Story so far: The light circuit is working, so I can simulate a sunrise. The tea-making aspect remains to be seen to.

TL;DR: I drilled into a steel block and put a cartridge heater inside, the block is now a hot plate.

Following from the flaming failure of a first foray into hot plate building, a complete rethink was thunk. Now, I shall simply drill a hole into a steel block and insert the cartridge heater. The heater can do its thing until Tha Block is Hot and then the block can heat a cup of tea for breakfast. Seems reasonable?

The first step is to drill a cartridge heater sized hole in a steel block, that is, drill a cylinder of about 0.5cm diameter and 2.5cm depth. For reference, imagine a standard antibiotic pill in your hand, you know, half red, half yellow capsule full of feel-good, perfectly reasonable to be swallowed whole, as per its design. Now imagine the obtrusively sized, obtusely designed choking hazard that it morphs into the moment it leaves your sight and enters your mouth; that’s about the size of the cartridge heater.

Drilling a hole that size into steel with a hand drill is no routine procedure. Learning the correct method required substantial trawling through the unchartered waters of random forums and subreddits, where each comment further verifies the Big Fish Theory; expert metal workers are exposed as mere novices by increasingly snide remarks of “Um, actually…” that are as lacking in self-awareness as they are in relent – at least until someone mentions Hitler. Unsurprisingly, the omnipresent Mariana Trench of knowledge, YouTube, was also explored. One of the titans of the platform, Gus Johnson, was there to provide his trademark well-founded, rational and at times even cheekily comical interpretation, just as he has done for the trials and tribulations of the working man in America; the toxic lack of empathy that infects the landscape of Google reviews; and the decaying state of our natural world as we stray further from God. The video I speak of, though, is of course “Gus Johnson Sings an Entire Conway Twitty Album”.
Bus croons:

You want a man with a slow hand
. . .
You want somebody who will spend some time,
 Not come and go in a heated rush

This pretty much sums it up. If you use a very high speed, you’ll initially drill through by scraping lots of very fine steel filings away, however, eventually you’ll end up with a thick, impenetrable layer of these filings at the bottom of your hole and all you can do is move them around and get them into a heated rush – blunting your drill bit in the process. What you want to do is keep the rpm low and apply as much pressure as you can downward through the drill bit. You’ll know you’re Doin’ it Right when the steel you’re cutting away starts to slither up the thread of your drill bit as continuous and spiralised serpentine articulations – acquiesced entirely to their charmer.

It really does require you to spend some time with it, baby. The hole I drilled took around 2 hours and it wasn’t light labour either! At first, I tried summoning every ounce of force I could muster from my arms and pushing down on the drill, whose response was to summon the spirit of Laura Les and subject me to the harshly shrill, yet somehow enchanting dissonance of the bit turning in place fruitlessly – thus reminding me that my arms are indeed like very roast-able little cigarettes. Ultimately the only way I could pile enough force behind the cutting edge of the drill bit to make it carve through the steel was to lie myself atop the heel of the drill and push my weight through it. While this was effective, every force has an equal and opposite reaction, and here I am pushing down through my sternum with enough force to continuously carve steel. You’d think with a name like sternum it’d be made of sterner stuff but turns out this process got pretty painful pretty pronto. So, if you ever want to attempt something similar make sure and check the checklist below.

PPE For Drilling Steel:

• Goggles (Fine particles and smoke from burnt lubricating oil are both pretty bad for your eyes.)
• Gloves (Brushing away metal swarf with bare hands is pretty much the exact same as rubbing a cheese grater.)
• Chest Cushion (Place between sternum of driller and heel of drill to avoid bruising your chest the way you did after watching Tarzan for the first time.)

Of course, all that list protects is your body and the many emasculating mistakes made along the way raise the question: Do You Have Ppe for Self-Esteem? Well, personally, I vacillate between immersing myself in music where I can imagine myself as the audacious and brazenly immodest protagonist and lamenting over music where I can think, “well, at least I’m not that guy”. Each the type of music that concerns itself so singularly with one pole of the human experience, disregarding disaffirmations so indiscriminately, that to tell someone you enjoy it is to sully their notion of you with an apprehensive perplexity regarding the lucidity of your perception.
Music to count marbles to for those who don’t get it, music to hide marbles to for those that do.

Anyway, that’s the heating block done, in a very uneventful series of events I coated the heater in thermal paste and shoved it into the hole then turned it on. The block got very hot and all seems good. Onwards.