Category: Makin’ stuff and breakin’ stuff

Free Advice #003: Use a magnet, inside a plastic bag or beneath multiple layers of plastic wrap, to clean up shrapnel from drilling, cutting, or tapping metal

  • September 26, 2024
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Free Advice HerpDerp Makin' stuff and breakin' stuff Swarf + Copeaux + Scobs TØØLS
Earlier this month, I wanted to replace the bolt-feet on the bottoms of some filing cabinets with wheels, so I flipped one of them on its side, unscrewed one of the foot-bolts, and tried it in the closest-looking (size-wise) pieces of my bolt size-and-thread-check set, and found that it went smoothly into the female end […]

The Case of the Slumping Polystyrene Foam (Question for the Experts)

  • September 16, 2024
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Makin' stuff and breakin' stuff Mucking About With Things Questions for the Experts The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Recently, I mounted a few pairs of metal chests of drawers piggyback-style, which entailed drilling some holes. To keep the point of my drill from skittering away, I used a center punch to create a tiny dimple at each of the intended hole locations. Intending to clean the drill and the deburring tool that I’d used on the holes (a hex-shank deburring blade in a hex-shank handle as you can see in the photos below) once I had unpacked the tool-cleaning stuff (WD-40, Fluid Film, etc.), I laid them both — along with the center punch — on a fragment of one of the polystyrene foam sheets in which the metal drawers had been packed for shipment.

New vs. used T130-2.0SK ATTEN soldering iron tip

  • June 8, 2024
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Bizznezz HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
New-in-tube ATTEN T130-2.0SK soldering iron tip. This is a mostly-photos followup to , which concluded with some photos taken of a lightly used T130-2.0SK ATTEN soldering iron tip, described online as a knife tip. It gets inserted into a corded handle that, in turn, plugs into an ATTEN GT-series soldering station (such as the ATTEN […]

Fingertip Microscope iMicro Q3 (late-2023 Kickstarter project from Shanghai)

  • May 30, 2024
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Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Spitting Images The Diary of Lupin Pooter To see a world in a grain of sand
Phone-camera-microscope’s-eye view of the surface of the wrist wrest pad glued onto a computer keyboard. Phone-camera-microscope’s-eye view of the surface of the wrist wrest pad glued onto a computer keyboard. A 2023 Kickstarter project for a high-magnification mobile-phone-camera microscope that closed to new backers last December (iMicro Q3 – A Fingertip Microscope toward the Optical […]

More conical? Or more trumpet-shaped? Result inconclusive.

  • May 10, 2024
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Post-soldering, post-cleaning pic of the protoboard and rows of pin headers used in this little test, labeled with the solder wire used for two pairs of 2×4 pin header blocks: 8 pins soldered with no added flux and then 8 pins soldered with Chip Quick CQ4LF liquid flux, done for each alloy. I’m saddled with […]

Testing fresh solder wire: various flavors of flux-cored K100LD and Innolot

  • May 2, 2024
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Post-soldering, pre-cleaning photo of the protoboard and rows of pin headers used in this little test. Numerous punishing soldering sessions have left this solderless breadboard stained, scorched, and cracked and it is not long for this world. Recently, I posted about picking up soldering again after a hiatus () and I’ve gotten some fresh spools […]

Odd (and oddly transient) software (mis)behavior:
Could not find file 'gifski.dll'.
ScreenToGif seemingly losing or forgetting gifski.dll

  • April 25, 2024
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HerpDerp Is that the way it is? Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Yesterday, I encountered an odd issue where ScreenToGif seemed unable to use its own bundled or downloaded-at-install-time version of gifski (gifski.dll).

Getting back into the soldering saddle (Indium SAC305 vs. Kester K100LD with and without extra flux)

  • April 22, 2024
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Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering Testing The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
One of a few snapshots I took of the same soldered pins, in between twiddling the focus height adjustment on a microscope. In this first of three images, the uppermost bits of the pins are the most in-focus features. This and the next two photos are taken of a small region on the prototype board […]

Soldering fixture test: stainless steel mesh + silicone foam

  • June 21, 2021
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Contrivances Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Here’s the setup I tried: a cut-off length of white silicone foam (with a 15mm x 20mm rectangular cross-section), a roughly square piece of stainless steel mesh, and binder clips securing the mesh against the foam. On occasion, one needs or wants to solder wires to a small and irregularly-shaped component. Last month, I tried […]

This may not have worked (reliably) even if I’d had the pin ordering correct

  • June 11, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter
Here’s a zoomed-in image of my attempt to connect to an SCD41 sensor without soldering wires onto it or cobbling together some sort of jig with pogo pins. I recently got some SCD41 sensors. They report CO2 level in PPM as well as temperature and humidity. They’re also surface-mount, of the LGA variety and small […]

Calibration slides: a boon for measuring small things like the dimensions of solder pads on surface mount components

  • May 28, 2021
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Contrivances HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering TØØLS
One of the calibration slides, with the 1-mm-per-division scale above a new surface-mount CO2 sensor from Sensirion. I hadn’t aligned the start of the scale with the left side of the sensor yet, but it’s 1 centimeter (10mm) square. The trend seems to be that the share of interesting new thingamajigs and doodads available only […]

Hits and a miss, sort-of fixing obliterated solder pads on a PCB

  • May 25, 2021
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Sodding soldering The Diary of Lupin Pooter TØØLS
Pre-solder-enblobbening photo of my jury-rigged fix for an obliterated solder pad intended for the positive pin of a coin-cell battery holder mounted on the reverse of the PCB. In recent months, I’ve been lending a helping hand to a few people who’ve shown interest in electronics. I’m not an EE or an electronics expert of […]