Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
It lacks the flange required to seal the O-ring against the outside of the bin, but I can fix that:
Can-o-worms – sleeved valve
It’s a chunk of PVC pipe faced to the proper length, bored to fit the valve body, then gooped in place with acrylic caulk.
Snug the nut inside the bin and it’s all good:
Can-o-worms – new valve installed
The original valve depended on having a smooth plug turning inside the outer shell, but years of grit scarred the interface enough to produce a slow drip. It also had the annoying mis-feature of aiming the opening inward, between the bin legs, where a jug didn’t quite fit.
The water heater valve depends on compressing a smaller O-ring against a seat inside the body, which may tend to clog with crud. We added a mesh filter to hold back the worst of the gunk, so this is in the nature of an experiment using free hardware.
The best bid on a recent tree removal project replaced most of the usual crew with a Merlo Roto telehandler:
Tree Work – Merlo setup
The orange gadget on the end of the boom is a Woodcracker manipulator with a terrifying switchblade chainsaw:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – rear
The saw has hydraulic motors, so you can hear the blade ripping through the wood.
The jaws above the saw hold the piece during the cut:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – side
Then lift it away:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – cut lift
The boom has a 115 foot vertical reach, so it can remove entire treetops:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – align
Then align the branch with the chipper’s gullet and ram it into the feed rollers, with no intervention from the ground crew:
Tree Work – Merlo – chipper feeding
The Woodcracker chainsaw isn’t quite long enough for the trunk, so the jaws stabilize the trunk during a manual cut:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – trunk support
Then haul the whole thing away:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – trunk lift
The Merlo can lift 11,000 pounds near the middle of its range, with a 1600 pound limit at the maximum horizontal reach and 5500 pounds at 115 feet vertically. As far as I can tell, nothing about this project came anywhere close to the machine’s limits.
The day arrived with a severe thunderstorm watch, but the main part of the storm passed far north of us. The local power company keeps this company on speed dial and called them for emergency work in the wake of the storm, so the Merlo left early and the remaining crew used a bucket truck to take down the last tree in old-school style.
The Merlo is staggeringly expensive, but lets one operator take down an entire tree without any climbers or riggers. I suspect the reduction in crew size (and insurance premiums) pays for the machine in short order; the crew was less than half the size involved in a neighbor’s project with another contractor.
Highly recommended!
Merlo’s promotional video has comparisons with similar machines and I’m sure you could waste an entire afternoon on such things. For sure, I didn’t get anything else done that day.
You might expect the tang to extend well into the handle, but that’s not what you get in a cheap tool:
Dandelion Weeder – ferrule detail
The Bucket o’ Rod-like Materials had a rake handle about the right diameter, so I sawed off a suitable length, set up the steady rest with a bushing, and turned the end to match the ferrule:
Dandelion Weeder – end turning
Pound the ferrule into place and drill the new handle to fit the tang:
Dandelion Weeder – drilling setup
The handle seemed a bit raw and, as it was already chucked in the lathe, got a synthetic string wrap with clear epoxy coating:
Dandelion Weeder – string epoxy
The pourable epoxy is reaching the end of its shelf life, but seemed entirely suitable for the purpose. I wrapped two layers of string around the dry handle, laid paper over the lathe bed, slathered epoxy over the whole affair, and let the lathe turn dead-slow for most of the day to even out the coat.
The next day: hammer the blade mostly straight again, smear JB QuikWeld on the tang and into the hole, gently hammer them together, chuck the blade, apply more epoxy to the ends, and let it turn:
Dandelion Weeder – end epoxy
A careful inspection reveals my casual disregard of the finer points of tool handle craftsmanship, but it came out surprisingly pretty:
Dandelion Weeder – repaired
The blade remains the finest butter-soft cheap steel and still doesn’t extend the length of the handle, but Quality Shop Time™ is not to be sniffed at.
And, hey, nary a trace of 3D printing or laser cutting!
Wearing my FitBIt Charge 5 tracker in the shower without activating its Water Lock feature occasionally produces odd results, but the most recent mishap ventured deep into the peculiar:
Jammed FitBit Charge 5
Its complete lack of buttons makes the thing completely waterproof, but also means it cannot continue when the touch / swipe interface gets horribly confused.
The recovery process requires snapping it onto its USB charging cable, then pressing the nearly invisible button embedded in the USB connector shell three times, with one second between each press: click hippopotamus click hippopotamus click.
Then it restarts / reboots and eventually all is well again.
Perhaps I can now recall the magic incantation without digging through the online help again, because I am certainly not going to suddenly remember to do the Water Lock dance before showering.
This year’s MVP health plan has a different “OTC Benefit” than last year, even though MVP is contracting with the same company to provide what seems to be essentially the same benefit.
This arrived half a year after the new OTC benefit card showed up:
MVP OTC Card Expiry
I suppose somebody noticed MVP hadn’t gotten around to telling us they were cancelling the old card, despite its Valid Thru 12/26 notation. Well, the card isn’t exactly cancelled, it just stopped working when all the money evaporated.
This not being my first ride in this particular rodeo, I spent all those sweet OTC benny bucks days after they become valid on the first day of every quarter-year, buying up my stock of overpriced OTC stuff.
In theory, you could buy the stuff elsewhere, but you had to scan each item in the retail store using the worst app imaginable to determine its eligibility and coverage. If the store was in a no-wireless-data phone zone: too bad, so sad.
This year’s program is simpler: you must buy everything from the sole-source supplier, even though it costs four times more than the comparable item at, say, Walmart or even Amazon.
Although the oven igniter I just installed worked, its 3.0 A current fell below the gas valve’s minimum 3.3 A, which, based on past experience, suggested it would fail in short order. Just to see what happened, I sent a note to the seller, who offered a warranty swap and, after a bit of fiddling, the replacement arrived:
Oven Igniter B – 3.3 A initial current
This one draws exactly 3.3 A, so it just barely meets both its product description and the gas valve’s minimum current.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 