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

Book Safe

I’m not supposed to tell you about this, right?

I made a book safe by cutting out the insides of an old dictionary, gluing the pages together, and lining it with formed cardboard and purple crushed panne. It’s really pretty.

First, gather your tools.

I used a stencil so I’d know where the cutting lines were. Have a spare blade for the knife- you’re going to need it!

Having a metal edged thing to guide the blade is good- the edges of the hole will be straight (important later). Having a plastic one is bad- the knife will eat the edges.

Cut out the innards of the book. I could cut about 60-80 pages at a time. Use the stencil every time you start a new section of pages to prevent drift. This will create a slight sawtooth edge, but that’s fairly easy to clean up later.

Once the insides are out, dust out the insides, and paint the insides of the pages with glue. I used 1:1 water:elmer’s glue and a ratty old paintbrush. Press the book flat (a good use for your AHS yearbook, yeah) and let it dry. Put a piece of waxed paper between the the first page you cut and the facing page to prevent stickage. I left about 20 uncut. In this and the next step, try not to let glue drips dry in place- wipe them away.

When the glue is dry, trim the sawteeth on the inside back. It doesn’t have to be perfectly flat. Glue again. Repeat this until satisfactory, keeping in mind that it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Cut a strip of cardboard from a cereal box and fold it so that it fits inside the cavity. It should be level with or slightly below the glued pages. It should fit snugly but not bow out in the middle. Glue in place but don’t worry if it doesn’t stick or cracks off in the next step.

Cut a rectangle of fabric that will cover the bottom and sides of the cavity with some spilling over the edges. Don’t worry if it seems like a lot, trimming will occur.

Put a thin layer of glue across the bottom of the cavity and stick the fabric to it. Don’t put so much that it soaks through (It looks bad). Let it dry.

Put a another thin layer of glue on one of the fabric sides of cardboard and stick the fabric to it. Then glue up the space between the cardboard and the book. Tuck the fabric in between the cardboard and the book. If there’s not enough space, trim, but make sure there’s enough to tuck. Make sure the fabric is smooth, then clamp and let dry. The cardboard should mold to the side of the book a little but smooth out any irregularities.

Cut the corners of the fabric so that the glued edge of fabric goes to the corner of the cavity and no further. Trim the Newly cut edge so that it overlaps the glued edge a little bit. Repeat the gluing, clamping and trimming for the other corners, waiting for the glue to cure after each side.

ta~daa!

It came out really nice. When it’s closed, you can’t tell from looking at it. It’s really light, though. I’ll have to weigh the innards to see how much I can put in it :D

(And yes, in the last post Dennis box is peering out from inside…)

Ruffled Cuffs

My sewing machine came with a ruffler. It’s an alien looking gizmatch but I believe it to be the /coolest thing evar/. At least, when it’s in operation. The day I figured it out I made rather a lot of ruffles-

-and I’m still finding the silly things in my bed. It’s quite ridiculous.

This is the attachment and a sample ruffle.

But I haven’t really done anything yet. I’ve just spent a day being gleeful. *puts glee to use*

Do-hin-gus

I *just* printed my first thing on The ShopMaster’s Thing-o-Matic.

I started it out in google Sketchup, just doodling around pretty much, exported it to .stl, sent it through SCAD, and thence to the printer!

And it printed! (for 11 minutes)

There are so many things wrong with it that I can’t even start but IT IS MADE OF SO MUCH WIN

Tool Holsters

Dad suggested that I make holsters for the tools I picked up at Cabin Fever- two vice grips, a micrometer, a finger sized adjustable wrench- out of Kevlar thread because kevlar is cool. Ebay, kevlar thread, lifetime supply, $15-30. It takes forever to make anything out of thread as we discussed over dinner that evening, and it was decided that I would have to wait until June to get Kevlar thread. June? June is Far Away. I dig out my crochet needles and some nice grey wool/acrylic yarn and get to work.

A week later I have these:

From left to right: micrometer, leatherman, eensy vice grip. The leatherman and eensy vice grip have grommets hammered into the top with cute little clip earing holders that fit through and hook onto my belt. The metal in the clips is soft, so I expect fail from them. The micrometer has grommets but no clips because I have no more clips and haven’t found anything else that doesn’t require me to be overly clever. The eensy vice grip has a little loop+bead closure to keep the holster shut. I made the bead out of fake turquoise stone.

This is the wrench. Instead of a beltpouch for it, I macraméd(?) a lanyard for it. It’s hard to see in the picture, but the wrench unclips from the lanyard with a clip I stole off my usb key.

This is the holster for the big vie grip. It’s designed to fit around my leg. I originally intended for it to go around my thigh, but discovered that it slid down. FAIL. so I changed it to fit around my calf, which is a much more satisfactory solution anyway- it doesn’t interfere with my cargo pockets that way.

yaaaaygeeking

All the holsters were made pattern free- I just made it up as I went along, occasionally holding the work up the the tool to make sure I didn’t totally mess it up.

Watchpocket

…because I can :D

I designed and added this pocket after I made the vest. It would have been much easier to make if I had known when I made the vest.

These are the patterns I used to make the pocket.

The one on the top left if the intricately folded model I used to make the pattern below it. I cut the fabric from the lower left one. The one on the right, once trimmed of its faux-pocket, become the pattern for the flap.

The pocket fits under the flap of the bigger pocket to hide horrible stitchery.

And the watch in the pocket. It has its own flap to keep the watch in- it fell out several times during Cabin Fever when I had the pocket without the flap- and to further hide my bad stitchery.

So much of my stitchery is bad on this because I had to try really hard to not sew the big pocket shut by contorting the vest, which made it difficult to sew in a straight line.

My First Engraving

Got the gcode plugin from http://cnc-club.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35#usage working with inkscape and did a test run of it. Got a huge mess of gcode out…

…sent it to the sherline…

…and it worked! (After twiddling the z-axis so that the cutter intersected the surface a tad)

The text belongs to my father, the gear belongs to me. They are overlaid because all tests are done on scrap and that’s the scrap I got…

Merry Christmas, everybody!

AP Classes

This is true.

For reference:

http://thisisindexed.com/

Taxi Horn!

…I do not actually know if it is a taxi horn. But that’s the story I’m sticking with!

Two summers ago my father found an antique brass car horn at a tag sale and suggested it would make a great bike horn for moving obthe music outfitterslivious peds… $5 and a ride home later, I got to test it and it was loud. But it had no squeeze bulb for ease of use on it so that had to be fixed. I can’t make one of those. To the internet!

I purchased the replacement bulb from The Music Outfitters. I measured the end of my horn and compared it to their measurements. They were Close Enough, so it Should Work, right?

no.

The bulb and the horn did not fit together. Should have taken their advice and gotten a new horn, but that would have taken the fun out of it all!

This is the horn, the adapter, and the bulb from left to right. Apparently I can’t consistently spell ‘adapter’ correctly. hmmph.

The adapter is the silver bit in the middle. I got to play with the lathe to make that, my first major project! woo! My father’s infinite stash provided me with an aluminum tube with an ID (Inside Diameter) smaller than the horn’s OD (outside diameter) and an OD bigger than the bulb’s ID. got that? It took me a diagram. The tube’s dimensions required that I trim it to fit the bulb’s ID and the horn’s OD. The ID is seems easy- and isn’t. The chuck has to grip the thing you are turning so you can’t cut the parts it’s gripping. My father’s solution to this is to put a bolt the hole in the tube, tighten a nut on it, and chuck the bolt up! (My father gave me a lot of help on this. without him it would never have happened!) He had clearly done this several times before because he had a variety of bolts with divots for the tailstock already turned in them. I used the lathe’s automatic thread function (the lathe can do threads all by itself. It’s Really Neat.) to turn the outside to the right diameter.

Then to the threads on the inside of the tube. First step is to drill the ID to be closer to the horn’s ID than it was before. The horn has, of course, nonstandard threads but they /are/ at a convenient 32 pitch. This means I couldn’t use a standard tap but I could use the lathe’s thread function (I keep calling it a function. It’s a series of levers and knobs and dials) to turn the threads. The not-the-hardest-step of this was finding the right tool. Since it’s all nonstandard… we had to find a tool that fit the hole, had a tooth the right size to cut the threads right and was sharpened right. Dad, of course, had the close-enough tool in a box. And it worked!

After a brief mishap involving indexing and turning the chuck but not the index, I got an adapter.

hand shown for scale. Here you can see the threads on this end in the inside.

and here is the adapter shown on the horn (yes it is a brass reed whut) without the bulb.

The bulb has a tube that fits inside the adapter and over the reed. It got epoxied in last. Epoxy?, yeah, sure. The horn had a hole in the tube so it would have leaked air if I made a ring with threads on all sides.

man i love epoxy

dad made a A Post about this a while ago. You’re getting this one so much later because I stuck it on the end of my post queue.

Three Legs and a Paint Job

I did not know I could paint that well OR spontaneously sculpt like that. Miracles happen all the time!