Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Speaking of things that don’t work, these header pins from my stash have developed some sort of rot. They’re genuine Brand Name pins, albeit a few decades old, and have been stored in the original bag in various basements along the way.
What’s supposed to happen: you touch a pin with a soldering iron and some solder, the solder melts and wets the pin. If the pin is in a circuit board at the time, the solder bonds it to the pad surrounding the hole. Nothing exciting here, except that when I tried to use these pin headers, that didn’t happen.
The symptom is that the headers are unsolderable: the solder doesn’t wet the pins.
Unsolderable header pin detail
The detail view shows what does go on. When I touch a the pin, the original solder plating scoots out of the way, exposing the underlying metal (or whatever it is). Neither tin-lead nor tin-silver solder wets the surface, so the pin can’t be soldered.
The flux forms a layer over the new surface and doesn’t do its usual job of cleaning the metal. Scraping the pin clean doesn’t seem to help, either. In fact, nothing helps: that whole bag of headers is a dead loss.
I’m sure these things worked when they were fresh, but that was a long time ago. I’m not sure what sort of change could occur underneath the original solder plating.
So I picked up some new headers with what passes for gold plating these days and they work fine.
The pix come from my pocket camera on the binocular microscope, using my homebrew adapter.
Not that anybody pays attention to these things, but NOAA’s N-Prime earth observatory had a successful launch today.
There’s a bit of backstory to this bird: Lockheed-Martin manged to drop the satellite during the final phase of its assembly, causing all manner of damage. Basically, they forgot to bolt the booster adapter down before trying to tilt the satellite over.
It seems L-M ate the rebuild costs, which was a nice gesture on their part.
I wrote about the event in my Dr Dobb’s Journal column some years back, in the context of how we do error checking in our projects. Bottom line: no matter how good you think your development process might be, alas, you’ll always miss something. The trick is to miss only small problems, not project-killers.
This flotsam recently washed over the railing. I added the bold highlight:
Ladies and Gentleman.
In order to have your company inserted into the registry of World Businesses for 2009/2010, please print, complete and return the enclosed form (PDF file) to the following address:
WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE
P.O. Box 2021
3500 GA Utrecht
The Netherlands
register@ — .biz
FAX: ++31 — — 8107
Updating is free of charge
Treating the attached PDF with the same casual nonchalance I use with any lump of high-level radioactive waste, I opened it in The GIMP (to strip any interesting PDF malware) and found an ordinary printable PDF form.
Surprisingly, it didn’t have any slots for charge card or bank account info, but, down at the bottom, there’s a dense block of fine print.
I ran it through pdftotext to get the raw text and here’s the kick in the head, boldified for your reading convenience.
THE SIGNING OF THIS DOCUMENT REPRESENTS THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS AND THE CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEBPAGE: WWW.WORLD-BUSINESSGUIDE.COM. THE SIGNING IS LEGALLY BINDING AND GIVES YOU THE RIGHT OF AN INSERTION IN THE ONLINE DATA BASE OF THE WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE, WHICH CAN BE ACCESSED VIA THE INTERNET. A CD ROM WITH WORLDWIDE BUSINESSES IS GRANTED, ALL IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONTRACT CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEBPAGE: WWW.WORLDBUSINESSGUIDE.COM. THE VALIDATION TIME OF THE CONTRACT IS THREE YEARS AND STARTS ON THE EIGHTH DAY AFTER SIGNING THE CONTRACT. THE INSERTION IS GRANTED AFTER SIGNING AND RECEIVING THIS DOCUMENT BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER. I HEREBY ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION WITH SERVICE PROVIDER INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORIES LTD “WORLD BUSINESS GUIDE”. I WILL HAVE AN INSERTION INTO ITS DATA BASE FOR THREE YEARS. THE PRICE PER YEAR IS EURO 995. THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY EXTENDED EVERY YEAR FOR ANOTHER YEAR, UNLESS SPECIFIC WRITTEN NOTICE IS RECEIVED BY THE SERVICE PROVIDER OR THE SUBSCRIBER TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EXPIRATION OF THE SUBSCRIPTION. YOUR DATA WILL BE RECORDED. THE PLACE OF JURISDICTION IN ANY DISPUTE ARISING IS THE SERVICE PROVIDER’S ADDRESS. THE AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE SERVICE PROVIDER AND THE SUBSCRIBER IS GOVERNED BY THE CONDITIONS STATED IN “THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR INSERTION” ON WEBPAGE: WWW.WORLD-BUSINESSGUIDE.COM
I haven’t checked out the full T&C, as I doubt I’ll benefit from such a listing.
This probably works best in large organizations, where one sucker responds to the spam and then the billing department responds automatically to incoming invoices. The two-month advance notice is a really nice touch, isn’t it?
Why do people continue to fall for this crap? If it didn’t pay off, the spammers would dry up and blow away, so there must be a fresh crop of suckers every day.
Inside a batteries.com 9V batteryCorrosion inside batteries.com 9V battery
Back in the Good Old Days, 9 V batteries had a stack of half a dozen pancake cells inside that completely filled the outer case. These days, it seems they use cylindrical cells similar to AAAA cells, with more wasted space around the edges.
I retrieved these batteries from our smoke detectors. I tend to poke the self-test button occasionally and wait until the low-battery alarm starts chirping, rather than throwing half-used batteries out. Being that sort of bear, I date the batteries when I put them in; they usually last two years.
This one is from batteries.com and lasted 18 months. The obvious corrosion inside the shrink-wrap plastic sleeve says that the cell sealing isn’t nearly as good as you’d wish. The two most heavily corroded cells are completely dead, but the rest have about 500 mAh of life left in them (at a rather low 50 mA discharge rate). With a bit better QC, it’d be a winner.
Notice that the case contacts have sharp points that ensure a decent connection, perhaps despite the crud. Only one or two of the points actually make contact, which probably contributes to a faster assembly time: just get the ribbons in the right neighborhood and crimp the case closed. On the other hand, all the current must flow through one or two points, so don’t use them as a high-current source.
Eveready Gold 9V battery innards
On the other end of the scale, this Eveready Gold battery has six loose cells and lasted 2.5 years. All the cells have roughly the same level of charge remaining: they’re thoroughly dead.
The build quality seems better, with individually shrink-wrapped cells and a compliant closed-cell foam layer on the bottom of the case to maintain pressure against the contacts. No sharp points, so they need more pressure.
The cell polarity is exactly reversed from what you’d expect: the button end is negative. So, even though this looks like a cheap source of AAAA cells, that’s a cruel deception…
Ever notice how, when you take your car in for inspection, it always comes back with the wheel lug nuts tightened beyond the ability of mere mortals? I think it’s because they have their pneumatic impact wrenches turned up to 11, just to make sure the nuts never, ever come loose and expose them to liability.
Broken wheel lug with attached SocketLug
Found this yesterday while walking back from the store with two gallons of milk. The shiny bit in the background is labeled SocketLug, which is evidently a trademark associated with Gorilla (but with no Web presence), and sports patent number 5797659. The stud in the front evidently snapped out of somebody’s wheel, probably flush with the surface. Gonna be trouble getting that out!
The lug is a threaded 9/16-inch steel stud, with a root area of maybe 0.18 square inches. Let’s suppose the yield strength is 100 kpsi, so breaking that thing required 18 k pounds. The thread looks to be 18 TPI for a 1.8 degree helix angle; call it 3%. If they lubed the threads and lug (ha!), letting us assume 20% friction, then the wrench was applying 700 pounds at a 9/32″ moment arm: call it 2.5 k lb-in or 30 k lb-ft of torque. Pretty impressive, given that typical pneumatic wrenches weigh in at around 500 lb-ft of torque.
Which says it really wasn’t the wrench doing the breaking, which should also be obvious because it was lying at the side of the road rather than on the shop floor. Even a 1000 lb-ft wrench would create only 5% of that yield load in the stud, so something else was wrong.
That orange patch in the upper left looks like rust in a crack, with the gray area in the lower right revealing the final fault. Maybe the shop monkey (or owner?) managed to whack it while installing the tire, create a small crack that let in the usual NYS road salt, and after a season or two the stud failed after being cranked tight once again.
There’s likely another four on that wheel: safety in numbers! Unlike those old Citroens with but a single nut securing each wheel…
Green tea is supposed to be good for you and Tazo China Green Tips is supposed to be pretty good tasting, so I’ve been sipping a cuppa or two in the morning. Teabags are a spendy way to buy tea, so I’ve been buying half a kilo at a shot from cooking.com, storing it in glass jars, and teaspooning it into a tea ball infuser over the course of the next year.
This interesting additive appeared in one of my teaballs; fortunately I was awake enough to notice it before it wound up in hot water.
Beetle found in Tazo Green Tea
It looked pretty much like the hull of a generic Asian Garden Beetle, although we haven’t seen anything quite like it in our gardens. Not a big deal, as garden beetles are fairly inoffensive critters, but not something that should make its way into a bag of lah-dee-dah tea. On the other paw, it’s hard to filter stuff like that out of the stream.
Fought my way through the Flash-saturated Tazo site, sent a note to the Customer Service folks, eventually had a pleasant phone chat. After convincing her that I wasn’t rabidly angry and that it really was one of their beetles, she dispatched fifteen bucks worth of Starbucks gift card.
It seems Starbucks either owns Tazo, both of ’em are controlled by the same outfit, or something like that. She was in the Starbucks Customer Service chain o’ command, anyway.
Beetle bottom view
So I picked up three boxes of Tazo tea bags at the local Starbucks: more China Green Tips and some Green Tea with Lemon Grass (which doesn’t appear on their website). Left me with three cents on the card; I’m not a regular customer, so it’s now in the pile of cards I use as measurement shims in the workshop.
I’d been adding lemon grass from our garden to the morning cuppa for a pleasant lemon scent. The Tazo version includes Lemon Verbena, some mint, and other flavors that cranked the scent up to 11 and the taste far into my ptui range. Unpleasant, indeed.
For what it’s worth, if you’ve tried & disliked other green teas, give Tazo China Green Tips a shot. It’s delicate and much better than the other (far cheaper) green teas I’ve tried; Salada Green Tea is particularly noxious.
One of the China Green Tips reviewers on cooking.com comments “I found a rather long, nasty, kinky hair … I was shocked. I threw out the whole bag … I was unable to drink tea for a week”.
Mexican Bean Beetle on Soybeans
Now, party people, I’m here to tell you that food just doesn’t pop out of the ground in a pristine state. Maybe it’s because we eat a lot of food from our own gardens, but passengers like that, let alone the odd hair, just aren’t an issue. Consider, for example, this critter that made it all the way into the house on some soybeans: he’s likely related to the Asian Garden Beetle family and not all that far back in their family trees.
If you want to really worry about something, ask yourself whether your tea grew downwind of, say, Zhejiang Happy Face Metal Refinery Complex Number Six. No way to tell about that, other than through a detailed chemical analysis of every cuppa.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 