Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The ancient and much–repaired Sears humidifier works better in its new location across the living room with its front raised a few millimeters, which may have something to do with its plastic housing supporting a pair of heavy water containers for a few decades.
After fiddling around with shims to find the proper height, these feet descended from the Husky workbench feet:
Humidifier Caster Feet – installed
They’re glued up from 3 mm plywood sitting on a 1 mm layer of cork:
Humidifier Caster Feet – clamping
The humidifier seems much happier with its casters 4 mm above the floor. Seems awfully fussy to me, but there’s no arguing with success.
Mary counts birds for Project Feederwatch and the feeder goes up at Halloween, whereupon birds begin smashing against the windows. Having bought a lifetime supply of paracord for this purpose on our previous house, I made a DIY Birdsaver for the rear windows:
DIY Birdsavers – interior view
This project was tremendously simplified by discovering the soffits consist of molded PVC sheets having exactly the proper 4 inch spacing and a convenient lip perfectly suited to capture the knot:
The knife’s silhouette came from a few minutes with GIMP, because cleaning up the edges on a graphics tablet is easier than fiddling with precise spline curves. Export the selection as an SVG, import into LightBurn, set to Fill, and Fire The Laser:
Garden knife sheath
The upper block in the LightBurn layout is an oversized rectangle so I could cut that out first, stick craft adhesive on both sides, trim the edges, drop it back into the hole, then cut the middle part of the sheath.
It’s made of recycled through-dyed chipboard and it won’t last forever, but that’s not a problem because these things tend to wander off before they disintegrate.
I must do a few more for the other garden bucket, but those should be straightforward.
The common fate of all “soft touch” silicone handles is to become sticky and gooey. While some goo may be removable, I’ve found that wrapping self-bonding silicone tape around the mess both encapsulates it and maintains the grippiness of the original silicone.
A few weeks ago, the house seemed unusually warm when I crawled out of bed. Checking the heat pump thermostat woke me right up:
Heat pump – battery critical
This, as they say, is not a nominal outcome.
A pair of AA alkaline cells powers the thermostat and, due to its wireless communication link to the heat pump’s air handler in the attic, it chews through two pairs a year. As you’d expect, it displays a “Battery Low” message for at least few days at the end of their lifetime, which was not the case for this failure.
After replacing the cells, the thermostat reported that, yes indeed, the house was much warmer than usual:
Heat pump – high temperature
A temperature monitor showed the heat had jammed on in the deep of the night:
Heat pump – runaway temperature
The heat pump exhaust temperature showed a similar event:
Heat pump – exhaust temperature
One of the AA cells showed about 1.3 V, but the other was around 0.25 V, suggesting an abrupt failure, rather than the normal gradual voltage decrease with plenty of time to replace the cells.
It’s reasonable to jam the heat on when the thermostat isn’t communicating, rather than let the house gradually freeze, but it did come as a surprise. I don’t know how the heat pump reacts to a battery failure during the cooling season; not refrigerating the house would be perfectly fine in most circumstances.
The Amazon Basics AA cells I’ve been using have worked as well as the Name Brand ones, so I was willing to write one off as happenstance.
However, during the recent Daylight Saving Time dance, I discovered the clock in Mary’s Long Arm Sewing Room had stopped, with an Amazon Basics AA alkaline cell from the same lot inside:
Failed clock AA cell
The date shows I’d replaced it in March, with the previous cell lasting an amazing 3-½ years. This one was completely dead, reading barely 0.1 V, after seven months. Mary hasn’t had a quilting project at the long-arm stage in recent months, so the clock may have been stopped for quite a while.
Perhaps something has gone badly wrong with Amazon’s battery supplier QC.
As the saying goes: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
The next morning found it huddled against the cold:
Mantis – chilled
It had reached operating temperature and gone about its business a few hours later.
I deployed a cardboard Mantis in its honor as a seasonally appropriate yard decoration, but mine didn’t survive the night nearly as well as the real one:
Protip: Wear gloves, because you’re working in front of an unprotected and eventually very sharp blade.
The blade-holding clamp snaps magnetically into a rotating chuck so you can flip the knife over, at least if it’s not quite as long as that one. The chuck index has a spring-loaded release button:
Work Sharp Knife Sharpener – rear view
The spring is powerful and the button arrived with a recess around the screw holding the chuck together:
Work Sharp Knife Sharpener clamp button – as received
Pressing the button hard enough to release the chuck hurt my index finger, but their Tech Support said it’s like that and that’s the way it is. Turning the screw adjusts the spring compression, but I think this situation calls for “more secure” rather than “easy to push”.
Fortunately, I have a laser cutter and know how to use it:
Work Sharp Knife Sharpener clamp button – filled
Despite appearances, it’s a 10 mm disk of 4.3 mm clear acrylic stuck to the screw head with a snippet of white double-sided tape and flush with the surrounding plastic surface.
A smooth button makes my index finger much happier …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 