Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
My old Aceco FC1002 frequency meter stopped working without being plugged into the charger. It runs from a quartet of NiMH cells taped into a tray I made seven years ago:
The faceplate bears the scars of its cracked acrylic (?) coating, so I pushed it out, traced the outline on a flat piece of polypropylene clamshell packaging, cut it out, and stuck it in place with tapeless sticky:
Aceco FC1002 – polypropylene faceplate
That removes the branding, but IMO improves the appearance.
It should continue working for another half decade or so!
Playing with Evaluating a recently arrived MakerBeam Starter Kit revealed swarf snarls in the tapped end holes. After giving up on a needle-nose tweezer, a compressed air blow gun expelled the mess from a handful of short beams:
Makerbeam – internal swarf A
A scrap of acoustic foam backstopped the rest of the assortment:
Makerbeam – internal swarf B
Which doesn’t account for the scattering of swarf and oil blown elsewhere in the Basement Shop.
Perhaps a bad day in the MakerBeam factory?
Protip: wear eye protection when using compressed air!
We recently installed a Dripworks drip irrigation system for Mary’s garden and, of course, pre-assembled the emitter / dripline tubing, fittings, and supply / filter / plumbing for each of the beds in the Basement Shop. A few days after burying the main lines, plumbing the filter + pressure regulator, and plugging in half a dozen bed assemblies, Mary noticed some emitter tubes weren’t delivering any water and other beds seemed too dry.
N.B.: We bought everything directly from Dripworks. This is not counterfeit crap from a sketchy Amazon seller.
I cut the dripline just downstream of the Micro-Flowvalve on a completely dry bed, whereupon no water emerged. Cutting the supply tube just upstream of the valve produced a jet squirting halfway along the bed. I tried and failed to blow air through the valve: it was completely blocked despite being in the “open” position. I installed another valve and the emitter tube started working properly.
I sat down at the kitchen table with a bag of unused valves and peered through them (the pix are through the microscope):
Dripworks valve – mostly open lumen
That’s one of the better-looking valves, with only a little mold flash in the lumen.
Partially occluded lumens were more typical:
Dripworks valve – partially occluded lumen
Quite a few were almost completely obstructed:
Dripworks valve – mostly occluded lumen
For lack of better instrumentation, I blew through the valves and sorted them by effort:
Dripworks valve – sorted by blockage
Two of the valves in the group on the left are completely blocked, with the others mostly blocked.
The middle group has enough mold flash to produce noticeable resistance to the air flow. I think water would have more trouble getting through, but the emitters would at least look like they’re delivering water.
The group on the right has mostly unblocked valves, with visible mold flash but little restriction.
I have no way to measure the actual water flow, so it’s entirely possible the QC spec allows considerable blockage while still delivering enough water to the emitters. More likely, the spec assumes a clear lumen and the mold flash is a total QC faceplant; it’s obviously not a controlled quantity.
Well, I can fix that:
Dripworks valve – drilling
That’s a 2.3 mm drill going straight through the valve body. I drilled the valves from both ends and blew out the swarf:
Dripworks valve – drill swarf
That produced twenty valves with clear lumens. Of course, the drill leaves a slightly rough interior surface, but it’s now much easier to blow air through them.
We hadn’t installed the driplines in two beds with three emitter tubes per bed. I cut out those six unused valves and sorted them by resistance:
Dripworks valve – six samples
Both of the valves on the left are blocked, the three on the right are mostly OK, and the one in the middle is partially blocked.
With two dozen repaired valves in hand, we returned to the garden, I cut 22 valves out of the installed driplines and replaced them under field conditions. Returning to the Basement Laboratory, I blew the water out (*), sorted them by resistance, and produced a similar distribution, albeit with no pictorial evidence. Although we have no immediate need for the used valves, they’re drilled out and ready for use.
In very round numbers, you should expect:
A third of Dripworks valves will pass (close to) the expected flow
A third will have a minor flow restriction
A quarter will have a severe flow restriction
One valve in ten will be completely blocked
Plan to drill out all the Micro-Flow valves before you assemble your driplines.
AFAICT, none of the other ¼ inch fittings we used have any interior flash, so it’s only a problem with the valves.
A rainy day finally produced an opportunity to install the rear fender bracket on my bike:
Tour Easy Rear Fender Bracket – improved
It’s actually another iteration, tweaked to hold the fender snugly against the bracket, because it’s tucked in a location where I can’t measure anything.
The brake noodle isn’t connected yet, but it has plenty of room in front of the fender block.
The back of the Pliers & Cutters drawer produced an ancient Felco C7 Cable Cutter minus its spring:
Felco C7 cutter – missing spring pin
That’s an M4 screw serving as a size test for the hole where the other pin used to be.
Surprisingly, Felco still exists, still makes the C7 Cable Cutter, and actually sells a replacement spring as part number C7/10. Unfortunately, their online sales apparatus and cart seem broken: I put the spring in the cart, but found no way to pay for it. Worryingly, the usual Terms & Conditions link produced a modal dialog with one word: TEST.
So I got a spring (part number 5/11, available only as a pair in kit 5/91) for a Felco C3 cutter (no, the numbers do not match) from Amazon. Later I found a sketchy seller offering a sketchy C7/10 spring that might fit correctly or could be total trash.
Felco swaged the original spring pins into the handle, a manufacturing technique I certainly cannot duplicate, but an M3 screw will just barely fit inside a 4 mm stud, so I made some measurements:
Felco replacement spring pin – dimension doodle
Fitting action to words:
Felco C7 cutter – replacement spring pin
That started as a 1/4 inch rod of no particular provenance and is reasonably close to the actual dimensions.
The spigot on the screw end is threaded M3 and is just barely shorter than the thickness of the handle, so the button-head screw can pull it snug:
Felco C7 cutter – button screw
And then the spring just snapped into place:
Felco C7 cutter – spring installed
It it obviously grossly excessively too long, but that really doesn’t matter for the number of power-on hours it’s likely to see during my administration. In truth, it feels pretty good in the hand after releasing the latch and having it expand smoothly.
If I ever run across a C7/10 spring, it’ll be an easy swap.
The objective being to reduce the number of onion maggots in Mary’s Vassar Farm plot without chemical agents, I conjured sticky trap screen frames from the vasty digital deep:
Sticky Trap – first production run
Each one contains half a sheet of yellow sticky plastic, which is easy enough to cut before peeling off the protective covering sheets. The cage is half-inch galvanized hardware cloth snipped with hardened diagonal cutters. A bead of acrylic adhesive around the base holds the cage in place
Although you can deploy sticky sheets without cages, they tend to attract and affix beneficial critters: butterflies, small birds, furry critters, toads, gardeners, and the like. We don’t know how effective the cages will be, but they seemed better than nothing.
They mount on ski poles cut in half:
Sticky Trap – ski pole installed
And on fence posts around the perimeter:
Sticky Trap – angle bracket installed
To my untrained eye, some of those doomed critters are, indeed, onion maggot flies. The rest seem to be gnats and other nuisances, so IMO we’re applying population pressure in the right direction.
Each base-and-cap frame takes about three hours to print, so I did them one at a time over the course of a few days while applying continuous product improvement.
The sheets rest on small V blocks intended to keep them centered within the cage:
Sticky Sheet Cage – angle bracket – solid model
The ski pole attachment must build with the cap on top, but it bridges well enough for the purpose:
Sticky Sheet Cage – ski pole – solid model
The overhanging hooks on the blocks (just barely) engage the grid to keep the lid in place, while remaining short enough to not droop too badly. You could probably delete the hooks from the bottom plate, but they align the cage while the adhesive cures.
The sheets tend to bend in the middle, so I’ll stick a thin slat or two vertically to keep them straight.
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For what should be obvious reasons, we armored Mary’s “kitchen garden” with buried concrete blocks and deer fence. I secured the fence to 7 foot plastic-coated steel-core posts strapped to shorter stakes supporting the lower wire fence, using cable ties we both knew wouldn’t survive exposure to the sun.
As part of the spring garden prep, I summoned proper supports from the vasty digital deep:
Deer Fence Hanger – Build view
The general idea is to plunk one atop each post and tangle wrap the netting through the hooks, thusly:
Deer Fence Hanger – installed
The garden looks like we killed an entire chess set and impaled their carcasses as a warning to others of their kind, but the fence now hangs neatly from the top of the posts rather than drooping sadly.
Each one of those things takes nigh onto two hours to emerge from the M2, so I printed them one by one over the course of a few days while making continuous product improvements.
The “natural” PETG isn’t UV stabilized, either, but it ought to last longer than those little bitty nylon cable ties. We shall see.
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The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 