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.
Things around the home & hearth
Cleanup after painting the hairlines involved opening the cap of the rarely used can of methyl ethyl ketone:
It seems white-tinted polyethylene deteriorates after a dozen years of exposure to concentrated MEK fumes, suggesting I don’t use nearly enough enamel paint.
The Container Stockpile disgorged a pair of pure polyethylene jars that should last another decade.
Early in the irrigation season, Mary turned on a DripWorks Micro-Flow Valve, only to have the knob + stem pop out and release a stream of water in the wrong place. Mary jammed it back in place until I could chop out the offending valve and install a known-clear replacement.
The knob broke off the stem when I tried to pry it out of the valve body:
The lip around the inside of the cap snaps over the top of the body, which is why I wrecked the stem, but the chip broke off the cap while Mary was turning it just before the stem popped out. Her fingers are barely strong enough to turn the valve, which means something had gone wrong before she started turning.
A look straight into the valve body:
The stem has swarf left over from drilling out the mold flash last year:
All in all, the Dripworks drip irrigation system works well, but their overall attention to QC leaves something to be desired.
We deployed six sticky traps in the onion patch immediately after planting in late April and replaced the cards in mid-June. The first set of cards collected a considerable number of what resemble, to my untrained eye, onion maggot flies and the onion plants remain healthy:
Each image shows both sides of a single card.
The cards sit a foot above the shredded leaf mulch and I managed to drop at least one of the cards while extracting it from the cage, but they all have plenty of onion maggot flies in addition to the random debris.
The cards inside their cages have not accumulated larger insects like honeybees / moths / butterflies, although the tiniest specks are definitely mini-critters along the beetle / gnat / aphid / mosquito axis.
Unlike last year, the second set of cards will remain in place until harvest to maintain continuous pressure on the fly population.
If you’re really interested, the dozen original camera images have more detail.
Mary sketched a quilt layout on ordinary Letter-size paper using her quilting templates, but the final design will be a 30×30 inch layout requiring a suitably upscaled template. Running the numbers suggested a template with curved edges lying on a 70 inch diameter circle, which was easy enough:
The normal-size acrylic template with a 20 inch diameter sits atop the upscaled cardboard version. We decided cardboard would work fine for a single-use tool; should she need one in the future, I have the technology.
It turns out that the inner curve also has a 70 inch diameter: its center point is displaced 200 mm along the center radius from the outer curve. The straight sides are parallel, not radii of either circle.
She decided a much longer template would simplify smooth edge-to-edge curves, so I laid out a skinnier version with a keyed joint in the middle:
The grid represents the OMTech laser’s 700×500 mm platform, so I used LightBurn’s Cut Shapes function to chop the template into two overlapping parts:
The cuts at the keyed ends extend slightly more than needed, but weren’t critical. Similarly, I didn’t worry about kerf compensation for two pieces of cardboard joined by packing tape.
The template looks a lot like a scimitar:
The shorter version had its corrugations running along the short dimension. I put the longer version’s corrugations along the longer dimension, thinking they would prevent bending. That was true, but they also interfered with the pencil tracing the curves. Next time, I’ll know better!
An email from Amazon arrived a few days ago:
I suppose we’re even, because I have no recollection of setting a Purchase Reminder on anything at any time.
By default, my email client does not display remote content in messages, which chops out the cute pictures, as well as killing all the cruft and tracking widgetry infesting commercial email these days.
When the driveway runs yellow in the rain, it’s pine pollen season:
Our robot vacuum snuffles up quite a collection of dust:
Peeling a layer of the usual fuzz off the filter reveals the pollen:
This, too, shall pass and my eyes will rejoice.
Some weeks ago the Sunbeam clothes iron Mary uses for her quilting projects stopped retracting its cord and a few days ago the entire compartment holding the cord spool simply fell off:
One plastic stud and two thin plastic tabs held the compartment onto the rest of the iron. How they lasted this long I do not know, but they are neither replaceable nor fixable.
When you see badly rusted screws in an electrical device, you know the story cannot end well:
And, indeed, it hasn’t:
This being a steam iron, it has a water tank that gets filled through an awkward port with a sliding cover. Mary is as conscientious a person as you’ll ever meet, but the occasional spill has certainly happened and it is painfully obvious the iron’s designers anticipated no such events.
The coil spring had rusted into a solid mass:
I removed the spring, soaked it in Evapo-Rust for a few hours, then cleaned and oiled it:
Rewinding and reinstalling the spring showed it has lost its mojo and cannot retract more than a few feet of cord.
She’s in the middle of a quilting project and will replace the iron with whatever cheapnified piece of crap might be available these days. Similar irons have reviews reporting they begin spitting rust after a few months, which suggests the plastic tank or stainless steel hardware in this one have been cost-reduced with no regard for fitness-for-use.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 