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?

Primo Comet Aneurysm: Teardown

So, as you might expect, I couldn’t let the aneurysm on that tire get away without a closer look: had to haul the poor thing out of the trash and dissect it. Here’s what it looked like on the bike:

Primo Comet Aneurysm – inflated

The outer rubber has disintegrated and is pulling away from the Kevlar belt underneath, but it’s still holding air!

Cutting that section out of the tire and flattening it makes things look almost normal:

Primo Comet Aneurysm – flattened

Peeling the rubber off the carcass reveals that the body cords have either broken or ripped loose under the belt:

Primo Comet Aneurysm – peeled

There was no external damage over that part of the tire and I was wrong about a gash in the Kevlar belt. However, the ends of the belt overlap just above and to the right of my thumb, so perhaps there’s a manufacturing flaw in there somewhere.

Now it’s in the trash!

2012-08-04
Could This Be A Hacked Router?

Found this interesting SSID on a drive up Albany way:

Hacked router SSID

I wonder how long it’s been like that? If the router’s owner doesn’t use WiFi, then it could last forever.

Rule of Thumb: Disabling admin access from the router’s WiFi port is just good practice…

2012-08-01
Trouser Hangers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

So I finally looked at why one of the trouser hangers made a nasty gritty noise. Turns out that, no suprise, when you rub steel against steel long enough, it wears away:

Trouser hanger – abraded steel

Another hanger had a huge roller that worked wonderfully well:

Trouser hanger – elaborate roller

That one was obviously over-engineered, but a simple roller also works well:

Trouser hanger – simple roller

They cheapnified this one just a bit too much, because it’s not quite a roller any more:

Trouser hanger – ineffective roller

A bit of rummaging turned up enough hangers with working rollers, so it’s all good now…

2012-07-29
Hot Air Balloon Launch

The local Chamber of Commerce sponsors a hot-air balloon weekend that always seems to attract terrible weather; we got to see one of the launches at a nearby park on a hot afternoon before the storms.

The crew cold-inflates the balloon with a roaring gasoline-powered blower:

Balloon – cold inflation

Way over there on the left, almost out of sight, one of the ground crew tethers the top of the balloon:

Balloon – anchoring the top

When it’s mostly inflated, they fire the burners for the hot inflation:

Balloon – hot inflation

And then the magic happens:

Balloon – liftoff

The Montgolfier Brothers would be proud:

Balloon – up and away

These are all hand-held with the Canon SX230HS at looong telephoto, with a bit of cropping & tweaking. They’re the usual low-res blog pix, but the originals aren’t much less gritty… the camera you have is better than the camera you don’t: we were out and about on other errands.

2012-07-22
Dog Tick

There I was, in the kitchen, minding my own business, when I felt something crawling up my shin…

Dog Tick – Ventral

It’s 5 mm from snout to rump, so it’s most likely a dog tick, not a deer tick, not that that makes me feel much better. It’s stuck to a strip of adhesive tape to prevent it from going anywhere and was flat enough to have not fed on anybody recently.

One could develop agoraphobia…

That picture didn’t require focus stacking, although I gave it a try anyway with inconclusive results. I must conjure up a much more rigid camera mount before that works well; a mini tripod isn’t good enough.

2012-07-17
Canon S630: Bulk Ink Rot

Something has gone badly wrong with the yellow bulk ink that I’m using in the Canon S630. Over the winter a precipitate formed in the bottles:

Sediment in ink bottles

And in the ink tanks:

Sediment in ink tank

But now that the Basement Laboratory has warmed up, not only does the precipitate remain, but some of it is growing:

Growth in ink tank

The picture doesn’t do it justice; it looks like pond scum in there. Only the yellow ink behaves like that, so it’s likely some contaminant in that batch. Because I buy ink in pint bottles, it’s a long time since that batch arrived and there’s no point in kvetching to the vendor. IIRC, I actually got this bottle from a friend who scrapped out his S630; he’d been refilling cartridges from the same source, too.

I ordered four sets of five tanks (CMYKK) from the usual eBay vendor for 20 bucks and will toss the old tanks & ink when those arrive.

There’s a set of four bulk ink bottles from a long-dead HP2000C printer on the shelf, but I suspect the ink chemistry differs by enough to ruin the Canon’s printhead… which is discontinued, so when the head dies, the printer dies, too.

2012-07-16
Another Dirac Delta: Moen Faucet Repair (?!)

Can anyone explain how it is that, all of a sudden, Yahoo! Image Search generates 466 hits for my post on repairing our Moen bathroom sink faucet, a sleepy post in my Long Tail that’s been ticking along at one view per day since last December?

The flash mob was here and gone within the span of an hour:

View spike for Moen faucet post – 2012-04-05

Does Yahoo! Image Search have something like a featured image of the hour? I can’t find anything obvious, but I cannot imagine what else would cause that many views of a single page that lacks buck-naked celebrities, jackass stunts, or hideously embarrassing personal revelations.

Given that all of their “trending image searches” show (typically female) human faces, I doubt that the grubby innards of a faucet would appear in that gallery.

This has happened before from the same source…

2012-07-07