Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The whole reason I got a 3D printer in the first place was to make things that would otherwise be too difficult or tedious by hand or on a CNC mill. Most of the things I make look like brackets and I don’t do sculptures … this stuff solves problems!
Being able to go from “I need a part shaped like that” to holding the thing in my hand a few hours (or, for complex designs, days) later is empowering. Being able to adjust a dimension by changing the source code and “recompiling” to get a new part is wonderful.
These five slides from the presentation show my answers to the question “Why would anyone want a 3D printer?” Clicky for more dots.
Things I Designed – 1Things I Designed – 2Things I Designed – 3Things I Designed – 4Things I Designed – 5
I’m producing more Tux chocolates with the 16 cavity silicone mold, so I dumped four bags (each with 50 g of chocolate chips) into a big pot of tepid water:
Milk Chocolate Bags – in Tempering Bath
I taped them closed to ensure the zip tops didn’t come unzipped while squeezing the chocolate, which worked out quite well: highly recommended.
Based on previous experience, I paid a bit more attention to the water temperature and kept it at 88±1 °F, transferring a cup or two at a time between this pot and the slightly hotter water (about 95 °F) in another pot. Although I’m sure a closed-loop sous vide bath would maintain tighter tolerances, I’m also sure that wouldn’t make any real difference in this operation.
I also wore thin white cotton gloves, in an attempt to prevent my hands from warming the chocolate above the proper temperature while squeezing the bags. That probably didn’t make any difference, because you must get pretty chummy with the bags and the gloves didn’t amount to much.
The results, just after extracting the second set of 16 chocolates (minus some, ah, shrinkage), looks pretty good:
Tux – Milk Chocolate – Batch 1
I called it quits for the evening, extracted the two unopened bags from the bath, and let them cool overnight. The next morning revealed an interesting sight:
Milk Chocolate Blooming – Tux and bags
Now, I’d kneaded all the bags to mash the melting chocolate chips together and squeeze out the air, but hadn’t done much more than that. The patches of white cocoa butter seem to correspond to individual chips within the melted mass, so it’s not entirely a temperature thing; I don’t see how to make an individual chip hotter (or colder) than everything else in the bag.
Remelting those two bags the next morning produced these Tuxen, with the very brown ones having just emerged from the mold:
Tux – Milk Chocolate – Batch 2
The proper temperature for dark chocolate is about two degrees higher than for milk chocolate, so I boosted the water bath from 88 °F to 90 °F and dropped in four bags of dark chocolate chips.
At those low temperatures, the chocolate resembles putty, rather than honey, and requires firm pressure on the bags. I think the close contact with my fingers, even with gloves, raises the temperature too much; the chocolate isn’t untempered (I think that’s the right word; “distempered” sounds much more ominous), but it may be more prone to blooming.
Thinking that the silicone mold might chill the chocolate too rapidly, I put a warming pad under the aluminum pizza pad, brought the silicone slab up to about 85 °F, and found that the chocolate molded much more readily. Cooling the mold to 72 °F, just over room temperature, took quite a while.
The first dark chocolate Tuxen were already blooming when the second set emerged:
Tux – Dark Chocolate – Batch 1
I tried cooling the mold by putting a damp towel under the pizza pan, with equivocal results: the last two sets of dark chocolate bloomed about as rapidly as the first.
It is, perhaps, significant, that the blooming seems confined to the chocolate surfaces in contact with the mold. The flat back surface of each Tux remains in good condition, which suggests that the mold temperature is more critical than I expect.
So my process, such as it is, doesn’t produce good results. Obviously, I need more practice…
Actually, with the advice & consent of my health-care provider (back in the day, we called them “doctors”), I’m titrating melatonin doses to see whether it has any effect on my wake-up-and-toss-and-turn. The pharmacology seems dubious, at best, but the stuff doesn’t appear to have any amusing side effects.
We’re both well aware that you can’t run a blinded experiment on yourself and that the placebo effect confounds null results.
I picked up some 10 mg melatonin in donkey-choking Size 00 capsules, then (lacking a balance with sub-0.1 mg resolution) cut it down using the drug-addict razor-blade-on-glass trick. I can easily do power-of-two divisions, cross-check by eyeballing the capsule fill, and assume the resulting accuracy will be Good Enough.
Useful ratios to get 8 cut-down capsules, starting with the indicated number of 10 mg capsules:
1.25 mg = 1 x 10 mg/8
2.5 mg = 2 x 10 mg/8
3.75 mg = 3 x 10 mg/8
5.0 mg = 4 x 10 mg/8
6.25 mg = 5 x 10 mg/8
7.5 mg = 6 x 10 mg/8
8.75 mg = 7 x 10 mg/8
In principle, those capsules are US-made, kosher, halal, and blah blah blah. They’re a third the price of the local health-food store’s offerings: Size 00, Size 0, and Size 2 (out of stock) capsules. I hope that a bag of 500 isn’t a lifetime supply…
A capsule size chart, swiped directly from one of the eBay suppliers, so I can find it again:
Gelatin Capsule Sizes
Cutting 10 mg retail capsules down to 5 mg shows there’s about 320 mg of powder inside: 5 mg requires 1 + 1/8 Size 4 capsules.
If you’re interested in debating homeopathy, do it somewhere else; it has no physical or clinical basis.
Over the decades, the same local repair shop has performed the annual NYS inspection on our cars; we started there when it was conveniently near to jobs at the IBM plant and continued out of habit. In the last, oh, five years or so, they’ve begun reporting all manner of Things That Need Work, ranging from “dirty fluids” to worn shocks. Oddly, none of those problems recurred from year to year and were never written up on the inspection summary; they were always phoned to Mary, who politely declined the service.
On several occasions, I’d drop off the car and walk to the mall across the road to pick up this-and-that. They’d call Mary (I don’t carry the phone), she’d say she would pass the message to me, and they would never mention the problems when I picked up the car. Huh.
Most recently, they told her the front brakes had “wafer thin” pads and the rotor disks were severely worn. She declined the service, as always. When I change the oil, I do an under-the-car lookaround and the brakes have always looked fine, but, being that type of guy, I pulled the front wheels and took a closer look at the situation:
Right Front Brake
The pads start at 7 mm and wear to a minimum thickness of 1 mm, at which point the cross-pad wear indicating groove will vanish and a little metal tab will touch the rotor and start screaming. These pads have about 2 mm left to the bottom of the grooves and are wearing evenly.
The rotors start at 28 mm thick and wear to 26 mm. These rotors measure 27.73 mm and have no serious grooves or scars.
Just for grins, I pulled the rotors and measured the thickness at the middle of the swept ring, aligned with the bolt holes:
Sienna rotor thickness
Bottom line: the rotors match to within 0.0015 inch = 0.04 mm and have 0.0005 inch = 0.013 mm of variation around the circumference.
With 91 k miles on the OEM pads and rotors, I’d say they’re doing fine and that we don’t use the brakes nearly enough.
The Whirlpool water heater anode rod is corroding nicely:
Whirlpool anode rod – 2014-04
The new GE water heater anode rod seems to be passivating:
GE anode rod – coated – 2014-04
There’s some corrosion up near the bolt head, so it’s not entirely asleep:
GE anode rod – bolt – 2014-04
I hammered the coating off the rod, scuffed the shiny parts with coarse sandpaper, wiped off the dust, and stuck it back in its socket. We’ll see what it looks like next year.
Both tanks flushed nicely without too much sediment.
Two 40 W incandescent bulbs in the front bathroom burned out within a few days of each other. Being that type of guy, I know that I installed this bulb nine years ago:
Bulb base – install date
The date is easier to read with the bulb in hand: 13 Feb 05. The (5 yrs) indicates the previous bulb in that socket lasted five years.
The other bulb date went in during March 09, so it survived only five years; the previous bulb lasted 6 years.
Even though 40 W incandescent bulbs are history, maybe I have enough spares on the shelf that the next owner can replace ’em with cheap LEDs.
This may not be science, but it does have numbers…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 