The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, and curiosities
Who’d’a thunk it?
Plenty of wrecked vehicles wash up on the shores of the corner gas station / repair shop, but this is a first:
Yes, those are what you think they are:
We think it spent some time downrange on the local police training lot, but these days you never can tell.
So this arrangement pulled in, maneuvered about, and backed up to the building I was standing in the shade of:
As Zappa once said: “Apparently, there was no law against that …”
Now that vape “pen” refill cartridges are (mostly) dead, roadside debris has gotten chunkier:
It’s a Hyde Edge Recharge vape pen or it could be a counterfeit. You (definitely not me) get “up to” 3300 puffs from the 10 ml container, with 50 mg of nicotine ensuring you can’t get enough and will come back for more. Although I don’t follow the market, “disposable” vape pens can still contain the fruity flavors prohibited in refillable pens, with the added decadence of throwing the whole thing away when the tank runs dry:
My admittedly inexperienced eye says the “tank”, which is really just a fiber cylinder soaked in fruity juice + nicotine, still has plenty of hits remaining.
The Basement Shop may never smell the same again.
Of more interest, the silvery lump wrapped in a white felt strip is a 600 mA·hr lithium cell that slurped 406 mA·hr through its USB Micro-B jack when I recharged it. Perhaps the user victim sucker tossed it when the battery “died”, being unable / unwilling / ignorant-of-how to recharge it? The yellow aluminum case seems faded on the mouthpiece end, but that might be a stylin’ thing.
A closer look at the electronics payload:
The two red wires over on the right went to the coil in the draw tube to the right of the “tank”. Not being interested enough to care, I wrecked the coil while extracting the rest of the contents. Comfortingly, the red and black wires from the PCB go to the positive and negative battery tabs.
A closer look at both sides of the PCB:
The SOT23 IC sports an LTH7 topmark corresponding to an LTC4054-4.2 Standalone Charge Controller (Analog Devices absorbed Linear in 2017). The two LEDs to its right glow red during charge and white during each puff.
The black felt disk covers an anonymous pressure sensor activating the coil during each puff. With four pins, the sensor must be far more complex than just a switch, but nowadays puff sensing could require an entire ARM microcontroller.
Speaking of microcontrollers, there’s always this fate:
I fought down an almost uncontrollable urge to amputate my arms at the elbows and cauterize the stumps …
I planned to replace the vinyl straps on our set of (salvaged) lawn / patio chairs and made a pair of rivets for one long-missing strap:
The overall project is on indefinite hold, as a Steel-blue Cricket Hunter (*) has decided at least one of the chairs is an ideal place to start a family:
The patio under the chair is littered with blades of grass and twigs that didn’t quite fit through the 5 mm vent hole in the tube, but that long stem went in just fine:
We have seen the wasp airlifting crickets near the chair, so provisioning has begun. The cricket seemed not only larger than the hole, but also larger than the wasp; we assume the wasp knows what she’s doing.
The new wasp will hatch this year, pupate over the winter, then hatch and emerge next summer, but I plan to replace the straps after the construction season ends.
I have no idea how to clean out whatever’s accumulating in there …
(*) I learned them as Steel-blue Cricket Killer, but the crickets are just paralyzed, not completely dead.
Given a few pounds of smashed tempered glass:
Lay some pieces atop an acetate sheet (to prevent scratching) on the scanner, grab the whole thing, then isolate an interesting chunk:
Next time: flip the image left-to-right to match the glass piece as seen from the top, because the scanner was looking at the bottom.
The weird purple background started as black, but blowing out the contrast while ignoring the color mis-correction makes the next step easier.
Trace around the perimeter with Scissors Select, clean up the result in Quick Mask mode, expand the selection by a few pixels to improve clearance, then turn it into a two-color image mask:
Import the mask into Lightburn, trace it into vector paths (which is trivially easy and accurate given such a high-contrast image), then cut a chipboard prototype to make sure it fits:
Clean up any misfits, test as needed, cut the inner shape and outer perimeter from 1.5 mm black acrylic, cut just the outer perimeter from 3 mm clear acrylic. Put the piece of black acrylic matching the glass shape into the scrap box.
Mix up a few milliliters of clear pourable epoxy, butter up the clear acrylic, lay the black acrylic on top, line up the edges, then gently place the shattered glass into the cutout:
Next time: apply gentle pressure, perhaps through a flexy sheet, to ensure the entire glass surface contacts the epoxy layer while squeezing out the bubbles. This will surely skate the glass across the acrylic, so don’t leave it unsupervised.
The relatively clear areas show where epoxy eased its way into the cracks between the granules; there is no correlation between the air bubbles and unfilled cracks. The epoxy had the viscosity of warm honey and I didn’t expect it to flow so easily, but it doesn’t affect the outcome.
Wait for a day, no matter how hard that may seem, for the epoxy to cure. Leave the small cup holding the remnants of the mixed epoxy nearby so you can test the cure without disturbing the Main Event.
The bottom looks pretty much like the top:
The shattered edge reflects off the bottom of the clear acrylic, as seen through the side:
Matching the perimeter to the fragment would be interesting, despite my low-vertex-polygon fixation.
It could become a paperweight or a (shot glass) coaster.
At first we thought a mighty crunch in the morning meant the trash collection truck had dropped a garbage bin from a great height, but the sound of sirens and a myriad flashing lights revealed the true cause in our neighbor’s front yard:
The extent of the damage was more apparent from the road side:
Another one that ain’t gonna buff right out.
The driver was walking around uninjured and the ambulance left quietly.
A day later, the trajectory became apparent:
The right side barely kissed the tree on the right, but the front wheel hooked the utility pole (that’s the new pole in the picture), snapped it off at ground level in addition to the usual break maybe ten feet up, and bounced a piece off the other tree:
I didn’t know you could shatter a cast aluminum alloy wheel, but the missing half of the outer face was lying amid the rather scrambled stone wall along driveway.
We’re reasonably sure we know the cause. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
After the flatbed hauled away the car and everybody left, I harvested a few pounds of interesting debris from the lawn:
It’s tempered glass from the driver-side windows, shattered into small chunks and barely hanging together in those sheets. Laminated windshield glass is entirely different stuff.
The smaller chunks glitter like jewels:
Obviously, the window had a bit of tint.
The smallest chunk, seen from its flat surface, shows the cuboid fragments:
A side view shows more complexity:
Tempering prevents a glass sheet from shattering into long knife-blade shards. Although the edges of the fragments are not keen, we are dealing with broken glass: they are sharp.
How sharp? They make glass knives for slicing eyes and cells.
Broken tempered glass also sheds razor-edged flakes perfectly shaped to penetrate bike tires, although most roadside glass comes from ordinary beverage bottles. The tiniest flakes can make a mess of your eyes, so exercise at least some rudimentary shop safety practices.
Those slabs ought to be good for something, even if they fall apart at the slightest touch …
A rare trip to the Poughkeepsie Railroad Station provided an opportunity to check out the LED bulbs in the chandeliers:
The 108 bulbs had only one deader (lower left in chandelier C).
I have no way of knowing if they’re the same bulbs from six years ago, but the accumulation of bugs / dust / crud inside the (what I would expect to be) sealed envelopes suggests they’ve been hanging there for quite a while:
The dark cruciform patches might come from failed LED chip strings, although the bulbs all had the same eyeballometric brightness. The patches all seem to have a hard lower edge, so we may be seeing shadows from dust accumulating atop the chips on the PCB.
They’re a definite step up from CFL bulbs, although still not as pleasant as OG incandescent filaments.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 