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?
A price / coupon scanner in a nearby CVS evidently woke up dead:
Yup, it’s a Linux console boot log, with the last line suggesting something horrible happened inside the device mapper:
A start job is running for dev-mapper-cryptswap1.device
The systemd timing status shows it’s been stuck for a while and has no hope of rescue:
(2d 1h 41min 10s / no limit)
I’d reboot that sucker if it had a keyboard …
Things remained rather quiet at the end of the driveway for a few months, then this happened just before breakfast:
Rt 376 had accumulated some sleet overnight and freezing rain was still falling. The driver apparently lost control around the curve, missed the fire hydrant behind me, and went up the embankment sideways at a pretty good clip.
As far as I can make out, the left front door took out the mailbox post, which was the stump of a utility pole installed long before we bought the property:
Admittedly, the post was rotten around its base, but remained a substantial chunk of wood. The black plastic curl is the air deflector formerly sealing the front of the car’s undercarriage.
Seen from the far end of the debris field, the car smashed dead center into the mighty honeysuckle bush, shed a variety of small parts, recoiled backwards, and tagged the tree as it rolled down the embankment:
The mailboxes sit on the shoulder to the right of the car.
No serious injuries to the driver or passengers, although they got an ambulance ride to the ER to make sure.
Those dents just ain’t gonna buff out:
I did get three years out of the repaired mailbox hinges and perhaps I should preemptively transfer the hardware to the new mailbox.
There’s never a dull moment around here.
A new Dunkin’ opened up about a week ago, whereupon this happened in the right-angled drive-thru lane:
A closer look shows they need more concrete down there:
If that were my gas service, I might have put up two ineffective bollards.
Sharper eyes than mine pointed out I misspelled Poughkeepsie, so I took advantage of the opportunity to make the whole thing look better:
It turns out the low-surface-energy tape stuck like glue to the acrylic tag (because that’s what it’s designed for) and peeled right off the laminating film on the printed paper. So I stuck some ordinary adhesive film to the back of the new paper label, left its protective paper on the other side, cold laminated the film+paper, laser-cut the outline, peeled off the back side of the laminating film with the protective paper, and stuck the new adhesive to the LSE tape still on the tag.
I have no idea how well this will work out in the long term, what with two adhesive layers bonded to each other, but this whole thing is in the nature of an experiment.
Another specimen at the corner gas station atop their flatbed hauler:
The exposed ICs add a piquant touch, don’t they?
We’ll never know the rest of the story …
The improved Holly Mirror Coaster looks pretty good:
Until you realize some of those specks aren’t surface dust and take a closer look:
The surface scratches are doubled by their reflection in the bottom mirror. The little dots that aren’t doubled reveal marks in the mirror surface itself.
An even closer look:
As nearly as I can tell, those are random speckles caused by the laser tube firing when it shouldn’t, due to the chaotic nature of the gas discharge going on inside.
In this case, they cause defects in the mirror coating allowing alcohol from the fat-tip permanent markers coloring the engraved areas to hit the acrylic. The starbursts come from stress cracks around the punctures.
Peering even closer shows similar cracks along the edges of the colored areas:
Not much to do about the random speckles, but it’s obvious I must up my coloring game.
Which would be significantly easier if rattlecan spray paint sprayed at winter temperatures …
After the first two snowflake coasters, it finally penetrated my thick skill that putting a 1 mm hole in the flake cut from the center of the plywood would convert it into a decorative window hanging:
Admittedly, I may be using the word “decorative” in a manner you had not previously encountered, but work with me on this.
Cutting a similar flake from transparent acrylic looks better:
Transparent acrylic turned out to be, well, too transparent, so I set up a LightBurn layout to “engrave” a light frosting on the flake before cutting it out:
That worked for all subsequent flakes, but I had to do something about the first few flakes. After realizing that the time to engrave an object depends only on its width, I set up a rectangle with the proper parameters, snugged two forlorn flakes next to each other, and fired the laser:
I thought using cardboard was a Good Idea™ for a stable backing, but lightly vaporizing the top layer produced an unbelievable amount of filth:
I had to scrub those poor flakes with dish detergent and a toothbrush to get them even close to their former pristine state; the blue one may never recover.
Anyhow, frosted flakes look good if you don’t look closely:
The grid pattern comes from the window screen in direct sunlight; the vertical bars are DIY BirdSavers.
The LightBurn layout produces 120 mm coasters to fit my 20 ounce mugs:
You get two hanging flakes: one plain plywood and one frosted acrylic!
The LightBurn SVG layout as a GitHub Gist:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
