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

  • Maximum-Strength Homeopathic Medicine

    This ought to cure what ails me:

    Empty Size 4 Gelatin Capsules
    Empty Size 4 Gelatin Capsules

    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
    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.

  • Toyota Sienna Brake Wear: No Trouble Found

    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
    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
    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.

    It may be time to start patronizing a new shop…

  • Waterless Urinal Target Redux

    Spotted this (so to speak) on a journey:

    Falcon Waterless Urinal -seashell target
    Falcon Waterless Urinal -seashell target

    Evidently, the bee is out and the shell is in…

    Some backstory fills in things I never knew about the subject. There are, of course, lawsuits.

  • Water Heater Anode Rod Status

    The Whirlpool water heater anode rod is corroding nicely:

    Whirlpool anode rod - 2014-04
    Whirlpool anode rod – 2014-04

    The new GE water heater anode rod seems to be passivating:

    GE anode rod - coated - 2014-04
    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
    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.

    Searching for “water heater” will turn up other posts…

  • Incandescent Bulb Lifetime

    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
    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…

  • Red Oaks Mill Dam: Continued Crumbling

    Recent rains and snowmelt raised the level of the Mighty Wappingers Creek a bit:

    Red Oaks Mill Dam - 2014-04-06
    Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2014-04-06

    It’s not flood stage, but there’s plenty of water flowing over the dam:

    Red Oaks Mill Dam - crumbled top - 2014-04-06
    Red Oaks Mill Dam – crumbled top – 2014-04-06

    The crumbled rubble fill hardly disturbs the flow until the bottom falls out at the downstream edge:

    Red Oaks Mill Dam - crumbled top detail - 2014-04-06
    Red Oaks Mill Dam – crumbled top detail – 2014-04-06

    I once spotted a job offer for a live-in dam tender over in Wallkill, but it turned out to be Internet debris; they automated the process and no longer need a human. I want to live in the powerhouse next to a dam, but it’s not to be…

    Search for Red Oaks Mill dam to find other dam pix.

  • Synchronized Subscription Scams

    Three envelopes arrived in the same mailing, all bearing the same return address across the back:

    PublishersPayment - Three Return Addresses
    PublishersPayment – Three Return Addresses

    By now, I know what’s inside the envelopes and simply toss them in the recycling, but getting three at once seemed worth investigating. Inside, they’re not quite identical:

     

    PublishersPayment - Three Renewal Scams
    PublishersPayment – Three Renewal Scams

    So SBS, PDS, and PBC are all snuggly in White City, Oregon, with LBS somewhere just offstage…

    Apparently enough people miss the warning on the back to justify the expense of the junk mailings.

    It’s nice work for someone with absolutely no ethics whatsoever. At least they’re not phoning us, so maybe they’re not complete asshats…