Painting Chrome Car Interior Trim - Toyota Highlander

Some people may wonder why anyone would want to paint the nice shiny chrome car interior a flat black color. This seems like a really odd thing to do but the next time you are driving and the sun is glaring, blinding you from all directions, the answer will become obvious. For some reason I think that I am especially sensitive to this particularly when the glare is coming from inside my own car - it drives me nuts!
  
I decided to do something about the blinding light and paint some of the annoying shiny chrome in my Toyota Highlander a nice soothing flat black. This might seem like an easy thing to do but painting interior car trim chrome isn't that easy. First of all you have to find out if it's "real chrome" as in real metal or is it the fake plastic chrome that is so popular in cars these days. In this specific case I'm interested in painting the chrome cup holder trim in the center console of my Highlander. It turns out that these are real metal chrome that is over-molded onto fake plastic looking chrome.
 

2009 Toyota Highlander Center Console Cup Holder Trim

Here are the cup holders that I am talking about with one removed and flipped over so you can see it. These just snap in place and with a little careful prying they come right out. I think that Toyota used real metal here because of the wear they see with people putting cups, cans, bottles, spare change, ammo, cell phones and everything else in this convenient location.

Schlieren with Anamorphic Lens and Blue LED

I am still really busy this last week but I managed to try something that I was wondering about. Specifically I wanted to try using an anamorphic lens with the Schlieren parabolic mirror setup to see if it increased the resolution. As I mentioned already I have been really busy so I only had time to build a lens and give it a quick try. The results were interesting but not quite what I wanted. I think that with more tinkering around I could make it work.
 

Schlieren of candle with anamorphic lens and blue light source

Another thing that I also wanted to try again was using a blue LED instead of a white one. I gave this a try back when I was using a convex lens instead of a parabolic mirror to reduce / eliminate chromatic aberrations. It didn't help so I switched to the parabolic mirror.

Another Cryptographic Idea (continuing a thought)

Another idea and this one starts back with another post that I did a long time ago. It's a short one and you can find it HERE. What I was writing about back in that post relates to multiplication with a prime modulus and how the numbers you get are all the same, just in a mixed up order. For a quick example below is what I am talking about:

     1   2   3   4

1   1   2   3   4

2   2   4   1   3

3   3   1   4   2

4   4   3   2   1

The above little chart is a multiplication table mod 5. The numbers in orange are the numbers that are being multiplied mod 5 and the numbers below them are the results of the multiplication. So if you look at the green 4 in the table it's obliviously the result of 2 x 2 mod 5. If you look at the green 1 right next to it , it's the result of 2 x 3 mod 5. The interesting thing (to me anyway) is that if you look at the chart it's all the same numbers just in a different order.

Back when I wrote the original post about this I didn't have time to figure out anything to do with that but now I think that I have.
  
As long as the multiplication table is built using multiplication mod a prime number the table will never have the same number twice in any row or any column. That doesn't happen if the table is made using a non-prime modulus. To see what I mean go to THIS site and scroll down to the cool interactive  chart they have. You can select it to be a multiplication chart and change the modulus to anything you like.
  
The idea would be to use this to create cryptographic diffusion in blocks of data. Maybe start with something like 8 bytes of data and multiply each one by another, incrementing one of them with each multiplication. Here is a nifty and colorful picture to help explain what I am talking about. Try changing the modulus from a prime number like 11 to a non-prime like 10 and see what happens.

Modular Multiplication with Rotation (shifts)

A new Lathe Video

This has been a very busy week for me and I have not had a lot of time to be working in the garage. One thing that I did manage to do was make a video about how my Homemade Wood Lath is put together. One unfortunate thing that I noticed was the day after that I put up the video on Youtube someone copied it to another site and claimed as their own work. I did put my blog address in the video but they cut that part out! Dirty thieves!
 

  
Click below to see more with some links to other lathe stuff!