🐻Will the Ground Hog see his shadow?🤔

Friday in Punxsutawney: A chance of snow showers🌨 before noon. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 25. Chance of precipitation is 40%.

Observations in working with plexiglass / acrylic:

1) 0.08 inch aka 2 mm plexiglass is plenty thick for electronics cases. Relatively cheap, under $12 for a 18×24“ sheet at Lowes.

2) It’s better to spend your time carefully scoring the plexiglass and getting a deep straight groove in the plexiglass prior to snapping. Take your time, apply light but not too hard pressure on the scoring tool.

3) Use a metal square and clamp things down firmly. You don’t want the plexiglass to move while scoring or snapping.

4) Drag the point of the scoring tool over the glass with light pressure at a 45 angle. Use an inexpensive scoring tool, a knife won’t work as well.

5) Repeatly score the edges of the plexiglass on your break line. The score must be deepest here. If your score is insufficient on the edges, you will either end up cracking through plexiglass or getting an uneven break not following your score line.

6) Apply only modest pressure when breaking along the score line. If you can’t snap the plexiglass easily like breaking off a perforated sheet of paper, your score is too shallow along the edges.

7) Focus on getting the edges of your score as deep as possible. This can’t be stressed enough.

8) You can rework a bad break by scoring and breaking off excess material. You can also sand things down. But this is much harder that properly scoring the material in the first place. Plexiglass is hard material, it doesn’t sand down that easy.

9) Acrylic glue isn’t necessary for connecting pieces of plexiglass. You can use superglue with good results. Acrylic glue probably won’t even work that well with score and snap plexiglass due to rough surfaces and gaps and is toxic to use indoors. I might use the acrylic glue later on but for now I’m staying with the much cheaper super glue.

10) Even inexpensive thin plexiglass makes very nice looking cases for electronics. It’s quite easy to score and snap with practice. Once you get better with that you can order colored and tinted plexiglass for more options.

Good morning! 🙉Happy Sunday. 🙇➕Three weeks to Winnie the Pooh Day. Mostly cloudy and 43 degrees in Delmar, NY. ☁There is a west-northwest breeze at 6 mph. The skies will clear around 9 am.

🌷🌷Only 51 days remain until the first day of calendar spring!🌷🌷

Today will be partly sunny, with a high of 45 degrees at 1pm. 14 degrees above normal. 🌞West wind 3 to 6 mph. A year ago, we had cloudy skies with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 37 degrees. The record high of 56 was set in 1916. 9.6 inches of snow fell back in 1897.

The sun will set at 5:04 pm with dusk around 5:34 pm, which is one minute and 18 seconds later than yesterday. At sunset, look for partly clear conditions and 42 degrees.🌅 There will be a calm wind. Today will have 9 hours and 51 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 2 minutes and 15 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be mostly cloudy, with a low of 28 degrees at 6am. 13 degrees above normal. Northwest wind 3 to 5 mph. ☁In 2017, we had mostly cloudy skies. It got down to 25 degrees. The record low of -10 occurred back in 1925.

Like usual, waffles and blueberries for breakfast. Always a good breakfast but maybe a bit intense on the sugar side of things, although st least the sugars in blueberries are natural sugars aka fructose. 🍇☕I lack a blueberry emoji but I bet concord grapes would be good on waffles too. I bet they eat them a lot in Western NY on waffles. They have good concord grapes out there. 

I’ve cut and sanded down the pieces of acrylic plexiglass for my Variable Message Sign. It’s not perfect but it will work. 🔳📟 I’m going to glue with superglue and fill in gaps with hot glue, as things aren’t perfect but pretty good. Too rough though for the acrylic weld. I’ll save that for a future project, especially if I buy the plexiglass pre-cut. I have to research to find an economical option for that. They’re are lots of places that will cut plexiglass to your exact specifications on the internet. 

Once the sun comes out, I will go hiking. Not going to go too far but it should be a pretty nice day. Maybe I should also wash my truck. I should go grocery shopping too. I’m thinking about going to the Hannacroix Preserve although I guess I could go go somewhere else. I’m not sure, I’m chewing it over.🗻 Going to be muddy in a lot of locations but the Hannacroix Preserve usually isn’t that bad bar a few soft spots. 

As previously noted, there are 3 weeks until Winnie the Pooh Day when the sun will be setting at 5:31 pm with dusk at 6:00 pm. 🍯🍯🍯On that day in 2017, we had partly cloudy skies and temperatures between 52 and 18 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 35 degrees. We hit a record high of 63 back in 1981.