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?
I walked out for milk just after 6 am one morning and confronted an aerial assault force:
The Balloon Festival had a mass launch from the Dutchess County Airport just before I reached the end of the driveway on Sunday, 12 July 2015 …
Surely, a good time was had by all!
As I rolled into the Stewart’s Shop on a milk-and-eggs run, a plume of smoke spiraled out of the cigarette butt station near the door, way off on the left side:
A closer look:
By the time I unhitched myself from the bike and reached the door, two smoke jets squirted from the top and a pall of breathtakingly foul smoke filled the parking lot. I mooched a big cup of water from the folks behind the counter and pulled off the container’s lid, which let in enough oxygen to ignite a full-up fire in the heap of cigarette packs, plastic wrappers, butts, lottery tickets, receipts, and other combustible junk atop the sand bucket in the base of the butt dump. Sprinkling the water over the blaze knocked it back; I replaced the lid and declared victory.
I always take a shower after returning home from a ride, but, this time, we also ran all my bike clothing through the washer right away.
Phew…
Verily, it is written: Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.
From Russia, probably without love, routed through Bulgaria via eBay:
They’re glass electrometer resistors from late in the Cold War:
That one presents 100 GΩ between its lead wires, which would count as open in any other circuit I’ve ever built.
The assortment arrived much richer than advertised, although I’d be even happier with a few more 10 GΩ and a few less 100 MΩ resistors. The 1000 GΩ = 1 TΩ resistor in the upper right seems absurd on the face of it, but there it sits.
I have no way to measure these, other than to build an electrometer amp and see what happens…
Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t make it wrong:
Spotted at the U-Pick Blueberry Field Formerly Known As Secor’s.
Spotted this while walking out for supper after a day at the CNC Workshop:
Then it got worse:
The lower left block remained fixed throughout the glitzy scrolling / rolling / blinking updates in the sign’s repertoire:
The affected block is 64 pixels tall and, at a guess, 128 pixels wide. Looks like a module enable failure…
A semitrailer load of scrap metal pulled into an I-90 rest stop just after we arrived:
Apparently, they dump the scrap into the trailer from a great height and, sometimes, a bar can gash the aluminum side wall. That slice obviously predates the current load, but you can see how it happened: dump a load atop a bar leaning against the side and you get a giant metal shear.
The trailer also had several puncture wounds:
I didn’t notice the circular feature at the bottom center until I looked at the picture, but it certainly reminded me of a bullet hole in glass plate. Close inspection of the original image suggests it’s a welded stress relief border around a drilled hole, perhaps with a boss on the inside of the trailer:
Ya never know what you’ll find out on the road…
We spent a pleasant evening hour walking & sitting on the town beach in North East PA on our way back from Detroit:
The entire area smells strongly of the grapes that grow well in the hilly terrain south of Lake Erie. A local expert said that Welch’s (a major local employer) moved its CHQ to Concord MA to put a better hometown name on the company’s letterhead; being based in North East evidently didn’t have the same ring.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 