Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Our new-to-us house included a heavy-duty basement dehumidifier with a blower motor calling for a few drops of SAE 20 oil twice a year. Some searching turned up a specialized flavor of 3-In-One Oil for motors.
It arrived with free inclusions:
3-in-One Motor Oil – top inclusion
Backlighting makes them more obvious:
3-in-One Motor Oil – top inclusion – backlit
There’s also a free-floating jellyfish slightly denser than the oil:
3-in-One Motor Oil – bottom inclusion – backlit
As is now the typical case with Amazon purchases, the only choices are to return / exchange the item, as the seller cannot be contacted directly. I tried sending 3-In-One a question through their website, en passant discovering they’ve been Borged by The WD-40 Company, only to be rejected by the site’s Captcha without ever seeing the test images.
AFAICT, it’s oil and the motor will just have to get used to it.
One doorbell ding came from a guy who sheepishly admitted he had just collided with our mailbox, which sits on the outside of a gentle curve and sticks out, IMO, a bit too far into the street.
This not being my first time in this rodeo, I allowed as how if he’d replace whatever broke, I’d do the fixing and it’d be all good. As it turned out, the only broken part was the foamed-plastic post, which split neatly along its length around the crosspiece hole. After looking things over, I said I’d just epoxy it together and call it done.
That afternoon, I mixed up a generous cup of the casting epoxy I’d been using for coasters and suchlike. It is now well past its best-used-by date and somewhat cloudy, but I figured it would suffice for the purpose; nobody will notice cloudy epoxy on a mailbox post.
I have Too. Many. Clamps. and know how to use them:
Mailbox post repair
He departed, quite literally in tears, over my not raking him through the coals. I figured anybody who’d stop and admit to property damage needed encouragement, not chastisement, and replacing the headlight on his pickup would be more than enough punishment.
The decaying ADA bump (a.k.a. detectable warning) strips at the Dutchess Rail Trail’s Overocker Road Trailhead require cyclists to carefully pick their line. We’re on our way for groceries, so I’m towing the BOB Yak trailer and have just jounced over the edge of the concrete “ramp” while making a right-angle turn to the right:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0020
The four-digit frame numbers tick along at 60 FPS.
The car remained stopped at the crossing during this whole affair.
Mary is approaching along the same line with the same intent:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0198
A closer look shows her front wheel is parallel to the edge of the concrete ramp:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0198 detail
We think her wheel slipped off the edge of the concrete and, with the edge preventing her from steering left to counterbalance the sudden tilt, she knows she’s going to fall:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0228
Whereupon Newton took control and left no way out:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0250
Fortunately, this is at about zero miles per hour:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0276
She collected a nasty bruise on her starboard ham, plus a few scuffs here and there as the bike basically rolled over her:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0306
And back down again:
Rollover 2024-04-09 – 0330
Elapsed time: 100 frames = 1.7 seconds.
The drivers of vehicles in both directions rushed to assist Mary, but, apart from a few bruises and scrapes, she was in good shape.
The fairing incurred fatal cracks, but held together as we completed the mission. No surprise: after nearly a quarter-century of sunlight exposure, polycarbonate loses a lot of its durability.
Now, to be honest, we both ignored the Dismount before crossing road sign at the intersection. Over the years, I have seen a few cyclists stop and dismount before walking through the trail’s at-grade road crossings, but they are most certainly the rare exception; we all stop while waiting for traffic to recognize our presence, then ride through.
Rail trail maintenance has always been a low priority and the County’s “Vision Statements” over the decades have been largely irrelevant to what actually happens out on the pavement. ADA strips at trail crossings have been decaying for years and I expect that to continue for many more.
It’s apparently customary for piano tuners to annotate their work on the keys, starting after the serial numbers on the bass notes at the left end:
Piano tuner notes
After admiring that, you can pop the hammer links off with a prybar:
Detaching piano keys
All 88 keys stack neatly into a Home Depot Extra Small moving box, filling it about 2/3 full, starting with the bass keys on the bottom:
Boxed piano keys
I harvested the lovely wood panels, then the scrapper hauled the carcass to the transfer station. Perhaps it raised the secret chord when it hit the bottom …
Lest you wonder why we didn’t try to contact X, who would surely be interested in a free piano: we did. Believe me, we tried, for many values of X, only to find nobody wants a piano in this day and age.
I thought cleaning that mess up would solve an intermittent power problem, but the camera continued to fail immediately after being deployed and finally refused to work at all.
The camera case has eight (!) AA cells in one half connected to the electronics in the other half by a pair of wires that pass through the hinge between the halves:
M50 Trail Cam – pivot wire route
The steel rod is the hinge pivot, with the battery half wearing brown and the electronics half in lighter plastic. As you’ll see in a bit, the rod is fixed in the electronics half and the battery half pivots around it.
The two short case sections on the right contain the two wires carrying the 6 V battery power. Some gentle manipulation suggested the fault lay inside those hinge sections, which meant I had to figure out how to get them apart.
The other end of the steel rod has a knurled section jammed firmly into the electronics half, but I managed to carve away just enough plastic to expose just enough of the knurl to get just enough of a grip (yes, with a pair of genuine Vise-Grip 10WR Locking Pliers, accept no substitutes) to yoink the rod out:
M50 Trail Cam – extracted pivot
With the hinge released, the problem became immediately obvious:
M50 Trail Cam – failed hinge wires
Yes, those are wire strands poking out of the hole in the left hinge section.
A tedious needle-nose tweezer session extracted the remains of the wires from the hinge and cleaned out the adhesive:
M50 Trail Cam – extracted OEM PVC wires
Although those two hinge sections are hollow with plenty of room for the wire, it seems the assembler squirted adhesive into both sections to glue the wires in place. As a result, every time I opened the case to charge the batteries, maybe two millimeters of wire twisted 180° degrees. The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did.
I snaked a pair of 20 AWG silicone-insulated wires through the hinge sections:
M50 Trail Cam – silicone rewiring
The OEM wires had PVC insulation, which is a terrible choice for wires that will undergo lots of flexing, but that’s what SJCam used.
Two untidy blobs of acrylic caulk do at least as good a job of sealing the case openings as the black gunk visible in the earlier pictures:
M50 Trail Cam – new caulk
I left all of the wire in the hinge un-stuck, hoping the twist will distribute itself over maybe 5 mm of wire and last longer.
In anticipation of future repairs, however, I left enough of the knurled end of the hinge rod exposed to get an easy grip:
M50 Trail Cam – restaked pivot
Solder the new wires to the old pads, assemble in reverse order, and it works as well as it ever did:
The alert reader will note I did not reset the camera clock after charging the batteries, a process requiring the janky SJCam app.
The two finches on the right have been constructing a nest in the wreath hanging at our front door. They tolerate our presence, although they’d be happier if delivery folks dropped packages elsewhere.
The back of the box gets downright multilingual, although there’s no English-language mention of “magnesium” anywhere on the box:
Little Fairy Electric Sparklers – box backLittle Fairy Electric Sparklers – box rightLittle Fairy Electric Sparklers – box left
They are most assuredly not electric, which means they have no batteries to corrode and they still work fine:
Little Fairy Electric Sparklers – test firing
They emerged from a box of my father’s memorabilia, most likely packed away by his parents, so they date back to the early part of the previous century. The American Sparkler Company is long defunct, but the Internet never forgets.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 