Corneal Abrasion, Helicoils and an Anaglyph

Thursday night, in a bout of typical roughhouse on the couch, Max managed to scrape his fingers across the surface of my eyeball. The good news is that corneal abrasions heal very quickly. The bad news is that while they heal it feels like there's a porcupine rolling around under your eyelid. But I'm all better now.

Rudi, our next door neighbor at the Saturday Market, stripped out one of the clamping screw threads in his Sherline rocker toolpost. He uses a Sherline lathe for some of his turned boxes and needed it repaired or replaced ASAP. So I volunteered to fix it.

Out came the #10-32 tpi Helicoil kit.

The stripped hole on the right.

Drilling out the hole.

Tapping with a Helicoil tap. The tap is of the same pitch as the stripped hole, but with a larger diameter.

The helicoil insert. It is basically a helical coil of wire.

The straight tang at the end enables the insertion tool to drive it into the hole.

The insert is loaded into the tool and screwed through the body to compress it around the insertion screw. Then the end of the tool is pressed against the hole and the insert screwed in.

And the insert is inserted.

The tang is visible at the bottom and must be removed.

One sharp whack with a punch does the job.

I found my old Red-Blue Anaglyph camera jig and showed the kids how to take 3D anaglyphs. I used the free Anaglyph Maker software.

How I ever got Max to stand still for the minute or so it took to make the two images I'll never know.