Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Those aren’t alarm pushbuttons. These are alarm pushbuttons:
Submarine Albacore – alarm pushbuttons
They’re in the USS Albacore and obviously intended for use by someone in a hurry: the tactile shapes tell your fingers everything they need to know. If I understand the ship’s history, the Collision Alarm switch contacts closed only during tests, although they did have a close call with the sub towing the (unpowered) Albacore from the Philly boneyard to its final resting site.
According to the information we saw, the control board was refitted / replaced / redone to remove classified hardware, so the woodgrain Formica background may not be original. On the other hand, this was a sub intended for extensive experimentation, so maybe they used a cheap and easily machined material.
We stopped at Lowell MA to visit the New England Quilt Museum (photography prohibited) and the Boott Cotton Mills Museum (photography encouraged). The NPS, among others, managed to salvage the buildings and restore some of the machinery, to the extent that one room on one floor of one building has some running cotton mills:
Boott Cotton Mill Museum
A bit more detail:
Boott Cotton Mill Museum – line detail
The original mills used water power, as did much of New England’s industry, but moments after Watt worked the bugs out of that newfangled steam engine, water power was history. The museum uses a huge old electric motor, mounted on the ceiling, to drive the line shafts above the mills; the vibration shakes the entire building and they hand out ear plugs at the door, despite having only half a dozen mills operating at any time. The working environment, horrific though it was, attracted employees (largely young women) from across the region; it was a better deal than they had on the family farm.
Employees were, of course, prohibited from using cotton to plug their ears…
They sell the cloth in the museum shop and we’ll eventually have some kitchen towels.
A while back I picked up one of Harbor Freight’s cheap screwdrivers sets; the largest two drivers far exceed my simple needs, but the smaller screwdrivers work surprisingly well. I couldn’t figure out where to store the things, as they’re used often enough to remain ready to hand, while being too bulky for any of the drawers. Emboldened by my success with those shoe latch springs, I decided to bend some coat hanger wire into simple clips that grab the screwdrivers around their waists:
Screwdriver clip – rear view
The first step forms a loop where the mounting screw will go; squeezing the wire around the pin with pliers made a reasonably good imitation of a screw hole:
Screwdriver clip – screw bend
The next two bends shape the wire to the arms; I eventually figured out that bending the wire ends to a mutual right angle worked out better than the acute angle you see here:
Screwdriver clip – second bend
Bending both wires at a right angle formed the arms:
Screwdriver clip – arm bend
Two more bends in each arm finished off the clip:
Screwdriver clip – entry bends
I chopped up a coat hanger with smaller diameter wire to make clips for the smallest screwdrivers with narrower handles.
Repeat that a dozen times, drill pilot holes into a ready-to-use bit of scrap lumber, screw the clips with 3/4 inch flat-head screws, add four more holes on the right for finishing nails to hold the red screwdrivers (which have suitable holes in their handles), screw the whole affair to the bottom of the floor joist, and it’s all good:
Screwdriver rack on floor joist
After running the first half dozen screws with great effort, I fetched the beeswax and the rest slid right into place.
The larger driver handles stick up inconveniently far behind the fluorescent lamp fixture that’s barely visible along the top, but (I’m pretty sure) I won’t use those nearly enough for that to be a problem.
I suppose I should dip the raw ends of the wires in goop to avoid harpooning myself; I think I’ll mostly handle the screwdrivers by their shafts, so maybe that won’t be a problem, either.
One of the ribs in the six-passenger umbrella we keep in the van snagged on something and snapped its fitting on the spreader strut:
Umbrella strut – broken connector
This being wonderful engineering plastic that cannot be solvent-bonded, epoxy is the only adhesive that will work. However, those joints undergo tremendous stress in a deployed umbrella, so a bare epoxy joint won’t have enough strength for the job. What to do?
Wonder of wonders, when I got the umbrella into the Basement Laboratory Repair Wing, I discovered:
The not-quite-round strut fitting stub slipped right into a short brass tube from the heap and
Just enough of the fitting remained on the rib to anchor the tubing
A silicone tape wrap kept most of the epoxy inside while it cured:
Umbrella strut – epoxy curing
Clearing off a few blobs made it all good:
Umbrella strut – brass tubing splint
We don’t play golf, but such a big umbrella keeps most of the rain off two people; it’s a tchotchke from back when Mary worked at IBM (hence the color scheme). We call it our “six-passenger” umbrella because it looks about that big when we deploy it…
The bikes stand upright inside the van and the helmets ride on the floor with all their stalks sticking up. This usually works out well, but on our last trip my helmet rolled under my bike and rubbed the foam ball surrounding its mic against the chain, producing a result so awful that I had to install new foam.
The foam comes from a sheet of Sonex acoustic foam baffle, snipped into a reasonable approximation of a ball, with a slit deep enough to surround the mic, and a cable tie holding it closed:
Foam mic ball on bike helmet boom
For what it’s worth, I’ve found that excessive wind noise correlates with too much mic gain. The mic rides about a finger’s width from the corner of my mouth, I talk at a normal volume, the amp supplies about 20 dB of gain, and we have no trouble with wind noise. The amp gain depends on the mic sensitivity, so your results will certainly differ; these mics came from the heap with no specs whatsoever.
I suppose wind noise also depends on the bike’s speed, but when I’m going that fast I don’t have enough brain or lungs left over to hold a conversation…
The absurdly heavy pump nozzle atop the kitchen sink soap dispenser seemed more wobbly than usual. Some investigation suggested the fitting atop the plastic pump has gotten smaller, which may be due to having the nozzle wobble around on it.
In any event, a wrap of Kapton tape snugged it up just fine:
Sink soap dispenser pump
We’ll see how long that lasts; this thing may be nearing the end of its useful life.
Our Toyota Sienna arrived with a blank cover plate where a fancier model would have a switch. It seemed a shame to let that space go to waste, so I popped the plate out, rummaged around in the heap, found a small circuit board with a blinky LED that just exactly fit the space available, and drilled a suitable hole:
Sienna anti-theft blinker – inside
When it’s installed in the van, it looks and acts just like the security system we don’t have. For all I know, that plate was for the security system control, so perhaps it’s an exact match!
Sienna anti-theft blinker – bezel
The batteries last about two years, a few months later I notice the lack of blinkiness (it’s hidden behind the steering wheel in my normal driving position), and eventually I replace the corroded batteries. This time, I had to replace the entire battery holder; things got pretty nasty in there.
As I recall, the PCB came from a fancy “greeting card” mailed to me by the Business Software Alliance, with the implied threat that if all my paperwork wasn’t up to par, my use of potentially unlicensed software would blow up in my face. That was back in the day when mailing something that pretended to be a bomb was considered a cute joke and when I actually ran more than one Windows PC.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 