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 small rabbit, occasionally seen about the back yard and within the garden, met an untimely end:
We credit one of the neighborhood hawks or owls.
Over the course of the next few days, the corpse lost more of its stuffings and eventually vanished.
Perhaps a similar event produced the bunnyless head we saw a while ago.
Go, birds, go!
A wind gust pushed Mary’s bike over with the daytime running light on the downward side:
Frankly, it’s better to have a cheap and easily replaceable plastic widget break, instead of something expensive and hard to find.
Because we live in the future, a replacement part was just a few hours away:
Well, a few hours after installing a replacement thermistor and recalibrating the M2, but nested repairs happen every now and again.
To the road!
One of the two air pockets in the token padding had popped:
Fortunately, they were plastic bottles with rugged contents, so I suppose the packaging was up to the task.
The pedal on one of Mary’s Kenmore Model 158 sewing machines lost most of its speed control abilities, which past experience has shown indicates its carbon / graphite disks have deteriorated. Fortunately, I still have a supply of disks from the Crash Test Dummy machine and have gotten pretty good at dismantling the pedal housing.
While I had the pedal apart, I filed the brass contact plates smooth again:
Most of the deterioration happens within half a dozen disks snuggled up against those contacts, a few more on the other end of the stack against the graphite button applying the pressure, and an occasional grimy disk in the middle of the stack.
I filled both stacks flush to the top of the ceramic housing, then removed one disk from each to let the brass contacts slightly compress the stacks:
A quick test showed the control range started a bit too fast, so I removed one more disk from the stacks, buttoned it up, and it’s all good again: a slow start with a good range.
A loud crack during a windy thunderstorm announced this mess:
Some deft bow saw work cut it down to size:
Whereupon our neighbor arrived home and we dragged the carcass off the driveway.
Fortunately, it missed everything important, as have several recent branch falls in our yard. The same cannot be said for the many downed trees around the immediate area from recent storms; some folks are hurtin’ bad.
Verily, houses (and trees) are trouble!
Dump into a stick blender cup:
Blend thoroughly. Slurp.
Notes:
AFAICT, this is the only way to make an avocado palatable.
There is absolutely no connection with yesterday’s post.
Ten months ago, I cleaned the corrosion off our favorite cheese slicer:
After cleaning, I coated it with XTC-3D epoxy:
We’ve been using it daily ever since and it spends most of its life drip-drying in the dish drainer. I added a third opening to the cheerful orange measuring spoon holder just for the slicer.
A few weeks ago I noticed corrosion once again growing on the handle:
I think the rot comes from water diffusing through the epoxy, rather than gross leaks through damage or pinholes. The tip of the handle has the most corrosion, probably due to the water drop hanging there, even though it also has the thickest epoxy coating: it cured with the handle pointing downward.
Verily, rust never sleeps …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 