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?
Several of this year’s praying mantises set up shop in the decorative grasses bracketing the front door:
We found their egg masses, formally called ootheca, attached to the stems in mid-October:
They feel like rigid urethane foam and seem eminently protective:
We’ll cut around the masses when it’s time to clear out the dead grass next spring. I was tempted to bring one inside, but dealing with a gazillion tiny mantises in a few months would be daunting.
As you might expect by now, I harvest various bits & pieces from the PCs falling off the trailing edge of my assortment. The bag of obsolete DRAM recently floated to the top of the heap:
Half a gig of ECC RAM from what might have been a fire-breathing Pentium Pro box:
The PCBs along the top apparently filled vacant memory slots.
Some 32 and 64 MB DRAM from a few IBM laptops I turned into picture frames:
DDR2 DRAM in assorted sizes & speeds:
PC133 DDR DRAM, with four sticks of 1 GB PC3 along the bottom:
If you look closely, you may see something you can use. No reasonable offer refused …
Just to see how it worked, I engraved the Tek Circuit Computer scales on scrap CDs:
At first, I hadn’t correctly scaled the text paths, but the diffraction patterns caught my eye:
The illumination comes from two “daylight” T8 LED tubes in a shoplight fixture, running left-to-right, so it seems I held the camera rotated 1/4 turn in landscape mode. The pix look OK either way.
Bottom deck:
Middle deck:
Top deck, with the camera held portrait-style:
I’m a sucker for diffraction patterns …
The tiny engravings don’t photograph well, because they’re floating atop the transparent disc and the rainbow patterns from the data layer, but they still come out OK even when scaled to fit on a hard drive platter:
Looking good!
So I bought some LM12UU linear bearings from a nominally US-based eBay seller and received a suitably marked bag:
They looked a bit on the skinny side:
It seems somebody in the supply chain wasn’t paying attention, which isn’t surprising given the its ability to deliver ten hunks of reasonably precise machining to my mailbox for a buck-and-a-half apiece.
As it happens, I already have far too many LM8UU bearings and, after some unavailing back-and-forth with the seller, eBay customer service determined neither of us was “at fault” and refunded the whole order.
Being in no particular hurry, I ordered the next lot from halfway around the planet. Apparently, I’m now known throughout the land:
Another label atop that one sported my actual address, with a matching Orange Connex tracking number barcode. Turns out OC is a “a joint venture between a leader in Chinese private equity investment, CITI CPE, and the a [sic] pioneer of global e-commerce platform, ebay”.
AFAICT, containers of “direct from China” packages arrive in the belly of a cargo airplane, get a sticker with their final destination, and enter the US postal system. It’s not clear buying from a “US seller” changes anything, as many of those packages come from addresses matching a building next to an airport.
This came about while tinkering up a shade for a repurposed LED downlight:
It’s a 4 inch DWV pipe coupling I bored out to fit the LED housing, which was ever so slightly larger than the pipe OD.
Cutting it off required as much workspace as the poor little lathe had:
Ignore the toolpost handle across the top. What’s important: the cutoff blade poking out of the QCTP, above the orange carriage stop lock lever, extending just far enough to cut through the coupling’s wall before the compound hits the coupling. The compound slide is all the way out against the cross-slide DRO, rotated at the only angle putting the tool where it needs to be and clearing the end of the coupling.
It ended reasonably well:
But, in retrospect, was hideously bad practice. Next time, I’ll make a fixture to hold the fitting on a faceplate.
My buddy dBm took pity on my plight:
The far end has a 2.5 mm hex driver, although I’ve never encountered a nut for an M1×0.25 screw in the wild. It doesn’t fit an 0-80 nut and gulps 00-90 nuts, so it’s definitely hard metric.
My collection of glasses required an aggregate two turns of tightening, which prompted dBm to remind me of threadlock.
Done!
Thank you, dBm!
Mary made a batch of veggies in tomato sauce and froze meal-size portions as winter treats. The moist air inside the containers froze into delicate ice blades on the zucchini slices:
A closer look:
The blade cross-sections might be oblong hexagons, but it’s hard to tell with crystals melting almost instantly after the lid comes off. Some of the smaller hair-like blades reminded me of tin whiskers.
Yummy!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 