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
With macro lens adapter in hand, I started taking a picture a day with the intent of making a time-lapse movie:
Of course, that particular flower bud fell off after three days.
We returned the plant to a cool location for the Christmas season. Evidently the kitchen was far too warm for best performance…
This pitiful excuse for a hinge actually lasted far longer than I expected:
Also much to my surprise, the plastic solvent-bonded to itself, although I doubt either of those pins will survive another four years.
The yellow discoloration seems to be most prominent on the inside of the lid, which suggests the water is nastier than they’d have you believe. The disinfection additive has switched from chlorine to chloramine and back to chlorine over the last few years, which may have something to do with it.
Sean reports that the first field test of the Tux Cookie Cutter went well:
I obviously need a few samples for QC purposes…
At some point we brought home a fruit fly starter kit that produced a zillion fruit flies in the worm compost bin; every time we opened the cover, half a zillion flies would emerge. After a bit of fiddling with the usual Internet recipes, I managed to produce something useful:
The trick involves making the liquid enticing enough to get the flies through the hole in the coffee filter top:
I used about a cup of water, an ice cube of apple juice for sweetness (they are, after all, fruit flies), a tablespoon of vinegar for that delicious rotten aroma (they prefer damaged, easy to eat fruit), and a few drops of dishwashing detergent so when they hit the liquid they’re sunk.
The container must be tall enough to let them rise past the entrance opening on their way toward the light; I settled on the 2 pound ricotta cheese containers we have in abundance:
That’s the catch after maybe a month at the end of the season, but it represents a week of activity back when we were breaking the infestation. I deployed four of those traps atop the compost bin to catch the half-zillion escaped flies and fired up the vacuum cleaner to extract the half-zillion remaining inside every time we opened the lid. After a few weeks of that, we’d managed to get ahead of their breeding cycle and the problem pretty much Went Away.
A garden sprayer awaiting repair emerged from the benchtop clutter. It’s an old one, with a metal shell and actual screws, so I could dismantle it to reveal the problem:
It’s evidently impossible to make a good, cheap, corrosion-resistant spring (pick any two, I suppose):
Some rummaging in the Big Box o’ Medium Springs produced a slightly smaller spring that should last for a while; it’s good, free, and rust-able, if a bit too short.
Much to my astonishment, I found a length of 3/8 inch Marine Bronze rod in the stockpile and made a bushing to take up the remainder of the space:
It won’t get a good test until gardening season opens next year, but it seems to seal well enough.
This brass dragonfly has graced our garden for some years, but what seemed like a gentle tap during fall cleanup knocked both eyeballs out. The original adhesive looked like urethane, so I cleaned the sockets, applied a layer around the rim, and popped the marbles back in place.
The clamping looks painful…
Of course, that’s an unbroken Harbor Freight clamp…
Having missed the fall driveway paving deadline, we will have a gravel section in the middle of the driveway until next spring. All the water from the garage downspouts and the back yard runs down the driveway, which dumps it directly into the gravel patch and the new retaining wall’s foundation. That means the gravel patch, at least, will become a mud hole, which I take to be a Bad Thing.
So I bandsawed some 4 inch DWV pipe & fittings in half lengthwise, glued them together as a gutter to capture the runoff and divert it into 80 feet of DWV pipe leading to the bottom end of the wall, then filled the half-pipes with gravel to let us drive right over the whole mess. Unfortunately, the top end of the gravel patch has the driveway ending in broken asphalt, Item 4 gravel, fine gravel, and rubble that make it impossible to snug the pipes up against the asphalt. That means the runoff would pretty much vanish before it reached the gutters.
So I excavated just barely enough gravel to ensure a downhill slope from the remaining asphalt, mixed up a random bag of mortar that’s been kicking around in the garage for a few years, and troweled an apron from the asphalt to the half-pipes. Generally I sign my work, but this kludge need last only a few months and I left it to cure.
The next morning I discovered one of the chipmunks felt the work really needed a signature:
That’s OK with me…
FWIW, this is why you need Too Many Clamps:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 