Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Ferrite inductor cores are notoriously fragile: they do not withstand much abuse at all. Given the amount of fiddling I’ve been doing with the Totally Featureless Clock, it was inevitable that I’d manage to drop the antenna…
Broken ferrite bar antenna
Gluing it back together with cyanoacrylate demonstrated that some things just never work the same. The antenna depends on a continuous flux path through the winding and even the minute gap introduced by the adhesive is enough to ruin the antenna.
What they say about hearts and wheels is also true of ferrite bar antennas:
That’s in addition to the ten dollars folding cash money enclosed with the survey as, I suppose, a motivation to not chuck the whole thing in the trash.
The survey told us that our household had been “scientifically selected” to ensure a valid sampling of the TV viewing population, so it was very important to return the survey. I was astonished that they’d pay thirty bucks for a survey, but that’s probably a good indication of their desperation.
OK, sez I, I’ll play along; every man has his price.
It took ’em until Question 4 to get to the heart of the matter: how many television sets does our family own? Surprisingly, the first choice was “None” and, because that best describes our situation, that’s what I picked. Most of the other questions didn’t have a “Hell, no!” response, but I picked the smallest numbers, hours, and viewers they allowed.
While there is, in fact, a TV in our house, it’s parked on a basement shelf with its cord wrapped around it and hasn’t been turned on in years. Sort of like the “iron phone” I keep in a box nearby; it comes out when I must verify that the phone company’s problem is upstream of the jack on the side of the house.
And, besides, it’s an analog TV and we all know what that means: ain’t none of those signals on the air these days. Yes, we have a cable connection, but the only thing crossing the jack is Internet data and, IIRC, the Cablevision diagnostic channel.
We have a lot of time for interesting & productive projects. They didn’t ask about that sort of thing, though.
Our results were, most likely, something of a disappointment.
[Update: OK, three times is enemy action. I will delete further comments asking to be signed up for the survey. ‘Nuff said.]
Mary found a sliver chipped from the outside edge of a Corelle dinner plate, which provides an opportunity to see something that’s normally invisible: the ceramic layer inside its glass coating.
Overall, the sliver is nearly two inches long and about the same width as the plate is thick.
Corelle sliver
Peering through the microscope at the left end, the glass layer is most obvious along the top edge. You can barely see it along the bottom, where the chip thins to a razor edge.
Corelle sliver – detail
On the right end the upper and lower glass layers are a bit more obvious, at least with the light arriving nearly horizontally and after some aggressive exposure hackage,
Corelle sliver – side light
The ceramic has a slightly higher coefficient of thermal expansion than the glass, so it puts the glass under a tremendous amount of compressive stress as the newly manufactured plate cools. Glass is really strong in compression (and terribly weak in tension), so the plate becomes remarkably hard to break. More details there and there.
The plate rims do tend to chip, however, if you own them as long as we have. These are the long-discontinued Old Town Blue pattern: over three decades old by now.
Oddly, they’re still under warranty: back in the day, Corning sold its then-new Corelle with a Lifetime Warranty. Nowadays, you get three years for the mid-grade line, five years for thicker plates, and a mere one year for stoneware (whatever that is). I suppose enough people actually took them up on the warranty to make it economically impractical.
I ran a fine diamond file over the chipped edge and it’s OK. Eventually, we’ll break down and get new plates, but there’s no sense rushing a decision like that…
Mary cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, which entailed sorting out all the various spice jars. She thought the Chili Powder looked a bit odd and, indeed, it did: a whole colony of beetles and their larvae was a-squirm in there!
The label states:
All Natural
non irradiated — no preservatives
Frankly, I don’t see any particular problem with food irradiation.
Beetle larvae
Beetle larvae – detail
Beetles atop Chili Powder
Chili Powder Beetle – dorsal
Chili Powder Beetle – ventral
If you’re the sort of person who cooks your meals, as we are, then you’re eating plenty of denatured proteins and broken DNA anyway. In this case, snuggling that jar up to a nice warm Cobalt-60 slug for a few minutes would have been a great improvement.
The main ingredient, of course, is “chili peppers”. The remainder doesn’t sound particularly life-sustaining, though: oregano, cumin, garlic, sea salt, and spices. Anything that can live off that brew must have a bad attitude, the way I see it.
Being that sort of bear, I’d written the date on the label: 19 Aug 08. So, in round numbers, we use two ounces of Chili Powder a year. Obviously, we shouldn’t buy that stuff in bulk…
Those are millimeters on the scale it’s crawling on, so these are little bitty bugs.
Our travels took us past a mall, in which I discovered another generation of waterless urinals. The general notion is that the cartridge contains a light oil that allows urine through to the drain, while blocking sewer gases just like an ordinary pipe trap.
IIRC, the Hynes restroom retrofit installed waterless drain cartridges in a standard urinal. Unfortunately, with no flush water to rinse the bowl, the urine simply dried in place with exactly the olfactory effect you’d expect.
This urinal is obviously a custom-designed hunk of ceramic technology and, according to their copious literature, whizz just slides right off and runs through the Sloan cartridges on its way to the drain. I’m not sure how all that works, but things have certainly improved… or, perhaps, the mall does maintenance much more frequently than Hynes.
Waterless urinal target
Anyhow, that small dot a few inches above the cartridge seems like an aiming target. Speaking strictly as an amateur apiarist, the notion of “pee on the bee” isn’t all that attractive, but I suppose they needed some way to direct the stream away from the inlets …
Sometimes I get to do an easy one. This dust collector came with the house and sits on the fireplace; one of the little guys fell off when Mary went on a cleaning frenzy. As nearly as I can tell, he had a bad butt weld (using the exact term) with marginal penetration.
A dot of JB Weld, an uncomfortable overnight stay on the workbench, and he’s as almost good as new. I briefly thought about resistance-soldering him together, but came to my senses: epoxy to the rescue!
The balance point is sufficiently delicate that the additional weight of the epoxy pulls his side down a bit. I’ll call it art and leave it at that, although I should build a little circuit with a proximity sensor and an electromagnet to keep the thing in motion.
See-saw tchotchke repaired
Yeah, that’s my Tau Beta Pi Bent in the background… along with the little glass bead I made in the Corning Museum of Glass a few summers ago.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 