Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
As a reminder for the next time in this rodeo, the latches holding the temperature adjustment knob on the Delta 17 Series dual-handle bath / shower faucet look like this:
Delta bath faucet cap latches
I am unable to apply enough force to the smooth edge of the knob opposite the handle to un-latch it, so I jammed a small prydriver into the gap and twisted enough to pop the latch, at the obvious risk of scarring the chrome plating.
A better approach would involve a plastic prydriver intended for consumer electronics case cracking.
For the record:
Unlike the other bath faucets, this one has shutoff valves inside the wall
Unbelievably, the ankle zipper tab broke off in my hand:
Wind Pants Zipper Tab – broken
It’s one of those zippers where the tab releases a lock preventing the zipper from coming unzipped. Mary noped out of removing and replacing the entire zipper.
Trimming a snippet of aluminum miniblind from the Small Box o’ Flat Stuff and two dots of JB Kwikweld epoxy seemed appropriate:
Wind Pants Zipper Tab – clamping
Ugly, but serviceable:
Wind Pants Zipper Tab – repaired
The stray epoxy scraped off under fingernail pressure over the next two days and the pants are ready for the next snowfall.
Seen with the shock cord in place, it’s obvious that combining moderately high temperature with steady compression sufficed to bend the PETG enough to pop those tabs loose from the vent.
So the OpenSCAD model now produces a stiffening ring to be laser-cut from acrylic:
The whole snout builds as a single unit in the obvious orientation:
Clothes Dryer Vent Filter Snout – V2 – slicer
Because the part of the snout with the tabs is 7 mm tall, I glued a 4 mm acrylic ring to a 3 mm ring, with both of them glued to the snout:
Clothes Dryer Vent Filter Snout – acrylic gluing
That’s “natural” PETG, which I expected to be somewhat more transparent, but it’s definitely not a dealbreaker.
Mary will sew up another cheesecloth filter and we’ll see what happens to this setup.
As the saying goes, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”
Fortunately, living in the future makes it easy to iterate on the design & implementation until experience produces what should have been obvious at the start.
The cart in Mary’s Vassar Farm plot returned in need of repair:
Garden Seat – fractured body
Those fractures near the end of the axle let the axle erode the side wall:
Garden Seat – eroded body
This will obviously require some sort of reinforcement on the body holding the axle, but the first challenge involved getting the wheels off the axle:
Garden Seat – axle cover
Some brute force revealed the hub covers snapped over an install-only locking fastener:
Garden Seat – axle retaining clip
More brute force cut those fasteners (a.k.a. star-lock washers) to get the wheels off the axles.
While contemplating the situation, a box of 606 bearings (as used in the PolyDryer auto-rewind spindles) failed to scamper out of the way and produced a victim fitting perfectly on the 8 mm axle:
Garden Seat – bearing idea
I regard such happenstance as a message from the Universe showing I’m on the right track. The alert reader will note the axle should not rotate, but does sport scars showing it’s done some turning in the recent past, so the bearing may not be a completely Bad Idea™.
Finding a Lexan snippet exactly as thick as the bearing suggested bolting a plate across the side of the body to support the bearing, like this:
Garden Seat – reinforcing plate installed
Some layout work in LightBurn produced a template to mark the body for hand-drilling the holes:
Garden Seat – drill marking template
In retrospect, that was a mistake. I should have:
Laser-cut an MDF sheet to make a drill jig
Drilled one hole and inserted a screw
Drilled the rest of the holes in exactly the right places
Instead, three of the holes in that nice Lexan sheet ended up slightly egg-shaped to adjust for mis-drilled holes in the body.
I squeezed 5 mm rivnuts into whatever fiber-reinforced plastic they used for the body, which worked better than I expected. They’re intended for sheet metal, so I set the tool for 5 mm compression and they seem secure. I hope using plenty of screws across a large plate will diffuse the stress on each screw.
In this situation, I regard JB KwikWeld epoxy as “removable with some effort”, as opposed to the destruction required with those star-lock washers. High-strength Locktite might also be suitable, but I do not anticipate ever having to remove these again for any reason and do not want the nuts to fall off in the garden.
While it’s possible to buy replacement caps, this seemed more appropriate:
Humidifier bottle cap reinforcement – installed
It’s PETG-CF, of course:
Bottle cap reinforcement – solid model
The shape is a ring with a simplified model of the cap removed from the middle:
Bottle cap reinforcement – lid solid model
It fits snugly over the cap atop a thin layer of JB PlasticBonder that should hold it in place forevermore:
Humidifier bottle cap reinforcement – bottom view
The other side shows the crack over on the right:
Humidifier bottle cap reinforcement – top view
Close inspection showed a few smaller cracks, so that cap was likely an original.
I made another ring for the other cap, only to find it was slightly larger with a black washer inside: apparently a previous owner had replaced one of the caps. The OpenSCAD program has measurements for both, not that you have either.
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Mary’s Hens and Chicks gardening group is having a White Elephant gift swap, where one can get rid of anything vaguely garden-related without repercussions, so I ran off a set of eponymous coasters for practice:
Hens and Chicks Coasters – overview
They’re 3 mm laser plywood with English Chestnut stain and satin polyurethane sealant, with PSA cork on the underside. Even if (IMO) the stain came out too dark on some of them, they’re perfectly suited for the occasion.
Those of long memory will recall our vermiculture setup in the basement that turns kitchen scraps into plant food. We accumulate scraps in plastic milk jugs, which jugs get recycled after they become grody.
I finally made a decorative coaster to keep the sometimes-wet jug off the counter:
Printed Fragment Coaster 165mm – in use
This used several of the larger smashed glass fragments from the collection:
Fragments 165mm square – scan sample
They all fit inside a 165 mm square, with the conformal perimeter disguising the outline:
Run a bead of epoxy around the edge of each recess
Fill in the center with a thin layer
Squish the metallized paper reflector in place starting from one end to ease the bubbles out
Cover the reflector with another layer of epoxy
Lay the glass fragment down starting at one end
Press gently down to get all the bubbles out
Cover the glass with more epoxy
I dripped enough epoxy on each fragment to form a meniscus without having it go over the rim:
Printed Fragment Coaster 165mm – epoxy meniscus
The Basement Shop temperature is just over 60 °F, so I put a heating pad in a huge ziplock bag, laid an aluminum sheet atop it as a heat spreader, put some waxed paper on the aluminum just in case, then did the filling described above:
Printed Fragment Coaster 165mm – warming setup
A cardboard box on top helped the heating pad keep the coaster at a uniform 85 °F, slightly warmer than the epoxy instructions recommend, but it cured overnight with a wonderfully shiny surface.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 