Category: Mucking About With Things

When batteries splooge, electronics are the first to suffer

  • January 30, 2019
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
You go a week or so without looking at your TV, only to pick up the remote control and find it stone dead. Then, when you pry off the battery cover to swap in some new AAs, bits of the old batteries fall out, along with a shower of greenish-whitish powder. After you pick up […]

Another chakra unblocked: first use of J-B Weld

  • January 29, 2019
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Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A new bit of hardware needs to be bolted down to the benchtop during use but I’d like to be able to stow it away the rest of the time. The base of the item in question features four M8-diameter holes, so I hunted around for stainless steel threaded inserts. I could only find stainless […]

Seems Legit: Mitutoyo 500-196-30 AOS Digimatic Calipers

  • January 22, 2019
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
A skim of various Google results (e.g. How to tell if my mitutoyo calipers are fake? and Is it an original mitutoyo vernier caliper?) followed by a quick visual inspection of my purchase leads me to believe that I’m the proud new owner of a pair of authentic Mitutoyo 500-196-30 AOS Digimatic Calipers. They were […]

赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift + GOOP really has CHAINGED!

  • December 12, 2018
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
赠品 is Simplified Chinese for free gift. In Traditional Chinese, it’s 贈品. The same reasoning that comes into play in trying to reason out the sorts of merchandise that might hypothetically be traded over interstellar distances (assuming that the buyers don’t already have Star-Trek-style replicators) applies when choosing whether to order something from Taobao or […]

Butchering an LED bulb

  • December 6, 2018
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
This light bulb (Philips 18W 6500K 2000lm 150mA 220-240V ac 50/60Hz 9290011650A) had the temerity to flicker, so it got to taste the cold HSS of my hacksaw blade. When one of the bulbs in our kitchen began to flicker, I saw a chance to sate my curiosity as to what was inside. The meanings […]

Butchering a BMO

  • November 29, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Forgive me, BMO! Tonight, I extracted an MTR Octopus card NFC thingamajig and implanted it in a purchased-for-this-purpose hollow BMO figure from, apparently, a 2014 series of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. This particular BMO toy was dubbed Channel Changin’ BMO because its screen consists of a lenticular-printed sticker that allows it to display multiple facial […]

Better late than never: carbide-tipped hole saws, M35 HSS-Co step drills, and deburrer

  • November 18, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
My second batch of Bosch TM5 carbide-tipped hole saws, with a rubber band holding the packaging on the largest one closed after I opened it, three no-brand-but-putatively-M35-grade HSS-Co step drills, a deburring tool and (not really visible) a plastic box containing ten carbide tips for same. It sure would’ve been swell if the items pictured […]

And just a few decades later…

  • October 5, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two lemon batteries, connected in series, can (just barely) power a red LED. Making a lemon battery was one of the sciencey activities I encountered frequently while leafing through children’s science-experiments-you-can-do-at-home and “rainy day” activity books when I was a young’un and wanted to try but couldn’t. As this article explains, a single lemon isn’t […]

Flaky T-slot extruded aluminum struts

  • September 19, 2018
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Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Congratulate me on removing these aluminum chips without sending any of them airborne. The lengths of 30cm x 30cm T-slot extruded aluminum (aka 80/20) and assorted T-slot-compatible hardware (e.g. T-slot nuts) I ordered weeks ago showed up yesterday. Last night, after stripping away the layers of packaging (dust-impregnated, faded greenish woven polyethylene textile over bubble-wrap […]

That Beckett quote is defeatist.

  • August 16, 2018
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Mucking About With Things Sassafras! Horsefeathers! Fiddlesticks! The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Yes, it pleases me to believe that these four 2N3638A transistors are NOS. This evening’s tinkering session is going to involve yours truly double-checking a breadboarded circuit I assembled last week, to assure myself that it correctly replicates a circuit included in a datasheet for an EOLed Hall effect sensor and then, if no boneheaded […]

OK, WD-40 probably isn’t the best spray paint remover. But it works in a pinch!

  • July 27, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things The Diary of Lupin Pooter
M12 screw-on foot pads for pegboard/storage wall units that I’m adding to my workshop I would’ve left the the durned things silverish—if they’d shown any inclination to stop shedding paint. The inside of the box in which the M12-bolt “shelf feet” had been shipped to me was speckled with the stuff and it rubbed off […]

Bodge of the week: replacing a naked piezo buzzer

  • March 20, 2018
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Two specimens of the same model of timer. Top: an as-yet-unused timer, opened up to show its innards. Bottom: my good-enough-for-now five-minute fix: soldering an SMD pieze buzzer to two of the leads on a transistor inductor. A few days ago, a dual-clock kitchen timer we’ve had for years stopped making much noise when its […]