Eggs

Preface: We’re not allowed to have heating elements in our room. Or microwaves. Or heat sources except hair dryers and irons of various sorts.

Oops: Roomie, who is fantabulous, has a tea boiler. I have a box of eggs.

Mad Science: Tea is basically hot water, right? Heat water, drop in egg, have hard boiled egg for [meal].

Ending well: Of course not. The tea boiler has no controls on it other than the plug. No timer, nor temperature.

Conclusion: It takes slightly longer than 10 minutes to achieve a hard boiled egg, dropping them in is a bad idea- one gets egg drop soup, not a hard boiled egg, and tongs are really useful.

I do not own tongs. Or a spoon- had to borrow Roomie’s, who, unlike me, is prepared to live in real life.

The tea boiler is kinda like a pitcher with a heating element. This is the first egg, surround by egg dropped soup.

The instructions said to let them cool in water. Doing so.

This is the first one again. It didn’t cook completely, but was firm enough to be considered done and it was delicious.

…yep

Skull Candy Headphones

I picked up a pair of nice-but-broken Skullcandy headphones from a friend. Symptoms- right side doesn’t work. Wiggling the cables doesn’t help.

Obvious solution: Take the lid off! And so I did. The wires tested continuous from the ring, through the speaker, and to the end of the cable from the shell. There was a resistance (of about 30 ohms? If I recall correctly.) across the speaker, indicating that it was still functional, not just passing current. I resoldered the wires to the pads because it looked like the original joints were all cold soldered, which makes for a poor connection.That did not fix the fault, instead isolating he faultto three feet of cable.

Wires always break at the connectors. That’s where they bend. The easiest connector to get to is by the plug. Taking the plug apart revealed nothing useful. More continuity testing revealed that the break was in the actual wire. Cut the wire back and inch, and it works. Reassemble everything in reverse order, with heat shrink tubing, and tada, working headphones.

All pictures are preoperation.

Here we’ve got the pads where the wires connect to the speakers. The blue wire has the best connection of the four because the other three are cold solder joints or have resin caked around where the wire exits the solder, another sign of a bad joint.

This is the inside of the plug. It looks like they filled it with hot melt glue and jammed the stress relief on over it. Crude, and not much better than what I did. I cut the glue off to get to the plug so I could resolder the wires to it.

The wires. The set on the right are all broken. If you look carefully, they are all missing wires from their left half- headphone cables are usually composed of multistrand wires with insulation that burns off when soldered. The left set is perfectly fine. Here, the yellow ones are from the shell/power, red is from the ring, and blue is from the tip of the plug.

Millennium Penguin

Millennium Penguin: Millennium Falcon, Aquatic Edition. …*perfectly straight face*

Freshman year? Sophomore year? My parents got me a penguin lunch box ’cause tetra had one and it was really cool. Anyway, a couple of years of hard use destroyed it and it’s been sitting around, looking forlorn and cute.

The first thing I did was to take it all apart- all the seams holding it together came out, along with the lining and remainder of the lame thin foam they used. The front/back/sidepieces were measured and patterns were created from the measurements. I intended to use the original outside with new foam and lining to preserve it’s looks, but the bottom side was completely destroyed (…loose weaves don’t stand up to full waterbottles that well, apparently…) so I created a pattern to replace the bottom, which was originally part of the sides. i Then cut fabric and foam from the patterns, and assembled.

Materials: Original penguin lunchbox, packing foam, lining fabric, black fabric for the bottom (I used fabric left over from butchering a pair of pants), paper for patterns.

The original penguin:

Some of the damage:

The damage on the inside. In the lower right hand corner, the damage to the lining and foam can be seen.

Penguin parts:

All of the parts flopped on top of each other. The side pieces, connected by the strap, used to have a bottom piece as an integral part. I cut them apart to make replacement easier. The straps had pulled on the shell and broken the plastic in the fabric, so I sewed the straps through the fabric and the foam to stabilize it. The foam I used is old packing material, about 1/8th inch thick, and significantly thicker and stronger than the original.

The front and the back, with their new lining over the foam.

Assembled:

I assembled it much the way it was assembled originally. The order of the seams was different, though. I put the separate pieced together- shell, foam, lining and sewed them together, and then put the assembled pieces together by sewing the edges together.

The new foam makes the penguin a lot stiffer and harder to squash than the original. More use is obviously in order.

All hail the penguin!

Dennis Box

I made a small Dennis Box from an index card for Marbecca. It wasn’t the best rendition of the dennis box, and I decided to make a better one, printable and easily reproducible.

Assembly Instructions:

1. print, using picture below
2. cut along outline
3. separate tabs from faces and other tabs. Do not cut into the faces or cut the faces apart.
4. Fold along all uncut lines.
5. Tape or glue tabs to the backs of the faces.

How I made it:

• Steal the faces from LawlietPandaLuvr
• cut faces apart and save each as an individual jpg
• use the foldable box function in inkscape to create a box with faces slightly bigger than Dennis’ faces.
• import Dennis’ faces and place over the box faces.
• export the whole shebang as a png, then open it with Gimp
• adjust it so that it fills a standard page, save as jpg
• print and assemble

The Dennis Box is from the Sora Show.

In the background of the pictures, you can see some of the contents of the next post. :)

Lance Heads

…because I can get sucked further into the fandom.

Just to keep my hand in sculpture, carving and painting ’cause I haven’t done any of that in a while, I made up three lance heads in the style of my character, Xaldin.

I made three blanks in polymer clay (using a stencil), colored two with 1:1 white:silver paint and then did light to dark gradients in blue and purple, one each. I then did the third in 1:1 black:silver with a darker purple gradient over it,  which I liked a lot more than the white/purple one. I made all of them with a necklace attachment, since they’re only about two inches long and perfectly suited for a geek!necklace.

These are the white/blue and the black/purple ones.

There is no picture of the white/purple one because I decided it was lame and covered it in painted blood (after taking pictures) to make it look like it was straight from a fight but then I LOST the originals and with the blood on it, I’d warning it (on dA) M[strict: violence and gore]. So not posting it here.

Janus

I’ve got two faces now!

Not yesterday, but the Saturday before, I went to the 3rd Ward for their Maker-a-thon, hosted(?) by MakerBot. I spent most of the day there (and the rest on the train *eyeroll*) getting in the way, getting photographed (apparently I’m photogenic? Or maybe it’s just my hair.), and sitting on a table talking about printed things. It was awesome.

The far corner of the room had a middle sized geodesic dome set up in it, with a 3D scanning apparatus set up inside. The scanner involves a Kinect, a laptop and a clot of clever about which I know nothing. They guy running the scanning was kind enough to scan me, and then upload me to Thingiverse so I can be printed.

And lo! I am printed:

We don’t look very much alike, but that’s made up for with the extreme coolness of this.

It can’t be seen in this picture, but the printer exploded my nose badly. As that was one of the last things to print, I saved the print with a little deft knife-work (and ruined any resemblance of our noses). Dad says he’s found the bug in the code that causes that error and has reported it.

My current projects are proliferating, but I’m working on learning OpenSCAD by modeling a zipper to print. The replicat is on hold, as are the goggles that I’ll use the scan of my face to get a custom fit on.

Printing Brass and Painting Plastics

Dad printed me another huge cube as a test run for his new set of calibrations. It printed perfectly, except for what we think is a thermal shock through the middle of it.

The shock can be seen in the right middle flange as a small crack.

Dad printed a bunch of knots to test the overhang capabilities. They’re about the size of the end of my thumb. I decided to clean one up and turn it into a necklace or something.

The back one really is smaller! These have been cleaned up a little with a knife.

ABS plastic (what we print in) dissolves in acetone or methyl ethyl ketone (MEK).  This is after dipping it in MEK for slightly longer than not at all (too long!), panicking, dipping it in ‘Barbie Goo’ (the ABS/MEK solution used to prep print beds), attempting to blow out the film that filled up all the gaps (and generally failing), and then dipping it in clear MEK.

Holding it is tricky- if you have any contact with it, that spot with look different than the rest because it didn’t come in contact with the MEK. So I hung it by a hair. The dip into the Barbie Goo bonded the strands of hair together with plastic. You can see it in the picture because the ‘threads’ are pink, instead of more or less invisible.

The difference is alarming. The one on the left has been cleaned up with a knife, the one on the right has been abused with MEK.

I tried painting it to look like wire. It didn’t work as well as I hoped- it looks like metallic paint on plastic. The paint did not stick or cover well because the plastic is so smooth. I will sand the next one (after making it Perfectly Smooth with the MEK.)

Huge!Cube

[bad penguini didn't do anything worthy of a post until this morning. Which is pretty sad given that she's been autoposting for nearly two months now. *baffbaff*]

So I woke up silly early this morning, started the print run going, ate breakfast, did my conlit hw while watching the printer, and two hours later I had a Companion Cube 50 mm on a side. 50mm is half the width of the Thing-O-Matic‘s printspace. Generally, things look better the bigger they get- the smallest cube looks very crude while the Huge!Cube looks almost good! Why almost? The y-stage lost about 30 steps about 1:15 in and shifted everything to the back that far. (The motors that drive this are stepper motors, which when they lose steps, do not return to the real origin- they return to where they think the origin is.)

It’s about the size of my fist. You can see the line across the middle where the steps were lost.

The line is much more obvious here. You can also see some of the overhang fail here where the plastic didn’t stick where it was supposed to.

Pardon for the picture being upside down- it’s just easier to explain if the cube is rightside up to our perspective, even if the floor doesn’t agree. What happened here is that the shells (the outside plastic in the neat horizontal lines) couldn’t handle being extruded onto air. The loops you see sticking out are part of the fill on the inside, designed to prevent this very problem. I think that if the overhang routine was turned off and the normal shells were left in place, it would work fine. The overhang routine uses one shell and solid fill on the inside. The single shell does not stick where it is supposed to and the solid fill can push it right off the edge of the piece. This cube was printed with 3 shells (kinda like really close concentric circles) and 20% fill and (I believe) if the overhang routine didn’t take over, the shells would stack and give each other something to rest on. If that didn’t work because the angle is too shallow, the spilled inner shells should stack and the outer shells should be in more or less the right spot and it should recover.

And the lot of ‘em, all in a stack. So cute!

AP Classes

This is true.

For reference:

http://thisisindexed.com/

Watch Time

because it is Time I Had a Watch. I lost my watch *ages* ago and it recently became time to fix that. So I popped a new one off the stack of wristbandless watches, took my father up on an offer for some helmet webbing and buckles, and spun up a new watch.

The watch itself is a simple black digital Casio from Way Back because it used to belong to my father who is, by the way, pretty awesome. The helmet webbing (straps and lacing) and buckles also belonged to my father but only because his helmet had gotten old and he took it apart to see what was inside. That’s pretty much everything I used, except for the usual needles, thread, and fire (to seal the ends of the straps) that accompany any soft project.

ta-daa!

What’s really neat is that the position of the watch in relation to the buckle can be changed.

Not much to say. It’s a watch.

The buckle is really nice. It is designed with a flat bit that goes between your skin and the actual clip to prevent pinching when putting it on. It’s flat enough to fit my wrist comfortably. It’s a little thick, but I don’t spend much time wrist down on stuff so no matter.

The strap is fully adjustable (it fits over my armwarmers which no other watch does!). The stitching is knotless: I left a tail, stitched over it and then ran the other tail under that stitching and pulled to tighten. It shows no signs of coming loose.