theSalmonFarm Blog » 2007 » April

Reproducing Parts

Glen — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:36:54 +0000

My clock has a number of very worn or damaged fastening parts. The bolts are salvageable but there are a number of screws that have been been ground flat along the threads and the slots have been torn. The challenge is the parts are English (not American Standard) and most were hand made 125 years ago. At that time, “fillister head” screws were used.

I went to Amesbury Industrial Supply and they looked at what I had. The staff is first rate and very knowledgeable. They did their best, but fillister head screws just aren’t common. They searched their supplies and found some of the sizes I needed. *BUT* the parts are in batches of 100. I need a total of 18 screws across 6 sizes. Ordering new parts would force me to buy 600 pieces!

I pondered my options. Googled suppliers and even looked on eBay. I finally arrived at the idea of making my own. Fortunately, the thread sizes and lengths are common. All I needed to do was machine the heads.

Turns out (pun intended) it’s pretty easy to lathe a bolt into a fillister head and then use a Dremel to cut the slot. The picture show a 1/4×20 1/2″ bolt on the left and my finished fillister had screw on the right. I need to try and make the head even smaller for a couple of the parts but this is a pretty good start.

IBM Supports Developers in a BIG Way

Glen — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 13:01:39 +0000

I was reading Stephen O’Grady’s blog and started link hopping. My jumping off point was� the announcement of IBM supporting MySQL. Then I trolled around where I found IBM’s growing support for PHP through Zend Core. I had read previously about WebSphere support for PHP.

I’ve confessed previously that I skipped the Java development tract in my career development. I went from C/C++ thru a bunch of “other stuff” and ended up in the world of script developers with PHP.

IBM’s announcements and support for broadly used technologies and interfaces is a good sign. It’s not all roses and champagne. I think IBM still needs to simplify the deployment side of the equation, ala XAMMP. Developers need low thresholds to entry.

Agility Training time Again

Glen — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:29:36 +0000

I am so happy spring weather has finally arrived. I’m sure Zen (my dog) is equally happy. While our hikes in the woods have been enjoyable, Zen and I like the challenge and discipline of Agility training. This year the backyard will get some new equipment - we need a high walk and an a-frame plus I will be adding 6 new jumps. Here is the yard from last fall …

It’s Black. Satin Black.

Glen — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:22:37 +0000

The weather is turning ugly once again and that is bringing my restoration progress to a screeching halt. I need to spray but cool damp air is nearly the worst environment for that effort. I don’t want my hard work to go into reverse so I’m moving all the parts back into the house. (With the house on the market, this is a bit of a trick since I can’t leave them handing around and some of the parts of big or heavy or both!)

With the base frame in the house along with the a-frame and a few of the arbor stands, I just could not resit any longer - I had to click off a couple of pictures.

Back on April 8th, Carl read the post on polishing and commented, “You sure that�s the same clock we picked up?” The following picture should just add to his skepticism .

The front of the base frame looks so clean now that the spare holes are filled. The same goes for the a-frame but it needs some of those holes .

Progress - but no peaking

Glen — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:53:38 +0000

Clock watch, day 36 …

I did more prep work last night and first thing this morning. Taking advantage of the reverse of weather from cold and raw to unseasonable warm, I got up early this morning and got to play with MAPP ! My mechanic neighbor suggested I get a MAPP torch rather than the typical propane variety. At over 5000 degrees F (yes 5K!) it can make very short order of melting lead to fill some unwanted holes in both the base frame and front A-frame casting. I followed the lead-ing with some filing and sanding to make the 100yr old “oops” go “bye-bye”.

The large hole in the lower left of the a-frame was filled, along with some smaller holes and the two holes in the front of the base frame. (My guess is the base frame holes were meant to receive the manufacturer’s name plate. But, when the clock was flipped from right to left, the nameplate had to go. It will eventually be restored in my clock, right below the drive drum.

I fired up the spray booth again and got the base frame, a-frame parts, arbor stands, and drive weight pulley primed and thru finish.

A picture of the work would be much easier to understand, but, I am letting the paint cure and won’t assemble until I get everything else ready. So, this picture of the clock before disassembly will serve to show what work was finished.

The clock really doesn’t look like the same one that came back from Chicago.

ttd = 54

DIY - Paint Booth

Glen — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:47:16 +0000

Often, to finish a project, you need to step back and fashion the right tool to help along the way. This was most assuredly the case with the clock. I’ve added 11 hours of labor but zero progress on the restoration. *BUT* I now have my own paint booth !

The pictures are of the right side and front of the booth. The diagram are the plans - in case you want one an 8′x8′x8′ booth of your own .

I did manage about 4 hours of work on the clock. I wanted to insure I had the full paint process figured out so I prepared the the pendulum bob and painted it with two coats of primer and a coat of satin black epoxy finish.

BTW: the paint booth uses one furnace filter on the air inlet (with the fan) and two filters on the outflow. If you look closely in the picture of the pendulum bob, you can see the outflow filter - it’s already black !

ttd = 52

Google Acquires Marratech For Web Conferencing

Glen — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 19:40:44 +0000

Here is one I’ve been waiting / expecting to see …

Google Acquires Marratech For Web Conferencing

March was an exciting and dynamic month given announcements at VoiceCon from leading vendors in the unified communications market, the TellMe acquisition by Microsoft and the WebEx acquisition by Cisco.
So Google getting into the web conferencing market certainly makes April interesting. … There are not a lot of details yet on what exactly Google intends to do with the technology but the obvious items come to mind:

integration with Google Talk
integration with Google Apps
conferencing service provider ?
offer carriers a web conferencing package ?

Source: Collaborative Thinking: Google Acquires Marratech For Web Conferencing

There is an important and telling statement on the Google blog …

To clarify some confusion, we acquired Marratech’s software, not the company itself.

Source: The Official Google Blog

Home Office goes Gigabit

Glen — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 02:40:45 +0000

The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with a Netgear Gigabit switch. To speed things up a bit, I updated my media server with a Gigabit PCI card.

Today, The ReadyNAS NV+ arrived. The first thing that struck me was the heft of the NAS. It’s no bigger than a two-slice toaster but it weighs about 8-10 lbs.

The SATA installations went smoothly. The instructions were easy. About 5 minutes later, the NAS had 1.5GB of HDD loaded (only 666GB are usable because of RAID1 and journaling).

The ReadyNAS configuration UI is an intuitive albeit lengthy web interface. It took about 15 to get through all of the configuration. The NAS has every conceivable service. I configured SMB, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and an iTunes Server. I opted for group and user level security. I could have gone with the basic Microsoft based WORKGROUP (and it also supports Microsoft Domains) but I wanted some familiarity across to my Linux servers.

I was very impressed by the email notification support - it worked without messy interfacing to my ISP SMTP. It not only sends alerts for warning and error situations but it also email notifies users when FTP accounts are created for them.

The one surprise was the “synchronization” phase. I installed two unformatted disks. The NAS automatically formatted the first drive and configured it right away. Within about 15 minutes the NAS was “open for business”. The second drive was formatted quick enough but it was another 5 hours (that’s not a typo) for it to synchronize with the first drive. I found that really strange since the first drive was empty to start.

The real work will be transferring all the data off the media server onto the NAS. The Gigabit switch will be busy !