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.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

  • Wheel Stress Test

    Wheel Stress Test

    Spotted while walking on Rombout House Lane out of the Vassar Preserve:

    Pothole vs wheel weight
    Pothole vs wheel weight

    Looks like somebody hit that pothole at a pretty good clip and knocked a wheel weight loose.

    Rombout House Lane is a tiny L-shaped road serving as a Preserve entrance and exit not at the intersection of Rt 376 / Raymond / Hooker, but it’s slated for oblivion when NYS DOT finishes constructing the roundabout / rotary. With plenty of heavy equipment now crushing it, a walking pace is as fast as anyone should drive (or bicycle!) there.

  • Improvised Garden Gate Latch Staple

    Improvised Garden Gate Latch Staple

    For reasons not relevant here, I ended up making a field-expedient repair to a garden gate latch:

    Improvised gate latch staple - installed
    Improvised gate latch staple – installed

    The hole in the post just to the left of the obviously improvised staple shows where the Original Staple had vanished, never to be seen again. It looks like the gate has shifted an inch or so to the right (or the post to the left), which would explain why the staple gradually worked loose.

    The improvised staple is a length of coat hanger wire bent into a square U, with the ends snipped off at an acute angle:

    Improvised gate latch staple - cut wire
    Improvised gate latch staple – cut wire

    Those points do look scary, don’t they?

    Then I gently tapped it into place, driving maybe ¾ inch of wire in the wood, flattening the loop a little more than I wanted, but not enough to make me try again.

    Not our gate, not Mary’s garden, but deer pose a threat to all veggies within, without regard to ownership.

    I have *a lot* of coat hanger wire for repairs like this …

  • Pill Desiccant

    Pill Desiccant

    One of my Old Guy medicines has an elaborate desiccant container:

    Pill desiccant container
    Pill desiccant container

    Being that type of Old Guy, I weighed the container when I emptied the bottle, then left it sit in the kitchen cabinet with the scale for a week as the weight slowly increased.

    It started at 2.38 g and stabilized at 2.56 g, so it absorbed 0.18 g of water from the air after it got my attention.

    Peeling the label revealed an obvious joint:

    Pill desiccant - contents
    Pill desiccant – contents

    Looks like HO-scale coal in there!

    The desiccant weighs all of 1.20 g, so it absorbed something more than 10% of its weight. That’s less than I found with silica gel, but I don’t know the starting weight or how much moisture it already absorbed.

    A newly opened pill bottle disgorged a container weighing 2.42 g. The initial weight obviously depends on many variables, none of which would be tightly controlled.

  • As If Your Life Depended On It

    As If Your Life Depended On It

    Spotted on a scissors lift outside a grocery store being remodeled:

    Skyjack scissors lift warning labels
    Skyjack scissors lift warning labels

    The SkyJack instruction manual explains the symbols, although some of the Quick Start instructions remain baffling.

    We had great fun making up captions to suit the pictures …

  • Bathroom Faucets: User Interface FAIL

    Bathroom Faucets: User Interface FAIL

    The sink faucet in our motel room worked the way you’d expect:

    Grohe sink faucet
    Grohe sink faucet

    It pivots left-right to adjust the temperature and lifts to control the flow, which is Off when the handle is parallel to the sink countertop.

    Evidently, everybody assumes that’s the way the identical faucet handle works in the shower, despite the helpful label:

    Grohe shower faucet
    Grohe shower faucet

    Did you notice the minuscule red dot below-and-left of the handle or the corresponding blue dot just to its right? Absent the label, those provide all the hints you’ll get as to how the handle operates.

    The faucet body & plumbing were loose in the wall, as though many previous people had given it a firm yank to get water out of it.

    I’m 3.5 diopters nearsighted and can’t see those little dots. Mary is 2 diopters farsighted and can’t see the label or the dots.

    What did they think would happen with different valves having identical affordance?

  • Laser-cut Paper Pad Hooks

    Laser-cut Paper Pad Hooks

    Mostly because I could:

    Laser-cut MDF paper hooks
    Laser-cut MDF paper hooks

    Another pair of hooks support the far end of the sketch paper pad, all hanging on the end of the shelves holding laser materials & tooling.

    MDF isn’t particularly well-suited as a hook for anything weighing more than a dozen sheets of paper, but that pad is now out of the way where it won’t get curled.

    The shape comes from a bunch of rectangles welded together in LightBurn, with the obvious corners rounded off for stylin’.

  • Breaking Up Is Hard To Watch

    Breaking Up Is Hard To Watch

    These might be aftermarket hood stripes on a not-very-old Mini (or Mini Hatch):

    Must be heartbreaking to watch that happen through the windshield.

    On the other paw, given the Mini’s reliability record, they might be OEM stripes:

    In 2015, Consumer Reports awarded the 2006–2012 Mini Cooper S the title ‘Worst Used Car’, saying that while it was “cute and delightfully entertaining”, the repair frequency was “heartbreaking” because the magazine’s surveyed owners reported problems in the areas of “engine major, engine minor, engine cooling, fuel system, body integrity, and body hardware have issues at an alarming rate”.

    One hopes that puppy had fewer internal problems …