DIY and Hobby projects, small to big. Pictures of course

Cafe Society
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481

I will call it done now, even if I still change this and that letter or spacing/kerning very now and then. This is how this page looks with my font:

The screenshot is different from what I actually see, but never mind. So would you deem it acceptable as a replacement for Comic Sans?

Next project: dig a pond in the garden without using plastic to seal it off.

ETA: I see that the spacing between = and " (after “quote”) is too close. Another detail to polish… A font is never finished!

482

Do you have a plan for the pond? Are you going to line it with bentonite instead of EPDM or the like?

483

The terrain is extremly wet, there is a swamp just a stone throw away, so I hope it will fill a bit on its own. I also plan to line it with a coarse textile (does “jute sack fabric” make sense in English?) that I will impregnate with clay, and keep on filling it with a water pump running constantly until the particles in suspension and the leaves and stuff line the bottom and make it, I hope, water tigh-ish. Here you see what happens when I dig three or four feet deep, but the water table is particularly high this year. Usually water is five to six feet deep:

I reckon, perhaps over optimistically, that I only have to make it water tight enough to overcome five feet of pressure. And I hope the water filtering out downwards will eventually seal the bottom enough to keep the pond full with a trickle of water flowing constantly in, with a little solar operated pump. The pump should get the water from four or five meters deep, there is always water there.

484

Sounds like it will work fine in that environment. Jute sacks with clay translates well. There are whole books dedicated to vegetation to keep the water clear.

485

It’s in my pole barn in my backyard.

I’m not a mechanic. But I have a bunch of old cars, and my son and I like to tinker with them.

486

Wow, I think I would have lazied out of doing all those variants even for the less-used characters like the accented letters. Good work!

@Crafter_Man , I thought that a head gasket was just a single flat piece of material with holes in it. I’d have thought that big three-dimensional piece would be some sort of manifold, not a gasket.

487

That big piece of metal is the cylinder head (“top of the engine”). The head gasket goes between it and the bottom of the engine, which houses the pistons and crankshaft.

488

That’s correct. The cylinder head is bolted to the top of the engine block, and the head gasket goes between the cylinder head and engine block.

The last two photos show the cylinder head after it was unbolted from the top of the engine block.

Generally, after a head gasket has failed, it is best to do some work on the cylinder head before bolting it back onto the engine. At a minimum the bottom side of the cylinder head (the side that makes contact with the head gasket) should be “machined-flat” by a machine shop. The reason is that the cylinder might be warped, and if this is not done the new head gasket could soon fail. In addition, it’s also a good time to replace the valve guide seals.

489

In Spanish those letters are very much used! :rofl: But yes, it has taken a very long time. About 30 years, all intermediate steps considered, with long pauses.

490

Ah, yes, I have the bad habit of glossing over usernames, and didn’t notice that it was you who did it. And I notice that you did make fewer variants for characters not used in Spanish, like ø or the umlauted letters.

Yeah, I think we’ve all had some projects like that.

491

I am not alone :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

492

Yes! Fantastic job! There is something about Comic Sans that I just find profoundly ugly, as if it had been created by someone that hated their job and humanity as a whole. Yours is a work of someone that cares.

Do you have a name yet?

493

I have a working name, you have to give a file a name, but I am open to suggestions for a snappy name if you have one.

494

I dunno, call it “snappy” perhaps?

495

Good idea, pity you are not the first one to suggest it:

Also a pity to waste such a good name for such a mediocre font.
Thinking further about it, a name starting with the letter “a” would be preferable to avoid scrolling too much in the font menu to find it. And no, Aardvark is not the name I had in mind either.

496

Not a particularly big deal, but I’ve been planning to do this for three years: a Plexiglas display case for a ship model that my wife’s grandfather built. Three years ago, we moved into this house that her grandparents bought the year she was born, to take care of her mother, who has dementia.

The original case consisted of four loose pieces of glass only held in place by the slots in the wooden base and matching top piece of wood. It was a delicate and precarious assembly. Moving it risked it falling apart and damaging the model. So I took it apart and discarded the glass, planning to rebuild it in Plexiglas.

Fast forward three years, and my brother-in-law is moving his mother out to Kansas this week, where he will take care of her. So I decided a couple of weeks ago that now is the time to finish the case so it can be shipped out to them.

Decades ago I had done some construction in Plexiglas, so I remembered the basics, but back then I had a table saw to cut the material. I don’t now. I reviewed some YouTube videos to learn about the score-and-snap method of cutting, which took some practice, and still often didn’t yield perfect results. Then I realized that I could get much better cuts using my router.

In the end, with mistakes and material used for testing, I had just enough left to cut the four pieces I needed, and I cemented them together without any major flaws.

Here is the case by itself, upside down, resting on the top piece:
Google Photos

Right side up, enclosing grandfather’s model:
Google Photos

(NB: I claim no credit for the beautiful model, built from scratch probably in the 1950s or earlier. All I’ve done is stick four pieces of acrylic together to protect it.)

If you look closely, the case is not perfect. In the first picture, the top edges of the pieces are slightly different heights, by 1/16th inch or so, but this has no practical effect when the case is assembled. Slightly more annoying is the fact that the big front and back pieces are about 1/16th short in width, because when you use the score-and-snap method you lose about that much to the scoring and sanding. I didn’t realize that when I was measuring.

If you look closely, at the bottom right there’s a slight gap where the pieces don’t meet. The 3/32-thick material is flexible enough that I could cement it for most of the vertical join, but not all the way to the top and bottom.

My BIL has assured me that this is good enough for all practical purposes, and I think it will probably hold up just fine for quite some time. But the perfectionist in me is inclined to buy another sheet and, using the router for all the cuts, remake it to a higher degree of perfection before shipping it out west. With the experience I’ve gained making this one, the next will be much quicker and easier. (And the third would be even better!)

Nevertheless, I’m pretty pleased with the results, and glad that, whether I redo it or not, this family heirloom will finally have the protection it deserves.

497

Nice!

So the original was just four panes of glass only held together loosely by the top with no corner beads? Yikes

498

The hole for the pond has grown:

With the help of some machines. The way forward looks clear from here. Let’s see how long it takes!

499

When our Kitchen was redone last year, the washer outlet got moved to a different circuit. Turns out it was basically a lighting circuit that included the dining room light and game room lights.

The new washer being on that circuit caused the LED lights to flicker dim. I believe meaning it was drawing too much amperage and creating a low wattage situation for the lights.

So last week I ran a heavy duty extension cord (12 gauge) to one of my 20a shop circuits and ran a wash. No lighting issues.

Today I ran a 12 gauge dedicated circuit to a new GFCI outlet. About 47’ of wire, but a nice straight run, so nothing too hard. I had an open spot in the breaker box and had received a 20amp breaker this morning thanks to Amazon.

Cable is straight and stapled into place. The box is secure and power tested out. All that is left is to run a wash load.

No pictures as nothing much to see.

500

Kind of a silly one:
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No, it’s not the little diorama that’s important. It’s actually the stand for the dome.

You see, I have a cat that’s just a little too investigative. And he really, really wants to get inside the dome and mess with whatever’s in there. He once tipped it over and it rolled onto the floor–thankfully not breaking due to it hitting carpet, but next time, who knows?

It just rested on the original base. I needed something to hold it down. But I also wanted to change out the diorama from time to time, so I didn’t want to just glue everything in place. And at least these Legos are sorta precariously balanced and I needed the glass to come down from above and lock into place.

So I came up with this for the base:
Imgur

And this for a ring that the glass glues into:
Imgur

At the bottom of the ring I have two screws with the heads not fully flush (1/8" gap). To attach the ring, it gets brought down from above and the screw heads go through the large parts of the two slots in the base (the parts you can see through). Then, twist it clockwise so that the heads slide into the narrow parts. It’s a relatively right fit, but not too tight. Just enough that a cat batting at it can’t loosen it.

The ring part I 3D printed, while the base is laser cut from four 1/8" layers. I sanded and painted it to make it look a bit nicer.

You can also see a little cutout at the bottom of the base. That faces the rear, and an L-bracket fits in there to hold to the thing it’s sitting on.