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.
Growing and sometimes fixing
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.
It seems the best bait for voles is to tie sunflower seeds to the trap trigger, but poking a needle through the seeds tends to split them.
Well, I can fix that:
This is “shell drilling” of a kind I had not previously encountered:
Those are #52 drill holes, 63-ish mils in diameter, and pass a standard sewing needle with ease.
The traps have been baited and deployed amid a plague of voles and I await customer feedback …
“Laser test paper” is, of course, intended for testing lasers, but I thought it might make a outdoor plant tag. A while ago I tried some Trolase Thins acrylic for that job:
Which turned out to be entirely too stiff, which wasn’t surprising given that Trolase Thin is intended for signage stuck on flat or slightly curved surfaces.
Despite being “paper”, laser testing paper is also too stiff:
The wrinkles and cracks on the left end of the tags shows the plastic coating makes it basically impossible to shape / bend the paper enough to wrap around a plant stem, then push it through the hole (offscreen to the left). I was not surprised too much by this discovery.
Those two strips now hang outside the kitchen window (left end upward), where they’ll get enough sun and rain to keep a plant happy, and I’ll see how well the engraved / damaged plastic coating stands up to that sort of abuse.
For Science!
After deporting the same tree frog from her shoe five times over the course of a month, Mary finally admitted defeat:
We think this is the same frog who insisted on sunning itself on the railing back in June:
If that isn’t a smug smile, I don’t know what one might look like.
When she related this tale at a Master Gardener meeting, one of her cronies said a similar frog commandeered a shoe and refused all offers of a new home, so apparently tree frogs and shoes just go together.
Anybody that persistent deserves whatever it wants; Mary will get a new pair of shoes and keep them indoors.
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:
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.
One of the sticky traps absorbed a mighty blow during the season and its ski-pole mount snapped off. Rather then rebuild the whole thing, I decided to just epoxy the pieces together and stick a reinforcing plate on the bottom.
I added a pair of screw holes to the OpenSCAD model and produced a projection of the bottom layer:
if (Layout == "Projection") {
projection(cut=true) {
Attachment();
Cap();
}
}
Which looked like this:
Cutting that shape from an adhesive sheet looks the same:
The somewhat raggedy large hole seems to come from OpenSCAD’s somewhat low-res SVG outline conversion.
Fill the broken part with epoxy:
Clamp it together on a plate to keep the bottom aligned:
Cut an acrylic baseplate:
Apply adhesive sheet to acrylic, stick it on the bottom of the cage, add a pair of stainless steel screws, and declare victory:
We’ll see how long that lasts out in the garden next year …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 