Category: Mucking About With Things

Success: eliminated as non-optimal one way of soldering wires onto tiny, irregularly-shaped components

  • May 20, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Testing TØØLS
Behold, my home workbench. The component I hoped to solder is bathed in the illumination from my microscope’s LED ring light. Tonight, I tried one very simple way of holding an itty bitty, non-flat electronics component and some wires still while I solder the stripped ends of the wires to the pads on the component: […]

Storage shelf mitosis

  • April 28, 2021
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Measuring the shelf upright, trying to figure out the best location for my hacksaw cut. Storage, storage, storage. Utterly tedious, once you’ve made your plan and purchased the storage hardware, and yet at the same time so necessary. Recently, I erected some shelving in our storage room (which was actually intended as the bedroom for […]

Trying to heat-test some Nitto and Chukoh PTFE adhesive tapes

  • April 7, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering TØØLS
The “before” view of my second experimental setup. Three types of PTFE tape, two PTFE-impregnated glass fiber tapes and one straight PTFE tape, all with silicone adhesive, under test. How do you hold components in place while soldering? Not the PCBs on which the components are mounted. PCB holders and PCB vises can be pricey […]

My first taken-through-microscope soldering video

  • April 4, 2021
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts Sodding soldering To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Animated GIF clip of me soldering one pin on a breakout board. This afternoon, I soldered some breakout boards and recorded the process using the camera on my recently-acquired microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) and used my other recent purchase (a QUICK 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier) to deal with the flux smoke instead of […]

Mushy bars of soap: testing a countermeasure

  • April 4, 2021
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Contrivances Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
The plastic countertop soap dishes we’ve gotten have ridges intended to keep the soap bar a millimeter or so above the rest of the dish surface. Those ridges are a bit on the wide, long, and numerous side, however, and the result is that the parts of the bar that contact the ridges stay moist longer than the rest of the bar and those areas often feel mushy the next time one grabs the soap.

Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier

  • April 3, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Top of my Quick 6601 solder fume extractor and purifier, with the tethered remote control and not-yet consulted Chinese-language instruction manual resting next to the base of the flexible duct. There wasn’t much assembly involved. One end of the flexible duct slides onto the flange mounted atop the machine and attaching the flared rubber intake […]

New microscope for the workbench

  • April 2, 2021
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand TØØLS
Snapshot of the screen showing part of the calibration card included with the microscope’s camera. The magnification goes much higher but this is the highest at which a meaningful bit of the card is visible. I recently acquired a new workbench microscope (a SHOCREX 3800W) from the manufacturer’s (or rebadger and reseller’s) Tmall store. I […]

Chrome Vanadium Chinesium: Finest quality. Superior workmanship.

  • May 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
A recent haphazard domestic DIY escapade furnished me with the above photo: replacing the shredded sisal twine and fabric on our cats’ scratching posts. The sisal materials were fixed in place using beefy little round-crown staples, so I ordered some staple removers (the ones with a screwdriver form factor, ending in what looks like chisel-edged, […]

The scourge of planned obsolescence, in Magic 8-Balls

  • March 26, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
There are innumerable how-to videos and static, step-by-step online guides to replenishing the water inside the fluid reservoir of a Magic 8-Ball, but a cursory Google search didn’t turn up any explanation of the process by which the water manages to evaporate out of its little plastic prison. My first guess would be that there’s […]

And idle sat the cordless rotary multitool in its case a few feet away

  • March 21, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
I would have saved some time and gotten a much cleaner result if, to begin with, I had used my Bocsh Dremel-alike, but the result was acceptable. Tonight, I added a 2-part plastic miniature latch to a generic plastic drawer. The latch has two components, one terminating in spring-driven jaws and the other being, basically, […]

How heat-shrink tubing reacts when exposed to the arc of an electric-arc lighter

  • March 19, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
LEFT: tubing shrunk by exposure to a flame. RIGHT: tubing shrunk via placement very near the arc of an electric-arc lighter. If you’ve ever wondered what the arc of a flame-less lighter would do to heat-shrink tubing, the above photo may be of interest. In addition to having a rough texture (a consequence of the […]

Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits

  • February 1, 2019
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Knocked together several different cheap Chinese PCB-plus-through-hole-parts electronics kits as a means of trying out a couple of different soldering iron tips, whilst listening to some recent podcast interviews with Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb. The surface of the yellow silicone mat on which I worked is speckled with tiny dried droplets of rosin and will […]