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: Repairs

If it used to work, it can work again

Bicycle Mobile Rebuild

A long-lost repair finally made it to the top of the list:

Bicycle Mobile – bottom view

The original string had long since rotted out, but everything else was in a plastic bag just waiting for this occasion.

The colorful cylinders are stacks of laser-cut 6 mm disks with a 2 mm hole, held to the wire & string with a tiny dot of high-viscosity cyanoacrylate glue at each end:

Bicycle Mobile – detail

The disks came from acrylic leftovers:

Bicycle Mobile – laser-cut acrylic

The motion you can’t see makes the shiny bikes much more visible out there:

Bicycle Mobile – side view

The string came from dismantled badge reels providing spiral springs for the auto-retracting spools in the PolyDryer boxes.

The weight ball had a 2 mm hole filled by a wood plug which I cleaned out piecemeal with a 1.5 mm drill bit in a pin vise; a short length of wood skewer holds the new string in place.

Because the upper arms support more weight, their disk stacks need fewer disks for the same leverage. The original mobile had (at most) four 6 mm chromed plastic balls at each level, so I started with eight 3 mm disks, adjusted the stack length as needed, glued them in place, then removed the surplus disks by crushing them with a Vise-Grip.

I should rip off the design (“© otagiri 1979”) to build another with recumbent bikes.

2025-07-29
Solar Garden Light

I salvaged a solar garden light from the Vassar Community Gardens midden heap and stripped it down:

Solar garden light – internal

The single IC is a YX805 “solar lawn light boost control chip” and the resistor-like thing is a 82 µH inductor setting a 13 mA input current.

Cleaning off some minor corrosion, charging the NiMH cell, and soldering an amber LED onto the pigtail wire brought it back to life.

It’s now perched on the porch railing where it catches some afternoon rays:

Solar garden light – deployed

Maybe we can think of something better for it to do …

2025-07-25
Sewing Notions Drawer Pull Rethreading

A small sewing notions cabinet, once my mother’s, now holds some of Mary’s supplies and, a few days ago, had one of its drawer pulls fall off. While preemptively tightening all the screws, I found one no longer held onto its pull:

Notions drawer pull – parts

They don’t make drawer pulls like that any more!

As I see things, it can be forgiven for losing its grip after nearly a century.

Thread the screw in as far as it will go and lay the pull flat on the bench vise anvil:

Notions drawer pull – hammering setup

A few gentle whacks with a pin punch on top and bottom, plus a tap on each side, compressed the pull’s remaining threads around & into the screw:

Notions drawer pull – reshaped

Put it back in its drawer, snug the screw, and it’s all good.

That should suffice for at least the remainder of its first century …

2025-07-24
Dutchess Rail Trail: Brush Trimming & Pruner Repair
The bushes & trees along the Dutchess Rail Trail were reaching out to touch us again, so I took some slow rides with many stops.

~~Maple~~ Oak trees along Page Park Drive:

DCRT Brush Trimming – oak – 2025-07

Blackthorn encroaching through the fence at Overocker:

DCRT Brush Trimming – blackthorn – 2025-07

A tree somebody tossed down the trail bank near Morgan Lake:

DCRT Brush Trimming – discarded tree – 2025-07

The slide lock on my trusty rehabilitated Fiskars bypass pruner worked loose and began sliding into the LOCK position when held overhead, then fell apart during disassembly:

Fiskars pruner – lock rebuild

The lock now consists of:
- An M4 × 12 mm nut from a Chicago Screw that exactly matched the 5 mm OD cylinder passing through the pruner body
- A laser-cut fluorescent acrylic disk for thumb grippiness
- A washer just because
- An M4 hex-head screw
- A dab of Loctite bonding screw to nut
Clean the blades with alcohol and it’s ready for the rest of the season.

I should have put a wave washer in the stack for some springiness, but it works surprisingly well for what it is.

Now: discover how long acrylic lasts out there in the wild.

Update: Yeah, the lock needed a wave washer for more friction, which became apparent after the first overhead branch.
2025-07-10
Newmowa NP-BX1: 2025 Batteries
A new sextet of NP-BX1 batteries for the Sony AS-30V helmet camera arrived:

Newmowa NP-BX1 – 2022 vs 2025

The traces:
- Blue = 2025 batteries
- Red = 2022 batteries when new
I don’t know what the bump in the middle of the new battery discharge curve means. Something weird in the chemistry, I suppose. Getting good batteries from Amazon surely remains a crapshoot and I now have four chargers.

Recharging all six batteries required 5488 mA·hr, just over 900 mA·hr apiece. Running the camera on a one-hour bike ride burns 600-ish mA·hr, so that’s comforting.

Comparing the new results with the 2022 batteries tested last month:

NP-BX1 – Newmowa 2022 in 2025-06

The upper traces appear in red in the first plot, the lower curves come from three years of use.

I’ll deploy the two best 2022 batteries (D and F) in the SJCAM M20 keeping watch from the Forester’s dashboard.
2025-07-08
Plastic Spring Clamp Jaw Rod Replacement

A recent quilt photo shoot degenerated into me chasing several bright orange clamp jaws across the deck as they popped off their clamps hanging from the photo backdrop scaffold. Most clamps have jaws snapping onto actual rods, but these clamps have molded-in-place “rods” much smaller than the 2 mm expected by the jaws and much more irregular than seems reasonable.

Trace and scan the nose of a clamp:

Large spring clamp nose outline

Curiously, the molded rod is not centered in the nose:

Large spring clamp nose – pin locatIon

Use LightBurn to coerce a scan of the first sketch into a suitable path, laser-cut some MDF, and glue up a drill fixture:

Spring clamp jaw pins – fixture gluing

Align the drill to the center of the off-center hole marked on the bottom layer:

Spring clamp jaw pins – drill alignment

The drilling setup looks casual, but hand-holding the clamps against the rear wall and into the form-fitting nose recess sufficed:

Spring clamp jaw pins – fixture overview

I snipped the plastic “rods” out before drilling the holes, then rammed 2 mm steel rods in place:

Spring clamp jaw pins – steel

They’re really 5/64 inch = 1.98 mm rods from the oil-hardening drill rod stash, but entirely sufficient for the purpose.

With one clamp in hand, though, there was obviously no reason for the rods to be off-center. So I centered the drill in the nose, punctured the rest of the clamps, and pressed 2 mm carbon fiber rods in place:

Spring clamp jaw pins – steel vs carbon fiber

The rods were cut to 20 mm by rolling them across a pad with firm pressure from a utility knife. That was mostly to get some experience cutting carbon fiber, which is obviously overqualified for the job.

Snap the orange jaws in place and I shall never suffer the embarrassment of chasing them again …

2025-07-01
CNC-3018XL: Table Drive Nut Overstress

A confluence of unrelated events led me to unboxing and setting up the CNC-3018XL most recently used to plot Homage Tek Circuit Computer decks, but the table slid along its rods entirely too easily. A peek at the leadscrew revealed an assortment of parts last seen when I extended the frame:

3018CNC – table drive – as found

The featureless cylinder is the leadscrew follower nut, which evidently popped out of its proper place in the table drive block:

3018CNC – table drive parts

The crude chamfer suggests that end went into the block first, so that’s what I did:

3018CNC – table drive – follower nut installed

It seems snug enough in there, at least for a machine used solely for plotting and maybe drag knife cuttery, so I’ll assume the box received some rough handling during our move.

It’s now back in place and seems to work well enough:

3018CNC – table drive – installed

I briefly considered adding some setscrews to hold it in place, but came to my senses. If it pops out again, maybe it’ll be time to rebuild that block with proper retention.

The software side of the thing surely needs TLC, too.

2025-06-30