Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
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 model is the Steampunk Octopus (in retrospect, the lower-vertex NixFix version should print better with its under-engine braces). The tests were to see how well its articulated tentacles printed and whether I understood how PrusaSlicer’s Multimaterial Painting worked. The answers: “Perfectly” and “Undo is my copilot”.
They’re both in PETG, with the orange eyes & features painted onto the STL model using the Smart Fill tool type to select surface facets joined within a given angle. Getting that right requires some fiddling, because you (well, I) can inadvertently select & flood a nearby area.
With Halloween fast approaching, they should be useful:
The fixture in the lower left is just an MDF square with a 15 mm post of more MDF glued in the middle to align the pieces. The white disk is the adhesive sheet, cut to 119 mm OD to leave half a millimeter clear around the outer edge, thus avoiding embarrassing stickiness.
Peel one side of the adhesive sheet and drop it over the post sticky side up:
Double-faced DVD coaster – adhesive sheet ready
Drop one of the DVDs over it, label side down:
Double-faced DVD coaster – first disc on adhesive
Lift it off, peel the other side of the adhesive sheet, put it over the post sticky side up, and drop the other DVD on top:
Double-faced DVD coaster – finished
The data side of the discs has a 0.3 mm raised rim just inside the track zone, so they don’t sit exactly flat on the table and expect a slightly concave lower surface on the mug / glass / cup. Neither of those seem like dealbreakers thus far, although I’m sure somebody will object.
A ring or two of general-purpose glue, along the lines of E6000 urethane, would be significantly less fussy than cutting adhesive sheets.
One of Mary’s gardening cronies suggested Sting-Kill might reduce her dramatic swelling [^1] after a bee / wasp / insect sting. Because it must be applied immediately after the sting, the swab must be on hand in the garden or on a bike ride, but the glass vial inside seem entirely too fragile to survive amid the usual clutter of a purse / pocketbook / belt pack / bike pack.
Well, I can fix that:
Pill tube – PETG default
It’s a KeyChain Pill Tube from Printables, enlarged 20% in the XY plane to fit the Sting-Kill swab, with the white applicator end fitting neatly into the domed screw-on lid for a bit of cushioning.
The solid model looks about like you’d expect:
Pill Tube – slicer preview
Despite that preview, I printed it with a brim. PETG sticks tenaciously to the Textured PEI steel sheet and a brim wasn’t really needed; just pop the parts off the platform when cool.
Somewhat to my astonishment, the threads screwed together easily, smoothed out after a few on-and-off cycles, and it’s ready for a moment we both hope will never occur.
[^1] Mary did tote an EpiPen back in the day, but a few near misses indicated she’s no longer quite as sensitized. She does swell up something powerful and we’re hoping immediately applying a Sting-Kill will help knock it down.
Although the drilled sunflower seeds worked reasonably well, various critters gnawed through the threads and escaped unharmed with the seeds. We tried gluing seeds to the trigger with good old Elmer’s Non-Toxic School Glue, only to find garden ants absolutely love the stuff.
Well, if voles like seeds, they’ll surely like nuts:
Rat traps – walnut halves
Those are rat traps (much bigger than mouse traps) with walnut halves secured to the top and bottom of the trigger with hot melt glue.
Yes, the plywood plates under the traps hold them together. There’s no reason to put fancy new traps outdoors where they succumb to weather in short order; these are veterans from previous episodes.
Having taken out two voles with sunflower seeds over the course of a week, the walnuts accounted for two more voles in three days. Mary thinks a neighbor vole needs a day to notice its buddy has gone missing, so the average pace may be a vole every other day.
Bonus: Gnawing on the nuts or trying to pull them away triggers the trap, so those walnuts are still out there.
The community gardens have enough voles to attract Red Tailed Hawks, which have started perching on fence posts and stooping on voles foolish enough to run along the paths or into grassy areas. Some gardeners seem disconcerted by the presence of such large birds in close proximity, but Mary assures them they’re helpers.
The kitchen counter has only two useful places for the cutting board and the spot Mary favors puts a distinct swale under one corner. A bit of measuring and solid modeling produced a simple shim to make the answer come out right:
Cutting Board shim – solid model
The basic shape is union() of a trio of hull() operations forming the three sides, with the text label as a separate object to verify I understood how to build a multi-material object.
Export it as a 3mf file, open it in PrusaSlicer, slice, print:
Cutting Board shim – label
Putting the label on the bottom surface takes advantage of the nubbly finish on the Textured Steel Sheet to make it look like it just grew in there.
The label is just barely visible from the top, despite extending only 1/4 of the way through the 1.6 mm bottom slab:
Cutting Board shim – top
So white PETG needs more than 1.2 mm of thickness to hid a black feature. Today I Learned, etc.
Multi-material printing produces a Wipe Tower to hold all the extruded junk during color changes:
Cutting Board shim – wipe tower
The curl under the nozzle comes from the final ramming used to shape the end of the filament into a point for reliable material / color changing.
Although a shim is something of a nuisance, it works perfectly:
Cutting Board shim – in use
Much easier than installing an L-shaped Corian slab with a sink cutout!
The faded engraving dates back to the early days of the laser …
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The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 