My last 3D-printed bracket gits my dial gauge!
It’s a lovely snug fit for mine and there’s no chance of the gauge moving during use, though the channel for the probe is actually not as high as it ideally ought to be.
I’ve corrected that in the design itself now, though I’ve not actually tested this one out. Unless I need to print another I’ll live with the inaccuracy.
I’ll upload the FreeCAD and stl files for these later in case anyone else finds them useful.
I’m still struggling with the lurgy, but really couldn’t face achieving nothing with the day so this afternoon forced myself outside to rake a couple of barrows of mixed council green waste and home-made compost over a couple of metre or so of vegetable bed and planted out my broad beans. I’m still thinking it’s a bit on the early side given the recent weather, but the roots were coming through the bottom of their pots and they really needed more space, so now it’s done.
Thirty-six plants planted in all and I have saved the two smallest left over to cover losses during transplanting.
I watered them in well, though I’m not sure there was a need as we’re forecast another eight hours of heavy rain tomorrow.
Or get someone to clumsily manipulate an image for you?
Of course I’m taking about the Mother’s Day photo issued by Kensington Palace. I looked at the photo having read the news that the image had been pulled by various agencies and it screams “fake” to me. Not just for the weirdness of Princess Charlotte’s left hand that has had the most attention, but there are a whole load of other issues too. What doesn’t worry me that much is the lack of a wedding ring. People who have been ill often remove rings because they’re uncomfortable if their fingers become swollen due to the illness or drugs that they’re prescribed, so I don’t see that as necessarily a big deal.
What I do find odd are other details:
The pattern on the shoulder of the jumper worn by the younger prince (I don’t know their names, I have to admit — the royal family aren’t normally a big thing for me) is messed up.
The same pattern is in sharp focus, but the hand around his side is in very poor focus as is the area around it.
The shadow on the back of the elder prince’s wrist from Kate’s hair just doesn’t look right. In fact her hair at that point looks completely wrong too and the quality of lighting on his sleeve doesn’t convince me either.
The elder prince’s left thumb looks very skinny and weird, as does the little finger on the same hand, in fact. I’m not saying it’s an AI-created image, but I know people who have worked on AI image-creation software who say fingers are one of the things that are hard to get right.
Charlotte’s skirt is doing something quite odd in front of the little finger knuckle of the same hand and the ribbing on her cardigan seems to have completely disappeared.
Other things I question but am less sure about:
The blurring on the zip of Kate’s jacket. In places the individual teeth are visible and then they aren’t.
I’m sure it’s warmer where they are than it is here, but there seem to be an awful lot more green leaves on the plant growing up the wall in the background than there are on any trees I’ve seen around here.
The hair on the right side of Kate’s face appears blurry, whilst that on the left is much better defined.
Something odd appears to be going on with the ankle of the boot on Kate’s left foot. There’s a piece that appears to be sticking out of the back.
Either the elder prince is standing with his feet unusually close together, or his left foot has gone missing.
So, I’m convinced it’s a fake, whether generated by AI or patched together in something like Photoshop. Which raises a couple more questions. Firstly why do it in the first place? I don’t imagine anyone would have batted an eyelid if they’d not released a photo. After all, that’s apparently Kate’s thing (I’ve got to admit I don’t actually know that and just read it in a news article) and she’s been ill (that much I was aware of). The second is, if you’ve decided to release a fake, why make such a poor job of it?
Years ago I had an uncontrolled warming cabinet made from a 40W incandescent light bulb inside an old chest freezer, but I decided that the time had come to speak of many things replace it with something better. So, off to Amazon/Ebay/one of those places I went, to order a 40W greenhouse tube heater. Importantly, one with no temperature limiter that wouldn’t allow the heater beyond the manufacturer’s idea of a sensible limit.
The rest of this project is made from stuff I had about the place already.
The first job was to make up a box from 12mm ply that was the right size to sit two national supers on top side-by-side (to keep them warm prior to extraction), so 920mm x 460mm basically. The depth of the box also needed to be sufficient to sit two 30lb honey buckets one on top of the other with a rack to stand them on and room for the tube heater under the rack. In my case that’s about 500mm.
I added some handles because, well, they were there 😀
The box is lined with 50mm PIR insulation board, edges taped up with aluminium tape.
Even the lid had some glued to the underside using PVA.
I cut an internal floor that allowed me to fix the tube heater in place and made up a rack from bits of scrap pine shelving. Probably several different shelves by the looks of it. It’s hidden in this photo, but under the far end of the shelving and attached to it is a 100mm 12V PC fan. One of the older ones that just has a positive and negative supply, not the newer types that have speed control on a third wire.
Also in that photo you can see the wiring for an STC-1000 solid state relay set into the box from the outside so I can control the target temperature. Also on the outside is a 240V socket into which I plugged a 12V wall-wart to power the fan. I could have bought a 240V fan and avoided using the wall-wart and socket, but I had all the parts in the workshop so it cost me nothing to re-use them.
Testing time!
And in case the display is a little difficult to read…
After a few hours of running…
I AM ALL WEEDED OUT! But fortunately so is the vegetable plot. Despite yesterday’s rain and the fact that I am still feverish due to the lurgy that I’ve had for the last few days I forced myself to dodge the rain showers and finish the last bit of weeding. I can’t help feeling that like the Forth Bridge, it might now be time to start again 😀
I also did the propagator shuffle and managed to finish sowing my list of seeds for this week as well as another batch of jalapenos which didn’t germinate that well first time around. Other than those it was all flowers today: Ammi Majus, Cape Daisy and Lobelia.
Jobs still outstanding are sowing parsnips and planting first early potatoes, because the ground is still far too cold and wet. There’s precious little Sun forecast for the next week, but nowhere near as much rain either, so hopefully things will at least start to dry out.
My modified design for the dial gauge mount:
And the final print, which is considerably better than the previous one, thanks to my discovery that the X axis belt had become very slack.
Looks much better. Only whilst the design has an internal diameter of 53mm for the body of the dial gauge which is 52.85mm, the actual internal diameter has come out at 52.55mm so it won’t fit 🙁 I was so sure I was on to a winner there, too.
Back to FreeCAD once again…
I was hoping to post a new version of my dial gauge mount for checking the table saw blade is square to the T-slots today, but yesterday I developed a nasty case of the lurgy and thanks to lack of sleep and energy have been too hard of thinking to make the necessary corrections to the design. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow and can be a little more productive than I’ve managed today.
Cut a man some wood and he’ll start IKEA, give a man a tablesaw and there’ll not be a tree in sight within six months. As the saying goes.
Easy-peasy one this, but it makes life so simple. I must find some more pictures of it in use. The construction is easy enough to see from this photo:
The inner “slats” can be withdrawn after assembling the frames to release them from the jig. They’re just there to hold the sides in place. I can’t claim credit for this design: there are plenty along similar lines on that ewe-choob, some that even allow construction of one hundred frames at a time.
The idea however is simple: grab a fistful of sidebars all the same way up and run a bead of glue down the slot for the top bar before slotting them into the jig as above. Tap the top bars into place and then run down the top with a staple gun, stapling vertically through the top bar into the side. I use a 35mm staple for this. Turn the jig over (turning it sideways means the frames won’t fall out) and nail in the bottom bars. Pull out the slats and there you have ten perfectly square frames. Without particularly hurrying I found this much faster than making frames individually, and most modern wood glues will be stronger than the wood itself, so we’re all good.
I’m sure I took more photos last time I used it so I’ll post those when I find them.
I’m not sure the Sun rose today, it was so dark all day. And we’ve had a fair bit of rain, too. I braved the rain to move my potted-up strawberries into Frankenstein’s Greenhouse and then retired inside a greenhouse to get some sowing done.
I’m a bit limited by how much I can sow right now because I’m so low on propagator space, so initially stuck with peas, salad onions, nasturtiums (I’ve often wondered if the plural of ‘nasturtium’ shouldn’t be ‘nasturtia’) and radishes. Salad onions I sowed about eight seeds to a module tray cell, radishes about half a dozen. They can all just sit in the greenhouse to germinate. I also sowed sweet peas, Larkspur, Nicotiana and Scabious which can get in the propagator tomorrow after I’ve had a bit of a reshuffle.
There’s more to sow yet and in previous years I’d even have had my first early potatoes in this weekend, but the ground is too cold and wet for them yet.
Some people apparently use shopping bags, but I prefer things to be a little more ordered and hunted around the interwebs for a suitable design. Eventually I came up with something that I thought would do the job, but I was a bit short of suitable wood. I did have some scrap cedar from a hive box that was well beyond repair, so I cut it into strips and glued them together to make a board that was big enough to cut the sides from. The ends are from a single piece of timber whilst the handle is a scrap broom handle or curtain rail or something like that. Probably more likely a curtain rail. I drilled some blind sockets (of course, what else would they be for a curtain rail?) to take the ends of the rail so the handle could be glued in and would support the ends of the box rather than needing to put a screw through from the outside.
