Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Imagine “updating” these windows with modern high-efficiency glass:
Terwilliger House – parallelogram windows
That’s the end wall of the 1738 Terwilliger House on the Locust Lawn site. I’m sure the woodwork doesn’t date back that far, but the glazier demonstrated genius-level mastery.
We were on a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour, marred by a visitor who knew the rules about not touching the exhibits didn’t apply to her. My parents ran a restaurant / gift shop and, to this day, my hands automatically find their way into my pockets when I enter a store, let alone a museum.
Quite some years ago, I added a wire shelf to the bottom of the “pantry” closet to hold odds-and-ends. The most recent deep-cleaning cycle required removing the shelf, which required removing the mounting brackets to get the fool thing out of the closet.
The backside of one bracket shows I had a bit of trouble matching the mounting holes to the wall anchors:
Pantry wire shelf brackets – overview
The lower bracket bears some advice from my Shop Assistant:
Pantry wire shelf brackets – detail
Check thrice
Measure twice
Cut once
From what little we hear these days, she’s learned the value of always checking her work…
Large quilting projects require lots of thread, beyond the capacity of the previous spool adapter, so we came up with a different solution:
Large spool holder
These are cheap & readily available from the usual sources, but recent reviews indicate that the “metal” base has become plastic and the build quality isn’t anything to rejoice over. My feeling is that if it’s going to become a shop project anyway, I should just conjure something suitable from the heap.
The base is a random plastic project box that came with a flimsy sheet-steel top, which I replaced with a rectangle of 0.1 inch = 2.5 mm aluminum plate for more heft. The box is filled with 1.5 pounds of wheel weights, so it’s not going anywhere on its own. The silicone rubber feet probably don’t add much to the project, but why not use ’em?
The feed hook started life as copper-flashed welding filler rod, smooth to the thread and pleasant to the eye, sitting in a hole drilled into a stainless steel 10-32 screw. It’s long enough to feed the thread just above the Kenmore’s top surface. A hook works better than an eyelet: just pass the thread over the hook and you’re done.
The central shaft is a wood dowel, shaped & sanded on the (metal) lathe, held in place by another 10-32 screw. Inside the spool sits a length of “3/4 inch” CPVC pipe (ID = 0.7 inch, OD = 0.875 inch, gotta love those plumbing measurements) that’s a sloppy fit in the just-over 1 inch spool ID.
The smaller spools fit directly on the dowel, perhaps atop the CPVC sleeve.
This seems to work OK, but I’m going to trim the dowel down to just over the length of the spool, so the thread will feed without touching the wood. I thought stacking the smaller spools atop the CPVC sleeve made sense, but that turned out to not be the case.
Took about an hour to conjure with found materials and without a hint of 3D printing…
But, as before, most of the corrosion is close to the top end. The rest of the rod was covered with a thick mineral scale that I hammered off, then scuffed the rod with a shoe rasp to expose some metal.
Clearing off the shelves produced a book I haven’t opened in a loooong time:
Vector Mechanics for Engineers – cover
The price sticker shows that textbooks have always been expensive:
Vector Mechanics for Engineers – price tag
The first line looks like a date and, indeed, I took “Principles of Mechanics” in Spring 1974, so that book would cost $88.08 in 2015 dollars, based on the official CPI calculator.
It’s harder to figure college costs, but the old rule of thumb says it’s a factor of two higher than the CPI. A bit of successive approximation with a compound interest calculator suggests an annual inflation of 3.9% and 7.8% says the book would cost $403 today.
Which, it turns out, isn’t all that much higher than what our Larval Engineer has been paying for the fatter textbooks in her engineering courses.
Even using today’s worthless dollars, that’s still a chunk o’ change…
Memo to Self: As the bumper sticker puts it, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 