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?
Having watched a tour bus jounce over the poor suffering street lamp base, I can easily understand how something similarly large killed the street signs:
The black ring in the upper left formerly positioned a barrel over the lamp base:
Something heavy shaved down those bolts:
The blue-and-white pull cord seems at risk of vanishing.
They’re now laying asphalt and the project continues apace.
A discussion about engraving leaves on the LightBurn forum prompted an experiment with a seasonally appropriate motif:
Those ran at 500 mm/s with 8 to 10% power, respectively the fastest speed & lowest power for my 60 W CO₂ laser.
The mmmm material has obvious irregularities and doesn’t lie flat:
A closer look:
The line interval is an absurdly large 0.5 mm to keep the leaf from falling apart, as the laser burns almost completely through despite the low power.
I thought about scattering a bunch of these along the driveway, but came to my senses just in time …
NYS DOT installed rows of street lamp foundations along both sides of Rt 376 as part of the intersection reconstruction that will eventually put a fourth traffic circle along Raymond Avenue. Until the intersection of Rombout House Lane with Rt 376 vanishes, this lamp base at the corner sits well within the turning radius of the heavy trucks entering & exiting the contractor’s material dump & equipment marshalling yard:
The fluorescent paint appeared after something heavy ran over the base and bent two of the bolts that should secure the lamp post.
A few days and a few more passes killed those bolts dead:
The barrier barrel in the background sat atop the base for a few days, but obviously didn’t affect the outcome.
A few hundred feet south, a heavy metallic mass sheared off another pair of bolts and bent the survivors:
Someone eventually moved the sheared bolt atop the base, so perhaps the damage has been noted where that note will have some effect.
The “bolts” are the threaded end of long rods embedded in the three or four feet of pre-cast concrete forming the lamp base. The concave concrete mass to the right in the first picture is residue from the poured concrete in the hole anchoring the base to the ground.
A four foot deep trench along the row of lamps holds electrical conduit between them for the wiring that will eventually surface through the conduit covered by the duct tape. The white-and-blue cord hauls the pull tape from one base to the next to pull the conductors through the conduit.
Replacing those cast-in-place bases won’t be a trivial (pronounced “inexpensive”) operation and I suspect a powerful motivation to just un-bend the wounded bolts and pretend they’re not severely weakened. I doubt a base with just two bolts will pass final inspection, but maybe the inspector won’t look inside the lamp pole covers.
Nah, that sort of thing never happens …
Spotted while walking on Rombout House Lane out of the Vassar Preserve:
Looks like somebody hit that pothole at a pretty good clip and knocked a wheel weight loose.
Rombout House Lane is a tiny L-shaped road serving as a Preserve entrance and exit not at the intersection of Rt 376 / Raymond / Hooker, but it’s slated for oblivion when NYS DOT finishes constructing the roundabout / rotary. With plenty of heavy equipment now crushing it, a walking pace is as fast as anyone should drive (or bicycle!) there.
For reasons not relevant here, I ended up making a field-expedient repair to a garden gate latch:
The hole in the post just to the left of the obviously improvised staple shows where the Original Staple had vanished, never to be seen again. It looks like the gate has shifted an inch or so to the right (or the post to the left), which would explain why the staple gradually worked loose.
The improvised staple is a length of coat hanger wire bent into a square U, with the ends snipped off at an acute angle:
Those points do look scary, don’t they?
Then I gently tapped it into place, driving maybe ¾ inch of wire in the wood, flattening the loop a little more than I wanted, but not enough to make me try again.
Not our gate, not Mary’s garden, but deer pose a threat to all veggies within, without regard to ownership.
I have *a lot* of coat hanger wire for repairs like this …
One of my Old Guy medicines has an elaborate desiccant container:
Being that type of Old Guy, I weighed the container when I emptied the bottle, then left it sit in the kitchen cabinet with the scale for a week as the weight slowly increased.
It started at 2.38 g and stabilized at 2.56 g, so it absorbed 0.18 g of water from the air after it got my attention.
Peeling the label revealed an obvious joint:
Looks like HO-scale coal in there!
The desiccant weighs all of 1.20 g, so it absorbed something more than 10% of its weight. That’s less than I found with silica gel, but I don’t know the starting weight or how much moisture it already absorbed.
A newly opened pill bottle disgorged a container weighing 2.42 g. The initial weight obviously depends on many variables, none of which would be tightly controlled.
Spotted on a scissors lift outside a grocery store being remodeled:
The SkyJack instruction manual explains the symbols, although some of the Quick Start instructions remain baffling.
We had great fun making up captions to suit the pictures …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 