busybee fluffy rambles

Fireplace

The fireplace work was going to start last Friday, but it was raining, so it was postponed until Saturday.

Then on Saturday the dude who was scheduled to do it was out sick, so it was postponed until Monday. As in Christmas Day.

Surprisingly the dude showed up at 9:30 AM today, and he seemed none-too-pleased about having to work on Christmas (and I don’t blame him!) and then it turned out his supervisor didn’t actually buy a necessary thing and, since everything was closed, because it’s Christmas, it had to be put off until tomorrow (Tuesday).

He’s planning on starting work at 8 AM, which means I have to wake up very early. Oogh.

Bathroom

I think the bathroom plumbing is also scheduled to start on Tuesday. That wasn’t terribly clear. Oops.

Anyway, I’m pretty hopeful that the bathroom stuff won’t be so difficult after all. I think that all that’s necessary is for them to tighten the connection from the shower valve to the shower head, which should be possible to do without opening up the tile (or only carving away a little bit of it, rather than needing to redo a whole bunch). The shower valve connection is also screwed in with Teflon tape, which I don’t think is correct, and they might need to just solder it in place instead. Which is what should have been done to begin with.

There’s also likely a need to improve the connection on the shower head side of the pipe, as well, which will probably necessitate opening up the drywall at the top. Thankfully I opted to not have the tile go all the way up to the ceiling!

After all that’s done, the original contractor has agreed to do all the post-plumbing cleanups/fixups (which will hopefully just be drywall patching, mudding, painting, and replacing the damaged baseboard, all of which are pretty low-stakes) and then we’ll call it even.

Ceramics!

A couple of years ago I got into pottery, and threw a few pots, and took them to a local pottery studio’s firing service, and they apparently came out really good but I never got to see them because my finished pots got stolen, probably by a student of one of the classes there. And this was right when I was having my big end-of-career pain flareup, so I put my pottery stuff on hold.

The firing service has since moved back to the sister studio up the street from me (which is much better-protected) and they offered me a few free firings to make up for my pots being stolen, and I never got around to taking advantage of that.

Anyway, recently I came across a video on 3D-printed clay forming, which got me interested in doing it again, and then one of the comments on it mentioned using 3D printed objects to make positives for slip-casting molds, which is a thing I was planning on doing eventually after I got more familiar with ceramics anyway. But then as luck would have it, yesterday the Almighty Algorithm (hallowed be its name) served me up another video on making slip-casting molds and, hey, it’s even easier than I thought it would be, and now I have the necessary information for how to do it.

So, I’ve ordered the stuff I need to make some molds, and am starting to design some of my own positives to make molds from. The first thing I’ve designed is an (aspirational) ceramic version of my 54mm espresso catch cup (with a somewhat more elaborate shape), and I think I have it worked out.

However, it won’t be the first thing I cast, as I need to figure out the shrink factor for the slip I’ll be using, and of course it’d be good to get some practice on something simpler. Also the design is slightly complicated by the shape of the “foot” (which has to also accommodate the alignment magnet), although I think I’ve worked out how to actually build the mold while avoiding air pockets.

Incidentally, for that I’m doing my modeling in Blender.

Anyway, here’s what I ordered for the mold making:

• Plaster of Paris
• Foam core backing board
• A hot glue gun (I already have one but it sucks, and this one is marginally better)
• and I put some Murphy oil soap on my shopping list, as that’s way cheaper to buy locally than at Amazon

I also already have a whole bunch of porcelain (both black and white) that I can turn into slip, and the various pottery tools that I’ll need for finishing the molds and the castings.

I should also get some plastecine, since that can make the moldmaking a lot easier.

3D printing!

So, I got a pretty big response to the catch cup on eBay.

The response was, “well, that looks nice, but I’m much more interested in your tamping station.”

I had just put the original version of the tamping station up on Printables with the caveat that it’s designed specifically for my bottomless portaholder (although that listing seems to be for a different one than what I’d bought, thanks Amazon Marketplace), but people seem to want to just, like, pay me money for one that works more generically.

So, tonight I redesigned it to allow for multiple portaholders (including the factory Breville one) and also a version with a space for the tamper and filter to live, and I’ve got the shape to where I like it. I can’t really start production until my threaded inserts and set screws arrive (since I still have to validate that I’ve left enough space for the insert) but that should all be arriving on Thursday and then I can start my production run.

I’m not quite sure on pricing or color choices just yet (I’ll probably start out just doing a run in red PETG and then maybe also do a few other colors), but it’d be kind of funny if this is the item that starts getting me sales on Etsy.

Another thing that people have been requesting is a magnetically-aligned portaholder for the Timemore. I’m not so keen on doing that since it’s not a product that I would use myself (I prefer a catch cup workflow for a number of reasons that aren’t worth getting into) and there’s also a number of fussy little design challenges, but maybe I’ll do one eventually anyway.

Anyway, working on the tamping station design led me to finally install the OpenSCAD beta and enable its new “Manifold” engine, which replaces CGAL. Manifold is a little bit buggy (I ran into some weird stuff with complex nested differences) but holy cow it’s so much faster. My tamping station (which involves a lot of very complex operations) used to take a minute to render on my Mac Studio. Now it takes just a couple seconds. I hope Manifold gets better and more stable and becomes the new standard CSG library, because gosh it’s fast and makes OpenSCAD actually nice to use, instead of simply less bad (for me) than Fusion 360.

I should also try out FreeCAD and SolveSpace at some point.

Etsy general

I still need to make listings for my urchin bowls.

Misc stuff

My Baratza Sette 270 sold today, so now I’m down to only one extra grinder (the modded Encore).

Also my living room feels so much more spacious now, and having a bigger VR playspace is nice.

I’ll probably sell my treadmill. I can’t figure out where to put it and it’s not all that fun to use. Beat Saber and DDR are better workouts anyway.

I still have a bunch of music stuff for sale, some of which I’m really surprised hasn’t been snatched up yet (especially the Osmose). Sigh.

And, I meant to go to bed over an hour ago, oops.