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.
Continuing the Halloween theme with a Bee and a Mud Dauber Wasp:
The little wasp has 0.5 mm slots perfectly suited for very light cardboard. It’s missing a few small pieces because at that scale they just don’t matter.
The chunky bee uses the familiar 1.4 mm chipboard:
A rear view to remind me where that long flat slab fits:
They have far too many pieces for mass production!
An alligator head should look good at the front door in late October:
The printing on the moving boxes makes it a bit less scary on the other side:
Perhaps those are gang tats!
The eyes are fluorescent acrylic and definitely improve the thing.
Continuing the theme of Halloween decorations (and slots-n-tabs resizing), a Dragonfly took shape:
It’s about a foot long, which makes one think of those prehistoric insects flying in dense, oxygen-rich air.
Of course, a Dragonfly needs prey, for which a Mosquito should suffice:
It’s about five inches from needle tip to tail and would certainly put up a stiff fight.
They’re both made from chipboard, with original model slot sizing being Close Enough that I could just resize the whole thing to fit the available sheets.
After five years, it’s time to replace the Anker 13000 mA·hr USB power banks / chargers I used with the M20 cameras and then the C100 cameras:
The Anker 325 20K V2 power bank is considerably chunkier, as befits its 20,000 mA·hr cell capacity (although the fine print says 12,500 mA·hr output):
The white tape stripe on the top marks the USB port on the end to reduce the fumbling involved in an out-of-sight socket. There’s also a USB-C port on that end for both charging the pack and powering other devices.
The new mounting cradle descends directly from the 13000 cradle:
The model includes a projection of the battery on the XY plane for export to an SVG file suitable for laser-cutting an EVA foam pad to cushion the bumps.
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
They still look pretty good after a year:
Which is to say: the orange acrylic hasn’t faded, the black paint’s still in place, and the gates seem to stay closed.
One might quibble about the missing wire snippet on the lower left corner, but on the whole it doesn’t get much better than that …
After a month outdoors, the (failed) flexible strip labels show signs of wear:
The upper one has a coating of clear rattlecan paint and looks much the better for it. The lower one is bare, but also suffered greatly from being folded and tucked through itself, so it started in worse condition.
Perhaps the paper will work better when stuck to metal plant label stakes, although I suspect the adhesive sheet will fail first:
Those are random names; Mary tells me the proper label format has the Latin nomenclature on the first line.
They’re now out on the patio for observation.
For whatever it’s worth, my fascination with this paper boils down to “it’s cheaper than Trolase” for applications not requiring archival quality and duration. If it lasts Long Enough, that’ll be Good Enough.
This seemed like a good idea for dispensing small drops of acrylic solvent while gluing spiders together:
It’s the Buffer Extraction Tube from a COVID-19 rapid test kit with a short brass tube jammed in its dropper tip. The longer brass tube let me suck that dose of solvent into the tube without any of the hassle required to pour the liquid from a big can into a little tube.
Tell me you didn’t save those things because you thought they didn’t look like they might come in handy for something.
Well, that turned out to be a Bad Idea™, because whatever plastic that tube is made out of cracks when exposed to the hellish mixture in SCIGRIP #3 solvent adhesive. The tube didn’t dissolve or melt, it just cracked when you (well, I) squeezed the sides.
My Box o’ Test Kits has a few other types of tubes, but I used a syringe from the inkjet refilling era and that worked OK.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 