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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

Quilting Pin Caps: Recycled O-Ring

While doing something else, I rediscovered the fact that common 5 gallon plastic bucket lids have an O-ring gasket that seals against the top of the bucket. Some seals are hollow tubes, some are solid rods:

5 gallon can lid gaskets

The white O-ring has about the right consistency to serve as a quilting pin cap, along the lines of those 3D printed and silicone rubber filled cylinders. Although the rubber / plastic stuff isn’t quite as squishy as silicone snot, it holds the pin point firmly without much of a push.

Chopping the O-ring into 10 mm sections produced another small box of prototypes:

Lid gaskets as pin caps

Garden planting season remains in full effect, shoving all quilting projects to the back burner and delaying the evaluation phase of the project…

2012-06-16
Garden Knife Scabbard

Mary uses an ancient paring knife (that, back in the day, my father had sharpened beyond all reason) to harvest garden veggies, which called for a scabbard to protect the blade, the bike pack, and the fingers.

I snagged a random block of acrylic from the heap, straightened the long sides, milled a channel just wide and thick enough for the blade down the middle, then added small recesses at the right end for the knife’s haft:

Garden knife scabbard – main block

The cover is an acrylic sheet, solvent-glued and clamped in place:

Garden knife scabbard – clamping cover

The cover exposes about 1/4 inch of channel so she can lay the point in place, rather than precisely aligning the point with the slot. I suppose I should have used gray acrylic to provide some contrast; maybe we’ll add a snippet of tape.

Then mill four sides flat, break the edges & corners with a file, and it’s all good (in a blocky kind of way):

Garden knife scabbard

The blade has become sufficiently bent over the years that simple friction holds it in the slot. It’s open on both ends so she can flush out the inevitable dirt.

I was going to engrave her name on the back, but came to my senses just in time…

2012-06-13
Norelco T770 Beard Trimmer: Battery Pack Rebuild

The NiCd cells in my Norelco T770 beard trimmer finally gave out, for the obvious reason:

Norelco T770 cells

They’re rated at 600 mA·h, as are the much shorter 2/3 AA NiMH cells I also used for those phone packs:

Norelco T770 – rebuild

That’s a wrap of Kapton tape around the cells, plus a block of closed-cell foam to fill the cell holder. It’s not a high-stress environment, so this hack-job repair should work fine.

The trimmer’s charge / discharge cycle remains hostile to NiMH cells and I don’t expect a great lifetime from the new cells, either…

2012-06-12
Evapo-Rust vs. Battery Contact Corrosion

A long-forgotten toy emerged from the heap bearing a trio of corroded NiMH cells between the usual plated-steel contacts:

Corroded contacts – original

The toy wasn’t worth salvaging, but I extracted the contacts and applied Evapo-Rust to see what happened. After an overnight soak, some corrosion remained:

Corroded contacts – after Evapo-Rust

Scrubbing with a stainless-steel detail brush removed the flakes and left reasonably clean metal behind:

Corroded contacts – after brushing

Although it’s not beautiful, I think the contacts came out as well as one could expect. The longer contact plate has holes, thinned sections, and some corrosion inside the spring; I’d be mildly tempted to rebuilt the whole thing with some nickel shim stock and a new spring.

If I were salvaging the toy, I’d dab vinegar on the wiring to neutralize the creeping potassium hydroxide, rinse the whole thing with water, and clean out the case. Instead, it joined the consumer electronics recycling box with a thud…

2012-06-10
Magazine Billing Network: Same Scam, Different Name

This just in: an offer to subscribe to The Economist at a mere $50 over sticker price…

Magazine Billing Network – Not A Bill

Apart from the name, everything matches that Subscription Billing Service scam: same layout, same (non-toll-free) phone, same address.

Perhaps the SBS name became too hot to handle?

At least they’re not the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned telephone scammers…

2012-06-09
Belt Gluing

When I bought a new belt some months ago, I thought the lack of stitching meant it was made from a single strip of leather. Come to find out that it’s actually two strips glued together with something sticky that came un-done at the point where the belt passes through the buckle.

So I peeled a bit more apart, smoothed a thin layer of urethane glue (aka Gorilla Glue) inside, laid waxed paper on both side just in case the foam expanded beyond my wildest imagination, and clamped it together:

Belt clamping

The glue layer turned out just about perfect, with only a few blobs sticking out the sides:

Belt with urethane glue blobs

Those blobs snapped off easily enough and the belt works fine again. We’ll see how long this one lasts…

2012-06-05
Forsythia Clearing

It was decided, in that place where what is decided must be, that the time had come to hack back the giant forsythia stand encroaching from the neighbor’s yard. The stuff tip-roots, so anything that stands in its way gets assimilated, and the only way to make headway is to tear it out by the roots.

We eventually clearcut a section about 15 feet wide and 40 feet long by the simple expedient of lopping off everything that stuck up:

Cleared Forsythia

Removing the roots required prying with a 7 foot length of 1.5 inch octagonal steel bar braced on a chunk of 4×4 inch lumber rammed up against the roots. With my full weight on a 6 foot lever arm, the roots would just barely break free.

A dozen wheelbarrow loads like this went atop the branches on the heap:

Forsythia root balls

That’s my kind of outdoor work: kill them all…

Mary raked and seeded the debris field just before the next rainfall. It ought to be good for another few years.

2012-06-04