Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Friends of ours planted a few dozen Liriope spicata as a border around their nicely trimmed flower garden. This did not work out well, as the stuff spreads like a weed and duplicated beyond their wildest imagination. However, this part of the description caught our attention:
No serious diseases or pests occur for creeping lilyturf. […] Lilyturf is reported to have little wildlife value.
Translation: nothing kills the stuff and deer don’t eat it. Sounds like exactly what we need for the section of the front yard that slopes down to the road, where mowing poses a threat to life & limb.
We said we’d take it, they dug it out and bagged it, I hitched up the bike trailer, and we paid them a visit:
YAK Bike Trailer – 55 lb of grass
They’re a few miles off the south end of the Dutchess Rail Trail, which is (by definition) pretty much dead flat and made the trip a lot easier: that load of grass added up to 55 pounds! They dropped off a few bags on their next trip past our house, which tells you how much they wanted to get rid of it.
I wielded the post-hole digger to prepare about 100 sites, shook the dirt off the existing grass roots to backfill the holes, we divided the new clumps by chopping them with a shovel, and a day later we had everything installed and watered down:
The handle cracked and fell off this ball valve while I collected the hoses and suchlike from the Vassar Farms plot:
Ball valve with broken handle
Surprisingly, it’s not plastic, but (most likely) some cheap & grainy pot metal that wasn’t designed for durability. Rather than throw out that nice brass and stainless steel valve body, I figured a new handle was in order.
To the Basement Laboratory Machine Shop Wing!
The ball rotates freely inside the valve with the handle missing, so I found an aluminum rod (which, IIRC, was the original kickstand from my Linear Mach III ‘bent) that exactly fit the ball opening’s ID:
Ball valve – removing nut
What with it being a dark and stormy night outside (and having shut down all the computers in anticipation of a monster thunderstorm), I decided to get medieval with some hand tools. The first step involved finding an aluminum plate of about the right size and thickness, with markings left over from whatever I’d been building when it last saw the ceiling lights:
Ball valve handle – initial layout
After carefully drilling & filing the shaft hole, it looked like it’d work fine. Then I realized that, for whatever reason, the original design aligned the handle parallel to the hose when the valve was closed, which made very little sense when analyzed according to the Principle of Least Surprise.
So I drilled-and-filed another hole on the other end at right angles to the first one:
Ball valve handle – proper alignment
The original handle had two bumps molded on the bottom that acted as stops at each end of its 90° rotation. I figured a pair of 10-32 screws would suffice, not to mention they’d provide a bit of adjustment in case I blundered the hole positions. I planned to chop these stubs to whatever set the proper length below the plate:
Ball valve handle – trial fit
It turned out that the proper length was just about exactly that of a 1/4 inch 10-32 set screw flush with the top of the plate, so that’s what I used instead. They’re located one radius out from the outline of the valve body; trace the body shape on the handle in each orientation, eyeball one setscrew radius out from those intersections, and drill the holes.
Lay out a nice handle shape by eye, rough it on the bandsaw, introduce it to Mr Belt Sander for final shaping, touch up the concave corners with a rat-tail file, scuff the flat surfaces clean with a Dremel stainless steel wire brush to produce a used-car finish (nice polish over deep scratches), and it’s all good:
Ball valve handle – top view
The knob on the end is actually a foot intended for the bottom of a widget case:
Ball valve handle – bottom view
It won’t get leak-tested until next year, but what could possibly go wrong?
One thing, perhaps: that screw likely lies too close to the hose, particularly one sporting a replacement connector. I may be forced to bend the narrow part of the handle up a bit…
And here’s the name-brand towel for a mere one cent more per hundred towels:
Bounty Select-a-Size Towel – unit price
How can this be?
Easy! Notice that the name-brand towel allows you to tear off a smaller sheet, which is actually a good idea. Even better, at least from their perspective: more sheets per package = lower unit price! I didn’t check the actual mini-towel size, but surely it’s less than half the usual size, so the comparable unit prices is more than a factor of two higher than shown.
I suppose it’s only a matter of time before WalMart slices their towels in half to get an even better unit price.
Carpet and floor tile used to be priced per square yard. Now it’s roughly the same dollar amount per square foot.
The Nike cycling shoes I bought some years ago (at a steep discount when they got out of the cycling shoe biz) close with a ratcheting plastic strap rather than laces, so I bought a spare set of straps: the plastic part always breaks first. As it turned out, a coil spring inside each latch failed and the stub end (on the right side here) gradually worked its way between the latch tab and the frame:
Cycling shoe latch – broken spring
Eventually this got to the point where the latches jammed and I had to do something. The first step was to drill out the rivet holding the spring and tab in place:
Drilling latch rivet – magnetized bit
You’ll note the rich collection of swarf clinging to the drill bit, which indicates this one hasn’t been used since a lightning strike magnetized all the steel in the house. A pass through that demagnetizer shook off the swarf and prepared the bit for the next time.
Releasing all the parts shows the problem:
Nike cycling shoe latch – broken spring
The OEM springs used 24 mil spring wire that, surprisingly, matched a box of music wire in the Basement Laboratory Warehouse Wing. The spring coils have 5 turns that just clear the 3 mm rivet that I recycled as a mandrel; I think a 2.5 mm pin would produce a better fit. Not being a fan of rivets, I replaced them with 4-40 machine screws, even though the threads probably won’t do the aluminum frame any good at all.
A protracted bending and wrapping session produced a reasonable approximation of the OEM spring:
Latch spring – formed
It’s worth noting that each of those coils uses up about 55 mm of wire: 5 × 3.5 mm × π. Cut an excessively long piece from the music wire coil!
Trimming and shaping the ends to fit through the notches and around the outside of the frame shows that my wire-bending skills need considerably more practice. This spring (the second one I made) also shows that my beginner’s luck with the first coils wore off all too quickly:
OEM springs with homebrew replacement
But both springs fit and work fine, so I’ll call it done for now:
Repaired latch – nut side
Will a replacement spring break before the plastic strap?
The Locust Grove / Morse Estate (yes, that Morse) holds Sunset Sensations fundraisers throughout the year, wherein local restaurants and caterers prepare three food samples based on what’s growing in the historically accurate gardens and a local wine store selects matching wines. Mary and I volunteer as servers and they generally assign me to the wine table; being one of the few volunteers with Y chromosomes, I’m good at toting boxes and yanking corks.
The most recent event featured Cusumano Insolia wine in bottles with glass stoppers:
Glass wine corks – natural light
Front lighting with the flash makes them even more glittery:
Glass wine corks – flash
I’m thinking one of these atop a little box with an internal LED would make a dandy nightlight. Maybe etch the stem surface to add a bit of diffuse illumination?
The display on Mary’s Cateye Astrale cyclocomputer (remember cyclocomputers?) faded to gray, which meant a new CR2032 lithium cell was in order. I grabbed one from the heap, popped out the old cell, inserted the new cell, and … the display stayed blank.
Quick like a bunny, I reinserted the old cell to save the odometer (15524 miles) and wheel circumference (1475 mm) data; the display returned to dim gray.
The “new” cell, which came from an unopened pack, read 0.45 V with no load…
The cell didn’t have a date code, but the package sports a cryptic MU that might encode the date of manufacture or the date of packaging or the copyright date or something; the various search results aren’t forthcoming and the Energizer site gives no explanation.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t owned that package for more than a few years and it’s been in a shirtsleeve environment (plus the occasional hot van) ever since.
Another Energizer cell from a more recent lot, bearing CA on the package and YA on the cell, worked fine.
Being that sort of bear, I wrote the date and mileage on the previous cell (a Newsun, whoever they are, with a 3Y code), because the last time around the odometer value didn’t survive the cell change. The current total works out to 277 miles/month = 3300 miles/year, including winter downtime, which is fine with us; we mostly ride the bikes around town on errands and take the occasional tour.
After un-bending the top of a pole lamp that suffered an untimely collision with the floor, I discovered that the entire stock of three-way bulbs in the heap had at least one burned-out filament each; I’d acquired them when Mom moved out of the Ancestral House, so they dated back a long time. So I figured I’d insert a decently sized single-filament bulb and be done with it.
Three-way lamp sockets have an additional tab contact between the usual central contact and the outer shell:
Interior of 3 way lamp socket
The shell forms the common contact for the filaments and the switch counts in binary: off / off, off / on, on / off, on / on. In principle, the tab sits low enough to not contact the shell of an ordinary bulb.
I was doing this in the Basement Laboratory Workshop Wing, with the lamp plugged into the outlet strip along the front edge of the bench; that way, I simply poked the power strip button to remove line voltage from the lamp while swapping bulbs. So I:
turned the power strip off
unscrewed the last dead three-way bulb
threw it away
screwed in an ordinary bulb
turned the strip on
At which point all the fluorescent overhead lights in the Laboratory went dim, the shop resounded with a deep resonant groan, and the acrid smell of electrical death filled the air. Elapsed time less than a second, tops.
Come to find out that the socket’s contact tab stuck up a little bit further than it should, producing a dead short across the line:
Melted bulb base
Of interest: the branch circuit breaker didn’t trip, the GFI on the circuit didn’t trip, and the pop-out breaker in the power strip didn’t trip.
Huh.
I harvested the pole sections, the base counterweight, and the line cord. The rest of the corpse joined the bulbs in the trash…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 