Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The Fiskars PowerGear lopper Mary uses in the garden had occasionally encountered a tomato cage wire and the blade had a few dents. We recently had a bunch of knives / blades / tools sharpened by somebody who knows what he’s doing and, while the lopper blade is now deadly sharp, grinding the dents out changed its shape enough that it no longer met the opposing plastic (probably glass-filled nylon) anvil.
For lack of anything smarter, I cleaned the anvil, spread a layer of hot-melt glue over the surface, squished it flat with a snippet of PTFE fabric, and closed the jaws:
Fiskars lopper jaw repair – silicone cloth indent
Which left a blobular layer on both sides of the now perfectly matched blade channel:
Fiskars lopper jaw repair – blade indent
Trimming off the blobs made it slightly more presentable:
Fiskars lopper jaw repair – trimmed edges
The textured surface definitely looks great, even if the rest looks like the hack job it is.
I’m hoping the glue layer has enough traction on the anvil to survive the duty it gets in the garden, where Mary uses it to harvest cabbages & suchlike. I’m sure the occasional cage wire will test its resolve, but we’ll know more next summer.
Each of the glass fragments in a 3D printed coaster sits atop a metallized paper reflector in its own recess and gets covered with epoxy:
Printed Coasters – epoxy fill
That’s an early printed coaster with the epoxy pool covering the entire surface. Putting a rim around each fragment to form separate pools works better.
Assuming I do a tidy job of filling the recesses, this process worked exactly as you’d expect until I printed a coaster with blue PETG-CF filament:
Printed Coaster – Set C – oblique
Other than a slightly ragged cork layer motivating me to make the cork slightly smaller and use a fixture to align it properly, the coaster looks reasonably good. However, a close inspection shows all the epoxy pools are slightly recessed below their rims.
It turns out printing PETG-CF with an extrusion multiplier of 0.8, which I figured based on fitting threaded parts together, doesn’t fuse the threads into an epoxy-tight surface:
Printed Coasters – PETG-CF leakage – footprint
Fortunately, I’d been working on a silicone mat that could take a joke. I managed to move the coaster to a plastic sheet and refill the drained pools, although they continued to drain while curing.
After the epoxy cured to a rubbery texture, I scraped off the meniscus around the perimeter of the coaster, but the bottom shows it cured in a pool of its own making:
Printed Coasters – PETG-CF leakage
The cork conceals the evidence and the result looks good enough for my simple needs:
Smashed Glass 3D Printed Coaster – Set C – in use
Memo to self: Use the correct filament preset for the job!
Cleaning the baseboard radiator fins before moving the houseplants back to their winter abode by the living room window made sense, so I took the trim covers off and vacuumed a remarkable accumulation of fuzz off the top and out from between the fins. The covers had an equally remarkable accumulation of sawdust along their bottom edge, apparently deposited when the previous owners had the floor sanded before they moved in a decade ago.
If you happen to live in a house with baseboard radiators, I’m guessing you never looked inside, because nobody (else) does.
Anyhow, the radiator fins should rest on plastic carriers atop the bent-metal struts also supporting the trim covers, so that they slide noiselessly when the copper pipe expands & contracts during the heating cycle. Over the last six decades, however, the plastic deteriorated and most of the carriers were either missing or broken to the point of uselessness:
Baseboard Radiator Sled – old vs new
The shapes on the bottom are replacements made with a 3D printed base (“sled”) and a chipboard wrap around the radiator preventing the fins from contacting the strut:
Baseboard Radiator Sled – OpenSCAD show
Although it was tempting to 3D print the whole thing, because plastic, I figured there was little point in finesse: chipboard would work just as well, was much faster to produce, and I need not orient the shapes to keep the printed threads in the right direction.
The Prusa MK4 platform was just big enough for the number of sleds I needed:
Baseboard Radiator Sled – printed
The sleds along the left and right edges lost traction as the printing progressed, but everything came out all right.
The OpenSCAD program also produces 2D SVG shapes for the chipboard wraps and adhesive rectangles sticking them to the sleds:
Baseboard Radiator Sled – OpenSCAD SVGs
Import those into LightBurn, duplicate using the Grid Array, Fire The Laser, then assemble:
Baseboard Radiator Sled – assembly
The slits encourage the chipboard to bend in the right direction at the right place, so I didn’t need any fancy tooling to get a decent result.
A few rather unpleasant hours crawling around on the floor got the struts bent back into shape and the sleds installed under the fins:
Baseboard Radiator Sled – installed
Protip: Gloves aren’t just a good idea, they’re essential.
The trim cover presses the angled chipboard where it should go against the fins. The covers carry shadows of the plastic carriers, suggesting the clearance was tighter than it should have been and thermal cycling put more stress on the plastic than expected. We’ll never know.
Although I’ll make more for the other baseboards as the occasion arises, I hope to never see these again …
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After about four years, the two well-aged 12 V 9 A·hr batteries in the Belkin F6C1500 UPS gave up after a few minutes without line power, whereupon I swapped the UPS out for a new one.
The old batteries don’t have much life left in them (the date in the title should be 2021):
SigmasTek 12V SLA -2025-09-30
That’s with a 1 A load, rather than the 2 A I used earlier, as they’ll never be used for heavy loads again.
The new 7 A·hr batteries can power a 300 W incandescent bulb for 10 minutes before sounding the Low Battery alert, then another three minutes before shutting down. That’s about 12 A at 24 V, call it 2.6 A·hr from grossly overstressed batteries.
After the deck stain cured for a few days, I replaced the dryer vent:
Dryer vent
The alert reader will note it’s held to the siding with four stainless steel 4 mm socket-head cap screws, for which I’m not going to apologize one little bit.
They fit into a quartet of threaded wood inserts driven into the siding, because the previous vent had small steel screws that pulled out many years ago.
I used a 4-¼ inch oscillating hole saw to embiggen the original 4.000 inch hole through the wall that doesn’t fit contemporary “4 inch” dryer vent pipe. The 4.000 inch hole in the interior seal plate also needed embiggening.
We must add a filter bag of some sort, as the dryer really wants to coat the deck in fuzz, but that’s in the nature of fine tuning.
There are no other pictures, as this was a ten minute job that burned an entire afternoon …
Mary got a pair of HOKA shoes in the spring and, after a few months of what we consider light usage, had the upper detach from the sole:
HOKA shoe – failed joint
The oddly shaped holes in the rubberized area are a stylin’ thing, not defects.
The wet-looking stuff is E6000+ adhesive, which then got clamped overnight:
HOKA shoe – clamping
It cured and seems to be holding the pieces together:
HOKA shoe – glued
HOKA shoes came highly recommended by a friend and carry a corresponding price tag. Mary felt expensive shoes should hold together better than that, so (before I undertook the repair) she returned them under warranty. Some weeks later, the shoes reappeared with a note describing the failure as “normal wear and tear” which is not covered by the warranty.
Whereupon I was given permission to have my way with them.
For whatever it’s worth, this also happened:
HOKA site blocking
Mary’s conclusion was they’re nice shoes and fit well, but they’re definitely not worth three times the price of the shoes she’d been wearing.
Mary reported a problem unplugging the USB charger powering the light pad (the successor to the pad I repaired) she uses for quilting layouts:
USB Charger – as found
Yes, that blade is sticking out of the hot (“Line”) side of the outlet.
The only way into the charger was through its other end:
USB charger – interior top
Because I had no intention of returning it to service, I tried pushing the errant blade back in place, only to have it overshoot the mark and bulldoze various parts aside:
USB charger – PCB blade contacts
The two upright shapes contact the blades, but do not lock them in place. The PCB pulled easily out of the case, with no objection from the remaining (“Neutral”) blade.
The blades are simple steel bars press-fit into the plastic case, without holes / dimples / notches to lock them into the plastic. As far as I could tell, they were not molded in place.
I tossed the corpse into the e-waste box, extracted another USB charger from the Box o’ USB Chargers and returned the light pad to service.
I do have a few Genuine UL Listed USB chargers, but these are not among them.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 