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.

Tag: Improvements

Making the world a better place, one piece at a time

IWISS SN-2549 Crimping Tool Instructions

Because I needed to know which of the four dies in the jaw of my IWISS SN-2549 crimper was the right one for 24 AWG ribbon cable:

IWISS SN-2549 JST Crimper Manual

It turns out either of the two middle slots should work, but the crimps look better in the smaller one.

Admittedly, the instructions are thin on technique, but I only wrecked four pins while retraining my crimping hand. The key trick is indexing the insulation fingers on the step inside the jaw, thus putting the socket box or the male pin outside where it won’t get smashed flat. Squishing those fingers from their normal splayed condition into a rectangular shape helps fit them into the jaw against the step.

Living in the future where the right crimping tool doesn’t cost five Benjamins is great …

2024-06-18
Laser-marked Hole Drilling Spots

While setting up to drill holes in the aluminum base for the running light buck converter, I wondered if laser-marking the spots directly from the solid model would work better than my usual fumbling around.

The solid model:

Running Light – power box – bottom view

Export projections of the pieces from OpenSCAD as an SVG file:

Running Light – power box – Projection view

Import into LightBurn, set up for a very fast, very light cut and Fire The Laser:

Laser-marked hole spots – masking tape

That’s in ordinary masking tape on a hard-anodized sheet of aluminum from the pile, which looked better than I expected.

The same aluminum covered with blue tape:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – hard anodize

Which looks much better in person than it does in the photo.

On a soft aluminum sheet from the Basement Warehouse Zone:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – sheet aluminum

The dark outline is a comfort mark hand-drawn around a chipboard test piece to verify the layout fit between random holes drilled in the sheet during its previous life.

A closer look at a corner hole:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – hard anodize – detail 1

And the center hole:

Laser-marked hole spots – blue tape – hard anodize – detail 2

The holes appeared in the right places after center-punching by eye, but the fragility of those four little tape leaves around the center point must be experienced to be believed.

And, yes, those are deliberately low-polygon approximations to a circle, because I’m a low-poly kind of guy.

I really need an optical center punch if I do more such silliness. The box with those HP plotter digitizing sights recently came to hand, so I suppose I should make something.

2024-06-12
Laser Test Paper

A pack of Black Laser Engraving Testing Paper arrived and I put a few snippets to the test:

Laser test paper – miniature pattern overview

That’s the standard backlash test pattern shrunken down to a little over an inch wide, with the laser power reduced to the bare minimum. Despite that, the numerous holes show where the pattern concentrates enough energy to vaporize the paper.

The “paper” seems to be laminated between two black plastic sheets that smell terrible when engraved, so they’re probably some form of acrylic. The Amazon product description is, despite all the verbiage- remarkably uncommunicative of the actual materials involved.

The circular pattern is 10 mm diameter on the outside:

Laser test paper – miniature pattern detail

Those should be circles around the perimeter, but their distortion shows what happens when you try to move a hulking CO₂ laser head around a 1.5 mm diameter circle at 400 mm/s. Of course, the actual speed is nowhere near that fast along such tiny vectors.

The traces are about 0.2 mm wide, with obvious scorches where the beam starts and stops, which agrees reasonably well with previous measurements.

All in all, both the paper and the laser pattern look better than I expected, particularly as the results indicate the machine has no measurable backlash at all.

2024-06-11
Laser-cut Profile Test Pieces

A new battery for my electrified Tour Easy recumbent arrived. It has newer 21700 lithium cells in the same overall box, but the baseplate requires new blocks adapting it to the frame:

UPP Battery Mount – solid model

The top profile fits snugly into the battery mounting plate, with clearance on the sides for the latches:

UPP Battery Mount – trial fit

However, I had enough trouble measuring those recesses that I broke down and added a projection() view to the OpenSCAD code:

UPP Battery Mount – profile

Exporting that as an SVG image and importing it into LightBurn let me cut it out of chipboard:

UPP Battery Mount – laser cut profiles

Obviously, it took several iterations to fit the top profile to the baseplate, particularly after finding slightly different measurements at each block position. On the other paw, laser cutting the profiles proceeded much more quickly than 3D printing just a few millimeters of the block, so it was a net win.

The new battery baseplate doesn’t have an internal space for the buck converter feeding the running lights, so there’s more construction ahead.

2024-06-10
Dish Drainer Drain Board Draining Improvement

It seems all the drain boards under dish drainers are now intended for contemporary under-counter sinks without a rim, which is not the Old School drop-in sink we have in the kitchen. After considerable faffing about, I hacked a fix to make the drain board & drainer fit the sink:

Dish Drainer – sink lip cutout

The crude notch not only lowers the front edge by a few millimeters, it also encourages the lip to stay over the sink, rather than sliding back over the counter and slobbering water everywhere.

The drain board has stiffening ribs under the center section, cleverly arranged so they do not actually touch the counter. I measured the shape of the board near the ribs:

Dish Drainer – measuring center ribs

And then cut shapes to both support the board and rest on the counter:

Dish Drainer – center support

The board has a swale in the middle, directly over those ribs, requiring more tilt for proper drainage:

Dish Drainer – rear support

Getting all of that flying in formation required several iterations and we’re still not entirely satisfied, but at least the water flows into the sink and does not puddle in the drain board or on the counter.

Stipulated: wood is the wrong material for the job, hot melt glue is breathtakingly ugly, and you want no part of this.

You can buy fancier drain boards, some with cute spouts leading into the sink, but the fine print suggests most expect to work with rimless under-counter sinks.

2024-06-06
Laser Material Scrap Bins

Being in need of small bins to sort cutoffs / scrap material from the laser and now having an essentially unlimited supply of corrugated cardboard at hand, this made some sense:

Laser scrap bins – cutting

The cardboard is 3.8 mm thick and laid with the ribs parallel to the X axis to make all the parts stiff in the right direction. I rearranged the parts to fit the space available and work around the butterfly finger hole over on the right.

The box pattern comes from the infinite supply at boxes.py (you’re welcome to the jawbreaker URL with my parameters) and assembles to become a sturdy little box:

Laser scrap bins – in action

Rather than gluing all those fingers into their holes, I ran a hot melt glue bead around the bottom perimeter and up the four corners, which seems to do the trick. The fingers parallel to the X axis tend to be fragile, as only one or two corrugated ribs run along their length, but the overall box is surprisingly rigid after gluing.

They’re nominally stackable and the pattern includes stiffeners glued across the leg openings so they don’t slide off the box below, but it’s obvious these boxes will always have too much stuff to allow stacking.

I made a longer box for plywood scraps and may need a couple more for other stuff yet to be unpacked, but you get the general idea.

The WordPress AI Assistant reminds me to remind you of the safety measures appropriate for using hot melt glue: consider yourself warned.

2024-06-04
Sillcock Faucet Alignment Wedge: Getting the Angle Right
A pair of frost-free sillcock faucets arrived to replace the house’s leaky and un-repairable hose bibs. The faucet must be mounted at a 5° angle to let the water drain out when it’s closed:

Everbilt Frost-Free Sillcock faucet – installation

One might expect the Alignment Wedge included with the faucet to have a 5° angle. Because I can both measure and math, it has a 1° angle.

Well, I can fix that.

Start by scanning the bottom (widest side) of the wedge and apply GIMP’s Select by color tool:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – GIMP color selection

After a little manual cleanup in Quick Mask mode, apply a 1 mm inset to ensure it snaps around the pipe, convert the selection to a path, export it as an SVG image, and import it into OpenSCAD to cut the angle:
```
// Sillcock faucet alignment wedge
// Ed Nisley KE4ZNU - May 2024

MaxThick = 5.0;
Tilt = -5.0;

PlateOA = [60,40,MaxThick];   // XY = original angle plate size

difference() {
  linear_extrude(height=MaxThick,convexity=5)
    offset(r=-1.0)
      import("/mnt/bulkdata/Cameras/2024/Shop Projects/Sillcock Faucets/Sillcock faucet angle washer - outline.svg",
             center=true);
   translate([-PlateOA.x/2,-PlateOA.y/2,MaxThick])
     rotate([Tilt,0,0])
        cube(PlateOA,center=false);
}
```
The solid model goes into PrusaSlicer for duplication & slicing:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – PrusaSlicer layout

And comes off the printer looking just about like you’d expect:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – OEM vs printed

The far side of both wedges are 5 mm tall, but you can see the difference four more degrees makes in the front.

It’s even more obvious from the edge:

Sillcock faucet alignment wedge – on pipe

The wood siding where these will fit is perfectly vertical, so getting the wedge angle right isn’t really optional.

I must drill the existing hole in the sill plate out to 1-1/8 inch to clear the pipe fittings, plus the wood around the screws holding the current bibs to the wall will surely need some buttressing, but all that’s in the nature of fine tuning.

FWIW, this was the first 3D print after the move and I’m happy to say the M2 had no any need of adjustments.

The WordPress AI image generator apparently ignored the post text and produced a stylin’ picture of an arched bathroom faucet over a rimless sink, which I shall leave to your imagination.
2024-05-30