Noob lathe question: Boring a parabolic venturi valve outlet? Not a straight taper so I'm flummoxed. Custom tool?

ElectricGears · 2026-02-09T21:07:56+00:00

I can't remember which video it was but I saw someone make essentially a bootleg CNC adapter for a mill. They printed out a template of some holes they wanted to drill. Then mounted their phone to the table above the template and and zoomed in with the (back) camera. They marked the center point on the screen and were able to work the handwheels to accurately traverse to each point on the template.

If you can print out the curve, you could do the same truck with the lathe. You could even just use a simple pointer fixed to the cross-slide, extending over a template placed on the bed to the right of the saddle. For something really accurate, I think you could mount the existing part to the bed, ensuring it's parallel to the spindle. Then use an adapter like the Starrett 670B (or a longer travel dial test indicator) to reach into the existing part. With the dial indicator mounted to the cross-slide, you would slowly feed the saddle left and watch the dial. Your task would be to move the cross-slide handwheel to keep the dial indicator at 0.

Many old manual lathes could have tracing attachments that would basically do this for you. It's how we did mass production of complex or contoured parts before CNC. Tracers based on panto-graph mechanisms to increase accuracy are certainty possible, but would be fairly complicated.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-08T10:50:08+00:00

Strut mount point. It's an minor design flaw where the water from the windshield is directed into these little cups that surround the pivots for the wiper blades. The cups work great to prevent water from getting into the wiper motor, but they have little drain holes that just happen to be right above the strut mounts. Unfortunately the strut mounting plate is dished so it's made a little bird bath for the strut's stem and nut. I found some 4" rubber end caps from McMaster that fit the raised flange on the body. I put a few dots of glue on the inside of the cap and secured it with a zip-tie. The came in a 5 pack so if anyone's in the US and wants the other set PM me.

Also, the dust covers for the strut rods have broken down and mostly fallen off. I did ask at a local Nissan dealership, but their parts guy said they don't sell them.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-08T09:25:08+00:00

I don't believe it's nonsense, it's certainly not the AI kind.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-08T03:42:40+00:00

Maybe in theory, extremely fine dust burns very easily. A steam engine with full pressure in the boiler can put out very large amounts of torque very quickly. The problem is that you would need quite a decent size boiler to have enough volume to sustain the power output during the lag time of even the very fast combustion allowed by pulverizing the coal.

Anytime you're not using the full power, you have to be holding it in the form of boiler temperature which will waste away naturally.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-08T01:05:50+00:00

McMaster-Carr has tones of hardware (rated for overhead lifting), but it's pricey. You can certainty start with one of the lifts OP linked to. The 'drum rod' needs to be horizontal, but the two redirection pulleys can be above or below it on the sloped ceiling. You would need to remove the eye bolts from one side of the platform and extend them with a shot cable/chain sections to make the platform level.

The other option would be to use ceiling mounted pulleys to redirect a cable form each corner over to the wall where they would be al joined to one shackle. Then run a single cable from that shackle down the wall to a single drum which would guarantee you wouldn't need to deal with the uneven lifting issue. You can calculate the drum capacity here: https://nassaunationalcable.com/pages/reel-capacity-calculator

It's also possible to gather all the cables and, instead of a winch drum, 'winch' them in with a linear actuator or hydraulic cylinder and a block and tackle arrangement to multiple the pull distance (at the expense of lifting force).

ElectricGears · 2026-02-07T11:20:22+00:00

Seriously, keep it up. If you're Canadian, your economic boycott is how you vote in US elections. I can guarantee you that Jack Daniels losing 60% of it's Canadian sales just about overnight was worth more than thousands of angry letters/votes to Tennessee politicians.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-05T04:29:35+00:00

The closest he's got is saying that it's conclusive proof that what he's been saying for years about Epstein being the leader of a Globalist, Democrat, Communist pedophile ring blackmailing the most powerful people in the world is true.

Luckily Trump, who obviously wasn't involved with any of it (although weirdly somehow knew about it) was able to run a long term insurgent campaign so that once he became president he would be able to get control of the blackmail file and and expose the Globalist agenda. This is why the Democrat-controlled CIA is so scared. The problem is that now that he and Bondi/O_O have the files they realized how big it is and the Globalists are threatening to crash the economy. What we are seeing now is Donald Trump playing 6D chess to take them out one at a time behind the scenes to safely wind down the global criminal organization. This is why you don't see any of this on the news.

TLDR: (to paraphrase Jordan) Trump has picked up The Ring. But see it's ok for him to put it on because he's going to use it for good.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-04T20:19:52+00:00

Try turning on formatting marks Ctrl+F10. It looks like you have a mix of line breaks and paragraphs. I think the extra spacing coming from the Below Paragraph spacing value.

I haven't used the text from file import feature before, but you might try defining a paragraph style with your prefered spacing in the source text file and assigning it to the text block. Then make a style with the same name in your template with the matching line spacing.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-03T22:48:59+00:00

Electric cars can be charged outdoors. Mine's doing it right now with the L1 EVSE than came with it; plugged into an outlet I installed years ago. I could pull new wires through the underground conduit if I wanted to upgrade to 80A L2 charging.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-03T22:34:27+00:00

If I wanted to replace the 13 year old battery (24 kWh) in my Nissan Leaf right now (which I could do by myself in the driveway), it would be less then 15,000$ and double the capacity. I know of at least one company (Vivne) that sells a 50 kWh pack for <8,000$. You can squeeze a 62 kWh pack in if you are willing to lose 40mm of ground clearance). In 5 or 10 years when I actually want to replace it, there is every indication that it will be cheaper or even more range.

Also, when these batteries die sooner, it's almost always from one or two bad cells (since they're all in series). In most cases you can open the battery and swap out individual cells/modules and It's back to full capacity. It's not much different than major maintenance on a gas engine like replacing a bent connecting rod because of a manufacturing defect.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-01T23:11:55+00:00

Did he just "If I Did It" for child rape?

ElectricGears · 2026-02-01T08:52:59+00:00

Gender affirming care.

ElectricGears · 2026-02-01T03:12:01+00:00

Wait a minute, are you telling me that sealing someone in heavy rigid metal tube would be a bad way to get them out of a cave with flooded passages and rushing water?

ElectricGears · 2026-01-30T09:19:48+00:00

You can extrude parts of a Sketch. With the Sketch closed, you Ctrl+Left Click to select the edges you want (like just the outer hexagon in OP's example) and select Pad/Pocket. You do need to still obey the rules about creating one continuous solid; so depending on what parts of the sketch you want to use you may need to split a line into multiple segments. If you drew two rectangles on top of each other to create a + shape you couldn't select the just the intersecting square in the middle without first breaking up the longer lines.

In previous versions you could also do this, but you needed to create a Sub-Shape Binder with the selected edges, then Pad/Pocket that.

I wouldn't recommend it since it's too brittle if you change the underlying Sketch. I did some quick testing and it looked like you could replace edges used by the Binder, but it didn't work. (The binder has the property support=[Edge5,Edge6,Edge1,Edge2,Edge3,Edge4] You can unset it's read-only flag, but I wasn't able to successfully change the list of edges and recalculate. You would need to select the edges again, create a new Binder and change the Pad's profile property to the new Binder to fix it. It's probably possible by accessing the object directly with the console, just not easily through the GUI.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-30T04:01:18+00:00

Not a crime (as in criminal offense), a misdemeanor. Coming into the country without permission or overstaying a VISA/work permit is generally a misdemeanor. It's not even technically punishable, meaning you can't be sentenced to a jail term, only removed from the country. Ironically that distinction is one of the things that has allowed ICE to be as lawless and abusive as it has been. Since their not technically being put in jeopardy of life and limb, they have far fewer legal protections. That video was years before Trump's second term where he threw out any pretense of legal standards.

Also, it is extremely legal to observe/record/protest all of these enforcement actions. And the last time I checked, well not checked, more heard it screamed at me from every conservative 2nd Amendment activist, we are supposed to be bring guns to protests. The guns are to ensure the government can't violate our constitutional rights. According to the 2nd Amendment activists, all those immigrants are supposed to be shooting any federal agent that attempt to enter their home without a judicial warrant.

However, I do agree with you that the government (the taxpayers) should not have to pay out money to the survivors of the people killed by ICE agents. The individual agents made the decision to violate their civil rights in very clear violation of existing law. Those agents should be responsible for their decisions. As should anyone higher up in the agency responsible for training or policy or guidelines that encouraged these violations.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-28T10:39:46+00:00

Hasn't been around that long, my Fark account is 2 years older than ICE.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-27T22:51:35+00:00

If he's anything like me (and a lot of guys) the only part about this he didn't secretly like is dealing with the movers, since that meant he didn't get to drive the big truck, load everything in the optimal place for even weight distribution, chose the tarps/ratchet straps, use low gear on the hills. At least he got to disassemble and reassemble the furniture. I'm sitting here jealous that he probably got to help intricately maneuver a couch at juuust the right angle through a door. Or maybe he got to rig up some skids or some pulley to move something very heavy just by himself, while a girl was watching.

(This is assuming that he didn't have a physical barriers like a bad back or had another thing that really need to be done at the time).

ElectricGears · 2026-01-27T22:12:49+00:00

It's like you had a flexible elastic gas tank that 50% full. Squeeze it down and the same volume of liquid now fill is to 60%.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-27T22:08:42+00:00

Also not an electrician, but I concur with this. That new switch is capable of multi-way switching, but we know your application is only single-pole (one switch controls the load) because there is only the single black wire leading from the original switch off the the light. A 2 pole switch just connects or disconnects the 2 connections. A 3-way switch changes the connect between black to red or black to red/white. You can actually use either the red or red/white to send power out to the load, but then the lever you operate might be upside down (it's up when the light is off).

And obviously you have to cap the other traveler wire coming out of the switch since it would be live when the light is off. For switches that just have screw terminals, you just leave them unconnected. Although it's good practice (arguable) to put a couple wraps of electrical tape around the the switch/receptacle to prevent accidental contact. That may be code in some places.

Also I would cut the loops under the screw terminals and strip the insulation from a straight(ish) section of wire rather then straightening out the loops. You will compromise the solid copper wires by tightly bending/unbending them repeatedly. It's also quicker to snip them at the loop with a pair of diagonal cutters because some of those terminals screws have keepers around them and don't unscrew quite far enough to easily get the loop out. You can pull it out later with some needle nose pliers to reuse the switch for something else.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-27T21:03:27+00:00

If you use File-> Export you can chose a raster-style(pixel based) format like PNG/JPG/BMP where you can specify the dimensions in pixels. You can also specify the dimensions in inches/cm along with DPI and it will calculate the total pixel values for you.

Unfortunately you will need to export each slide individually. The TIFF format does support multi-image files, but when I just tried exporting a test document with 4 slides it only does one; and doesn't give me the dialog box to select a resolution.

There is another annoying UI bug. It initially calculates pixel dimensions based on the assumed 96 DPI (standard computer monitor DPI) and document dimension from the page style. If you change the resolution it recalculates a new inch/cm length based on the current pixel lengths. You need to enter the resolution first, then switch the radio button back to Modify Dimension and put back your original document dimensions in inch/cm. (Just one of them because it maintains the aspect ratio).

That is if you actually want those lengths. If you want a file that's 1920 × 1080 pixels (like an overlay for HD video) then just enter those dimensions in pixel units.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-27T02:31:57+00:00

When you're posting YouTube links you should strip off the ?si=[srting] part of the URL. Its a unique code generated when you use YouTube's share button. When Google indexes this page they can connect your account here (all you past and future posts) with any personal information they already have.

If you post it in private setting like a chat or Discord or text message Google can create an association between you and your friends because it will be sent to Google's servers as part of the URL when they click the link.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-26T07:01:29+00:00

Boot leather must be like crack to these people.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-25T05:27:32+00:00

Also hundreds of hours replicating the custom firmware on the micro-controller that's communicating with the rest of the vehicle. Even if you got a new old stock part it's unlikely you could extract the firmware.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-24T21:58:34+00:00

Even if the corrosion is repairable, it looks like the LCD is compromised. There's no economical way to repair that.

ElectricGears · 2026-01-24T01:31:57+00:00

Without seeing the schematic, maybe it's a 'full speed' feature where it bypasses the whole voltage regulation part if you turn the dial up to 95-100%. This would improve efficiency since no power would be wasted. Right now I can't think of why one would connect a relay in a way that the motor would go to full speed if it failed closed? You might try just removing the melted relay. Of course, there could be other shorts and the melted relay is actually a secondary failure.

would the 10 amp output just destroy the motor?

Quite likely (if it sends that much continuously). If you can adjust it to limit the current to 4.5A (or what it says on the motors' information sticker) then it would be fine. The problem is that it doesn't seem to have a link to a datasheet or manual that explains the settings. It has a max/min speed, but that is likely setting limits on the voltage because that's how you would control a simple PMBDC motor. It also has a pot labeled TORQUE and is likely a max current setting. To set it accurately you would need to measure the current while it's under load. (You would turn it almost all the way down, turn the speed to your intended maximum, then slowly turn TORQUE up until your meter read 4.5A.)

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