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.
Making the world a better place, one piece at a time
A new pair of shoes arrived with extravagantly long laces requiring shortening. Years ago, I found heatshrink tubing completely unequal to the task, so I deployed Real Metal:
The ferrules come from a kit of such things, minus their plastic strain relief:
That’s a fancy hexagonal crimper for round-ish results. If you have a square terminal block, you should use the square crimper that comes with the kit.
Worked perfectly and produced immediate customer satisfaction.
This seemed appropriate for a day involving toys of all descriptions…
A cast iron stove (most likely a mid-last-century reproduction rather than a Genuine Antique™) emerged from a living room recess:
The line across the lid lifter handle shows where it broke, long ago, likely while being played with. Back then, I’d done a static-display-grade fix with a dab of clear epoxy, but a better repair seemed called for; my repair-fu has grown stronger.
I expected the handle to be pot metal, so drilling a hole in both ends for a music-wire stiffener seemed reasonable:
Much to my surprise, the carbide bit skittered off the surface, leaving fine swarf standing on the end. Turns out the lid lifter is cast iron, just like the rest of the stove!
Given that much of a clue, I aligned the pieces in a pair of machinist’s vises:
Slide apart (the vises stand on a smooth glass sheet; the nubbly side is down), dab silver solder flux on the ends, capture a snippet of 40% silver solder in the gap:
Hit it ever so gently with a propane torch and slide together:
The solder flows at 1200 °F = 650 °C, roughly corresponding to the blue-gray color near the joint. The nice purple (540 °C) on the left shows where I held the flame to start, with yellows (400 °C) on both sides. Good enough, sez I, it’s going to be a static-display exhibit.
Most of the solder went to the back side, so I filed it smooth and buffed off most of the heat coloration with a stainless-steel wire wheel in the Dremel:
A little more wire-brush action left the front side looking good:
As with most of the repairs around here, it simply makes me feel better …
Now, go play with your toys!
We were tasked with replacing the foam cushion and seat covering on a pair of kitchen chairs. Removing the existing fabric seemed simple, until I pulled a dozen staples holding the cardboard cover to the bottom of the chair and exposed the fabric stapled to the MDF plate:
That’s just part of one corner. Obviously, whoever built the chair wanted to be very very very sure the fabric didn’t come loose!
Removing the staples from one corner produced a pile:
Piling up all the staples from the other chair looked even more impressive:
I fired maybe a third as many staples into the new fabric, which seems secure enough.
While cleaning the filter in the 1 gallon ShopVac for the bandsaw and lathe, I found the last few bags from the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned and long-gone Samsung vacuum cleaner that seemed about the right size for upcycling:
They’re a bit bulky:
It’s surely not worth buying bags just to cut ’em up, but, with a stock on the shelf, why not?
We spotted a pile of room safes in one of the motel stairwells:
Judging from what we found in the room, it’s out with the old and in with the new:
Too bad about the mounting pedestal, though: same size, different orientation.
Something unexpected always lurks in the datasheet …
One day, long ago, this tree grew in a certain bedroom:
And then a flower appeared in the laundry room:
Much to our delight, she asked for forgiveness, not permission … which was, of course, granted immediately.
The original astable multivibrator ran from a dead CR123 primary lithium cell:
With a terminal voltage falling from barely 3 V, the LED drew about 3 mA (1 mA/div), tops, without a ballast resistor:
Hacking in a charged NP-BX1 secondary lithium cell boosted the supply to 4 V:
Which, diodes being the way they are, raised the LED current to nearly 400 mA (100 mA/div):
Somewhat to my surprise, a few weeks of abuse didn’t do any obvious damage to the LED, but I added a resistor while I was soldering up another holder:
There’s not quite enough room for a 1/8 W axial resistor, so why not blob in a surface-mount resistor?
Which cuts the current down to a mere 15 mA (10 mA/div) from a lithium battery at 4 V:
It’s still blindingly bright, but now I don’t feel bad about it.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 