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 myriad of tree frogs serenade us in the evenings, but we rarely see any. This fingernail-size critter was impossible to miss against a brown plastic trash can:
It sat tucked nose-up inside the handle until I loomed overhead, whereupon the edge seemed better. It eventually jumped to the ground, dozens of body lengths below, and hopped off into the leaf litter behind the cans.
We wished it well and expect to hear from it during the rest of the season.
Spotted in the corner gas station’s wrecked car lookaside buffer:
The white paint seemed familiar:
Word has it the 16 year old son was driving, with his father in the passenger seat, and managed to lose control without any of the usual causative factors. Everyone lived to tell the tale, which is a tribute to the contemporary auto tech we all take for granted.
Contrary to what we thought, they crashed around 8 pm and Central Hudson cut the power around midnight to repair the lines.
Looks they’ll need another truck; that ain’t gonna buff right out.
You’re on the ground floor of a motel, on your way to your room on the second floor, and you’ve found the elevators:
Which one of those six button-like objects will summon the elevator for a trip up to your room?
Quickly, press one of them!
Canada Geese seem primed to travel in a straight line, whether in the air, on water, along a rail trail, or even on a sidewalk:
They proceed around corners in an orderly manner:
But they completely ignore crosswalk markings:
We think two goose families joined forces for this outing: four large geese and seven goslings by our count.
The sidewalks sport a rich assortment of goose poop, so the geese obviously enjoy their hikes.
We woke just after midnight to a completely dark and silent house, I padded around shutting of half a dozen UPS units under various desks and benches, and we eventually got back to sleep:
According to our clocks, power actually returned about four hours later.
Our grocery ride the next morning went past the crash site:
Tracks in the grass leading up to the smashed mailbox on our right suggest the driver didn’t quite make the very slight curve leading to the straight section.
It was garbage collection day and the debris field covered the entire front lawn:
Both poles have rectangular reflectors, but the one on the smashed pole (on the left) shows the pole is maybe four feet shorter than it used to be.
We have no idea how a can of white paint got involved in the proceedings:
[Update: Now we know where the paint came from.]
Quite some years ago, an errant driver demolished the front corner of that house and, more recently, the whole building burned out, so there may be a jinx on the site.
Other than that, we had an uneventful ride …
Spotted behind a mall undergoing renovation:
Perhaps they were loading it from the end and didn’t notice the instructions:
Protip: Always get the biggest dumpster available!
With the Bafang BBS02 and all its gimcrackery on the Terry Symmetry buttoned up and ready to go, I took a few closeout pictures for future reference.
The motor has a sheaf of wires sticking out of the bottom crying out for a protective covering:
Although cameras tell only the truth they’re allowed to see and can be made to lie by omission, sometimes their latent truth was completely invisible to eyewitnesses in real time.
I only noticed the mis-routed shift cable when I looked through the last set of pictures.
It should pass through the plastic channel under the metal tab holding the cable guide to the bottom bracket shell:
Normally, aiming the cable into the channel is no big deal. In this case, I had to undo the shift cable, remove the left crank, loosen the motor and rotate it out of the way, nudge the cable with a small screwdriver, then reinstall in reverse order.
Dang, that was close …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 