Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
My ladies favor hard cheeses that are murder on cheese slicers. I just replaced the wires on a pair of favorite slicers, using 0.020 inch stainless wire. That’s thicker than the 14-mil wire they came with, so I’m hoping it’ll last longer.
Being thicker, it’s also harder to push through the cheese, so it’s subject to more force and might break sooner. Ah, tradeoffs…
What I really want are monomolecular wires that can cut through anything…
I’ve suggested using a knife on the Romano and Gruyere, reserving the slicers for Cheddar and other sissy cheeses…
Oh, the red stuff on the right-hand slicer is Liquid Electrical Tape. The handle is raw aluminum and leaves smudges all over the place. I’m assuming the layer doesn’t have much lead content, but who knows?
Mary & I did the weekly grocery run today, with a few add-on errands.
I’m (finally) shipping the Totally Featureless Clock to my friend and hauling a bag of shredded leaves (the first of a dozen) with which Mary mulches the plants in her remote garden plot. We dropped off the leaves and some garden gate fencing (from her bike), then continued on for groceries.
Trailer with Package and Shredded Leaves
Mary returned to the garden to spend the afternoon coaxing the plants to grow nicely, while I hauled the TFC (and the groceries) to the UPS inlet.
Trailer with Groceries and Package
And then I hauled the groceries home. Most of the four bags of chow fit in the trailer, with squishable fruit & veggies in the bike panniers. A whopping 13 miles, all told, but a good time was had by all.
The trouble with bicycles is that they have approximately the cargo capacity of your car’s glove box. Panniers help, but for bulk capacity you need a trailer. Think of it this way: these days, a good trailer costs maybe three or four tanks of gasoline.
If you keep coming up with reasons why you can’t get your butt on your bike and “I can’t haul X!” is one reason, a trailer might be the answer for reasonable values of X. It’s no good for plywood sheets and water heaters, but I’ve hauled plenty of other X that would ordinarily call for a car trip.
It’s an old B.O.B Yak. Works fine, tracks well, doesn’t wobble, carries more than you think possible.. Just do it!
We each put about 2000 miles a year on our bikes, most of it on errands just like this. That’s not many miles by bicycle fanatic standards, but we do lots of other stuff in addition to biking…
Search the blog for “trailer” and you’ll find a few other hints & tips.
So I dismantled the three junk packs I got from halfway around the world and rebuilt them with better-quality cells. Search for NP-FS11 and you’ll find the rest of the story.
Some observations…
These cases are the thinnest plastic that doesn’t actually break when you pick it up: to crack the case seam, you must push firmly. Two of the three packs were already cracked and the third yielded to a slight squeeze.
The cells are labeled Sony Energytec, which ought to be a reputable brand name. Some possibilities:
Counterfeit cells
Quality test rejects
I don’t know why you’d bother putting counterfeit cells inside a generic case; it’d be more profitable to sell a completely counterfeit battery with a fancy Sony label. So I’m guessing these came from a batch of cells that failed inspection and were miraculously saved from destruction.
Battery Protection Circuit Board
They have the usual protection circuit board on the top. What’s a bit tricky is that you must unsolder the three leads connecting to the case terminals before you can extract the cells. I unsoldered the strap from the negative terminal while I was at it; the positive lead is inaccessible beyond the black IC on the left.
The black knobs on our black-front Kenmore stove have slightly raised pointer extensions. At a glance, you cannot tell whether the knob points upward to OFF or downward to 5.
Oddly, the oven temperature knob has a nice white index line engraved (well, molded) in the pointer extension. So it’s not like they didn’t know how to do index lines. I’m guessing they had to take a buck out of the build cost and omitting four index lines added up to just the right amount.
I added tape markers shortly after we got the thing. The previous tape was fluorescent orange; the adhesive lasts several years before turning gummy. These new markers are snippets of outdoor-rated retroreflective tape and should last longer.
Run the knobs through the dishwasher occasionally to get ’em nice & shiny. Surprisingly, that doesn’t seem to bother the tape.
Sat down for some tech reading in the Comfy Chair one morning and spotted a lump near the road, at the foot of the deer crossing warning sign.
While I don’t know if this deer was one of that group, it’s a fair bet.
There was no freshly smashed glass or broken plastic in the area, which indicates a relatively low-speed collision, the kind where the deer’s legs snap against the bumper and the body rolls over the hood, crushing sheet metal and deforming plastic frippery along the way.
Many cars display that kind of damage around here. They look as though somebody walloped them with a huge sandbag, which is pretty much the case.
The animal huggers seem strangely silent about such events. If they had the courage of their convictions, they’d subsidize drivers (and gardeners) affected by the deer overpopulating the area. But, no, they never offer to do that.
I did find this in the driveway across the street…
Deer Whistle
Before equipping your car with such gimcrackery, read that.
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBay vendor responsible for those curves sent three replacement NP-FS11 batteries, commenting:
We’ve sent all your comments to the factory and ask them for a total quality inspection in this batch of batteries.
Here are the capacity curves for an initial charge, a test, recharge, and another test on each pack. The curves match up reasonably well (the top & bottom traces are nearly exact overlays), so I believe the results are accurate.
MaxPower NP-FS11 – Packs JKL
One pack is the best I’ve seen yet. The other two are junk, pure and simple.
So, to summarize:
One of three batteries DOA in first batch, others weak
Two of three batteries DOA in replacement
Overall, that’s a 50% failure rate even if you have relaxed standards…
I decided that, despite their “customer service”, this level of quality deserves the dreaded Negative Feedback checkbox.
Now, to saw the cases open and replace the cells. I cannot imagine any way to justify this on an economic basis, but we’ll certainly have enough batteries for that camera when I’m done.
If I had any confidence that spending more on the batteries would get a higher quality product, I’d do it. The question is, would another order of magnitude make any difference?
So I bought 530 bucks worth of new tires for the van; it’s ten years old with 66k on the clock. Picked the most suitable ones:
Near the top of the Consumer Reports list
Best constellation of features for our use
Available at the local tire shop
CR is essentially the only place that does actual across-the-board tests; you can disagree with their methodology, but it’s pretty much the only game in town.
I wound up at the local tire shop after bouncing off one of the online sources. In this case, tire + shipping + installation costs more online; the local shop was one of the online source’s installers.
So I went direct. They’re aboveboard: the balance + installation charge is the same no matter where the tires come from.
Had a 10:00 appointment and it took 90 minutes to get out of the shop. Not impressed.
The tire pressure monitor light came on halfway home. Well, OK, maybe it’s noticed the tires are bigger? But it’s a differential rotation counter, sooo… that’s not the problem.
Checked the pressure after letting the tires cool off for a few hours.
37 – Left rear
32 – Right rear
40 – Left front
34 – Right front
The pressure monitor was definitely doing its job!
Adjusted them all to 36 psi (hard, but we’ll see how it rides), reset the monitor, and it’s all good.
Factory trained and certified mechanics, my obscene-gerund deleted-noun.
Oh, and the lug nuts were evidently tightened by Andre the Giant… gotta break those suckers free before we do much more driving!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 