Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
PrusaSlicer can recognize “things that look like logos” and process them with two different materials, so I tried it out with some plant signs:
Plant Signs – 50pct scale
They came out surprisingly well, particularly for characters with two adjacent filament threads:
Plant Signs – 50pct scale – 2-stroke
Smaller characters with single threads show more stringing, a characteristic of PETG, but it brushes off easily enough:
Plant Signs – 50pct scale – 1-stroke
While the existing text isn’t nearly as informative as real plant tags, they’re surely more durable and a chunkier font would improve both printability and readability.
I suggested Mary hand them out to any of her gardening cronies in need of a chuckle …
A highly effective way to bait a rat trap for garden voles:
Rat trap – still baited
The trap is a Victor M205 (in a 12-pack as M326) with a big yellow plastic bait pedal. The bait is pieces of walnut, secured to the pedal with generous strands of hot melt glue. The trick involves mechanically capturing the walnut by slobbering glue over & around it, forcing the vole to pull & tug while gnawing the last bit of goodness.
Which generally ends badly:
Rat trap – gnawed bait
I do not begrudge the critters a fancy last meal; it’s gotta be better than their usual diet of carrots / radishes / turnips.
Voles have no qualms about eating the bait from a sprung trap with a dead compadre a few millimeters away:
Rat trap – empty bait
They will sometimes eat the walnuts and their dead compadre.
The plastic pedals work much better than the old-style metal pedals at holding the steel arm wire. The wire slides freely on the plastic, in contrast to the previous high-friction metal-on-metal latch.
Some of the traps were entirely too sensitive and required slightly bending the tip of the arm wire upward to increase the friction on the plastic plate. Always always always handle armed traps by the wooden edges beside the kill bar, so when it accidentally snaps your fingers are nowhere near the business end.
After I figured out how to properly bait the traps and we set out half a dozen traps in the most attractive crops, Mary’s garden produced 54 dead voles over the course of 90 days, sometimes in groups of three or four at a time. While this did not prevent all the crop damage, it definitely reduced the problem.
Next year we’ll start early and probably reach triple digits by midsummer.
The same technique with Victor M035 mouse traps (in 12-packs as M035-12) is brutally effective on house mice.
An entry from The New Garden Encylopedia, copyright 1936 through 1946, gives recommendations for using arsenical poisons in your garden:
Arsenical poisons
My father always said anybody who talks fondly of The Good Old Days wasn’t alive back then. He was and thought things had definitely improved since then.
Three months of outdoor exposure suggest that laser test paper can survive use as a plant tag for one growing season, at least when it remains flat:
Laser test paper – small plant labels – 3 month exposure
The two upper tags demonstrated the paper has no flexibility worth mentioning, so it cannot become a tag wrapped around a stem.
The two lower labels spent their time tucked into a window frame where they got plenty of sun & rain without the benefit of a backing plate. Looks good to me!
Contrary to my expectation, the craft adhesive sheet behind this label survived intact, although the label itself took some damage, perhaps from the more direct sunlight out on the deck:
Laser test paper – plant marker – 3 month exposure
In any event, they look Good Enough™ for our simple needs and next year’s plants will be properly labeled.
For reasons not relevant here, I ended up making a field-expedient repair to a garden gate latch:
Improvised gate latch staple – installed
The hole in the post just to the left of the obviously improvised staple shows where the Original Staple had vanished, never to be seen again. It looks like the gate has shifted an inch or so to the right (or the post to the left), which would explain why the staple gradually worked loose.
The improvised staple is a length of coat hanger wire bent into a square U, with the ends snipped off at an acute angle:
Improvised gate latch staple – cut wire
Those points do look scary, don’t they?
Then I gently tapped it into place, driving maybe ¾ inch of wire in the wood, flattening the loop a little more than I wanted, but not enough to make me try again.
Not our gate, not Mary’s garden, but deer pose a threat to all veggies within, without regard to ownership.
I have *a lot* of coat hanger wire for repairs like this …
One of Mary’s gardening cronies suggested Sting-Kill might reduce her dramatic swelling [^1] after a bee / wasp / insect sting. Because it must be applied immediately after the sting, the swab must be on hand in the garden or on a bike ride, but the glass vial inside seem entirely too fragile to survive amid the usual clutter of a purse / pocketbook / belt pack / bike pack.
Well, I can fix that:
Pill tube – PETG default
It’s a KeyChain Pill Tube from Printables, enlarged 20% in the XY plane to fit the Sting-Kill swab, with the white applicator end fitting neatly into the domed screw-on lid for a bit of cushioning.
The solid model looks about like you’d expect:
Pill Tube – slicer preview
Despite that preview, I printed it with a brim. PETG sticks tenaciously to the Textured PEI steel sheet and a brim wasn’t really needed; just pop the parts off the platform when cool.
Somewhat to my astonishment, the threads screwed together easily, smoothed out after a few on-and-off cycles, and it’s ready for a moment we both hope will never occur.
[^1] Mary did tote an EpiPen back in the day, but a few near misses indicated she’s no longer quite as sensitized. She does swell up something powerful and we’re hoping immediately applying a Sting-Kill will help knock it down.
Although the drilled sunflower seeds worked reasonably well, various critters gnawed through the threads and escaped unharmed with the seeds. We tried gluing seeds to the trigger with good old Elmer’s Non-Toxic School Glue, only to find garden ants absolutely love the stuff.
Well, if voles like seeds, they’ll surely like nuts:
Rat traps – walnut halves
Those are rat traps (much bigger than mouse traps) with walnut halves secured to the top and bottom of the trigger with hot melt glue.
Yes, the plywood plates under the traps hold them together. There’s no reason to put fancy new traps outdoors where they succumb to weather in short order; these are veterans from previous episodes.
Having taken out two voles with sunflower seeds over the course of a week, the walnuts accounted for two more voles in three days. Mary thinks a neighbor vole needs a day to notice its buddy has gone missing, so the average pace may be a vole every other day.
Bonus: Gnawing on the nuts or trying to pull them away triggers the trap, so those walnuts are still out there.
The community gardens have enough voles to attract Red Tailed Hawks, which have started perching on fence posts and stooping on voles foolish enough to run along the paths or into grassy areas. Some gardeners seem disconcerted by the presence of such large birds in close proximity, but Mary assures them they’re helpers.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 