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Sunday, November 13, 2016

Bubble level

At my job collegues use this bubble leveler. They had some spares and dropped them on my desk. They know I am a tinkerer and am always interested in all kinds of technical stuf.




This leveler is however small and I immediately had (as always) some wild (weird) ideas. For realising them I needed a larger leveler. So I started thinking on how I could make one myself. The general idea behind it is after all dead simple.






So my first stop (and only one) was at a DIY depot. There I found some clear plastic foodsafe tube. The outer diameter was 10mm and the inner diameter 8mm. So it was a thick tube with thin walls and therefore just what I needed.




I cut about 9 cm of the tube. Then I closed one side of the tube with my glue gun. Then I waited till the glue cooled down.


Next step was to fill the tube with water. I did not fill it totally as I obviously wanted a bubble. Then I  closed the other side with my glue gun.



And presto. It was done.

However the tube was not straight. As you can see it was bended. Now that is not really usefull for a bubble leveler.


To the rescue comes my faithfull Beagle 3D printer. So I printed a frame for it. Now it functioned it just like I wanted it to do.

So it works. But now what.

Well I have some ideas for projects for this. But to make it really usefull the contrast between the bubble and the water is not big enough. So I started experimenting with ink in stead of water. Well that was no success as the ink dried and I ended up with a tube with solid black walls.



So then I used syrup. A real dark syrup and that worked like a charm.

Just make sure that you test in a long term that the fluid you are using will not dry out and you'll have a cheap bubble-level.

Any of you have a clue on what I am going to make with this..........Hint: movement detection.

Till next time.
And have fun.

Luc