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
This cheerful assortment came from a friend with an assortment of happy chickens:
The lonely Medium white egg, obviously strictly from commercial, serves as a size and color reference. Most of the others weighed in the Large to Extra-Large range.
Even though none of the chickens had the digital upgrade, the morning omelet tasted just fine!
Although I knew the Sienna showed signs of a leaky head gasket, the exhaust system needed some attention, and a sporty used car recently put it in the shade, this still came as a surprise:
I’m trying to get a crew … together and live the demolition derby dream
By the time I arrived, the dashboard trim had vanished and the air bags were safely out:
Diligent application of a Harbor Freight “Professional Windshield Removal Kit” cut through the side window seals, but the rear window rested on four impossible-to-cut locating studs:
I managed to pry the glass off using a Gasket Scraper and considerable muttering.
With all the exterior trim, lights, and mirrors gone, the Sienna was in fine race trim:
But, being no longer street-legal, it required trailering. For the record, not all huge pickup trucks have bulky guys with pot bellies behind the wheel:
A few hours later, it was in the Short Track Full Size pack at the Upperco Volunteer Fire Company’s Demolition Derby:
The driver required a few laps to shake off years of safe-driving indoctrination:
But eventually the spirit of the thing took over:
We now know the transmission oil cooler sat just ahead of the left front wheel, where it was exposed to damage by a glancing collision:
The Sienna finished the race and made it almost all the way to the trailer before bleeding out through the ATF cooler.
The driver emerged in fine shape, although the door didn’t work nearly as well as it had fifteen minutes earlier:
A race staffer in a Bobcat aimed the carcass in the right general direction and shoved it onto the trailer for the return to base:
You can find shaky low-res camera action documenting the event, because video-or-it-didn’t-happen.
We piled the windows / parts / detritus into the back, a scrapper hauled it away the next morning, and that’s the end of our Sienna’s story.
Toyota sold a lot of Siennas, which means the Hot Topics list over on the right will show a need for Sienna ABS trouble codes long into the future.
In fact, the adjacent motel slot had a disconcerting sight:
I think it was a 2001 model, but …
Because you get white eggs from white chickens and brown eggs from brown chickens (*), this one came from a brown chicken with the digital option:
The egg matched the carton date stamp, so this must be an additional part of the process.
Some casual searching shows egg shell printing is a production-line thing.
I suppose RFID-per-egg will eventually be the Next New Thing.
(*) Yes, and chocolate milk from brown cows. Work with me on this, OK?
Spotted this on Rt 376 during a ride around the block:
A “Cannabis Energy Drink” without the obvious active ingredient seems like deceptive marketing to me, but, apparently, there was no law against that, even here in New York State.
It’s becoming obvious I don’t get out nearly enough.
Smoking bacon during the winter months brought the third tank into play, requiring the POL-to-QD adapter I’d had in the drawer for just such an occasion. Not much to my surprise, the old PLA fitting adapter snapped along the layers near the outside end of the triangular snout:
So I ran off the two orange ones in PETG with six perimeter layers and 50% infill density:
Those should last roughly forever …
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
| // Propane tank QD connector adapter tool | |
| // Ed Nisley KE4ZNU November 2012 | |
| // 2018-04-08 toss MCAD includes overboard | |
| //- Extrusion parameters must match reality! | |
| // Print with about half a dozen perimeter threads and 50% infill | |
| ThreadThick = 0.25; | |
| ThreadWidth = 2.0 * ThreadThick; | |
| HoleWindage = 0.2; | |
| function IntegerMultiple(Size,Unit) = Unit * ceil(Size / Unit); | |
| Protrusion = 0.1; // make holes end cleanly | |
| inch = 25.4; | |
| //———————- | |
| // Dimensions | |
| WrenchSize = (5/8) * inch; // across the flats | |
| WrenchThick = 10; | |
| NoseDia = 8.6; | |
| NoseLength = 9.0; | |
| LockDia = 12.5; | |
| LockRingLength = 1.0; | |
| LockTaperLength = 1.5; | |
| TriDia = 15.1; | |
| TriWide = 12.2; // from OD across center to triangle side | |
| TriOffset = TriWide – TriDia/2; // from center to triangle side | |
| TriLength = 9.8; | |
| NeckDia = TriDia; | |
| NeckLength = 4.0; | |
| //———————- | |
| // Useful routines | |
| module PolyCyl(Dia,Height,ForceSides=0) { // based on nophead's polyholes | |
| Sides = (ForceSides != 0) ? ForceSides : (ceil(Dia) + 2); | |
| FixDia = Dia / cos(180/Sides); | |
| cylinder(r=(FixDia + HoleWindage)/2, | |
| h=Height, | |
| $fn=Sides); | |
| } | |
| /* | |
| module ShowPegGrid(Space = 10.0,Size = 1.0) { | |
| Range = floor(50 / Space); | |
| for (x=[-Range:Range]) | |
| for (y=[-Range:Range]) | |
| translate([x*Space,y*Space,Size/2]) | |
| %cube(Size,center=true); | |
| } | |
| */ | |
| //——————- | |
| // Build it… | |
| $fn = 4*6; | |
| //ShowPegGrid(); | |
| union() { | |
| translate([0,0,(WrenchThick + NeckLength + TriLength – LockTaperLength – LockRingLength + Protrusion)]) | |
| cylinder(r1=NoseDia/2,r2=LockDia/2,h=LockTaperLength); | |
| translate([0,0,(WrenchThick + NeckLength + TriLength – LockRingLength)]) | |
| cylinder(r=LockDia/2,h=LockRingLength); | |
| difference() { | |
| union() { | |
| translate([0,0,WrenchThick/2]) | |
| cube([WrenchSize,WrenchSize,WrenchThick],center=true); | |
| cylinder(r=TriDia/2,h=(WrenchThick + NeckLength +TriLength)); | |
| cylinder(r=NoseDia/2,h=(WrenchThick + NeckLength + TriLength + NoseLength)); | |
| } | |
| for (a=[-1:1]) { | |
| rotate(a*120) | |
| translate([(TriOffset + WrenchSize/2),0,(WrenchThick + NeckLength + TriLength/2 + Protrusion/2)]) | |
| cube([WrenchSize,WrenchSize,(TriLength + Protrusion)],center=true); | |
| } | |
| } | |
| } |
I have often kvetched about Amazon’s casual approach to packaging, so this took me completely by surprise:
There’s a 500 mm length of 16 mm round linear motion rod / shaft inside the small blue-and-white box. Previous shipments of similar rod have arrived in a lightly padded envelope or rattling loose in a box of other stuff.
The small blue-and-white corrugated cardboard box contains a bag protecting the well-oiled shaft, with padded end caps preventing the shaft from escaping or whacking against anything.
The middle box is made from two U-shaped sheets of molded (not corrugated) fiberboard, with one rigid U stapled into those wood end caps, the other U fitting over the assembly, and plenty of packing tape securing the two. Enough bubble wrap fills the cavity to surround and completely immobilize the inner box.
FedEx carried the armored box from Thomson to an Amazon warehouse in February, so it wasn’t packed specifically for me.
The upper box is a standard Amazon corrugated carton, with slightly more than a token amount of paper packed around the fiberboard box. The paper didn’t completely immobilize the middle box, but did serve to keep it from rattling loose.
I paid twenty bucks for the rod, with “free” Amazon Prime shipping, and UPS delivered it in the usual two days.
The whole affair weighs 7 pounds. If I were to reship it to somebody using UPS 2nd Day, they’d charge me $39 just for the shipping.
I felt unworthy …
On the other paw, Amazon recently sent a dozen LED lights with a casual disregard for protection:
Both ends of the carton were shredded, although all of the cardboard tubes and LED lamps remained still inside. Not all the tube end caps completed the journey, however.
The carton didn’t sport the usual Box Certificate mark found on all Amazon cartons and was made of brittle Chinese cardboard, so it was intended for protected shipping, perhaps inside a freight container, not as a business-to-consumer shipping box.
Somewhat to my surprise, all the LED lights worked, including several that shrugged off their tube caps, as in the upper right, or broke their white cardboard end plates, as in the rest. The plastic protectors on the LED pins served their purpose!
Amazon provided a partial refund when I filed Package Feedback, so they’re paying attention to damages.
Five pounds of granular erythritol fared better, with a token air pillow contributing nothing:
It makes ya wonder, it does …
As usual, several shoplights didn’t survive the winter, so I gutted and rebuilt them with LED tubes. Even the fancy shoplights with genuine electronic ballasts survive less than nine years, as two of those eight “new” lamps have failed so far.
The dead ballast looks the same as it did before:
Some deft work with a cold chisel and my Designated Prydriver popped the top to reveal a plastic-wrapped circuit board:
Perhaps the flexy gunk reduces the sound level:
While also preventing casual failure analysis and organ harvesting:
The black gunk smells more like plastic and less like old-school tar. It’s definitely not a peel-able conformal coating.
One the other paw, the two magnetic ballasts in another lamp sported actual metal-film capacitors, which I harvested and tossed into the Big Box o’ Film Caps:
If a dying ballast didn’t also kill its fluorescent tube(s), I’d be less annoyed. I’m running the remaining tubes through the surviving fixtures, but the end is nigh for both.
The new LED tubes produce more light than the old fluorescents, although I still don’t like their 6500 K “daylight glow” color.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 