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.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

  • Corelle Sliver

    Mary found a sliver chipped from the outside edge of a Corelle dinner plate, which provides an opportunity to see something that’s normally invisible: the ceramic layer inside its glass coating.

    Overall, the sliver is nearly two inches long and about the same width as the plate is thick.

    Corelle sliver
    Corelle sliver

    Peering through the microscope at the left end, the glass layer is most obvious along the top edge. You can barely see it along the bottom, where the chip thins to a razor edge.

    Corelle sliver - detail
    Corelle sliver – detail

    On the right end the upper and lower glass layers are a bit more obvious, at least with the light arriving nearly horizontally and after some aggressive exposure hackage,

    Corelle sliver - side light
    Corelle sliver – side light

    The ceramic has a slightly higher coefficient of thermal expansion than the glass, so it puts the glass under a tremendous amount of compressive stress as the newly manufactured plate cools. Glass is really strong in compression (and terribly weak in tension), so the plate becomes remarkably hard to break. More details there and there.

    The plate rims do tend to chip, however, if you own them as long as we have. These are the long-discontinued Old Town Blue pattern: over three decades old by now.

    Oddly, they’re still under warranty: back in the day, Corning sold its then-new Corelle with a Lifetime Warranty. Nowadays, you get three years for the mid-grade line, five years for thicker plates, and a mere one year for stoneware (whatever that is). I suppose enough people actually took them up on the warranty to make it economically impractical.

    I ran a fine diamond file over the chipped edge and it’s OK. Eventually, we’ll break down and get new plates, but there’s no sense rushing a decision like that…

  • Rudy Sunglasses: Back From the Dead

    Clear lens installed
    Clear lens installed

    As expected, the uni-lens on Mary’s Rudy Project sunglasses cracked right up the middle as that stress crack above the nosepiece opened up. The sunglasses came with interchangeable lenses, so I swapped in the clear lens.

    Having used urethane adhesive to mechanically lock the defunct gray lens in place, the broken bits were pretty firmly bonded. I applied a brass hammer and small drift punch to the remaining tabs, pried the debris out of the temples, cleaned the adhesive from the recesses, and snapped the new lens in place. Surprisingly, it popped in and locked securely.

    The nosepiece has never worked satisfactorily: there’s nothing locking the flexible blue-silicone pad to the straight-sided posts that are supposed to hold it. As a result, it tends to pop off at the most inopportune moments.

    Rudy nosepiece
    Rudy nosepiece

    I dotted the posts on one side with cyanoacrylate and the other pair with epoxy to see if either will bond well enough to make a difference. If those fail, I’ll try urethane, although I’m not sure what will happen as the urethane expands in the sockets.

    Anyhow, she now has glasses suitable for biking on cloudy and rainy days… which is much better than a sharp stick (or a bug) in the eye, as we see it.

  • Chili Powder Beetles

    Mary cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, which entailed sorting out all the various spice jars. She thought the Chili Powder looked a bit odd and, indeed, it did: a whole colony of beetles and their larvae was a-squirm in there!

    The label states:

    All Natural

    non irradiated — no preservatives

    Frankly, I don’t see any particular problem with food irradiation.

    If you’re the sort of person who cooks your meals, as we are, then you’re eating plenty of denatured proteins and broken DNA anyway. In this case, snuggling that jar up to a nice warm Cobalt-60 slug for a few minutes would have been a great improvement.

    The main ingredient, of course, is “chili peppers”. The remainder doesn’t sound particularly life-sustaining, though: oregano, cumin, garlic, sea salt, and spices. Anything that can live off that brew must have a bad attitude, the way I see it.

    Being that sort of bear, I’d written the date on the label: 19 Aug 08. So, in round numbers, we use two ounces of Chili Powder a year. Obviously, we shouldn’t buy that stuff in bulk…

    Those are millimeters on the scale it’s crawling on, so these are little bitty bugs.

    [Update: Useful advice from the UC IPM folks.]

  • Waterless Urinal

    Waterless urinal
    Waterless urinal

    Our travels took us past a mall, in which I discovered another generation of waterless urinals. The general notion is that the cartridge contains a light oil that allows urine through to the drain, while blocking sewer gases just like an ordinary pipe trap.

    These Falcon urinals smell not at all like the Eau de Outhouse I found in Boston’s Hynes Convention Center some years ago; I suppose there was some pushback from the end-user community…

    IIRC, the Hynes restroom retrofit installed waterless drain cartridges in a standard urinal. Unfortunately, with no flush water to rinse the bowl, the urine simply dried in place with exactly the olfactory effect you’d expect.

    This urinal is obviously a custom-designed hunk of ceramic technology and, according to their copious literature, whizz just slides right off and runs through the Sloan cartridges on its way to the drain. I’m not sure how all that works, but things have certainly improved… or, perhaps, the mall does maintenance much more frequently than Hynes.

    Waterless urinal target
    Waterless urinal target

    Anyhow, that small dot a few inches above the cartridge seems like an aiming target. Speaking strictly as an amateur apiarist, the notion of “pee on the bee” isn’t all that attractive, but I suppose they needed some way to direct the stream away from the inlets …

    Urinal target
    Urinal target detail

  • Failed Switch

    Switch Innards
    Switch Innards

    When I flipped this switch on, it started fizzing and emitting ozone-scented smoke while the lights it controlled flickered. This is not a nominal outcome. I toggled the switch a few times, but it continued to misbehave, so I installed a replacement switch and laid the old one out on the desk for an autopsy.

    It’s an old-school mechanism, as suits the 1930-vintage structure it came from. The lyre-shaped arch with the spring swings back and forth on its tabs, which rest in the small recesses near the middle of the switch body. The peg on the toggle handle engages the spring, thus providing the over-center snap action.

    The switch action takes place at the bottom of the arch, where those two very small tabs stick out. They wipe on the grubby-looking bottom tabs of the oddly shaped flat-brass doodads, the U-shaped ends of which surround the screws that clamp the copper wire to the switch.

    I expected to find a scorched contact or perhaps an insect in the mechanism, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Apart, that is, from the layer of congealed grease covering everything inside. I suspect the grease was applied in the factory to help prevent contact corrosion, but the volatiles are long gone.

    Switch Contacts
    Switch Contacts

    A closeup of the switch contacts shows (what I think is) the problem.

    All the contact points are covered in grease, but the lyre-shaped gizmo looks like it’s been painted: its contact points were black and resisted cleaning by fingernail scraping.

    As nearly as I can tell, all the current passed through a very few high spots that were wiped somewhat clean as the contacts closed. As those spots heated up, the grease melted and flowed over them, increasing the resistance and the heat.

    The switch had been working for many decades, as the BX armored cable in the box had fabric-covered rubber (stiff rubber) insulation. I managed to install the replacement switch without breaking the insulation, but it was ugly in there.

  • What’s Inside This Box?

    Digital Media Player box
    Digital Media Player box

    Got a package from halfway around the world that, I thought, corresponded to a recent eBay order. Opened the envelope and pulled out a box containing … a Digital Media Player?

    That’s odd. I don’t recall ordering one of those.

    At this point, anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s The White Plague should get the chills. Do you or don’t you open a mysterious package from far away that seems to offer something interesting?

    Pandora might have something to say, too.

    Digital Media Player box - contents
    Digital Media Player box – contents

    Well, open it I did, and found exactly what I’d ordered: a stash of female headers pins. Of course, one can’t tell what else might have come in the package, but so it goes.

    Now I can hand Eks half a lifetime supply of the strips to replace the ones I mooched.

    One other mildly surprising part of the package: it seems we’ve gotten to the point where magnetic closures are cheap enough to replace everything else, including intricate origami tucks. There’s a small steel plate pasted under the flap. Who knew?

    Digital Media Player box - magnetic closure
    Digital Media Player box – magnetic closure

  • A Christmas Season Poem

    Twas the Night…
    By Mary Nisley

    ‘Twas the night before September, when outside the house
    Many creatures were stirring, not just a mouse;
    The garden was fenced all ‘round with care,
    In hopes that deer would never come there;
    My daughter was nestled all snug in her bed,
    While replays of band practice ran through her head;
    My husband was sleeping, and hoped for much more,
    As I settled down for a short summer snore.
    When out in the yard there arose such a clatter,
    I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
    Away to the window I flew like a flash,
    But saw nothing on the deck; what was that crash?
    Then off to the kitchen to flip on the lights,
    To better reveal the outermost sights.
    When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
    But an eight pointed buck: a powerful male deer!
    His head, it was lowered; his mouth, it was red,
    He looked mean and angry, a monster to dread.
    When he moved I saw a most terrible sight,
    His antler was tangled in the fence very tight.
    I ran for my husband, to wake him from sleep,
    He groggily blinked, then from the bed he did leap.
    We dashed to the doorway, but the buck, he was gone,
    One glimpse of my motion made him quite strong.
    We surveyed the garden with the help of a light,
    What destruction was done before the buck’s flight?
    Alas! My poor garden, damage lay all around,
    Two heavy steel fence posts he’d bent to the ground.
    The ruin was total in two veggie beds:
    Stalks twisted and broken, big leaves lay in shreds.
    We pushed the posts upright, unsnarled all the net,
    As we patched the fence up, we felt it was wet.
    Shining flashlight on hands revealed blood on our fingers,
    But it was not ours: could deer blood still linger?
    Sunshine the next morning revealed all of the damage,
    Plus an antler tip broken in the buck’s desperate rampage.
    The rabbits and woodchuck say “Thanks Mr. Buck!
    You’ve opened the garden, it’s our great luck!
    We’re feasting on beet greens, parsley and chard,
    To fatten for winter is no longer hard.”
    We wish you happy holidays, filled with warmth and good cheer,
    And may your next growing season have gardens without deer.

    Folks: I couldn’t make this one up; that is exactly what happened. I believe the buck was grazing on fallen apples from my neighbor’s tree when, in the dark, his antlers tangled in my fence netting. They were velvety, still soft and growing, so when he broke a tip trying to escape, there was blood all over. At 2:00AM I was outside, stringing up twine and drenching it with deer repellent, hoping to keep the rest of his herd from testing my jury-rigged fence.

    Acknowledgments: Thanks to Clement Clarke Moore and his “The Night Before Christmas” for the shape of this poem and for my lines 9-11. His words fit the situation so well that I couldn’t resist using them.

    Ed says: It’s Christmas: we can take the day off from tech, right?