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

Curtain Rod Spring Pusher Block

Spotted during Autumn Window Cleaning:

Curtain rod pusher block – spring contortion

That’s the compression spring inside the curtain rod over the kitchen sink, intended to push the ends against the cabinets on either side. The screw slides along the outer rod and when tightened, backstops the spring against the inner rod.

The end of the spring is apparently intended to twist and jam inside the inner half of the rod, but that seemed so … unesthetic.

Being in the midst of setting up a Windows 11 box for the laser cutter, I used it as an excuse to fiddle with the RDP configuration to get LightBurn running in full screen mode on the monitor atop my desk; more about all that later.

The little pusher block is a hull around a pair of circles the same diameter as the smaller dimension of the inner rod, spaced apart enough to match its width, then laser-cut from a scrap of 1/4 inch acrylic:

Curtain rod pusher block – overview

Which assembles as you’d expect:

Curtain rod pusher block – installed

The spring seems much happier pushing against the block, doesn’t it?

Admittedly, this was completely unnecessary, but if you think of it as a side effect of the Win 11 thing, it makes at least a little sense.

2024-11-07
Sears Humidifier: Bottle Patching

Although the Sears humidifier (Model 758.154200 if you’re keeping score) that Came With The House™ works fine with its lid hinges broken, Mary heard an odd hissing sound somewhere inside. The sound continued with the thing unplugged and, after a protracted struggle in the kitchen sink, we tracked the sound to a crack in one of the dimples joining the front and back faces of the right-side water bottle:

Sears Humidifier bottle – overview

The vertical shaded bars come from the camera’s electronic shutter vs. unfiltered 60 Hz AC powering the shop LED lights.

Unsurprisingly, replacement bottles are no longer available, although you can get fill caps and valves, plus wicking filters.

A water drop squeezed in the crack:

Sears Humidifier bottle – crack

The bottles are polyethylene that sneers at any normal sealant, but I have a few square inches of tape intended for repairs exposed to weather. I didn’t get the snippet aligned just as I wanted, but its gooey adhesive definitely covered the crack:

Sears Humidifier bottle – patched

The bottles normally operate with a slight vacuum, thus the air hissing through the crack, so the tape need not withstand any continuous pressure and the adhesive layer should flow into the crack if it goes anywhere at all.

Protip: the gooey adhesive bonds instantly and irrevocably to whatever it touches, so do a trial fit before you peel off the backing tape.

If the “Serial” is a date code, it’s been around for while:

Sears Humidifier – data plate

It should be good for a few more decades …

2024-11-06
Laser Test Paper: Weathering

Three months of outdoor exposure suggest that laser test paper can survive use as a plant tag for one growing season, at least when it remains flat:

Laser test paper – small plant labels – 3 month exposure

The two upper tags demonstrated the paper has no flexibility worth mentioning, so it cannot become a tag wrapped around a stem.

The two lower labels spent their time tucked into a window frame where they got plenty of sun & rain without the benefit of a backing plate. Looks good to me!

Contrary to my expectation, the craft adhesive sheet behind this label survived intact, although the label itself took some damage, perhaps from the more direct sunlight out on the deck:

Laser test paper – plant marker – 3 month exposure

In any event, they look Good Enough™ for our simple needs and next year’s plants will be properly labeled.

2024-11-04
Doorbell Button Skulls
With only days to spare, I decorated the doorbell button:

Doorbell button skulls – installed

Yeah, I jammed Sharpies in the eye sockets, but they look exactly the way they should. The middle skull is in the middle of the actuator in the hope that’s where it’ll get pushed.

The solid model comes directly from the seasonally appropriate teapot lid handle with a rectangle to suit the doorbell button actuator:

Doorbell Button Skulls – solid model

Perforce, the OpenSCAD code has eyeballometric magic numbers:
```
// Doorbell Button Enhancement
// Ed Nisley - KE4ZNU
// 2024-10-28

Button = [5.0,13.0,40.0];    // button width, boss depth, button height

union() {
    rotate([0,0,65])
    translate([-121,-105])      // totally eyeballometric
        import("stackofskulls - 50mm.obj",convexity=10);

        translate([0,Button.y/2,Button.z/2])
            cube(Button,center=true);
}
```
The rectangular slab goes all the way down to the platform because I couldn’t be bothered with support or a little wedge.

I’m sure it will survive exactly as long as it must.

Dunno how many little ones will venture up the driveway, though:

Halloween mailbox decorations
2024-10-31
Cart Coin Handle vs. Reality

This failed pretty much the way I expected:

Cart Coin – broken handle

The “carbon fiber” part of PETG-CF consists of very very short fibers, unlike the longer fibers in real carbon fiber materials, so the strength is nowhere near what you might expect from the marketing. I knew this going in and the break wasn’t surprising.

Round cart coins continue to work exactly like US quarters.

2024-10-29
Humidifier Lid Hinges
The humidifier that Came With The House™ had a lid with two broken plastic hinges that I figured I could never replace, but while cleaning out the fuzz for the upcoming season I found one missing piece stuck inside the lid. Given a hint, I glued it back in place:

Humidifier Hinge – outlined

There’s a strip of duct tape around the outside holding the fragment in place while the adhesive cured.

A manual curve fit to the image in Inkscape produced the red outline, which gets saved as a plain SVG and fed into OpenSCAD to create a solid model:

Humidifier Hinge – solid model

The cylinder doesn’t exactly fit the end of the hinge, but it’s close enough. The straightforward OpenSCAD code making that happen:
```
// Humidfier Hinge Replacement
// Ed Nisley KE4ZNU
// 2024-10-20

HingeThick = 10.0;
PinLength = 10.0;

ScrewOD = 2.0;

NumSides = 2*3*4;
Protrusion = 0.1;

difference() {
    union() {
        translate([0,0,HingeThick])
            cylinder(d=6.0,h=PinLength,$fn=NumSides);

        linear_extrude(height=10.0,convexity=5)
            translate([-3.1,-8.0])
                import("Humidifier Hinge - ouline.svg");
    }

    cylinder(d=ScrewOD,h=4*(HingeThick + PinLength),center=true,$fn=8);
}
```
The pin has a hole for a M2 screw, but contemplation of the broken pieces suggested the pin wasn’t the weakest link, which later experience confirmed.

Figuring I’d need only one hinge, I made a spare for fitting:

Humidifier hinge – on platform

The unmodified part fit just about perfectly, whereupon a completely ad-hoc fixture involving a pair of laser-cut MDF slabs, a craft stick epoxy mixer, and more duct tape held it in place while the adhesive cured:

Humidifier hinge – fixturing

The hinge pin turned out to be half a millimeter too long, which is easily fixed, and it worked fine:

Humidifier hinge – installed

That’s more duct tape wrapped around the perimeter to hold the pieces in place, should it break again.

Which, I regret to report, occurred on the way up the stairs from the Basement Shop™ when the lid slipped from my grasp, fell away from the rest of the humidifer’s top panel, and jammed open:

Humidifier hinge – break

The PETG-CF part held together, the adhesive remained bonded to both pieces, but the original plastic fractured just below the joint. A closer look from the other side shows the break:

Humidifier hinge – break detail

The other hinge broke about where it did before.

So the humidifier remains in service with the lid in status quo ante and a small bag inside holding the fragments for the next return to the shop.

Drat!
2024-10-28
Worst Deck Staining Job Ever

This looks about as awful as I expected:

Worst deck staining job ever

The previous owners replaced the deck two years ago, but the contractor installed more than half the planks with the grain cupped upward. The job was so bad the contractor replaced the most egregiously warped planks (over by the door and out of sight on the right) under warranty, but left all the other mis-oriented planks in place, presumably because they weren’t that bad yet.

The bare wood must age for a while before staining, so the shelf of painting supplies held a year-old gallon can as a reminder, with about two inches of stain / preservative in the bottom. I applied it to the “new” planks with pleasing results that absolutely do not match the rest of the weathered wood. With nothing to lose and plenty to gain, I applied the rest of the potion to the worst of the upside-down planks, producing the egregiously bad result you see above.

Given how the stain weathered to oblivion over the course of the last year, I expect all those planks will become roughly the same shade of ugly by next summer, when I might possibly be motivated to slather another gallon over the deck.

A friend observes: Houses are trouble.

2024-10-25