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?
Around this time last year, Humana was spamming me with emails sporting a misconfigured unsubscribe link, so that I could not get myself off their mailing list.
This year, they have the unsubscribe link set up properly, except …
Apparently my email address was good enough to get their junk email to me, but it’s not good enough for them to stop sending junk.
I was pretty sure this was deliberate last year. Now, I’m certain.
And they want me to trust them?
You can’t make this stuff up.
Another layer of the memorabilia box produced my mother’s 1953 diary, with the first entry in my father’s hand:
With the benefit of hindsight, some entries stand out:
These were certainly not fresh from the garden:
Perhaps reaching this stage required some persuasion:
This required me to be outdoors:
Mom’s case of “strep throat” required three penicillin injections to knock it down:
I get up a little earlier and go to bed a little later nowadays, but I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of this:
My eyesight was much better back then:
My parents ran a restaurant out of the house:
As you might expect, the diary tapers off after the first year.
Sorting out a box of memorabilia produced a dusty bottle full of crumbled brown pills:
The English part of the label:
Indication: Adequate and optimal treatment for gastrointestinal disorders, malnutrition, neurasthenia, tuberculosis, bere-beri, etc. It improves the appetite and promotes health
Dose: 4-8 tablets[,] 3 times a day
WAKAMOTO-HOMPO
EIYOTO-IKUJINO-KAI, CO., LTD.
SHIBA-PARK, TOKYO
My father spent several years on an all-expenses-paid trip to the South Pacific between 1943 and 1945. I have no idea what relation that bottle might have to his adventures, but the English text suggests it’s not a souvenir of those times.
Somewhat surprisingly, Wakamoto is still in business:
I’m sure it’s good for what ails you …
A dentist’s office has been a-building for what seems entirely too long, but the outdoor sign finally went up. Being that type of guy, I had to take a closer look at how they wired up the LEDs:
That’s exactly as half-assed as it looks: unprotected PVC wires emerging from raw holes drilled into the backplate and burrowing into unsealed laser-cut acrylic loosely seated behind the white character boxes.
Everything you see is gonna be full of bugs in no time!
I’ve done similar botch jobs, but generally for my own use …
Half a year ago, a stash of vintage acrylic sheets emerged from the Outer Darkness into the Shop Light:
That big yellowed sheet is 9 mm = 3/8 inch thick, with an inch of warp, entirely enough to keep it out of the laser cutter.
So I cleared some floor space and loaded the sheet with a collection of scrap steel sufficient to bend it the other way:
The main weight comes from a perfectly sized snippet of railroad rail, topped off with steel disks, angle iron, and a rugged scissors jack
The sheet didn’t touch the floor, so the weight kept stress on the plastic and it gradually flowed the other way:
The center remains 5 mm higher than the edges and, given that cold-flowing is at best an exponential process, I recently declared victory and added it to the stockpile. I’ll gnaw off small pieces for any given project, so the remaining warp won’t matter.
The rule of thumb says a CO₂ laser cutters needs 10 W per millimeter of acrylic, so my 60 W laser will be somewhat underpowered. Two or three passes should suffice and, for sure, nobody will kvetch about edge quality.
Mary persuaded the squash vine to run along the top of the garden fence, where it would get good sun, stay out from underfoot, and produce what we call aerosquash:
That bright green spot is a misplaced tree frog:
Well, maybe it’s the same frog we’ve seen elsewhere; it’s hard to tell with tree frogs.
Not everything green is froglike, though:
That one got dealt with … harshly.
Yeah, this is enough to knock your bike completely off course:
The black smudge matches a scuff on the right sidewall of the front tire. I think I hit it in that orientation and it pivoted clockwise while lifting the bike and shoving the tire to the left.
Another look from what was likely the right side of the shoulder:
I’ll give it a decent burial out back … and be glad our roles aren’t reversed!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 