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 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:
So the question came up: “Exactly what happens when one of those things gets wet?”
Which obviously requires an experiment:
That’s the mis-cut top deck revealing why GRBL really needs four digits after the decimal point, but, other than that, it’s perfectly representative of the genre: heavy paper, good ink, nicely laminated in plastic.
Prediction: water should seep into the paper, dissolve the ink, maybe delaminate the plastic, and generally make a mess.
Which is exactly what happens:
User Advisory: your shiny new Homage Tektronix Circuit Computer is not waterproof, so don’t use it in the sauna!
The debris field from a recent high-energy collision with a utility pole just north of Red Oaks Mill included another attractive hunk of jewelry:
I asked the guy who runs the towing service across the intersection if this was a “high-performance car / low-performance driver” situation. He said “Nah, the car was a piece of crap.” It apparently collided with the pole after pulling out of the adjacent gas station with entirely too much foot on the throttle; the young driver was last seen having considerable difficulty with a field sobriety test.
Anyhow, the labeling suggests it’s the right-side fog light from a Nissan car.
After removing various shattered plastic mounts and scrubbing off the obvious dirt, the lens didn’t look much better:
The bright triangle is one facet of the hood over the 55 W halogen bulb. The lens seems to be covered with a scattershot coat of gray spray paint or primer, rather than ordinary road grime, applied with surprising uniformity over the entire surface.
A quick wet-sand operation with 400 through 3000 grit paper, then some Simichrome, cleaned it up pretty well:
Repeating the whole process, this time with a vigorous circular motion:
It’s definitely got a used-car finish: nice polish over deep gouges.
Look closely to see 400 grit diagonal scratches headed upward to the right; I must use 600 or 800 grit paper between the 400 and 1000. I don’t care about optical clarity, just knocking back the worst of the damage will suffice.
Methinks it would look pretty with internal RGB LED lighting, although the optics are obviously set up for a halogen filament just under the edge of the internal hood. If I get it just right, the thing could project a beam across the room …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 