What could all of these possibly have in common?
This is like an episode of “Connectionsâ€, one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
For about one week a year, somewhere near mid April and mid-August, my wife complains about the garage door not closing when she needs to leave for work.
It seems that during those periods, equidistant from the Summer equinox, the angle of the sun above the horizon, or azimuth, puts it at precisely the right angle to shine directly into the sensor for my main garage door. This renders the sensor blind, and causes the door to refuse to close, which agitates the wife, which makes my life less pleasant. This is known as the trickle-down-misery-theory. If SWMBO is unhappy, you are unhappy.
“Why not tell her to leave earlier, or later†you might ask. Well, this would simply place these two weeks closer together or farther apart, and would solve nothing.
I had taped a toilet paper tube over the receiving sensor, effectively narrowing its view of the world, but alas, this just shortened the number of days of “sunrise hell†for the wife.
Today, I came home to find stuff stacked and piled and taped in place to block the sun, and, knowing that this would mean a disgruntled spouse who would let me know how her morning went, I decided to fix this once and for all.
So, I searched around the garage for dark plastic tubes that might provide suitable tunnel vision for the garage door sensor. I eventually came up with an old lawn sprinkler head:
I don’t know why I save these when they fail, but I have finally made use of one of them!
I removed the top collar and pop-up center, then chucked the sprinkler housing in my lathe, turned off the threaded lip around the top, then reversed it and turned off the female threaded base, and opened up the lower end just enough to allow a force fit over the lip of the protrusion on my garage door sensor.
So, sunrise, azimuth, sprinklers and lathes all came together in a machining project.
Hey, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you have a lathe, everything looks like a turning project.
This is like an episode of “Connectionsâ€, one of my favorite TV shows of all time.
For about one week a year, somewhere near mid April and mid-August, my wife complains about the garage door not closing when she needs to leave for work.
It seems that during those periods, equidistant from the Summer equinox, the angle of the sun above the horizon, or azimuth, puts it at precisely the right angle to shine directly into the sensor for my main garage door. This renders the sensor blind, and causes the door to refuse to close, which agitates the wife, which makes my life less pleasant. This is known as the trickle-down-misery-theory. If SWMBO is unhappy, you are unhappy.
“Why not tell her to leave earlier, or later†you might ask. Well, this would simply place these two weeks closer together or farther apart, and would solve nothing.
I had taped a toilet paper tube over the receiving sensor, effectively narrowing its view of the world, but alas, this just shortened the number of days of “sunrise hell†for the wife.
Today, I came home to find stuff stacked and piled and taped in place to block the sun, and, knowing that this would mean a disgruntled spouse who would let me know how her morning went, I decided to fix this once and for all.
So, I searched around the garage for dark plastic tubes that might provide suitable tunnel vision for the garage door sensor. I eventually came up with an old lawn sprinkler head:
I don’t know why I save these when they fail, but I have finally made use of one of them!
I removed the top collar and pop-up center, then chucked the sprinkler housing in my lathe, turned off the threaded lip around the top, then reversed it and turned off the female threaded base, and opened up the lower end just enough to allow a force fit over the lip of the protrusion on my garage door sensor.
So, sunrise, azimuth, sprinklers and lathes all came together in a machining project.
Hey, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you have a lathe, everything looks like a turning project.
+#$