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.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

  • More Quilting Pin Caps

    Pinning the top of Mary’s latest quilt used more than 1600 pins: three boxes of specialized quilting safety pins, plus straight quilting pins tucked into all the 3D printed / silicone filled caps. Less than a quarter of the quilt top fits on the table:

    Quilt top with pins
    Quilt top with pins

    Although Mary doesn’t need them right now, I made another batch of 100 caps for her next project:

    Quilting pin caps - 4 x 25 - on platform
    Quilting pin caps – 4 x 25 – on platform

    I tweaked the OpenSCAD source to build a 10×10 array:

    Quilting Pin Cap - 10x10 array
    Quilting Pin Cap – 10×10 array

    But it turns out that a 5×5 array of caps, duplicated four times, works out better:

    Quilting Pin Cap - 5x5 array
    Quilting Pin Cap – 5×5 array

    Slic3r takes far longer to process the larger array than to make four copies of the smaller array.

    Half an hour later, they’re ready for silicone fill. In retrospect, natural PLA wasn’t a good choice for this job: there’s no way (for me) to take a picture of translucent silicone in crystalline PLA atop waxed paper on a white cutting board under fluorescent light…

    On the upside, however, you can see exactly how far the pin goes into the cap:

    Quilting pin in translucent cap
    Quilting pin in translucent cap

  • Samsung Vacuum Cleaner Floor Brush: Wheel Retainers

    We still haven’t exhausted the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Samsung Quiet Jet vacuum’s bag supply, so when a wheel fell off the floor brush again, I had to come up with a better fix than a twist of wire. Obviously, those delicate little retaining latches need more persuasion.

    Capture the wheel in the Sherline’s 4-jaw chuck on the rotary table and drill four holes just below the end of the latches:

    Samsung wheel - drilling
    Samsung wheel – drilling

    The wheel is 20 mm thick. The holes lie 9 mm back from the open end of the wheel or 11 mm from the closed end at the chuck face. Drill maybe 6 mm down; I did it by eye, jogging slowly downward until the tip of the drill touched the latch.

    Tap the holes and install four 8-32 setscrews:

    Samsung wheel - setscrews installed
    Samsung wheel – setscrews installed

    I don’t have a bottoming tap, but an ordinary plug tap was Good Enough; the incomplete threads should hold the setscrews in place.

    Reinstall the wheel, tighten the setscrews, and wrap festive silicone tape around the whole affair:

    Samsung floor brush - wheel installed
    Samsung floor brush – wheel installed

    I heroically resisted the temptation to pry the other wheel off for a preemptive repair …

     

  • Eco-Friendly Firewood?

    These seem to be ordinary birch logs, cut into short chunks, sporting a top crosscut loaded with fire starter:

    Light-n-Go Bonfire Log - stacked
    Light-n-Go Bonfire Log – stacked

    The front of the label makes them seem wonderfully eco-friendly, but the fine print on the back shows that they’re from the Old World:

    Light-n-Go Bonfire Log - origin label
    Light-n-Go Bonfire Log – origin label

    There’s surely a universe where shipping heat-treated firewood from Estonia to Poughkeepsie makes perfect sense. I just didn’t realize I was living in it.

  • Monthly Science: Basement Safe Drying

    Back in early May, I swapped in a new bag of silica gel, which (as always) immediately punched the humidity down to the Hobo datalogger’s 15%RH minimum reading:

    Basement Safe - 2014-05-26
    Basement Safe – 2014-05-26

    A closer look at the very beginning of that data shows the humidity dropping for an hour after the door closes:

    Basement Safe - 2014-05-09 Detail
    Basement Safe – 2014-05-09 Detail

    The logger is on the bottom of the safe, with the desiccant bag on the shelf above it, and there’s no mechanical air circulation: it’s all done by air currents, driven by whatever drives them. I have no idea what that bump in the middle means.

  • Sencha Green Tea: Japanese vs. Chinese

    I recently ordered a pound of genuine Japanese Sencha Green Tea from Harney & Sons (who turn out to be a long bike ride away at the Millerton end of the Harlem Valley Rail Trail), having had entirely enough of the rather bitter Chinese Sencha from the local grocery store.

    Guess which one is which:

    Japanese vs Chinese Sencha Green Tea
    Japanese vs Chinese Sencha Green Tea

    Yup, Japanese on the left, Chinese on the right. The latter comes from the bottom of the container, hence the larger proportion of flakes, but it’s obviously different stuff.

    Based on the first few cups, the new tea has a much better taste.

    From what I read, the price of Japanese teas has taken a real beating in recent years, because everyone (else) fears Fukushima Daiichi fallout. My feeling is that a Chinese tea plantation could be downwind of Smiling Face Heavy Metal Refinery Complex Number 5 and you’d never know it.

    For reference, the Japanese Green Sencha was $40 for 1 lb delivered.

    They tossed in a few sample packets, including “Paris: Black tea with Fruit and Caramel”, which was horrible…

  • Stirrup Hoe: New-to-It Handle

    Mary (not the spammer) uses a stirrup hoe for most of what little weeding she does, so it spends much of its life outdoors in the Vassar Farms plot. The bottom of the handle disintegrated and she brought the business end home for repair:

    Stirrup hoe - replacement handle
    Stirrup hoe – replacement handle

    That was easy: a suitable handle lay on the top of the rods-and-tubes rack; I’d harvested it from a defunct rake a while back. Although the wood is weathered, we think of it as well-seasoned. The errant hole marks came from a first pass, before I realized there was no point in having the handle extend beyond the outward-bending part of the brackets.

    The bolts and locking nuts are original!

    Ya gotta have stuff…

    (And not a trace of 3D printing anywhere to be seen. Imagine that!)

  • Family Energy Cold Call: The Key Number

    A cold call from Family Energy, completely in violation of our presence on the FTC Do Not Call registry, produced an offer: “lock in” a rate of 8.9 ¢/kWh for two years. My experience has been that anybody cold calling me does not have my best interest in mind and a few minutes of search-fu showed that, while Family Energy may not be a scam, they certainly employ unique marketing methods for an “energy supply company”.

    For reference, the last two years of Central Hudson supply charges:

    Central Hudson Gas & Electric  
    Dollars per kWh  
    Date MFC Supply Ch Market Price Market Pr Adj Net Supply Ch
    2012-03-08 0.00190 0.05982 0.00635 0.06807
    2012-05-09 0.00190 0.05665 0.00524 0.06379
    2012-07-12 0.00191 0.06396 0.00532 0.07119
    2012-09-10 0.00196 0.07805 0.00260 0.08261
    2012-11-08 0.00196 0.05206 -0.00100 0.05302
    2013-01-12 0.00196 0.05027 0.00322 0.05545
    2013-03-12 0.00196 0.08340 0.00241 0.08777
    2013-05-09 0.00196 0.07359 0.00116 0.07671
    2013-07-10 0.00197 0.05458 0.00397 0.06052
    2013-09-09 0.00203 0.08143 0.00420 0.08766
    2013-11-05 0.00203 0.06634 -0.00368 0.06469
    2014-01-08 0.00203 0.05816 0.00061 0.06080
    2014-03-12 0.00203 0.14779 -0.00534 0.14448
     
    Average 0.07514

    That’s the only part of the bill Family Energy (and other suppliers) can replace; the remainder pays for delivering the energy to our meter.

    Family Energy’s marketing obviously plays off the staggering price spike in the most recent bill, but the CHG&E rate is lower than their “locked in” offer. In fact, if you exclude the last line, the CHG&E average is 6.9 ¢/kWh. The price spike came from the 2014 midwinter natural gas shortage and, assuming no simultaneous equipment failures, prices should return to the normal pattern.

    We may be building / upgrading pipelines, but expect the usual stalling, because environment.

    Family Energy does offer a $25 cash-back if your annual bill exceeds the CHG&E rate, up to a maximum of $75, but that’s chump change compared to the size of our bills…

    All I know is what I read on the Intertubes, but it seems the Family Energy door-to-door sales droids have even less interest in overall customer satisfaction.