Smoky out there...
Hey all! Hope you're breathing ok out there. We're getting hit hard by wildfire smoke from fires up in Canada right now. If you don't have an air purifier, you might want to consider building a Corsi-Rosenthal Box to clean the smoke out of the air in your home. If any of your friends and neighbors have asthma, COPD, or other respiratory issues, check in on them and see if they need help getting groceries or doing other errands while the air's bad.
It's a short one this week, so let's dive in.
This Week in the Workshop
My main project this week was tackling the overflowing bin of optical disk drives that we've been pulling out of computers for the past couple of months. Optical disks include CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and all their writable and re-writable variations. They're called optical disks because the data is stored and retrieved using lasers and reflective material rather than magnets. I saved them out separately because they have a lot of specialized parts that you don't find in other computer components, and I didn't want to have to juggle quite that many sorting containers at once 😂 By doing them in one big batch, I can get the best understanding of what's in each drive, and make sure that all the stepper motors and little bits of stamped brass don't get lost in the shuffle.
I love these sorts of projects because I get to see the diversity of designs even among very similar devices. These are all laptop slimline drives, and they all have the same basic parts. They have optical read heads on rails that can move back and forth along the radius of the disk. They have central motors that attach to the disk and spin it. They have springs to pop the disk tray out to accept a disk, and rails for the disk tray to slide along.
But within the basic design constraints, there's a lot of variation. Parts are made out of different materials, or take slightly different shapes. They all have the same problems to solve, but they solve them in different ways.
And here are all the bits from those drives! The aluminum and steel will get recycled through Padnos, and the circuit boards will go to Boardsort in Ohio. I'll probably hang on to the various motors and optics assemblies while I learn more about what's in them and how to get them apart. We also got quite a harvest of grommets and steel rods, which I'm sure will come in handy for future craft projects.
I still have the desktop optical drives and floppy drives to go, so next week we should have nice harvest of plastic gear wheels to show off 😂
Recommendation Corner
The recommendation this week is a short skit by comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan about a Civil War ghost with some unfinished business. It's hard to say much more without spoilers, but it's only 6 minutes long, it's very funny, and it makes a lot of good points.
This Week's Nails
You made it to the end of the newsletter, so that means you get to see this week's nails! I went with a metallic sparkly theme to celebrate getting the first shipment of motherboards off to Boardsort for recycling.
Take care of yourselves in all this smoke. If you need help getting an air purifier set up, let us know. If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.
Pre-meme-ium Content
Now that we've got a few people supporting us with premium subscriptions, we wanted to find a way to thank our supporters without putting anything useful behind a paywall. So I've started tacking on a couple of memes to the end of each newsletter! If the paywall feature is working, free subscribers will see one meme below, while paid subscribers will get to see all five. (Note: I'm increasingly sure the paywall feature isn't actually working yet. But it's probably going to start working in a few weeks when I upgrade our hosting plan. So enjoy the free memes in the meantime, and think about whether you might be able to spare $5/month to help keep Montague Commoners going.
If you're living on less than $35k/year, please do not give us money. Just let us know and we'll hook you up with the memes for free.
