an assortment of little things
Apr. 30th, 2022 01:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdOkay so, just some shit I've done this week (and last week too I guess):
WORKBENCH:
0: Did I mention installing built-in bolts onto the underside of my bench, so I can hand-turn them so they extend out the top of the bench, which means I can bolt things like the anvil and the drill press and other stuff down while I'm using it? They retract back into the surface. It's pretty nice. Anyway, I did that like a week ago. ^_^
1: Better power leads. Shorter, full 15 amp, two of them for power at each end of the bench for safety. Also replaced the power-breakout brick with an identical model that I spruced up/cleaned up. It grips plugs much more tightly now.
2: Turns out some corkboards are made of felt, and I have leftover acoustic tiles from the refrigerator nook project, so how I have corkboard made of high-density felt over the workbench. I want that more than whiteboard, but fortunately, there's room for both.
3: Last week, I pulled the old latch off the chest that I'm using as part of the bench. This week, I wood-puttied over the holes where all that had been and sanded it down, and made a few similar repairs elsewhere. Second layer - should be the final - is curing overnight now. I'm using the strong shit that smells terrible while it's curing, but I'm reasonably confident it'll stay, so it's worth it.
(Yes I ran a filter and used a mask and opened the garage door.)
4: Printed and installed underhanging containers, one for nuts and washers for the bolts I mention above, and one for small metals recycle. I used the blue PLA for the latter, it's really quite pretty, and blue is recycling colour around here.
I was just going to use glass preserves containers I'd kept - they're really useful, I use them for many things - but I was worried about anything that might slowly unscrew itself under vibration. Plus, glass shatters when it falls onto cement. These slide into place and won't shatter if they fall, and so should be better.
5: We've had some mostly-full cans of latex paint that came with the house and I finally tried some of that solidification powder you can buy at the hardware, and it works! Now we can throw those out.
6: Not long ago, I noticed that the plastic shelving units I have that basically make up a wall dividing my tiny basement/garage shop from the bike parking have these really oddly sized channels within the shelves, open on the ends, going basically all the way through, and I figured out that if you had the right sized dimensional lumber (or metal bars, whatever) you could link the units together for additional stability, and, if the beams were long enough, substantially more shelf strength. I finally cut a piece of 4x4 down to the right dimensions and HEY it works!
I'm only going for the stability - linking the shelves together with shorter pieces, not pieces that run the full length of the shelves - as they're strong enough for what I need, and getting 4x4s cut down appropriately is genuinely asking kind of a lot out of my little table saw. But I would like to anchor the shelves to the ceiling for earthquake times, and linking them together would help with said stability. I hope.
7: I realised a couple of days ago that my "arms-reach" approach to bench organisation (thanks, Adam Savage!) combined with my own organisational style had lead me to put all tools on the left, and all supplies on the right, and that there was literally only one exception left, so I made it zero exceptions. So far, I'm kinda loving it, so for me, clearly, it works.
3D PRINTING:
1: I printed a lot of little modular drawers as test objects while I was trying to get that stupid, stupid eSun matte black PLA to print without sucking. This week I spent some more time trying to sand it into some sort of good appearance that went back to flat and matte, and... basically failed. So I assembled the best of them into a 2x4 array of very tiny drawers, with drawers. It's cute, but useless.
2: Realised that if I rotated an object in the slicer differently than I had the previous time, it would be a lot - I mean, a lot - stronger this time, due to how the PLA is laid down during actual printing. Bonus points: far fewer attachment points and SO much easier to remove. Bonus bonus points: looks better, because the smooth curves from the design are now smooth curves in real life, with no layer stepping! And the areas that do have layer stepping are dramatically easier to sand. Smoooooooooooooooooooooooooth xD
3: The way the heater works on this stupid thing is common in 3D printing devices (and also common to my hot air station) in that its heater works via lots and lots and I do mean lots of on-off cycles, as in several a second. (PWM heating. Christ. But that's what it is.)
This creates massive bullshit noise on our already stupidly noisy electrical system. It's only drawing 100 watts so is mostly harmless (particularly with some filters in place) but the dimmable LEDs in one fixture in the washroom Do Not Like It and flicker in protest.
But I now know if you put a good line conditioner between the printer and the rest of the system, it yoinks that shit right back out. In my case my test line conditioner is also a UPS, but I doubt you actually need that.
It also sounds like a hammer on a detuned AM radio. I may see if I can add more RF shielding.
4: The somewhat-quieter hot-end fan arrived today. Hopefully I can install it tomorrow. The factory hot-end fan works fine and isn't that loud - the real loudboi was the PSU fan - but it's the loudest part left, and this should be quieter enough to notice, so I'm going to try to fix it.
(It only cost $12+tax+shipping, so it's not an expensive experiment.)
Some people step the fan power down to 12 volts and use PC fans, but that's a bad idea here unless you go much larger and build a custom housing, because even the best 12V PC fans that'll fit the tiny (40x10mm) space just don't move enough air and you will get heat creep and that will screw you eventually. So I'm sticking with 24 volts and more air. Changing how the PSU vents really did change the whole noise game, taking it from... hm.
Oh, I know. I run a small HEPA filter when I'm using the printer, particularly with heavily-coloured PLA, just because who even know what they're using for the pigments, right? Anyway, it's not super quiet, but it's quieter than average for such a device.
Swapping out the PSU cooling system meant the printer went from being meaningfully louder than the HEPA filter to being meaningfully quieter than the HEPA filter. So the hot-end fan really is just icing.
But I like my quiet and I will do what I can to get more of it.
HOPEFULLY THE LAST OF THE POST-COMCAST FALLOUT:
So I went to a lot of work when we moved to cellular for the static/house line to be able to keep using my old voicemail/phone answering system, because the big feature cellular never gave us that land lines had was the ability to screen calls by listening to voicemail being left as it's being left, and picking up if you actually want to talk to the caller once you know what's going on.
Guess what silently died a few days ago?
So mad. I mean, 20 years is good service, but still. I fixed it last time, I can't this time - or well, maybe I could, but it's broken again and this time in a way that involves surface mounted blobs on a circuit board, so I think it's off to Telephone Heaven, by which I mean disassembly and electronics recycling.
Fortunately, thanks I imagine mostly to rural communities, you can still buy this old-school shit pretty easily. The new unit even has a couple of new features I like, the best of which being the ability to put individual receivers on silent mode on their own individual schedules. So now I have one near the electronics workbench on the top floor set to ring only for a very limited number of hours, and it won't wake us up if someone calls at 3am. So that's kind of an add, really? I used to have to run downstairs if I cared about the caller.
But goddamn I did not need that. It actively interfered with trying to schedule a contractor. Like, delayed something - fortunately a minor something - by days.
(Also, the new handheld receiver, while smaller than the old one, is still large enough to hold on my shoulder if I need to type something real quick while I'm on it without going to speaker or having to fuck with a headset.)
I did briefly consider trying to thrift and even-older answering system that used tape. But not seriously.
Well, not that seriously. I'm not foone. xD
OTHER STUFF:
1. Finally brought in the frost protector for the outdoor container plants, and cleaned and put away all the parts. It's been a very cool spring, but that's okay, the snowpack needed it and has benefited nicely. We weren't really in drought before, but we were dry last year. We're completely up to normal again now.
2. Cleaned up the bike parking part of the garage, which wow, it really needed. Landscaping tools/gardening and houseplant supply storage still needs some work, but it's a lot better than it was.
3. Made a little stack of tools, mostly landscaping, that need various degrees of work. That includes the old circular saw which works okay but the baseplate is bent - it came to me that way - and the housing doesn't inspire confidence.
Now I have a workbench big enough to fix all this shit for real, so I'm gonna.
I should probably start with that saw.
WORKBENCH:
0: Did I mention installing built-in bolts onto the underside of my bench, so I can hand-turn them so they extend out the top of the bench, which means I can bolt things like the anvil and the drill press and other stuff down while I'm using it? They retract back into the surface. It's pretty nice. Anyway, I did that like a week ago. ^_^
1: Better power leads. Shorter, full 15 amp, two of them for power at each end of the bench for safety. Also replaced the power-breakout brick with an identical model that I spruced up/cleaned up. It grips plugs much more tightly now.
2: Turns out some corkboards are made of felt, and I have leftover acoustic tiles from the refrigerator nook project, so how I have corkboard made of high-density felt over the workbench. I want that more than whiteboard, but fortunately, there's room for both.
3: Last week, I pulled the old latch off the chest that I'm using as part of the bench. This week, I wood-puttied over the holes where all that had been and sanded it down, and made a few similar repairs elsewhere. Second layer - should be the final - is curing overnight now. I'm using the strong shit that smells terrible while it's curing, but I'm reasonably confident it'll stay, so it's worth it.
(Yes I ran a filter and used a mask and opened the garage door.)
4: Printed and installed underhanging containers, one for nuts and washers for the bolts I mention above, and one for small metals recycle. I used the blue PLA for the latter, it's really quite pretty, and blue is recycling colour around here.
I was just going to use glass preserves containers I'd kept - they're really useful, I use them for many things - but I was worried about anything that might slowly unscrew itself under vibration. Plus, glass shatters when it falls onto cement. These slide into place and won't shatter if they fall, and so should be better.
5: We've had some mostly-full cans of latex paint that came with the house and I finally tried some of that solidification powder you can buy at the hardware, and it works! Now we can throw those out.
6: Not long ago, I noticed that the plastic shelving units I have that basically make up a wall dividing my tiny basement/garage shop from the bike parking have these really oddly sized channels within the shelves, open on the ends, going basically all the way through, and I figured out that if you had the right sized dimensional lumber (or metal bars, whatever) you could link the units together for additional stability, and, if the beams were long enough, substantially more shelf strength. I finally cut a piece of 4x4 down to the right dimensions and HEY it works!
I'm only going for the stability - linking the shelves together with shorter pieces, not pieces that run the full length of the shelves - as they're strong enough for what I need, and getting 4x4s cut down appropriately is genuinely asking kind of a lot out of my little table saw. But I would like to anchor the shelves to the ceiling for earthquake times, and linking them together would help with said stability. I hope.
7: I realised a couple of days ago that my "arms-reach" approach to bench organisation (thanks, Adam Savage!) combined with my own organisational style had lead me to put all tools on the left, and all supplies on the right, and that there was literally only one exception left, so I made it zero exceptions. So far, I'm kinda loving it, so for me, clearly, it works.
3D PRINTING:
1: I printed a lot of little modular drawers as test objects while I was trying to get that stupid, stupid eSun matte black PLA to print without sucking. This week I spent some more time trying to sand it into some sort of good appearance that went back to flat and matte, and... basically failed. So I assembled the best of them into a 2x4 array of very tiny drawers, with drawers. It's cute, but useless.
2: Realised that if I rotated an object in the slicer differently than I had the previous time, it would be a lot - I mean, a lot - stronger this time, due to how the PLA is laid down during actual printing. Bonus points: far fewer attachment points and SO much easier to remove. Bonus bonus points: looks better, because the smooth curves from the design are now smooth curves in real life, with no layer stepping! And the areas that do have layer stepping are dramatically easier to sand. Smoooooooooooooooooooooooooth xD
3: The way the heater works on this stupid thing is common in 3D printing devices (and also common to my hot air station) in that its heater works via lots and lots and I do mean lots of on-off cycles, as in several a second. (PWM heating. Christ. But that's what it is.)
This creates massive bullshit noise on our already stupidly noisy electrical system. It's only drawing 100 watts so is mostly harmless (particularly with some filters in place) but the dimmable LEDs in one fixture in the washroom Do Not Like It and flicker in protest.
But I now know if you put a good line conditioner between the printer and the rest of the system, it yoinks that shit right back out. In my case my test line conditioner is also a UPS, but I doubt you actually need that.
It also sounds like a hammer on a detuned AM radio. I may see if I can add more RF shielding.
4: The somewhat-quieter hot-end fan arrived today. Hopefully I can install it tomorrow. The factory hot-end fan works fine and isn't that loud - the real loudboi was the PSU fan - but it's the loudest part left, and this should be quieter enough to notice, so I'm going to try to fix it.
(It only cost $12+tax+shipping, so it's not an expensive experiment.)
Some people step the fan power down to 12 volts and use PC fans, but that's a bad idea here unless you go much larger and build a custom housing, because even the best 12V PC fans that'll fit the tiny (40x10mm) space just don't move enough air and you will get heat creep and that will screw you eventually. So I'm sticking with 24 volts and more air. Changing how the PSU vents really did change the whole noise game, taking it from... hm.
Oh, I know. I run a small HEPA filter when I'm using the printer, particularly with heavily-coloured PLA, just because who even know what they're using for the pigments, right? Anyway, it's not super quiet, but it's quieter than average for such a device.
Swapping out the PSU cooling system meant the printer went from being meaningfully louder than the HEPA filter to being meaningfully quieter than the HEPA filter. So the hot-end fan really is just icing.
But I like my quiet and I will do what I can to get more of it.
HOPEFULLY THE LAST OF THE POST-COMCAST FALLOUT:
So I went to a lot of work when we moved to cellular for the static/house line to be able to keep using my old voicemail/phone answering system, because the big feature cellular never gave us that land lines had was the ability to screen calls by listening to voicemail being left as it's being left, and picking up if you actually want to talk to the caller once you know what's going on.
Guess what silently died a few days ago?
So mad. I mean, 20 years is good service, but still. I fixed it last time, I can't this time - or well, maybe I could, but it's broken again and this time in a way that involves surface mounted blobs on a circuit board, so I think it's off to Telephone Heaven, by which I mean disassembly and electronics recycling.
Fortunately, thanks I imagine mostly to rural communities, you can still buy this old-school shit pretty easily. The new unit even has a couple of new features I like, the best of which being the ability to put individual receivers on silent mode on their own individual schedules. So now I have one near the electronics workbench on the top floor set to ring only for a very limited number of hours, and it won't wake us up if someone calls at 3am. So that's kind of an add, really? I used to have to run downstairs if I cared about the caller.
But goddamn I did not need that. It actively interfered with trying to schedule a contractor. Like, delayed something - fortunately a minor something - by days.
(Also, the new handheld receiver, while smaller than the old one, is still large enough to hold on my shoulder if I need to type something real quick while I'm on it without going to speaker or having to fuck with a headset.)
I did briefly consider trying to thrift and even-older answering system that used tape. But not seriously.
Well, not that seriously. I'm not foone. xD
OTHER STUFF:
1. Finally brought in the frost protector for the outdoor container plants, and cleaned and put away all the parts. It's been a very cool spring, but that's okay, the snowpack needed it and has benefited nicely. We weren't really in drought before, but we were dry last year. We're completely up to normal again now.
2. Cleaned up the bike parking part of the garage, which wow, it really needed. Landscaping tools/gardening and houseplant supply storage still needs some work, but it's a lot better than it was.
3. Made a little stack of tools, mostly landscaping, that need various degrees of work. That includes the old circular saw which works okay but the baseplate is bent - it came to me that way - and the housing doesn't inspire confidence.
Now I have a workbench big enough to fix all this shit for real, so I'm gonna.
I should probably start with that saw.
