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Friday 29 March 2024

Making Web Toys I Can Use

Bear with me. It's not often I get to brag about stuff I've designed. I say "designed" because I figured it out, then got some AI help to fix the most esoteric (to me at any rate) problems that came up.

The widget at the foot of these articles.

You know it, this one: 

Google didn't just give me a widget like that. I think maybe they just aren't the "Do No Evil" company they started out as ... 😸 But (and this is part of the reason why I pay so many online fees) I have a virtual server at Digital Pacific. I host one blog on there because I sometimes worry that Google will just close Blogger/Blogspot down as it has so many other of its properties. 

First - Digital Pacific aren't giving me anything for this testimonial. I started with them almost twenty years ago, to host a small static website. Yes, they've been around for a long time. I also put several people onto one of their servers and set them up with websites. And when my old site wasn't needed any more, I closed it down and didn't use DP for a year or two, but then another use case came along, and I signed on again. And then again with the current site, O Hai Corona!

I've never had a problem that either I couldn't solve fairly easily or one that DP considered too trivial to give me their full support. 

So Anyway.

As the site has a perfectly good webserver, I can use it to serve out content - and chunks of web code. That whole image above is a mini web page that (thanks to ChatGPT3.5 looking up the variables for me) grabs the URL of the blog post and puts it into the buttons so that you can share/copy/bookmark, it contains a whole little Universe of code and stuff, and that you can use to do whatever with.

To bung it into a blog article here, I have a little HTML template I just copy over an existing page, and that creates that little graphic up at the top of the page, and adds the code to display the Bitty Little Box down at the bottom of the page. 

What's the beauty of that? 

I can add the piece of HTML to display the BLB on the bottom of any post or web page and it'll consistently display the same way. And if something stops working or I want to add a new feature, I do it once in my DP server and it reflects in ALL the pages the code is in. So even old posts that had it in, can now see my "Contact Details" link I added at the bottom. If I use a different service to display the links, I only have to change it once on the DP server, and not have to worry about editing 900+ instances manually.

And it only took me a few weeks of refining and experimenting for n hour here and there to get it up and runnimg. 

One other feature I like about it is that if I have an older post (which may not have had a BLB in the past) I can edit and update it with just that one piece of HTML and bongo - it now has the BLB and all that it contains.

Short post, I know, but now the BLB contains a contact details link so if you're interested you can contact me. 

Enjoy!

Tuesday 26 March 2024

Automation Project: Shed

Starting shed automation. I know, it seems to be ass-backward to not be finished with physical moving-in stuff and already planning the improvements, but I have to plan, and also it was a bad bones day so hard physical exertion was out. 

A propos of drawing circuits, I need a Windows app that I can use to easily draw up circuit diagrams to post in here, does anyone know of something that's free, able to have components added without needing a degree in CAD / CAM / Ballyhoo BS? 

I'd just like to be able to quickly draw a box, add a few terminals to it and label the box and terminals, then use that in multiple drawings along with common components. (Or tell me one that isn't free and then help me out with a donation?

Anyhow. The thing I want to turn into a black box is this AC current sensor thingie. You can find them on AliExpress for a few bucks and a five-week wait, and they're a bit super-easy, just power them from the same 5V as the board you're using to monitor (in the case of that link, an Arduino Uno but I have a few others in mind) and measure the Out voltage on an analog pin. If I was a smart-ass I'd add voltage sensing, then work out the total power draw of the workshop but I'm a dumb-ass and all I want is to trigger an action if more than an amp or two is drawn on the monitored line.

Why Automation? 

This is the little gizmo in question, the ZMCT103C which will sense 5A, which I think is reasonable given the 700W - 1600W range of mains-powered tools I have. I'm not sure what the gizmo does with more current but I'm hoping it just silently maxes out and doesn't get blown up by a larger input voltage. We'll see. If desperate, I can actually wind myself a transformer and just make a circuit to switch at some predefined current.

If you want a ZMCT103C of your very own, a quic search of AliExpress will get you around a dozen hits, FSM knows how many more if you just type it into DuckDuckGo. (Or Google, not my recommended option though.)

But that doesn't get you to the "why" of the whole thing does it? Basically, it's simple. If a large enough device draws current and there's no voltage on the dust extraction, I want it to shut down until someone presses Reset. Dust extraction is paramount for me, wood dust from power sawing and routing is fine enough to go through a normal dust mask and play hell-high havoc with my respiratory issues. And when I turn on any such machine and the control board realises that there's power on the air/light circuit, then it should turn the dust extractor on. I'll try and arrange it so that all the dirtiest power tools have a suction hose on them, and a blast-gate that I can open to allow dust to be whooshed away and filtered so that I can get away with a relatively simple respirator.

Most workshops have these auto-on systems but they're built into the superduper shop vacs they buy, you have to plug the power tools into the shop vac and then it switches on when the tool is powered up. That's great for many smaller shops and hobby setups like mine, but as I said, my needs dictate something a bit better. Shop vacs produce a huge plume of 2u dust and that's just a limitation they have. They run high speed air, and that puts a lot of pressure on filters. 

I want a lower-speed, high volume setup and I'm building it. Also, those shop vacs are inside the workshop so that means that whole dust plume is going right back into the air I'd be breathing. You can (sometimes...) run a vent hose outside from the shop vac but it costs because it reduces the overall efficiency and so you get less dust extraction. 

Some of the low-speed high-volume dust extractor systems people use, also vent back inside the shop. Some have huge cylindrical folded-paper filters atop them but those filters only catch some of the dust in that dangerous size range, and even then, those filters cost a bomb, need cleaning (which need regular cleaning, generally with an air hose nozzle, and then there you are, shifting the dust out of the filter and into the air around you. Ya just can't win.)

The only thing you can do is take the best tips from it all and put the extractor outside - with all the filtering you can get - and be prepared for a few efficiency losses along the way. Because of course even the scenario where the machine is outside has drawbacks. For a start, it creates a vacuum inside the shop, and if the wind's in the right direction you can cop the dust right back. On cold days, the extractor system will cause that vacuum and then cold air will creep in through every gap. 

And THAT is why I want automation. To be able to make the shop as clean as possible for my lungs' sake. 

So some of the programming has just been sorted out:

If power tool on and no power to light / air circuit, emergency stop power to the tools.
If power tool on and power exists to light / air then activate dust extraction.
If dust extraction is on as per above, and pwer tool turns off, countdown 30 seconds and turn extraction off. (You want time for the dust in the lines to get to the cyclone, also sometimes you're just moving a length of wood along to make the next cut, so turning the extraction system on then off then on again is wasteful.)

The other thing is that I want to run the dust extraction off solar and an inverter, because even though it seems a negligible current, with the mitre saw turning on and the extraction system turning on, that could trip the circuit breaker for the garage. There's only a single 16A circuit into the place, meaning that in practice it's limited to 10A per outlet which means that two motors kicking in at the same time could easily exceed the 16A rating. 

For the moment I'll have to chance it - or power the extraction system from the laundry which is on a different circuit and circuit breaker. A new battery for the solar panel and a chunky 4000W inverter are outside the budget for now. But I want to allow for it in future. 

Anyway - just a progress report. As always, please share the link to this page, consider making a donation, and come back soon for the next article!

As always, be awesome, stay awesome!

Tuesday 19 March 2024

AliExpress - An Improvement to Orders Page?

Firstly, I'm trying out a "drop cap" style graphic at the head of each article that'll allow you to tell which blog the repost came from when it's announced on social media. If you find this annoying let me know, but give it a few days to see how it goes...

Now on with the show. I see that AliExpress has made order tracking that little bit better, I've never seen:


. . . tracking info start with "Collected by courier" on any of my other orders, there's always been a longish hiatus where the order was packed but - invisible - just not tackable. 

Sometimes that Cloak Of Invisibility lasted right up to the day the item was received here in Australia, sometimes I'd get a grudging email after two weeks that the order was in the system with China Post or something. 

Anyone else noticed this as a new thing or have I just never had a seller that bothers to use the feature? 



Wednesday 6 March 2024

Garage Shed Sched

Firstly, I'm trying out a "drop cap" style graphic at the head of each article that'll allow you to tell which blog the repost came from when it's announced on social media. If you find this annoying let me know, but give it a few days to see how it goes...

So you may have gathered across all my blogs (check them all at Ted's News Stand) that real life has reared its head in our life here, but it's also started settling into a new routine so besides having more time to be indoors and writing, I also have more time to go back to making a garage into a workshop.

To complicate matters, it's coming up on our hottest months and the garage is a 6m by 6m steel sheeted and roofed structure without a tree in sight to shade it. When temperatures outside hits 26C the interior (with a door open and fans blowing cooler outside air in) hits 33-34C. And we're heading for the middle of summer, when temperatures outside will hit 34C - 38C quite often...

UPDATE: Thanks to the skylight blinds the difference between inside and out is now only 6C with door open and 4C with door open and intake fan on... 

I guess I could open the garage roller door. 

.

But no. I can't. 

.

Our cats are confined to the house and yard - and that means they can get into the garage by its side door. Which they do all the time because they're all of them my apprentices and like to be around when I'm working on projects. (At least, right up until I make those big noises with the machines, then they sensibly go outside and observe from a safe distance...)

Eventually, I'll make a folding screen to stop them running out and onto the highway, but that will take time and frankly, after the most recent bit of work I've completed, I can't see myself doing a large folding screen this summer. Thanks to what I've done the garage is already a little cooler inside, but if I'm going to lose another couple of kilos in the "tin sauna" I'll use that energy to finish moving in rather than improving the airflow. It'll be cooler again soon enough, and then too cold without a heater Also, besides hot work, it's hard going with respiratory and mobility issues. 

I do okay, I just do okay slower than most others would...

For now, I might have to be content with the goals I've already scored:

  • Sunshades covering the wall-to-wall set of skylight panels. 
  • Tool trolley (almost) finished.
  • Shopvac turned into a cyclone dust collector.

Sunshades

I noticed early on that the skylight panels (just a 40cm wide strip of translucent corrugated panels in the roof, but provide great light - and unfortunately, heat) made the place uncomfortably warm in spring, and put an old cloth gazebo wall panel up temporarily over the western side, as I figured the afternoon heat would be the worst. Then Pickle.  

So what happened? I had the panel clipped up with spring clips, Pickle found his way up onto the shelving, decided that he was going to use the canvas for a hammock, walked out onto it and - took an almost 1.7m drop to the concrete below... Luckily the clips only let go on one side and the cloth wrapped around him and slowed his fall, because I could only watch as he came down, it was all so quick. The tube chute he ended up sliding through was enough to reduce his fall from a possible thump to a mild bump, and he's okay. 

But that meant that I had to take time off the main setting-up jobs to make sure that Pickle didn't get to the top of the rack shelving again. (Closing any direct climbways above the first shelf, a minor engineering miracle.) And put up the canvas again because otherwise it was uncomfortably hot inside. 

The old...

Halfway to the "new, improved" shades...

... and I don't have a photo yet of the whole new setup. 

Then just a week or two ago I took the gazebo canvas down, cut two correctly sized panels from it, and covered a bit more than a metre of the skylights either side of the ridge. They're designed to more or less stay there all the time but can be furled up towards the c entre to let more light and warmth in, in winter.

I installed two support wires that go from side to side over the ridge rafter spaced about 900mm apart, used a few steel tubes from another gazebo structure to make spreaders for the canvas, and fixed the panels in place on the support wires. Because I had a pack of tarpaulin grommets, I added two to each canvas panel so I can also support the middle of each panel. 

I'd earlier bought a 1.8m x 1.8m 70% shadecloth swatch of a similar sandy tan colour that I could cut in half for two 900mm x 1.8m panels, put four grommets per side on those, made similar spreader bars, and ran them from the end of the tarp to the walls. That gives about 90% shade over the apex of the roof and 75% for the ends, and I can slide the spreader bars up to open it all up for winter, slide them back down for hotter days. 

Tool trolley

This was my hardware cart in the smaller shed, but I've made it the storage for power tools, hand tools, and a few other bits n bobs. I need to extend a pair of steadying bars and move the rear caster wheels outwards for a bit of extra stability, but most of the tools are on it somewhere. It ain't pretty but it's functional. 

Shopvac cyclone

I've had an 80litre olive drum on a cart made from an old pram frame for months, and a spot to sit the Shopvac at the front. But I hadn't yet had time to make the plumbing and set up a drum cyclone. 

But then I had a half day to mess around, got things halfway to a prototype that I thought would work, and when I had another half day, I put it together. It too ain't pretty but it does keep all the dust out of the shopvac, meaning I can use it to dust-collect on the power tool tables and also vac up the floor, without needing to buy filter after filter for the Homelite shopvac. It has one downside though, I managed to block the end of the hose while it was running and was treated to the sight of the olive barrel just imploding like a bad science experiment. And it was loud, decisive, and FAST! I changed my underwear and continued.

Luckily the decades-old plastic didn't split, but I'm now looking for a much more sturdy barrel... Meanwhile, I have a smaller shopvac style machine that I use for floors or anywhere there's a chance of water or something that could block the hose and cause another implosion, and just the cyclone for the dust ports on the mitre saw, drill press, table saw, and any other power tools with a port. Being on the trolley I can move the dust collector to wherever it's needed. 

There's also a continually running air cleaner filter, and I wear a mask when using the machines as well. 

NEWS!: I found a large extractor vent/motor combo. Backstory: 

Now, people who make their own dust extraction systems often make the turbine rotor turbine for it out of plywood and attach a motor and build a spiral exhaust chamber etc... The idea of such a turbine is that it moves a large volume of air at a lower pressure. 

But it's a LOT of fiddly work that could explode on you if anything lets go and unbalances it at 5,000 or 10,000RPM or whatever. Good turbine or squirrelcage blowers are kinda expensive on my budget.  And I saw this vent motor combo in the opp shop for twenty bucks and thought "Well, this'll save me making and balancing a fiddly turbine, and I have several old mains motors that' spin this up to the speed I'll need..."

Then I cleaned it up a bit, and on a whim, sorted the wiring out, hooked it up to an RCB and gave the "ole Beige Mario Mushroom" a quick test to see if the turbine impeller was balanced before investing much time in adapting it to a more powerful motor. I needn't have worried...

My wife took the first video of it but I had to take a second one because she was --- shall we say very VERY surprised by the speed and volume of air it shifted and let out a few unladylike words... Quite frankly, so did I, because the amount of air it shifted for such a small power consumption took me by surprise. So here's Take#2:

The dome is about 420mm across, enjoy the rush!

You can find my other videos at https://youtube.com/@PTEC3D. Warning, I don't edit my snippets (yet) so it's all raw footage. And a bonus, boring, non-trained voice.

Bonus: The mitre saw

You might recall that I bought the 254mm compound mitre saw a few months back at a garage sale, and put it into service as soon as I lowered the height of the plinth it was on, and I've been using it for the soft woods of pallets and the pine lumber I have and it was fine. 

Then I tried a piece of harder wood and noticed that the blade was getting smoking hot. Not good, so I checked a few things. Including the blade. - Wow... - The blade that had 13 of the 40 carbide tipped points broken off, chipped, or otherwise damaged... 

(Not by me, I might add. I knowingly used it to cut aluminium T track but the saw blades are made for that, just use a slow feed rate and a mitre saw will rip through anything aluminium, plexiglass and many plastics. Nope - I was just a dope and didn't check the blade when I found it at the garage sale and so missed an chance to maybe whittle the price down a bit more... Lesson learned.)

I had a bit of money put aside and luckily it was enough for me to go to the hardware store and buy another blade for the beastie and still have server fees etc t hand. Haven't made a cut with it yet but I'm sure it won't have as much tear-out as the old blade had... UPDATE: It's lovely to use now. I've just made around a dozen rails for the last (The LAST!!! Hurray!!!) part of the shelving and it's like magic. 

As it's now our height of summer it's a bit warmish (36-42C, about 97-108F) to be working out there doing heavy work like finishing the rack shelving and moving large quantities of stuff around, but there are smaller projects:

  • The "new-new "dust extractor system. I made the cyclone system I mentioned and that I'm quite proud of out of a shop vac and an 80litre plastic olive drum, which is fine except it depends on high-speed rather than of volume of air so it screams a bit loud, which is annoying and also, high-speed air stirs up a lot of dust. The new-new system will use a 120litre drum for the cyclone, and whatever I find works for the second and third stage filtering and power plant. (Or in this case, power mushroom...)
  • I'm also working a 200litre drum into a plastics washing machine, currently making the mesh insert that the plastics will go into to be washed. (BONUS: It'll also let me wash other things, as long as they're not oily.)
  • Re-jig of the tiny table saw (or finding a cheap one on local buy/swap/sell and having generous patrons) so that I can finally be sure my badly racking home-brewed fence will remain square - or finally free up that table for use as a router table. 
  • I need to make any draw of current on the power tools outlets, switch on the dust extraction and then keep it running long enough to clear out the plumbing afterwards.
  • I need a way to cut off ALL power tools power for emergencies.
  • I'll be getting back to designing my little CNC router so that I'll have some wood, plastic, and aluminium milling capability. 
  • Still looking for someone to send me a Bambulabs machine 😺 so I can print parts for tools etc without having to futz and fart around with my cranky, fussy, and now ageing Creality Ender 3 Pro. It's still a good printer but takes a lot of setup, has to  be watched while printing, and I just don't have that amount of time. 
  • Thicknesser, anyone? I could really use that or an electric planer for taking plastic sheets to a smooth finish rather than clogging up expensive sanding discs as I'm currently doing... 
  • I have - of course - the rack shelving to finish and move stuff into. But - LAST row of shelves!
  • And to build a lean-to roof with solar panels on top and a long wood rack underneath, and a water collecting drum for shop water seeing as running water isn't handy close by.
  • I need to make a cat-containment set of folding panels so that next summer I'll be able to partially raise the garage door to let air in but filter our cats that would otherwise escape and get run over on a highway 20 metres away.
  • I'm also going to need to partition off a space for the wife's little scooter so it can stay undercover but not get workshop dust all over it. 
  • If I can finagle it I'll ask the landlord to please let me cut a utilities panel in one wall where I can place the dust extractor outside and only run plumbing and a power lead inside. 
  • If I can achieve that last point, then in winter I can use the same extractor utilities panel to run diesel heater combustion pipes outside for winter heating. 

And at some stage of course, I'll want to be making useful items out of waste plastic including waterproof capping and cladding for my bird, bat, and possum nesting and roosting boxes. Oh and I have half a dozen orders from my wife that I'd really like to have the facilities to Make for her...

Now please bookmark, share, donate - help me get some of these projects ready to hand off to worthy community organisations.

The great news is that we' ve heard a great new word from the wife's hematologist: remission!

Stay Awesome!

Thursday 29 February 2024

HDPE Fun Facts With Toasters

HDPE Bottle Cap Fun Facts. Here I am doing a quick research project using the HDPE bottle caps people have been bringing me to recycle. Meet your average soft drink bottle lid... 

Firstly.

All HDPE will have roughly the same specifications. It has a Specific Gravity (SD) of 0.95 meaning if you had a cubic centimetre block of it vs a cubic centimetre (cc) of water, the HDPE would weigh 0.95g and the water, 1g. 

That means that the HDPE will float in water, I tested it with my sample - and yes it does. 

  1. I used my flat sandwich press which limits the outer dimensions of the piece I can make in it to around 25cm x 15cm. 
  2. I could place a grid of 8 bottlecaps across, 4 bottlecaps deep. I placed one of those BBQ protector sheets on the bottom first, left the long edge of it leaning up against the lid of the sandwich press, lining up the 32 bottle caps as close together as I could. 
  3. Then I folded the BBQ protector sheet over them, closed the press, and put about a kilo of weight on top. 
  4. Switched the unit on and left it for 20 minutes, then did not open the press or remove the weights but left it to sit for another 40 minutes to cool down. 
  5. That last bit's important. 
  6. For reason A) the plastic is tacky and despite all the non-stick claims for the BBQ sheets, it'll stick and get pulled like toffee if you try to take a peek and you'll end up with a warped sheet. 
  7. Reason B) is that even if you don't try to peek between the sheets, as the plastic cools down it'll shrink at different rates depending where it's getting cooled the most, and this will always put a bow in it. (If you don't believe me, make a small thin patch of plastic sheet, peel it off the BBQ sheet as soon as you're able to, and drop it in a bucket of cold water. Scrunch!)
  8. By 40 minutes it was still warm but my plan was to put a second layer of bottle caps on, so it was all going back for a second heating anyway. I just eased the BBQ sheet off the top of the plastic (using cotton gloves because it wasn't really all that hot by then - but I recommend good silicone heat-resistant gloves anyway) and added another 32 caps in the same grid pattern.
  9. I then proceeded as for step 3 again but set my timer for 30 minutes as there's a bit more plastic to heat up.
  10. At the end of that time I again switched the unit off and then walked away - but for at least an hour this time. 

My setup looked like this:

That's around 1kg of lead on top.

And by this time I was trying another experiment with other caps.
You can see why my results have a surface pattern - both from the BBQ sheet and the wrinkles it gets, and also from the fact that for the sake of speed I wasn't "kneading" the plastic in between. Generally when making sheets in a panini press, you (wearing silicon heatproof gloves, of course!) roll and twist and knead the plastic between adding / reheating layers to get air bubbles out, and get a more uniform surface, better colour, and more interesting patterns. (See almost any Brothers Make Youtube video to see how.)

Also note that some presses can fit several layers of bottle caps at a time but I'm not so lucky with this press. Also, most pros recommend that your plastic be shredded and I don't have a shredder nor a burning desire to sit down for two days with plastic bottle caps and a pair of shears cutting all down to shreds... 

(Down near the bottom I have the ideal sheet-making machine I'm hoping to get my paws on one day - it's a teeshirt transfer press but it fulfils my requirements quite well - over 200C temperature available for harder grade plastics, 300mm x 380mm flat rectangular press plates, both heated, locking press mechanism, a timer, and can be readily modified to make precise straight-edged rectangular panels repeatably from most materials. Being able to experiment with one is one of the reasons I ask for donations...)

In the case of the lower image, the bottle caps are off the larger juice bottles but they're still all type 2 (number 2 in a recycle triangle symbol) or HDPE. I could have used all LDPE (4) but it's more flexible and softens at a lower temperature than HDPE. 

As I said, I left the first experiment for over an hour to cool, because it's a bit warm (34C) here so the whole setup was still warm to touch - but also, luckily, the plastic had set solid enough to no longer bow during the remaining cooling. 

And the first experiment result was this:

As you can see, burnt sugars, and you can see each bottle cap still.

The result didn't need to be fantastic for my purposes for it so I decided not to waste too much time on it. Washing it using a reasonable washing system I don't yet have, using hand shears to painstakingly cut it all into smaller more uniform chips (and there's another tool I need, a decent shredder...) was deemed to be too much mucking around for a sheet of plastic I was just going to use for in internal panel that will have stuff mounted on it, out of sight.. 

The dirty looking marks are where there was dried drink on the lids, and because I didn't really care about appearance or strength too much, I left them unwashed. Also, because I figured it out all by myself when my first ever experiment had that same "grotty" look. Drinks (and milk) have sugars in them, the sugar when put in the press and heated gets burnt and "toasted" and also melted into the plastic itself. And that's a problem.

You'll appreciate that whereas with a sheet of clean plastic, I can return all the shavings and trimmings back into the tub to go round again, but once you've got some toasted sugars baked into the sheet, all trimmings will be contaminated with crud you can't get out by washing. 

For my project, this is a sub-panel behind a control panel and will never be seen, there's plenty of room to place it with only minimal material needing to be taken off - and I wanted to show you one of my first "gotchas" I came across. You literally *must* wash every piece with water and maybe a small amount of surfactant (detergent) if you want a good clean output. Don't depend on your collectors to do it...

This shows the importance of having some means to wash and dry your plastic well, why a better press than a sandwich press is eventually going to be on your wishlist too, and for the sake of a consistent output, you need something that will shred or flake the plastic to a small consistent size that will form a uniform product. 

I've got the materials for a decent wash system, and when I build it the documentation will be here. I'm hoping to find a way to shred/grind plastics after washing and drying, and again, if either I get enough in donations to buy one or build one, the build and use will appear here. 

That second experiment

... this seemed like a much better idea in theory ...

... until you consider the wildly dofferent expansion ratios of plastic versus steel ... 

The idea was to put some fine wire mesh in between, but at this scale it does not work ... The steel mesh is fine when everything's melting, it's still sort of fine as everything's cooling down between the plates of the press, but as soon as the pressure comes off . . . sproing! 

It was a first class lesson in first class stuff-ups thanks to my first-class lack of thinking things through. 

What I learned from that

This would probably have worked if there was a 10mm - 20mm sheet of plastic involved, but you need a modified Precious Plastic sheetpress and cooling press set A) that I can't afford and B) that would wipe out all the spare space in my workshop and C) would need a separate mains power line in the workshop. My little sandwich press can barely handle 6mm thicknesses before it can't supply heat fast enough, so the contraction of iron mesh even as thin as that mesh was, will always result in a topographical map.

The idea for putting reinfocing inside a panel came to me because I've previously ironed plastic into cotton cloth, which works a treat and gives the plastic greater strength - just like the glass cloth in fibreglass. Because cloth (or fibreglass cloth) doesn't really expand with heat, and will always let the plastic win the shrinkage contest..

As I said, one could possibly stretch a wire mesh across a Precious Plastic sheetpress halfway up, but you'd need a special split edge form with space for the mesh. And it'd leak plastic, resulting in the top side always having sag. 

The reason I thought of the wire mesh was twofold, A) as observed above, the strength factor, but B) also the fact that mesh as fine as I was using can also help to screen things from electrical interference. It'd be a great Faraday cage if one could connect the edges together and to earth.

Anyhow - this has to wait until I can test it with a tee shirt press converted to mini sheetpress that can make consistent products. I might be able to make 8mm thick sheets on that with a bit of care. 

Re-stocking

We give our 10c Container Return Scheme plastic bottles to a friend's kids, and we keep the bottlecaps because HDPE. But now we've told the kids that if they collect bottlecaps of their other bottles before recycling them for the 10c, I'll pay them a few more bucks. I know, I'm a soft touch. But the kids are saving to buy themselves things and start savings accounts, and I'm happy to help them get some business nous. Plus - I'm slowly getting a 20litre tub filling up with hdpe. 

My hope is to one day be able to put collection bins around the place and collect a useful amount of material. But that means buying or making lockable bins, and driving around town checking and emptying bins regularly. And once I have a system, I can donate it to the local Community House and they can use it to make money for their good works. But I won't be doing it with my pension income.

Anyway - like share bookmark donate - I'll take all the help I can get to get to my next goal of getting a tee shirt press I can make into a sheetpress. Your donations make it possible for me to keep my online stuff online and to keep experimenting and presenting my results for others..


Wednesday 28 February 2024

Ruby Tuesday - Meet the laptop

So I've had a new laptop for about a week now and am still nowhere near "moved in" to it. I'm going slowly because my old laptop (Toshiba Satellite Pentiumsomething 4G RAM mechanical SATA 40G or some such originally I upgraded to 240Gb SSD SATA) had some huge number of programs installed on it and I'm not sure which ones I'll keep on it vs transferring to the new laptop. It's also over ten years old and software that used to run on it crawls now, despite completely flattening it and re-installing new W10 on it twice in that time. 

I've had a $300 Ideapad 10" convertible and the wife has a 14" Lenovo of a similar style to the new kid on the block but about four years old now. Most importantly, the Lenis have been reliable - and after my current one, my third Toshie, developed broken hinges leading to a broken casing, I'm regretfully saying buh-bye to the Toshiba brand. 

The 10" IdeaPad has been great for a glorified tablet running W10, and I've used "Lena" as it's known, for about four or five years now as a note taker, Zoom and Skype machine, general take it anywhere machine, and between the wife's Lenovo and "Lena" I'm comfortable around the sleeky little grey/silver machines. 

And apparently (and despite a long career in IT, system and network admin, and freelancing) I'm the least machine-proud person I know. When I was filling in for a worldwide logistic company's IT guy while they went for a six month stress leave, I had to buy a new phone because my current one had bit the dust. I walked to a corner shop near work in my lunch break, found another Nokia that looked like it'd do, charged it, whacked my old SIM in, and rang a mate. This is the conversation:

DD: (the friend) "I thought your phone was cactus? Waaaaasssssuuuuup?" (Yeah. Unfortunately. It was back THEN...)

Me: "Yah I just bought one at lunch, charged it and put my SIM in it. Much better battery life now."

DD: "So? Tell! What have you bought?" 

Me: "Ummm... Hang on. Uh - it's got a salmon pinkish case." (And fair dinkum I had no bloody idea what make or model it was at that stage. And still don't to this day. Nor do I care.)

DD: ". . . kidding, right? Right?"

Me: "fraid not, it was a phone, I needed a phone, now I haz one..."

Pretty much always since starting a full-on career in IT, that's been my attitude. Screw the brand name, screw the accessories and bells and whistles - does it do the job and do it well? - then buy it and set it up, give it to the person it was built up for. Luckily a lot of the office machines, besides compiling software and letting the person program on it, also partook of the daily network FPS deathmatches we ran... So I did get to know the name Radeon pretty well... 

But the thing about getting Toshies was - I got a secondhand Toshiba CHONKBRIK when I needed a machine to take out in the field, and it was surprisingly tough and capable so I was really pissed when one day I went to open the lid and there was a *crack!* and the lid separated from the hinge, the screen cracked across a corner, and that was all she wrote...

I finagled the second one from a supplier at a good price, copied everything off the old hard drive, and had a good machine I was still using six years later when I retired with disability and moved interstate to here. Then one day opening the lid creaked like opening the Great Hall doors at a haunted mansion, and from then on I didn't close the lid... (I did hear that a touch of oil applied with a fine tip syringe helped. And it did, for a few more months, but apparently the issue is mechanical damage inside the hinges.) Then one day the cleaner pushed the lid down when they went to dust...

And now, my latest Toshiba "whatever" has been sitting with the lid open for the last four of its ten years next to a big HP display, with a wireless keyboard and mouse...  "Ruby" will let me roam with my machine again.

It's a bad shot of Ruby but I think we all know what a laptop looks like.

So for the people who will want to know:

Lenovo Ideapad Slim, aka "Ruby" because it arrived by courier on Tuesday 13th Feb, specs etc from the supplier website:

Lenovo 14” Ideapad Slim 1 Laptop R5 16/512GB
Brand Lenovo Descriptive Colour Cloud Grey
Manufacturer's Warranty 12 month
Microsoft Office Preloaded
Model Number 82R3006CAU
Operating System Edition Windows 11 Home
Product Dimensions (mm) 325.3W x 216.5D x 17.9H mm
Product Weight (kg) 1.38 kg
Windows Cortana Yes

Connectivity
Bluetooth Compatibility Bluetooth 5.1
Internet Connectivity Wireless
Wireless Protocols Wi-Fi® 6, 11ax 2x2

Display Anti-Glare
Display Resolution 1920 x 1080
Display Size (Diagonal) 14 in
Display Type LED
Video Resolution 1080p FHD

Display Performance
Refresh Rate 60 Hz

Photo and Video Capture
Integrated Webcam Yes
Primary Camera Video 720p HD

Ports
Headphone/Speaker Ports (3.5mm Audio Out) 1
Number of HDMI Ports 1
Number of Networking Ports -
Number of USB 2.0 Ports 1
Number of USB 3.2 Ports 1
Number of USB-C Ports 1
USB-C Functions Data-Only
USB-C Speed Type USB 3.2

Power
Battery Technology Lithium-ion
Power & Charging Interface AC adaptor
Run Time (Up To) Hours 9.73 hours

Processor and Memory
64-bit Computing Yes
Graphics Processor Integrated AMD Radeon™ Graphics
Max Processor Clock Speed 4.0 GHz
Number of Processor Cores Hexa-Core
Primary Processor Number R5-5500U
Primary Processor Type Ryzen 5
Processor Clock Speed 2.1 GHz
Processor Manufacturer AMD
RAM Installed Size 16 GB

Storage
Hard Drive Capacity 512 GB
Installed Storage Type SSD

And straight away I can tell you that the claimed max battery life is not all that. I tend to leave power save settings on the performance side because otherwise why did I buy a new faster machine to run updated software? - And so, I get about five hours. 

Other than that, I still don't much like W11 and may yet retrograde to W10, who knows? I don't do Evil Things on my machine and it's set up as a work machine so there's nothing worth Microsoft's time and processing cycles to exfiltrate, either. I might grit my teeth for the moment and keep using it, maybe even set it up with a linux or ReactOS and see how they go. 

I'm reasonably comfortable around touchpad use, but I got a $20 BT mouse because I prefer a scroll wheel to a two finger drag. Speaking of which "Ruby" has 2,3, and 4 finger drag actions, most of which I'll never use, but it's good to know I can 3-drag up to open task window views and left / right to select one, but alt-tab also still works, y'know? 

Anyway - you may be wondering about how I could afford the princely sum of AUD$808 and maybe donations have helped finance the machine but no - I took out some superannuation since I'm now fully entitled to. Previous donations went to pay some part of the online fees I rack up for the hosted WP blog and domain names, and that's all she wrote. If you'd like to help, I direct you to the last part of this post, visit my Ko-Fi page and send me the price of a cup of coffee perhaps. 

As always - stay awesome!


Thursday 15 February 2024

Gluing Bits Of Wood Together.

I've heard this over and over and over and over. And it's always so controversial; "This works!" vs "It'll never work!" My experience has been the latter.

It's the old argument about gluing endgrain wood. There aren't many that say that gluing endgrain to endgrain is actually a solid way to join, nor that gluing endgrain into a longitudinal grain is all that much better. 

But for better or for worse, the whole topic has just had a mini revival with the video by Wood If I Could. She feels strongly that gluing endgrain onto anything else needs mechanical help, from wiggle nails, dowels, biscuits, tenons, or screws. I have to agree.

It all stems from a video two years earlier when someone else proved that it doesn't matter because glue is stronger than wood fibres. And - sort of - that make sense until I try an experiment or three. But people tried to interpret that video as saying that endgrain joints are as good as longitudinal grain joints - because glue. Yeah. So ya!

Stumpy Nubs also picked the actual point of the OG video - that glue is way stronger than wood. Because glue. But he also seemed to miss the point. I could glue a square centimetre of steel to the end of a block of wood, and another square cm to the side. I can tell you the the steel will hold, the glue will hold - but the piece on the endgrain will come off much more easily than the piece on the longitudinal grain.

Errrhem!

It's one of the tyhings I do - in my opinion, badly - but still something I'm working on improving in. So I dunno about great carpentry and woodwork. In fact, I don't even do mediocre carpentry and woodwork. But I've also been around the traps and this gluing issue has happened to me at times:

"WTFSM is going on with this *&%$!##* join? Why will it not stay glued? AARRGGHH!!!!"

The Flying Spaghetti Monster never answers me. 

Over the years I've come up with an inkling of why it happens that when I glue two planks side by side after carefully straightening and dressing the edges, they stay glued to the point that I can often split one of the boards before the glue joint will let go.

And conversely, no matter how well I dress the ends of two boards and glue them up, they tend to fall apart when I put just a little bit of pressure on them...

It helps to imagine what goes into trees  when they're making treewood. ("Treewood "- hat's a technical term from my old man right there, if I pointed at a tree and asked what it was, he'd say, in all seriousness, "why that, that's bird-sitting-tree-wood." But he really could tell lumber apart by the look and smell of it, dozens of different types. Made me feel a bit uneducated about woodworking, and determined to do more until I became a bit educated. Anyway - back to treewood.)

As WIIC says, trees need to get water and nutrients up their wood, or they woodn't (hehehehe yes pun intended) survive. So the fibres in a tree trunk run lengthways, from the roots to the crown. The tree has capillaries running the length of them. Capillaries, you can picture as thin long straws.

When we saw a log up, we split it lengthways as that's the way you get long planks. The planks have all these little straws running the length of them. This also makes planks strong in one direction, and carpenters and woodworkers spend all their time dressing the wood to show off the grain of those capillaries, and plan their projects to use the wood in the optimal orientation so that the project will be strong and look good.

But sometimes you have to join the end of a plank to something else and that's when the fights start. If you're in one of those fights right now, use this analogy:

The Bundles Of Straws

Imagine a piece of wood as a bundle of straws. In fact, take a bundle of straws, and glue them together side by side until you have a shape like a plank that's 10 straws wide and 3 straws high. Just one length will do. It was relatively easy to glue the straws together side by side like that because there's so much surface area along the length of each straw for the glue to stick to.

Now make a second, identical plank and let them both dry for a few days side by side. Now try to glue them together end to end... 

And that's it. The whole lesson. Gluing two straws together end to end is a damn sight harder to do, and has a damn sight less strenght, than gluing two very short bits of straw together side to side. Even if the glue IS stronger, it doesn't matter because you can break the tips off capillaries easier than you can separate capillaries glued side by side.


Making Web Toys I Can Use

Bear with me. It's not often I get to brag about stuff I've designed. I say "designed" because I figured it out, then got ...