Netflix seems to have gotten more copies of Stargate SG-1. I'm quite happy, even though they took the discs off the saved list and put them at the bottom of my queue, rather than where I had put them in the first place. It seems clear that they need an "Unavailable" state, distinct from "Very Long Wait" and that doesn't count towards the algorithm that prevents them from sending discs further down in a series until you'd seen the previous one. I had no idea that the discs were back in circulation until I saw that they'd sent JAG instead of SG-1 this time around, so I have no idea how long they've been available.

So, I moved Season 2 Disc 2 back up top, and even though I'll be seeing it out of order, I'm glad I'm at least seeing it.

If I have one complaint about Netflix, it's that it's really not set up for TV series like this. Keeping these shows in order has required much more queue maintenance than it seems like should be necessary.

That's it - I officially can't take Megatokyo any more. Gah!

We'll be eliminating our landline, soon, so if you only have our wired number, email me for our wireless.

I eliminated a bitchy political post. I'm sure it's for the best, and the cutoff is pretty reasonable, but it's still aggravating to have acted responsibly amidst all this fuckup.

Anyway.

I'm in the middle of playing Fallout 2 - I'd never played the original two, and I was curious, since I'd heard so much about them. 1 was a good, solid game. 2 feels a little aimless right now, but it's a bit more sandboxy, I guess. I'd like to have the energy to play through them as different sorts of characters, but while it's a neat retro gaming experience, I don't think I'm that into them.

I started reading a review of Fallout 3, which I was already interested in. I think this quote sold me, though:
Sounds like radiation plays more of the role it always should have. That's just such a compelling scene...sign me up!

The I-90 Innerbelt bridge in Cleveland is perfectly safe. It's just aging quickly and some parts can't support 100% load. Y'know what? I'm sure it'll be fine so long as we don't run trucks over it any more...

Forgive me if I take another route!

I usually brown bag, but when I don't, I often would order a 'Cajun chicken sandwich' from Mardi Gras. Today was one such occasion - but while calling in my order, I was greeted only by a recording saying that their new hours are only Thursday, Friday, Saturday after 3PM. They're the ones with the books, of course, but I'm really surprised that they couldn't make ends meet on the lunch rush. They're right next door to the Plain Dealer, and it always seemed busy.

They used to be a great deal for carryout, throwing in a soup that you wouldn't normally get if you ate in. And the chicken was nice and spicy, and a good generous cut. Too generous, I suppose, since they aren't doing the lunch thing any more.

Yes, I know it's not really steampunk. What we came up with doesn't really fit a label, but that word seems to give most people the right starting point.

We had a great time at George and Vicky's party. It's something we look forward to every year, obviously. Pictures below the cut:

( Halloween Party Pictures )

Or, how to craft a keyed flux channel for your aetheric jumpship.
(This is part four of a how-to series. Start at Part 1!)

The Wooden Cane

Now we're back to some rather mundane crafting. For the cane itself, I didn't have the time or resources to get a piece of wood properly turned. Since it's just a costume piece, I picked up a 39" poplar banister pole from Home Depot. It does have extra detail that we don't really want, but:

• It's cheap
• It's readily available
• It's long enough
• It has a nice square block at the top that's just a bit too large to fit in the black pipe

That last one's important. I considered buying a cheap cane and taking it apart, but that would have left me with no way to mount it to the pipe. To make the square peg fit in the round hole, I just went to town with some 60 grit sandpaper. Poplar is soft, and the area being shaped on is going to be inside a metal tube, so you just have to make it fit. I messed up one of my measurements and made the top too small, but I was saved. I hadn't quite gotten everything round yet, so I really had a square with rounded corners. The corners made pretty good contact still, but I was really close to junking the cane and having to start over. There's a welding bead running down one side of the black pipe, though, so I could get it in there sort of snug, then twist until the corners jammed into the bead and held it securely. Since this was just at test fitting, I did everything gently, but enough to know that it would work. The wood will be the base that the batteries sit on, so keep that in mind when deciding how much of it will go into the pipe. Leave enough room so that both batteries fit, but not so much that they don't have a solid base to rest on. Cut off the excess.

Pull it out and paint! I chose a glossy black lacquer, because it seemed like the right thing. I didn't know exactly how it'd turn out, but I thought it would not be too glossy, but really be a hard coating—and that's pretty much exactly what I got. Give yourself a few days to really do it right. I had two, and it was enough to be acceptable. The lacquer takes 24 hours to dry fully, and the first coating was pretty much a disaster. The wood sucked up tons of lacquer as it dried. I had enough on there that I was afraid it was going to run (it didn't), but the next day, I could still see wood grain. It also had a really rough, kind of hairy finish. I was pretty much terrified, actually, since by the time I was working on it again, I had less than 24 hours to the party.

Ideally, I would've done 3-4 coating sessions, allowing the lacquer to dry fully between sessions, and sanding it smooth. I had two evenings available, barely, so I grabbed some 600 grit sandpaper (much more fine than I would've used between coats, ordinarily) and fixed up that first coat. I wet sanded for consistency, then dried it off with a paper towel to not only get the water off, but the dust from the sanding. The little hairs and such immediately came off, and the cane really felt good. Looked like heck, but felt good. I hung it back up and put about 4 more coats on, waiting ~15-30 minutes between coats. The end result was a nice light gloss and solid black color, not silky smooth, but not remotely rough.

Not So Black Pipe

By this time, I was getting pretty rushed, so forgive me for the sparseness of the photos. This work is pretty straightforward, though. The tube that holds the batteries and dimmer knob is made of 1 1/4" black pipe. While it's maybe a bit too large, I chose this because the batteries fit (even with the dimmer installed, which is important), black pipe is cheap, it comes threaded, and you can get it cut to size. I wish I had a bit more time to spend working on the pipe, actually. When they cut it down to 8" for me, the pipe clamp bit deeply into the tube, and I would have liked to sand it down a bit more to hide those marks, or fill them with some sort of filler or something. I didn't have the time to do that (or likely even the resources for keeping it rather circular as I sanded), so I just did a quick once over.

First, using that rough sanding cylinder at a higher speed (1700 rpm, I think), I deburred the end of the pipe. When that was smooth enough to not readily scratch up the cane as I mated the two pieces, I put a quick rounded edge on the outside, too. It's a little feature (you can see it on the 'sanded pipe' photo, if you look), but I think it's a nice touch. I tried lots of little things to make this look as little like actual black pipe as possible.

Next, there are a few holes to drill. Do the drilling before the sanding, so you don't have to go over it again after putting your nice, sanded metal back on a hard cast steel drill press table. The first hole is a 1/4" hole just a bit below the threads. This is where the dimmer goes. 1/4" was appropriate for the shaft of my potentiometer, your mileage may vary. Also, this is probably the best place to point out that I had to modify the body of the pot a little bit. It originally had some aluminum prongs for spacing it in a panel, but these put the pot too far back when accounting for the rounded pipe. I bent them back and cut them off closely. I double-checked that doing so would still offset the little circuit board away from the metal of the pipe, just to avoid any shorts. It's a good idea to test your fit before painting, so you don't have to worry about scratching the finish.

Now drill 4-5 small holes near the non-threaded end of the pipe, so that we can tap some brads through to the wooden cane. I say four or five because I intended to put five on the base, but ended up with four due to late night maths. I put mine an inch in from the end, since the wood extends 2-2.5" into the pipe. Find a brad you like and either grab a set of calipers to measure the actual size of the shank or drill a test hole in a piece of scrap metal (not wood - you want to test the fit through something that won't give). The brad should not be sloppy in the hole for a good fit. I chose a little flower-shaped upholstery brad. I think we see these infrequently enough that their intended use doesn't pop instantly into mind, but they add a nice Victorian flair.

Using 220 grit sand paper, followed by 320 (or 400?), I quickly sanded off the black oxide coating. The coating is rough, and oily, and it would not have taken paint well. This also let me get rid of the sharp bits around the teeth marks, though it was not enough to eliminate them completely. Be certain to also sand inside the pipe, around the drill holes, to remove the burrs. I masked off the threads for the first coat, but the metallic paint I was using was so thin that I ended up not even bothering for subsequent coats. Place the pipe threads-down on paper or some other protective surface, and paint light coats 15 minutes apart. Every metallic paint I've used has run if you look at it funny, and this was no exception. Even doing my best to keep the coats as thin as possible, I still ended up with a couple minor runs.

Finishing Touches

While coats are drying, do some of the little things that will really make the cane pop. I polished up the union to a nice shine, figured out how to best use the O-ring (on top of the bulb flare, rather than under the acrylic base), and put a plastic chair foot on the bottom of the cane so that I wouldn't scratch anyone's floor. Had I time to experiment more, a metal band or foot on the bottom would have looked really nice. Perhaps some sort of leather sleeve to cover the threads below the union. We're almost done, so it's embellishment time.

Final Assembly

Carefully slip the pipe onto the cane from the bottom. When the position was right, I gave it a twist to lock it against the welding in the pipe. If your sanding is more accurate than mine, you might not need that step. With the wood locked in place, tap the brads through the holes in the bottom, and make the join permanent. I probably should have used some glue here;It was a few hours before this cane had to be usable, and I was not feeling so bold.

Find a large flat surface somewhere that will hold the cane and the bulb assembly. Slip the potentiometer in the pipe, pop the knob through the 1/4" hole, and secure with its nut. I skipped the included lock washer, but in retrospect getting a brass washer to replace it, and bending it to the curve of the pipe would have been a good idea. As it is, I was lucky, and the nut didn't scratch the paint. Attach your batteries (careful, remember there's no backwards voltage protection) and slip them into the pipe behind the body of the pot. Test the circuit to make sure nothing got loose or damaged. Tip up the bulb and start threading the union on. Be sure to hold the bulb steady as you tighten the union, because as the fit gets tighter, it will want to grab the bulb and turn it around. You want to keep the rails and solder from scratching the inside of the tube.

The End Result

Glamour Shots:


For those who stuck around for the how-to, thanks! I hope you enjoyed seeing it come together, and maybe found a little inspiration.

Or, how to craft a keyed flux channel for your aetheric jumpship.
(This is part three of a how-to series. Start at Part 1 or continue to Part 4!)

The Vertical Circuit

Now, you need to start thinking three dimensionally. I found it very helpful to start sketching out the schematic in the vertical format. You can't do it for everything (the IC with the two op-amps, for example, can't really be drawn flat), but it's still useful. It gets you familiar with which pieces are connected to what, how to orient the circuit, and where your tight spots will be. In this case, I knew that the bits having to do with the potentiometer should be on the bottom, since that's where those rails are. I knew that the LEDs needed to start at the top, but run to about the middle, so that's where those two nodes needed to go. My inductor would not fit inside the five rails, but would fit inside three, so it had to go near the top, as well. The constant current source, then, was on the bottom, followed by the current compare and PWM, and the buck converter was spread over the upper 1/3 of the rails. The LEDs then led back down to the current compare, which is back at the op-amp. Basically, start at the bottom of the rails with the top of the circuit schematic, and proceed in a clockwise spiral through the schematic while going up on the rails. When you hit the LEDs, go back down.

Current Source

At this point I snugged up nuts on the rails and got them oriented the way I wanted them. It would have been a really great time to remember that I was putting terminal lugs on the bottom of the acrylic base, too. I had to go back and disconnect the rails and tighten them again after doing the whole circuit. Bad move - it worked out all right, but was much more trouble than it should have been.

Work with three rails for as long as you can. The front two aren't used for much, anyways. I waited until I was putting the IC in before putting those rails up. That made soldering more difficult, but it meant that I knew that everything would fit and not short out.

We have lots of vertical space. Use it, but don't waste it. Vertical space is much more plentiful than horizontal, though, and resistors are longer than you give them credit for - longer than the gap between rails, for instance. Rely on those leads to let components move the circuit upwards. It's tough to make a physical connection before soldering in this little space, but give those leads a twist when you can. Make sure to use some sort of a clamp (pliers, etc.) to protect your ICs and transistors from the heat of your soldering iron. Get a fine tip—you'll need it to solder between the rails. Also, tinning your leads before soldering and keeping a clean tip are absolutely essential. You're working in tight spaces with little physical support and some sensitive components - everything you do should be about minimizing the solder time.

When connecting to the rails, a great way to secure components is to grab a space piece of rod and wrap the leads around it to make a little spring. Remove it from the scrap rod, and slightly tighten this spring to cause a good 'grip' when you slip it on the rail. Slide it down where you need, and solder it. This is another reason why it's a good idea to work from the bottom up. Be careful, because it takes much more heat to solder to the rail than it does to solder two components together. Make sure your solder actually bonds with the brass, and doesn't just sit on it in a little ball.

Comparators

To reduce its horizontal footprint (that is, oriented as we are, the dimension from point of leads to top of package), I bent the leads on the op-amp outwards at the point where they get thinner. This had the added advantage of giving me two soldering surfaces if I needed. In this space, it's just about impossible to solder three things directly to each other. Rather, use the long lead of a resistor (or a separate piece of wire, if absolutely necessary) to create a separate solder joint for each component that joins a node. I made exceptions to this where convenient, but it was a good general rule.

After you get the IC mounted, screw the front rails in place, and connect them up to the op-amp where necessary. You won't likely be able to get a heat sink on the IC. I'd like to recommend a socket so that this is not a problem, but I don't believe one would fit.

LEDs

After the IC, it's all downhill. Not only is the rest of the circuit relatively straightforward, but you'll have gained familiarity with how things have to be laid out. I had all sorts of trouble trying to fit the area around the inductor in my head while planning on paper, but it just flew together when I actually sat down to do the work.

As of when I bought these components, it was very difficult to find efficient, bright, white LEDs with a diffuse lens. The white LED market appears to be all about brightness, and a frosted LED scatters its light all over. If you're making a desk lamp, a focused light might be appropriate, but a 30° spread on the LEDs in this cane would give people spots if they looked down the top of the cane, and would put a spotlight on the ceiling and/or floor when just carrying it around.

I took matters into my own hands by chucking the LEDs into my drill press, running it on its slowest setting, and giving them a good scrubbing with 220 grit sandpaper. You can't really sand it too much, but you can definitely sand too little, so don't be shy. This is especially true on the dome of the LED, which is where the lens is. After you unchuck the bulb, examine it under a bright light, looking for reflections. Any shiny spot is a spot where the light is going to shine straight through instead of diffusing.

After you get your LEDs unpolished, wire them up. I chose to point two up and two down - mostly for aesthetics, but also because even when scuffed up, the LEDs still put out more light along their axis than otherwise. Double- and triple- check your soldering and component placement. Make sure no wires are touching, and no components are brushing up against rails. Give it a little shake to make sure nothing will jostle against anything else (though it should be pretty solid at this point). Then...fire it up! This circuit doesn't have any backwards voltage protection, so be extra careful when attaching the 9Vs.

Give a twist to your pot, and you should get a gentle glow. If not, you still have your prototype breadboarded, I hope. Personally, I went at 1/3 speed while soldering and planning, checking every node configuration against the breadboard at least three times. Just before applying power, I noticed I had one resistor wrong, going across the legs of the pot instead of connecting one of those legs to ground. Fortunately, that ended up being the only mistake. I wouldn't relish having to rework the circuit around the IC, for example. Soldering up this circuit took me three long evenings, just to give a sense of the deliberateness I felt it was due.

Add the Bulb

Now that you know the circuit works, slide the bulb over the circuit and check the fit. You might need to rock it or turn it from time to time to get the irregularities of the rails to fit in the irregularities of the tube, but try not to twist or shake it too much. The ends of the rods, solder spikes, and ends of leads will put small scratches in the bulb, and they add up over time.

To help the fit in the union, I found a 1 1/4" ID compressible rubber O-ring in the plumbing section of Ace Hardware that fits perfectly. It helps snug things up, since the flare + base are not quite thick enough to meet the black pipe, due to the taper of the pipe threads. If you're super confident, you can weld the tube to the base at this time, so that the bulb will not have the opportunity to twist and scratch any more. So far, I have not been that confident.

The top assembly is complete! Set it aside for now.

Or, how to craft a keyed flux channel for your aetheric jumpship.
(This is part two of a how-to series. Start at Part 1 or continue to Part 3!)

The Tube 'Glass'

Now that the base is done, the circuit works, and the rails are ready for soldering, set it all aside. Everything is for naught if it doesn't fit in the tube!

This video convinced me that this project was possible, and without his techniques, I never would have been able to make the tube. You may have seen it before - it's a nice, relaxing video of a gentleman who makes vacuum tubes by hand. It's really inspiring stuff; almost everything in his shop appears to be hand-made. I really recommend grabbing a cup of coffee or tea and giving it a watch, if you haven't seen it.

Flaring the Base

As a disclaimer, I should mention that while I did some cursory research, I'm not positive that everything I did here is completely safe. Look up safety information for handling and forming acrylic before continuing!

I bought 1 1/4" OD (1" ID) extruded clear acrylic tubing from McMaster-Carr. As an aside, I really recommend them for this sort of work. They're not always the cheapest, but their selection is huge, their selection tools are top notch, and you can almost always get a minuscule quantity of whatever you need.

Cut the tube a little more than twice as long as it needs to be. I don't have his nifty jig for spreading the base out, but I made due with my distant memory of the glass blowers at Hale Farm and Village. I have a heat gun for stripping paint, and knowing I had this project in mind, I got the good version with lots of different temperature settings. I've heard you only need 300°F to shape acrylic, but that's with putting it in the oven for a couple hours over a form. I need most of this to be unheated, and it's out in the open air, so I used 450+ on the heat gun. The base only needs reshaping, so a lower setting is probably better.

I just heated the end of the pipe, rolling it in my hands as I went to try to even out the heat. For the shaping, I used the rounded, outside edge of a pair of adjustable pliers. Remove the tube from the heat and roll it with one hand while putting the pliers inside the tube and gently flaring the end. Take it slowly and heat it multiple times, always working it until the plastic hardens up and doesn't want to be shaped any more. If you stop shaping too soon, it will tend to pull back towards its original shape (the same will happen when you heat it again, so don't be surprised by that). After you get a nice flare, heat it up one more time and gently press the flared end into a clean, flat surface. Rotate it around while eyeing it (or using a level, I suppose) to get the flare as close as you can to perpendicular to the tube. If the flare is crooked, it will never sit right in the union, so take as much time as you need here. Of course, it won't be perfect, and IMO that just adds to the 'hand blown' look of the bulb.

Once you have a suitable flare, sand it down to fit in the union. Be careful to keep the outside of the flare concentric with the unheated portion of the tube. There's probably a better way to do this, but I just used a coarse sanding wheel with my drill press set to its lowest RPM. Take quick bites out of the acrylic, and don't hold it against the wheel too long, or it will heat up and go liquid, gumming up your sandpaper. I checked both fit and concentricity using the union.

Rounding the Dome

I did this part much later, but in retrospect, it would probably be best to do it right now. When I made the bulb, I was not yet certain how long the rails would need to be. This put me in the awkward situation of setting aside the acrylic work for days to work on the circuit, then having to reheat the tube and work the end. Better to do it now.

This is where the vacuum tube video really helped. On my first tries on test pieces, I did it all wrong, and it just wasn't coming out well at all. I was about to give up, when I remembered the method he used—gave it a shot, and it worked perfectly the first time. Kick the temperature up a bit on the heat gun. We don't need to just deform the plastic now, we need it really ductile. Be careful, though - at ~650°F you can start to boil the plastic, which leaves little bubbles embedded in your tube as it cools. I got a few, but it doesn't look too bad. If I were to do this again, I'd attempt to do it at the same lower temperature that I did the shaping, but since I'd put off forming the dome, I was low on time and didn't want to mess up my half-finished tube in an experiment.

Slowly rotate the center of the tube in the heat. Get a feel for how far away each of your hands is from the heat gun, because it's easy to lose track of where you are and drift off center. As you rotate with your hands, occasionally lightly pull the ends from each other. You want to heat the center to plasticity, drawing the middle thin, until the two ends pull apart. Be careful and increase you rotation as the center starts to come apart - the thinner plastic will heat more readily, and this is when your bubbles form. The new ends will be ragged and brittle where it is thinnest.

Allow the plastic to cool completely. Acrylic is insulating, so this may take a while. Grab a file and carefully file the ends down to make a flat. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you're just trying to eliminate the bits of plastic that basically break apart at a touch. Be careful, but don't fret if you get some little cracks at the top. You're about to melt the ends again, anyway.

Return the rough end of the tube to heat. Heat the very tip, slowly working your way towards the bulk of the tube. The thinner plastic will pull in on itself, making more of a domed shape. Unlike the glass in the video, I couldn't get it to pull all the way in, so I helped it along. After the plastic stops changing shape readily, and to avoid bubbling again, I pulled the tube from the heat and just rolled it by hand on the clean workbench. Ideally, I would've had some sort of dishing form, but the flat table works if you're careful. The dome doesn't have to be a perfect hemisphere—what you're looking for is to close up the hole at the top, primarily, without pushing too much material into the rest of the tube.

To finish up the look of a glass bulb, cut a clean end in solid 1/8" acrylic rod. Heat the end of the rod until it melts and starts to deform a bit under its own weight. Don't be so worried about bubbles here, because you're going to deform it. Carefully, warm the dome of the bulb while you do this, too, but it doesn't need to be so warm that it will shape easily. Touch the melted end of the rod to the dome, push in to give it a good contact, then pull it away, giving a little twist. The end will pull out and give a nice little 'tail.'

Or, how to craft a keyed flux channel for your aetheric jumpship
(This is part one of a how-to series. Continue with Part 2, Part 3, or Part 4!)

Credits

• Cane concept from Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio (best seen illustrated here)
• Highly Efficient 0-100% LED Dimmer © 2006 J.A. Bezemer. Schematics for this circuit are open source, licensed under GNU GPL 2 or later. Therefore, so are my exceptionally minor modifications.

Every well-dressed gentleman requires a cane, and the retrofuturist is no exception. Since this Halloween's outfit has been heavy on the "Victorian" and really light on the "Time Traveler," I accepted Ann's gracious offer to finish my shirt for me while I spent the last week working on my cane. It's almost complete—the paint is drying, literally—but the project is so large that I'd like to split it up over a couple posts, anyway. As I'm sure you all know by now, I'm really bad about stopping what I'm doing to take pictures, but I hope I'm getting better. Thumbnails link to full, and there are more shots in the set.

Basic Design

I don't have any pictures laying out everything you need, because I bought things and made it up as I went along. The basic idea is this: shape an acrylic tube to look like a huge vacuum tube, open at the bottom. Make a non-conducting base (I chose more acrylic) to hold brass rods. The brass rods fit into the tube, and both support the dimmer circuit and act as the power rails—they give it the look of a vacuum tube instead of some sort of crude pleasure device. The base of the cane is wooden, as it should be, and it is fitted at the top with a plain metal pipe of some sort for the batteries and controls. The tricky part is mating the acrylic tube on top to the metal tube. I got really lucky and found exactly what I needed at Home Depot.

Prototype the Circuit

I first wrote about this circuit way back in February. Since, I've discovered that moving it off the breadboard supply and on to 9V batteries solved just about every glitch I had. The start-up pulse that I was getting when quickly switching off and on appears to have been some sort of capacitance issue with the 808, not the dimmer circuit. I bought enough components to make this circuit three times - one prototype, one real circuit, and one in case I massively messed up. I didn't want to disassemble the prototype as I made the real one, and the components (with the exception of that damnable inductor) were all really cheap, in any case. Finding a choke of the necessary rating (5mH) was hard enough—finding one that also fit inside the tube ended up being a real challenge. The coil cost more than the rest of the circuit combined.

Qty	Digikey Part Number	Unit Price	Extended Price
3	497-2983-5-ND	0.86000	$2.58
3	BC547BTACT-ND	0.11000	$0.33
9	BC560CTACT-ND	0.12000	$1.08
3	1N5822-E3/51GI-ND	0.34000	$1.02
3	490-3830-ND	0.23000	$0.69
3	490-3811-ND	0.16000	$0.48
3	P13460-ND	0.11000	$0.33
3	P13465-ND	0.11000	$0.33
6	P13464-ND	0.14000	$0.84
3	DN4755-ND	11.88000	$35.64
3	CT2205-ND	2.71000	$8.13

I got the LEDs from theLEDlight.com - I've bought from them before, and I love their site and selection.

Qty	Part Number	Unit Price	Extended Price
1	LED5-30-40DG-WW-12	$17.88	$17.88

Now having some experience with the circuit, I first had to divide it in two parts—the part in the tube, and the part in the handle. I wanted to split it up so that you didn't have batteries floating around in there, for instance. I decided against a switch for simplicity - I'll just pull the batteries out when not in use. So the batteries (V_LEDS, V_logic, GND) and the potentiometer (GND, V_ref, V_T4) go into the handle. I knew I wanted it to have rails soaring inside to give it the look of a vacuum tube on steroids. So combining those nodes gives five rails. V_LEDS, GND, V_logic, V_ref, V_T4. Ground is by far the most used, so it goes in the center. I made V_ref and V_T4 shorter than the back three. I thought it looked better, gave a sort of frame or shelf for the LEDs to float above, and gave me extra room to fit the inductor.

Make the Base

Five rails inside a tube that's 1 1/4" OD is a pretty tight fit, but it can definitely be done. The thing to watch out for isn't just the placement of the rods, but making sure that you still have enough room to turn the nuts on to tighten them down. I had originally planned on two rows, three in back and two in the front. Fortunately, I abandoned that early and went for a pentagonal configuration. This gave me a lot more room to work with, as I could put the rails far to the outside and give myself a nice cage to work in.

I was really stumped on how to get the rods equally spaced until I remembered how to use a compass. Looked up the formula for length of sides of a regular polygon and approximated that with the compass. If you start at the odd point and then do the two vertices on either side of it, working out from there, it doesn't matter that the last two aren't exactly the right distance from each other. The placement is still symmetrical, which is all that really matters.

I ended up making the base three times. The first time, I just didn't have my head wrapped around the mechanics, and I made the base the same as the OD of the acrylic tube I'll be using for the shell. Unfortunately, I forgot that I would be flaring the bottom of the shell to fit the inside of a 1" cast bronze union for copper pipes (expensive, but the best connector I could find). Both Lowe's and Home Depot have unions in this size, but only Home Depot's was useful to me. Theirs was threaded to the same gauge as black pipe is, and with copper so expensive and not sold by the foot, I had to go with black pipe for the main body. Figuring out this junction literally took me an entire Saturday of shopping at every hardware store and home improvement place I could find, and was the one part that made me really wish I had access to a metal lathe.

So, the second time I made it, I used some acrylic I had laying around from the last time I put a window in a PC of mine, back when that was a new and different thing. That ended up being too thick, letting me only grab a thread and a half of pipe when I put it all together. The third one came out best (practice, practice!), and is actually a little too thin (from window-acrylic, again, from Home Depot), but I bought an O-ring this morning that I hope will help deal with that.

Cut and Thread the Rods

Deciding how long the rods should be took a little while. On the one hand, I had no idea how the circuit would fit along them, and I didn't want to run out of room. On the other hand, the whole vacuum tube section goes above where you'd hold the cane, and I didn't want my cane turning into a staff—it'd muddy the impression of the character. In the end, I decided on 8" from the acrylic base to the end of the long rods, and it ended up being a really good choice on both counts.

I picked up a dirt cheap tap and die set at Harbor Freight. It's imported crap, but I'm only threading brass, and I didn't know what size I'd need. I should've done some more research, but just ended up going by trial and error. I got 1/8" rods of 360 free machining brass, and tried #6 and #4 taps. The former worked, but felt sloppy. The latter I think was too deep a cut, but it held the nut a lot better, and the #4 nuts are also a lot smaller, so I went with that. It ended up being a good choice, except that it was hard to keep the threads straight. When using a die, you're supposed to taper the end of the rod first, so the die as something to 'sit' on before its teeth have a chance to grab. I think my tapers were uneven, which got me off to a bad start. Regardless, while it's not machinist-quality work, it's serviceable. I tapped the end, threaded a nut on, and marked 8" from the thread side of the nut. Then I used my angle grinder to cut off the rod and clean the end up. Sand off the burrs, and put the next rod in the vice.

As mentioned, the pants are done! I remembered to take a few photos before I left for work this morning. Pic at right pops to the photo set.

They're definitely a size too big, which is disappointing. I think they're not the last pants I'll make with this pattern, though, so at least I had the learning experience. Next time around, I have to make the smaller size, and shorten the inseam by about an inch and a half. Ann hemmed it up for me this time, but there's a bell at the bottom to accommodate boots, and I think I lost some of the shape. No biggie. I'm really quite happy with how they came out, though not quite as happy as with the vest (mostly because of the sizing error). I'm sure they'll get use as my metabolism slows and my waistline swells. :/

Spent this weekend working on my other project, and things are going quite nicely. The soldering isn't coming out quite as well as I would have hoped, but it's one of these situations where if I had time to do it again, having practiced, it'd be better. Well, I don't, so I'll have to hope that the distortion of the acrylic, the darkness of the room, and the glare from the LEDs will mask my errors. I got about a third of the way through my soldering last night, and I'm just about through the only remaining hard part. With luck, I'll be able to completely finish that part up tonight, which will give me the rest of the week to finish up the mechanicals.

Heck, what am I saying? With luck, the whole damned circuit will actually work when I get the soldering done!

I finished the pants up on Sunday. I haven't been able to post pictures yet because I keep forgetting my camera in the center console of my car. Dammit.

I've decided that the 'prototype' of the shirt I'm making will serve well enough for Halloween, which means I'm probably about 1/4 of the way done with the shirt now - the front's done, I have to gather the back and sew on the yoke tonight, maybe get to the arms. It's meant to be a really nice shirt - removable cuffs and collar, shirt tacks, the whole nine yards, so it's not something I'd likely be able to wear again anyway. I'm not sure if I'll do the other shirts in this pattern, either. Unlike the pants and jacket, shirt design was apparently still undergoing a lot of changes, and I think they wouldn't be as nice as a modern shirt design for daily wear. Shirts are seeming pretty easy so far, though, and it'd be nice to own some shirts that actually fit, so I'm looking forward to trying my hand at a few this winter.

I mostly took a break last night, as I had to get up early for a dentist appointment. Ended up staying up later than usual anyway, ahwell. I'll get back into the sewing tonight, and hopefully be mostly done for the weekend. I'm planning on taking a break from sewing and working on another little project that should hopefully round this whole outfit out. If it goes well, pics next week!

The Browns won?! Like, for really reals? Man, now I wish I'd remembered to tune the game on the radio...though I probably still wouldn't have listened to it over Chuck and Heroes.

I consider Chrome an interesting oddity at most right now. I keep it around because it's good to check page rendering with all the popular browsers. I was shocked to discover today that I can't use the mouse wheel to navigate forward and backwards through my history. I use that all the time in Firefox.

We watched Iron Man last night. It was really quite good, and I'm glad I got a chance to see it. The dialog was fast, sharp, and natural - it really helped the movie. All in all, just a lot of fun.

I came back and sewed until almost 3. I got the belt on the back of the pants done and the curtains assembled, hemmed, and pressed. Tonight, after a late work night, I hope to get them attached. Then, hop to LOTRO for our regular Friday night group, and head back downstairs to hopefully finish up the pants. I don't think I'll get all my Is dotted and Ts crossed tonight, not at the pace I tend to work, but it's definitely the home stretch. No pictures today, having left the camera in the car overnight.

It's looking like a sort of busy weekend, too. Ann already cut out the fabric for the shirt prototype, so I suppose I'll do that as quick and dirty as I'm able to - let me check the fit, if nothing else. If I'm to take a stab a the jacket, though, the shirt pretty much needs to be done by Wednesday at the very latest. For a pattern I've not even looked at before, I'm not exceptionally hopeful.

I give up on Bloglines. It's official. I used to love their rss aggregator, but it's recently become completely unusable to me. To whit:

• Twitter feeds no longer update
• Slashdot's feed has been listed as broken for at least a week
• I can't remember the last time it actually told me about an Penny Arcade update
• Some smaller, random RSS feeds I have sometimes take a day or more to show they've actually changed

So, I'm in the market for a good aggregator. Any suggestions?

Pretty good sewing last night. I'm still hot and cold, just fatigued I guess. The topstitching on one outer leg seam came out ok, but the other one's pretty terrible. I'm bad at long, straight lines in general. I think I'm not bold enough with my sewing, and I'm certainly not comfortable enough with this machine, yet. It'd also help to have a bigger table to put the sewing machine on - I always feel like the fabric's being pulled someway, and I have to compensate for that.

Someday, I need to figure out how to properly fit, too. I got the pants assembled to the point where I could put them on last night, and they seem too big. Probably a whole size. It's a bit difficult to judge right now, but the fit just feels sloppy to me. There's a dart in the back of the pants that's only marked for sizes 3-6 (I'm currently making 2), and if I had the time to invest, I'd go back and put it in for my size. It'd shape better. I'll see how the final fit is (tough to tell where everything's supposed to be right now, with unfinished edges), but if I do this pattern again with better fabric someday, I'm currently looking at just doing the smallest size. It has a couple inches of ease available in the back, so I should've erred on the side of it being too small.

I'm afraid the jacket will be too small. Ann and I looked at the sizing, and I believe we decided to cut out the smallest size there, too. I did do the smallest vest size from the same pattern, so I'm hoping they're complimentary. I also hope I have time to do it. It's looking like these pants are going to take me a full week to finish (last saturday to this saturday), and the vest took me two...only two weeks left until this needs to be wearable, and I haven't even prototyped the shirt or jacket yet. Don't have fabric for them yet, either, and I'm probably going to lose most of saturday to family and friends. Man, I thought starting at the beginning of September would've been time enough.

Well, no welt pocket walkthrough today. I don't know if I was just more comfortable with them and got careless, or it just wasn't my night, but I'm really not pleased with how this last one came out. You name it, it went wrong. I wanted to be really precise on the 1/4" separation between stitches, so instead of eyeballing the spot on the presser foot (don't have a 1/4" quilting foot), I moved the needle to the left, got out my B foot, and aligned the previous stitch on the right-hand mark...only to discover that the needle doesn't go all the way over to the left. It's only about 3/16" over instead of 1/4". that doesn't seem like much until you multiply it by the 4 gaps between stitches - 1/16" * 4 is 1/4" off. The two outside lines are supposed to end up an inch apart, and were 3/4" apart, instead. Being off 25% is suddenly significant. In truth, it still would've been okay if I hadn't already done the pocket on the other side. It would've been visibly smaller. Then, I finally get it all done, restitched, turned, forced to lay how I want it to, and you do some top stitching around it and bar tack the ends. Got that done, turned it over, and there was a bird's nest on the bottom that must've taken up a foot of thread. I have no idea what happened there - as best I can tell, the tail from the start of the stitch must have gotten sucked down into the bottom stitch mechanism at the end, and prevented it from looping properly. Dunno. All I know is it came out decently the second time. Fabric looks like swiss cheese now, though - I hope it's all right, but it's only twill.

I think that side is cursed - even while it was getting all messed up, the other side came out beautifully. Ahwell. With luck, I'll get to finish up the majority of the rest of the pants today. The curtain is a lot of fiddly work with little pieces, but before dealing with that, I get to pretty much put everything together. It'll be good to paint with broad strokes for a while.

I suppose it's more incentive to get the rest of my sewing done, so I have time to make the frock coat. Hiding mistakes ftw!

An evening of company and good television (zomg Heroes!) severely limited my sewing last night. I finished the hard parts of one of the welt pockets in the back. No biggie, especially on this pattern - they're old hat by now. The welt is turned, pressed, and secured; just need to attach the bag now.

This does give me a chance to blog about a sewing shop I found without burying it in a bunch of other text, though. Janie's Sewing Corner is a neat place. The image on her site appears to be the old location. The new one is considerably larger. Janie's knowledgeable and helpful, and has lots of great fabric. An always changing supply, too, as she has a good number of end cuttings and partial bolts left over from other tailors' work that they just want to unload. Lots of suitings and coatings, really great stuff for men and women. Also good linings, which IMO is a definite weakness in JoAnn's selection. Lastly, she carries all sorts of interfacing - the proper things for the projects you have, and she knows how to use them, so no more fighting with the interfacing ladies at the cutting counter.

Livejournal won't let me inline a Google Map, so here's a link. Janie's Sewing Corner is located right near I-480 and the Jennings Freeway, so it's pretty easily accessible from anywhere in Cleveland. Thanks for saving the world from Google Maps, Livejournal!

Tomorrow, I'll hopefully have a quick welt pocket how-to, since the instructions on the pattern I'm using are phenomenal.

I spent this weekend working on my pants. I'd hoped to start and finish them, but that was out of my reach. I spent literally all day and night just cutting out the fabric on Saturday. I have no idea what takes me so long in that process. Slow and methodical, I guess, but it's not like I was even working with distractions...and I already had all the patterns cut! I just had to pin, cut, and transfer marks.

Transferring the marks took extra time this time, though - I taught myself how to use tailor tacks. It seems like I'm doing it right, even though I had trouble finding a page that really explained what to do, and how it should look on both sides of the fabric and between them when you do it right. Very basically, it appears to be this: Double or triple thread through a needle. Stitch through the pattern paper and all layers of fabric once, very loosely, down and back up. Leave a loop on the far side 1-2" long, and leave 1-2" tails on the top side. Since the top side doesn't have a loop, the paper pulls right off the ends of the tails. Now separate the two pieces gently, letting them pull about 1/2" of the tails you left from either side. Clip in the center, and you'll have two tufts of thread at each mark.

It eventually goes really quickly, and though it requires punching little holes in the pattern, I think it's actually easier on the paper overall, because you're not folding and bending it out of the way to transfer marks, then doing it again on the opposite side of the fabric. Working with and around the tacks has been a bit challenging, though. I'm a neat freak when working, and I kept trying to pick the 'threads' off of my fabric (where the heck did that come from? Yank. Oh, dammit!). Also, I think it's best to remove them and replace with a pin when it comes time to actually sew around them, or else you inevitably end up stitching through a thread and have to really carefully clip to take it out.

The only question I have remaining with them is how to use them on pieces that I'm interfacing. This time around, I just pulled them carefully almost all the way towards the right side, fused the interfacing on, and hoped I didn't damage anything too badly when pulling the short ends out of the fusible when I'm done with the tack. Can't be right, though. Probably need to lay the interfacing on, remake the tack through fabric and fusible, pull the old tacks out, and then fuse. Fortunately, this wasn't much of a concern with the pants, but it would've really been trouble on the vest. That brocade would've just torn itself apart if I'd been yanking on tacks in the interfacing.

Anyways, I got the cutting done and finished the edges on Saturday. Yesterday, I did the interfacing got the fronts almost wholly assembled (pockets, both sides of the fly and facing, button holes, joined fronts at crotch. I started on the backs, but it was getting late, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be doing the welts while I was that tired. Especially considering I made some really bone-headed mistakes when sewing the fronts together. I ripped it back out and did it again - came out considerably better, but still off about 1/16" when comparing the seams on the fly of the right to the left. If they had to be off, though, they're off in the right direction - the direction that hides the right fly's seam under the left's flap edge. Fly came out much better than on the prototype, though, overall.

The vest is done! I sewed on the last three buttons last night. I'm not too pleased with the placement of two of the buttons, but I don't think they stand out when worn. The buckle on the back didn't seem like it was going to hold at all, so I just sewed it in place. Image pops to flickr set.

As I've said, I'm quite pleased overall. I started in on another sekr1t project last night, and it went well after a rocky start. Tonight, though, it's back to sewing with cutting out the good fabric for my pants. Yay pants!