Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Tag: Improvements
Making the world a better place, one piece at a time
The seasoning in between the scuffs & scrapes remains in fine shape. Running the Scotchbrite pad around the perimeter obviously wears the coating, but, on the whole, nothing sticks anywhere.
I’ve started re-seasoning it after each use, which isn’t a big deal, and we’ll see how the scratches level out.
The lovely gray-black patina on the nubbly outside surface from the original moderate-woo oven seasoning requires no further attention.
A Flint Arrow stainless steel spatula works exactly the way a spatula should:
Flint Arrowhead Stainless Spatula – in action
That is, of course, a used spatula from eBay. It cost slightly more than the various new spatulas we’ve tried, but not by very much, and should last (at least from our perspective) forever.
Thanks to all of you for aiming us in the right direction!
I picked up two sets of mica trimmer capacitors from eBay:
Mica trimmer capacitors
The big cap on the left goes from a bit under 1000 pF to just over 2500 pF, maybe a 50% range. I got four of the things, they can be disassembled, and I could reduce the total capacitance by maybe half; the tuning range would drop by even more, so it may not be worth it.
The smaller trimmer has different sections: 300-400 pF and 500-700 pF, with about 25% range. As nearly as I can tell, the 700 pF section has one more pair of plates than the 400 pF section.
Given that compression caps work by mashing a stack of mica sheets, I think more pressure makes them more stable and running near the high end of their range will be a Good Thing.
Soldering these New Old Stock relics may be challenging, as the stacked flat metal leads aren’t in pristine condition: properly wetting all the leaves will require plenty of flux.
Resonating the loop antenna requires an external capacitor around 1000 pF. Paralleling a 120 pF fixed cap with both sections of the dual-section cap should do the trick: 900 pF minimum, 1200 pF maximum. Putting the fixed cap on a jumper would reduce the total capacitance, which seems easy & sensible.
Then you can insert Unicode characters without memorizing their hex values. Of course, you must memorize the Compose key sequences. Fortunately, they’re more-or-less mnemonic for the ones I occasionally use, which are hereby cherrypicked from that list.
Press-and-release the Compose key (right-Win), then type the characters as shown to get the symbol in quotes:
Producing Greek letters requires a “dead_greek” key, so it’s easier to start with bare hex Unicode values at U0391 (Α) and U03b1 (α) and work upward until you find what you need:
U03A3 Σ uppercase sigma
U03a9 Ω uppercase omega
U03C3 σ lowercase sigma
U03c9 ω lowercase omega
U03c4 τ lowercase tau
U03c0 π lowercase pi
U0394 Δ uppercase delta
U03F4 ϴ uppercase theta
U03B8 θ lowercase theta
U03D5 ϕ phi math symbol
U03A6 Φ uppercase phi
U03C6 φ lowercase phi
Odds and ends:
U00a0 | | non-breaking space
U2007 | | figure space (invisible digit space)
U202F | | narrow space
U2011 ‑ non-breaking hyphen
U2030 ′ prime (not quote)
U2033 ″ double-prime (not double-quote)
U2018 ‘ left single quote
U2019 ’ right single quote
U201C “ left double quote
U201D ” right double quote
U2245 ≅ approximately equal
U2264 ≤ less-than or equal
U2265 ≥ greater-than or equal
U221A √ square root
U221B ∛ cube root
U221C ∜ fourth root (yeah, right)
U221D ∝ proportional to
U2300 ⌀ diameter
U25CA ◊ lozenge
If you set the keyboard layout to US International With Dead Keys, maybe you (definitely not I) could remember all the dead keys.
The original cast-iron seasoning recipe, after half a dozen iterations of flax seed oil & high-temperature baking, produced disappointing results:
Wagner cast iron skillet – washed – top
The key point of seasoning seems to require heating the oil enough to polymerize its molecular thingies, with (IMO) pretty nearly everything else boiling down to woo.
Since that rusting incident, I’ve done this after every use:
Wipe the pan clean with the same hot soapy water I use for everything else
Remove crud with the same Scotchbrite / sponge pad I use for everything else
Rinse and wipe dry with the sponge side of the pad
Set stove timer for 3 minutes
Put pan on simmer burner, set to high flame
Continue cleanup until timer sounds
Set stove timer for 3 minutes
Wipe half a dozen drops of flax seed oil around pan with cotton cloth scrap
Continue cleanup until timer sounds
Turn off simmer burner
Wipe pan with that oily cotton scrap
The pan reaches about 300 °F after 3 minutes. The “opening the pores” thing is woo, but a completely dry pan doesn’t spit back and that’s a major plus.
The pan tops out at a bit over 400 °F after a total of 6 minutes. There’s no smoke, no excitement, just a hot pan on the back burner.
Given that I’m washing the pan anyway, the whole “seasoning” operation adds maybe two minutes to the process. By now, it’s entirely automatic.
Nota Bene: Set the timer before turning on the burner and before adding the oil, because you will become distracted and will not remember the pan quietly heating on the back burner. You have been warned.
After two months of doing that about once a day:
Wagner Cast Iron Skillet – Low Woo Seasoning
Granted, it looks about the same as the previous results, but this uniform dull black coating repels water, doesn’t rust, loves oil, wipes clean without scouring, and the daily omelet doesn’t stick hardly at all. Obviously, the key difference is that I’ve polymerized a gazillion coats of oil, rather than half a dozen.
Although I have no idea whether I’m exposing us to lethal free radicals created by the polymerization process, I doubt anybody else knows anything on that subject with regard to their own seasoning technique, so we’re pretty much even. As with most such worries, It Doesn’t Matter.
Next, I’ll just wipe the pan and let it dry in the rack. That coating should eventually wear off, at least in the high-traffic areas; let’s see how little maintenance it requires.
The mid-1950s wood doors on our house have wood storm doors with interchangeable wood-framed glass and screen panels. Twice a year, the diligent homeowner will swap the panels to match the season; during the last 60+ years, the glass panels remain undropped.
The back door has a diagonal tension brace to hold the door in shape; the door may be slightly distorted or the frame slightly out of square. In any event, the brace obstructs the panel, so the semiannual ritual includes loosening the brace and removing four screws. During the last 60+ years, the screw holes have required repair / filling several times; about five years ago, I plugged them with epoxy putty and drilled them to fit the screws.
That repair having aged out, I was about to renew the epoxy when I realized that I now have brass inserts that would work even better, if I replaced the original wood screws with 10-32 machine screws.
I cut the screws to the exact length using the brace and brass insert as a fixture:
Storm door – screw cutting
The vacuum cleaner nozzle to the lower right inhales the debris from the Dremel cutoff wheel that would otherwise fill the shop; I used up the last half of a wheel on four stainless steel screws.
Because each end of the brace has two screws, I knew that I couldn’t just drill out the four holes, plant four inserts, and be done with the job: the first insert on each end could go pretty nearly anywhere, but the second insert must match the brace hole spacing. The only way I know how to do that is to epoxy the first two inserts in place and let them cure, drill the other two holes slightly oversize, mount those inserts on the brace, butter them with epoxy, put the brace in place, tighten the first two screws, snug the brace, and hope I didn’t epoxy the brace to the door or the screws to the inserts.
Slips of waxed paper between the brace and the door prevented the first problem and oiling the screws prevented the second. It’s not the best-looking job I’ve ever done, but nobody will ever see the inserts behind the brace:
Storm door – inserts
Now, we’re ready for winter and I’m ready for spring!
Most likely, the new owners (whoever and whenever they may be) will never use these inserts, as they’ll replace all the windows & doors, plus sand & refinish the hardwood floors, before moving in …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 