Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
While swapping chuck jaws I realized I didn’t have to pile them on a shop rag atop the lathe headstock, no matter how neatly cut those rags might be:
Lathe chuck jaw holder – installed
It’s three layers of MDF cut to hold all six jaws from the 4 inch 3 jaw chuck, stuck together with wood glue.
You really need only four sockets: one empty for the jaw you just removed, then work your way around the chuck. But, hey, MDF is cheap and I usually remove all three at once anyway.
When it starts walking away, it’ll sprout silicone feet.
Mary’s ResMed AirSense 11 saves the data from every overnight breath she takes on an SD card, which she uploads to OSCAR once a week. I figured she needed an SD card to USB adapter / card reader of her very own:
The LightBurn layout is pretty much what you’d expect, with the letter inside the outline of the USB dingus on a tool layer to get the size right:
PU PSA Vinyl test – LB layout
The red layer is a “kiss cut” through the vinyl (remember: polyurethane) that leaves the backing paper mostly undamaged:
PU PSA Vinyl test – dot mode cut detail
The cut uses Dot Mode, with the laser firing at 10% power for 2 ms, spaced every 0.1 mm along the cut. I found 0.1 mm spacing produced a more-or-less continuous cut in the PETG sheet for the Tek Circuit Computer cursor hairline, but this picture shows it’s definitely running in pulsed mode. In any event, Dot Mode is the only way a 60 W CO₂ laser can make a kiss cut, as a normal vector cut can’t run fast enough to prevent cutting all the way through the backing paper, even at 10% power, around those letters.
The edges of the letters are slightly melted with a raised border, although they look pretty good if you’re not peering at them through a microscope.
I cut the rectangular outline with scissors, peeled the waste vinyl away, and weeded the ‘a’ with tweezers:
PU PSA Vinyl test – weeded
Stick a snippet of transfer tape on top:
PU PSA Vinyl test – transfer tape
In theory, the transfer tape sticks more firmly to the cut letters than the letters adhere to their backing paper, so peeling off the tape also peels the letters off the backing paper.
Which did not go well:
PU PSA Vinyl test – transfer tape – peeling
The two adhesions obviously require a delicate balance to work properly and I would be unsurprised to learn different transfer tapes behave differently on each type of vinyl sheet, with no way to know the results without trying every possible combination.
A few retries got the “r” back in position on the transfer tape, but a bit of kink remains in the “M”.
A third adhesion balance occurs between the transfer tape and the USB card reader, where the tape must stick to the letters slightly less than the letters stick to the reader. Burnishing the tape + letters to the reader encouraged the letters to stick and the tape pulled off without dislodging them.
We deemed the result good enough for the purpose and the process taught me a few lessons along the way. Next time, maybe it’ll work out better.
Reasonable people disagree as to the cause of the failure, but a replacement controller for the (new) Bafang motor I’m installing on my bike just arrived in the mail.
Disassembling the motor is straightforward, except for the part where you must excavate an internal plug from the silicone snot gluing it into place, eventually revealing its socket:
Bafang motor – interior gasket – connector
Regrettably, there seems no way to do that without destroying the dense closed-cell gasket around the connector:
Bafang motor – interior gasket – damaged original
Equally regrettable: a replacement gasket wasn’t included with the replacement controller. Although I don’t have any of the specific foam, some marginally less dense foam from the Big Box o’ Padding seemed suitable for laser cuttery:
Bafang motor – interior gasket – iterations
The upper left prototype suggested a slightly larger rear bar that produced the gasket in front, which fit snugly:
Bafang motor – interior gasket – test fit
It lacks the latch cutout, but the foam is squishy and I expect to never touch it again.
A generous glob of hot melt glue holds everything in place:
Bafang motor – interior gasket – replacement glued
Although the usual Youtube videos show folks slathering RTV silicone caulk on these connectors, that’s a Very Bad Idea™, because RTV caulk releases acetic acid as it cures. That’s not a problem in the open-air siding-and-lumber environment the caulk was intended for, but sealing a glob of the stuff inside an enclosure will eventually corrode all of the electronics therein.
Cutting intricate doodads has become trivially easy: if you can draw it, you can pretty much cut it, just like that:
That’s eight months of weathering on MDF covered with indoor urethane sealant and it’s not as awful as I expected: the MDF didn’t actually disintegrate, it just collected some mold / mildew / crud.
A closer look:
Please Close The Gate – weathered MDF – detail
The black paint survived surprisingly well.
I hadn’t paid much any attention to the edges, so they got covered with random amounts of black paint and urethane. It seems that’s where the disintegration starts:
Please Close The Gate – weathered MDF – side view
MDF definitely isn’t the right material for an outdoor sign and I knew that going in, but it’s cheap and readily available, which makes up for a lot.
For comparison, they looked nice right after installation:
A warm day let me shoot the engraved signs for the Vassar Community Garden gates with rattlecan black:
Please Close The Gate – masking tape peeled
The full sheet of orange acrylic arrived with plastic protective film on both sides, which I planned to use for paint masking. Alas, one side also had a wrinkle running its length that ended up on two signs, so I replaced that film with blue masking tape.
As fate would have it, the first side of the first sign I peeled had masking tape and produced what you see above.
Things went bad in a hurry. The paint had no adhesion whatsoever to the plastic film and fell off in flakes as I peeled the film away:
Please Close The Gate – plastic peeled
I assumed the flakes would just fall off the signs, perhaps with a little persuasion, so I peeled and weeded all the signs before cleaning them up.
Although the paint was fully dry, when the molecularly smooth surface of each paint flake touched the molecularly smooth surface of the newly exposed acrylic, the two instantly and permanently fused together.
There were a lot of flakes:
Please Close The Gate – plastic peeled – detail
Removal techniques that did not work:
Vacuuming with a brush
Gentle rubbing with a soft cloth
Firm rubbing after spraying with acrylic cleaner
Scraping with a plastic razor blade
So I deployed a P220 grit sanding block and wrecked the glossy surface of both sides of all six signs. I briefly considered trying to recover the finish by sanding them all up through about 2000 grit, then came to my senses: my sanding arm is weak.
Careful examination of the last picture shows several places around edges of the circle where the plastic film melted into a blob that blocked the paint, rather than vaporizing. I used enough power to engrave only about 0.3 mm deep (because they’re engraved on both sides), but the transition wasn’t fast enough for a clean edge.
They don’t look as nice as I’d like, but they’re good enough for the purpose:
Please Close The Gate – installed
The acrylic sheet is more see-through than I expected, at least when backlit by bright sunlight.
Please Close The Gate – seethrough
Next: we discover what happens to UV-stabilized orange acrylic and black outdoor paint over the course of a year in garden sunshine.
The time has come to add a Bafang mid-drive motor to my Tour Easy recumbent, much like the one Mary has been using for the last two years. When I got to the point of installing the motor in the bottom bracket shell, this happened:
Bafang Triangle Plate – jammed screw
It turns out the triangle plate has slightly misplaced bolt holes:
Bafang Triangle Plate – misplaced bolt holes
If you look very carefully, you’ll see the holes sit just slightly above the midline of those ears. The additional fractional millimeter below the holes touches the motor end bell and prevents them from lining up with the tapped holes.
Normally, you’d just hit the plate with a file and be done with it, but it’s ferociously hardened steel: a file bounces right off.
I deployed a Dremel sanding drum above the ShopVac’s snout to catch the abrasive dust, eroded just enough steel to line up the holes, and everything now fits the way it should.
A recent Squidwrench meeting provided the opportunity to make a couple of racks for an assortment of Refresh Tears / Liquigel bottles:
Refresh eye lube – storage cases
I used chipboard to find out if the cross plates would stiffen the floppy 1.1 mm sheets enough for this light duty. Indeed, the overall structure becomes a nice rigid box, even though the feet and corners can’t withstand much abuse.
The finger joints use the default settings, which produce a lot of fingers along the edges. This turns out to be a Good Thing, as it gave the yellow wood glue plenty of opportunities to bond the sheets together.
Combining the default 5° slope with nine bottles along each level wastes a tremendous amount of vertical space. The adjacent racks hold three much larger cans per level, so roughly the same space doesn’t look like much. In retrospect, a 3° slope should work for smaller bottles.
And, yes, the squash on the lower shelf store nicely and become yummy meals all winter long.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
