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?
Spotted this at an Ohio rest area along I-90:
The slanted stake isn’t a normal vector for the sign surface, but you could derive one…
For whatever it’s worth, Ohio wins the Interstate Highway paving quality award, hands-down, in comparison with New York.
Within the memory of those yet living, these rooms had a purpose:
That’s at the fancy Chautauqua Lake rest area on eastbound I-86.
The majority of NY Interstate rest areas are, suffice it to say, far less ornate. Their walls now sport bare phone mounting plates and cut-off cables.
They don’t have any phone books these days, either…
An embossed sheet of my Geek Scratch Paper carried the valve knob sizes home from the garden, which prompted a comment from Mike about The Good Old Days in sunny California. Because I’ve disabled comments on old posts due to the spam load, here it is:
Ed has made references to his “geek scratch paper”… which brought back memories.
Gullivers Restaurant in Orange county, CA has been around since at least 1974. Back then they catered to the moderately expensive out-for-dinner crowd in the evenings and on the weekends, but during lunchtime they had a businessmans luncheon special in the main dining room that was oriented towards a decent meal and in-and-out-in-an-hour. The side rooms were for those that were doing longer lunches or business deals over lunch.
The key was that Gullivers was smack dab in the middle of Orange County’s tech region and right across the street from the large airport (now called John Wayne Airport). It’s also very close to Interstate 5, Interstate 405, and state highway 55… all 4-lane-each-direction major freeways.
During those lunch hours it was not unusual to see ID badges from over 20 companies in the main dining room. Several new products and at least one new company were formed over those lunches.
But the topic was “geek scratch paper”… well… Gullivers lunchtime paper placemats back in the 1970s were printed with graph paper on the back side!!!
Imagine: Geek scratch paper at every table provided by a thoughtful restaurant!!! And this was forty years ago!!!
I worked at one of the design houses in the area for over two years. I personally know of at least four new circuit designs, a half dozen new sheet metal designs, a number of circuit board re-designs, several new or modified software routines and at least six Product Change Notices and Engineering Change Orders that were started on the back of a Gullivers place mat (or three, or four…).
For a long time my resume had a bullet point that read “Able to convert lunchtime scratch paper engineering sketches into formal documentation and engineering change orders”.
I’ve not been inside Gullivers since 1981 – in over thirty years I’ve not been in that area except to drive on Interstate 5 on the way from Los Angeles to San Diego. The restaurant may be gone or remade itself into something else. But the next time I’m in that part of southern California I’ll make a special stop and check, and if their placemats still have graph paper on the back side, I’ll email you a photo or three.
On a different but similar topic… At one time the local ham radio club members used to choose which restaurant to migrate to after the monthly meetings by which ones had a blank back side on the place mats…. especially for the planning sessions prior to major events.
Mike WA6ILQ
A few minutes after we started riding, an insect collided with my helmet. About 3/60 second before impact:
We paused in a park at the far end of the ride, rolled out, and another insect buzzed past:
Both of those flew within a few inches of the lens, far inside the camera’s fixed-focus near point, and it’s a wonder they look as good as they do. Looking at successive frames reveals wingbeats, although they’re surely flapping much faster than frame rate and therefore heavily aliased.
Fortunately, a Gas Hawk didn’t come that close:
All from the Sony HDR-AS30V in 1280×720 at 60 frame/s. The bug images were ruthlessly cropped to show the full-size dot-for-dot camera image, then stored with minimal compression.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been buzzed on the bike, but it’s a record for one ride.
We noticed far more sparrows than usual in the garden, some flying clumsily, then saw both adults feeding a nestling peering from the nesting box:
Our presence interrupted the regular feeding pattern, stalling the male sparrow atop the utility pole with a tempting snack in his beak:
Even when it’s time to leave, just thinking about growing up and joining the world makes you tired:
May they all eat many garden insects!
Taken with the Sony DSC-H5 and tele extender lens, zoomed all the way in, with a touch of manual focus and exposure override.
Our Larval Engineer stopped by, on her way to a half-year co-op job out around Route 128, and devoted a few days to merge-sorting / triaging her possessions. Having shown her the HP 74754A plotter project, she later dropped a bag o’ stuff on my desk without comment:
The perforated pen holder stuck to the plotter case (hey, it would still fit!) in front of the carousel with a bit of foam tape on an angled bracket you can’t quite see. It held 15 pens at the ready: I really used that plotter.
The doodle on the yellow sheet sketches a bulky adapter between the spindle nose thread on the Sherline CNC mill and a plotter cartridge. The flange-less pen body might just fit into the spindle bore, but I remember concluding that machining pen bodies or adapters wasn’t worth the effort. Now it’s a simple matter of some OpenSCAD source code and a few hours of hands-off production, so perhaps I should re-think that.
No dates on anything, but I got the Sherline in 2004. The pen holder probably dates back to the late 80s, shortly after I got the plotter. Most likely, I gave her the bag o’ stuff and told her to make something interesting; it could still happen…
A while back, Keith Ward sent a Big Box o’ Plotter Pens that:
After a bit of sorting, I had a quartet of “disposable” liquid ink pens with contents ranging from desiccated to gummy. With nothing to lose (and having already cut a clearance slot in the plotter case), I drilled a small hole in the top of each reservoir, squirted some inkjet printer ink into the void, and taped the hole closed.
Surprisingly, a little liquid love restored all but the black pen to working condition, if not perfect heath:
I think the blurred white disk floating in the reservoir sealed the end where you jam the tip in place to activate the pen. The blob of dark gunk shows the reservoir didn’t start with yellow ink, but I had nothing to lose.
The top pen in this picture is another style / brand with a smaller reservoir:
The white pen in the foreground has a 0.3 mm ceramic tip, contains its original green ink, and works as well as it ever did; it might be refillable, too.
The liquid-ink pens have a serpentine vent in the tip. This is a Genuine New-Old-Stock pen in a four-pen case labeled HP 5061-7566:
The serpentine path connects the exterior vent opening (facing you) to a tiny hole (on the other side of the blue shaft) into the ink chamber. As it turns out, a new hole drilled in the reservoir admits enough air to drain the (freshly refilled) liquid ink through the serpentine path all over the workbench. Having some experience with refilling inkjet cartridges, I deployed a towel decorated with colorful splotches in anticipation of such an unexpected event, although my fingers looked considerably more cheerful than usual for a few days.
The black pen never worked quite right, but the other three did fine. The ceramic pen is at the top:
Protip: the blown contrast and rear-surface bleedthrough behind the yellow ink should tell you it isn’t visible in normal room light. I must mix yellow with another color if I ever refill that pen that again.
KiCad uses only one pen for the entire schematic, even when you select “plot in color”, suggesting nobody has sent the “plotter” output stream to an actual plotter in a long, long time.
Despite the charm of watching the plotter crank out an entire schematic page, it’s not a compelling enough user experience to replace an inkjet printer. For an art project, one might be seeking an entirely different user experience and the answer might be different, too.
Selah.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 