That’s eight months of weathering on MDF covered with indoor urethane sealant and it’s not as awful as I expected: the MDF didn’t actually disintegrate, it just collected some mold / mildew / crud.
A closer look:
Please Close The Gate – weathered MDF – detail
The black paint survived surprisingly well.
I hadn’t paid much any attention to the edges, so they got covered with random amounts of black paint and urethane. It seems that’s where the disintegration starts:
Please Close The Gate – weathered MDF – side view
MDF definitely isn’t the right material for an outdoor sign and I knew that going in, but it’s cheap and readily available, which makes up for a lot.
For comparison, they looked nice right after installation:
A warm day let me shoot the engraved signs for the Vassar Community Garden gates with rattlecan black:
Please Close The Gate – masking tape peeled
The full sheet of orange acrylic arrived with plastic protective film on both sides, which I planned to use for paint masking. Alas, one side also had a wrinkle running its length that ended up on two signs, so I replaced that film with blue masking tape.
As fate would have it, the first side of the first sign I peeled had masking tape and produced what you see above.
Things went bad in a hurry. The paint had no adhesion whatsoever to the plastic film and fell off in flakes as I peeled the film away:
Please Close The Gate – plastic peeled
I assumed the flakes would just fall off the signs, perhaps with a little persuasion, so I peeled and weeded all the signs before cleaning them up.
Although the paint was fully dry, when the molecularly smooth surface of each paint flake touched the molecularly smooth surface of the newly exposed acrylic, the two instantly and permanently fused together.
There were a lot of flakes:
Please Close The Gate – plastic peeled – detail
Removal techniques that did not work:
Vacuuming with a brush
Gentle rubbing with a soft cloth
Firm rubbing after spraying with acrylic cleaner
Scraping with a plastic razor blade
So I deployed a P220 grit sanding block and wrecked the glossy surface of both sides of all six signs. I briefly considered trying to recover the finish by sanding them all up through about 2000 grit, then came to my senses: my sanding arm is weak.
Careful examination of the last picture shows several places around edges of the circle where the plastic film melted into a blob that blocked the paint, rather than vaporizing. I used enough power to engrave only about 0.3 mm deep (because they’re engraved on both sides), but the transition wasn’t fast enough for a clean edge.
They don’t look as nice as I’d like, but they’re good enough for the purpose:
Please Close The Gate – installed
The acrylic sheet is more see-through than I expected, at least when backlit by bright sunlight.
Please Close The Gate – seethrough
Next: we discover what happens to UV-stabilized orange acrylic and black outdoor paint over the course of a year in garden sunshine.
A recent Squidwrench meeting provided the opportunity to make a couple of racks for an assortment of Refresh Tears / Liquigel bottles:
Refresh eye lube – storage cases
I used chipboard to find out if the cross plates would stiffen the floppy 1.1 mm sheets enough for this light duty. Indeed, the overall structure becomes a nice rigid box, even though the feet and corners can’t withstand much abuse.
The finger joints use the default settings, which produce a lot of fingers along the edges. This turns out to be a Good Thing, as it gave the yellow wood glue plenty of opportunities to bond the sheets together.
Combining the default 5° slope with nine bottles along each level wastes a tremendous amount of vertical space. The adjacent racks hold three much larger cans per level, so roughly the same space doesn’t look like much. In retrospect, a 3° slope should work for smaller bottles.
And, yes, the squash on the lower shelf store nicely and become yummy meals all winter long.
Mary left the sticky card traps in the onion patch until the last onions came out, clustered them around the leeks, and collected them long after the season was over.
I count maybe twenty flies that might be onion maggot flies or cabbage maggot flies.
The cards protected the onion crop, failed miserably for the leeks, and did nothing for the nearby cabbages. Deploying the cards while planting worked very well, refreshing them after a month continued the protection, but the main fly season seems to end shortly thereafter.
All the sticky cards as a slideshow, starting with the three along the border fence:
VCCG Onion Card – fence A – 2022-11
VCCG Onion Card – fence B – 2022-11
VCCG Onion Card – fence C – 2022-11
VCCG Onion Card – plot A – 2022-11
VCCG Onion Card – plot B – 2022-11
VCCG Onion Card – plot C – 2022-11
VCCG Onion Card – plot D – 2022-11
The cards remain sticky to my fingers, but an adroit fly could skate over the debris field and emerge unscathed.
The final garden harvest included several carrots minus their leafy tops:
Rodent-approved Carrot
I sliced that top from a rather rotund carrot and the broad tooth marks suggest a large rodent. Mary found and blocked a tunnel under the fence, so we think it was a groundhog, rather than a rabbit, but we’ll never know the rest of the story.
The rest of the carrot was fine, so the unknown critter had mmmm good taste. Unfortunately, it sampled far too many root crops as it toured the buffet, leaving Mary’s root-cellared stockpile unusually low for our winter meals.
I wear 30 dB over-the-ear protectors with a pair of Bluetooth earbuds tucked inside for a rhythm track. I had been carrying my Pixel 6a in a side pocket, until I noticed a remarkable amount of crud inside the glass protector over the camera lens:
Pixel 6a camera protector dirt
How crud could get inside (what I thought should be) a sealed compartment inside the phone’s armor case became obvious after peeling the protector off:
Pixel 6a camera protector dirt – overview
Come to find out the protector’s adhesive layer has an opening near the edge of the camera, leaving a slot allowing the howling chaff storm onto the camera glass. Random pocket fuzz certainly contributed some particles, but the entire phone case had a surprising amount of yellow-brown dust tucked inside.
So I left the protector off, dumped the music files into my old Pixel 3a (which never had a camera protector), and will henceforth leave the 6a indoors during similar adventures.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 