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?

  • Watching Paint Dry

    The rules for disposing of latex paint around here require that it be “dried with sawdust”, whatever that means. Over the years we’ve accumulated quite a lot of latex paint, in addition to a rich stockpile that Came With The House™, and I simply don’t have that much sawdust.

    Since they don’t seem to object to dried latex paint, I made a drying tub by stapling aluminum flashing around a stand that used to hold a water heater off the basement floor, lined it with heavy plastic, and started pouring latex paint into it:

    Paint drying tub
    Paint drying tub

    After a year of intermittently dumping paint, that solid latex cookie must be two inches thick and I suppose it’s time to toss the first batch.

    For what it’s worth, I discovered that storing paint cans upside down doesn’t guarantee that the paint remains fresh. This can had a solid latex cookie against the lid, with plenty of corrosion to go around:

    Paint can stored upside-down - interior
    Paint can stored upside-down – interior

    The coagulated paint above the latex cookie was as horrible as you might expect.

    Memo to Self: just throw it out, OK?

     

  • Monthly Science: Garden Soil Temperature

    The soil temperature near the base of the bird box, under a few inches of chipped leaf mulch, shows the expected trend for the growing season, but there’s a weird bump in mid-October:

    Garden Soil Temperature
    Garden Soil Temperature

    The NWS temperature summary confirms the anomaly, with the DEP column giving the departure from the historic average:

    DY MAX MIN AVG DEP
==================
 1  65  58  62   5
 2  72  58  65   9
 3  73  49  61   5
 4  65  51  58   2
 5  62  40  51  -4
 6  70  38  54  -1
 7  76  52  64  10
 8  74  52  63   9
 9  70  44  57   4
10  63  37  50  -3
11  56  44  50  -3
12  63  35  49  -3
13  63  37  50  -2
14  78  59  69  17
15  79  69  74  23
16  72  53  63  12
17  73  52  63  13
18  68  50  59   9
19  56  33  45  -5
20  61  30  46  -4
21  57  48  53   4
22  53  50  52   3
23  52  48  50   2
24  59  41  50   2
25  66  34  50   2
26  58  43  51   3
27  64  38  51   4
28  73  38  56   9
29  68  42  55   8

    The precipitation record shows over an inch of rain in those four days, so that weather probably blew in from the south.

  • Halloween Horror: Line Voltage on the Loose!

    I hauled the Kenmore 158 sewing machine and controller to a Squidwrench meeting for some current measurements (and, admittedly, showing it off) while schmoozing. After hauling it home and setting it up on my bench again, it didn’t work: the motor didn’t run at all.

    While doing the usual poking around under the cover, I spotted this horrifying sight:

    Loose AC line hot wire
    Loose AC line hot wire

    The brown insulation tells you that’s a hot wire from the AC line and, in fact, it’s coming directly from the line fuse; it’s live whenever the plug is in.

    It’s a stranded wire to allow flexing without breaking, but that same flexibility allows it to squeeze its way out of a tightly fastened screw terminal. In principle, one should crimp a pin on the wire, but the only pins in my heap don’t quite fit along the screw terminal block.

    This sort of thing is why I’m being rather relentless about building a grounded, steel-lined box with all the pieces firmly mounted on plastic sheets and all the loose ends tucked in. If that wire had gone much further to the side or top, it would have blown the fuse when it tapped the steel frame. The non-isolated components on that board are facing you, with those connections as far from the terminal block as they can be.

    Engineers tend to be difficult to live with, because we have certain fixed ways of doing things that are not amenable to debate. There’s probably a genetic trait involved, but we also realize that being sloppy can kill you rather quickly; the universe is not all about pink unicorns and rainbows.

    In fact, the universe wants you dead.

    Now, go play with those goblins and zombies tonight…

    Memo to Self: Tighten those terminals every now and again. A wire will come loose shortly after you forget to do that, of course.

  • Astable Multivibrator: Hairball Edition

    Just to show all those precisely machined enclosures and tidy hand-wired boards don’t count for much:

    Astable Multivibrator - as-built
    Astable Multivibrator – as-built

    The schematic again:

    Astable Multivibrator - as-built - simulation
    Astable Multivibrator – as-built – simulation

    It started with that idea and evolved slightly.

  • How Big Is Your Blog, Ed?

    So the good folks in the wordpress.com support infrastructure have been manually exporting my blog and sending me a link to the ZIP file, pursuant to the still unresolved failure-while-exporting issue. A bit of back-and-forth around the latest backup / export produced an interesting data point:

    The message about the export file not being found is simply an indicator that the huge export could not finish compiling before a more general time limit was reached — in this case because your site is easily in the top .1% for size. I will pass your suggestion for improved exporting along.

    I’m sure that’s among the freebie blogs on wordpress.com, but I never thought of myself as a member of the 0.1% club.

    Huh. Snuck up on me while I wasn’t paying attention. If I could do that with money, I’d be on to something.

    I’ve never participated in their post-a-day challenges, because that’s what I do around here. Should you find something interesting, every now and again, that’s a bonus.

    Back to the workbench…

     

  • Calling All Airship Pirates!

    This airship drifted by just north of the house, aimed toward one of the nearby back yards on the hillside:

    Hot Air Balloon - Red Oaks Mill
    Hot Air Balloon – Red Oaks Mill

    It was not at all clear they intended to land, just that it was happening anyway. Burners roaring, the bag just cleared the ridge and vanished into the west…

    Further, we know not.

    Back in 2006, I spotted a balloon making a water landing:

    Water Landing
    Water Landing

    They managed enough lift to cross the driveway, then deflate it on the yard in front of the house, to the delight of passersby…

  • Real Estate Signage: Devaluing the Brand

    Stipulated:

    • Christie’s has licensed their brand to local realtors
    • Such licensees / franchises / whatever are locally owned and operated
    • Realtors make money only when they sell a property
    • Sometimes, you must sell a property’s upside potential
    • Ya gotta market what ya got

    Even keeping all that in mind, I think this property devalues the Christie’s brand:

    HL Property - Salt Point Turnpike
    HL Property – Salt Point Turnpike

    IIRC, it was a roadhouse eatery, back in the day, has been many things since then, and hasn’t been much in recent years.