Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
I walked up to a sign-in kiosk with an interesting difference:
Kiosk app update
If they ask a question on a public-facing device, they must expect a response. Right?
This interesting assembly sprouted from an upstairs wall:
Wash hose valve
The brass fitting seems intended for a braided hose leading to a nozzle, but there was no corresponding floor drain in the room. I’m sure the shutoff valve in the bottom elbow was turned off.
Back in the motel, I attempted to plug in my charger:
USB sockets vs AC plug
The currently trendy black-on-black design scheme doesn’t work well in the low-light environment of a motel room. The white plastic tabs in those USB sockets were the only visible parts of that whole assembly.
As the saying goes, “Without temptation, there can be no virtue.”
According to the manual, which I have hitherto had no reason to doubt, our non-turbo 2015 Subaru Forester has a 15.9 gallon fuel tank:
Subaru Forester – Fuel Capacity Chart
One screen shown on the dashboard’s Multi-Function Display gives the current mileage and estimated range:
Forester – MPG Range
Dividing those two numbers gives you 13.97 gallons, the current fuel level. As you’d expect, should the average miles per gallon change, the range will change accordingly.
The trip odometer says we have driven 72.8 miles since I filled the tank. Dividing that by the average mpg gives 2.3 gallons, so the tank could possibly hold 16.2 gallons, which, given all the averages involved, is reasonably close to the 15.9 gallons shown in the manual.
Being that type of guy, I have a spreadsheet tallying each fillup since the car was new:
8.1 gal average
7.5 gal median
13.9 gal maximum
Long ago, my father taught me to fill the tank when the needle got halfway down and I’ve been doing so ever since. As a result, we have only rarely seen the Low Fuel Warning Light:
Subaru Forester – Low Fuel Warning Light info
A concatenation of unavoidable events put us southbound on I-87 when that light went on. Given the estimated range of 70-ish miles, I planned to refuel at the New Baltimore Service Area, about a dozen miles ahead.
The engine shut down and all the dashboard warning lights lit up with the Service Area Ahead sign in view:
Out of Gas – Service Area Ahead
All the “facilities” are blank because they’re rebuilding the whole place, with the gas station remaining open.
So I slapped the shifter into neutral and we drifted slowly along the shoulder, under the bridge visible ahead, and eventually came to a halt at the beginning of the exit lane.
There was only one thing to do:
Out of Gas – Walking On
Some storytelling later:
Out of Gas – Walking Back
Just because I could:
Refueling – GPS Track
For what are, I trust, understandable reasons, I started the tracker after I began hiking and forgot to turn it off before driving away.
After figuring out the devilishly complex spring-loaded anti-spill spout on the gas can, we drove 1500 feet to the Service Area:
Out of Gas – Service Station
As usual, I filled the tank until the nozzle automatically shut off, for a total of 13.554 gallons in two transactions:
Pump Receipts
Now, it is possible the Forester fuel system has another 2.3 gallons tucked away somewhere, but if that reserve doesn’t make the wheels go around, it’s not doing me the least bit of good.
The fact that I’ve occasionally added just short of 14 gallons suggests the estimated remaining capacity depends strongly on the average mileage up to that point and I have come very very close to running out of gas on several occasions.
As far as I can tell, the usable fuel capacity is a scant 14 gallons and the Low Fuel Light goes on with, at most, a dozen more miles in the tank.
This is the second time in more than half a century of driving I’ve run out of gas.
My father was right and I shall henceforth mend my wayward behavior.
The color is apparently a side effect of the CO₂ laser vaporizing the plastic, because it emerged during the engraving process.
Polycarb tends to get all melty when cut, so it’s not particularly good for laser machining. Indeed, the engraving produced filaments of (presumably) melted / condensed plastic that I brushed off after taking this picture:
Polycarbonate engrave – 400mm-s 20pct 0.1mm – as cut
If you could put up with the filaments and the poor cut edges, it might be useful for front panel legends and suchlike.
The big price displays at the Mobil station on the corner have always behaved oddly, but these replacements began failing within a week of their installation:
Mobil price sign – north face
That doesn’t look too bad, until you notice the number of dead LEDs in both red displays.
The south face is in worse shape:
Mobil price sign – south face
The green LEDs seem to be failing less rapidly than the reds, but I don’t hold out much hope for them.
The previous display had seven-segment digits made of smooth bars, rather than discrete LEDs. This one appeared after the segments failed at what must have been more than full brightness; the red LEDs were distracting by day and blinding by night.
Maybe they got the LEDs from the same folks selling traffic signals to NYS DOT? The signals around here continue to fail the same way, so I suppose DOT doesn’t replace them until somebody enough people complain.
Jake, our affectionate term for whichever turkey is having trouble, eventually walked from right to left closest to the house, down the patio steps, and rejoined the flock. The tip of his “arrow” tracks aims backwards, because all three toes point forward.
It turns out turkeys panic when they’re behind a barrier and see the rest of their flock moving away. A panicked turkey makes a lot of noise while rushing back and forth, the rest of the flock contributes what must be advice, and the resulting tumult suffices to wake the dead.
That would be me, in the bedroom off to the left, but my cold-boot sequence takes long enough that I missed the action.
Some years ago, we discovered how distressed a trapped turkey can get when the flock descended from trees in an adjacent yard, with (a different) Jake landing in the garden, on the other side of the fence from the flock. Over the course of the next several hours, Jake ran back and forth along the fence while the rest of the flock alternated between sympathetic honking and disinterested feeding, until eventually he remembered his wings and managed a short-field takeoff over the fence.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 