Why Have I Been Quiet? Pt 3

The First Parcel and Beyond

Finished. Note that the first picture is from the day before cutting the hatch in, which I think was a Monday, and the external and functional bits were probably finished Wednesday. I wrote part of this after, but some of the pictures were - it's just complicated, all right? (Which is Ted code for "I've forgotten stuff already and I'm piecing this together from the odd notes and photos I took." )

Thursday we had a series of medical appointments that took us out, back home, and out again. Each time, I checked the receiving tub for parcels. And on the last outing of the day, after checking the plastic tub again, I decided to walk back up the driveway to the back gate and check. You know, just in case. 

This pic is from just before cutting the hatch through
and the spot where it now is, is right above the white
sign there. Also, that's where the tub was - but not on
the day in question, there was just bare concrete by then.

"The tub *used to be there* oh well. I'll pretend it was" 

That's me, trying to imagine what the postie was thinking when he - dropped the parcel right under the new parcel hatch with the A4 laminated sign saying "New Parcel Delivery" and left it there.

... and that's the hatch and A4 sign, that was
right above and fully operational on the
day in question.

The tub wasn't there because it was inside - right under the A4 laminated sign saying "New Parcel Delivery" that the postie obviously hadn't read. Anyway. That happened. 

Then it was Friday without another delivery, (believe me I was itching to get a delivery just for the thrill of seeing the thing actually in use) and so on the weekend I put a second poster up with an arrow pointing to the hatch. But it'd be almost a whole week before I got to see it used for real... 

The Test Parcel got "delivered" multiple times, at
first because it would be a good size and weight to
test that parcels would end up in the tub and not on
the cement underneath.

But eventually I started just "delivering" it in true cargo cult fashion to try and attract a real parcel by sympathetic magic - and eventually it worked, the next delivery however was HUGE and I was frankly surprised that the 30x45x12 manchester package fitted and dropped in at all - and that was alongside a package containing a full spool of filament. Colour me impressed with myself... 😸

But that large delivery "broke the drought" and since then the cargo cult's managed to magic up half a dozen packages and larger envelopes for us. 

Cats In Design

The design doesn't leak cats due to the hermetic seal (well if you're a cat the small gaps are as good as a hermetic seal I guess) and it hasn't given the postie hernias because of the over-centre-assisted closing design. The only thing I can honestly say could have been made better is the counterweight - 1.5litres of water in a plastic milk jug doesn't seem like it'll stand the test of time too well... 

But it does prove the weight needed. I'll find a suitable solid weight in time and replace it, and for now it's doing the job. 

Bonus PS: In the first pic above you'll see the rusted tin can on the right, the padlock that secures the door of the shed is under it, one of my favourite life hacks. It keeps rain (of which we've had a lot in the last few La Nina years) out of the padlock. I have to thank my father for this hack, he'd been using tins to keep padlocks unrusted and operational since the 70s. 

Latest Pics

Well before completion.

That photo shows the tub in its alcove, but is just before I put the clear plastic water shield flap over the opening where the tub comes out, and also before the corruga - ... look, why don't I go and get a progress photo? OneMomentPlease...

Most Recent Pics

Only missing Mrs Ptec3d's
art contribution, she'll mosaic
and artwork the heck out of it.

That's completed, mostly. There's the corrugated roofing piece that stops the cats from attaining Kitty Nirvana by jumping over the fence and trying to cross the highway that's about 25m from this gate. You can make out the clear plastic skirt that keeps cats and rain out of the tub.

And that's the postie's-eye-view of the whole delivery process. The piece of cord at the left runs to the counterweight and is arranged overcentre, that is, the door's quite happy to sit like that. Moving back along the door, there's a grey slide made from one of those flexible cutting boards, and then there's an inside door too that you can see, it drops away as the door is brought up and so the parcel slides back and gets dropped inside into the tub.

When the door is open, it blocks access to the tub and also - as a very last resort - if a cat's managed to smuggle itself into the whole enclosure past the cat-hermetic seal then it can't get up when the postie opens things up. (And then the cat gets showered in parcels so not sure if that's a disincentive or reward for them...)

Elvis And Me

... and a bunch of bananas. 

When the NSBG is (finally...) finished, it'll feature the little Tinkercad Man, the Tinkercad Elvis, and a tiny bunch of some supermarket promo bananas. There's a backstory you can follow back here in the previous posts but basically it came about because I used them in the Tinkercad mockup I made to show the landlord, and resulted in a large(ish) donation of fence palings from him. 

Yeah so there I was chillin' with Elvis . . .

Yep, THAT Tinkercad drawing. Keen observers will have spotted myself and Elvis, and the super-observant would have noticed the banana in the Package Receiving Area as well. It's a slightly large exotic banana but perfectly good for scale. And if you know, you know. 

So Mrs Ptec3d sneakily got online and bought an Elvis keyring. And found a Coles promo banana toy, the kind you get if you spend more than twenty bucks or whatever. The stage, as they say, was set. AND THEN! We got Solar Jiggly Elvis, as well!

He's solar, and he's jiggly,
and he's Elvis dammit.

So the plan is to create a diorama - of the diorama that I created in Tinkercad - and attach it to the NSBG. Oh some of you may have been looking at the whole setup and wondering how well the plastic rain flap etc would survive the sun. Here's the thing. We live in the southern hemisphere, and the gate faces north - the sun never reaches over this side. So the diorama will be safe from the sun, attached to the inner side of it.

And since Solar Jiggly Elvis needs sun in order to work he'll have to have some kind of glass housing to keep the rain off and let his Jiggly Power in. But he also needs to keep his cool. Hmmm... Another project. Oh and of course, Tinkercad Me and Tinkercad Elvis are 3D models, aren't they? And 3D models can be printed... More projects... 

It's like I have a project
and a 3D printer...

Oops.

Anyway. That'll be another post one day. I did let the BG / NSBG project get in the way of posting stuff or doing anything else because I thought it prudent to finish this quickly once we'd started the ball rolling.

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