Engineer Zero

On Vulcan.

If you have to ask why anyone would have mice as pets, then you’re not the kind of person who’s going to understand. Mice are very sweet, quizzical little creatures who are natural clowns. The black plague was due to fleas, not mice.

Anyhow, when I first got mice, I took the word of the books that I’d read that six would be perfectly happy in a ten gallon aquarium. Well, they fought a lot, so I sent two back to the pet store and moved the others into a twenty gallon tank. They still seemed rather bored.

Hence, this ‘mouserie,’ which is five feet by five feet in area. I would like to show more plants and play stuff but the plants that I downloaded from Google 3D Warehouse slowed down Sketchup like you wouldn’t believe. I think I’d be better off ‘making’ my own plants, which I did with the grass clumps.

The hamster wheel should probably be shrunk by a factor of two to mouse size. Maybe. I got the wheel from Warehouse as with the plant photos and the mouse template, but everything else in the image was made by me. I was going to say that I am proud of the water bottle and stand assembly, but now that I look at it, I realize that the stand should hold the top of the bottle better. Another time.

The gray mouse is Susie, the black mouse is Walter. Annabelle and Agatha (Aggie) are the whites on the left, Mabel is on the right. Muriel (who is a catnip toy) isn’t shown. Let’s pretend she’s in the hut. (Mental Note: Put Muriel in hut.)

This play area would be outside. The bedding would be natural earth, exposed to rain so that there is no cleaning requirement. The equipment can be soaked in detergent for half an hour each week, and that’s the only maintenance. Otherwise, replacing the bedding and washing the walls can be time-consuming.

Maybe I could make a little mousie elevator so that they could ride up to a tunnel that would allow them to come inside to a five gallon tank when it was cold outside.

The wall may seem a bit high, and for the girls it probably is. But Walter could all but fly.

Yes, past tense. But for now, let’s not dwell on that.

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The system should be self-explanatory. I’ll go into more detail, including a specific application, later. Anyhow, enjoy.

Hey, this time I slapped on some ‘resters’ which allow the candy grabber to rest against the box as shown. If you have a better term than rester, I’d like to hear it. You won’t get paid, however. I’m not getting paid either, by the way.

I decided I needed more negative verticality.

I was in one of those there grab a bag o candy stores and wondered if the process could be improved. Because, you know, it works, which means it’s just asking to be fixed. Ask any engineer!

The grabber on the right (ie Mark II) has a kink, allowing for greater verticality in one’s grabbing of candy. This means less sticking of the hands within the box, which is good for the other patrons. And if you came after someone else, then you’re one of those other patrons.

Anyhow, originally my idea was for something like a glove bag like they use in nuclear and biological work. Then I wondered if the procurement and maintenance costs might be a bit high for a candy store. So I thought that maybe I should just work to keep the hands out of the box, and that’ll be enough for today’s post.

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Finally, a tea cup that can keep the bag and string from hitting your nose. A gee-gaw to be 3D printed, except ABS plastic melts at 180 F so you can’t use Makerbot on this one. Gee-gaw, strange word. Gee-gaw. Something a crow would say.

You might wonder what this thing is, if the title of this entry didn’t give it away.

Anyhow, I went to the Google Warehouse and downloaded a spoon, then inserted it into the model. Like so:

The basic idea is, you don’t want your wetted spoon to touch the table because that would be germy. So you insert it into a spoonholder, which through the power of what I like to call “Archimedean Static Leverage” prevents the spoon from touching the table. Now, you might be saying, “Why don’t I just put the spoon on a saucer or a plate?” Well, you could say that.

If you want one of these, they’re only $39.95 plus postage. The reason for the price is because I really don’t want to make one, so I’ll charge so much that only an idiot would want to buy one. I was thinking, though, that someday I’ll figure out how to make a 3D printable file for this, and then it might be fun for people to make their own. Unlike saucers, by the way, the spoonholder never has to be washed. So maybe it’s not so silly, after all, huh?

And just in case you’re wondering what it would be like, here’s a spoonholder in a restaurant on Mars:

I have a New Yorker cartoon calendar, and today’s cartoon features a doghouse that looks like a human house. Anyhow, I was inspired to duplicate the house in Sketchup, and this is what it looks like:

The gables and roof are components, which really does make it a lot easier to draw things. I was wondering how the gables would turn out when they intersected the roof, but that’s what Intersect with Model is for. So I learned how to do that. Unfortunately, I learned how to do that before I made a roof component with overhangs, so I had to redo Intersect with Model. Or rather, I redid it for the far right gable, then I thought, “What the heck, it’s not professional work.” So I didn’t redo IwM for the other gables, and you can tell if you look closely at how their roofs intersect with the house roof. Which actually is kind of instructive. One of those cases where being lazy and incomplete is actually the right thing to do. Like not rewriting the previous sentence to be less grammatically ambiguous.

The gables were white in the cartoon. I have since changed them to black in the file, but refrained from uploading. If the cartoonist is lazy, who am I to disagree?