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.
Mechanical widgetry
The original camera position put it close to the MPCNC’s DW660 spindle:
Unfortunately, it sat slightly too close to the gantry roller along the X-axis for comfort.
The effort required to pry the mount off its hot-melt glue bed showed it wasn’t ever going to shake loose, so I fired up the glue gun and stuck it to a better spot on the XY assembly:
Seen from the side:
Bonus: it’s now trivially easy to tweak the locking screw!
Realigning the camera and recalibrating its offset proceeded as before.
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 …
A flash gun is hard to beat for straight-up nostalgia:
This Zeiss Ikon Ikoblitz 4 is in fine shape:
And no more grubby than one might expect after all those decades:
I distinctly remember Flash Guide Numbers:
The red dial scale has the Guide Numbers (aperture × feet) and the lower black dial scale gives the lens apertures. The manual doesn’t mention the black figures above the red Guide Numbers; they’re metric Guide Number (aperture × meters), which would have been obvious back in the day.
The tidy shell slides off when you release a latch in the back:
Then the reflector unfurls:
Mirabile dictu, the previous owner removed the 15 V “hearing aid” battery (Eveready 504, 60 mA·h in the 504A alkaline version) before storing the flash, leaving the contacts in pristine condition:
A 3 V CR123A primary lithium cell snaps perfectly into the battery holder, which I define as a Good Omen: a dab of circuitry could turn this into self-powered and highly attractive Art. This would be one of the very few applications well-suited for the coldest blue-white LEDs.
One could adapt an A23 12 V alkaline battery (33 mA·h) to the holder, at the cost of half the capacity.
The silver shield just to the left of the battery conceals a 250 μF (!) nonpolarized capacitor.
One could build a bayonet-base (GE #5 / Press 25) adapter or poke a doodad with a 9 mm cylindrical base into the M2 bulb adapter (unrelated to my M2 printer):
Herewith, the Zeiss Ikon Ikoblitz 4 – Instruction Manual, should you need more details.
This hardware may be a progenitor of Gibson’s vat-grown Zeiss Ikon eyes.
A stack of loot boxes prize crates treasure chests on the Squidwrench Operating Table yielded a big box of torque drivers, two of which now grace my collection:
As with clocks: when you have more than one torque wrench, you don’t know what torque it is. The black driver had a solder blob in its adjustment socket, obviously intended to prevent unqualified people (that would be me) from bungling a production-critical calibration.
A suitable drill in a pin vise put a hole down the middle of the blob:
Turning a tap into the hole produced enough traction to yank the solder shell straight out of the hex. Whew!
The red driver goes to 30 lb·in, the silver to 30 lb·in, and the black to 100 oz·in. The red and black now agree to within maybe 4 oz·in, which I think is Good Enough, and both within 4 lb·ft of my Harbor Freight 200 lb·ft clicky wrench, which probably doesn’t mean much at the low end of the wrench’s scale.
The silver driver refuses to agree with anything, which suggests somebody else monkeyed with its calibration before I laid hands on it.
More calibration is needed.
A recent road trip presented this spectacle in the first Pennsylvania rest step on northbound I-83 (clicky for many more dots, then scroll to see it all):
It’s a 150 Ton Flat and Depressed Well 19 Axle Trailer, including four axles on the front truck:
Another truck on the rear pushes uphill and provides lateral control downhill:
The weight block on the rear truck provides more traction, because friction depends on normal force.
The PA transportation folks were verifying the overall weight and per-axle distribution by weighing three axles at a time:
Each scale has a 20 k pound range:
The ones I saw reported 10-14 k pounds, so figure 24 k pounds per axle, then multiply by 19 to get 456 k pounds overall.
The driver of the lead escort vehicle said the tarp covers a machined steel assembly weighing around 200 k pounds, with a total “vehicle” weight a bit under 500 k pounds. This is the second of four similar loads going from the Port of Baltimore to somewhere in Ohio where they’re assembling a huge press. It seems American manufacturing is still a thing.
They’ll be driving for four or five days from Port o’ Baltimore to Ohio, following a route described in excruciating detail on four pages of notes, plus another 16 pages of permits for the series of bridges rated to carry however many axles will be on them simultaneously.
Some searching produced a video of a similar load in transit, perhaps on the same trailer. Another video shows a different trailer jockeying into position beside a ferry (!).
For the folks involved, it was just another day at the office.
Back in the day, HP scope probes had a rugged music-wire hook on the tip:
These days, scope probe tips use ordinary sheet steel punched into a hook shape:
By sheer bad luck, the first probe out of the bag had a mis-punched end with no griptivity:
Dunno what happened, but it was definitely sheared off in the factory.
After I finally recognized the problem, I shaped a crude hook with a safe-edge needle file and continued the mission:
A quick note to Siglent put a replacement probe tip in the mail, so it’s all good.
Thinking about springs to apply downforce on plotting pen holders suggested magnets, so I extricated some neodymium bars from my collection of power toothbrush heads:
A snippet of magnetic field visualization film shows a dipole pattern:
Snapping two of them together in line:
… produces a quadrupole:
Now, if only I had some magnetic monopoles, this whole thing would be easier!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 