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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

Knitting Stitch Counters: Material Tests

Our Young Engineer knits during rare moments of downtime and sketched an idea for stitch counters to mark progress between those moments. There being nothing like a new project to take one’s mind off all of one’s previous projects:

Stitch Counters – overview

These are more along the lines of feasibility / material tests than finished products, so you’ll see plenty of rough edges.

Prior to doing this, we agreed that 3 mm material was probably too thick, particularly given the small scale: the hexagons are 10 mm edge-to-edge with a 1.5 mm hole for the jump ring.

The jump rings are (mostly) 8 mm OD, which may or may not be the right diameter for all possible knitting needles.

The count sequence goes 10 20 10 40 50 10 with alternating colors:

Stitch Counters – red and blue

Those came from 3 mm red and blue transparent acrylic, looking entirely too much like candy. Cutting two identical layouts from two different materials, then swapping a few counters, gives me two related-but-different sets. This idea is also subject to revision.

I like the set of 3 mm acrylic mirror counters colored with Sharpie:

Stitch Counters – mirror

Alas, the unprotected mirror backing won’t survive long in the real world and Sharpie ink tends to stress-crack the acrylic. Bonding a thin colored sheet / gel filter to the back with an adhesive sheet in between would work, although I don’t look forward to the fiddly alignment. Bonus: sticky edges are a nonstarter in this application.

A setup error produced a set of unmarked counters that might still come in handy for something:

PXL_20230507_150124595 – Stitch Counters – blue blank

Trolase acrylic 1/16 inch = 1.5 mm sheets produce the most visible legends, in a relentlessly industrial sort of way:

Stitch Counters – Trolase

Those have a single thin layer atop a white or black base sheet, but three-layer 1.5 mm Trolase sheets with matching top and bottom colors (cladding on a white core) would look better.

If you can’t decide on a color, go clear:

Stitch Counters – clear

All of those appear on a background of some thin DIY plywood:

Stitch Counters – veneer plywood sheets

The bottom sheet is very pale veneer that came with a layer of genuine 3M 468 transfer tape with 200MP adhesive. I stuck three different veneers on three 100×50 mm rectangles of the stuff to make 1.5 mm thick “plywood”. The adhesive sheet provides lateral strength, not the wood fibers, so it’s not quite as easy to tear as the broken fragment would suggest.

The results look passable, although there’s room for improvement:

Stitch Counters – veneer plywood

After engraving & cutting, I slathered them with clear polyurethane finish and hung them up to dry:

Stitch Counters – wood finish curing

I like the effect, but using the pale veneer for the bottom layer made them look identical from that side. Worse, two of the three top layer veneers had nearly identical colors (one has more grain) after the finish cured.

More thought seems in order, but at least I’ve explored some of the solution space.

2023-05-09
Dirt Devil Stick Vacuum: Floor Brush Salvage

The knuckle joint on the Dirt Devil stick vacuum failed, so it followed us home instead of leaping into the trash:

Dirt Devil – broken swivel joint

Although the fitting seems to be made of ABS, it’s now missing major chunks of plastic in the high-stress areas, so rebuilding it seems not worth the effort.

Because we don’t have any carpets and this one will never leave the basement, I extracted the carpet beater brush and its motor, only to find Yet Another Example of poor assembly practices:

Dirt Devil – stray strands

It’s a 12 V (-ish, I didn’t measure whatever comes out of the vacuum head) DC motor and those errant strands aren’t quite long enough to meet in the middle. The yellow rectangle is a thermal fuse that would be shorted out if the strands were a bit longer.

The broken joint lets the head swivel from side to side, but the elevation joint is still good. If I don’t expect too much, the thing might still suffice for extracting dust from under the benches:

Dirt Devil – taped joint

Worst case, I can swap in a classic floor brush using one of the adapters I made a while ago:

Dirt Devil adapters – assembled

That was easy, if only because I skipped the hard part …

2023-05-08
Zenni Optical Glasses: Nosepad Misalignment

Mary’s new glasses arrived from halfway around the planet with excruciatingly misaligned nosepads:

Zenni Optical glasses – misangled nosepads

Despite past experience, Zenni generally does better than this.

Fortunately, a few minutes with the same metal-forming pliers as before settled them in place.

Ya gotta have tools!

2023-05-03
Subaru Forest High Beam Bulbs: Thermal Damage

Although these passed the annual New York State safety inspection, I thought they needed replacing:

HB3 9005 Bulbs – bulged glass

A closer look:

HB3 9005 Bulbs – bulged glass – detail

The bulge was upward, of course.

The Forester’s manual says they’re HB3 bulbs, but the rest of the world knows them as 9005 bulbs. At full power they draw 60 W = 5 A each, although we rarely drive at night and then rarely have the opportunity for much high-beam use. I assume the blackening comes from nine years of running at half-ish power as the Forester’s daytime running lights.

The low beam headlights seem to be in fine shape.

These two went into the tray under the floor of the rear cargo area, because the crappy bulb you have is better than the one that just burned out on the road.

2023-05-02
Plant Markers: Craft Stick Edition

Inspired by a LightBurn forum post I ~~can no longer find~~ once again tracked down, I tried my hand at ~~popsicle~~ craft stick plant markers:

Plant Markers – craft stick tests

You’d have only one name on the end of each stick, with the uncut section jammed into the ground: these are test pieces to demonstrate capability.

Wood is better than acrylic because it checks all the eco-friendly attribute boxes. Admittedly, craft sticks don’t exactly grow on trees, but we seem to ignore such externalities in nominally eco-friendly products.

Bonus: a recurring revenue stream from the replacement market!

The design, such as it is, involves subtracting the letters from a rectangle maybe half a millimeter short of their top & bottom extents and a few millimeters longer than their length. Using a chonky font with generous letter spacing may prevent prompt disintegration by weathering:

Plant Marker – craft sticks – LB layout

Engraving the letters marks their uncut sections outside the rectangle, although we know laser char on wood-ish materials fades in sunlight. The two big sticks have Radish engraved with varying density; the darker version looks better against a lighter background never found in an actual garden.

Mary thinks they might be a nice fundraiser for the next Master Gardener Plant Sale.

Outdoor field tests seem appropriate …

2023-04-21
Subaru Forester Gas Tank Capacity, Experimental Measurement Thereof
According to the manual, which I have hitherto had no reason to doubt, our non-turbo 2015 Subaru Forester has a 15.9 gallon fuel tank:

Subaru Forester – Fuel Capacity Chart

One screen shown on the dashboard’s Multi-Function Display gives the current mileage and estimated range:

Forester – MPG Range

Dividing those two numbers gives you 13.97 gallons, the current fuel level. As you’d expect, should the average miles per gallon change, the range will change accordingly.

The trip odometer says we have driven 72.8 miles since I filled the tank. Dividing that by the average mpg gives 2.3 gallons, so the tank could possibly hold 16.2 gallons, which, given all the averages involved, is reasonably close to the 15.9 gallons shown in the manual.

Being that type of guy, I have a spreadsheet tallying each fillup since the car was new:
- 8.1 gal average
- 7.5 gal median
- 13.9 gal maximum
Long ago, my father taught me to fill the tank when the needle got halfway down and I’ve been doing so ever since. As a result, we have only rarely seen the Low Fuel Warning Light:

Subaru Forester – Low Fuel Warning Light info

A concatenation of unavoidable events put us southbound on I-87 when that light went on. Given the estimated range of 70-ish miles, I planned to refuel at the New Baltimore Service Area, about a dozen miles ahead.

The engine shut down and all the dashboard warning lights lit up with the Service Area Ahead sign in view:

Out of Gas – Service Area Ahead

All the “facilities” are blank because they’re rebuilding the whole place, with the gas station remaining open.

So I slapped the shifter into neutral and we drifted slowly along the shoulder, under the bridge visible ahead, and eventually came to a halt at the beginning of the exit lane.

There was only one thing to do:

Out of Gas – Walking On

Some storytelling later:

Out of Gas – Walking Back

Just because I could:

Refueling – GPS Track

For what are, I trust, understandable reasons, I started the tracker after I began hiking and forgot to turn it off before driving away.

After figuring out the devilishly complex spring-loaded anti-spill spout on the gas can, we drove 1500 feet to the Service Area:

Out of Gas – Service Station

As usual, I filled the tank until the nozzle automatically shut off, for a total of 13.554 gallons in two transactions:

Pump Receipts

Now, it is possible the Forester fuel system has another 2.3 gallons tucked away somewhere, but if that reserve doesn’t make the wheels go around, it’s not doing me the least bit of good.

The fact that I’ve occasionally added just short of 14 gallons suggests the estimated remaining capacity depends strongly on the average mileage up to that point and I have come very very close to running out of gas on several occasions.

As far as I can tell, the usable fuel capacity is a scant 14 gallons and the Low Fuel Light goes on with, at most, a dozen more miles in the tank.

This is the second time in more than half a century of driving I’ve run out of gas.

My father was right and I shall henceforth mend my wayward behavior.
2023-04-17
Kitchen Scale: Button Shield

While I was thinking about something else, I added a back shield to our kitchen scale:

SmartHeart 19-106 Scale – button shield

A pogo pin connected to the circuit common contacts the copper foil when the bottom cover is screwed down:

SmartHeart 19-106 Scale – shield pogo pin – detal

The shield prevents the buttons from responding to fingers on the bottom of the scale, so it no longer wakes up when I extract it from the under-cabinet shelf, and concentrates its attention on the buttons, so it no longer seems quite so willing to lock up due to mysterious influences.

With an absurd amount of rebuilding, this scale is becoming not a complete waste of free money.

The batteries soaked up 240 mA·hr of charge, which means the scale drew about 10 mA/day over the last three weeks. Given that the scale’s original 2032 lithium cells have a total capacity around 220 ma·hr for currents in the microamp range, expecting them to supply a current around 10 mA is was absurd.

2023-04-12