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.
If you measure something often enough, it becomes science
They still look pretty good after a year:
Which is to say: the orange acrylic hasn’t faded, the black paint’s still in place, and the gates seem to stay closed.
One might quibble about the missing wire snippet on the lower left corner, but on the whole it doesn’t get much better than that …
After a month outdoors, the (failed) flexible strip labels show signs of wear:
The upper one has a coating of clear rattlecan paint and looks much the better for it. The lower one is bare, but also suffered greatly from being folded and tucked through itself, so it started in worse condition.
Perhaps the paper will work better when stuck to metal plant label stakes, although I suspect the adhesive sheet will fail first:
Those are random names; Mary tells me the proper label format has the Latin nomenclature on the first line.
They’re now out on the patio for observation.
For whatever it’s worth, my fascination with this paper boils down to “it’s cheaper than Trolase” for applications not requiring archival quality and duration. If it lasts Long Enough, that’ll be Good Enough.
This seemed like a good idea for dispensing small drops of acrylic solvent while gluing spiders together:
It’s the Buffer Extraction Tube from a COVID-19 rapid test kit with a short brass tube jammed in its dropper tip. The longer brass tube let me suck that dose of solvent into the tube without any of the hassle required to pour the liquid from a big can into a little tube.
Tell me you didn’t save those things because you thought they didn’t look like they might come in handy for something.
Well, that turned out to be a Bad Idea™, because whatever plastic that tube is made out of cracks when exposed to the hellish mixture in SCIGRIP #3 solvent adhesive. The tube didn’t dissolve or melt, it just cracked when you (well, I) squeezed the sides.
My Box o’ Test Kits has a few other types of tubes, but I used a syringe from the inkjet refilling era and that worked OK.
Having failed at making flexible plant tags, I figured using laser test paper to make laser test targets might work:
They descend from my original dot-mode laser beam targets:
The dots just barely punch through the back side (open in a new tab & zoom for more dots):
The plastic coating chars and buckles with each pulse, but remains in place:
Wiping the surface removes the loose coating / ash / debris to expose the underlying charred paper core:
Those are two pulses marking the ends of each axis, so the machine remains well aligned after the fourth-quarter tweak.
A single pulse shows the beam has a nice round shape with well-defined edges:
In principle, the beam should be more intense toward the middle, but I suspect that’s beyond the paper’s ability to resolve the energy; the beam either burns through the coating or it doesn’t. In all those targets, the back surface of the paper remains undamaged.
Manila paper targets seem to have better energy resolution and take much less time to produce:
The black test paper will certainly come in handy for something, though.
The most recent Tide HE Laundry Detergent bottles seemed smaller than the one we were about to empty and, indeed, they were:
Call it 9% smaller, based on the volume in liters. I suspect the price was also 9% higher, but that would require more digging in the file cabinet than seems justified.
Note that both bottles claim “64 loads”, each with an asterisk (well, a lozenge ◊ symbol) explained on the label:
That’s the new chart. The old chart was more explanatory:
Note the “just below Bar 1 on cap” weasel wording. The term “meniscus” enters the chat, although laundry detergent doesn’t have much in the way of surface tension.
One might reasonably assume the bars on the new cap have gotten shorter, so that the volume of detergent used for each load would be smaller.
One would be wrong:
The blue cap on the right is one we’ve been using for the last few years, because I put black tape at the level of the first bar to match our “Medium” loads. I cannot imagine how much dirt would require filling the cap to Bar 5.
The clear cap on the left is the new cap. I filled the blue tap to the top of Bar 5 with water and poured it into the clear cap, where it comes about 3/4 of the way to the top of the new Bar 5. Evidently, the amount of detergent required to get grubby clothes clean has increased by 33%.
The old cap holds just shy of 4 fluid ounces to the top of Bar 5:
The new cap holds 5.5 fluid ounces to the top of its Bar 5:
If you have really crusty clothing, you’re now using 36% more detergent per load.
The obvious arithmetic shows the old bottle holds 23 “Bar 5” loads and the new bottle holds 15.
To the limit of my measuring ability, both caps hold 1.3 fluid ounces to the top their respective Bar 1 levels. I cannot vouch for the “just below” level, but I suspect more accurate measurements would show the new caps have slightly lower volume at that level, juuust enough to make the “64 loads” weasel wording come out right.
As with all too many such claims, they lie.
Earlier this year, a pair of House Finches chose the a pine cone wreath hanging outside our front door for their nest.
One day a Starling attacked:
There’s a Youtube video of the action following those pictures:
Ms. Finch suffered a peck to the head raising a few feathers into a small topknot, but seemed otherwise undamaged. The eggs survived unscathed and a month later they fledged a quartet of new finches:
Yes, they’re surrounded by a ring of bird crap: finch chicks can aim and fire overboard, but they don’t have much range.
The same finch pair abandoned their second nest after a Brown-headed Cowbird added an egg and punctured both Finch eggs:
Their third attempt failed after four eggs when a Cowbird added a fifth:
A few days after that picture, something tore that nest apart and destroyed all the eggs:
The scattered feathers suggest a major battle with severe injuries.
Three nesting attempts produced only four fledglings: a bad year for those two finches.
Morning KP provides considerable time to watch the goings-on in the back yard, including the wide variety of pollinators (formerly known as “bees”) in the stand of daisies just off the deck:
I wondered if the flower heads tracked the sun or just sort of stood there, so I deployed the trail camera to take one picture every five minutes for a bit over 24 hours. Converting just under 500 images into a movie required this incantation:
ffmpeg -framerate 4 -start_number 75 -i IM_%05d.jpg -s 1920x1080 Daisies.mp4
The result of which now appears on Youtube:
The short answer: daisies don’t really track the sun, but they move more than I expected. The stalks carrying unopened flowers writhe all around, occasionally getting stuck on other stems and suddenly snapping free. I was particularly surprised at the number of bees going about their business just around midnight.
For whatever it’s worth, I had to put the open camera in full sunlight on a table out on the deck to dry out the water left from a recent rainstorm. Whether the water comes from diurnal pumping or a leak through the rim gasket, I cannot say, but it can’t possibly be doing the PCB any good.
I do not expect the video to go viral …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 