Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
While sorting out an extrusion problem on the Makergear forum, I suggested marking the motor shaft and the filament drive shaft to see if the motor pinion inside the gearbox had worn out: if the motor turns and the filament gear doesn’t, then it’s dead inside.
For future reference, you mark the motor shaft thusly:
Makergear M2 – filament drive motor – rear shaft
Two marks on the filament drive gear tell you if the shaft is turning and if the gear is slipping on the shaft:
A Round Tuit™ finally arrived for this long-delayed project:
Vise soft jaws – installed
They’re bandsawed from an impossibly heavy-duty U-shaped aluminum extrusion salvaged from a scrap pile; the flanges are 6 and 7 mm thick. I’ll put in a good word for the Proxxon 10/14 TPI blade, because it goes through aluminum plate like butter.
The wood strip under the top flange raises the fillet on the interior angle enough to let the extrusion sit flat on the top vise jaw and square against the gripping side. It’s held in place with double-sided carpet tape.
They’re faced with a rubber sheet I thought was twice as thick when I picked it out of the Big Box o’ Squishy Sheets, but turned out to be two thinner sheets invisibly stuck together. Carpet tape holds one of the sheets to the jaw; I expect the other sheet to fall off in short order.
You’re supposed to embed neodymium magnets in the jaws to hold them to the vise. As far as I can tell, they’re perfectly happy to just sit there all by themselves and, anyway, magnets would grow lethally sharp and bulky steel fur coats in short order.
Squaring the long edge didn’t pose much of a problem:
Vise soft jaws – squaring edge
Tidying the ends, however, required more setup:
Vise soft jaws – squaring ends
That’s the Sherline Tilting Angle Plate at 90°, with barely enough room on the far side for the base of a Starrett Double Square to set the extrusion vertical; the hand clamp holds it in place while tightening the step clamps. It sits on an aluminum sheet to put its upper end three smidgens over the angle plate, letting me flycut one smidgen for a clean edge.
Now I can retire the old soft jaws, which have served for too many decades and are far too ugly to show; improvised from weatherstripping glued to bent-square copper pipe and intended as a quick fix. You know how that goes …
Just for completeness, here’s what the various soaker hose clamps look like in the garden, as solid models only let you visualize the ideal situation:
Soaker Hose Connector Clamp – Show view
This one prevents a puddle in the path to the right:
Soaker hose repairs in situ – clamp
Bending the hoses around the end of a bed puts them on edge, with this clamp suppressing a shin-soaking spray to the left:
Soaker hose repairs in situ – end-on clamp
The clamp at the connector closes a leak around the crimped brass fitting, with the other two preventing gouges from direct sprays into the path along the bottom of the picture:
Soaker hose repairs in situ – clamps and connector fix
All in all, a definite UI improvement!
As far as I can tell, we have the only soaker hose repairs & spritz stoppers in existence. Hooray for 3D printing!
Dutchess County has another Household Hazmat / Electronics Disposal Day coming up, so I harvested some useful parts from the three dead dehumidifiers lurking under the bench.
The (perfectly good) blower motor in one unit lives inside a convenient plastic housing:
Scrap Dehumidifier Blower Motor – housing
It’s sitting on three foam pads hot-melt glued to three wood blocks cut to fit inside three convenient molded features, making it nice & quiet & stable.
I lashed it together with a chopped-off IEC cord, because the stock dehumidifier cords are just way too stiff. The motor and blower originally pulled air through the dust filter, the condenser, and the evaporator, before blowing it out the side, so it’s running pretty much unloaded. A quick test shows there’s not much difference between the high and low speeds:
High: 1050 RPM, 80 W, 12.5 m/s air flow
Low: 1000 RPM, 77 W, 11.7 m/s air flow
Low speed seems slightly less noisy, but the wiring now has insulated QD connectors just in case I ever want to run it at full speed.
For whatever it’s worth, the most recent dehumidifier failed one year into a two year warranty, but the company decided it was simpler to just refund the purchase price than to replace the unit. It seems the “sealed system” inside loses its refrigerant after a year and there’s no practical way to seal a small leak and recharge the system; unlike an automotive air conditioner, the tubes are soldered shut after the initial charge.
They all sport Energy Star badges, but throwing away the whole damned thing every year or two tells me we’re not measuring the right values. Obviously, somebody could make a worthwhile dehumidifier, but as of now Frigidare, GE Appliances (sold to Haier), and Danby are on my shit list. Next year, I expect to add HomeLabs to the list, because the dehumidifier is identical to the Danby unit (and, ah-ha comes with a 2.5 year warranty). They’re all made by Haier (or another Chinese factory) and nobody applies any long-term QC to their products.
Five years later, the digits I painted with Rust-Oleum Rusty Metal Primer have weathered pretty well, while the original ink has fallen off the retroreflective sticker:
Mailbox numbers – original vs primer
As before, I wiped off the crud with denatured alcohol and painted neatly inside the lines. The other digits on both sides still look as good as the day I painted them, with only a few bubbles and nicks.
Memo to self: Next time, buy a big sheet of 3M retroreflective film, make a stencil by vinyl cutting, paint the entire number in one shot, and be done with it.
I built a small plywood work table for the drill press:
Drill press – scarred vise table
Obviously, that was a long time ago. It’s a plywood scrap with a small cleat screwed to its bottom, upon which one can position / clamp / hold / finagle smallish workpieces without worrying about drilling into the surface.
The mill vise under the plywood grips the cleat and the whole affair rides on a Sears “Drill Press Milling Attachment Stock No 27585” which is basically a simple XY table with hand dials. It’s not rigid enough for actual milling (which you should never do on a drill press, anyway, because the end mill will pull itself out of the Jacobs chuck), but it’s good for tweaking the position before you drill something.
One should never hand-hold workpieces while drilling.
Actually, those are the remainder of two production runs devoted to reducing the amount of water sprinkling the garden paths. A 50 foot hose runs along both sides of one 14 foot bed, crosses the path, then continues along the adjacent bed. The hoses have (deliberate!) sprinkler holes along their porous rubber body and sometimes the layout puts a hole where it waters the path.
The blue silicone rubber strips provide a bit of sealing to prevent the absurdly high pressure water from streaming through the orange PETG clamps. It’s OK if the clamp leaks, but less flow is better!
I’m getting really good at making those aluminum backing plates and, in fact, I think it’s faster to run the blanks past the disk sander, then drill the holes, than to CNC-machine them. Could be wrong, but Quality Shop Time is not to be sniffed at.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 