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Timasomo 2024: Week 2 Updates
It was genuinely inspiring seeing everyone's posts from last week. There are a LOT of awesome projects going on!
Time for another update on your progress:
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What did/didn't you get done this week?
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Anything go according to plan?
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Anything go off the rails?
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Any successes or struggles to share?
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Do you need feedback or help on anything?
This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.
Blacksmithing 𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑶 2024: Week 2 The Pumpkin-ing
Previous week
We all know the failures of last week, so it's time to finish the fuller and see if that helps move things along.
First things first, knock a few things off of the honey-do list.
Grab some 1/8" plate to form the base and uprights, mark, cut, find center, drill hole in the base for the upcoming plug weld. Mock up the results so that the idea in your head actually looks like it'll work in reality. Drill holes in the uprights and two more holes in the 1/2" plate jaws, then confirm fit up. Upper hole in the uprights is deliberately oversized so the jaws can open to accommodate the stock. Cut a couple inches of 1" square bar to fit in the anvil's hardy hole, clean up the edges, and drill a divot for the plug weld.
Get your PPE ready, this is not a joke. The welding arc is brighter than the sun and only a foot or so from your face. You will go blind without a hood. It also spits out UV rays like you wouldn't believe. You can and will (and I have) get a pretty instant sunburn. Welding hood, gloves, and long sleeves (this is a welding jacket) at a minimum. I also wear a leather apron and earplugs while blacksmithing. You cannot replace your vision or hearing, protect them. As an old metal head that had a habit of headbanging right next to the speakers at concerts, I'm honestly surprised I can still hear as well as I can. I wear earplugs at concerts now too.
Set it up, plug weld it, flip it, weld the bar to the plate on the bottom.
Remember kids, a grinder and paint makes you the welder you ain't!
Since this is going to be near red hot steel, I didn't paint it. Also those (and the upcoming) welds are worse than usual because I realized afterward that I didn't have the shielding gas turned on for my MIG welder. Still solid, still sticks, still penetrated, and it's a non-critical component anyway, but talk about looking the fool.
Mark the direction you want the jaws to face, mock them up, tack into place, then finish the welds, and finally realize the 60 seconds of welding you've done total on this has all been without the shielding gas on...
Test for function, get the forge hot, and get to work. The holes you drilled are to progressively make the work smaller and smaller with each pass. Once it's reduced to as small as you'd like it to be, grab a hot cut chisel you've made (store bought is also fine) and remove it from the stock. Some cleanup of the bottom is needed, so heat it up again, put the stem in the anvil's pritchel hole, and give the bottom a few whacks (get your mind out of the gutter, pervert) to clean it up.
Be sure to give autumn a warm welcome.
Make another that's too small, keep trying out different techniques until the cut of test pipe you've been using is all used up, shut off the forge, put away the tools, smile at the "Aww they're so fucking cute!" from your wife, and have a glass of good bourbon to finish the evening.
Think about improvements to the fuller to make it easier to use (striking surface on top, a stop on the uprights to keep the top jaw from flipping over backward, knock the sides of the base to fit the edge of the anvil face so it can't rotate as much in the hardy hole) as the twilight creeps in and your pupper cuddles up next to you.
To be fair, they are fucking cute. A productive week, I'd say!
Also if those are your bad welds I hope you never see any of my atrocious welding :)
Brother, that's the good side of the welds! The other three were porous as hell (at the top anyway, didn't notice any porosity in the critical areas while grinding); doesn't help that I didn't really clean the metal either, just hit it with the grinder wheel a bit. While they sure as heck aren't pretty, so far no weld I've made has failed and that's the important bit. Pretty is for social media welders, I got shit to do other than fish for stack of dimes likes on instabooktok. So long as your stuff stays stuck to the other stuff you stick it to, then stick it out my man mat!
Besides, my semi-atrocious welding is up against your magnificent woodworking and you definitely win there. Bed is looking great!
Pinging all Timasomo participants/conversationalists: here’s the new topic for the week.
Notification List
@0d_billie
@Akir
@alp
@Aran
@Areldyb
@arqalite
@AugustusFerdinand
@CannibalisticApple
@Carrie
@cfabbro
@DefinitelyNotAFae
@EarlyWords
@em-dash
@eve
@first-must-burn
@HEBV5
@honzabe
@hungariantoast
@Interesting
@irren_echo
@IsildursBane
@knocklessmonster
@mat
@NaniTheHuman
@Omnicrola
@Papavk
@patience_limited
@PelagiusSeptim
@PnkNBlck71817
@PossiblyBipedal
@RheingoldRiver
@ShroudedScribe
@shu
@SloMoMonday
@smoontjes
@Soggy
@Tygrak
@vildravn
@Weldawadyathink
@Wes
@WiseassWolfOfYoitsu
If you would like to be removed from the list, let me know either here or by PM.
Also, if anyone would like to be added to the notification list, let me know as well!
Unfortunately my server rack project may end up on hold. I determined that I can't actually get fiber internet yet, so my level of priority on this is significantly lower. (Cox uses some incredibly deceptive language.) And my motivation is down the drain for this reason too.
Also just have a lot of other things going on. Midterms, another project taking longer than anticipated, etc.
This week a large amount of BRRRRRRRRRRRRR has happened. But I got all the wood sanded. My fingers spent quite a lot of time being all tingly because my sander is very vibratey. I hate my sander, but I don't quite hate it £300 to upgrade to the next model.
Then lots of roll roll roll followed by plenty of wait wait wait. But I got all the wood primed (two coats) and some of it topcoated (two coats, one more once assembled). I'm using Tikkurila's Everal Aqua 40 for the finish coats, which I haven't used before but it's lovely. Smells of bananas!
I also drilled a lot more dowel holes using this self-centring jig (not homemade) because the design has evolved a little to be far more complicated for the sake of a small visual effect. Then today, I managed to assemble one end of the bed (this is the foot end, currently being 'clamped' using my one long sash clamp and some ratchet straps). It can only be assembled in the room it's going in, I don't have space to do it anywhere else. Also it's only coming out of that room with a saw and in pieces. I considered finding reversible fixings but we have no plans to move any time soon and such fixings are expensive and even the best of them work loose.
Did I mention it's a four poster bed? It's a four poster bed.
Ugh, that's one of the worst feelings, especially since unlike a limb that fell asleep it takes forever for the tingles to go away. My old leaf blower used to leave me in mild agony for hours after using it for prolonged periods because of that. I also couldn't justify the cost of replacing it while it was still in working order though, but it thankfully died a few months ago. And the new one we bought to replace it doesn't have that issue, thank God, since the leaves just started falling here and I wasn't looking forward to using the old one again! :P
I have, somewhere, some vibration damping gloves which are moderately effective. They're also very awkward because they're fairly heavy leather with a thick layer of memory foam in - hence them being "somewhere" rather than on my hands.
Ugh, that sander numbness. I have a 3D printed sign project for my inlaws that's been in a pile in the corner of my living room because I am avoiding the impending sanding. Post-processing is my least favorite part.
I haven't looked this up but is tumbling a thing for 3D printed parts? I use a tumbler for polishing awkward shaped jewellery items (or just if I'm feeling lazy and don't need a full mirror finish). I'm sure with the right media you could tumble FDM printed bits - although I suppose you might need a fairly hefty tumbler.
That's not a bad idea. I did a little searching, and it seems like its slow but effective with the right media. Something that takes a long time but requires little manual effort would be my speed.
I bet I could build a pretty good tumbler with a mix of scrap bin hardware I already have and 3d printed parts to turn some kind of big off the shelf drum. My max print volume is just over 200cm^3, so that it's a nice limit on the drum size.
Aren't they pretty loud? Maybe I could do a drum inside of a drum with some rock wool so that my wife doesn't murder me in my sleep because of the noise.
Noise depends on the medium a bit. I have a steel shot tumbler, which is of the kind often sold for kids to tumble rocks in and that's fairly quiet. In a garage or something it shouldn't be too disruptive. I also have a magnetic tumbler which uses 0.2mm steel pins, and that's pretty noisy. I'd be happy with that being on during the day in my house but I think I'd turn it off at night. Vibratory tumblers I have no idea about, I've never used one of those in person.
My shot tumbler only needs a couple of hours to bring copper or silver to a decent finish, and my mag tumbler needs even less time. I guess you'd be abrading rather than burnishing, but I still wouldn't expect processing times to be all that long. Even ABS is pretty soft compared to copper.
You can get the little drum tumblers pretty cheap on the eBay/AliExpress/etc kind of sites, might be worth a try on smaller parts before building something bigger.
Did another drabble/scene for City of NPCs. Decided to just write out a potential first meeting between the two leads, with a bonus NPC! Very helpful in solidifying the psychological/social differences between people and NPCs in my head. I'm pretty happy with this and will likely use it in the final draft.
First Encounter
She grabbed his arm and he jolted. “What—”
“You're bleeding,” she said, eyes fixed on the scrape he got earlier when he tripped against a wall. Small droplets of red smeared his arm. Not much, but more than he'd expected given he'd expected nothing.
Ethan's face twisted with annoyance. “Darn, it was that deep?” he grumbled. The scrape seemed to no longer be bleeding, but he'd still need to stop by a bathroom to wash it off.
The girl was still staring at it though, green eyes wide. “It's so red,” she said wonderingly. A bit different from the usual responses NPCs gave. She tugged his wrist and said, “Come on, let's go!”
“Sure,” he replied lightly, slightly bemused as he let her drag him away. Some NPCs had stronger pre-programmed reactions to human injuries than others, feeling a compulsion to help fix the injury ASAP that overrode everything else. It was easier to go with the flow than try to argue. Besides, his job didn’t have a rigid schedule, he could spare a few minutes so she could get it out of her system.
He could guess where they were heading within seconds. His job involved keeping a rough mental inventory of the types of products each store sold, and there was a corner shop one block over that would fit the bill perfectly.
So he raised an eyebrow when she walked right past the door without so much as a second glance.
Now Ethan followed not out of resignation, but curiosity. He saw this girl every day, knew she worked at a local tea shop. She should know that store had basic first aid supplies, he had probably directed her to the store at least once in his three years as a Zone Monitor.
So, he kept his mouth shut, wanting to know where they would go.
His patience was soon rewarded when they reached the Curio Shop. He barely had time to remember that he usually saw this girl with the girl who worked here before she threw the door open without any preamble. “WREN!” she yelled, loud enough to make him jump in surprise.
It made her friend also jump behind the counter, yelping as she dropped something. “Dammit, Callie, don't yell!” she growled, shooting a glare their way as her hand wrapped around her fingers.
The newly identified Callie ignored the rebuke as she marched in, dragging Ethan along like a toy. He had to look pretty comical, face blank and almost bored as he let himself be manhandled by the shorter girl. “Wren, we need the first aid kit!”
“Yeah, no shit,” Wren grumbled. Whatever she dropped must have been sharp or something judging by the way she still cradled one hand.
Callie zeroed in on this other potential injury and gasped. “Oh no! Wren! Are you bleeding too?” She darted over and tried to pry Wren's fingers away.
“H-hey! Stop it!” Wren flinched back, annoyance curling across her face. Colorful bandages flashed briefly, hot pink and highlighter yellow and fluorescent orange wrapped around different digits, and Ethan quietly snorted.
Now he got why Callie had dragged him here. He had noticed this girl sporting different bandages in the past, the bright colors eye-catching against her muted navy blue coffee cup. She didn't always have them, but she had them enough that it was memorable.
That also meant whatever she had on hand would be similarly neon-bright. Ethan could appreciate the girl liking them, but he'd rather not sport lime green bandages. As Callie tried to wrestle Wren's hands apart to look at them, he took the chance to subtly inch towards the door.
Alas, his hopes were quickly dashed as Wren’s eyes locked onto the motion. “Hey, weren't you here for him?” she asked Callie, and the blonde immediately whirled around to Ethan as he froze.
“Right! I almost forgot!”
“Curse you,” he muttered with a small grimace at Wren as Callie grabbed his arm and yanked him over to the counter. Wren's grumpy scowl had softened to something more amused, smirking at his miserable look.
“Look! He cut his arm and he's bleeding!” Ethan let her thrust his limp arm over the counter, showing off the minor specks of blood from his scrape. Absolutely no new spots had appeared since she started dragging him, confirming he really didn't need a bandage and just needed to wash it.
Wren stood frozen though, eyes wide as she stared at the small smears of red. Ethan scoffed and rolled his eyes. Another blood fixation response? “Oh, come on, you can't be that shocked by a little blood,” he said, nodding at her hands.
His voice seemed to snap her out of the immediate fixation state, her own hands suddenly snapping forward to grab his arm. He jolted at the contact, not expecting it, and she leaned over. “It's... red,” she whispered, her voice shaky.
Okay, this was getting weird. “Uh, yeah,” he said slowly. “It's already fine, but I guess if you want to put a bandage on it or something, you can? And maybe let go?” His voice cracked a bit as he mumbled the last bit, turning his head away with a small grimace. On top of the awkwardness, he could now feel a slightly slick feeling where her fingers wrapped around his wrist, confirming she had definitely cut herself. Which meant he'd have to wash off that blood, too. Great.
“It's red,” she murmured, not seeming to hear him, and... Okay, yeah, this was getting way too weird for him. NPCs didn’t usually fixate on the color.
Callie practically bounced as she leaned forward, a giant grin on her face. “Right? It’s just like your blood!”
Ethan groaned. “Hey, I—” Then her words registered and he froze, gaze snapping down to where her hands gripped his arm.
Red.
A deep, rich shade of red stained her fingers and smeared his skin.
His first, automatic thought was that he had gotten another cut without noticing, but then he realized, no. His mind flashed to Callie’s words, and to how Wren had cradled her hand after dropping something. That wasn't his blood.
That was hers.
His gaze lifted to find her own blue eyes boring into his, her stunned expression likely mirroring his own shaken look.
“You're a human too?” she breathed, and like that, the world seemed to halt.
Days since last confirmed encounter with a human: 0.
I'm working on a guide for a Yu-Gi-Oh! deck I'm playing, see last week's update here.
I've finished the individual card discussions for the archetype, I now wanna make a section about non-archetypal cards that are pretty much mandatory for the deck to function competitively.
I also spent a huge chunk of time researching this particular ruling, which is based on precedent from a ruling for a card named Green Baboon, Defender of the Forest.
It forces us to choose which card we want to summon from hand if we have two monsters that would summon themselves from hand (or hand/graveyard) simultaneously. Since it's not a rule of the game itself and not written anywhere in the rulebook or guides for beginners, I wanted to cover it so people wouldn't be confused trying to summon two monsters at once and their online simulator only allowing one, or their judge at a tournament telling them they cannot summon both.
I also realized I need to write down some less-optimal combos that you could perform if your opponent has a powerful handtrap like Dimension Shifter or Mulcharmy Purulia/Fuwalos, in order to either waste as few cards as possible or avoid giving your opponent too many cards.
Either way, the guide is shaping up nicely, I hope I can publish the first draft sometime next week so I can get feedback from other Fire King players.
3D Printer rebuild is mechanically done and tested. I need to make new side panels for the case still but then it will be done.
No progress on long term project of jukebox due to being out of town for the weekend. Plan is to hit it again this coming weekend.
In the "I finished one project, now to adopt new one" project, I'm actually resurrecting something I worked on a few years ago and then stalled on. I had been working on building a closed loop servo motor system for 3D printers. For context - most 3D printers use stepper motors. They are precise, especially with current controller chips providing microstepping, but relatively low power density. A standard NEMA17 motor caps out at about 10W, and using microstepping significantly degrades the effective torque and RPM. DC motors can be much more powerful for the same weight. A DC motor with similar effective power output and a gearbox to bring it down in to the operational range of the printer would be 100g as opposed to over 300g for that stepper, and it would be turning much more of that power into useful work as microstepping essentially involves making the motor fight itself so it's wasting a lot of potential output power turning it in to heat. I've seen appropriate 300g DC gearmotors that can push 100W.
So why don't all 3D printers use servos? Price and complexity. Industrial grade steppers are cheap. That NEMA17 can be had for $15-20 and the controller board is $10-15. An industrial servo with a similar level of precision is $1k+ and there isn't much in the way off off the shelf controller electronics to take a generic motor and turn it in to a servo.
So, I'm wanting to find a way to bridge the gap with a bit of hobbyist power and using newer but low cost chips. I had attempted this a few years ago using Pololu 25mm DC gearmotors with an integral quadrature encoder. It was generally actually pretty effective, but the precision was under what the stepper could achieve. The steppers typically natively have 200 steps/rev and then are commonly configured with 32 microsteps per step, so 6400 precise positions per rev. The gearmotor was a roughly 20:1 gear ratio with a 64 count/rev quadrature encoder, so about 1300 measurable positions per rev, and it's a lot harder to precisely seek one, so your effective resolution is between half and a quarter that.
So the plus of that would be that it would be really inexpensive. $60ish for all the parts. However, the sort of people who would be interested also wouldn't want to degrade their printer's accuracy. Higher resolution optical rotary encoders are either large or expensive - I'm guessing they're a good chunk of the cost of the industrial units. However, there's a newer way to do the encoding that I think will work, which are absolute position magnetic rotary encoders like the AS5600. They read at accuracies of 12-14 bits per rev, which is actually better than the stepper can achieve, and that's before the gearbox. Likely a bit less accurate per tick, but still far more accurate than 64ppr from the encoder.
So I've got a couple of bits on order that should be showing up in the next couple of days and I'm going to work on seeing if I can make this work, with the current 3D printer as a testbed.
Pretty good progress on the blaster this week. I finished the exterior modeling and did all the internal cutouts for the electronics. Here's the first test print and also a shot of the four parts showing the internal routing.
The plan is to let M3 socket-head bolts self-tap to attach the two halves, and this test shows that works pretty well. I need to solder longer leads onto some of the LEDs to route them where I want them, then I can put everyting in and test the internal layout and trigger mechanism. I also forgot to add a grill for the speaker.
This feels pretty close, and I have a quiet week, so hoping to have the blaster mostly done before the weekend. Then I can sew the robe for the costume and the whole thing will be done, except the side buns, which my wife has agreed to be in charge of.
Looks great! What printer do you use?
Thanks! This was printed on a Prusa Mk4.
I also have a mk3S+, but I think I'm going to sell it to finance another mk4+mmu combo. The mk3 has been an excellent printer, but the balance between ease of use and upgradability on the Mk4 is really in the sweet spot for my needs.
Offtopic: I see very few complaints about Prusa overall, which is making me highly consider them for my next printer. Any complaints/issues with the MK4 and/or MMU?
No movement this week, or at least none worth talking about. Still struggling with syncing this thing. Perfectionism is getting in the way here (because I can feel that it's wrong!), so I think I need to focus on getting something that's close and then tweaking it later rather than trying to get each section perfectly lined up before moving on.
Last night, I assembled a prototype of my Steam Deck keyboard, and did some typing and hardcore gaming with it. It's in desperate need of real button labels (I at one point just ssh'd into my laptop, pulled up the keymap in the qmk source, and referred to it while playing nethack), but I think the core idea is definitely sound.
I abandoned the original plans I had for the dpad, in which I would just put a taller dpad on top of it, upon realizing that the dpad is special: it's the one button that tilts when pressed instead of just moving downward, so you can't just constrain it to move up and down like you can with other buttons. And the taller you make it, the more horizontal movement is generated by a given tilt angle. The four-separate-button arrangement shown there is me experimenting with what to do instead. It's... usable, but it does not feel good to use.
I'm also going to look around for some lower-profile diodes. The switches I'm using (KXT3) are very low profile, and part of what made button design so challenging is that the diodes (1N4148WS) are significantly taller and mounted right next to each switch, so the bottom of each button has to be shaped to hit the switch while missing the diode.
I have also gotten a friend sufficiently excited about this project to help me out with mechanical design :3 She is good at this sort of thing and will very likely have better ideas about some of these issues than my decidedly "idk just mess with the numbers until it fits right" approach to design.
Uhhhhh, I did nothing :(.
No real update for me this week! I've been pretty busy and social so I left it be. I attached a few things and the thing that annoys me now is that there's a plastic sheet that you have to glue to cardboard and then you have to in turn glue little cardboard sakura flowers to the plastic which is, believe it or not, supremely annoying and a shitty medium for attaching things to plastic lol.