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reticulate menorah IV
Monday, November 27 2017
Mostly before work, I assembled and finished the menorah whose parts I'd cut up and de-burred yesterday. The assembly process is rapid and satisfying in the way that cutting is not. But it's also messier, since greasy flux has to be applied to every place where solder will go. I wore rubber gloves as I worked, which gradually changed to a greenish yellow with exposure to copper and flux. I ended up going with a somewhat simplified version of the reticulate design that I'd used for my past three menorahs. You can see the difference here:
Menorah made today.
Last year's menorah (two menorahs ago).
As with the menorah I'd made back in May, my cleanup of the stray solder was made much easier by the use of a Dremel. The attachment was a toolhead that consisted of little tongues of sandpaper that whizzed around, quickly lapping up soft metal like solidified solder while mostly just burnishing the copper.
I realized this morning while listening to a spoiler special about Halt and Catch Fire that I hadn't actually downloaded and watched the final two episodes. So I quickly did that this morning and managed to watch them over the course of the day in little bits (sometimes while working on the menorah or even doing day job work). That final season had special resonance for me because one of the web cataloging startups is named "Comet." You may or may not recall that I too worked for a company called Comet a couple years after the events of that episode. The Comet I worked for was Comet.net, a mom-and-pop soup-to-nuts internet service provider in sunny Charlottesville, Virginia. It was there that I learned all I would need to know to get my first dotcom job on the West Coast.
Meanwhile a professional carpet cleaning guy had come by and was steam-cleaning a number of area rugs, several of which had been pissed on by cats while they were in Gretchen's basement library. The cats (and, to a lesser degree, the dogs) consider shag carpets the functional equivalent of the outdoors and think nothing of pissing in them. After the guy left, the carpets were damp for awhile and had to be left open to dry. [Amazingly, as we would discover the next day, at least one cat pissed in one or more of the shag carpets before they could have a chance to dry.]
This afternoon I ducked out of work for an hour to run some errands. I needed some longer 3/8 inch carriage bolts and Gretchen had a $10,000 check for me to put in the bank. But I'd also been haunted by the memory of that beat up old TI-83 Plus graphing calculator I'd seen at the Tibetan Center thrift store. So that was my first destination. Since that guy who always cuts me a good deal was there, what the hell, I also threw in that old Canon Powershot S230, despite its weird proprietary USB connector. Total expense with the calculator: $2. Those are prices even my 12 year old self could've afforded (even in 1980 dollars), for things that would've made that kid so fucking happy.
Back at the house, I cleaned the crud from the calculator's battery connectors, put in some new batteries, and of course it didn't power up. So I took it apart and found that the greenish-blue corrosion from leaky batteries had found its way all the way to the place on the "motherboard" where the contacts from the battery compartment were supposed to press. Fortunately, I was able to clean all of this up and get the calculator working reliably. I should say that my experiences at the Tibetan Center thrift store have provided a harrowing education in the corrosive power of old leaky alkaline batteries. I've usually been able to repair such damage, though the device is never quite the same. I should mention that rechargeable Lithium-ion batteries never appear to develop any sort of leak and are typically not the thing that destroys the equipment they live within. (Usually, as in the case of the many digital cameras I've bought at the Tibetan Center, the devices work perfectly fine, but were probably rendered obsolete by granny finally taking the plunge and getting herself a smartphone.)
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