Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Back in August, the squash vines were in full flower:
Bees in Squash Flower – overview
Here’s a closer look:
Bees in Squash Flower – detail
Pop quiz: how many bees do you count?
With the benefit of watching them move, I counted nine bees in that blossom!
Winter squash vines bear large flowers (that blossom is the size of my outstretched hand) that attract large bees: bumblebees and their cousins, carpenter bees. Quite often, bumblebees spend the night huddled inside the blossom and emerge early the next day when they reach flying temperature. Honeybees, being more social, return to their hives overnight; we’re pleased to see that there’s at least one feral hive in the neighborhood.
We attended the Walkway Over the Hudson’s Moonwalk event / fundraiser on the night of the Hunter’s Moon, which also happened to be a penumbral eclipse. You can barely see the darkness in the lower right-hand quadrant, down around Tycho Crater:
Penumbral Eclipse of Hunters Moon
That’s a fairly crappy picture by contemporary standards: taken with my Canon SX-230HS, zoomed tight, hand-held, braced atop the Walkway’s railing. Any of the telescopes deployed along the Walkway produced better / sharper / more impressive images. Heck, we’ve been there and brought back moondust, despite being stuck in LEO ever since.
Galileo upended the universe with observations based on images no better than that. What’s your excuse?
Wisely is it written: A poor craftsman blames his tools.
Go read Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. If you have dry eyes at the end of the last sentence, then I’d say you have what it takes to be the CEO of a really big financial institution.
The left temple mount of Mary’s five-year-old and staggeringly expensive titanium Silhouette glasses snapped. Here’s the intact right earpiece and the broken piece from the left temple (the lens is upside-down on the paper):
Silhouette frame – broken temple part
They’re just about ideal glasses, with nothing more than two lenses and three metal bits, but that means simple repairs don’t come easily. The Official Repair Price was about $120 to install a whole new earpiece, so, seeing as how she had these customized for computer work and wouldn’t be wearing them when anybody else was around, I got the job…
First off, mask the lenses with Parafilm to avoid scuffs:
Silhouette glasses – lens protection
Then cut out the broken part shown in the first picture. It’s attached to the lens with a U-shaped bit of transparent plastic that fits into the frame holes and captures its two peg legs; I used flush-cutting pliers to carve away the plastic bar on the inside of the lens.
The lens mount fragment is flat-out not reparable, but the broken end of the earpiece lies flush against the lens and is roughly circular. Even better, a 1/16 inch brass tube from the Little Box o’ Cutoffs fit the temple end perfectly: OD = 62 mils, ID = 35 mils.
The Little Box o’ Tiny Screws produced a pair of stainless steel screws (intended for the hinges in ordinary eyeglass temples) that also fit the holes in the lens and were precisely the right length, so the overall plan came together. The screws seem a bit over 1 mm diameter and I don’t have a nut for them, but epoxy is my co-pilot…
Line up and drill a pair of 47 mil clearance holes in that piece of 62 mil OD brass tubing, leaving barely 7 mil behind on each side:
Drilling brass tube
I may have to frame that picture…
Much to my astonishment, drilling those two holes worked on the first try. I’d chamfered the end with a #1 center drill while mulling over how all this would work out.
File off the screw heads to leave a thin plate:
Silhouette frame – temple mount parts
A dry fit shows how everything hangs together:
Silhouette frame – temple trial fit
The intact earpiece holds the lens at the proper angle on a flat surface, so as long as I can keep the repair parts in place on the lens, the temple angle will take care of itself.
I scuffed up the broken end of the earpiece to encourage a good epoxy bond, bent the edges of those flat plates around the tube, and cleaned everything with acetone. Tiny dabs of JB Weld epoxy hold the screws and the temple piece in the tube, with those little machinist’s squares encouraging the lenses to stay put:
Silhouette frame – mount curing
A day later, lay the lenses face down so the screws point straight up and dab on more JB Weld:
Silhouette frame – lens mount curing
Those dots aren’t quite as round as I’d like, but they’re the better part of 2 mm OD and I’m not complaining much. Note the nice fillet around the temple piece at end of the tubing.
Pause another day for curing…
Then file off the rough edges and peel off the Parafilm. It’s a bit on the garish side, but Mary preferred the Steampunk look over a crude paint job, particularly because it’s invisible from her side of the lens:
The bird on the right seems larger and may be the female of a mated pair, but it’s hard to tell at this distance. They could be siblings from the most recent nest in the area, but hawks aren’t chummy birds.
Search for hawk and you’ll find many more pix; I think they’re photogenic.
Go, hawks, go!
It’s taken at the usual 12x zoom with the 1.7 teleadapter on the Sony DSC-H5. I can’t justify the kilobucks required for a large-sensor SLR with nice long glass, but it’d definitely improve the picture quality around here. [sigh]
We biked to Saugerties for the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival and spotted this monster looming in the morning mist during the ride home:
Excavator on CSX gondola car – side
The end view shows it’s not an optical illusion:
Excavator on CSX gondola car – end
Some Google Maps fiddling reveals the plant, with the excavator atop the first car on the siding, down in the lower-left corner of the image:
Google Maps – Kings Highway at Tissal Rd
A zoomed view, rotated a quarter-turn CCW so it’s not quite so vertiginous:
Google Maps – Kings Highway at Tissal Rd – detail
My search-fu isn’t strong enough to uncover the plant’s name. They’ve obviously been doing something involving gravel and either asphalt or concrete for many years, so it’s not a prank…
Four of these ferocious Parsley Worms were chowing down on a volunteer dill plant along the garden fence:
Parsley Worm Caterpillar on Dill
Amazingly, they turn into Black Swallowtail butterflies that sometimes visit the Butterfly Bush outside our living room window. Well, maybe not this one, but certainly some of its relatives.
We don’t hassle them; they have a fearsome threat display that apparently works wonders on their natural predators.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 