback on Post had this to say:

While the AI-generated image may align with the content, consider using original or more contextually relevant visuals to maintain the professional look of the website.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. Thank you, AI image & text generators, for your help.
2024-05-28
C-Power KK-800A Calculator Dress Panel Re-gluing

Long ago, I got Mary a cheap “desk calculator” with a vital function: it beeps cheerfully with each keypress. Nothing lasts forever and the aluminum dress panel around the keys has been gradually working its way loose.

So, we begin …

Gingerly remove the panel, un-bend and flatten it, lay it on the scanner, and cover with black paper:

C-Power calculator keyboard cover

Blow out the contrast, threshold the image, do a little touchup, and get a binary mask:

C-Power calculator keyboard cover – mask

Import into LightBurn, trace and discard the image, do some shape optimization, add 0.2 mm to the height & width of one key, propagate those dimensions to other keys (Make same width and Make same height FTW), cut a paper prototype to verify the fit, iterate until it drops neatly into place, cut an adhesive sheet, then peel & stick:

C-Power KK-800A keyboard – adhesive placed

The dress panel was held in place by what was once a quick-setting gooey glue that had long since fossilized. Although it gave up on the aluminum, it was not going to come off the calculator body without more struggle than seemed warranted.

So I stuck the new glue atop the old glue and hoped for the best. You can see traces of the old glue bead through the sheet:

C-Power KK-800A keyboard – adhesive ready

Lay the dress panel in place, burnish between the rows & columns, and it looks about as good as it ever did:

C-Power KK-800A keyboard – restored

If the adhesive sheet also gives up on the aluminum, I’ll try some fancy 3M 300LSE adhesive.

The WordPress AI image generator heard I like keys, so it spat out some keys for my keyboards:

Calculator keyboard – WP AI image

The piano keys seem familiar, the thing in the middle looks eerily like a PDP-11 front panel, and … could that be a folding keyboard in the distance next to an 8-track player from a car dashboard?

2024-05-27
Sears Sewing Machine Table Latch Fix

The Sears sewing table (Model 853-9635, not that you have one) wrapped around Mary’s Kenmore machine has extension surfaces on both ends:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – overview

The foot panel is secured by a simple wood latch that fell off the left side:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – stripped hole

Having some recent experience with this sort of thing, but not wanting to work under there, I waited for a pause in the sewing, then tried to remove just the hinged piece under the top surface. It turns out the joint is glued-and-screwed, so removing the two obvious screws didn’t do anything.

Dismounting the top surface at its other hinge and hauling the whole assembly to the Basement Shop showed this wasn’t the first time the latch had pulled its pivot screw out of the wood:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – stripped hole detail

The reason the screw pulled out of the top hole / slot is obvious when seen from the edge:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – screw obstruction

That’s one of the screws holding the piano hinge in place, but AFAICT the original latch screw also went right across that hole with maybe three threads engaging the wood.

Moving the pivot half an inch to one side won’t make any difference, so I figured I could sink a threaded insert into the wood. I’d rather use the drill press, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – insert drilling

The combination square gets the drill eyeballometrically perpendicular to the end piece and the drill lies flat on the (underside) of the table surface. Seeing the bit line up with where the hole had to be was confirmation this would be successful; all I had to do was proceed slow-n-steady with the brad-point bit and stop when the tape hit the wood.

The insert screwed in as expected, without any collisions:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – insert installed

I drilled the wood latch to clear an M5 screw on the drill press, dabbed the screw with threadlocker, and reassembled everything on the bench for curing:

Sears Sewing Machine Table – latch installed

The extension surface on the right side of the table has an identical latch that hasn’t failed yet, but we agreed a preemptive repair is uncalled for.

The WordPress AI image generator is delivering much less jank, even if the result has little to do with the actual post:

Sears Sewing Table – WP AI image

Don’t think too much about the shadows, nor the lack of a treadle for what looks a lot like an early Singer Featherweight machine.

2024-05-24
Magnifying Desk Light: LED-ifying & Base Refooting

My ancient fluorescent magnifying desk lamp emerged from a box and cried out to be used, but the equally ancient 22 W fluorescent ring light was long past its prime and cried out to be replaced with something from the current millennium.

So I removed the fluorescent ballast / choke from the junction box at the lamp base:

Magnifying Ring Light – ballast removed

That’s a grounded outlet in the cover plate serving as a wire termination block. The red crimp connector joins a white wire that formerly went to the ballast with the black wire going to the lamp head; you’ll note the black wire from the line cord going into the same heatstink tubing at the outlet.

The lamp head had a push-to-start switch, presumably with an internal starting capacitor or some such, but also sporting a pair of terminals behaving like a single-pole push-on / push-off switch. A bit of rewiring, of which there are no pictures, made it work perfectly with the new 13 W LED ring light:

Magnifying Ring Light – LED ring installed

It now sits on a bit of laboratory ironmongery weighing about as much as a small child:

Magnifying Ring Light – on base

Although the base has four feet, it sits perfectly flat on my (admittedly battered) surface plate because all four feet have been ground to make that happen:

Magnifying Ring Light – foot plan view

Those feet will be hostile to any table / bench top outside their intended laboratory environment. Fortunately, the geometry is simple enough to build directly in LightBurn and cut from a cork disk with PSA backing suited to become a coaster:

Magnifying Ring Light – cork foot cutting

Which fit well enough, although all four feet are just slightly different:

Magnifying Ring Light – cork foot

The new Basement Shop™ is coming together and this stuff is getting easier …

The WordPress AI came up with a plausible steampunk build:

Magnifying Ring Light – WP AI image 1

Love those flowy feet, although the vertical rod in the back seems misplaced.

Adding “one-piece base” to the prompt produces contemporary style:

Magnifying Ring Light – WP AI image 2

Dunno what the dingus on the lower arm might be (perhaps a spring?), but it’s got the right general idea.

2024-05-23