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
A needle case emerged from the bottom of a drawer in need of repair:
The original joint used solvent glue and I suppose I could refresh it with acetone, but two blobs of hot melt glue seemed easier and, IMO, more durable.
In any event, it’s once more ready for use:
Hooray for another zero-dollar repair, although you can see why nobody else does them these days.
The matte mailing labels on the Kenmore 158’s hand hole cover plate did such a good job reducing the glare from the additional LEDs as to make the shiny hardware around the needle seem overly bright. I suggested gentle sandblasting might improve the situation without changing any surfaces in contact with the fabric.
I was given a spare presser foot to demonstrate my case:
The overhead light in the shop produces glare from the nice, shiny steel surfaces similar to what Mary sees from the sewing machine.
A few minutes applying 220 grit blast media with Tiny Sandblaster™ definitely changed its appearance:
In person, the finish is neutral gray overall, with those odd brown areas appearing only in photographs, perhaps due to the various lights in the shop. The slight texture variations seem to correspond to minor differences in the plating (?) over the steel surface. It definitely cuts down the glare:
The needle clamp and screw across the top of that picture travel up and down, so we decided to deglare them along with the “good” foot:
Another Tiny Sandblaster™ session knocked back their shine:
Those parts came out slightly less matte, perhaps due to reduced pressure in the propellant can. Seeing as how I’ve had the sandblaster for a couple of decades, I figured it’s time to use the propellant but, as expected, the in-can valve doesn’t re-seal properly, so I’ll be using compressed air the next time around.
After rinsing and blowing and rinsing and blowing the grit out of the threads, everything went back together as expected:
I’m not doing either of the plates until we have more experience with the matte hardware, but it looks pretty good to me.
Spotted at the corner gas station, where they collect wrecks before harvesting their organs:
As far as we can tell, the car clipped the pole off at the base, whereupon it smashed down across the roof, leaving the trunk unscathed. The lack of blood on the airbag suggests the driver lived to tell the tale, although we’ll never know the rest of the story.
A collection of random stuff tossed on the back seat included a license plate bent into a surprisingly gentle curve.
Obligatory: And Sudden Death reference.
After a day of snow + sleet + ice, followed by overnight cooling, the bird feeder looked like this:
The ice generally doesn’t bond across the top, so the sheets slide off separately to the front and back. This time, they stayed together and began sliding off to the side.
The next two days were unusually cold and the glacier stopped sliding:
The temperature warmed enough during the day to let the glacier resume sliding, whereupon it fell and shattered on the patio.
While looking for something else, I stumbled across this Amazon offer (clicky for more dots):
Yeah, a trailer load a’ paper. Word.
Long ago, in a universe far away, my buddy Mark One mis-read a unit of measure and ended up with a trailer load a’ Tektronix Thermal Paper. It carried a silver-based emulsion requiring constant refrigeration, so he stashed about a pallet of paper canisters under every raised floor on the IBM Poughkeepsie campus. Even though the raised floor acreage has dropped dramatically, some of it may be there to this very day.
The JB Weld epoxy I slathered on our trusty hand-held cheese slicer a year ago continues to withstand daily washing and occasional trips through the dishwasher:
The bottom is in fine shape, too:
Compare it with XTC-3D epoxy, which admittedly isn’t rated for continuous water exposure, after a year:
JB Weld FTW!
This came about while tinkering up a shade for a repurposed LED downlight:
It’s a 4 inch DWV pipe coupling I bored out to fit the LED housing, which was ever so slightly larger than the pipe OD.
Cutting it off required as much workspace as the poor little lathe had:
Ignore the toolpost handle across the top. What’s important: the cutoff blade poking out of the QCTP, above the orange carriage stop lock lever, extending just far enough to cut through the coupling’s wall before the compound hits the coupling. The compound slide is all the way out against the cross-slide DRO, rotated at the only angle putting the tool where it needs to be and clearing the end of the coupling.
It ended reasonably well:
But, in retrospect, was hideously bad practice. Next time, I’ll make a fixture to hold the fitting on a faceplate.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 