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
This should be obvious, but don’t reach across the build platform of your Thing-O-Matic with the extruder at 215 °C: you might bump the nozzle with the back of your hand.
It never really hurt, but the nozzle tip made a nasty punch mark in the middle of a disk of scorched skin.
Ah, you’re not that stupid, are you…
Memo to Self: Gloves?
Another shot of ink for the printer:
The waste ink container is now a bit more than half full: 90 mm high in a 40 mm diameter cylinder. That works out to 113×103 mm = 113 ml. Given that “high capacity” cartridges for this printer contain 11 ml, I’m looking at 10 cartridges worth of waste ink.
While I was printing handouts for Cabin Fever, the R380 had a brain spasm and announced it didn’t recognize any of its ink cartridges. A power cycle brought it back to its senses and all the continuous-ink cartridges reset themselves to Completely full once again. With another printer, that error message required a complete new set of cartridges, because the printer could (and did!) set bits inside the refill-prevention chips that rendered the cartridges unusable.
I don’t buy that much ink at one time, but …
Now, I’m a big fan of continuous ink supply systems for desktop printers and buy ink by the pint, but these folks put me to shame…
It’s delivering ink to the Southern Dutchess News plant in Wappingers Falls.
After we rearranged the living room, we had a few floor lights in different locations that called for more X10 Appliance Controllers. I’m not a big fan of automated housing, because X10 communication is unreliable with a bullet, but it’s convenient to turn off all the lamps from the bedroom.
Anyhow, the old RCA HC25 X10 Appliance Modules I pulled out of the Big Box o’ X10 Stuff suffered from the usual conflict between compact fluorescent lamps and the “local control” misfeature that’s supposed to let you turn the appliance on by simply flipping the switch. The problem is that a CFL ballast draws a nonlinear trickle of current that the module misinterprets as a switch flip, thus occasionally turning the lamp on shortly after you turn it off.
This has been true since the first compact fluorescent bulbs appeared. The circuitry inside X10 modules hasn’t changed much, at least up until I bought the last round of switches quite some time ago. That’s either a Bad Thing (still a problem) or a Good Thing (everybody knows about it).
The solution (everybody knows about it, just use the obvious keywords) is to cut a jumper on the module’s circuit board that’s obviously placed there for this very reason. In this view, it’s just below the lower-right corner of the fat blue capacitor. If you need confirmation, it’s connected to pin 7 of the only IC on the board.
Snip the wire, move the cut end a little bit, and button the module up again.
Oh, yeah. No user serviceable parts inside is a challenge around here…
That post reminded me of an incident at my parents’ house, long after I’d moved out and many years ago.
For context, the Ancestral Home is a three-story brick pile dating back to the late 1800s, with nonstandard bricks and much thicker walls than you’d expect, with plaster-on-lathe interior finishing and really nice wood trim. It’s on the southwest corner of the Hummelstown PA town square, where Main Street tapers down to two lanes.
They were awakened around midnight by a mighty crash downstairs and found this in the front room:
It seems a westbound van, traveling at what’s tautologically called “a high rate of speed”, swerved across Main Street, tripped on the curb, plowed down a concrete planter, and spanked the front corner of the house pretty hard:
The driver wasn’t thrown clear, but a whole pile of crap fell out as they were extracting him.
Even in the days before air bags, this one was a total loss:
IIRC, the charge came down DWI but I vaguely recall he somehow wriggled out of that.
The building was never quite the same thereafter, either: those plaster walls were never meant to take a direct hit.
The pix are more horribly discolored satin-finish pages from the Family Album. One could do better color correction if one really had to, but …
Y’know how some folks say they don’t wear a seat belt because they want to be thrown free in a crash? Here’s how that works in actual practice.
The air bag fires as the front bumper begins to deform and your body rises off the seat. Because you’re not belted in, the bag boosts your upper torso against the roof liner, bounces your head off the sunshade and bezel, then feeds you directly into the windshield glass.
Laminated glass doesn’t disintegrate, so your skull probably won’t completely penetrate the windshield. You’ll lose some scalp, though, as you slide down the crumbling glass and wedge above the dashboard.
Even if you survive a broken neck, the ensuing brain trauma means you won’t be the same person ever again.
News flash: massive brain trauma does not make you a better person.
Before laminated windshield glass became mandatory, your head would completely penetrate the windshield. Here’s what happened in 1937, from the incomparably grisly — And Sudden Death by J. C. Furnas:
I read one of the many Reader’s Digest editions of that article during my formative years. Probably the one in October 1967, if a bit of Google-fu serves me right. You can’t get reprints of it from RD any longer, it seems.
However, unbelievably, while I was composing this post, I checked eBay and found a typewritten copy of the article, signed by Furnas, with 38 minutes remaining in the auction. I was the only bidder: for nine bucks (delivered) it’s mine.
Most likely it’s a publicity / fundraising copy, because the handwritten notation on the first page reads:
With best
regards to
[name]
J. C. Furnas
Oct 20, 1947
Those SUVs reside in the junkyard along the Dutchess Rail Trail near Creek Road, where I might get a new seat to rebuild my comfy office chair this spring.
Just got two eyeglasses from a different supplier halfway around the planet, with satisfactory results.
The frames have the largest lenses I could find that weren’t totally dorky; I still want slightly taller lenses, but that’s not the style these days. Their 35 mm lenses are slightly larger than the 35 mm lenses from previous vendor, but IMHO still not quite tall enough for progressive bifocals. The closeup curves seem to start lower on the lens, which is fine.
The 20 mm nose bridge is a Good Thing and made the nosepiece adjustments much easier than before.
Metal Eyeglasses-Vincent Dimensions Width 137 mm Earpiece 144 mm Lens width 50 mm Lens height 35 mm Nose bridge 20 mm
I used a 60 mm Near Pupillary Distance (for the bifocal lens area), which worked fine, although 1 mm might be better.
The regular glasses have the usual options and work fine. The 1.6 “super thin” refractive index (vs 1.5 “regular” in the sunglasses) makes the lenses noticeably thinner than the sunglasses, but I’m not sure it’s worth the upcharge.
- I use my Glasses for: Progressive - Bifocal without a line - Lens upgrades 5: Progressive Lens (no line) - Right Sphere(SPH): -3.50 - Right Cylinder (CYL): +0.50 - Right Axis: 180 - Right Addition (near) ADD: +2.25 - Left Sphere(SPH): -3.50 - Left Cylinder (CYL): +0.75 - Left Axis: 155 - Left Addition (near) ADD: +2.25 - Pupillary Distance (PD): 62 - Near PD: 60 - Lens upgrades 3: Super Thin (1.6) - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 1: Anti-Scratch - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 2: Anti-Reflective - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 3: UV Coating
For the sunglasses I tried Old School with-a-line bifocals and, frankly, don’t like them much at all. The line is very distracting in sunlight, which is where I wear sunglasses. Good news: the line falls directly across the fairing on my bike, so I can see the “dashboard” on the handlebars quite clearly. Bad news: the correction is a bit much for the automobile dashboard and, unlike the no-line bifocals, I can’t tune for best picture by nodding my head.
Their 80% gray tint is significantly lighter than the previous vendor’s 80%; next time go for 90%. Good news: unlike the previous vendor, these folks have no trouble with AR/UV coatings over a tint.
- I use my Glasses for: Bifocal - Both distance and reading with a line - Lens upgrades 4: Bifocal Lens (with line) - Division of lenses: 70% Distance - 30% Reading - Right Sphere(SPH): -3.50 - Right Cylinder (CYL): +0.50 - Right Axis: 180 - Right Addition (near) ADD: +2.25 - Left Sphere(SPH): -3.50 - Left Cylinder (CYL): +0.75 - Left Axis: 155 - Left Addition (near) ADD: +2.25 - Pupillary Distance (PD): 62 - Near PD: 60 - Lens upgrades 1: Standard (1.5) - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 1: Anti-Scratch - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 2: Anti-Reflective - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 3: UV Coating - Tint Key: Grey 80% - Eye Protection and Eyeglasses 4: Color Tint
A list of old frame sizes is there.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 