Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
As expected, the adhesive foam strips I used on the bathtub soap tray didn’t survive continued exposure to hot soapy water, so Version 2 includes hooks securing it to the ceramic soap tray and a few other tweaks:
Bathtub Soap Tray – V2 – LightBurn layout
The view from the top:
Soap Tray V2 – top
The hooks are more visible from the bottom, as is the 10 AWG copper wire preventing the whole affair from rotating around the ceramic handle from the weight of the soap bar:
Soap Tray V2 – bottom
Ignore the usual crud you’ll find on your ceramic soap tray, too.
It’s not particularly elegant, what with being cardboard, but it’s a proof of concept that will determine the final size.
The top layer is a ring around the lamp pedestal for a bit of stabilization protecting the four M3 screws holding the base to the lamp. Those screws sit on a 60 mm square, offset 1 mm to the front of the lamp:
NisLite Baseplate – LightBurn layout
Which explains why I typically make the first few versions of anything out of cardboard.
For the record, those inserts look like this:
Converted Ottlite – brass inserts
A pair of very flat-head M3 screws hold the front inserts in place through holes match-drilled in the remains of the bosses I’d long ago epoxied in place. I pressed the rear inserts in place by misusing the drill press, as the lamp is much too tall for the heat setter.
Then comes the iron base weight:
Converted Ottlite – iron weight
And then the steel outer plate:
Converted Ottlite – steel cover plate
The new base plate gets a ring around its perimeter for clearance under the four pan head M3 screws into the inserts.
If the cardboard base is stable enough, we’ll do an acrylic version in cheerful primary colors.
The LightBurn layout in SVG format as a GitHub Gist:
While cleaning dead bugs out of the ceiling lamps, we discovered the kitchen light was missing one of the three nuts holding its cover in place. While spare nuts might be available, this seemed like a quicker & easier solution:
Ceiling Lamp Nut – bottom view – solid model
The stepped interior fits a brass insert with 8-32 threads (not metric, to my utter astonishment) rammed in place with a heat-set tool:
Ceiling Lamp Nut – insert staking
Using the nominal diameters seems to work fine, although I’m sure some finesse will be needed with smaller inserts.
Printed four just to be sure, rammed three inserts, and they’re ready:
Ceiling Lamp Nuts – as-built
The curved cap matches the original nut through the use of the Chord Equation to get the cap radius as a function of its height (sagitta) & base diameter. Admittedly, it looks kinda grotty with only a dozen layers, but it’s the thought that counts.
The original nuts are heavy knurled steel and the new ones are cheap plastic, but nobody will ever know:
Ceiling Lamp Nut – installed
Bonus: now I have two spare steel nuts for the next time …
One of the flat-topped pegs anchoring the fuzzy black upholstery / carpet to the back of the rear seats went walkabout a while ago, but the situation only became critical after I vacuumed the crud out of the car.
Living in the future simplifies things:
Upholstery Peg – solid model
Rather than getting all fancy with barbed ends and suchlike, I just slathered the stem with hot-melt glue, jammed it in place, and waited a few breaths:
Upholstery peg – installed
The vivid yellow stuff is seat cushion foam.
3D printing is wonderful for simple parts like that.
The general idea of a light box is (wait for it) a uniform background in a box full of bright light:
Light Box – overview
Obviously, this is a low-budget light box, but it makes perfect sense if you already have an essentially unlimited supply of moving boxes, 11×17 inch plotter paper, and a couple of photo / video lights lying around.
A two-layer cardboard ring glued to the top keeps the light from sliding off the box and stiffens the gaping hole letting the light shine through.
You’d normally use a fabric background to get rid of those ugly gaps around the edges and a larger box would be better, so this is along the lines of a proof-of-concept.
In this day and age, you’d normally use a phone camera:
Light Box – gears overview – DOF
The lens on my Pixel 6a has a fixed focal length (around 4.4 mm = 27 mm equivalent) and a fixed f/1.8 (-ish) aperture, producing a razor-thin depth of field at the rear of the front gears. Note the fuzzy gears in the background, all of three inches away, and the slightly fuzzy front edge of the front gears. The camera’s digital zoom doesn’t help matters in the least, despite the AI-powered interpolation.
Keeping things close together helps, although the far end of the wipe towers and the rear of the gears lose detail:
Light Box – gears stacked
Looking from above also helps a little, but a top viewing port would reduce the skewed perspective:
Light Box – gears detail – DOF
Shallow DOF keeps your attention on the foreground, which is why real photographers use it for portraits:
Light Box – gears standing – DOF
The camera, an ancient Sony DSC-H5 with a zoom lens going down to f/8, still does nice work through a 2× macro adapter lens:
Light Box – gear detail – top light
The DOF is still narrow, but at least the entire front gear is in focus.
Adding a front light picks out the knurling:
Light Box – gears detail – front light
The results definitely look better than before, but it’ll take a bit of getting used to traipsing to the Basement Laboratory for every photo …
The flat robot vacuum assigned to clean the floors around here would occasionally get stuck under the leg of my Husky workbench-as-desk and fail to complete its mission. Living in the future makes solving that problem a matter of minutes:
Husky workbench caster feet – installed
The upper rim captures the locked-in-place wheel in a 35×25 mm recess atop the middle 45×35 mm slab, with a 2.5 mm cork layer on the bottom. Laser-cut, of course, glued with ordinary yellow wood glue, and clamped for about half of a Squidwrench remote meeting.
Raising the desk by 5.5 mm gives the Flat One juuust enough clearance to scuttle under there:
A small tweak to the venerable spoon drainer adds a configurable cutout adapting it to a slightly different dish drainer rack:
Measuring Spoon Drainer – solid model
Which lets it snuggle into the corner:
Measuring spoon drainer – installed
Both the old and new racks had coated steel loops stuck into rubberoid feet perfectly suited to collect water and eventually rust the loops. Given a new rack, I figured potting the feet in JB PlasticBonder urethane adhesive would help forestall the rust:
Rubbermaid dish drainer – foot potting
I wish it were white, rather than black, but the only other color choice is tan and I can’t wish nearly that hard.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
