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

  • Floor Lamp Height vs. Reach: Plumbing Fitting

    Floor Lamp Height vs. Reach: Plumbing Fitting

    Update: Welcome Adafruit! The reshaped elbow shown here eventually got threaded adapters for the tubing and an awful paint job.

    The floor lamp with the invisible / non-tactile controls moved to a different chair, where it didn’t have quite enough reach and too much height. Knowing what was about to happen, I spliced a JST-SM connector into the wire inside the tube:

    Floor Lamp - base wiring JST-SM connector
    Floor Lamp – base wiring JST-SM connector

    After trimming off all the extraneous bits, the larger half of the connector (male pins) fits through the tubing and the smaller half (female sockets) barely fits through the bottom bushings.

    It turns out half-inch copper pipe fittings (ID = 15.9 mm) almost exactly fit the tubing (OD = 15.7 mm):

    Floor Lamp - copper 45° elbow
    Floor Lamp – copper 45° elbow

    A quick test showed the 45° (actually, it’s 135°, but we’re deep into plumbing nomenclature) positioned the lamp head too high and with too much reach:

    Floor Lamp - gooseneck exercise
    Floor Lamp – gooseneck exercise

    So shorten the tube attached to the head and deburr the cut:

    Floor Lamp - tube deburring
    Floor Lamp – tube deburring

    The 45° fitting is too high and a 90° fitting is obviously too low, so cut a 20° slice out of a 90° fitting:

    Floor Lamp - copper 90° elbow - 20° cutout
    Floor Lamp – copper 90° elbow – 20° cutout

    Cut a snippet of brass tubing to fit, bash to fit, file to hide, buff everything to a high shine, silver-solder it in place, and buff everything again:

    Floor Lamp - copper 90° elbow - 20° fill strip
    Floor Lamp – copper 90° elbow – 20° fill strip

    The 5/8 inch aluminum rods serve to stiffen the fitting, smooth out the torch heating, and generally keep things under control.

    Wrap the obligatory Kapton tape around the butt ends of the tubes to fill the fitting’s oversize hole, put everything together, and it’s just about perfect:

    Floor Lamp - copper 70° elbow - installed
    Floor Lamp – copper 70° elbow – installed

    I immobilized the fitting with black Gorilla tape, but it really needs something a bit more permanent. One of these days, maybe, a pair of setscrews will happen.

    The additional reach required a little more counterweight on the far side for security, so I added the broken stub of a truck leaf spring. It should be secured firmly to the base plate, but no tool I own can put a dent in those three pounds of spring steel. Maybe it’ll merit a fancy enclosure wrapped around the base?

  • Reversible Belt Buckle: Setscrew

    Reversible Belt Buckle: Setscrew

    The post in my reversible belt buckle popped out again, a year after punching it back in place, so it’s time to do a better job.

    Grab the buckle in the Sherline vise, center on the post hole, and drill a #38 = 2.58 mm hole:

    Reversible Belt Buckle - cross drilling
    Reversible Belt Buckle – cross drilling

    Tap it M3×0.5, clean out the hole, tap the post + spring back in place, dab threadlocker on the shortest M3 setscrew from the assortment, snug down on the post, and reinstall the belt:

    Reversible Belt Buckle - M3 setscrew installed
    Reversible Belt Buckle – M3 setscrew installed

    Looks like it grew there, doesn’t it?

    Now, as my buddy dBm will remind me, the real problem is too much weight in the saddle, but this fix should move the symptoms elsewhere …

  • Tek Circuit Computer: Cursor Hairline Scraping

    Tek Circuit Computer: Cursor Hairline Scraping

    Engraving a PETG sheet with a diamond drag engraver on the Sherline and filling the scratch produces a good-looking hairline, but there’s a tradeoff between having the protective sheet pull the paint out of the scratch and having the crayon scuff the unprotected surface. This time around, I scribbled the crayon through the protective film, let it cure for a few days, then scraped the surface to level the paint and see what happens.

    First, an unscraped cursor:

    Tek CC - Cursor red lacquer - plain - overview
    Tek CC – Cursor red lacquer – plain – overview

    Peeling the transparent protective film:

    Tek CC - Cursor red lacquer - plain - partial peel
    Tek CC – Cursor red lacquer – plain – partial peel

    The hairline is solidly filled:

    Tek CC - Cursor red lacquer - plain - peeled
    Tek CC – Cursor red lacquer – plain – peeled

    Scribbling another cursor the same way, then scraping the protective film to flatten the shredded edges:

    Tek CC - Cursor red lacquer - scraped - overview
    Tek CC – Cursor red lacquer – scraped – overview

    The hairline remains filled, but not as completely:

    Tek CC - Cursor red lacquer - scraped - partial peel
    Tek CC – Cursor red lacquer – scraped – partial peel

    A closer look:

    Tek CC - Cursor red lacquer - scraped - peeled
    Tek CC – Cursor red lacquer – scraped – peeled

    Scraping the crayon off the film removes a substantial amount of paint from the hairline, but, on the upside, the protective film does exactly what it says on the box and the PETG surface remains pristine.

    Both hairlines are, at least eyeballometrically, Just Fine™ for their intended purpose.

  • End of the Thing-O-Matic

    End of the Thing-O-Matic

    After nine years, it’s come to this:

    End of the Thing-O-Matic
    End of the Thing-O-Matic

    The Thing-O-Matic got me started in 3D printing (and blogging!), provided an education in many useful subjects, and has long since outlived its usefulness.

    A view from happier times:

    Thing-O-Matic Overview
    Thing-O-Matic Overview

    Its components will live on in other projects.

    One of those bittersweet moments, fer shure …

  • Nut Socket Wrench Improvement

    Nut Socket Wrench Improvement

    The recesses in cheap 1/4-inch shank nut drivers aren’t much deeper than the nuts, which means a screw sticking out of the nut by more than a few threads defeats the entire purpose.

    Well, I can fix that:

    Drilling 5.5 mm socket
    Drilling 5.5 mm socket

    That’s a 5.5 mm socket for M3×0.5 machine screw nuts, getting a screw clearance hole drilled into it with a #28 drill (0.1405 inch = 3.5 mm). The sockets are allegedly “forged and hardened”, but an ordinary HSS drill bit cuts like they’re butter, so I’m thinking somebody skipped the hardening step.

    Turns out I had a lot of nuts to remove from black oxide M3 socket head cap screws, making a brief pause in the action totally worthwhile.

  • Magnifying Desk Lamp Pivot Clamp: One More

    Magnifying Desk Lamp Pivot Clamp: One More

    For reasons not relevant here, I made another clamp for a magnifying desk lamp and mailed it off in a small box. A few measurements suggested all such lamps share a common design and similar parts, so I duplicated my previous attempt, with some improvements.

    On the upside, the same scrap of aluminum plate I used for the previous clamp emerged from the stockpile and, after a session with Mr Disk Sander, sported two square & reasonably perpendicular sides:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - squaring stock
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – squaring stock

    Rather than rely on my original dimension scribble, I transfer-punched the hole location from my as-built clamp to the stock:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - locating stem hole
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – locating stem hole

    That’s a reenactment based on a true story: the actual punching happened on the bench vise’s anvil surface, with too many moving pieces supported & aligned by an insufficient number of hands.

    Drilling the 5/16 inch hole required mounting the Greater Chuck on an MT1 taper adapter for the Sherline:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - drilling stem clamp
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – drilling stem clamp

    It’s normally on an MT2 adapter for the mini-lathe tailstock, where it handles drills up to 3/8 inch. For the record, the Sherline’s Lesser Check tops out at 1/4 inch and the Least Chuck at 5/32 inch.

    Punch & drill the 4 mm cross hole for the clamping screw:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - drill cross hole
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – drill cross hole

    Grab the plate in a toolmaker’s vise, set up some casual guidance, and bandsaw right down the middle:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - sawing clamp halves
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – sawing clamp halves

    Bandsaw the outline to free the two halves from the stock, then clean up their perimeter:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - rounded
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – rounded

    Saw the clamp clearance almost all the way through to leave a protrusion, then file the scarred kerf more-or-less flat:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - filing interior
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – filing interior

    Do a trial fit in my lamp, which lacks the fancy brushed-metal finish of the remote one:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - trial fit
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – trial fit

    It holds tight and rotates well, so break the edges and shine up the outside to a used-car finish (“high polish over deep scratches”):

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - surface finish
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – surface finish

    The inside remains gritty to improve traction on the lamp stem:

    Magnifying Lamp Clamp - interior
    Magnifying Lamp Clamp – interior

    Declare victory, box it up, and away it goes!

  • Nissan Fog Lamp: RGB LED “Bulb”

    Nissan Fog Lamp: RGB LED “Bulb”

    After cleaning the fog lamp lens enough to be encouraging, I made an LED “bulb” from four WS2812 RGB pixels:

    Nissan Fog Lamp - LED bulb standup
    Nissan Fog Lamp – LED bulb standup

    The small threaded hole has an M3 setscrew to let the brass post slide up & down to adjust the LED position inside the fog lamp’s reflector.

    Despite my poor experience with the PCB-based WS2812 LEDs, the strip-mounted ones have been ticking along in the hard drive platter lamp basically forever, at least after I tamped down the heat problem.

    The brass hex rod has plenty of thermal conductivity, particularly clamped into an aluminum disk connected more-or-less well to the fog lamp’s base.

    Nissan Fog Lamp - RGB LED lamp
    Nissan Fog Lamp – RGB LED lamp

    The two short wires linking the two LED strips (the purple wire is data into the first LED) hold them in place around the hex, despite their desire to straighten out, pull free of their adhesive, and fall off.

    The general idea was to put the LEDs at about the same level as the halogen bulb filament, thereby spreading enough light to fill the reflector housing:

    Nissan Fog Lamp - LED vs halogen
    Nissan Fog Lamp – LED vs halogen

    I drilled a hole through the hex as a cable “conduit”, turned the end into a nice rod, then machined a stub of aluminum to fit:

    Nissan Fog Lamp - parting off LED base
    Nissan Fog Lamp – parting off LED base

    A pair of slots milled along the sides of the aluminum disk fit the housing’s locating features:

    Nissan Fog Lamp - LED bulb trial fit
    Nissan Fog Lamp – LED bulb trial fit

    Nissan used an elaborate spring latch to clamp the halogen bulb’s sheet-metal base in place, but its 50 mil wire didn’t have nearly enough give for my chunky aluminum disk. My version of a spring latch came from a length of 24 mil music wire, which definitely beats the epoxy I was planning to use.

    Heat transfer seems to be a non-issue, as the LEDs get barely warm to the touch. Until they drop dead, I’ll assume it’s all good in there.

    Two screws hold the lens in place, but the collision seems to have stripped their grip on the plastic and they didn’t un-screw:

    Nissan Fog Lamp - lens retaining screw
    Nissan Fog Lamp – lens retaining screw

    Jamming a utility knife blade under the screw head and prying upward while turning the screwdriver persuaded them out of their sockets, after which the lens popped out of its form-fitted silicone gasket with surprisingly little effort:

    Nissan Fog Lamp - reflector stains
    Nissan Fog Lamp – reflector stains

    The lamp spent a week or so beside the road, out in the weather, and shipped a few drops of rainwater through the rectangular hole under the spring latch anchor. Some delicate cotton-swab action removed most of the grime without too much damage, but the reflective film on those corrugations won’t ever be the same again.

    Now it’s just a simple matter of software …