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?

Power Screen Trommel

This monster appeared near Mary’s Vassar Farms plot:

Power Screen Trommel – right

I had to look up trommel, too.

Apparently suffering a breakdown, it spent the next two weeks idle with all its covers open. The can of WD-40 makes a nice touch, but the condition of the central lubrication panel suggested the last grease went through those Zerk fittings quite a while ago:

Power Screen Trommel – lube panel

The manufacturer’s information label, tucked in a protected position, remains pristine:

Power Screen Trommel – mfg plate

Scrawled notes near the control panel noted that someone installed new oil and fuel filters in late 2004, with 4103 hours on the running time meter:

Power Screen Trommel – controls

Then, one day, it vanished, perhaps back into the mysterious universe from whence it came …

2014-06-07
Rochester NY Railroad Station: The Merits of Overbuilding

Back when the New York Central Railroad built the overpass at North Clinton Avenue, likely around the late 1800s, they had no idea the I-beams under the tracks would eventually look like this:

Rusted I beam – Rochester RR station

The longitudinal I beams have more iron and haven’t corroded through:

Rusted beams – Rochester RR station

But the footing under that beam doesn’t look very good at all:

Rusted beam base – Rochester RR station

I think that Lego brick is a nice touch …

We drove the van along I-90 to Rochester and passed many bridge repair operations. The NY Thruway isn’t all that old and the rebar has been corroding out of the concrete pylons for years.

Nowadays, we use exactly enough material to carry the anticipated loads and not one gram more; fast forward a century and our structures won’t be around.

Those pictures were taken from the platform just west of the covered section.

2014-06-02
Dry Water

My first thought was that you can’t make this stuff up:

Dry Water – Pok RR Station

That’s taken through one of the windows over Track 3 at the Poughkeepsie railroad station, so it’s a bit blurrier than usual.

It turns out a “Dry Water” pipe delivers ordinary water, but normally contains pressurized air to prevent freezing. An intricate valve in a heated room balances air pressure in the pipe against the supply water pressure; when the air pressure drops, water flows through the valve to the outlet.

Normally, you’d use a Dry Water pipe in a fire suppression system, but it makes perfect sense for an outdoor hose bib (or whatever you call that quick disconnect fitting) on the top level of the Poughkeepsie Railroad Station.

There’s (almost certainly) an automatic drain valve that removes water from the dry pipe: otherwise, it’d remain full after use and pop the pipe during the next freeze.

2014-05-31
Business Proposal
This must be the season for scams, as WordPress recently forwarded this message through the Contact form:

My name is Mary. I was just reading Personal 3D Printing: 2014 Status Report – I’m doing some private research on 3D printing and the article is great! I loved images! Great sense of humor and amazing taste in choosing images! :D

But that is not the only reason why I’m writing.

I’m actually writing on behalf of San Francisco Circuits, a PCB solutions provider in Northern California. I came across your site, read some interesting stuff and thought I’d come to you directly and ask if you’re interested in guest posting on Softsolder.com?

We have writers on staff that write articles on circuit design, fabrication, assembly, and everything else PCB related.

Let me know if you are interested!

Thanks!

You may recall that post:
- The images came from stock photographs
- It had nothing to do with PCB fabrication
In fact, very little of what you read here has to do with PCB fabrication. Yes, I home-brew PCBs, but that’s about as non-mainstream as you can get.

Some interesting bits of metadata:
- San Francisco Circuits actually exists
- The reply-to domain is in Australia: go8.com.au
- The message came from a Croatian IP address: 212.92.194.119
The go8 domain has a placeholder web page. The Petrovic Family Trust probably runs an email server that we’re not privy to; I’d lay long odds they’re blissfully unaware of her account.

SF Circuits probably doesn’t know anything about her, either, and I’m absolutely certain those “staff” writers she touts know exactly squat about “everything else PCB related”.

Should I ask her for writing samples or pointers to their work elsewhere on the Intertubes? How much would they pay to write posts for me? If I had nothing better to do, I’d string her along for a while…

In fact, given how this spam stuff works, I suspect “Mary” isn’t her name and she’s not even female, but I’m never going to know the rest of the story.

One point in her favor, though: she has figured out how to get paid for doing stuff on the Intertubes.
2014-05-23
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