Projects that make or build something.
This is part of an ongoing series to test various internet-based suggestions for extending the life of a razor blade. You can see the background for this in the Post #1672.
I suppose that any group of people obsessed with the minutia of some activity will seem a bit odd to the rest of us. But the more I dive into on-line shaving culture, and on-line blade-sharpening culture, the weirder it gets.
Continue reading Post #1677: Planning the rest of my razor blade experiment.
Every once in a while, I realize that I’ve been doing something the hard way, all of my life.
Fresh-baked bread is one of those things.
So I thought I’d briefly share this. This is bread-baking with every corner cut and every possible effort spared.
The old me would:
That “standard” bread was pretty good. But, honestly, any fresh-baked bread is going to be pretty good.
But what a mess to make it. Kneading, in particular, takes a fair bit of time and effort and leaves residual sticky dough and flour on my hands, on the kneading surface, and so on. It also requires that you add just the right amount of water to the dough, so that it’s knead-able but not too sticky.
Turns out, you don’t need to knead bread. I’d seen “no knead” bread recipes, but I figured they were something exotic. Nope. This is just the basic King Arthur easiest bread recipe. Minus the kneading.
The trick is to let it rise overnight, in the fridge. The “gluten will form” in dough, all on its own. Kneading just speeds that up. So if you have the time, you needn’t knead.
More or less any standard bread recipe can be made this way. And, apparently, no-knead’s not news, because you can find this fact any number of places on the internet. You just have to think to look for it. Technically, I think the term of art for this is an “autolysed” dough, though there are autolyzed dough recipes that still call for kneading.
Not only is this low effort, it’s low-mess. Total labor time is maybe ten minutes. There is exactly one dirty dish to wash (the mixing bowl), and three utensils (two butterknives and a tablespoon). You’ll probably want to rinse the baking pan, and rinse whatever you used to cover the dough in the fridge. There’s a single piece of parchment paper to toss out. There’s no flour spilled over the kitchen counter, kitchen floor, clothing, and so on.
This is also an extremely forgiving recipe. Unlike kneaded bread, the recipe isn’t picky about exactly how much water you use. A little more, a little less, no problem. Or exactly how much yeast. Or what type of bread yeast you use. Or exactly how long it sits in the fridge. I usually leave it overnight, but I’ve left it 24 hours and it was fine.
Here’s how I now make two loaves of bread.
If you decide to put these into loaf pans, increase the bake time by about five minutes.
* The only part of this that isn’t obvious is what I mean by “tightly roll into a log”. This step is usually called “tensioning” the dough. Take your lump of dough. Place oiled fingertips on the narrow edge of the lump. Press down, pull toward you, and roll it up. Repeat. Just as tightly as you can manage. You should end up with a log maybe 2.5″ in diameter, and maybe 10″ long.
I oil the loaves so that I can do the second rise without tightly covering the dough to prevent it from drying out. As a byproduct, oiling them gives you a soft(er) crust.
Today’s bread recipe is half-whole-wheat, half-white. Because that’s all the flour I happen to have left in the pantry.
Here are the loaves just before putting them in the oven, then baked, then showing the crumb of the bread.
I imagine that expert bakers will scoff at this. You don’t get much “oven spring”. (Particularly not with whole-wheat flour.) I don’t bother to slash the top. It’s not the lightest bread you’ll ever eat. And so on.
And it doesn’t look as nice as the cartoon bread at the top of this post.
But I view this as a case of diminishing returns. Sure, you can knead it. Pat it gently. Add special herbs and spices. Whisper sweet words of encouragement to it. Slash the top before you bake.
And you might get a slightly better loaf of home-made bread, for all of that effort. Airier crumb. Crispier crust. Or whatnot.
But, so what? This minimal-effort bread is warm, soft, and delicious. It’s fresh-baked bread. Without the hassle. What’s not to like?
This is part of an ongoing series to test various internet-based suggestions for extending the life of a razor blade. You can see the background for this in the just-prior post. Continue reading Post #1673: Stropping a used razor blade. Meh.
Six years ago I decided to start using an old-fashioned (“double edged”) safety razor.
I got a couple of “blade samplers” from Amazon — collections of maybe a dozen different brands, five blades from each brand. I then bought a 100-count box of Persona blades. They got good reviews and, at that time, they were made in Virginia.
Sometime this year, I’ll probably have to buy razor blades again. So, obviously, we’re not talking about a huge per-diem expenditure, for shaving. Nevertheless, whatever I buy this time, I’m going to end up living with it for years. So I’ve been revisiting the market for double-edge razor blades. And, incidentally, disposable razors. Continue reading Post #1672: Does anything really extend the life of a razor blade? Part 1, the setup.
For several months I’ve been in the process of de-cluttering and generally getting rid of stuff. But that has stalled, for reasons that are not entirely clear. And it looks like de-cluttering is going to get somewhat harder from this point forward. Continue reading Post #1667: Döstädning and the problem of small stuff.
For some people, cold winter weather brings thoughts of hot chocolate by the fireplace, cozy comforters, or maybe skiing.
By contrast, I find myself thinking about insulation and R-values.
So, in the spirit of the holidays, here are two R-value calculations that I’ve been meaning to make.
Whenever the weather turns cold, I start getting lots of hits on Post #1412, on making an electrically-heated cover for outdoor faucets. Of late, I’ve been getting more than a hundred hits a day, thanks to this recent cold snap and an offhand reference in an on-line forum for Texas Aggies fans.
One of the interesting findings was how little electricity it takes to keep the inside of the faucet protector warm. For example, a mere 4 watt night-light bulb raised the interior temperature by 28 degrees. That more than meets my needs in any cold snap likely to occur in my area.
But is it really plausible that 4 watts could do that? Or was I (e.g.) mistaking heat leaking out of house for the impact of that small electric light?
Obviously, I could check that empirically by hanging up a standard faucet cover with no added heat, and seeing what the interior temperature was. But, at present, it’s about 15F outside, so I’m ruling that out for now.
Instead, this is a classic cases of “Sure, it works in practice. But does it work in theory?” I’m going to do a theoretical calculation of the temperature rise I should expect, using the R-value (insulating value) of Styrofoam, the dimensions of that faucet cover, and the energy output of a 4-watt bulb.
I’m going to model this as a Styrofoam box with dimensions 4.5″ x 4.5″ x 6″. That effectively covers the open face of the faucet cover with Styrofoam, instead of (in my case) brick. So I’m expecting to see more than 28F temperature increase out of this calculation. The box walls appear to be about 5/8″ thick.
Two final bits of data. The R-value of Styrofoam is listed by most sources as around 5.0 per inch. And 4 watts is equivalent to about 13.5 BTUs per hour (BTUH). (I rounded that down a bit to account for the small amount of energy that escapes from that bulb in the form of light, rather than heat.)
Here’s the calculation, first assuming foam on all sides, and then accounting for one side being brick, with a total R-value (for two inches of brick) of 0.88. (I don’t show the full detail of the brick calculation, only the bottom-line average insulating value of the combined foam/brick container.)
The upshot is that this does, in fact, work in theory. The theoretical temperature rise I get from an all-foam box is 41F, much more than I observed. The theoretical rise I get if I replace one side of the box with brick is 28F, exactly what I observed.
It’s purely a matter of chance that this calculation hits the observed value exactly. The fact that it’s close shows that what worked in practice, does, in fact, work in theory.
I’ve been watching Engels Coach Shop on YouTube for some time now. The proprietor is a self-employed wheelwright whose long-standing business builds and fixes all manner of horse-drawn transportation.
This has absolutely no practical relevance to my life, but is purely a pleasure to watch. Not only for the actual work performed, but also because the guy knows how to film, edit, and narrate a video.
Of late, he installed a 3000-gallon above-ground tank for watering his cattle. To which you might reasonably say, so what? Until you realize that he’s in Joliet, Montana. To put it mildly, the combination of an above-ground water tank and a Montana winter constitutes a freeze risk.
On the one hand, it’s heavily insulated (reported R50 on the sides, R120 on the top), and the water itself stores considerable heat energy.
On the other hand, it’s in the middle of Montana.
Source: Western Regional Climate Center
Apparently his YouTube following is deeply divided on whether or not they think this will work. Mr. Engels seemed kind of amused at the folks who thought he was going to end up with a giant ice cube. For my own part, I’m guessing it will work just fine, based solely on the guy who built it. But I don’t quite grasp why he seems amused by the opposite opinion.
So rather than just guess, let me do a couple of crude calculations. From the standpoint of the arithmetic, it’s really no different from my faucet cover. Just bigger.
First, I wanted to check out the water tower in Joliet, MT. Just to be sure that a big enough tank, with enough throughput, would not freeze in that climate. But when I tried a trick that always works for finding water towers on the East Coast — use Google Earth, set the perspective flat, and look for a water tower to stick up above the houses, because they are all 120 feet tall, more-or-less — that didn’t work. This, despite the fact that there is a municipal water system with a 160,000 gallon tank.
That’s because the Joliet water tower is mostly underground. Like so. I have no idea whether that was driven by economics, or by threat of freezing.
Source: Laurel Outlook
So, is a well-insulated tank, above ground, a problem or not?
The first hint that it’s not a problem is that the total heat loss of this tank is maybe 16 times the heat loss of my faucet cover. This tank is enormously larger. But it’s also enormously better insulated. The combination of having about 300 times the surface area, and maybe 20 times the average insulation, is that, by calculation (below, highlighted in yellow), this tank only loses a bit over five BTUs per hour per degree F. That’s just 16 times the heat loss in my Styrofoam faucet cover.
Here, I’ve assumed a tank shaped like a cube, with an average R-value of 60 on all surfaces. Should be close enough for a rough cut like this:
Well, given that a four-watt bulb would heat my faucet cover, it should be no surprise that even a modest heat input would (eventually) result in a large temperature differential between the inside and outside of that tank. Where four watts was enough to create a 41F difference in my all-foam faucet cover, here, a typical stock tank heater (150 W) would (eventually) generate a massive 94F difference between interior and exterior of the tank.
That’s a big enough difference that (arguably) this simple linear R-value calculation does not exactly hold. I don’t think that much matters. If for no other reason that, given the tiny heat input (about the same as you would use to heat a cup of water to boiling for tea), it would take years to reach equilibrium.
(Well, might as well calculate that roughly. This is about 25,000 pound of water. To raise that by 94F, with zero losses, using a 150W heater, would take just over half a year. With losses, yeah, a couple of years. If then.)
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, if the tank is well-mixed, running a 150W stock tank heater inside it would, in fact, guarantee that it would not freeze under almost any conceivable circumstances in that climate.
But there’s no electricity at that site. Instead, the tank has to “coast” all winter, using just the energy embodied in the water in the tank itself.
So, how much energy is there in that water? How much heat would you have to remove to take water, at a typical late-summer temperature for that area, and bring it down to 32F?
By definition, a BTU is the amount of energy required to raise one pound of water by 1 degree F. So if (say) the water starts out around 62F (late summer/early fall), it would have to lose over three-quarters of a million BTUs in order to reach 32F. As shown below, bottom line.
Now I’m going to do a little hypothetical calculation. Let me plop that tank down in January, in Joliet, MT, and see how much it cools off over the month. That is, let me start with that tank at 62F, and let it sit for 31 days with an average external temperature of 24F — the actual average temperature for that month and location. This should be a worst-case scenario for temperature loss, because it’s the largest temperature differential you could hope to see. Water temperature from late summer, against dead-of-winter air temperatures.
Here’s the simulation. I just calculate the daily heat loss, and then drop the temperature each day, using that heat loss (in BTUSs) as a fraction of the total heat embodied in the 62F vs 32F water. (That is, I pro-rate the BTUs of daily heat loss over the total 750K BTUs that would take the water from 62F to 32F).
OK, I finally get the joke. Worst case, this tank ought to lose just over 5F per month, in the coldest month of the year. And note that the cooler the tank gets, the slower the additional temperature loss gets. For all practical purposes, the likelihood that the tank will freeze is zero.
(Note that the calculation is linear in temperature, so that it doesn’t really matter if the temperature does up and down in January. The average heat loss is going to match the average temperature. There are more refined physics calculations that will add some slight non-linearity to this, but not enough to matter).
Unsurprisingly, this tank isn’t just built for that climate. It’s over-built. Some of my assumptions might be a bit off. The tank is a cylinder, not a cube. Likely I could have calculated the average insulation value better. I don’t really know the insulation value for the bottom of the tank. And so on. But even with that, this seems to have been built with a huge margin of safety.
I should have expected no less.
This is the followup to Post #1661. The problem is that I frequently have to crane my neck to see traffic lights, in my wife’s Prius Prime, owing to the steeply sloped windshield.
The inability to see stop lights is hardly a new problem in the American auto industry. In that prior post, I reviewed the century-long history of inventions that would let you see above the top edge of a car windshield.
I noted that in the modern era, you could solve this problem with a $30 dashcam. But, really, where’s the joy in that?
Instead, I turned my back on that obvious solution and decided to come up with an optical device to let me see above the top edge of the windshield.
The design criteria for this stoplight-viewing device are:
My solution is a negative Fresnel lens, mounted to the sun visor so that you can flip it down when you need it, and flip it up out of the way when you don’t.
In this case, a “negative Fresnel lens” is a flat plastic lens sold as an aid to seeing around blind spots on vehicles. (Negative refers to negative focal length, meaning this isn’t a magnifying glass, it’s a “shrinking” glass.) Typically, these are used by large vehicles as an aid to backing up. The lens allows the driver to see objects that can’t be seen directly through the back window of the vehicle.
Below, note that the top of the cloud is obscured by the roof of the vehicle. Yet, you can see the top of the cloud in the shrunken image in the Fresnel lens. This is precisely what I want to happen, for stop lights obscured by the roof of my car. I want to use a negative Fresnel lens to pull them into view.
Source: The lens I bought for this project, for about $10, on Amazon.
Some variation of this technology is used on the LightInSight. This is an aid to viewing stoplights consisting of a long, narrow Fresnel lens designed to be stuck to the of the inside of the windshield. The product illustration below is completely unclear, but the LightInSight does exactly what the lens shown above does: It pulls images from above the top edge of the windshield down into the driver’s view.
Source: Amazon.
From my standpoint, the LightInSight has a couple of drawbacks. First, it’s permanently in the field of view. I don’t want that. I want it out of the way when I don’t need it. Second, Fresnel lenses fail when viewed at sufficiently shallow angles. The higher the power of the lens, the sooner that happens. I feared that the LightInSight, however well-designed, was not going to be usable on the extremely sloped Prius windshield. Or, if it did, it would have to be a relatively low-power lens, and provide only a modest boost to visibility above the roof of the car.
Instead, I wanted a relatively high-powered negative Fresnel lens, mounted perpendicular to my line of sight. But mounted so that I could put it away when it wasn’t needed.
Finally, I rejected the use of a cheap positive (magnifying) Fresnel lens. That would have made fabrication a lot easier and cheaper, but it would have produced an image that was upside-down and side-to-side reversed. To me, typically facing a string of lights at a multi-lane intersection, that just seemed like a recipe for an eventual disaster.
The rest is just tinkering.
Other than the Fresnel lens, I tossed this together from scraps lying around the garage. Size, shape, and method of attachment were therefore more-or-less determined at random.
Here are the materials. The flexible Fresnel lens needs some sort of clear, hard plastic sheet to be affixed to. I decided to tape the lens to the plastic sheet with clear packing tape. And I decided to have this rest above the sun visor, held on with a couple of pieces of elastic, run through holes drilled in the hard plastic.
The only thing that is even remotely tricky is that the Fresnel lens is not uniform. By design, the bottom and side edges do a much better job of pulling images into the field of view, compared to the top edge. And after you cut it, you want to be looking through that external edge to find your stop light, not through the (much weaker) center of the lens. The upshot is that you want to cut your piece out of the bottom of the Fresnel lens, and you want to mount that so that the edge of the original lens ends up where the holes are drilled in the plastic.
Below I show the first test. It sits above the sun visor, held in place with two piece of elastic. To deploy it, pull it forward and let it hang off the front of the sun visor. When you are done, slide it back into position above the sun visor.
In the three pictures below, I’ve circled the one-way arrow to keep you oriented.
The first picture is the intersection, as seen when sitting up straight in the driver’s seat. The light is obscured by the roof.
Second picture show the traffic light from the “slouch and crane” position. Normally, I’d slouch in the seat and crane my neck to watch the light.
But with the Fresnel lens, I can see the light without slouching. This may not look like much in the photo, but it was perfectly adequate for monitoring the light to see when it turned green. No slouching required.
This will win no beauty awards, but it works, and it’s unobtrusive. When not in use, all you can see of it is the thin pieces of elastic circling the sun visor.
This could definitely use some tweaking if there were any need for an improved version. First, it’s far larger than it needs to be. Second, I’d probably glue the lens down, rather than tape it. Third, I’d probably cut a section from the less powerful portion of the lens (the top), as the lens is far more powerful than it needs to be to provide a clear image of the light.
By far the biggest drawback — totally unanticipated — is that you have to focus your eyes on the Fresnel lens, not on the road. Beyond being an annoyance, that means you aren’t focusing on the roadway in front of and around you. When the light turns green, you then have just a split second to refocus on the roadway and check conditions. This strikes me as a significant safety drawback to this device. Enough that maybe I want to rethink the whole thing.
But the bottom line is that this does what it’s supposed to do. It provides a usable image of a stoplight that would otherwise be obscured by the roof of the car. Thus, I carry forward the century-old tradition of ad-hoc “signal viewing devices” that let you avoid craning your neck to see traffic lights.
Briefly:
Continue reading Post #1661: When you can’t see the traffic light ahead of you. Part 1, the setup.
I’m just about to order some essential oils for my mice. Along with an essential oil diffuser. The poor things seem a bit stressed of late, and I figure that a bit of aroma therapy might help them more nearly align their chakras and generally improve their auras.
That’s sarcasm. Mostly.
Mice are vermin. Full stop. Yet I am, in fact, purchasing an essential oil diffuser and some essential oils for my mice.
It’s as logical as 1-2-3. 4 maybe 5.
Source: Clipart library.com
I’m now into Swedish Death Cleaning, the Garage Phase. Just another in an ongoing series of attempts to get rid of stuff.
Currently I’m going through my detached garage. Figuring out what can be given away. What’s good for scrap metal. What’s trash. What has to go to the household toxic waste station at the local dump solid waste transfer station. And so on. The idea is to return this space to its original intended use a hobby woodshop.
But for now, the main issue is that it’s filthy. Just filthy. And the principal source of the filth is mice. And all that mice do. And do. And do. In every conceivable location in that garage.
So, as long as I’m cleaning it out, I want to add some rodent repellents. Ideally, some effective rodent repellents.
Or so they say.
It’s not as if I haven’t tried rodent repellents before. It’s just that what I’ve tried has failed. And, I suspect that, as with my long and winding road for deer repellents, what will and will not work will be highly dependent on circumstances.
In any case, there appears to be some research suggesting that, if given alternatives, mice will stay away from areas heavily scented with peppermint, cinammon, wintergreen, and similar. Let me just summarize that by saying that mice hate peppermint.
So I go to the Home Depot website and look up their top-rated mint-based rodent repellent. They will cheerfully sell me a gallon of it for $34. Reading the fine print, I see that what they are selling me is a gallon of water, with a little squirt of peppermint oil in it. Above, the first ingredient is soap, followed by 0.5% peppermint oil.
So I’d be paying $34 for a little over half an ounce of peppermint oil. Call it $60 an ounce or so. Plus some other stuff. Of which, arguably, the cinnamon oil has value as a rodent deterrent.
(I note, parenthetically, that I have tried “sachet-style” rodent repellents before, without notable success. Hence my focus on liquids.)
Source: Amazon.com
Meanwhile, on Amazon, I can buy four ounces of peppermint essential oil (of unknown quality) for maybe $12. Plus, it’s Energizing!
That price strikes me as about fair, as the stuff is more-or-less a weed. My wife has mint patches established in several flower gardens, and it’s not so much a question of cultivating it, as keeping it in check.
As a bonus, the comments show that people do, in fact, use it as mouse repellent.
The drawback is that you need to keep reapplying it. Recommendations seem to be to strew oil-soaked cotton balls around, and re-soak them once or twice a week.
That’s way too much work. There has to be a better way to do this.
Source: Amazon.com
People who are into essential oils as room fragrances use some sort of system to deliver the scent. You can simply warm a puddle of oil. You can mix the oil with water and run it through an ultrasonic humidifier.
Or, you can buy a gizmo that will periodically spritz the essential oil into the air. Said gizmo generally being called an “air freshener”.
In the end, I went with the $11 Air Wick Essential Mist. It’s a battery powered air freshener that uses a small bottle of essential oil, and spritzes that into the air every few seconds, eight hours a day. Again, per those useful Amazon comments, you can pry the lid off the bottle and replace the contents with the essential oil of your choice. Each fraction-of-an-ounce bottle should be good for about a month.
As mice are nocturnal, I’ll set that up to spritz at night.
The only obvious negative is that, by reputation, these eat batteries. But with an exposed battery compartment, that can be easily fixed by hard-wiring a wall wart to replace the three AAA batteries.
Edit: Contrary to what The Internet told me, pure peppermint oil does not work with this device. It won’t atomize it, or, at least, not at unheated-garage temperatures. I redid this, mix pure peppermint oil roughly 50/50 with vodka. That now seems to be working. The upshot is that you need to thin the oil, and it looks like vodka (water and alcohol) will work OK.
As I said, completely logical, linear and rational. My little air-freshener-as-mouse-repellent costs about $25 to set up, and the four-ounce bottle of peppermint oil should last for maybe half-a-year. That’s all plus-or-minus battery replacements. And it will require monthly maintenance to refill the essential oil container.
If nothing else, the garage is going to smell a whole lot better than it does now.
It might even keep the mice away. We’ll see.
Nothing exceeds like excess.
For this second round, I decided to amp up the turkey jerky processing. I purchased several more discount turkey breasts from my local Safeway, to try out the idea of making jerky from fully-roasted turkey.
Recall from the just-prior post that the USDA safety guidelines for jerky call for you to cook the meat (to 165F) before drying it. That being the case, why was I going through the hassle of butchering and slicing raw turkey? I looked around on the internet and, sure enough, some people simply make jerky out of roast turkey. No need to cut up the raw meat.
In this round I gave that a try.
It works, kind of. It’s certainly a lot less messy, and a lot easier. But the cooked turkey tends to fall apart rather than cut cleanly. So I ended up with a lot of variation in the thickness of the “slices”. That’s a bad thing, when making jerky, as it generates variation in the extent to which the meat absorbs the marinade, and variation in drying time.
I used the same marinade as in the last post, but increased the salt substitute by 50% and dropped the liquid smoke. The final product this time has just enough saltiness to be satisfying, without being spicy.
The whole process yielded two pounds of rather ugly-looking turkey jerky, at a meat cost of $3.50 per pound. That’s starting from turkey breasts at $0.59 a pound. Compare that to what appears to be the going rate on Amazon of about $1.50 an ounce.
Plus, I get yet another pot of turkey soup out of it. Because, who doesn’t want yet more turkey soup, on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.
Judging from what was left in the Safeway meat case, I could probably keep this up for another week or so. But I think I’ve had enough. Two pounds of jerky is a lot.
The only thing left to do is to estimate the sodium content of this turkey jerky. I didn’t use any salt (sodium chloride), but the turkey itself has some naturally, and likely has some from whatever it was injected with by the meat processor.
Near as I can tell, four ounces of turkey contains about 100 mg of sodium. The rule of thumb is that you get an ounce of turkey jerky for every four ounces of raw meat. So this should end up with roughly 100 mg of sodium per ounce of turkey jerky. That puts this in the same league as Strollo’s, the lowest-sodium jerky on the market, with just 65 mg sodium per ounce.
Mission accomplished. It’s completely possible to make a tasty low-sodium turkey jerky at home. And you can make it from leftover roast turkey.
