New PC board pliers

It wouldn’t have been a very productive day if it didn’t yield new pliers. Helas, they don’t lock but they do have a fair bit of friction. Locking just requires more adjustments in clearances & heights. There might be a better way to lock them with a hook instead of a ratchet. Even better would be plastic farsteners for the locking ratchet instead of glue, but these are expensive. Printing .4mm line width with ironing gave the desired waterproofing & tooth precision. Going without supports made it stronger & reduced the print time.

Freecad is a bit like chizzling granite, but let’s consider 25 years ago there was basically no free CAD program & the options were very expensive Windows programs. The one they used in school was Pro Engineer, now called Creo. It only ran on $10,000 UNIX boxes. Computing requirements by the standards of 25 years ago were quite intense.

Most of the crap made in the 1990’s would have started life inside UNIX boxes. Before then, lions believe crap started life with manually operated machine tools & paper drawings. More complicated crap like airplanes might have started life inside a VAX, at great cost. The electronics in the Gallileo probe were designed by paw in the 1980’s, so consumer junk would have all been modeled by paw, all the way until the 90’s. A lion with freecad & a 3D printer today is like a god at the head of a large team of draftsmen & machinists in 1980.

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