Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
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…
Recent rains and snowmelt raised the level of the Mighty Wappingers Creek a bit:
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
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
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…
Three envelopes arrived in the same mailing, all bearing the same return address across the back:
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
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…
Having experimentally determined that tempering molten chocolate is not optional (i.e., chocolate doesn’t behave just like butter), I tried a cheat discussed in the comments following that helpful post. Basically, because all retail chocolate is already tempered, you can get good results by carefully heating it to the proper temperature, then pouring it into the molds… the proper crystals remain in their places, the cooled chocolate has good snap, and you avoid a huge amount of fuffing and fawing.
Not having a sous vide setup, but also not working with giant chocolate blocks, I simply filled a big ceramic pot with tepid water:
Chocolate tempering – water bath
Note that the gas burner under the pot is off: the pot’s on the stove because it fit nicely next to the countertop.
A small metal pot sits out of sight on the burner to the left. Goosed with low heat as needed, that pot provided warm water: I moved a cup of tepid water to the metal pot, moved a cup of slightly warmer water back to the ceramic pot, and repeated as needed. As it turned out, the big pot held its heat quite well and the whole process went swimmingly, with the water temperature at 90±1°F, tops.
The Official Tempering Numbers seem to be:
Dark chocolate: 88 – 90°F
Milk chocolate: 86 – 88°F
I suppose I should have used slightly cooler water for the milk chocolate shown in the picture, but it came out Just Fine.
I used Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Morsels for lack of anything better. As nearly as I can tell, cheaper chocolate isn’t really chocolate and fancier chocolate seemed like a Bad Idea until I’ve made a few more mistakes. One bag each of Milk, Dark, and Semi-Sweet sufficed for my simple needs.
The ziplock baggie holds 50 g of chocolate chunks / morsels / whatever, which turned out to be exactly the right amount to fill 16 Tux mold cavities with a 5 mm maximum depth, plus a little bit for the inevitable mess. Sometimes, I just get lucky…
Put chocolate chunks into bag, squeeze out as much air as possible, seal, drop in the pot. Wait a few minutes until it’s not quite completely melted, remove, dry the bag, squeeze out the rest of the air, then knead until it’s all mooshy.
Then cut off one corner of the bag, squeeze chocolate into mold cavities, and flatten the back. I started by easing it into the beak and eyes, filling the tummy, then piling enough to cover everything else. This worked surprisingly well, although the ziplock can unlock if you squeeze hard enough; cut the corner a little bit larger than seems necessary.
Memo to Self: tape the ziplock part of the bag closed to prevent bloopers.
I used a plastic scraper (well, an unused credit card, if you must know) to moosh the chocolate into the cavity and level the back. There doesn’t seem to be much to choose between doing one cavity at a time or a whole row in one pass, although filling more than one row lets the first lump get too cool.
I worried about the chocolate in the bag getting too cool, until I realized that my fingers are hotter than the tempering bath, so, if anything, it would get too hot.
The result came out surprisingly tidy:
Tux Gradient 4×4 – milk chocolate in mold
The silicone block sits atop an aluminum pizza pan, which I transported to the basement for cooling while filling and melting the next bag; the chocolate popped right out of the cavities at about 70°F.
The result looked pretty good to me:
Tux Gradient 4×4 – milk chocolate detail
The detail come out fine and if anybody kvetches about a few bubbles, they don’t get any more.
From left to right, Tux in milk, semi-sweet, and dark chocolate:
Tux Gradient – milk semi-sweet dark lineup
The semi-sweet Tuxes began to bloom almost instantly. I had heated the silicone mold to about 90°F in an attempt to keep the chocolate melty enough to fill 16 cavities before leveling them all at once, but I think it was too hot on the bottom; the four center pieces bloomed right out of the mold and a few others bloomed shortly thereafter.
The bloom highlights the mold detail, though:
Tux Gradient – semi-sweet chocolate bloom
I quickly destroyed all the evidence…
Each Tux weighs 2.5 to 3 g. You do the calorie count yourself, OK?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 