Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Category: Science
If you measure something often enough, it becomes science
A garter snake has taken up residence under our garbage can and is startled when I wheel it away:
Garter snake on the alert
This week it was curled into a compact bundle:
Garter snake in compact mode
The blue eyes indicate it’s in the process of shedding its skin, so next week we’ll have an even bigger and shinier guardian.
Shedding one’s skin apparently requires a great deal of thought, as it remained in that pose while I fetched Mary, then moved deliberately off into the leaf litter behind the can.
The small rodent population around here has definitely declined: garter snakes are murder on field mice and the hawks are taking out the chipmunks.
The six sticky traps guarding Mary’s onion beds in her Vassar Community Gardens plots collected this assortment of critter and mulch from mid-July through mid-August, when she harvested the last of the crop:
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap A
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap B
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap C
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap D
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap E
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap F
The labels do not match those on the first set through mid-July, because I don’t care quite enough to keep track of them.
The traps don’t collect many onion maggot flies, which suggests that a little control goes a long way. As far as she’s concerned, these traps work very well, because the crop has very little maggot damage.
Searching for onion sticky traps will produce the rest of the collection. Contact me for the full resolution images, should you need to ID all the critters.
After a year’s service in my Sony AS-30V helmet camera, the Newmowa NP-BX1 lithium cells perform pretty nearly as well as they started out:
NP-BX1 – Newmowa 2022 – 2023-08
Recharging the cells after that test averaged 907 mA·hr within 2%, so they’re still reasonably well grouped.
The camera burns 1.9 W, so the worst of the cells has a 100 minute runtime = 3.3 W·hr/1.9 W × 60 min/hr,.
Our usual weekday rides run a little over an hour and I change the batteries during our longer weekend rides, so they rarely see more than an hour’s use.
A recent 1-¼ hour = 75 minute ride soaked up 687 mA·hr, just about exactly 75% of 907 mA·hr. Gotta love it when the numbers work.
Surprisingly good performance, given the drama involved in finding those cells. I wonder if that will hold next year when I buy another set?
For the last six years, a set of eight Panasonic Eneloop AAA cells have been marching in pairs through the Superflashes in lockstep alphabetic order. We ride several times a week, less in the winter, and I changed the batteries once a week whether they need it or not, so they’ve gone through maybe 200 charge cycles. With four pairs and two bikes, that’s 100 cycles each.
They’re not dead yet, but they’re showing signs of age:
Eneloop AAA – final – 2023-08
In round numbers, the capacity is down 20% from their original 850 mW·hr. The 50 to 75 mV depression is probably more significant for an LED power supply intended for alkaline cells, as the light was running from 2.3 V instead of 3 V.
They worked surprisingly well, all things considered.
The best bid on a recent tree removal project replaced most of the usual crew with a Merlo Roto telehandler:
Tree Work – Merlo setup
The orange gadget on the end of the boom is a Woodcracker manipulator with a terrifying switchblade chainsaw:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – rear
The saw has hydraulic motors, so you can hear the blade ripping through the wood.
The jaws above the saw hold the piece during the cut:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – side
Then lift it away:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – cut lift
The boom has a 115 foot vertical reach, so it can remove entire treetops:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – align
Then align the branch with the chipper’s gullet and ram it into the feed rollers, with no intervention from the ground crew:
Tree Work – Merlo – chipper feeding
The Woodcracker chainsaw isn’t quite long enough for the trunk, so the jaws stabilize the trunk during a manual cut:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – trunk support
Then haul the whole thing away:
Tree Work – Merlo Woodcracker – trunk lift
The Merlo can lift 11,000 pounds near the middle of its range, with a 1600 pound limit at the maximum horizontal reach and 5500 pounds at 115 feet vertically. As far as I can tell, nothing about this project came anywhere close to the machine’s limits.
The day arrived with a severe thunderstorm watch, but the main part of the storm passed far north of us. The local power company keeps this company on speed dial and called them for emergency work in the wake of the storm, so the Merlo left early and the remaining crew used a bucket truck to take down the last tree in old-school style.
The Merlo is staggeringly expensive, but lets one operator take down an entire tree without any climbers or riggers. I suspect the reduction in crew size (and insurance premiums) pays for the machine in short order; the crew was less than half the size involved in a neighbor’s project with another contractor.
Highly recommended!
Merlo’s promotional video has comparisons with similar machines and I’m sure you could waste an entire afternoon on such things. For sure, I didn’t get anything else done that day.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 