Kitchen Fun

We put in some new cabinets.

Nothing exciting. They’re stained cherry now, but I still haven’t put up any molding. I hate molding.

This was exciting. A sudden flash of white hot electric light, flames and much hissing...

and a full pan of water exits through the hole into the stove...

The stove store (Stover, Evey and Jackson) said this is what happens when an element burns out. Usually it isn’t as dramatic but they had seen worse. Nice thing about SEJ is that they assumed I’d fix it myself, sold me new parts and told me it would be no problem.

Always take a picture of the wiring before you replace a switch.

The old switch. See how the contacts on the right are melted?

Procrastinating With Computers

I have a lot of projects going on right now, my regular jewelry and machine tool stuff, an air rifle that’s about 50% done and a lengthy kitchen semi-remodel. But sometimes you have to work on projects for the heck of it. Out in the “barn” I have a Dell Optiplex 270, in the small form factor. We use it to watch Netflix and Hulu when working or running on the treadmill. Unfortunately the other day it wouldn’t power on, and the power button was blinking an ominous yellow.

The Motherboard looked fine (some Optiplexes had bad capacitors) so I assumed it was the power supply. Being a small form factor a new power supply would cost as much as the used Dell had cost. What I ended up doing was mounting it in a Dimension 8200 case, figuring that at some point I’ll mount the 8200 motherboard in another case or just leave it around to trip over. The 8200 cost $3000 in 2002, now it’s not even worth $30.00, nor is the Optiplex. I get all these old Dells at the OSU surplus sales. The Optiplex has a P4 3.0 Ghz and 2GB of RAM, so it will run Hulu fine. That’s about the minimum antique processor for internet video, according to my unscientific tests. But I digress.

The main problem with putting the Optiplex motherboard in the larger case is that there was no way to use the existing 8200 fan and shroud from the case as it hit the CPU fan, and the Optiplex CPU fan has a shroud that wouldn’t reach the rear of the case. So it was just blowing hot air around the inside of the case. Still awake? No? go back to sleep.

I decided I’d mount an old case fan somewhere along the back grill to suck more air out of the case and hopefully provide better cooling. Unfortunately the motherboard only has one fan plug, which was used by the CPU cooler. I could have bought an adapter but decided to waste some time. I dimly remembered buying some female 4 pin molex connectors at a yard sale 12 years ago, searched for them and found them.

The three pin fan connector.

Male Molex from a power supply.

Female Molex and pins.

Wires stripped. (I ignored the blue fan sensor wire).

Pins crimped on.

Checking to make sure I get 12V, although at this point I thought Red & Black was 12V. It isn’t. I should have checked wikipedia first.

Pins inserted in the female connector body.

Optiplex in a larger case.

Here’s the fan wires and connector used by the CPU fan.

Plugged my new fan wires into a spare plug coming from the power supply.

(Can’t use the flash or you won’t see the blur). The fan spins. But it seems to be spinning slowly. This is when I discovered my voltage error.

I rewired so that I was getting 12V rather than 5V…much better. Now all the hot air is being sucked out of the case as fast as it’s produced. I ziptied the fan to the case grill for now, leaving it to run for a while to make sure there are no problems.

Unexciting Air Compressor

My old air compressor needed a companion. This was precipitated by the need to fill the tires on the Sienna during a cold snap. Because the old compressor is not exactly portable I needed something that I could lug around easily. I used to thread a hose through the shop window out into the driveway just to avoid lugging the compressor.

My old “portable” compressor. I bought it at a yard sale for $25.00 and it sounds like is beating itself to death every time I fire it up. It takes a long time to fill the tank. But it does work.

My impulse buy at Home Depot, on sale during the holidays for $69.00, and not the most exciting purchase.

It does have cord stowage in the back.

It came with an unregulated hose permanently connected to a tire chuck, one which demands that you lock it down on the tire stem. So you have to unlock it when you check the pressure, reseat, relock, etc. until it’s filled. The other regulated quick connector doesn’t fit any of my connectors. So both of those get replaced.

I made sure the gages read zero…

New regulated connector.

New unregulated connector. Now I can use all my old hoses and not have the irritation of connected hoses snagging on things as I carry it around. Until it dies. I’m assuming that will happen soon as it’s just a cheap oil-less compressor. It’s not as loud as I thought it would be but it does take a while to fill the tank to 110 PSI (115PSI on the gage which makes me nervous…) although less time than the old compressor (smaller tank but higher pressure).

How’s that for a boring slice of my life?

Link Dump

I won't bother apologizing for not blogging more, lately. But I plan to blog more. Part of the problem was that I hate the camera I was using (Nikon Coolpix L20), it had poor battery life and the white balance was always hit or miss. I just bought a Fuji FinePix S1800 so I hope to have more and better pictures. Still figuring out how to make it do what I want. So this post is all words.

Speaking of products I love or hate...
Love:
I bought two more of the IOGear wireless keyboards, one for the kitchen and one for the barn. It's held up well in the bedroom for the year and makes HTPC (home theater PC) viewing easy. Only problem is it doesn't work as you tilt it above about 40 degrees as the trackball is a bit loose.

Hate:
The Nesco Coffee Burr Grinder. I bought it on impulse at Bi-Mart. I should have been warned by the low price. The grinder does an pretty good job of grinding the coffee but the container it grinds into is so poorly designed that when you take the lid off the coffee flies everywhere. There's more coffee dust that I would want from a burr grinder and it seems to cling with a static charge to the container walls. In short every morning is met by a large mess and cursing. Read the 1 star reviews on the Amazon link, you'll see I'm not alone.

Love:
I finally hooked up a digital antenna to get OTA (over the air) broadcasts, the DISH feeds are often poor quality and they don't carry the additional local sub-channels. I bought a Philips MANT940 Antenna at a garage sale for $15.00, put it up on the 12' pole that was used by our old antennas. I was surprised that I could get all the local channels! The only down side is that I was hoping to save some money by giving up the DISH feed - but they have anticipated my move and rolled local channels into the main packages they offer - you can't remove the feeds anymore.

I'm off in an hour to take the kids to the Scratch Club, a guy at the local charter school started an after school club where kids could get together and learn the Scratch programming language. All part of my plan to turn the kids into nerds, or inoculate them against it. while our kids don't go to the school, it's open to all kids in the area. I help out as needed. Fun.

A few links:

• Open URL in New Tab, an IE add-on that is handy when there's a plain text URL and you don't want to copy, open a new tab, paste and hit return.
• Free OCR, which is a pretty good, free as you can imagine by the name, optical character recognition program. I found it useful when I was shopping for ram on Ebay and didn't want to type long strings of characters from the pictures of labels on pieces of ram for sale. if that makes sense...
• I forget whether I've posted this already, but it's an automatic bagpipe reed making machine.
• Our friend Kiko's essays on "The Work of Art".

Merry Christmas!

We've been quite busy but today we get to relax a bit.

All wrapped up.

Spider Man

Joy.

A lovely card.

Triops...

Lego Books.

All unwrapped...

Making Some Hooks…

I had to make a larger jewelry display for the local food co-op. The hooks the earring cards hang on are somewhat expensive and not really available in the length we want at a smaller wire diameter. Besides I wanted less of an “L” hook and more of a gentle bend at the end. So I made some to suit.

Drilling some steel rod.

Milling a 45 degree angle on one end…

One short piece of rod drilled only 1/2” deep.

Other piece slips over the end of the rod.

Bend down to 45 degrees.

Look at that…

That’s the type of bend I want to make it easy to slip the earring cards on and off the hooks.

Here’s my high tech setup for whacking up a bunch of bronze welding rod (which I had laying around) to length. That’s a rivet trimmer (scroll down to "Rotary Rivet Cutters") held in the vise.

The stop allows me to cut them all to the same length.

A pile of blanks.

.

Used a cup bur to round the hook end of the blanks.

I set up my Geometric die head with #6-32 chasers.

Done…I love my die head. I could have theoretically set the turret up on the lathe to part the rods to the same length, round the ends and cut the threads but that seemed like more work than the method I chose.



Here’s a short video of the operation.

This is what happens when you don’t lock the tailstock…

A pile of threaded blanks.

All the blanks bent.

I ran them in a tumbler with some walnut shell, wood pegs and rouge for a day. Didn’t completely remove several decades of oxidation but made them acceptable.

And all the hooks screwed into the display.

10/10/10

I didn’t realize it had been so long since I had blogged…hazards of the information age. You haven’t been missing out on much. Here’s the latest fun project, a home aquarium:

Home with a bag of fish.

Such excitement.

Max is the fish obsessed one but Henry likes them as well.

Four fish. Poor doomed little fish.

Besides normal life I’ve been working on some 3D modeling work for TDC and their website will someday be updated with the new designs. It’s nice to have a third part time job, I think I was slacking with just the Taig sales and jewelry.

In hobby news I finally found a few new airguns to play with and blog about, although I’m a bit heavy on bb guns right now. It had been a whole two months without getting a new airgun and I was going through a bit of withdrawal.

I finally gave up on getting Photoshop Elements 1.0 to play nicely with Windows 7. I’m trying out Paint.net although I find It’s easier to do file saving and renaming as a batch job in Irfanview after editing and color correcting the pictures in Paint.net. I find it hilarious that Paint.net’s homepage has google ads that tout other photo editing programs. In any case it’s a good piece of software and free.

As part of the above mentioned modeling job I often have to illustrate steps taken in Rhino so we can keep on top of the process. Turns out Windows 7 has a neat program called Problem Steps Recorder (just type PSR in the search bar). It captures everything in a .mht archive file that’s .zipped. Unpacking the .mht into html and separate pictures was giving me fits, I finally decided to just save everything out from IE separately as the unpacking programs I found didn’t work. Wake up! You fell asleep from the boredom.

Felice and I both transitioned to using a dual monitor setup on our PCs. I can’t believe I used to suffer with only one monitor. One thing that will drive you crazy is trying to get the displays to have the same color and brightness, etc. I found that by opening this picture in separate windows on both monitors was a good reference for tweaking the settings.

I know, I’m not being nerdy enough. Last month I also installed Virtualbox on my PC then installed Ubuntu linux on the virtual machine (yes nerdburger, I did just upgrade to Maverick Meerkat). Virtualbox is pretty slick not that I have any real use for it.

Oh yeah, I checked a bunch of rechargeable batteries with my multi-tester. Some days I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.

If you grew up in the Boston area in the 70’s you definitely remember this from almost every movie you saw.

George is working on rebuilding a Whizzer bicycle engine:

And I found this at a yard sale for free:

but I donated it to Goodwill. I didn’t have a Colecovision which was needed to get it working and it took up a ton of space I don’t have.

So that’s the last month and a half or so.