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.
After six years, the anodizing on the Anker LC40 flashlights I repurposed as daytime running lights shows some radiation damage:
The bottom side looks pristine:
It turns out they were clamped in slightly different positions on our two bikes:
The side view shows a gentle color transition:
Apparently I had swapped the caps from the two lights when I noticed the fading after only the first year.
A garter snake has taken up residence under our garbage can and is startled when I wheel it away:
This week it was curled into a compact bundle:
The blue eyes indicate it’s in the process of shedding its skin, so next week we’ll have an even bigger and shinier guardian.
Shedding one’s skin apparently requires a great deal of thought, as it remained in that pose while I fetched Mary, then moved deliberately off into the leaf litter behind the can.
The small rodent population around here has definitely declined: garter snakes are murder on field mice and the hawks are taking out the chipmunks.
Go, snake, go!
The six sticky traps guarding Mary’s onion beds in her Vassar Community Gardens plots collected this assortment of critter and mulch from mid-July through mid-August, when she harvested the last of the crop:
The labels do not match those on the first set through mid-July, because I don’t care quite enough to keep track of them.
The traps don’t collect many onion maggot flies, which suggests that a little control goes a long way. As far as she’s concerned, these traps work very well, because the crop has very little maggot damage.
Searching for onion sticky traps will produce the rest of the collection. Contact me for the full resolution images, should you need to ID all the critters.
One of the sticky traps absorbed a mighty blow during the season and its ski-pole mount snapped off. Rather then rebuild the whole thing, I decided to just epoxy the pieces together and stick a reinforcing plate on the bottom.
I added a pair of screw holes to the OpenSCAD model and produced a projection of the bottom layer:
if (Layout == "Projection") {
projection(cut=true) {
Attachment();
Cap();
}
}
Which looked like this:
Cutting that shape from an adhesive sheet looks the same:
The somewhat raggedy large hole seems to come from OpenSCAD’s somewhat low-res SVG outline conversion.
Fill the broken part with epoxy:
Clamp it together on a plate to keep the bottom aligned:
Cut an acrylic baseplate:
Apply adhesive sheet to acrylic, stick it on the bottom of the cage, add a pair of stainless steel screws, and declare victory:
We’ll see how long that lasts out in the garden next year …
Perhaps popsicle stick mixers?
I made a batch to see if they’d simplify mixing my usual tiny batches of epoxy … and they do! Now I need not worry about forgetting to wipe off the screwdriver or cross-contaminating the resin / hardener tubes.
Reshaping the tip so the laser beam enters at right angles to the stick produced a cleaner cut and a slightly narrower blade:
The fixture and LightBurn template I made for the engraved markers came in handy. Aligning the template to the fixture proceeds as with the larger craft stick garden markers.
A small holder keeps finished sticks ready for use:
I don’t know how long the box originally holding 1000 sticks has been sitting on the shop shelf, but it’s at least half full despite my continuing efforts. Maybe I can get ahead on my holiday gift prep?
The LightBurn SVG template layout as a GitHub Gist:
The new batch of glasses I just received makes me take back any nice things I previously implied about Zenni Optical’s nose pad alignment:
Zenni does have a guide to reshaping the frames, but it does not include aligning the pads parallel to your nose, which definitely goes better with wire-bending pliers in hand.
They should look more like this when you’re done:
I suppose this is a consequence of being able to get two eyeglasses + two sunglasses in three different frame styles and two different prescriptions, each with progressive lenses and antireflective coating, for about $350 delivered halfway around the planet.
Makes owning a set of metal-forming pliers look downright economical.
A few years ago, Mary paid more than that for a single pair of badly fitted glasses from a local outlet. Those days are over.
Half a year of plunking my morning cocoa mug on the magnetic stirrer had pretty well scuffed up its platform, so this seemed like a good idea:
Rather than add the blue disk to the small-scraps collection, I converted the Squidwrench logo into a LightBurn layout:
The roll of transfer tape I have on hand doesn’t stick well to the polyurethane sheet, so easing the vinyl onto the mug required careful tweezer work:
It’s on the other side of the mug from the original, somewhat battered, logo.
Now we can learn how long polyurethane sheets survive under the same conditions.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
