site banner
ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  4d ago (text post)   354 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 6, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

VHB is ridiculously strong when used on properly prepared surfaces; I've bent 1/8th inch aluminum plate trying to remove two stuck together with three 8-inch strips of the stuff without solvents. The trick is figuring out what 'properly prepared' means -- 90% of the time just dunking in simple green and rinsing with water works, but heavily polished or painted and almost all rubberized materials can benefit a lot from primer, and I'd expect helmets will fall into this domain.

Most other double-sided tape is either garbage (carpet tape) or won't last very long under exposure (basically every foam mounting tape).

Rivets are a great option in most situations you can make them fit, but alignment can be a pain without kliecos. I don't recommend staples. Epoxy is a mess, but it's really strong and there exist mixtures that will secure to most everything, at the cost of never coming off period. For obvious reasons I'd keep all three but especially the staples away from helmet pieces.

The other constraint to keep in mind is what you're sticking in place; it doesn't help to just have adhesive and the PCB strip well-secured and the LEDs flopping in the wind. Those sleeves have an advantage here, though even the floppy ones might have too large a minimum bend radius. Expect to mix-and-match.

The trick is figuring out what 'properly prepared' means -- 90% of the time just dunking in simple green and rinsing with water works, but heavily polished or painted and almost all rubberized materials can benefit a lot from primer, and I'd expect helmets will fall into this domain.

What about rubbing alcohol on the shiny (not foamy) parts of a bike helmet?

Isopropyl alcohol's worth a shot first, before trying to use primer. Beyond that, depends a lot on the plastic and coating; most bicycle helmets are ABS that I'd expect it would bind fine, perhaps benefiting from a bit of heat. Higher-end ones that are using carbonfiber, or scratch-resistant polycarbonate, I'd expect you'd want the primer.

The higher ends of gorilla tape can handle those cases if you don't want to deal with (or can't get, thank you California) the primers, but I haven't gotten any experience with how weatherproof it gets.

thanks!

how do you know so much about this stuff?

VHB specifically, I've volunteered for FIRST FRC a lot, and it's one of the go-to adhesives in that realm (and most teams get free spools of it), so I've gotten a lot of hands-on experience.

WS2812s, I ran a few different STEM outreach projects using them. They're great as a way to teach and show for loops in physical space, but the constraints are very easy to run into, even with Adafruit's documentation.

Circuit assembly work in general has just been a hobby. I think it's a really important skillset, but also one that's very badly underserved by mainstream college training courses.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats