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.
Who’d’a thunk it?
I fumble-fingered a plate, it fell between my tummy and the counter, and hit the floor edge-on. There’s a lot of energy stored in that stretched-glass ceramic layer! [Update: The glass is under compression.]
The fragments tend to be slivers rather than chunks, all with better-than-razor-sharp edges:
A bit more detail on Corelle in that post…
Back when I was growing up, I knew maple seeds came in pairs and finding a triple-seed cluster was a wonderful stroke of good fortune. Our young lady grew up knowing that same thing, of course.
Turns out the maple tree near the end of the driveway produces triple-wing seed clusters on a regular basis; we find several each year.
It hasn’t reduced the magic of maple spinners, but we no longer line them up along the fireplace…
This dragonfly decided that the tip of the 2 m / 70 cm antenna on Mary’s bike was the best place around to survey the area; it periodically zipped off to snag a meal, then returned to stand watch again.
Those wraparound compound eyes don’t miss much!
A few weeks ago, a much larger dragonfly bounced off my helmet and snagged itself in the delay line coil near the middle of the antenna: the dragonfly’s head slid 1/4 turn around the coil and latched firmly in place. Amid much buzzing of wings and thrashing of legs, I managed to unscrew the poor critter, whereupon it flew off undamaged.
I was really, really tempted to pocket a key, just in case it might come in handy elsewhere… but I’d have to stand on the toilet and that’s just gross.
Back in the day, I was third-chair lockpick in my college dorm and those piddly little locks weren’t all that difficult even then.
Quite some years ago, before I stapled a wad of steel wool in the hole gnawed in the corner of the garage door, the scrabble of little feet in the attic meant it was time to re-bait the mouse traps. Then, one night, we heard the scrabble of big feet in the attic…
This is the point where the horror film audience starts chanting “Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door!“, but, to our credit, we did not don our skimpiest underwear before venturing into the attic. We didn’t encounter any zombies, either, but we did find this chap:
This is about as far north as opossums get; their ears suffer frostbite over the winters and get all raggedy, hence the pink teddy bear aspect. These are not, however, cute and cuddly critters.
The house has a full hip roof with a four-foot soffit over the patio, which must be the best place for a ‘possum to hang out:
Some quick searches with the usual keywords suggested leaving the lights on and playing loud music, so we deployed several shoplights and a radio turned up all the way. It took two or three days, but eventually Mary spotted the critter on its way out of the garage… and now we don’t leave the garage door open any longer than needed.
FWIW, the path from the garage to the attic requires climbing those shelves, scaling three feet of vertical plasterboard wall, then crawling through a (now securely closed) vent hatch.
I managed to slobber some fresh hot melt glue on my finger…
It was whoop-dee-do brown carpentry glue from a gun that claims 350 °F output, so what looks like toasted flesh is actually the last remnants of the glue. The advice seems to converge around do not peel the glue (because you’ll rip the damaged skin and leave yourself with an infection) and keep the burn cool.
After a few hours cuddling with an ice pack I figured I was probably going to live through this. The next morning the glue flaked off, leaving a mighty blister behind.
Looks like something Piter de Vries might have enjoyed inflicting, had Frank Herbert only known about hot melt glue guns: “… there’s a sort of beauty in the pattern of pus-white blisters on naked skin, eh, Baron?”
One should don all manner of Personal Protective Equipment before using a glue gun, but I bet you don’t, either.
Just for completeness, here’s the original underside:
And with the new caps, many from Eks’ stash and a few from mine:
With all those in place, the firebottles lit up properly, the power tube plates remained dark, and it sounded great. The edge-lit engraved acrylic panel in the middle is a wonderful custom mod!
It’s in mint condition, with the original footswitch and a remote Echo speaker box with a pair of drivers:
It still has those original huge electrolytics, though. Eks says the best test comes after half an hour: if the cans remain cool, the leakage and ESR will be good enough.That’s the case, so we’re rolling with them. However, the amp has some residual hum that the Hum nulling pot can’t remove, plus a bit of noise, which means those ‘lytics probably hover at the bare minimum values required to keep it going.
I discovered (inadvertently, of course) that swapping the two identical 6D10 triple triode tubes killed the Vibrato oscillator. That triode would oscillate for a few seconds after the footswitch grounded the cathode, but one tube didn’t have enough gain to keep it going. More likely than not, the feedback resistors have increased in value, too. Swapping the 6D10s restored it to operating condition.
My Shop Assistant compared her tiny DSP Fender amp with this monster and concluded that DSP effects only sound good when you don’t have the original for comparison. Of course, you could lose that tiddly amp inside the Ampeg’s speaker case.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 