Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The hose on our aging Samsung Quiet Jet (used to be a Quiet Storm, but I suspect they lost a trademark fight) vacuum cleaner has been a constant nuisance. Most recently, the end toward the handle began splitting:
Splitting vacuum hose
The fix consisted of a tight duct tape wrap, which has absolutely nothing to recommend it other than expediency.
When the same thing happened on the other end, I sealed it up and added a length of husky heatshrink tubing.
Strain relief on vacuum hose
The flared end isn’t particularly decorative, but it serves to reduce the strain on the hose. Alas, there’s no practical way to do the same thing on the handle end.
The replacement cost for the hose roughly equals a new vacuum, so when we run out of bags, this one gets harvested for the shop’s Parts Heap.
The X10 RF Remote Control in the kitchen stopped working, which could mean only one thing: a set of dead AAA cells.
A negative terminal in the battery compartment showed the expected corrosion:
X10 Remote battery terminals
The corrosion evidently pushed the cell away from the terminal just enough to starve the remote.
The cells, on the other paw, looked just fine:
Battery negative terminals
They’d been in there a year, sported a date code that’s still a few years in the future, and had a 1.3 V loaded output. Looks like that little bit of corrosion gave me enough of a heads-up to get the cells out before they rotted.
Eks forced me to take a pile of crap useful make-froms, including a gooseneck task lamp that was probably bolted onto a machine tool in its former life. It sported a 20 W halogen bulb, but looked to be just about exactly the right size for those LED floodlights, which is why I didn’t put up much of a fuss about taking it off his hands.
The LED lamps are much bigger than the halogen bulb, but they fit neatly into the housing diameter. All they needed was a bit more front-to-back room, which looked a lot like a chunk of PVC pipe. The housing screws together with a 1.5 mm thread that I can’t produce on my inch lathe; I’m still not set up for thread milling. This being a low-stress application with a lamp that ought to outlast me, I figured I’d just make the belly band slip-fit the two threads, glue it in place, and move on.
I sawed off a length of PVC pipe, faced off the ends in the lathe, then CNC milled a recess to clear the male threads on the gooseneck part (I hate precision boring in the lathe). Given the rather tenuous grasp of that 3-jaw chuck, I made two passes around the perimeter: pipe ID 52.1, thread OD 54.5, remove 1.2 mm all around, about 9 mm down.
Milling top recess
On the other end, the female thread ID = 52.2 and the pipe ID = 52.1, so I glued another ring of PVC pipe inside to provide enough meat to turn it down. Once again, saw off a ring, face the ends, then cut out a segment so that the OD circumference of the inner ring is just slightly smaller than the ID circumference of the outer pipe. The result looked like this:
PVC insert sizing
Apply a heat gun to the inner ring until it’s soft enough to stuff into the pipe, clamp it until it hardens, apply PVC cement, and clamp overnight. Contrary to appearances, the ends of the two pipes are flush at the surface. Once again, you cannot have too many clamps:
Clamped PVC insert
Turning down the outside to fit the threads shows just how little meat was left on that pipe:
Skinning down to the insert
While it was chucked up (and despite my dislike of boring) I bored a bevel to accept the LED lamp and adjusted the OD so the lamp fit snugly between the end of the belly band and the lens holder on the front of the housing:
Floodlight in holder
The switch comes from the Parts Heap. A D drill puts a slightly undersized hole that’s just right for the threaded switch; I simply turned it in by hand. A length of zip cord carries the power up the gooseneck, where various ends get soldered to the switch and lamp.
I applied some hot-melt glue to the threads and pushed everything together:
Finished LED Floodlight
The glass lens on the front fits in a molded holder with an annular air gap. The LED lamp housing has all those fancy cooling fins against the inner pipe, so there’s a bit of cooling air flow around the lamp and out through the rear black section. A thermocouple reports the lamp temperature gets up around 75 °C in a 14 °C shop; a 50 °C rise might be a tad warm in the summer, but we’ll see what happens.
The power supply came from the Parts Heap: a 12 V 1 A wall switching power supply in the shape of a wall wart. For now, the zip cord from the lamp terminates in a coaxial power jack that (amazingly enough) fits the wart’s connector, but I’ll eventually put a box in there somewhere.
Clamped the butt end of the gooseneck to the backsplash on the countertop under the mill and It Just Works!
I picked up a pair of 12 V 4 W 3-LED floodlights (datasheet, newer datasheet, and catalog) with 34 degree and 24 degree beams from All Electronics, with the intent of making some task lighting fixtures for the shop. Somebody decommissioned the lamps by snipping off a pin, so they’re not immediately useful.
The back pulls off with a bit of difficulty, after removing the two obvious screws and holding the connector body in place while pulling. I didn’t try to remove the circuit board, which would require unsoldering the clearly marked Anode and Cathode LED wires that enter from the bottom of the board.
LED Floodlight – interior
I plan to build these lamps right into the fixtures, so soldering a wire directly onto the pin makes sense; I expect they’ll outlast my usage and a socket won’t add any value. As an intermediate step, I soldered a short brass tube onto the pin stump:
LED Floodlight – repaired pin
In new condition, these retail somewhere beyond $60, so cutting 6 mm from one pin shaved about fifty bucks off the price. I suspect they were extracted from somebody’s shiny new, recently abandoned, and probably foreclosed, office complex and were ruined to prevent resale-as-new. The fact that the reflectors got a bit scuffed up along the way wouldn’t help their value any, either.
They draw 330-odd mA from a 12 V supply, run from AC or DC (either polarity), and seem to have a constant-current driver inside. I wouldn’t buy ’em new, but for eight bucks a pop they’re a pretty good deal.
I’m not sure whether all unit prices must be converted to “per 100 count” or not, but it really doesn’t work out well for CFL bulbs (clicky for more dots):
CFL 2-bulb pack
That’s $549.50 per 100 bulbs, if you can’t make it out.
On the shelf below, however, a single-bulb pack priced out to $979 per 100 count, so the 2-pack is definitely a better deal!
In the Mysteriously Missing Label category, we find three similar products with only one shelf label. Which one is the better deal?
Caffeine unit pricing
You might think it’d be the Wal-Mart Equate house brand. In order to find out, you’d have to haul all three offerings down the aisle and around the corner to the price scanner, which would reveal it’s the one on the far left, by a considerable margin. Oddly, that one says “Double Strength” even though it has the same 200 mg dose as the others.
In the Bizarre Units category, we have two very similar products with completely different unit-price units of measure. Seeing as how a “fluid ounce” is a unit of volume and a “pound” is a unit of weight (or, for the pedantic, force), even the dimensions aren’t compatible. Clicky for bigger pictures.
Vanilla unit pricing – 2 oz
And, just to show that wasn’t a one-off mistake that could happen to anyone, the smaller size containers continue the theme.
Vanilla unit pricing – 1 oz
Given that nothing in a Wal-Mart store happens by accident, someone was directed to remove two of those three labels and another someone deliberately chose incompatible units.
Of course, anyone I’ve ever asked has no idea why that would happen…
These Fiskars scissors[Update: they’ve moved to the Gardening section. Try there or there. ] seem to be intended for sewing & quilting, but they work just fine for snipping plastic filament, cutting tape, and severing hangnails…
Fiskars Softouch Scissors
The titanium nitride coating probably doesn’t add much value to the mix, but that’s what they had at JoAnne Fabric when I bought ’em.
Fiskars scissors tip detail
This detail of the tip shows why they’re so great for detail work: each blade ends in a two-way taper to a genuine cutting point. Of course, that means they’ll survive exactly zero falls to the shop’s concrete floor, but they’re fine while they last.
The trick is to sign up for JoAnne sale flyers, which regularly deliver “40% off any one item” discount coupons, then make a targeted shopping expedition. Those coupons account for the green self-healing cutting mat that’s in the background of so many pictures around here, too…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 