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
An on-sale pack of yellow Astrobrights card stock tempted me:
Homage Tek CC – Yellow Astrobrights paper
The somewhat wrecked cursor comes from my collection of discards, because I haven’t yet figured out how to mill the outline and engrave the hairline on raw stock.
The paper isn’t quite the same color as my Genuine Pickett Model 110-ES circular slide rule:
Homage Tek CC vs Pickett 110ES colors
Nor, of course, are the ticks and legends nearly as fine as you get with real engraving, but it’s probably Close Enough™ for anybody other than a Real Collector™.
The orange curve is the last surviving (“least dead”) Wasabi battery from the 2017-08 batch and the dark green curve just above it is another DOT-01 from 2019-02. The problem is not so much their reduced capacity, but their grossly reduced voltage-under-load that triggers a premature camera shutdown.
The Batmax batteries measure better than the craptastic Wasabi batteries, worse than the STK batteries, and should survive the next year of riding. As before, I have zero belief that Amazon would send me a “genuine” Sony NP-BX1 battery, even at six times the nominal price, nor that it would perform six times better.
Batmax is one of many randomly named Amazon Marketplace sellers offering seemingly identical NP-BX1 batteries: Newmowa, Miady, Powerextra, Pickle Power, LP, Enegon, and so forth. Mysteriously, it’s always cheaper to get a handful of batteries and a charger, rather than just the batteries, so I now have a two-socket USB charger:
Batmax NP-BX1 – USB dual charger
Despite the “5 V 2 A – 10 W” and “4.2 V 0.6 A – 5 W” label on the back, charging a pair of batteries after a ride started at 700 mA from a USB 3.0 port. The charger makes no claims about USB 3 compliance, so I’d expect it to top out around 1 A from a generously specified port.
Eight minutes later, we’re turning onto the Dutchess County Rail Trail:
Losing the Battery Bag – flight – 2019-02-25
And then it’s gone:
Losing the Battery Bag – gone – 2019-02-25
Mary drove past there on her way to a distant meeting, but the little red bag was not to be found anywhere. Maybe it’ll reappear on a fence post or taped to the bulletin board; I’ve tried to return things I’ve found that way.
I expect somebody got a nice present and, if naught else, it’s good to drop happiness into the world.
There’s another reader and a quartet of batteries on their way.
After sliding the HON Lateral File Cabinet shelf into place and installing the bumpers, it seemed rather loose and floppy. Comparing the situation with the other file cabinet showed it had a missing glide button in the rear and two missing slides at the front.
A replacement button emerged from the end of a Delrin rod:
HON Lateral File – shelf button – parting off
The original buttons had an expanding stem, which is easy to do with an injection-molded part. I opted for simple adhesive, with enough of a blob underneath the shelf to (presumably) lock it in place forevermore:
HON Lateral File – shelf button – installed
The slides required an iterative design technique (pronounced “fumbling around”), because nothing on either side remained square / plumb / true / unbent. I hacked the first version from scrap acrylic, broke off anything that didn’t fit, and got better measurements from what remained:
HON Lateral File – shelf front guide – size test
With those measurements in hand, the second version used a pair of weird flat-head shoulder screws (probably from a hard drive) to anchor 3D printed angle brackets into the frame:
HON Lateral File – shelf slides – version 2
Those worked reasonably well, but PETG doesn’t produce a nice sliding surface, so the final version has flat-head Delrin studs in slightly tweaked brackets:
HON Lateral File – shelf slides – version 3
As with the buttons in the back, the original slides had expanding studs holding them in place, but glue works fine here, too:
HON Lateral File – shelf slides – version 3 – installed
The button isn’t quite square to the surface and the slide isn’t quite flush with the bent metal in the frame, but it’s Good Enough™ for a shelf that won’t get lots of mileage.
For reference, the brackets should print vertically to wrap the plastic threads around the upright for better strength:
HON Lateral File Shelf Slide – Slic3r
If you did it the obvious way, the upright side would break right off at the first insult from the hulking shelf, although they’re basically a solid chip of plastic, with a little infill inside the bottom slab.
While I was at it, I pulled the springs to make them a bit longer, so they touch the back of the frame when the shelf is half an inch behind the front face of the drawers. A firm push and those Delrin contact points let the shelf pop out an inch or so, with plenty of room for fingers underneath the front edge.
Some drawer slide stops near the back needed attention, too:
HON Lateral File – slide stop bumper – bent
I cannot imagine how hard somebody slammed the drawers, because bending the stops back to a right angle required a Vise-Grip and some muttering:
HON Lateral File – slide stop bumper
Oddly, the cushiony hollow side faces away from the drawer, toward the back of the frame, because putting it forward holds the drawer front proud of the front frame face. Maybe HON cost-reduced the steel slides by making them just slightly shorter and using the same bumpers?
The drawers have begun filling up from boxes scattered around the house:
HON Lateral File – fabric stash
That’s the “orange” part of Mary’s collection, now with plenty of room to grow!
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Mitchell 8.6 – Longitude computations of occultations 1872-1875
Here’s what “calculations” looked like in 1872:
Mitchell 8.6 p9 – Occultation of 1253 BAC at 11 hrs – calculation
Yeah, grinding out trigonometry by hand using seven-place logarithms:
Mitchell 8.6 p9 – Occultation of 1253 BAC at 11 hrs – calculation detail 1
Not just by hand, but by hand with pen and ink:
Mitchell 8.6 p9 – Occultation of 1253 BAC at 11 hrs – calculation detail 2
Although you’ll find an occasional ink blot, she was probably using a fountain pen, rather than a dip pen, and made very few mistakes along the way. She often recorded direct instrument observations in pencil.
The next time you start pissing & moaning about how hard solid modeling is, suck it up.
Bonus: a Ginger Snap recipe suggesting it wasn’t all toil & trouble in the observatory:
Mitchell 7.5 – Ginger Snap recipe
The mystery ingredient is saleratus, “aerated salt”, now known as baking soda; they used potassium bicarbonate before today’s sodium bicarbonate.
Somewhat to our surprise, our “new” HON Lateral File Cabinets include a pop-out shelf:
HON Lateral File – shelf – closed
The trick: push the bar inward against fairly stiff spring pressure, release it suddenly, watch it pop out maybe half an inch, get some fingers under the front edge, then pull it outward:
HON Lateral File – shelf – extended
Obviously, opening the drawer above the shelf will sweep whatever you put there onto the floor and opening the drawer below seems futile. I suppose it produced a bullet item on the features list.
Note that the topmost “drawer” is also called a “shelf”, because the front cover slides up-and-inward to reveal the contents. Should you stand eight feet tall, you might be able to look down on that shelf, but we mere mortals barely see its contents at eye level.
Dismantling the cabinets preparatory to deep cleaning revealed a pair of rubber bumpers along the rear edge of the shelf:
HON Lateral File – shelf bumper – installed
The slightly angled front side of the bumper (on the right) collides with a crossbar below the drawer just above it, preventing you from pulling the shelf entirely out of the cabinet.
Remove the bumper by pressing down and rearward (to the left), shoving the protruding lip into the slot with a thumb / screwdriver, then pull it upward through the slot:
HON Lateral File – shelf bumper – removed
The second cabinet had only one bumper, so I traced it twice onto a rubber sheet half as thick as the OEM bumper, bandsawed the shapes, and introduced them to Mr Belt Sander for cleanup:
HON Lateral File – replacement shelf bumper
Jammed side-by-side into the slot, they’ll serve the purpose:
HON Lateral File – replacement shelf bumper – installed
As with the replacement foot on the first cabinet, they’re not the prettiest things you’ve ever seen, but Mary doesn’t expect to use the shelf and they’ll never actually bump into anything.
Even the Pixel phone’s HDR image processing has trouble dealing with dark gray objects on a black background in dim light …
