Score so far: Vise: 1, Me: 0. In this post I tell the sad tale of trying to extract the jaw face screws that are frozen with rust – nothing has worked for me.
Warning: Once again, I don’t know what I’m doing!
Continue reading Trying to Remove Rusted Screws from the ViseI wasn’t happy with how much rust remained after the vinegar treatment, so I decided to give the vise a treatment with Evapo-Rust – my favorite rust remover.
I also decided that so little paint was left, I’d strip the remaining paint off, either with paint stripper or a wire wheel, depending on whether the paint had lead in it.
Continue reading Removing Rust and Paint from the ViseWARNING: I don’t know what I’m doing!
On a whim I bought a rusty, Ace brand 3 1/2″ (say 90 mm) vise at a garage sale. I’ve watched a few vise restoration videos, so I think I have a chance at restoring it…
Continue reading Restoring a Rusty Vise – It BeginsPoetry is meant to be read aloud.
This is my little poetry corner, containing dead folks’ poetry (for copyright reasons), in English (because it’s my native language), starting with William Shakespeare.
This series began in 2000, when I was experimenting with the then-new technology of online audio, via RealNetworks‘ RealAudio player. For quite a while I read and uploaded one short poem a week, mainly to learn what’s involved in audio blogging. At the beginning of the project I wasn’t too keen on poetry; now I really enjoy it, and some poems now affect me deeply.
Continue reading Spoken Songs: Poetry Read AloudWhile waiting for its case to be repaired, my craft-altered Ansonia Derby clock has been running on a test stand – off and on for quite a while. I noticed that every great once in a while the count lever failed to drop into the 8 o’clock slot, causing the number of hours struck to be incorrect from then on.
The problem was that the count lever needed adjusting so the lever wouldn’t hang up on the walls of the slot it was dropping into. In this post I describe my adventure of adjusting (bending) the count lever.
Continue reading Adjusting the Count Lever on an Ansonia Clock MovementDue to an attack on the old, out-of-date Needhamia.com web site, I’ve rebuilt the site on a modern host, rebuilding from LibreOffice files of the old posts to avoid transferring any infection from the old site.
Continue reading Needhamia Emmigrates to a New Needhamia.com…or why you should learn to maintain your own clock.
So you’re looking at that clock in the antique mall window. Perhaps it’s a lovely old Sessions Black Mantel clock, with lion heads and metal arches. It runs, and it’s only $90, so you take it home.
Continue reading The High Cost of Owning a ClockIt’s taken me a while to learn some basic metallurgy that I need for clock repair. When I started I scratched up my brass clock plates by cleaning with SOS pads – steel wool – because I didn’t know that steel is harder than brass. In this post I collect what I’ve picked up in this metals game of Scissors, Paper, Rock.
Continue reading Clock Repair: My Meager Knowledge of the Hardness of MetalsGIT is a file-revision control system, popular for open source projects because it supports widely-dispersed development teams. Unlike earlier revision control systems, it has no central server: each user has a separate copy of all the file revisions.
GitHub has a nice cheat sheet to use once you’re familiar with Git.
Continue reading How to Use Git Revision Control
One of the things holding me back from 3D printing for so long was learning what tools I needed and how to use them. It’s relatively easy to print things once you have a design: Cults3D, Hubs, and many others (including your friends who have printers) can print your designs, your local library may have printers for you to use, or you can buy a printer for a few hundred dollars.
Continue reading Getting Started With 3D Printing
