Buckyball Squid - Oh, Yeah!

This is my favorite original.  It's got physics mojo, relying on some kind of magnetic pole thing to keep the squid arms floating away from each other.  I hung the squid head on a length of monofilament threaded and knotted through a plastic washer I made from a drink cap.  I chose to hang the head and then attach the legs.  When attaching the legs, you move them in slowly to give them a chance to tell you if they're going to freak out and stick to the next leg over. Don't let them.  You know how it is - magnets.

 Squid hole view.  The head is a stack of 3-ball-side pentagons with a hole in the center.

Buckball Penta-Cannoli Torus

Guy at work got a set of these as a present.  They are ephemeral, occasionally frustrating, odd, and sometimes rewarding.  Here's a 5 sided torus made from little cannoli shapes.

 First make 5 of the pentagons.  We left the hole in the middle.  The shapes have 4-ball sides.  The hole may help with allowing the cannoli tubes to flex when you place the last tube.

 Here are the five.  If they don't want to line up square, you may have to unzip your cannoli and flip it the other way.  You know how it is.  Magnets.  The last one goes in tight; you have to simultaneously pry open the nearly-complete torus and make sure you get the match-up correct, too.  Took me two tries.

Building An Awesome Fishing Joke

I came up with this one at work today.  It arrived suddenly, like a cleansing bolt of inspiration from the realm of the divine.  You know what I'm talking about.

Q:  What did the alien trout say to the fly fisherman?
A:  Take me from your leader.

Genius?  I leave it to you, dear reader...but I think you do well to consider the alleged source.

Inexpensive Meade 4.5" 114mm F=1000mm F/8.8 DS-2000 Reflector - Disassembly and Focuser

This is a telescope someone gave me as a gift many years ago, purchased from a chain photography store.  It's part of the DS-2000 starter kit, which comes in both refractor and reflector form, and has a computerized drive system.  But I never got it collimated - or rather, I screwed up the collimation so badly that it saw poorly.

I have decided to clean it up and get it working, if possible.  To do that, I'm going to have to take it apart.

There it all is, taken apart.  Just do it.  Three sheet metal screws hold the plastic end rings to the ends of the tube.  Three machine screws hold the focuser to its port in the side of the tube.  Three thumbscrews hold the three tines of the diagonal to their slots in the tube.

I read that the focuser is "lubricated" with something that is practically tar, and that this gunk will eventually cause the stripping of the cheap plastic gears.  And I don't doubt it - that stuff was like...like...I can't explain it.  Tar is a good word.  First take the screws out of the square lid covering the gears.

Then you'll see a thin spring metal device that I believe is intended to push the shaft gear into the linear gear of the focuser tube.

Then under that, the gears.

This is about as complicated as the interface between two dirt particles, but there's one thing to watch out for, which is this side-play tensioner or what-have-you.  It's a screw pushing a rubber nub into the smooth side of the focuser tube directly opposite the gear drive.  You can see the nub just sticking out in the inside.  If I lost mine, I'd make one out of a couple layers of bicycle inner tube glued together or something.

Here's the mirror!  It's kinda ratty looking, but it makes your face look really big and is therefore fun to play with for a few moments.

I wanted to put a center mark on it.  I'd free-styled a red sharpie dot on it when I first wrestled with it, years ago, but I did it when it was still in the tube and - whatever.  It was ridiculous.  Took me ten minutes to get rid of it with isopropyl alcohol and a series of cotton swabs.   So I tried various techniques of marking the center, including this one.  Thales theorem rocks, but actually I wanted a ring around the center so a laser collimator would still work later.  Some people use those binder reinforcement rings, but WTF - I can do the same thing forty times harder, without spending $1.29.  Right?  Am I right?  So I wanted to mark a circlish thing around the center and hit upon a genius method.

It's metal ruler with a stop, in the form of some vice grip pliers, attached so as to place the end of the ruler, when the stop is at the edge of the mirror, a fixed distance from the center.

In the center of the mirror you can see the faint lines of Pigma Micron 005 I used to delineate a square with chopped corners - an octagon.  Then I stuck tape up to the lines and cleaned up the mirror.

Not very clean yet.  It's amazing, after getting a nice camera and cleaning some old lenses, how difficult it is to clean optical glass.  Some of the flecks are little grease spots that smear around but never want to leave - you almost have to nudge them off the edge of the mirror.  Some of them are pits from either bad manufacturing or awful storage conditions (my bad).  Some of them are scratches I put there.  Some of them either change every time I look at them or are permanent.  After about ten minutes of struggling, I got it as clean as I could and reassembled the scope.

I'll try collimating it next.

Installing an Acoustic Strap Button

I'm doing this partly to take pictures with my new camera, and partly because I haven't blogged much lately.  The one people who read my blog will be pleased, I know - you're intensely welcome and you know I like you alright.  But also my project acoustic refret straight-pull conversion needed a strap button, and I don't like the idea of the thing that loops around the headstock.  Why?  Because I have strong opinions about things I know nothing about.

For guidance, I consulted this article on frets.com - frets.com seems to have stringed instrument mojo about stuff.  Pointless aside: I also like the articles at Fret Not Guitar Repair, which has a wonderful name and great information, but the stuff she works on is way out of my class (search for "acoustic" on this blog to see an example of my class of work on my class of instrument).  I pretty much drill holes in things and hack them up with cheese graters.

This is where I plan to drill a hole.  Somewhere...on there. Too much toward the back and the guitar will want to flip forward, maybe, and too much toward the front and there could be a flying monkey attack.  I'm feeling whimsical.

The button will go in the middle.  But I've got to check that I won't hit any metal.  Does this thing have a bolt on neck?  I have to check, I cannot recall.

I'm no expert but I don't see any bolts here.  Let's drill with abandon.  I selected a bit that was about the size of the screw core and taped a stop to it so I didn't go shallow or through:

Then I screwed in the button, taking care lest I drilled the pilot too small and began to strain the wood.

That's ten minutes of work and I feel like a genius, plus my guitar doesn't fall on the floor when I get up, anymore.

Building a Watercolor Painting

I've taken up art.  I've decided I'm gonna back off on building/cutting/modifying objects for a while, except for the LCD monitor I'm going to attempt fixing in my next post. So armed with some supplies from the local art stores and a 1978 edition of The Watercolor Painting Book from the local library, I decided to do my own rendition of "Demonstration 10.  Winter Landscape".

That's it.  I call it "Early Snow" since I used way too much green in there.

Here's my Reeves paints, which I got in a set obviously.  The individual tubes are marked for color fastness and one or two are not excellent, just good.  A fact I will have to remember if I ever embark on a paint I anticipate keeping.  And still, even with 18 tubes of paint, all the instructions call for colors I don't actually have.  So I make it up.

Here's the paper.  Commonly available Strathmore, cut into quarter sheets to conserve badness.  There's enough bad art in the world and I don't want to create too much at a time.

Here's a nice shot of my brushes.  Nice because in focus.  I use them indiscriminately.  I think I need one called a "rigger", though, for fine lines (originally rigging on ships, so I hear).

And finally during cleanup, my palette.  The colors were pretty in the water, but don't show as well in the photo - nothing does, because my camera sucks.  I cleaned the palette out completely because I'd crapped up all the little color blobs so thoroughly that not one of them was uncontaminated with barf gray.

Building art is fun.  I'm going to do it again.

Third Attempt at a Homemade DIY Table Tennis Racket

Why I Need to Build Another Racket
My first racket, when combined with LKT Rapid Speed 2.0 rubber on both sides, weighs 220 grams.  That's 130 for the 7 ply fiberglass reinforced blade, plus 90 for the rubber and rubber cement used to glue it on.  I played with it for an hour and it's too heavy.  Okay for predictably looping the forehand, pleasant to smash with, but horrible for backhands, where the wrist is more involved.  And because I didn't build up the handle enough, I always had the impression it might slip out of my hand and kill someone.

Who knew building a ping pong paddle could be so hard?  I felt I had to do a few things differently:

1. Lay off the fiberglass.  The fabric I have is too thick, I think, and it brings in way too much plastic resin.  It's a theory.
2. Use clamps instead of weight to form the laminate.  I need to drive more of the glue out, thin out the glue lines.  Glue provides little strength on its own.
3. Less layers and a bigger, monolithic core.

I also rough-cut a piece of birch plywood to shape, to see how the weight came in.  

Left to right:  original 3 ply butt joined blade proof of concept, 80g; finished 7 ply blade, 130g; 2x LKT Rapid Speed with leftover rubber cement, 90g; rough-cut birch blade, 104g

Not good enough.  So I began to calculate.  The idea was to calculate the weight of a cut out blade based on a ratio from the 6"x10" whole board. That way, I could measure the boards going into the paddle and determine how it would turn out in advance.  I used the birch plywood and the remainder pieces as my sample, and calculated a bunch of stuff from it.

These calculations are all crap

The problem is that the birch plywood I started with was not cut to the final 10" length, but 12".  So my golden ratio of 0.57 was relatively useless.  And I didn't feel like doing it again.  I wanted action, not words!  I still think this is a good idea, though.  I really should do it.

So my next attempt was a 5 ply:  3/16" balsa core, two transverse 1/32" basswood plies, and finally two longitudinal 1/32" basswood plies.  All this wood came from National Balsa, which has been my choice of suppliers so far.  I didn't even pay for the balsa.  It came as part of the packing, to prevent my 6" wide 1/32" thick basswood sheets from breaking.  Sweet.

Here We Go
Per my new plan, this time I clamped rather than weighted.

Those are 1/2" granite tiles on an old desk, with a length of oak on top to keep the metal off the stone.  The glue is two part epoxy left over from my guitar project.  Next I needed a method to measure mass, or Earth weight.

This scale is a 500g model from Harbor Freight for ~$13.  It works consistently.

Once the piece cured and I cut it to shape, minus a couple millimeters per side to cut the weight further and make it easy to fit my old rubber sheets, it was about 87 grams.  Too much, so I hollowed the handle.

Blade with hollowed handle section.

I do all this work with a bandsaw, files, a Stanley SurForm cheese crater, and 100 grit sandpaper.  While I have a router, I do not have a router table.  That's why it looks totally unprofessional - I don't make templates and route around them.

Handles ready to be applied.

I decided I didn't need the end to be closed.  I broke it out completely.  The handles are more 3/16" balsa plus a layer of 1/16" basswood on top.  The completed blade is a good weight, IMO.

Completed blade, 91.2 grams

LKT Rapid Speed rubber reapplied and trimmed.

Assembled racket, 175.4 grams

Not bad!  Nearly 45 grams lighter than that beast I built the first time.

Playing Impressions
The completed paddle is in line with "real" paddles I've played with in the past.  Again, the handle isn't thick enough, thus the hockey tape.  I can flip the backhand much better than the 220gr monster, and it's only 5gr heavier than my friends preassembled Stiga Cannon.  It is of course much spinnier and hard to handle.

I am not a rater player, I haven't even come out of the basement yet, so I don't know how this blade and combination rates.  ALL?  OFF?  Who knows.

Now I have to get used to playing "real" rubber again.  The old monster blade, at 130gr naked, will be converted into a sandpaper paddle.

Relative Paddle Weights

• "Ping Pong, the Original" 4 pack of preassembled paddles: 135g - 141g
• Stiga Cannon preassembled paddle: 171g
• My second blade, the "beast": 130g
• My third attempt, hollow handle:  91g