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.
Taking & making images.
This truck’s home base seems to be south of Maloney on Rt 376 and it occasionally passes me on the road:
My eye-blink reaction that it was a junker turns out to be completely wrong, as it sports a really great paint job (vinyl wrap?):
The junker aspect may not be quite what they expected…
I’m not sure that’s skeuomorphic, but I don’t know the proper term.
I generally ride somewhat further into the travel lane than some folks would prefer, but I have good reason for that. Here’s how bicycling along Raymond Avenue at 14 mph = 20 ft/s on a pleasant summer morning works out…
T = 0.000 — Notice anything out of the ordinary?
T = 1.000 — Me, neither:
T = 1.500 — Ah!
T = 2.000 — I’m flinching into the right turn required for a sharp left turn:
Less than half a second reaction time: pretty good, sez me.
T = 2.833 — End of the flinch:
T = 3.000 — Now I can lean and turn left:
T = 3.267 — This better be far enough left:
T = 3.333 — The door isn’t moving:
T = 3.567 — So I’ll live to ride another day:
I carry a spectacular scar from slashing my arm on a frameless car window, back in my college days: the driver flipped the door open as I passed his gas cap at a good clip. The collision wrecked the window, the door, and my bike, but didn’t break my arm, sever any nerves, or cut any arteries. I did discover human fatty tissue, neatly scooped from under my arm onto the window, is yellowish, which wasn’t something I needed to know.
Searching for Raymond Avenue will bring up other examples of bicycle-hostile features along this stretch of NYSDOT’s trendy, traffic-calmed design…
We are not dog people, so being awakened at 12:45 one morning by a large dog barking directly under the bedroom windows wasn’t expected. After a bit of flailing around, I discovered the dog parked under the windows on the other end of the bedroom:
That’s entirely enough dog that I was unwilling to venture outside and attempt to affix it to, say, the patio railing, where it could await the town’s animal control officer in the morning:
It’s not a stray, because it wears two collars: one with leash D-rings and the other carrying a black electronics box that could be anything from a GPS tracker to a shock box that’s supposed to keep it inside one of those electronic fences. If the latter, a battery change seems past due.
Being a dog, it spent the next two hours in power-save mode on the patio, intermittently moaning / growling / barking at every state change in the back yard: scurrying rodents, falling leaves, far-distant sirens, neighborhood dogs, you name it. We would be dog people to want that level of launch-on-warning, but we’re not.
If parvovirus were available through Amazon Prime, I’d be on it like static cling. By the kilogram on Alibaba, perhaps?
Grainy photos taken in Nightshot IR mode with the DSC-F717, which works well enough after I (remember to) jiggle the Memory Stick to re-seat the ribbon cable connections.
Hat tip to Sherlock in Silver Blaze.
NYSDOT re-striped Rt 376 using paint with sprayed-on glass beads, rather than plastic strips, which produces lovely rainbows when the sun comes from directly behind. Alas, my helmet camera can’t resolve faint colors against the background glare and doesn’t show the circular reflection cutoff:
However, the scattered beads light up the pavement’s cracks and crevices.
Four days later, the drifts of beads have dissipated to leave bright reflections anywhere the tires don’t reach:
That’s along the big traffic circle at the Raymond / Collegeview / Forbus intersection.
Riding into the Village of Wappingers Falls, there’s a lumpy patched pothole just ahead of the fairing & front wheel:
You can watch (and I can hear) the fairing flex as the front end jounces over the patch:
The hydration pack slung behind the seat also jounces and, when the reservoir bag bottoms out, the sudden pressure increase squirts water out of the bite valve, all over my face and goggles, and way out in front of the camera:
The camera runs at 60 images/second: those 28 images span all of 450 ms.
Two seconds later, the droplet stabilized into a nice round lens:
The low humidity of a lovely day evaporated the drop after another three minutes…
Mary used a garbage can lid to shelter some plants, left it in the garden for a while, and a critter moved into the new shelter. She first noticed two well-prepared front entrances:
And a rear entrance or, perhaps, the emergency exit:
Gingerly lifting the lid, she found a dismantled bird corpse:
Along with a large stash of sour cherries from a nearby bush:
A good-size toad kept an eye on the proceedings:
We didn’t know toads ate sour cherries, but the evidence seems clear:
The image of a toad taking down a bird can’t be unseen, but, more likely, a recently fledged nestling took shelter and couldn’t figure out how to get out again.
We’ll never know the rest of the story.
At some point along a recent grocery ride, the top half of the flag mast on the BOB Yak trailer went missing.
We had a general idea of where it happened, but, fortunately, I Have The Technology:
The flag and pole ended up just off the road, only slightly the worse for wear. I hadn’t planned on riding two dozen miles on a rather hot and humid summer day, but so it goes.
The lower ferrule chafed away enough of the fiberglass pole that it could slip downward, eventually releasing the upper ferrule:
That split near the end enlarged the pole enough that the ferrule couldn’t slide off, so I contented myself with cross-drilling the whole affair for a 1-72 screw, packing epoxy into the hole, tucking more epoxy up inside the bottom end of the ferrule, then burying the screw and nut:
While I had it on the bench, I replaced the somewhat shredded fluorescent orange tape just under the flag and added a strip of diagonally striped red-and-white retroreflective tape for an attractive barber-pole appearance.
That should last for a little while longer…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 