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
An approaching cyclist warned to watch out for the snapping turtle:
This one claims the pond near Page Industrial Park along the Dutchess Rail Trail:
We’ll not dispute any snapper’s territory!
I’m hauling PYO apples from Prospect Hill Orchards in the hills on the west side of the Hudson; it was a lovely fall day for a 25 mile ride!
The Bondhus Lifetime Guarantee works, as a replacement wrench just arrived:
A close look at the aligned tips suggests the defective wrench blank was mis-chucked in the machine cutting the ball end:
All’s well that ends well: thank you, Bondhus!
The same lathe fixture and double-sided duct tape trick I used for the amber running light’s end cap should have worked for this one, but only after I re-learned the lesson about taking sissy cuts:
Yet another snippet of tape and sissy cuts produced a better result:
Protip: when you affix an aluminum disk bandsawed from a scrap of nonstick griddle to a lathe fixture, the adhesive will grip the disk in only one orientation.
The lesser kitchen faucet began dribbling and required replacement, as there are no user serviceable parts within. One of the 3D printed adapters I built during the previous iteration had disintegrated:
The new faucet came with a somewhat different baseplate and I managed to conjure a firm, sealed mount from the various parts without further construction.
The nicely curved brass snout is the third in my collection. Surely they’ll come in handy for something!
While I was in a plumbing state of mind, I again replaced the spout O-rings in the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned American Standard Elite (hah!) faucet, as it was also dribbling.
This time, I used oxalic acid to remove the assorted scale and crud inside the spout. It seemed to be more effective than the usual white vinegar, although nothing seems to preserve the O-rings.
We found this critter while checking for water after Hurricane Ida drenched the area:
It’s on the outside of the vent screen and we have no objection.
We should put up a bat house to encourage more of its friends to hang out with us …
In late May we deployed six sticky traps in and around the onion bed, attempting to reduce the number of Onion Fly maggots. By mid-June the sheets were covered with the shredded leaves Mary uses to mulch the onions, but half a dozen flies were out of action:
We’re pretty sure that’s what these things are:
They’re supposed to have red eyes, but being affixed to a sheet of snot for a few weeks doesn’t do the least bit of good for your eyes.
We replaced the sheets and left them in place until the end of July:
The sheets took another half-dozen flies out of circulation, Mary began harvesting the onions, and observed it was the healthiest onion harvest she’s ever had.
We declared victory, removed the traps, and the remaining onions suffered considerable maggot damage over the next few weeks.
Anecdotally, it seems reducing the Onion Fly population by (what seems to be) a small amount and maintaining pressure on the population dramatically reduces the number of maggots available to damage the onion crop. At least for a single bed in a non-commercial setting.
The plural of anecdote is not anecdata, but we’ll try it again next year, leave the traps in place while the onions are in the ground, and see what happens.
For reasons that should be obvious by now, I volunteered to rebuild a wheelbarrow used at the Vassar Community Garden plots. It spent all its time outdoors and one of the handles eventually broke off:
I’d already removed the wheel and front strap, which were in good condition.
The new handles were undrilled, so I marked and drilled them with a nice brad-point bit to get clean holes:
The metal “barrow” had cracked around the carriage bolts holding it to the frame, so I filed a quartet of fender washers to fit the square section under the heads:
After a false start, I marked the bolt heads and washers to line them up properly while tightening the nuts on the other end:
One front strut had gone missing, so I replaced it with a mashed-and-drilled section of ski pole:
All in all, a few hours of Quality Shop Time interspersed with a few pleasant bike rides to various local stores, wherein I learned who doesn’t stock the necessary hardware.
Protip: Home Depot has the highest-entropy hardware assortment.
For the record, all the bolts have a 5/16-18 thread.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 