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 pair of robins picked the best place for their nest:
I disabled the remote control for those spotlights, as we won’t be using them for a while.
Although I’m sure it’s a wonderful nest, robins certainly leave plenty of debris around their construction site:
I can’t figure how to mount a camera close enough for a good view and keep it out of their landing pattern.
A shed snakeskin appeared when I opened the garage door:
The skin sits atop the retaining wall next to the door, on a stone(-like) background with poor contrast: even an empty snake has good camouflage!
The exterior looks like genuine snakeskin:
I didn’t know the interior has an entirely different pattern:
As far as I can tell, the snake was going about its business elsewhere in the yard.
To be fair, there’s some luck involved.
Update: After Mitch nudged me, I found the (somewhat the worse for wear) snakeskin again. The head end was split, much as I described, but the tail end was intact (the snake having pulled out like a finger from a glove) and what I though was the inside of the top was the outside of the bottom, just pushed inward to form a very thin double layer.
Today I Learned … to always look closer!
A walk around Wappinger Lake brought me to the old penstock controls:
Still meshed after all these years:
The “new” penstock intake control, a pair of utterly practical and totally non-photogenic screw drives, sits just to the left of these relics.
A night view of the penstock from some years ago:
It still carries water to the recently refurbished power plant downstream on the right.
Those gears will remain meshed after everything else rots away …
The Dutchess Rail Trail has gotten far more use in recent months than ever before, with entire families walking along the path:
Almost by definition, though, goslings don’t practice social distancing …
The pivot on the Fiskars Small Detail Scissors (the name is larger than the hardware!) in the bathroom gradually worked loose to the point where I hauled it to the Basement Shop and whacked the rivet with a concave punch:
Setting the rim of the rivet down a smidge tightened the joint wonderfully well and two oil dots smoothed the action.
I grew up using these concave punches (I have several sizes) to set finish(ing) nails, but apparently real nail punches have a nubbin in the middle to engage the little recess in the nail head which used to be common, back when finish nails arrived well-finished from the factory.
They’re not roll pin punches, either, because those have a different nubbin to support the inside of the pin.
Peering into the bulb salvaged from the Nissan fog light suggests the scuff on the lens corresponds to an impact mighty enough to disarrange the filament:
No surprise, as the car completely shattered the utility pole.
The glow draws 1.5 A from a bench supply at 1 V, just to show the filament isn’t lighting up evenly across those gaps. The bulb runs at 55 W from 12 V and would be, I’m sure, blindingly bright, although the heat concentrated in those few coils suggests it’d burn out fairly quickly.
By LED standards, though, you don’t get much light for your 1.5 W …
An underexposed version highlights the filament, just for pretty:
Cropped to 9:16, it’s now a desktop background.
A pileated woodpecker devoted considerable attention to debugging the remains of a stump in our front yard:
It’s surely a descendant of this one, eleven years ago:
If you’re willing to wait a decade or so, a stump pretty much falls apart on its own, meanwhile providing habitat for critters both great and small.
Update: By popular demand, a slightly pixelated pileated woodpecker:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 