Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Although I’d sealed the cracks around the front door after the previous Yellowjacket encounter, a cloud of Yellowjackets revealed their queen had set up housekeeping between two plants in front of our house. I donned my beekeeper suit, sprayed the obvious entrances with wasp killer, then repeated the dose over the next several days until, as Khruschev apparently didn’t say, the survivors envied the dead.
The nest was about a foot in diameter, with the top slightly above ground level and bonded into the leaf / mulch layer:
Yellowjacket wasp nest – top overview
It had two active layers below the top (positioned upside-down here):
Yellowjacket wasp nest – side view
The bottom view gives a better idea of its extent:
Yellowjacket wasp nest – bottom overview
I know nothing of wasp nest building, but if they’re similar to honeybees, then the much larger cells in the disk were intended to raise overwintering queens to start new nests next spring:
Yellowjacket wasp nest – new cell structure
The longer capped cells sticking out beyond the others may raise the few drones required to mate with queens from other nests:
Yellowjacket wasp nest – capped cells
That’s a fly over on the left; the scavengers wasted no time getting in there for the (perhaps still poisonous) goodies.
My wasp identification skillz are weak, but this looks like an American Yellowjacket:
Spotted on a price scanning terminal during our grocery ride:
Price scanner update in progress
The process continued on all the scanner terminals as we collected our weekly supplies, crashed because a file was missing / locked / whatever, then became a steel-cage death match between whoever was running remote updates and Microsoft Windows:
Heavy winds during an overnight storm on July 4 2026 brought trees down across Dutchess County and caused widespread power outages. Our little generator justified its existence by preserving our food for about 24 hours, but other folks were without power for three or four days.
A large branch fell across the Carriage Hill entrance:
Carriage Hill Bridge – treefall – 2026-07-07
The terrain and lot layout in Carriage Hill often requires heavy equipment for tree maintenance:
Tree Clearing Crane
Many trees along the Dutchess Rail Trail toppled as their root balls rotated or simply broke off:
Rail trail north – treefall B – 2026-07
Others snapped and took out the fences:
Rail trail north – treefall A – 2026-07
We ride as far from this deadfall as we can:
Rail trail south – treefall – 2026-07
Cleanup continued for weeks and we wish the crews well.
The NYS DOT engineer who designed the Raymond Avenue rebuild told me drivers should drive on the median to give cyclists enough clearance. This rarely occurs, because the “design” put bollards / posts / road furniture just behind the curb where they both deter driving and are easily hit.
The July 4th power outage called for refilling the gasoline supply and I’m returning home along Raymond Avenue:
Tour Easy – Passing Gas on Raymond – 2026-07-08
That’s generous clearance, particularly from a hulking pickup truck. FWIW, commercial drivers generally do much better than average civilians.
If towing the trailer weren’t such a nuisance, I’d deploy a decorative gas can on every ride.
Having just cleaned a bunch of gunk out of the bottom of the worm bin, we decided to try a layer of window screen to keep both gunk and worms out of the sump.
A roll of window screen Came With The House™, minus label or provenance, that felt like some sort of plastic, perhaps with a glass core.
The bin has a 19-¼ inch = 488 mm ID with 10 thin support struts around the perimeter. Laying out a circle and cutting it accurately by hand seemed like a chore, even though the screen cut easily with ordinary scissors.
The diameter just barely fit on the laser’s 700×500 mm platform, so I laid it out in LightBurn:
Laser-cut window screen – LightBurn layout
For lack of anything smarter, I applied the same setting as for the faucet gasket material (30 mm/s at 25% of 60 W) and Fired The Laser.
As far as I could tell while the laser was trundling around the circle, absolutely nothing happened other than maybe burning off a coating with a little discoloration on either side of the path.
However, the circle lifted out with zero drama:
Laser-cut window screen
And was a perfect fit in the worm bin.
Color me surprised!
I have no pictures of the happy results, as all this happened in the few minutes between “We should try a screen”, dropping the cut screen in place, and reassembling the bin.
I think the screen would cut just as well with a higher speed. If the screen works and we need another, I’ll run a few tests first.
That’s not quite “as found”, because it came festooned with the remains of an obviously lab-built Peltier-cooled laser (?) diode fixture:
Rotary positioner – Peltier diode fixture
The positioner sported an obviously aftermarket tapped hole in the side, presumably for mounting to a support:
Rotary positioner – tapped mounting hole
The knob was apparently intended for fine angle adjustment, but it spun freely. Loosening another setscrew on the side released its well-worn parts:
Rotary positioner – drive gear – OEM knob
It’s not clear what the brown ring did, back when it did something, but there were no signs of stripped-off teeth or other debris in the recess; it is a very sloppy fit on the pin holding the knob. The knob may have had a compliant surface engaging the top of the ring, made with a long-since fossilized substance.
It turns out the rotary ring has triangles, not gear teeth:
Rotary positioner – tooth detail
However, setting the gear tooth pressure angle to 45° produces a reasonable triangle:
Rotary positioner – drive gear – solid model – end view
Even so, getting a functional knob required many iterations, primarily because I can’t measure any of the details and had to figure the fit by cut-and-try:
Rotary positioner – drive gear – gallery
The little white dots were an excuse to use the MMU3 for multi-material printing, because why not.
In truth, the knob doesn’t work particularly well, as the forces from the triangular teeth on the rotary ring tend to jam the knob against its pin. The knob might work better with splines driving a squishy TPU tire riding the crests of the rotary ring teeth than a real gear. Perhaps that’s what the original brown ring did before it fossilized.
For now, the positioner returns to the Box o’ Optics Lab Stuff, because it’s the wrong hammer for the Sherline’s laser aligner. It may emerge for a future project, when I’ll have more motivation to build a functional knob.
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The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 