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?
Dump into a stick blender cup:
Blend thoroughly. Slurp.
Notes:
AFAICT, this is the only way to make an avocado palatable.
There is absolutely no connection with yesterday’s post.
It could be an M107 155 mm gun, but the double muzzle brake (the front vent is shadowed) identifies it as a mighty M110A2 203 mm self-propelled howitzer:
Back in the day, being 30 km away from a kiloton or ten of nuclear blast was deemed Far Enough, although nobody actually pulled the string to find out. Apparently, sections of surplus barrels make hella-good bunker buster bombs, at least when you’re in a hurry.
Obsolete, of course, explaining why it’s parked behind the York Agricultural and Industrial Museum, seen from the wonderful Heritage Rail Trail. We rode south from York almost to the the Maryland line, then back again; a good time was had by all.
Spotted on a motel room door:
I wonder if all the peepholes in the motel were installed with a similar lack of attention to detail; it was recently renovated, so this is new work.
For sure, they’ll never be properly adjusted …
Obviously, the good folks at Park Tool never anticipated a three-cross spoke pattern on a 20 inch wheel:
It’s my trusty Park Tool TM-1 Spoke Tension Meter, unchanged since shortly after the turn of the millennium.
For future reference, the rebuilt wheel spoke tensions came out around 25, slightly lower than the 27-ish I measured on Mary’s bike; it didn’t occur to me to measure the tension until after I’d relaxed the spokes. I’ll ride it for a while before doing any tweakage.
The spoke pattern is pretty close to four-cross, due to the large-flange Phil Wood hubs:
Which makes for a hella-strong wheel, particularly seeing as how it’s very lightly loaded. The Tour Easy we got for our lass came with a radially spoked rim around a Phil hub.
I transferred the hub and laced spokes intact to the new rim by the simple expedient of duct-taping the spokes into platters, removing the nipples, stacking the rims, sliding the spokes across into their new homes, reinstalling the nipples, then tightening as usual.
This parts collection appeared atop the driveway wall, arranged just as shown:
It seems something snagged a large bee (not a honeybee!), ate the contents, and left the wrapper behind. We’ll never know the rest of the story.
Puts one in mind of Turner in Count Zero, though.
The top surface of the Anker LC40 flashlight serving as the daytime running light on Mary’s bike sees plenty of sunlight, particularly when it’s sitting beside her garden plots, and the black anodized finish on the screw-in battery cap has begun fading:
The bottom side of the cap is in fine shape, as is the main case, so the two parts came from different metal finishing lines.
The light on my bike, a marginally newer and essentially identical Bolder LC40, remains all black. I have no idea what “Bolder” means in this context.
Obviously, I must get out more …
The question occasionally comes up as to why one would want a Tektronix A6302 Hall effect current probe and AM503 amplifier. The answer is simple: non-contact, essentially non-invasive current monitoring.
I used the venerable dead-battery Astable Multivibrator to check out the rebalanced A6302 probe:
The scope screen in the background shows the two base voltages at the top, plus the overall battery current along the bottom:
The current at 1 mA/div shows plenty of noise, but the 200 ms LED pulse is barely 1 mA tall. The two AA alkaline cells have faded to 2.5 V, so the “wearable” white-LED-with-dyed-overcoat runs far under its nominal 3.6-ish V spec.
There’s basically no other way to get that result, because inserting a current-sense resistor into the circuit will alter the results, plus be intractably difficult to measure, particularly if you need the current in a non-ground-referenced branch of the circuit.
The AM503 has terrible thermal drift, by contemporary standards, but after the first half-hour or so it’s manageable for short durations. I’m thinking of epoxying a small knob to the screwdriver-adjustable twiddlepot to simplify the baseline adjustment.
Alas, even non-working probes and amps have become eBay collectables. You could, of course, buy new.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 