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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?

Subaru Forester Manual: Oddities

Our shiny new Subaru Forester came with a 540 page user manual and, being that type of guy, I’ve been reading through it. I suspect warnings like this come from a lawsuit in the not-too-far-distant past:

Camera Disassembly Warning

They seem to be very, very worried about small animals:

Check for Small Animals

In this situation, I’d hope the engine would fare better than, say, a squirrel:

Trapping Small Animals

Unlike the Toyota Sienna’s enclosed belt, I could actually replace this one, so I suppose a squirrel could take up residence somewhere in there:

Subaru Forester – belt and oil filter

And look at that oil filter: right up top, inside a bowl! The never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Toyota engineers mounted the Sienna’s filter horizontally, halfway up the side of the transverse V6 engine, where it slobbers oil down the block and over the front exhaust manifold.

So far, so good…

2014-05-16
HP Super Glossy Paper vs. Generic Ink: FAIL

When Aitch moved to NC, he unloaded a stack of printer paper on me to avoid paying half a buck a pound to haul it along. One package contained some high-end HP photo paper that, not being a high-end photo kind of guy, I figured I’d use for my 3D printing brag sheets.

Alas, after trying several permutations of image quality / paper type / ink density, it seems that the cheap generic ink I’m using in the Epson R380 simply isn’t compatible with the HP paper. The top image shows that the ink doesn’t wet the paper and forms a weird alligator-skin pattern:

HP vs Staples Glossy Photo Paper

The bottom image looks perfectly fine; it’s on cheap Staples photo paper, printed with the usual Photo quality on Photo paper.

I’ve read vague statements here-and-there that some HP ink uses an entirely different chemistry from the usual inkjet printers and, perhaps, that accounts for the mismatch. Not a problem, but it did blow an hour while proving that it wasn’t the configuration settings doing me in.

2014-05-11
Old-school Lecture Hall Illumination

We attended a talk in the Taylor Hall Auditorium at Vassar College, which features lovingly restored lamps that illuminate the pull-up desks on each seat:

Vassar Taylor Hall – desk lamp

The housing consists of black-painted cast iron, with a 7 W (“Christmas tree”) incandescent bulb keeping it pleasantly warm to the touch. A metal conduit connects the lamp to the main conduit running parallel to the seat rows at the edge of each step. Another hole on the other side cast light upward toward the ceiling, perhaps providing general room light in the Good Old Days.

The restored seats are much wider than dictated by contemporary standards, perhaps allowing enough room for the classic conical skirts often seen in historic Vassar photographs:

Vassar Taylor Hall – desk lamp perspective

That’s about 170 W of light down those two rows. I didn’t think to run the numbers at the time, but there’s gotta be a kilowatt of those little lamps in that auditorium!

And, yes, male pattern baldness affected a remarkable number of attendees…

2014-04-27
Waterless Urinal Target Redux

Spotted this (so to speak) on a journey:

Falcon Waterless Urinal -seashell target

Evidently, the bee is out and the shell is in…

Some backstory fills in things I never knew about the subject. There are, of course, lawsuits.

2014-04-26
Incandescent Bulb Lifetime

Two 40 W incandescent bulbs in the front bathroom burned out within a few days of each other. Being that type of guy, I know that I installed this bulb nine years ago:

Bulb base – install date

The date is easier to read with the bulb in hand: 13 Feb 05. The (5 yrs) indicates the previous bulb in that socket lasted five years.

The other bulb date went in during March 09, so it survived only five years; the previous bulb lasted 6 years.

Even though 40 W incandescent bulbs are history, maybe I have enough spares on the shelf that the next owner can replace ’em with cheap LEDs.

This may not be science, but it does have numbers…

2014-04-24
Bird Nesting Boxes: Cleanout Time

Springtime moves the Bird Box Cleanout chore to the front of the to-do list…

Three different species used this box in succession:

Bird box – stacked nests

Those tiny birds haul all this stuff into the boxes one twig / feather / strand at a time:

Bird box nests

The big branches come from a pick-up-sticks session; we don’t have birds that big around here!

One nest sported a decorative yellow plastic ribbon that the bird surely regarded as a rather tough bit of grass:

Bird nest with plastic strand

They could handle this job on their own, but we think we can reduce the number of parasites by airing out the boxes. We should do the cleanout in the fall to provide nice empty cavities that they can use for winter shelter, but they seem perfectly happy to snuggle together atop the nests in the cold and the dark…

2014-04-20
Some (Re)assembly Required

Setup: the local Walmart just replaced all their cart corrals.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Walmart cart corral – incorrect assembly

As nearly as I can tell, the installers permuted the railings; a simple three bit rotate-left-by-one operation would fix it.

Not much to my surprise, every single corral looks like that; either the instructions were wrong or, more likely, the installers never read the instructions. Obviously, they didn’t think about the results and nobody ever checked the final result.

Prediction: the corrals will look like that forevermore…

2014-04-19