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?
The three collet pen holders I got a while ago came with ink cartridges:
So I bought three bucks worth of a dozen pens to get pretty colors, whereupon I discovered they didn’t fit into the collet. Turns out the locating flanges aren’t in the same place along the cartridges:
The flanges on the top cartridge have been shaved down perilously close to the ink, but it now fits into the collet.
Bonus: a dozen fairly stiff springs that are sure to come in handy for something!
Aaand this front-end loader will require more than the patch kit and CO2 inflator from my bike pack before it’s back in service:
The local yellow iron inventory spends most of the winter snoozing in shopping mall parking lots, waiting to clear the snowfall. It’s been a light year so far, which is fine with me.
Apparently, cart corrals last about four years and, with this refresh, the assemblers got it right:
All the white-on-blue marker signs up on the poles seem to be top-side-up, too.
Of course, not many people bother returning their carts to the corrals, but the bewilderment factor should be lower now.
And, yes, the previous mis-assembly remained uncorrected. I can’t take credit for the replacement, even though it happened during my adminstration …
Spotted a slow-motion sculpture while on a walk for errands:
The fence encloses a lot next to a long-disused fuel oil (?) storage / distribution facility. The county’s historic aerial photos suggest the trees have grown since the the building inside the fence vanished in the mid-1970s.
We spotted this anomalous situation halfway up Cochran Hill Road:
It looks like a Verizon FiOS cable box filled with jumpers for all the houses along the way:
You’ll note the missing lock and misplaced latch. The box face isn’t scarred, so getting in must not have required much effort.
The box carries no company identification or emergency numbers, but it does have two theft deterrents:
Perhaps the deterrents worked better in warmer months.
Given how little Verizon wants to hear from its FiOS customers, I have sub-zero motivation for devoting the hours required to find out if it’s their problem. Somebody along Cochran should have enough standing for the case.
We spotted this assortment of jewelry gleaming along Clove Creek:
A closer look at a necklace:
And the brooch:
The water level has been dropping for several days as the air temperature went from tolerably cold to well below freezing.
It’s better in person; I couldn’t get close enough to avoid using the Pixel’s digital zoom, so the images have more gritty texture than you’d expect.
After the Great DMM Probe Debacle, I picked up similar-but-different set of cheap probes and clip leads.
The needle-tip probes carry a 20 A current rating:
If you look out along the wire, though, you’ll find a 10 A rating:
Now, even though 20 AWG wire in silicone may carry a 17 A spec, the corresponding 200 °C temperature seems excessive for a test probe. Limiting the current to 10 A would reduce the power dissipation by two thirds, which should limit the temperature rise. Whether the wire actually contains 20 AWG of actual copper strands remains an open question.
The kit also had banana plug / test hooks with no particular rating, although the wire allegedly has 16 AWG conductors:
The banana plug / alligator clip combo claims 30 A, also with 16 AWG conductors. Who knows? It could be true.
For comparison, the Siglent SDM3045 DMM came with these probes:
The probes carry a 10 A rating and, although the wires aren’t branded, I’ll assume they have good-enough QC to ensure the copper matches the claims. The production values seem a bit higher, too, even if they bear a striking resemblance to the cheap probes.
And, for reference, the probes with the cold solder joint also claim 20 A:
Wouldn’t trust any of ’em for more than a few amps, tops …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 