Tag: crafts

Catching Up: Signs Finished, Solar Stuff, Flowers Everywhere, Engraving Lighters, Silly Cats, No More Hip Pain Somehow?

MrsGF finished up the last of the welcome signs the other day with about three coats of all weather polyurethane. We did four all together. We’re keeping one and these three are already spoken for. They turned out pretty nice I think.

We hit a milestone with the new EG4-12000XP inverter. We hit half a megawatt of production earlier today! We’re going to need every watt we can get out of that system because the big central AC unit is still on the grid and it’s been going for something like 3 weeks straight now since we shifted into this hot weather pattern. We decided to leave it on the grid because while the 12000XP would have enough oomph to handle it, I suspect it would would discharge our batteries to a point where I would become uncomfortable overnight. It’s the old style AC system, but it’s only a few years old so replacing it isn’t in the cards at the moment. If we’d known better at the time we would have gone for a heat pump system which is much more energy efficient but at the time we weren’t even dreaming of putting in whole house solar. I looked into it but a heat pump system would have been around twice the cost so I never seriously considered it. Oh, well. Live and learn, as they say.

Our electric rate here isn’t bad, about 20¢/KWh, which is cheap when compared to what those poor buggers out in California are getting hit with thanks to Newsome and the California legislature being owned lock, stock and barrel by the utility companies and the hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes… (cough cough), I mean “campaign donations” and lobbying $$ they pay out every year. But the handwriting is one the wall, as they say. Thanks to the huge amounts of power the massive data centers being built here in the state are gulping down now and will gulp down in the future, the utilities are going to have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in new generating facilities, substations and high tension power lines to feed them, and you can be damned sure that if Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and the others building those facilities have anything to say about it, it’s going to be us consumers who are going to foot the bill, not them.

But on to a more pleasant subject. Laser engraving.

I had no idea but apparently Zippo lighters are still a thing with some people? I thought that with the rate of smoking going down every year the market for lighters would have shrunk as well but I guess I forgot about the people who smoke “recreational substances”, shall we call it? That’s still illegal here in Wisconsin but all you have to do is nip across the border to Illinois, Minnesota or Michigan if you want to light up.

I did the first one with the brewery logo on it to give to Kyle, one of the owners. And then I started playing around using the Lumos Flex from Wecreat and the fiber laser and wow, it does a nice job engraving stainless steel! Doesn’t take long, either. With the IR laser in my old Lumos it would have probably taken half an hour to do something like this. With the fiber laser it takes about 4 minutes. It actually eteches right into the metal so that design isn’t just discoloration, it’s actually etched in there and will never wear off. I’ve done about four of these for various people to give as gifts and they keep telling me I should put these up on Etsy or somewhere, but no thanks. I do not want to get into that rat race. Plain, genuine Zippo lighters cost me about $18 each. In order to make it worth my while I’d probably have to charge $35 – $40 for one and I don’t think anyone would be silly enough to pay that.

And then we got flowers! Wow, do we have flowers! Here are a couple.

As for the rest of the gardens I’m too lazy at the moment to go out and get pictures so you’ll have to settle for a description. The tomatoes are going gangbusters. They’re already loaded with green fruit. We have 6 plants this year. We were only going to put in 3 but we had 3 or 4 volunteers pop up and MrsGf didn’t have the heart to just pull them so she transplanted them to a better location and they’re looking just as good as the ones we grew from seed ourselves.

The carrots are thriving and we really need to thin them out. The beets? We’ve already been picking some and eating them. They’re doing fantastic. The celery is looking beautiful this year. When I’m mowing the lawn I can’t help but snip off a stalk to nibble on when I’m riding on the mower. If you’ve never grown celery yourself, please give it a try. You won’t believe how intensely flavored the home grown varieties are when compared to the commercial varieties they sell in the grocery store.

The onions are getting to the point where we’re thinking of starting to pull some and curing them off and putting them in storage.

We have a few zucchini plants as well and they’re producing beautifully. The nice thing about zucchini is that it has almost no flavor so you can slip it into anything and nobody will notice they’re eating something healthy. Tonight I’m going to do a zucchini-mushroom stir fry with lots of garlic and onions and parmesan cheese.

I’m eagerly awaiting the tomatoes. Absolutely nothing compares to the flavor of a ripe tomato fresh off the plant from the garden.

Let’s see, what else?

Oh, the hip! Almost forgot about that. I suffered for something like 3 weeks with pain in my right hip that was almost excruciating at times when I bent my leg the wrong way. It started to oh so slowly get better over time. But then the other day I woke up and got out of bed and suddenly realized that the hip didn’t hurt. At all. It was like someone just threw a switch. There’s a bit of soreness there but that’s because the muscles in the leg are stiff from not being used normally for so long.

So what happened? I have no idea. MrsGF thinks it might have been a pinched nerve and I suppose that’s possible?

Anyway, I’m still taking it easy because I’m terrified of doing something that might bring it back. But otherwise things are back to almost normal. I’m even back on the bike again but I’m keeping the riding limited to just a few miles and at a relatively slow pace for the time being.

Let’s see… Oh, almost forgot! Silly cats, right?

That’s Charlie over there in her new favorite stot to sit. If I scoot forward to type on the computer and there is any space at all between me and the back of the chair, she’ll squeeze in there. She is an absolute sweetie. I’ve never seen a cat that loves people as much as she does. She belonged to our daughter in law’s aunt but she had to move into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets so we volunteered to take her in and we’re so happy we did. She’s getting up there, about 14 or 15 years old now, and she has a heart murmur and a benign cyst on her neck that puts some people off but doesn’t seem to bother her at all. The cyst is inoperable because she can’t tolerate anesthesia. They tried once and her heart stopped and she almost died so unless it’s a genuine emergency neither we nor her vet are willing to try it again.

And that’s about it for now!

Hm? Oh, oh, wait… Oh no… That’s not a 3D printer on a truck heading this way, is it? No, it couldn’t be. I swore I’d never buy another one, didn’t I? I seem to distinctly remember saying that, didn’t I?

Catching Up

So I went and did something I promised myself I wouldn’t do again, I got a video camera. Yes, I could use my iPhone to take videos but using a very expensive phone to make videos in situations where it could be easily dropped into rivers, mud holes and trails while biking, or inside of laser engravers, etc. did not seem like a good idea to me so when a GoPro turned up for sale at a huge discount, I bought the thing.

I suspect this is going to be one of those situations where “well it seemed like a good idea at the time” comes to mind when I find it covered in dust on a shelf after not using it for months. That’s what happened to the last video camera I had.

Anyway, there is an excellent chance you will be inflicted with videos in the future, so allow me to apologize in advance. Videos like, well, this one below which is not only the first video I took with the thing but also illustrates my latest project.

That is made from a kit called a “Marble Run”, the Spaceport edition. And it is without a doubt the most ridiculously complicated thing I’ve ever put together. I didn’t keep track of how many hours I have invested in building that thing, but it was a lot. Handling hundreds of parts, many of them so small I needed to use a needle nose pliers to put them in place and chasing tiny, tiny parts across the floor when they went flying were par for the course. And whoever engineered this thing is absolutely, positively, a bloody genius. The engineering and creativity behind designing and making something like this almost entirely out of nothing but wood and a few pins and a couple of screws, is mind boggling.

It’s difficult to envision just how complicated this thing is from that video so here’s a more detailed photo.

I mean just look at that thing. Trying to put all that together was bad enough, but can you imagine trying to design something like that from scratch? There are close to 500 individual pieces, most come in sheets of laser cut plywood of varying thicknesses.

And there is another one of these that is just as complicated waiting for me that eventually will be joined up with this one, along with third kit that is a motor drive and lighting system to drive both of them.

I don’t recommend a lot of products here, but this is one I would definitely recommend if you’re into building kits or 3D puzzles. It’s from a company called Rokr that makes a variety of these marble run type kits/puzzles for adults that range in price from about $30 on up to well over $100 depending on size and complexity.

The instruction/assembly manual is very well written but some caution is necessary because some of the illustrations can be a bit confusing. It’s generally broken down into subassemblies that are then connected together or to the main mounting board which makes it easier. It comes with everything you need, including any tools that are necessary. It includes sandpaper for smoothing off edges, wax for lubricating the gears and friction points, screwdrivers, etc. I would strongly urge you to also have on hand a small needle nose pliers for working with small parts especially if you have big, fumbly fingers like mine. And keep a bottle of instant glue with accelerant handy as well. If you are careful you won’t need the glue, but me? I managed to break a couple of small parts. I’d also recommend some very good lights as well.

Even more impressive was the thing actually worked after I got it together. I needed to do a bit of adjusting and in some cases some trimming to get everything to work smoothly. But having something this complicated actually work when I was done with it should give you an idea of how well the instructions are written.

And while I’m talking about videos, how about a kitty? Sure, why not.

That’s Marvelous Mercy The Wonder Cat and yes, you have to use her entire name when you call her or she will ignore you. She is a real sweety. She is considered a “senior” cat although you couldn’t tell it from looking at her. She’s about as sleek and athletic as they come.

If I do start doing more videos, there is the question of storage space. While WordPress gives me a more than generous amount of storage space here, these videos take up a huge amount of space so I suspect that what I’ll end up doing is uploading them to my Youtube account and just linking to them from here.

Well if I ever get around to it. If I start to do video stuff it means I’m going to have to learn how to use editing software. Ick…

Let’s see, what else? Oh. I made a clock! Well, several of them, actually.

MrsGF likes that one up there so much that it’s now hanging over the fireplace in the living room. Here’s another one that I did the other week that MrsGF has hanging up in her office.

I’m really surprised people don’t make more of these. They’re easy to make and cheap? You can make them out of any scraps of wood you have laying around, and these battery operated clock modules are ridiculously cheap. I picked up a box of 15 of them, complete with an assortment of hands, for $27. That’s about $1.80 each.

And I’ve run out of things to talk about for the moment. Aren’t you glad?

Coming up in the future: I’m putting together a list of on-line resources for craftspersons who dabble with laser engravers/cutters. That’s one of the most frequent requests I get. So I’m putting together a list of websites for things like free images, .SVG and other files you can use for cutting or engraving, resources for finding materials at decent prices, etc. So keep an eye out for that sometime in the next few weeks.