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.
Things around the home & hearth
Evidently, it’s impossible to make a spring both good and noncorrosive:
I found a suitable (i.e., good, but rust-prone) spring in the Big Box o’ Medium Springs:
Unlike the repair for that sprayer, this spring turned out to be long enough to work perfectly. I have no idea how long I can keep this up, but … at least I’m now keeping pace with the failures.
One of my fundamental rules is that you should never, ever look inside the water lines serving your faucets. Having recently replaced a water heater, I had to violate that rule and discovered this growth inside the flex tube at the hot water outlet:
Anything that can thrive in 120 °F water gets my grudging respect.
Scrubbing it with a toothbrush produced gray sludge that rinsed right out, so I guess it’s all good now…
This is a classic case of investing more time and effort creating the fixture than machining the parts.
Start by squaring up the block, which came from the end of a random chunk of smoke gray polycarbonate, with two 10-32 holes matching the tooling plate hole spacing:
Then drill-and-tap four holes:
The left station will be for drilling the blanks clamped under a sacrificial sheet, so those screw holes aren’t used for anything other than clearance; the top millimeter will get chewed up pretty quickly. The screws in the right station will clamp a stack of drilled blanks under a cover plate. If I went into production, I could see using both stations for both functions, but …
There’s a locating pip in the front left corner that works perfectly with laser alignment:
The blank sheets show where they’d be located for drilling, minus the sacrificial sheet and its clamps that you’ll see below.
The G54 coordinate system origin sits at the locating pip. The G-Code then slaps a G55 origin at each of the two stations in turn to simplify their coordinates, with offsets from M54:
With all that in hand: stack, clamp, and drill some blanks:
I tried milling a single drilled blank with a sacrificial plastic top plate:
But that didn’t work well. I don’t know if this was due to an inept combination of climb milling, using the wrong speed / feed / material / cutter, and just poor style, but the edges of the blank mashed against the clamp plate and curled, instead of cutting cleanly:
So I made a pair of aluminum plates to clamp both sides of the blanks, then milled another stack:
That worked quite well, although the top and bottom clips needed some slight attention from a riffler file and I did break the edges on all the clips. This shows four new clips along with a hand-cut prototype:
So I made a dozen more clips, picked the best eight for two sets, sent one set to Dan, installed the other, and … now I have a bunch of spares.
I suppose I should sell clip sets on Etsy / eBay to all the other M2 owners, but I have no idea how to price ’em. If you want some fancy corner clips, send whatever you think they’re worth … [grin]
The lawn mower began emitting horrible crashes, which turned out to be coming from a flange at the rear of the mower housing that was formerly spot-welded to the main chassis. Those welds broke and the flange occasionally vibrated into contact with the blade, causing heartache and confusion for both parties.
Re-spot-welding the flange wasn’t in the cards, but the elaborately formed piece of steel did have a flat section in contact with another part of the chassis with just enough meat for a bolt. I grabbed the two with a Vise-grip, whacked the flange until it was more-or-less lined up where it should be, drilled a hole, and popped in a 1/4-20 bolt:
The curved section of the flange faces the blade, with the vertical end pointed anti-spinward: the blade nicks that edge.
A dab of red Loctite and a nylock nut topped it off:
Then I could complete the mission…
Having recently kibitzed on a project using de-icing cables (with some success) to soften PVC pipe for bending, herewith the useful numbers.
Data printed on the original cable:
Derived values:
The starting point was a 62 ft length of the cable, as I’d long ago converted the end into a heated bed for starting plants early in the spring. That presented a resistance of 11 Ω, drew a current of 11 A, and dissipated 1.3 kW at 21 W/ft. A kilowatt-class dimmer handled the load, but adjoining sections of the cable got hot enough to melt the insulation and terminate the experiment.
A shorter length of cable might be suitable for a cheap laptop brick power supply. To keep the dissipation under, say, 10 W/ft, we have:
The Dell D220P-01 brick on the M2 provides 12 V at 18 A (!) and costs under $20 on eBay:
You could run two 9 ft lengths cables in parallel from the same hulking brick. Whether that’s enough to soften a length of PVC pipe from the inside, without having the insulation get all melty, that’s another question…
This message may be useful, in the sense that it reports something about the internal state of the cash register:
But the fact that it appears on the customer-facing display means that the cashier won’t see it and can’t do anything about it. I’m not sure if the floor personnel know anything about buffers, either.
The cashier-facing display says: “Welcome to Walmart!”
As expected, that repair didn’t last very long at all; one hinge fractured along the same line as before. This time, however, we had a visit already in-plan, so I brought along my solvents and clamps.
Perhaps you wondered how I could have been so remiss as to not brace those thin white flanges. One picture of the unbroken hinge in the “lid down” position is worth a thousand words:
Need more? Here’s another thousand words from the other side:
As the lid opens, the gray tab pivots toward the edge of the lid until it’s nearly parallel, at which point all of the force tries to yank those two flanges apart and then crack the tiny solid part at the pivot pin.
Eventually, it succeeds. This is a view of the scanner base with the gray tab inserted in its slot, with the broken hinge in the “lid up” position:
Clever design, no?
I was unable to extract the broken fragment from the gray tab (actually, unwilling to apply more force, as I cracked part of the gray ring around the hinge pin), so this became an in situ repair. Once again, I applied solvent glue and squished the pieces together:
And clamped it while we ate lunch:
The brass rod applies the clamping force to the fractured part of the hinge through the pivot point. This isn’t the most stable clamp arrangement you’ve ever seen, but it worked well enough.
I pushed the scanner back half a foot, so the lid now clunks against the wall just before the hinges reach their limit. Maybe they’ll survive until the next visit…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 