Being the type of guy who uses metal bits & pieces, I thought this might be a useful aluminum rod:
EonSmoke vape stick
It turns out to be an aluminum tube holding a lithium cell and a reservoir of oily brown juice:
EonSmoke – peeled open
The black plastic cap read “EonSmoke”, which led to a defunct website at the obvious URL. Apparently, EonSmoke went toes-up earlier this year after ten years of poisoning their customers, most likely due to “competitor litigation”.
The black cap held what looks like a pressure switch:
EonSmoke – switch
Suck on the icky end of the tube to activate the switch, pull air past the battery (?), pick up some toxic vapor around the heater, and carry it into your lungs:
EonSmoke – reservoir heater
Maybe there’s a missing mouthpiece letting you suck on the icky end, activate the switch, pull vapor through the heater, and plate your lungs with toxic compounds. I admit certain aspects of my education have been sadly neglected.
The lithium cell was down to 1.0 V, with no overdischarge protection and no provision for charging, so it’s a single-use item. I’m sure the instructions tell you to recycle the lithium cell according to local and state regulations, not toss it out the window of your car.
As is all too common with 3D printed replacement parts done remotely, the first Shuttles game pegs didn’t quite fit into the game board’s holes. Fortunately, living in the future means rapid prototyping and quick turnaround:
Shuttles Game pegs – tapered – solid model
They’re slightly smaller, tapered toward the bottom, and take slightly less time to print.
The OpenSCAD code in the GitHub Gist now has has the tweaks.
Plant seedlings started in pots require some hardening off time outdoors before being transplanted. Veggie seedlings also require protection from critters regarding them as a buffet, so Mary covers them with a sheet of floating row cover, which must be both suspended over the plants to give them growing room and tucked under the tray to keep the bugs out. She asked for a frame to simplify the process:
Mesh Shelter Frame – assembled
The solid model shows the structure with no regard for proportion:
Mesh Shelter Frame – show view
The 5 mm fiberglass rods come from our decommissioned six-passenger umbrella, cut to length in the Tiny Lathe™ by applying a Swiss Pattern knife file around the perimeter, over the ShopVac’s snout to catch the glass dust. I started with a pull saw (also over the vacuum) during the weekly Squidwrench v-meeting, whereupon Amber recommended either a Dremel slitting wheel or a file, so I mashed everything together and it worked wonderfully well, without producing any errant glass-fiber shards to impale my fingers.
The corners consist of three tubes stuck together at the origin:
Mesh Shelter Frame – non-hulled corner model
Shrink-wrapping them with a hull() adds plenty of strength where it’s needed:
Mesh Shelter Frame – hulled corner model
I decided putting the belly side (facing you in the picture) downward on the platform and the peak upward would distribute the distortion equally among the tubes and produce a nicely rounded outer surface for the mesh fabric:
Mesh Shelter Frame – build layout
Which led to some Wikipedia trawling to disturb the silt over my long-buried analytic geometry, plus some calculator work to help recall the process; back in the day I would have used a slipstick, but I was unwilling to go there. Although I could special-case this particular layout, the general method uses Euler’s Rotation Theorem, simplified because I need only one rotation.
Should you need concatenated rotations, you probably need quaternions, but, at this point, I don’t even remember forgetting quaternions.
Anyhow, the Euler rotation axis is the cross product of the [1,1,1] vector aimed through the middle of the corner’s belly with the [0,0,-1] target vector pointing downward toward the platform. The rotation amount is the acos() of the dot product of those two vectors divided by the product of their norms. With vector and angle in hand, dropping them into OpenSCAD’s rotate() transformation does exactly what’s needed:
rotate(acos((BaseVector*Nadir)/(norm(BaseVector)*norm(Nadir))),
v=cross(BaseVector,Nadir)) // aim belly side downward
Corner();
Dang, I was so happy when that worked!
Because the corner model rotates around the origin where all three tube centerlines meet, the result puts the belly below the platform, pointed downward. The next step applies a translation to haul the belly upward:
translate([ArmOAL,0, // raise base to just below platform level
ArmOC/sqrt(3) + (ArmRadius/cos(180/SocketSides))*cos(atan(sqrt(3)/2)) + Finagle])
This happens in a loop positioning the four corners for printing, so the first ArmOAL as the X axis parameter translates the shape far enough to let four of them coexist around the origin, as shown above.
The mess in the Z axis parameter has three terms:
Raise the centerline of the ends of the tubes to Z=0
Raise the rim of the tube to Z=0
Add a wee bit to make the answer come out right
The 0.18 mm Finagle constant fixes things having to do with the hull() applied to miscellaneous leftover angled-circles-as-polygons approximations and leaves just a skin below the platform to be sheared off by a huge cube below Z=0, matching the corner bellies with the bottoms of the feet.
Because the corners have awful overhangs, the results look a bit raggedy:
Mesh Shelter Frame – corner underside
That’s after knocking off the high spots with a grubby sanding sponge and making a trial fit. They look somewhat less grotendous in person.
If we need another iteration, I’ll think hard about eliminating the overhangs by splitting the corner parallel to the belly, flipping the belly upward, and joining the pieces with a screw. What we have seems serviceable, though.
Having just emptied a propane tank while making bacon, I couldn’t find any of the wrench adapters I made to remove the QD adapter from the tank’s POL fitting. With memory of the broken garden valve wrench still fresh, I tweaked the solid model to include a trio of 1 mm music wire reinforcements:
Propane QD Adapter Tool – reinforced – Slic3r
Holes that small require clearing with a 1 mm drill, after which ramming the wires in place poses no problem:
Reinforced QD Adapter Tool – inserting wire
Except for the one that got away:
Reinforced QD Adapter Tool – errant wire
The music wire came from a coil and each snippet required gentle straightening; perhaps that one wasn’t sufficiently bar-straight.
Anyhow, I printed two tools for that very reason:
Reinforced QD Adapter Tool – side view
They’re now where I can’t miss ’em the next time I need them, although that’s not where the previous ones reside.
My favorite half-teaspoon measure hit the floor with a surprising sproing:
Half-teaspoon soldering – broken
The weld lasted far longer than anyone should own a spoon, I suppose, but it wasn’t much to begin with:
Half-teaspoon soldering – sprung handle
Having had much the same thing happen to a measuring cup from the same set, I cleaned the back of the spoon and the front of the handle with a stainless steel wire brush in the Dremel and gingerly re-bent the handle to remove any inclination it might have to break free again:
Half-teaspoon soldering – cleaned and rebent
Some 60% silver solder (the formula evidently changed in the last few decades), nasty flux, and propane torch work produced a decent fillet:
Half-teaspoon soldering – cooling
It looks a bit worse on the far side, but I’ll never tell.
Rinse off the flux, wire-brush the joint, wash again, and it’s all good.
I thought about excavating the resistance soldering gadget, but the torch was closer to hand and a bigger fillet seemed in order.
Mary took on the task of finishing a hexagonal quilt from pieced strips, only to discover she’ll need several more strips and the myriad triangles required to turn hexagons into strips. The as-built strips do not match any of the standard pattern sizes, which meant ordinary templates were unavailing. I offered to build a template matching the (average) as-built hexagons, plus a triangle template based on those dimensions.
Quilters measure hexes based on their finished side length, so a “1 inch hex” has sides measuring 1 inch, with the seam allowance extending ¼ inch beyond the sides. It’s difficult to measure finished sides with sufficient accuracy, so we averaged the side-to-side distance across several hexes.
Some thrashing around produced a quick-and-dirty check piece that matched (most of) the stack of un-sewn hexes:
Quilting Hexagon Cutting Template
That one came from a knockoff of the circle template, after some cleanup & tweakage, but failed user testing for not withstanding the side force from the rotary cutter blade. The inside and outside dimensions were correct, however, so I could proceed with some confidence I understood the geometry.
Both the pattern width (the side-to-side distance across the inside of the hex) and the seam allowance appearing in the Customizer appear in inches, because that’s how things get measured outside the Basement Laboratory & Fabrication Facility:
You feed in one side-to-side measurement and all other hex dimensions get calculated from that number; quilters default to a ¼ inch seam allowance. Remember, standard quilt hexes are measured by their side length, so just buy some standard templates.
Both templates have non-skid strips to keep the fabric in place while cutting:
Hex Quilting Template – grip strips
I should have embossed the size on each template, but this feels like a one-off project and YAGNI. Of course, that’s how I felt about the circle templates, so maybe next time I’ll get it right.
As it turned out, Mary realized she needed a template for the two half-triangles at the end of each row:
Quilting Hex Template – half-triangle
It’s half of the finished size of the equilateral triangle on the right, with seam allowance added all around. The test scrap of fabric on the left shows the stitching along the hypotenuse of the half-triangle, where it joins to the end-of-row hexagon. Ideally, you need two half-triangle templates, but Mary says it’s easier to cut the fabric from the back side than to keep track of two templates.
A surprisingly heavy stainless steel pan lid from the local ReStore has only one fault: when placed upside-down on the counter while we’re tending the pan contents, it will rock back and forth for nearly a minute. The lid has a rubberized insert for finger protection:
Pan lid – original handle
However, the inserts cover only the side of the handle, so the metal arch rests on the counter. Setting it up in the shop let me scuff up the handle contact points:
Pan lid – contact point
Then some Dremel grinding wheel work recessed the handle just barely below the inserts and changed the arch enough to keep it off the counter:
Pan lid – recessed handle crest
The lid now stops rocking after a few seconds and is much quieter while doing so. It may require a bit more grinding, but it’s much better after this small intervention.
