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?
Found in an apartment building lobby:
The LCD gibberish comes from an interaction with the camera shutter. It scrolls a lengthy set of instructions, but the peeling labels demonstrate ain’t nobody got time for that.
You were supposed to figure out how to use this thing with no instructions other than the scrolling display. In particular, the multi-multi-function keypad has no labels.
I suspect most folks just haul out their phones and call the tenant.
Spotted on a walk along the Mighty Wappingers Creek after a storm with plenty of gusty winds:
The tangle of branches and logs came from a tree that fell across the road from the far right side and put that crease into the guide rail. The vertical stump seems unrelated to that incident.
A bit of rummaging at the base of one post produced a victim:
The impact produced enough force to turn the rail brackets into guillotine metal shears against the posts:
It’s not a clean shear cut, which isn’t surprising under the circumstances.
An ordinary ½-13 Grade 8 bolt has a 17 k pound proof load: popping that bolt required a mighty oomf.
Memo to Self: stay indoors during windy storms!
Quite some time ago, I hammered out G-Code to engrave ersatz dog tags for a Cabin Fever demo:
A dozen years later, making a World War II dog tag is a whole lot easier:
Well, “easier” if you allow laser engraving in white-on-black Trolase using a font intended to mimic a typewriter.
Close enough, methinks.
Which comes from a simple layout:
The outline traces a scanned image of my father’s tag, fitting a few hand-laid splines around the curves:
I generated a random serial number based on my father’s draftee status (he was in his early 30s during his South Sea Island tour) and state of residence; my apologies to anyone carrying it for real. His blood type was A and (I think) the religion code marks him as “Brethren”, a common group in my ancestry.
Given the outline, various plastics, and a laser, other effects become possible:
It might come in handy for something, someday.
The LightBurn SVG layout as GitHub Gist:
The bollard at the newly opened Dunkin’ stands upright once again:
I can’t tell whether the bollard stands in more concrete this time, but the gray pipe to the left of the gas meter is definitely new.
In round numbers, it took less than a week for the first impact, a week for the first repair, and … we shall see.
The white disk just behind it is a rat trap, with a subtle explanatory sign directly above it. The building has three such traps, so they’re apparently trying to stay ahead of a known problem; we find similar traps around most commercial establishments.
Being that type of guy, I wanted to salvage a loooong square-head bolt from the utility pole stub formerly holding up the mailboxes, which would require a few gazillion turns of its square head with the Adjustable Elephant Wrench. After verifying I couldn’t just hammer the mumble thing through the pole, I gave a few turns of the Universal Socket on a ratchet:
It’s intended for goobered hex heads up to 1-¼ inch, but the pins slide down around pretty much anything that sticks out and jam against the shell, so it’s handy for those last-ditch extraction events.
After verifying doing this by hand would occupy me until just before the heat death of the universe, I followed Mad Phil’s signal connector adage: “If you can get to BNC, you can get to anything.”
Some rummaging produced this unsteady mechanical ziggurat:
From bottom to top:
Then stick the teeny end into the hand drill, rig engines for reverse running, and whine away on that bolt, which obligingly backed right out.
After the fact, I found the obviously missing ¼ to ½ inch square drive adapter hiding in the Drawer o’ Sockets:
Which doesn’t make any more sense, but is less likely to fall apart under normal use.
Aaaaand one more adapter makes this possible:
That’s a 50 mm socket turned by ¼ inch hex drive in four easy steps, although I’m reasonably sure it still won’t get the idler bogies off my armored personnel carrier.
The stray adapter steps down from ½ square to ⅜ square, should a need for a breaker bar occur during eyeball surgery.
Crawling around on the floor under the oven reminded me of the bottom pan we salvaged from the hulking oven that Came With The House™:
A closer look:
I can’t vouch for their accuracy, but finding recommended baking temperatures and times printed exactly where they will come in handy seems like a great idea.
It’s another example of the rule Eks taught me: When you must look up something, write it where you will need it the next time.
A LightBurn forum discussion about problems making Z-scale (1:220) bricks led me to trying a few ideas on the way to figuring out what was going wrong.
Each brick is about 1.0×0.5 mm, so an entire wall doesn’t cover much territory:
Yes, those are millimeters along the scale.
The kerf on my 60 W CO₂ laser seems slightly wider than the “mortar” lines should be, so I made a layout with the vertical lines slightly inset from the horizontal ones:
That let the kerf complete the lines without burning into the adjacent bricks:
The cuts are obviously too wide (and deep!), but just for fun I colored the chipboard with red marker and rubbed a pinch of flour into the lines:
Which looks chunky, but not terrible, for what it is. Maybe concrete blocks would look better?
The next attempt started with a raster bitmap scaled at 254 dpi = 10 pix/mm, so that single-pixel “mortar” lines between 10×5 pixel bricks would be 0.1 mm wide:
Scanning the image at 100 mm/s makes each pixel 1 ms “wide” and, because the power supply risetime is on the order of 1 ms, the laser won’t quite reach the 10% power level across the vertical lines:
The raster lines come out lighter and (IMO) better looking:
The horizontal lines are darker because the beam remains on at 10% across their full length, but the overall result seems much closer to the desired result.
The original poster will use a diode laser and, combining all the ideas we came up with, now has a path toward making good, albeit invisibly small, bricks.
His modeling (and coloring!) hand is strong!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 