Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Their offspring began emerging in early July, with our first picture on 3 July. I’ll leave the image file dates in place so you can reach your own conclusions:
IMG_20190703_184657 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – right
We think a titmouse (a known predator) pecked some holes, including the upper hole on the middle tube, as they seemed to expose solid (and presumably inedible) chitin from the outside:
IMG_20190703_184647 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – left
More holes appeared in a few days:
IMG_20190709_172632 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – right
The irregular spacing along each tube suggests they don’t emerge in the reverse order of installation:
IMG_20190709_172623 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – left
Three days later:
IMG_20190712_181634 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – right
IMG_20190712_181625 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – left
Two weeks after the first holes appeared:
IMG_20190717_172908 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – right
IMG_20190717_172922 – Organ Pipe Mud Dauber Nest – left
No more holes have appeared since then, so it seems one young wasp emerges every few days.
This nest produced about a dozen wasps, with perhaps as many launch failures. We’ll (try to) remove it and examine the contents in a few months.
We expect they’ll start building nests all over the house in another month …
Update: Fortunately for us, no nests appeared before the first freeze, so the wasps are holed up elsewhere for the winter.
After five years, I figured it’d be a Good Idea™ to replace the Forester’s wiper blades. Being in the Walmart at the time, I tried to use their helpful Wiper Selector gadget:
Walmart Wiper Selector
You’d think whoever is responsible for updating / replacing such things would have done so several times during the last eight years.
Well, all I can say is it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Alas, even the newly exposed fiber didn’t make much of a mark on the paper and, as you’d expect, the ragged ceramic tip dragged painfully across the paper. I assume the fiber had filled with fossilized dry ink.
A New Old Stock bag of fiber-tip pens emerged from the Big Box o’ Pens while I was flailing around:
HP 7475A Plotter – NOS Green pen package
I think the “812” in the lower right corner is a date code, most likely early in 1988, so the pens started their lifetime countdown at least three decades ago. They still work, though:
I’m sure the hard stop loosened the tolerances along the shaft, but the mower fired right up (with that new blade!) and has no more vibration than usual, despite the seriously bent blade mount.
I no longer have a deep emotional attachment to lawn mowers, which is apparently common, as the label advises me there’s no need to change the oil:
The ancient utility pole on the north side of our property fell over a few hours after a thunderstorm rolled through:
Fallen Utility Pole – end view
Fortunately, the wire clamps were upward and it just lay there without sparks or excitement. It feeds the vacant house out back, so restoring power wasn’t urgent.
Unfortunately, the lines neatly bisected Mary’s garden:
Fallen Utility Pole – garden view
The utility crew arrived a few hours later, disconnected the triplex at the fallen pole, rolled it up, secured it to the source pole out front, and promised a different crew would replace the pole in a while:
Central Hudson truck – 2019-06-27
We agreed restoring service to other folks who needed it should take priority.
Mary’s been ducking the various cable TV / phone / FiOS cables ever since.
The pole has been God’s own toothpick for quite some time, as shown by this picture from 2001:
CHGE pole – rear – top
Fortunately for us, its pole tag hadn’t fallen off in all those years:
CHGE Pole Tag – mid-north
That little tag may save us ten large during this exquisite little inconvenience …
Then plotting the data points and eyeballing a straight-line curve fit:
MPCNC – Drag Knife Holder – spring constant
Doing it on hard mode definitely has a certain old-school charm. The graph highlights mis-measured data and similar problems, because, if you don’t see a pretty nearly straight line, something’s gone awry.
But we live in the future, so there’s an easier way:
Droid48 – Spring Rate – Linear Fit coefficients
Well, OK, it’s the future as of the early 1990s, when HP introduced its HP 48 calculators. I’m using the Droid48 emulator on my ancient Google Pixel: living in the past, right here in the future.
Start by firing up the STAT library (cyan arrow, then the 5 key), selecting Fit Data … from the dropdown list, then selecting the Linear Fit model:
Droid48 – Spring Rate – Linear Fit screen
Then tap EDIT and enter the data in a tiny spreadsheet:
Droid48 – Spring Rate – Linear Fit data
My default “engineering mode” numeric display format doesn’t show well on the tiny screen. Tapping the WID→ key helps a bit, but shorter numbers would be better.
With the data entered, set an X value and tap the PRED key to get the corresponding Y value:
Droid48 – Spring Rate – Linear Fit prediction
Tapping the OK button puts the line’s coefficients on the stack, as shown in the first picture. Write ’em on a strip of tape, stick to the top of the holder, and it’s all good:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 