One of the drawbacks of crafting in an outside shed without air conditioning in north-eastern Arizona weather in August in the middle of the afternoon, is the simple fact that heatstroke can easily creep up on you while you shrug it off as simple fatigue.
I was trying to indicate my vise, so I woke up early in the morning to do it. The vise was way out of alignment, and I will document how I found that out and what I did to cure that problem, in a later article. I’m still only halfway there.
I had taken the sensible precaution of going back in the house frequently to get fresh ice cold water, and I had the fans in the shed full blast.
But still, as it started getting on to noon, the shed simply got hotter and I was beginning to notice. I thought I was feeling all right, and so I still wanted to push on, not wanting to let a simple little errand like indicating a vise remain undone. But over the next hour my thoughts started to get fuzzier, no matter how much extra water I was drinking.
I decided to call it an afternoon when I noticed that my Z axis motor was starting to skip even though I was commanding continual movement via the computer. I felt all three of my motors, and the Z axis especially was nearly too hot to touch. Evidently that motor was unable to dissipate the power I was putting through it because of the ambient temperature inside the shed.
So I thought…. okay, maybe discretion is the better part of valor… I’ll try again either after dinner or maybe even tomorrow. And so I shut down the shed for the time being.
And so my lesson learned for the day is this: heat can be equally hard on the electronic CPU as well as the crafter’s CPU, but in different ways. If one is complaining the other will soon follow.
