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

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
Baofeng UV-5 Wiring Plate Globbery

The weekly battery swap revealed the dismal state of the headset wires on Mary’s radio:

Baofeng wiring plate – loose wires

That’s after sorting & disentangling loose ends, ramming cables under their ties, and generally tidying things up.

Which suggested an improvement I should have done long ago:

Baofeng wiring plate – globbed

Verily, it is written: the bigger the blob, the better the job.

Gotta glob my bike the next time around.

Update: It’s hot melt glue!

2024-05-29
Magnifying Desk Light: LED-ifying & Base Refooting

My ancient fluorescent magnifying desk lamp emerged from a box and cried out to be used, but the equally ancient 22 W fluorescent ring light was long past its prime and cried out to be replaced with something from the current millennium.

So I removed the fluorescent ballast / choke from the junction box at the lamp base:

Magnifying Ring Light – ballast removed

That’s a grounded outlet in the cover plate serving as a wire termination block. The red crimp connector joins a white wire that formerly went to the ballast with the black wire going to the lamp head; you’ll note the black wire from the line cord going into the same heatstink tubing at the outlet.

The lamp head had a push-to-start switch, presumably with an internal starting capacitor or some such, but also sporting a pair of terminals behaving like a single-pole push-on / push-off switch. A bit of rewiring, of which there are no pictures, made it work perfectly with the new 13 W LED ring light:

Magnifying Ring Light – LED ring installed

It now sits on a bit of laboratory ironmongery weighing about as much as a small child:

Magnifying Ring Light – on base

Although the base has four feet, it sits perfectly flat on my (admittedly battered) surface plate because all four feet have been ground to make that happen:

Magnifying Ring Light – foot plan view

Those feet will be hostile to any table / bench top outside their intended laboratory environment. Fortunately, the geometry is simple enough to build directly in LightBurn and cut from a cork disk with PSA backing suited to become a coaster:

Magnifying Ring Light – cork foot cutting

Which fit well enough, although all four feet are just slightly different:

Magnifying Ring Light – cork foot

The new Basement Shop™ is coming together and this stuff is getting easier …

The WordPress AI came up with a plausible steampunk build:

Magnifying Ring Light – WP AI image 1

Love those flowy feet, although the vertical rod in the back seems misplaced.

Adding “one-piece base” to the prompt produces contemporary style:

Magnifying Ring Light – WP AI image 2

Dunno what the dingus on the lower arm might be (perhaps a spring?), but it’s got the right general idea.

2024-05-23