I was out fixing a broken wire in the front stair lights, which means working with wires held in place that I have to reconnect end to end, and I realised i could do this:
…and I can’t believe I never thought of it before. It’s so good. It holds the ends in place while you’re setting up and then you touch the hot iron to the solder and it just flows together. It is amazing, how did I not think of this until today?
(I’m sure this is an old trick, it’s just one I can’t ever remember seeing myself, so I didn’t know about it. Now you’ve seen it too ^_^ )
I’ve been overwhelmed with stuff lately and that’s meant not getting much done that’s not interrupt-forced. Like today (Sunday), sure, I did Monsterdon, and I did bagel baking, and I even got a tiny bit started on the bike cargo trailer.
But what I spent all night doing was surprise rebuilding the oven after it decided to break in yet another way, this time involving heat protective glass on the one remaining working oven. (It’s a double oven. The second one works but can’t be controlled sanely if at all.)
So tonight I had to disassemble almost all of the front panel including both doors and that didn’t take long at all now did it, ugh.
Anyway that’s back together though I can’t test it until Monday (today, for you) but we should be limping along again. I don’t know for how long because the control panel and system continues to degrade – this is why we can’t use the lower oven at all, or the timer anymore, or a bunch of other functionality – and I’m totally thinking that even though we don’t have any money right now we should use savings and replace it because frankly I don’t know that it’s possible to get this oven into a really safe configuration at this point.
But what I said I was going to write about is my dumb little minimal key holders.
For reasons I have too many keys. These are dumb reasons but they are reasons and I can’t do anything about them, and it’s always a problem in my purse – they get tangled, they’re hard to separate without looking, and so on.
Then I saw a Laura Kampf video where she briefly showed off how she’d made a minimal key holder by filing down the heads and putting all the keys on a single axis, and how it all folds down into something like a single-ended pocketknife, and I knew what I needed to do.
I’ve made three versions so far. (They’re on Thingiverse.) The first version was really only good if you didn’t want to file down your key heads at all, because sometimes you can’t do that – well, that’s a little unfair. It was good enough that I wanted to improve it and definitely didn’t want to go back to normal keychains.
Then I made version two – for my bike keys – and they’re all a standard size and the heads are just plastic so it was really easy to make that happen and after a week I was like “WHELP I need to make a filed-key-head version of version one” and went at it:
Version two is the pinkish-purple one with the bike pictogram on the side. (I came up with that too, very pleased with it.) Version three turned out to be best with two axes and between that and the little taps I added to the key head wrappers I’m really, really happy with it.
It’s really nice being able to tell them apart trivially by touch and being able to flick out the keys needed. Flick flick flick flick flick flick flick 😀
It’s also nice to have so much more space in my little purse – which, oh yeah, is what got me started on this whole project to begin with.
Anyway that’s one thing I’ve been doing and meaning to post about for ages. Hopefully I can post more soon.
I need to revise an opinion I’ve expressed about Creality’s basic PLA, mostly back on Reddit.
People used to ask for opinions about various filaments and a lot of us would say that while the sample PLA included with the Creality printers was always shit, if you actually bought a reel of their PLA, you’d find it perfectly reasonable. Not great, not by any means – but a reasonable, basic no-frills PLA for a good price.
But you’d also have a couple of people – fewer, but not zero – jumping in to say “no, Creality PLA is shit.”
And what I’ve learned over the last month or so is that there are secretly two kinds of Creality PLA, and they’re not well distinguished from each other. They’ll even be on the same Amazon product page. You kind of just have to know.
One is exactly as I described, and I stand by that opinion.
The other… it’s not good for much more than drafts, in my opinion. Not even for test objects – well, that’s unfair. Not for test objects that require any strength. The layer adhesion is much worse, the plate adhesion is worse (helped by higher plate temperatures, but you really have to crank it up), and the cooling contraction over larger areas is much worse.
Once you get used to it and figure out its annoyances, it’s not that bad if you don’t need strength. After all, it does print, it doesn’t clog and it’s otherwise adequately behaved – but it is a much weaker filament and has proven inadequate for even lightly stressed test objects.
So how do you tell them apart?
The more-expensive single-spool packs of PLA are fine.
The two-spool PLA bundles are not fine. It’s not a quantity discount; it’s a different filament.
I really honestly thought the cheaper price was bundling. I mean, the actual exchange rate means even low-cost PLAs are overpriced, so it made sense to me. But I was wrong. And the behaviour of this two-spool pack PLA really explains a lot about some of those old commenters back on Reddit.
Anyway, my opinions about plain Creality PLA stand – but only for the single-spool package.
The double-spool combo, though? Oof. Unless you do a lot of draft printing, in which case I could see a use case… I don’t think it’s worth the discount.
Someone was giving away a broken television – “it flickers” – on the local Buy Nothing group. I have a project that wants a high-quality diffusion lens, so I say “Hey, if nobody wants to try to fix it, I’ll take it” and I end up with it.
I pick it up. It’s much heavier and thinner than I expected, and higher end than I also expected, but no big deal until…
…I get home and realise it’s an OLED television, which doesn’t have the diffusion lens I want. They must’ve spent some serious money on this thing.
So I get into the paperwork, notice a couple of extra bits but skip them to get to how to assemble the stand, do so, and hook it up to see the flicker. To my surprise, actually yeah, that’s a reasonable description of what it’s doing! But it’s mostly working so maybe I can fix it. If not, oh well, my bad for not checking to make sure it’s not OLED.
Then I go through the rest the paperwork they threw in with it from 2019 when they bought it and discover:
The actual purchase receipt
The actual extended warranty proof of purchase that you need to use the extended warranty
Which says that they bought three years of extension to the two-year factory warranty which means
This goddamn thing is still under warranty.
I presume they will want it back. I have left them a message. This may be complicated by the fact they were heading out right after I picked this up, so now I’m wondering if they were going out to buy another TV.
Given how much this one may’ve cost, I’m kind of thinking it’s worth their time to take the new one back. But we’ll see.
Anybody know the proper way to test a high-voltage self-discharging capacitor?
(Don’t say Mr. Carlson’s, it’s a fine device but it doesn’t test caps like this. Will it show a leak? Yes. That’s by design.)
With a regular meter it tests in range and it’s correctly self-discharging but all that’s at meter voltage which is not exactly this thing’s operating range.
(It’s from a cabinet-fit microwave. Everything works except the magnetron doesn’t actually do anything. I hear the relay click but no zappy. So it’s probably that. But I’m not willing to replace that part because that involves breaking microwave radiation containment shields and I don’t have a microwave detector and I’m not buying one for one (1) microwave repair.)
As part of my ongoing air-exchange-based HVAC project, I have an outdoor air quality sensor from Ambient Weather (disclosure: nothing to disclose, no sponsorship, I bought it). It’s battery/solar powered, and that’s fine… except for the part where that doesn’t work here in the winter. We’re too far north and too dark.
But since it plugs in to charge and keeps working when plugged in, winner winner chicken dinner, right?
WRONG! Because first you have to take the bottom off the case, then the charge plug sticks directly out from the bottom facing down, like a goddamn Apple Magic Mouse.
I can’t fix the mouse, but I can fix this, and I have made a printable tray and rack system to let me use it that way. And, of course, I’ve put it up on Thingiverse.
I’m rather pleased with it – I think the design is pretty good – but in all honestly my favourite part is…
you know what they call positive fitment in the machining world? When two things really fit together just right?
This has that. At least with my print settings. It’s just… thonk and then it stays, and it does this with a third object I didn’t even make so had to measure out myself, and that’s just … yeah. Oh yeah. That’s the good stuff.
Ambient Weather unit held over my 3D-printed tray and rack, with the cord going through the tray and rack down to an outlet while plugged into the air sensor. Three of the four mounting rails – the ones that thonk into place – are visible.
Anna and I were getting ready to bike first to exercise then to go to the grocery and I noticed this metal ring on the floor of the garage and looked at it and thought, “uh, that looks automotive,” which was bad given it was next to Housemate Paul’s car.
Right where Bilbo left it
So I looked at it and looked at his car and didn’t see anything before I turned to where Anna had already gone outside with her bike, and that’s when I saw the big garage spring just kind of dangling there by the door – a place it should certainly never be.
(That’s bad.)
You know the little coils at the end of a long spring that is like at 90 degrees from the rest of the spring, and that’s where you hook it onto things if you’re using the spring that way? That’s what had broken off.
So I left it for the moment, but once we got back I started working on it, and it took a few tries but I settled on something which I think is a pretty good fix. The first couple of fixes absolutely worked, but I got worried about the tension strength and how it would interact with edges of connected materials. The spring does have a little bit of an arch now, but I think that’s actually okay? I mean, before, it had a 90-degree turn in the metal, and, well, that made fools of us all, now, didn’t it.
everything here is original except the D-shaped, uh… hook? with the two nuts. Originally the S-hook was just hooked onto the structural metal and you can see how it kind of marked it up, so I went with better.
I also shortened the run a little bit to make up for the reduced spring length, and I got the tension pretty well equal with the rest of the springs. The door opens and closes easily now. But if I’m hideously wrong about something for a very specific reason, let me know.
I never did write up a final followup report on the clothes dryer heat recovery system, did I? A writeup on Version 3.2, which I promised over a year ago when writing up Version 3.1.
Well: it works! It works really well, honestly. The house is more comfortable with a little more retained humidity in the winter but never gets at at all damp – if anything, what we need is more humidity reclamation, not less.
We also successfully reclaim a noticeable amount of heat, same notation. I don’t have any reason to change my numbers, so it even works out to a net operational profit! It even saves money, on top of everything else.
It really does all just work. We got to use it from November until May’s heat wave, even longer than we did last year, thanks to last winter’s particular weather. The very minor strengthening was all it needed, though honestly I’m not sure it needed even that.
The way to “close” it for summer pressure testing turned out to be really simple: a thin sheet of cooking silicone cut to the right size, slipped inside the door to cover the filter intake, held in place by the friction of the door itself and air pressure. It worked perfectly; we had no sign of leakage, the rigid air ducts I used to connect it to the dryer and outside vent never built up abnormal amounts of lint, in short: the pressure testing over summer showed no issues.
Once actively in use this past winter I cleaned it weekly, but I could’ve easily cleaned it every second or third week, based on the amount of lint build-up on the inside of the filter. The furnace filter is still good and can still be used again for another year, no question; I think the charcoal should be replaced more than once a winter, since we did get more laundry smell over time.
Which gets me to why I’m probably not really likely to reinstall it this coming autumn.
Over winter, one of my housemates switched back to scented laundry supplies. They did so for specific reasons which are pretty reasonable, honestly. I couldn’t even criticise it if I wanted to. But… even with the charcoal filter layer, those scents started becoming more and more of a presence. Most of the time just in the laundry room, but when their laundry was drying it’d creep out to other parts of the house, and even when it wasn’t their laundry, you’d still get some of the smell just from accumulated build-up inside the vents.
And I don’t like those scents. I use unscented laundry supplies for reasons. It’s not nasty or something, but it’s artificial and perfumey and I just really dislike it. On clothing, the amount left behind is hardly noticeable – but in the air, it really kinda is.
So in the end: this is a solved problem. Version 3.2 works and works well. I have no meaningful new notes or plans version a version 3.3, much less a version 4, because… it’s done! It works! It saves money and energy and helps keep the house from getting too dry in the winter and it’s low maintenance and safe! It’s genuinely quite nice!
Unless if you have people using scented laundry supplies, and you don’t like the scents. Then… it’s not as nice.
You never know. Maybe I’ll reinstall it anyway. Try changing the charcoal layer every month or something nuts like that. Particularly if it starts getting really really dry, come January.
We’ll see.
eta: This post includes a bunch of photos showing the design. This is of Version 3, but the only differences between versions 3 and version 3.2 are more bolts tying everything together better. Refinements, not replacements. Air comes in the right side, mostly goes out the front panel, excess pressure goes out the left and out of the building, and that’s also the safety release in case somehow everyone forgets to clean the system for several months.
Y’know, I’ve never really got cast iron, or why people get into it, but maybe I’ve just never seen it really completely restored. I’m thinking particularly of ornamental cast iron, or practical cast iron which is also meant to be decorative while functional. I’ve seen it painted and kinda rusty and also not rusty but not really… fully maintained I guess? Or maybe that’s just the average state in actual use, I dunno. It’s always struck me as a bland material, kind of sloppy and blah.
But fully and freshly restored it’s sculptural as fuck, and I’m kinda starting to maybe get it.
Three de-rusted, repaired (when necessary), blued, and generally restored cast-iron C-clamps
I did a bunch of colour work on this photo to get most of what you would actually see in real life – the unedited photo was very blue and really off – but even here, it’s not as warm looking as in person. The iron has a real lustre to it, a warm black that kind of glistens, almost glows, and the highlights aren’t as bright but they’re definitely there. I don’t know how long it’ll stay this nice, but it’s this nice right now and I’m really pleased about that.
The reason for this new photo (and thus this entire post) is that armiphlage on Dreamwidth was kind enough to inform me that all the various WD40s are not actually similar, and I’d used the wrong one for corrosion resistance. So I went out to find something better. I ended up with a lanolin derivative, which is also nice in that it’s not a solvent or corrosive or otherwise going to do much harm, and the…
Okay, there’s often The Old Guy at these stores, right? The one who’s been doing this since he was 15 and by “this” I mean he has a serious workshop and has probably rebuilt either his machine tools and/or his automobiles a few times, and actually uses these products on his own projects and knows them. That guy. It’s not always a guy, but it’s most likely a guy.
There’s one of those guys at the local mostly-automotive-goods-and-parts store. And he said that for cast iron, this is what I want, and I’m willing to go with that. The Old Guy at the shop said this’ll be fine, and I suspect he’s right.
So yeah, I bought it for the screws, and cleaned them up and reapplied the correct kind of corrosion inhibitor. And while I was at it I did a thin layer on the rest of the metal and rubbed it down well, and damn if it didn’t just add that little extra layer of shine, and I finally maybe started to see what other people see in cast iron. That’s when I thought, “This is pretty sweet. Even better than before. I think I’ll take another photo.”
And so, here we are.
Cast iron.
Still not my favourite, but… I think I kind of get it now.
I de-rusted and restored some more C-clamps. These aren’t labelled “Pony” or “Jorgensen” but are labelled “Adjustable” so I’m wondering if that refers to Adjustable Clamp Company, which is the maker of both Pony and Jorgensen clamps. But I don’t know.
As always, I am terrible about “before” photos but these were covered in so much rust they were a mix of furry and scaly and I brought them home in a plastic bag. But two days wrapped in paper towels soaked with rust remover does a lot, and a wire brush does a lot more on top of that.
I don’t suppose anybody local has an old bike trailer of some kind they don’t want/need, do they? Baby-seat trailers would do fine. Great, even, because really I kind of want to make something myself but on an existing frame.
Essentially, I have pretty good cargo capacity already? And a modular/swappable system I built myself. But I just had a case where it wasn’t big enough even though what I wanted to pick up was very lightweight. And that probably means trailer time. I am also considering what I could do with some kind of platform! But I’m worried about centre of gravity and all that.
And we’re on a tight budget until Anna has a new position somewhere, so.
Did I already push out another new version of ambient-hvac, this one adding a new seasonal mode for spring/fall? And only a day after pushing out the biggest update since launch?
I play sometimes with PHA filaments – they’re a lot more temperature resistant and/but also more flexible / less rigid – but I haven’t had a black before, and check out the change from glossy to matte depending upon printing temperature. I haven’t seen this in any PLA – and I hadn’t seen it in natural or wood-infill PHA either. but I pulled back out my white PHA tower and there it is, albeit much less obvious.
White PHA, black PHA, and black PLA temperature towers laid flat next to each other. The black PHA in particular is glossy at 220°C, becoming fully matte at 205°C.
PHA typically needs a 0.6mm nozzle, but I’ve found 0.5mm nozzles work with 0.4mm slicing and you get better bridging that way. People have been kind of moving lately to 0.6mm nozzles lately so it’s not a big deal either way, but it’s a nice little trick for that little bit of extra precision – though with this black I think 0.6mm should be the rule, there’s clearly some occasional issue with the 0.5mm. Not enough to cause a jam, but enough to flaw the otherwise lovely matte surface.
I’ve had issues with matte black PLA in the past, so now I’m wondering if this will work for my matte black needs. I hope so. Matte black prints are gorgeous.
I wouldn’t normally bother mentioning “Hey, I did all the mending late this afternoon” but the only reason I even found it again was because I was doing some reorganisation a couple of weeks ago, found the stack of things to mend, and put them into the project storage and management system I keep talking about.
And so today I had about the right amount of spare time and pulled out my sewing kit and the project box with all the little things that needed small amounts of work – the most complicated was replacing a bra strap – and got it done in about an hour and a half.
The bra had been queued up for about three years. Because it got lost, because it was just sitting in a pile in the closet.
Goddamn I can get a lot done with a good management system
I’ve uploaded an improved version of my thread-out alarm for any 3D printer using 1.75mm filament and once Thingiverse’s caching catches up it’ll be here:
This is just an alarm. It doesn’t tell the printer to stop, it just yells so you can know you need to come in and set up the next bit of filament. The advantage is that it uses cheap nonsense and also it doesn’t interfere with a printer-halting thread-out detector so you can use both at once if you want a custom alarm.
You’ll be able to tell if the version Thingiverse is showing you is actually the current one by making sure the project has four .STL files instead of just two, both the new ones (version 4) and the old ones (version 3).
Version 3 worked fine with good filament coming off a new spool; version 4 works fine with that too, but also works well with random bent-up bullshit which – hey guess what – turns out is when I actually want a filament alarm!
Also version 4 has a speaker grille for louder but harsher-sounding alarm. That’s kind of why I left version 3 up there; if it was loud enough for you already, you can use version 3’s speaker case with version 4’s thread holder and it’ll all snap together just fine. Or if for some reason you like the old thread feeder better but want louder, you can pick the opposite pairs and that’ll work fine too. The pieces are interchangeable.
Once upon a time, everybody shopped at Boeing Surplus. Not everybody everybody, obviously, but, you know. Everybody. Amongst the other things they were good for that you might not expect were gardening gloves, because they’d give up on welding gloves long before they were actually worn out for most purposes – sometimes even for welding – and they went so far down in size it was delightful. Even I could find gloves that fit, and I wear a women’s small.
Then the whole McDonald-Douglass merger happened and everything went to shit at the Lazy B, including the closure of Boeing Surplus, about which I am still a little angry. And that’s all a long way of saying that’s how I have a few C clamps from Boeing Surplus that I’ve had for just ages, all three of which pretty scuzzy and in need of care, one of which was not just that but also bent up in a few different ways. But had an typically deep throat so I’ve been using it anyway.
Sadly I don’t have any “before” pictures – I’m real bad at that. But I’ll show you one from after first-wire-brush cleaning just because I figured out a neat way to protect threads in a screw that I’m gonna need to hammer straight again. It’s not really a “before” picture either, though maybe you can see some of the bent bits:
C-clamp screw with threads filled with wire wrap, protecting the threads from the result of hammer/mallet impacts.
That worked pretty well. This is after a good scrub, and again, I have no real “before” pictures.
But here, this might give you some idea:
In the photos below you’ll clearly see the maker logo, reading “Pony.”
I didn’t know that was there. I knew something was there, and I kind of suspected it was a maker’s mark, but it was not legible. I thought it had been worn down too much to read. “Made in USA” was legible, and the model number on the other side was legible. But “Pony” wasn’t.
So with that in mind:
“Pony” model 246 deep throated C-clamp, repaired, restored, blued, brand side up
That Pony logo is not particularly subtle – I mean, it’s not screaming in your face, but it’s not exactly hidden either. And yet.
These pics are taken after straightening everything I could, filing away all the casting seams, cleaning with wire-wheel on my drill press, sanding (a lot), a little more filing, more cleaning, more sanding, and finally bluing.
The clamp works much better now. It worked before, but it’s less stupid. It’s not completely not stupid, because there’s a factory defect! The hole they tapped for the clamping screw isn’t done right, and is off-centre, so the screw doesn’t line up right with the clamp base. It’s close enough, barely, I guess, but very annoying, and you wouldn’t see it on modern equipment. If I was more determined and had more tools and knowledge, Icould re-do it – it’s the kind of problem I Make A New One would solve by filling it in with welding material, then re-tapping th ehole.
But I’m not him. Also I don’t have welding kit. Or patience with that nonsense. I’m just pleased I made it not bent and not scuzzy.
Here’s the other side:
“Pony” model 246 deep throated C-clamp, repaired, restored, blued, model number side up
It’s so smooth now. No, really, where you actually hold it. All that filing and sanding was on the edges and it’s just so smooooooooooooooth.
Photo taken before bluing but after all other repairs and filing and sanding and stuff, edge-of-clamp facing up. So smooth.
Those edges used to have not-rounded spots, and the casting seam sticking out, and a bunch of factory cutting marks where it got cut out of the mould I guess, and a lot more abrasive spots like that. Now it has basically none of those and it’s so, so smooth. xD
I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to blue it or not, honestly didn’t know, but I think this un-blued photo shows that was the right call.
Anyway, it’s nice now. It used to be kinda suck particularly because spinning the screw would work fine, then get jerky and sticky and weird where you hit the bend points, and the crossbar was broken and annoying and would get stuck, and now, not only is none of that true, it actually feels nice in your hand.
Which is as good a time as any to recommend My Mechanics (“I Make A New One” guy whose youtube name I finally looked up) as his use of hand files is definitely worthy of study, and an actual good use of video on the internet. I’ve learned a lot from watching him work.
OKAY if you’re out east welcome to smoke season, I’m sorry, I’m seeing numbers out of New York City which are “Spokane surrounded by wildfires” bad, and that’s some bad, bad, bad shit.
The number you need to pay the most attention to is 2.5nm particles. Here’s what you need to build, fortunately it is easy and not expensive and it is MUCH BETTER than any casual filter you’ll buy of Amazon. You’ll need to replace the filter elements once a year or less even assuming a three-month fire season.
Those KF94 and N95 masks you were wearing for COVID? I hope you didn’t throw them out, because 1) COVID is still happening and long Covid is extremely nasty, 2) worn properly, they work GREAT on this kind of smoke.
This will be a recurring feature of your summers now. Not every year, but every couple, and not always this bad, but more than once this bad. Be ready.
If you anneal your 3D prints, like, ever, that whole “pack it in popcorn salt” trick works an absolute treat. You still get a little shrinkage on the X and Y, and an even smaller (but borderline) height climb on the Z, but it’s way WAY less than without it, and otherwise the geometry just stays perfect and none of the details go anywhere or anything. I’ve been putting off trying this for months – partly because I don’t really do that much annealling lately – but now I’m like “wow okay I really learned something today” and wish I’d done it a few months ago.
It’s pretty easy. I put a layer of salt in a glass jar, then placed an ordinary plain generic PLA object at the bottom, before packing the rest of the jar with more popcorn salt as tightly as I could, tapping it a lot to make sure I got the best possible surrounding of my object, and using the lid to put some pressure on the salt from the top.
Then I hit the whole thing with 70°C for an hour (15 minutes preheat, 45 minutes at temperature), took it out and measured it, then repacked and reheated the same object at 80°C for 90 minutes (after preheat) and it’s fine, modulo a lesser degree of the inevitable X-Y shrinkage. The second heating cycle changed nothing dimentionally, despite the higher temperature.
If you’re using a PLA that anneals to a higher glass point after annealling and you have reason to care about geometry, this is a great solution. You can even re-use the salt. I wouldn’t eat it after using it forthis, of course, but you can use it all you want for annealling.
Anyway, this is a great trick and if you do 3D printing you should try it.
So I’ve kind of become unfond of the hang-arbitrary-boxes-to-the-rack system I had developed initially. I mean, it worked! It worked fine! I didn’t have one come down in six months of testing, even just using tape to attach the boxes to their hangers. Failure rate of zero.
I just decided it was too irregular for me, and kind of ugly. Your milage may vary and the parts needed to make it work aren’t going away. It’s staying a feature.
But it’s also limited in terms of how big a project you can hang off the thing, right? So I started thinking about it, and came down on an idea of what amounts to pointer objects, pointing to, say, a nearby closet or other storage area that doesn’t actually have to be visible. The pointer objects could make the hidden storage visible, reducing the size of the problem and maybe even eliminating it entirely.
They’re designed so you can use four colours via filament swaps even on a single-nozzle printer, and it’s not even fussy about it – these were printed using the Filament Friday high-speed profiles.
Plus I built them so they attach (with glue or double-sided tape) to the box-hanger elements, so those objects get re-used without modification, keeping them easily available for box hanging if you actually prefer the original idea.
Pointer (number) plate attached to single-height box plate. They fit double-height plates exactly so you can use those too.
The idea of the big white area is that you can either put dry-erase material on it and then use dry-erase markers, or you can just use a post-it of some kind instead. I did the latter because I don’t have any dry-erase material handy? But once we have spare money again I’ll do that I think.
Number plate with post-it on double-height box mounting plate, attached via double-sided tape.
(Okay, it’s not a real post-it, I was out of white ones and I wanted it white. YOU GET THE IDEA.)
So this is what a central unit looks like with number plates, which I think is a lot better than the add-on-boxes approach. Plus it lets you point to much larger boxes stored elsewhere – arbitrarily large storage elements, in fact. You could use this with standard shipping units if you were so inclined and had access to shipping units and weren’t using them to build, idk, a house or something.
Meanwhile, in the closet just to the right in this picture, the corresponding boxes. Notice that some of the boxes are much larger than anything you could actually hang directly on the unit. And now that I’m actually using it – the labels above are made up, but then I realised “oh wait I have actual projects too big for this system UNTIL NOW” – I can say I strongly prefer this version of the system.
But the old one is still 100% available if you prefer it. Anyway, in the closet:
ignore the “medium” label, I had an idea, it didn’t really work
And I realised yesterday that I have a laminator, so I can shake these designs up just a little and then laminate them and use dry-erase markers on these, too, if I want. In case that’s important for some reason. I mean, hey, you never know.
Anyway, that’s the big update. This is really starting to work for me. If you actually try this, let me know how it goes? There’s already a desktop-and-drawer open-organiser standard floating around in 3D-printing land, it seems to me that there’s room for a narrow-space vertical organisation standard too and if other people started designing for it that’d be pretty amazing. It is, after all, all out there and open.
(I can also a picture a single long row of these, along, say, one wall of a classroom, with one basket for each elementary or middle-school kid, right? Each with their own storage box that they printed. Art stuff could be in it, or something like that. Maybe above their coats, who knows?)
But I suppose we’ll just have to see whether the interest is actually there.
More project-organiser project. The idea with this is that they’re printable placeholders – pointers, basically – for projects where the component parts are too big to be hung in the hanging organiser directly. The number refers to a bin or box by number, and the big blank area is for dry-erase marker, so you can write the project name on the placeholder.
Here’s an example, numbered 3, yellow background:
3D-printed hanging white rectangular plate with a black-outlined yellow square in upper left, with an embossed number 3
And what that points to is a storage area, something like this, with numbered larger boxes and/or bins, with all the same marking:
six boxes, 1-4 “medium” sized, 5-6 larger, labelled similarly to the reference plaque in the previous photo
I was playing around with the word “medium” and considering playing with the word “large” but I don’t think that’s worked out, so that’ll probably go away. I like the numbers and colours though. We’ll see what happens as I work out the graphics language.
Also the “3” on the actually 3D-printed version is effectively a tri-colour-filament print. I designed it to allow up to four colours but I didn’t swap out the last colour soon enough and unless you’re right there the top blue layer is basically invisible against the black. Still, live and learn.
It’s a little unfortunate that the fonts don’t match but tinkerCAD only has three fonts and none of them really match the ones I have on my Mac. xD
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