2020/05/10 – This Week in the Lab

This week’s items are a bit eclectic but on this Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms making their way through Covid lockdown, we have some…

• 3D Printed Drawer bins
• Mold making / Plaster / Play-dough
• Bird Photos & Tripod Setup
• Hydroponics with new tubes

3D Printer Drawer Bins
I was trying to find a way to have better organization for some of the drawers I had and so I have been experimenting with some 3D printed bins of a couple of different shapes. So far so good, but like most 3D printed things they take forever to complete, the smallest one still takes like 6 hours!

Mold making / Plaster / Play-dough
For Mother’s Day I tried to do a plaster cast of my daughter’s hand and foot for my wife. We tried a couple different ways and the one I was hoping that would work the best was to do the handprint in play dough and then pour in the plaster, creating a relief. Didn’t have a lot of success, I think the moisture in the play dough affected how this particular casting material dried. Ran out of material, might order some more and try again in the future. But for now I was left with a very alien looking hand and foot.

Bird Photos & Tripod Setup
With Spring time being here the birds have returned to my backyard, I have a small feeder on the edge of the porch (the kind with the spring loaded doors to keep the squirrels and larger birds out) and it’s been having some visits from some very pretty birds, so I set up the camera on a tripod very close to the feeder and used the remote trigger to try to get some shots. Getting the focus right was the biggest challenge and I used too small of a depth of field and ended up with some shots not quite in the right focus. Learned a couple of things along the way and will have to try again when the weather isn’t as bad (Its very gray and rainy right now with sun and heat for the end of the week).

Hydroponics with new tubes
In last week’s post I mentioned that I was going to try using a large size hose/tube for my hydroponics setup, well, the new size arrived and works fantastically! So now there is a 1/2″ tube going in and a 1″ tube for the water going out. I’m not sure if the larger size cuts out any surface tension issues or just the fact that its double the size of the input but flow is not an issue anymore. I can turn the pumps to high and even clog the drain till its just about to overflow and the new 1″ can catch up and return the water levels to “acceptable” levels. Huge difference in the flow, now to see how it translates over to the health & growth of the plants.