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?

Driveway Concrete Vandalism

Driveway drain concrete

Having missed the fall driveway paving deadline, we will have a gravel section in the middle of the driveway until next spring. All the water from the garage downspouts and the back yard runs down the driveway, which dumps it directly into the gravel patch and the new retaining wall’s foundation. That means the gravel patch, at least, will become a mud hole, which I take to be a Bad Thing.

So I bandsawed some 4 inch DWV pipe & fittings in half lengthwise, glued them together as a gutter to capture the runoff and divert it into 80 feet of DWV pipe leading to the bottom end of the wall, then filled the half-pipes with gravel to let us drive right over the whole mess. Unfortunately, the top end of the gravel patch has the driveway ending in broken asphalt, Item 4 gravel, fine gravel, and rubble that make it impossible to snug the pipes up against the asphalt. That means the runoff would pretty much vanish before it reached the gutters.

So I excavated just barely enough gravel to ensure a downhill slope from the remaining asphalt, mixed up a random bag of mortar that’s been kicking around in the garage for a few years, and troweled an apron from the asphalt to the half-pipes. Generally I sign my work, but this kludge need last only a few months and I left it to cure.

The next morning I discovered one of the chipmunks felt the work really needed a signature:

Chipmunk tracks in concrete

That’s OK with me…

FWIW, this is why you need Too Many Clamps:

Clamping a half-pipe joint

2011-11-28
Vanilla Extract: Commercial Variations

This look at the ingredients found in various commercial vanilla extracts (plus their prices) finally pushed me over the edge into brewing up that DIY vanilla extract.

We’ve been using McCormick vanilla forever, mostly because it has the simplest and shortest list of ingredients:

McCormick Vanilla

Nielson-Massey vanilla seemed about the same, although it’s not clear why it needs more sugar than those “vanilla bean extractives”:

Nielsen-Massey Vanilla

Wal-Mart vanilla doesn’t smell like vanilla, even though it has more “extractive” than corn syrup:

Wal-Mart Vanilla

All three extracts have “Pure” on the label, which (according to Wikipedia, anyway) means that they have at least 13.35 ounce of vanilla bean per gallon of extract. I didn’t weigh the three beans in my 8 ounces of hooch, but I suspect they weighed far less than the regulation 0.834 ounce. Next time, for sure, I’ll go for triple strength extract!

Despite that, my DIY hooch has turned brown and smells pretty good…

These full-frame pix used my new close-up lens gizmo; even with some vignetting the results seem perfectly usable. Normally I crop pix down to the central section, so this will be as bad as it gets.

2011-11-24
Northern Saw-Whet Owls at Vassar

We recently attended an evening presentation at the Vassar College Ecological Preserve about their Northern Saw-Whet Owl (aka NSWO) research program. You can read more about both that and the owls elsewhere on the Intertubes, but I was impressed by the owl handling process.

NSWOs arrive from the mist net (the location of which the researchers do not describe in any detail, for obvious reasons) in a bulk carrier made of small tin cans strapped together with duct tape:

Owl carrier

Another container holds the Owl Under Test while being weighed:

Saw-whet owl in can

They express their obvious displeasure at this treatment by clacking their beaks (“KLOK! KLOK!”) and, if given the slightest opportunity, latching onto a finger:

Saw-whet owl vs researcher

Their claws will give you a nasty puncture wound or eight in a heartbeat; note how their feet remain carefully captured at all times. Despite that, the researchers sported many hand scars. FWIW, the owls are murder on mice and other critters, but evidently look a lot like lunch to larger owls and hawks.

NSWOs obey the general rule that anything with ears enjoys being scratched behind them. It may be reflex, rather than true bliss, but it works:

Saw-whet owl – calmed

After weighing, measuring, blood-sampling, and stroking, the handler takes each owl outdoors, gives it a minute to reset its eyes for night flight, and releases it.

2011-11-20
Magic Magnetic Protection

If this is true, I can scrap out my roll of mu metal shielding:

Magnetic card protection sleeve

I think they mean the sleeve protects the magnetic stripe from mechanical damage, but wedging those two sentences together certainly suggests the envelope has serious anti-magnetic mojo…

2011-11-10
Auto Escape Hammer LED Flashlight Hackage

A cheap auto escape hammer (IIRC, free in the bottom of a tag-sale box filled with stuff I could actually use) has been kicking around the back of the bench for far too long; it had a feeble single-cell incandescent bulb flashlight with the cheapest possible non-switch. I ripped all that out, carved out enough plastic to fit a CR123 lithium cell, hot-melt-glued a real pushbutton switch and 10 mm white LED in place, and soldered it up:

Lithium cell hacked into auto escape tool

The CR123 puts out enough juice to light up the LED, but it’d be happier with a bit more current. There’s no limiting resistor, so the LED gets what it gets.

Augment the screws with a few snippets of Kapton tape, use some real 3M Velcro tape, and it’s all good (albeit ugly on a stick):

Hacked auto escape hammer

Now, there’s no way to test the hammer part of it (perhaps I could visit a junkyard and whack out a few windows for practice?), but at least now we have a disposable flashlight in the van…

2011-11-08
Great Northeast October Snowstorm

Our yard accumulated about 14 inches of heavy wet snow that made a mess of the maple trees. Before I could get the snowblower out of the garage, I had to cut up a stack of branches:

Branches at garage

Yes, there really is that much of a slope leading up to the garage; clearing the driveway immediately after every snowstorm is not optional.

Many of the branches in the back yard broke off and simply leaned against the ones still arched over the driveway:

Branches in back yard

The front yard was a mess:

Branches in front yard

In addition to all that, we had branches down beside the house, in the garden, around the beehive, and, in general, everywhere. Obviously, we have too many maples, but they’re what the previous owners planted (or at least didn’t uproot while that was possible).

The generator bridged 25 hours without power to save the refrigerator & freezer contents and keep the house between 55-60 °F. We survived five days with no phone (shrug) or Internet (eeek!); the cell phone was, as usual, useless because the house sits on a local maximum in a shallow valley below line-of-sight from all the surrounding towers.

The last break in the phone & Internet cables occurred just north of us:

Branches on wires

Those branches came from a tree across the road that put down roots on a slab of rock that just didn’t provide enough griptivity:

Tree down on Rt 376

After three days of diligent bow-saw work and mule-mode dragging, we cleared the yards. The back yard clutter went over the cliff toward our bottomlands adjoining the Wappingers Creek and the front yard timber now sits ready for what we hope will be the town’s pickup:

Branches ready for pickup

Our experience was a nuisance, rather than a disaster, unlike that of many folks in the area.

Now it’s time for the annual fall leaf-shredding adventure…

[Update: Turns out the NYS DOT drew the short straw:

NYS DOT crew grinding branches

Took them the better part of 15 minutes; the larger branches nearly stalled that giant chipper. A tip o’ the hard hat!]

2011-11-07
Window Strike: Swainson’s Thrush

Birds flow through the Hudson River Valley during spring and fall migratory seasons, leading to tragedies such as this:

Dead Swainsons Thrush – ventral

We think it’s a Swainson’s Thrush that mistook our bedroom window for open sky:

Dead Swainsons Thrush – left side

We’ve tried several techniques to prevent birds from making that mistake, but to no avail.

It weighed 38 grams, a bit heavier than the typical 30-ish grams reported in our bird books. If I were flying to Mexico I’d want a little extra padding, too.

I put it out for recycling in the back yard; in Nature, nothing goes to waste…

2011-11-01