I am not sure where y’all evolved, but you skipped a few thousand years and a whole bunch of sharpened sticks.

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.

I used to take failed drives while they were powered on and kinda snap them really with a fast twisting motion in an attempt to get the arm to move or get the platters spinning.

It never worked.

Did you get bad sectors? Weird things can absolutely happen but having sectors marked as bad is on the exceptional side of weird.

Maybe? Bad cables are a thing, so it’s something to be aware of. USB latency, in rare cases, can cause problems but not so much in this application.

I haven’t looked into the exact ways that bad sectors are detected, but it probably hasn’t changed too much over the years. Needless to say, info here is just approximate.

However, marking a sector as bad generally happens at the firmware/controller level. I am guessing that a write is quickly followed by a verification, and if the controller sees an error, it will just remap that particular sector. If HDDs use any kind of parity checks per sector, a write test may not be needed.

Tools like CHKDSK likely step through each sector manually and perform read tests, or just tells the controller to perform whatever test it does on each sector.

OS level interference or bad cables are unlikely to cause the controller to mark a sector as bad, is my point. Now, if bad data gets written to disk because of a bad cable, the controller shouldn’t care. It just sees data and writes data. (That would be rare as well, but possible.)

What you will see is latency. USB can be magnitudes slower than SATA. Buffers and wait states are causing this because of the speed differences. This latency isn’t going to cause physical problems though.

My overall point is that there are several independent software and firmware layers that need to be completely broken for a SATA drive to erroneously mark a sector as bad due to a slow conversion cable. Sure, it could happen and that is why we have software that can attempt to repair bad sectors.

Tin the wire and the pin first and then touch the iron to them both quickly. They should stick fairly well without needing to add additional solder. Also, like someone else mentioned, flux can help quite a bit. (Maybe even a cupped soldering iron tip might be useful, depending on the situation.)

Learning how to solder SMD components will get you extremely familiar with how solder behaves at that scale. Let’s just say it’s significantly different than just doing basic wires and THT.

(Well, the solder doesn’t really act different, but at smaller scales it looks like it does.)

Well, that spider is in for a hell of a ride.

Absolutely! You just have to ditch those silly luxuries like food and shelter. You could even start working 80 hour weeks in hopes of getting passed over for that promotion again. Until then, you can just dream about how that extra $100 a month could possibly bring the total time down to 9,989 years.

General purpose printing will just be a filler, of sorts, and I can basically do that in my sleep. The only goal of that is to utilize equipment that would otherwise be idle.

The 3D scanning and reverse engineering is going to be the main focus but decent paying jobs will likely be sporadic for a while. The main function of the printers will be to prototype as to allow clients to test fit designs before they are finalized with proper materials.

When it comes to mold making, that is probably going to be part of what I do. However, that is its own science and takes a ton of experience to make viable commercial molds. (Simple molds are probably the only thing I could do at this point.)

Still, those are some good ideas so thanks.

Add more garlic and you’ll be fine.

For starters, I have a Prusa printer, Moose 3D scanner and a full license for Fusion 360, a small custom built CNC and a good selection of specialty tools.

If needed, I can revert to photogrammetry for capturing high detail on small parts. (Probably within 15um/.5 thou? I need to test the limits of what I can actually do before I say for certain…)

I can scale printing super fast and am lucky enough to have a Microcenter near me so I can buy more printers and filament in a hurry. (Now that I think about it, I’ll probably order a resin printer this evening. It’ll be useful for my own projects where I need to duplicate some injection molded parts.)

For now, I am going to let the jobs determine the scale of my operation and how I invest in additional equipment. Thankfully, I am decent enough at the mechanical aspects of this stuff to handle issues fairly quick.

But yeah, I already have a few thousand dollars in tools, assorted parts and filaments. It’s the odd tools I have that give me a good starting advantage, me thinks. (Nobody else I know has a full set of pin gauges, as an odd example. My electronic component and fastener selection is also fairly substantial.)

Honestly, it’s time to get an ROI from all of my own, personal projects that I have made substantial investments in over the years.

If there is a major pitfall for me, it’s the numbers bit. While proper accounting could resolve any tax issues before they happen, I’ll play it safe and probably also put back +20% extra for taxes, at least for the first few years. Thanks for the info!

Thanks for the recommendation and I just ordered a copy. (Used/$17 after tax from Amazon if anyone else was curious.)

Many instances have already adopted the lemming as a mascot, like my home instance:

Still though, you do you. I got no complaints about what people want to call things. ;)

*Lemmings. (I was going to use that as an answer to your post, but someone learning something new never gets me even the slightest bit miffed.)

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Most scam products like “power saver” plug-in modules for your home, fake ODB2 gas saver modules for cars or those little stickers for cell phones that are sold as “antenna boosters”. Also, anything that is marketed as a “detox” product will piss me off.

All of those products are actively being sold on Amazon, EBay and at some other major retailers or in malls. They are openly sold because people refuse to learn that magic does not exist.

Please. Stop buying these things.

There was a story a while ago about how these pictures were staged and designed to show the muskrat in the worst ways possible. It was basically super cheap publicity.

This post is an example of how these pictures propagate and keep that goat a household name.

Most anything can be if you try hard enough.

This guy was the real killer. The new RMcD is just the cover story.

Medvedev is just your average town drunk so he’ll probably be declaring war on pigeons soon enough, as well.

My office is in my basement. My cats love the idea though!