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 water hardness test strip recently arrived from Morton Salt:
I call it between 7 and 15 gpg. Based on the feel of the water just before regeneration, I’d been guesstimating 15 gpg, so it’s within reason.
I’ll back the softener off to 10 gpg and see what happens.
After a year of fairly light use, the lens holder (and “attack ring”) of my J5-V2 flashlight worked loose and began to rattle. The ring holding the lens in place turned out to be finger-loose, but that wasn’t the entire problem, so I removed it and looked inside:
The mysterious alien egg resides on the upper-right side of the LED emitter.
The aluminum ring holding the LED assembly in place was also finger-loose, so I unwound it to take the whole front end apart:
Reassembly with a few dabs of Loctite in appropriate places should prevent future rattles.
Given the number of … issues … accompanying this thing, I’d say it’s not been a good cost performer. The Anker LC40 and LC90 flashlights work much better.
Mary mentioned the pivot pin supplied with a quilting ruler tended to hang up on the layers of fabric and batting in the quilt squares she’s been making. A quick look showed the pin bore a remarkable resemblance to an ordinary thumb tack:
I reset the pin shaft perpendicular to the head, grabbed a small brass tube in the lathe tailstock, inserted pin in tube, grabbed the head in the chuck, ignored a slight radial offset, and attacked the pin with fine files and sandpaper:
The lathe chuck seemed the easiest way to firmly hold the head; I rotated the chuck by hand while filing.
Most of the remaining scratches go mostly parallel to the pin, but it really didn’t work much better than before. We decided polishing the pin wouldn’t improve the situation enough to make it worthwhile.
That’s the difference between sharp and keen, which cropped up with the cheap ceramic knife from a while ago. The point may penetrate the fabric, but the shaft can’t get through the tight weave.
She’s now using a scary thin and pointy embroidery pin, having successfully rebuffed my offer to mount it in a suitable base.
The neighborhood raccoons made off with our steel-cage suet feeder, leaving a dangling chain, several puzzled woodpeckers, and a potential gap in Mary’s FeederWatch data. A quick Thingiverse search turned up a likely candidate and a few hours of 3D printing produced a replacement:
The cheerful party colors just sort of happened after I realized orange wasn’t the new steel.
I bandsawed the top plate from an acrylic sheet, rather than devote several hours to printing a simple disk with two slots. Said slots came from a bit of freehand work with the drill press, a step drill bit, and a nasty carbide milling bur(r).
The loops holding the chains won’t last for long, as hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers land with thump.
It hangs from the stub of a former ski pole, loosely secured to the bracket holding the former feeder, and extending another two feet over the abyss beyond the patio. I doubt the raccoons will remain daunted for long, but maybe they’ll catch a heart attack when it collapses.
Emboldened by Erik’s suggestion to file the end of a smashed Sakura pen, I filed a notch around the metal snout, snapped it off, and pulled on the tip:
Come to find out the end of the snout is compressed around the nib and holds it in place. I don’t know how long the fiber cylinder might be, but it slides right out of the pen body.
So I squished the snout just a little, snipped off the metal tip, filed the fiber cylinder’s end to a point, and … it sorta-kinda works, but it’ll never again be a very good pen.
Obviously, I should conjure a slightly compliant pen holder for the MPCNC.
It turns out the thread guide on Mary’s new Juki TL-2010Q sewing machine has what’s euphemistcally known as “negative clearance” with the ruler foot she uses for quilting patterns. With the foot raised to move the cloth, inadvertently pressing the foot pedal or turning the handwheel can crunch the thread guide against the foot.
As you might expect, the intricately bent wire thread guide doesn’t survive the encounter. Not having a spare ready to hand and not knowing quite what it should look like, I reshaped it as best I could:
It worked moderately well:
The automatic needle threader wasn’t reliable, but she could cope until the replacements arrived.
Comparing the new one (left) with the wrecked one (right) shows I didn’t re-bend the loop tightly enough, putting the end on the right at the wrong angle:
It’s the kind of shape you can duplicate by the thousands with a production machine, but can’t make at home without entirely too much tedious effort.
The new one works fine, seen here in front of a walking foot, with the auto-threader looming in the upper foreground:
Aaaand now we have spares!
For reasons not relevant here, I had to wake up a New Old Stock bottle of an eye drug dispensed as a suspension in a small bottle:
A few hours at 50 RPM and it’s all shook up.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 