Mouse wheel problems

This has nothing to do with foundry work, but.....

Work has been intense beyond words this year, and while I am holding my own so far, I have worn a groove in my right index finger from using the wheel on the mouse, and even with tape and padding, it has become a problem.

I have lots more CAD work to do this year, so I needed a quick and effective solution.
I looked at a joystick mouse, but the reviews generally rated them awkward, and so that would only make something else hurt like carpal tunnel in the wrist.

I was changing out mice the other day (I am wearing out mice), and I noticed that two mice will work at the same time on the same computer.
So I tried using a left and right mouse, and using the left mouse for wheeling, using my left thumb and the mouse at 90 degrees.

It worked pretty well, but I kept leaning on the right mouse button, so I broke off both mouse buttons, and that solved that problem.

Then the laser was shining all over the place, so I opened the mouse (not easy), and cut the wire on the laser.
Now I can use the left mouse anywhere, and can actually put it in my lap or anywhere else where my left arm is in a comfortable position, and I don't have to have both arms reaching out to the table all the time.

The things you have to do to earn a dollar.

No time for foundry work, but if I get caught up next spring, I am going to try and get some engine parts cast.

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Have you considered a roller ball mouse?
Joe

 

I tried a roller ball mouse years ago, and it was too sluggish for CAD work.
I really have to be efficient at CAD work, since I don't have a draftsman.
I hired a temporary draftsman this year, but it took longer to check and correct his work than it did to just do it myself (a lot longer).

I put a cardboard pad on my right index finger, and am using it to push the mouse buttons only, and that is working pretty well.
Pressing and moving the index finger concentrates too much force in one spot.

The wheel on the mouse really needs to be twice as wide, with a flat rubber surface, and it should roll very easily.

I use both hands with CAD work, and have the keyboard programmed for the left hand.
That could present a problem with the dual mouse thing.

I also ordered some rubber finger covers, so that may work too.

I considered hooking a set of mouse buttons to foot pads, and just use the mouse for cursor movement.

It seems crazy, but the clicks per hour determines how much money I make.
Double the clicks per hour, double the money, so you can rest assured that I click the heck out of a mouse, and unfortunately click the heck out of my index finger too.

I tried using the next finger over, but that is not as fast.

Glad to have work this year though.
2008-9 were almost zero, and a lot of firms in town went out of business.

Edit:
The press-and-drag feature of Autocad is probably what is causing a lot of pressure problems.
I use that feature constantly, and can't really work without it.
You press the mouse and hold it down while panning on the drawing.

I notice that I can press and hold down the left mouse wheel, and then move the right mouse to pan.
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very interested if you find a solution. the first link is a neat little accessory that might help. Im seriously considering the fully adjustable gaming mouse from the second link. I gave up gaming completely about 2 years ago, because it was flaring up my carpel tunnel, and ... well like you it was keeping me from making a living . if you find a good solution please share.

thanks in advance

V/r HT1




https://therevisionist.org/reviews/...itis-tendonitis-rsi-repetitive-strain-injury/

 

I looked at mice today at best buy.
They have computer mice, and gaming mice.

The wheel ball was comfortable, but it is the "press-and-drag" feature that is causing the high pressure point problem on the index finger.
I did not see the joystick style mouse, but again, I don't think that would solve the press and drag problem.

The gaming mice did have wide flat wheel surfaces, with tire tread rubber on the wheel, but again, the wheel did not press easily to its click-point.

Seems like a minor problem I know, but I have a lot of money riding on a contract this year that requires a whole lot of CAD/mouse work.

I looked in my mouse box at home, where I keep spare mice that I have purchased in the past, and found a dell mouse with a wide flat wheel with rubber coating.
It feels much better since the wide wheel spreads the load over a much wider area.

I bought some stick on felt padding at the drugstore and tried that on the right index finger.
The felt helped, but it flexed too much.

I cut a piece of clear thin plastic strip off of a packaged item, and put that on the right index finger, and then the felt tape over that.
With the right taper on the end of the plastic, and the right width, I can wear it and still type.

So for press and drag, I can perhaps take apart a mouse, and try and adjust the spring pressure on the wheel.

Another option I tried this morning is putting my second mouse on the floor, and controlling the wheel with my left big toe.
Not bad really, but I am thinking about adding a foot pedal, and using the left mouse on the floor just to hold down the wheel, and then do the regular pan with the right mouse.
This may work.

The things you have to do to earn a dollar.
This is basically a do-or-die trying situation (not to be all alarmist an such).
One way or the other, I am going to meet my deadline next February.
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I tried a lot of various fixes yesterday, tape-on pads, various mice and configurations.
Nothing was really working.
I think I have a solution today.

I have some slip-on rubber finger covers on the way, and will see how those work, but until they arrive......

I put a vinyl glove finger on my index finger, wrapped it with a paper towel infused in epoxy, and let it set with my finger bend at the appropriate angle.
Then added a stick-on pad to smooth things out a bit.
It is thin enough to be semi-flexible, but rigid enough to spread the force out across the entire finger.

Seems to be working like a charm.
Disaster averted for now.

The things you have to do to make a living.

Edit:
I have seen assembly line workers with every finger taped up, and I am glad I don't have to apply as much force as one would when working on an assembly line.









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When I have index finger issues such as an injury from a metal splinter, I switch to the ring finger to operate the mouse wheel and give the index finger a break. It seems to be fairly easy to do. A friend's father used to have the local Tandy dealership and sold Tandy 1000, 2000 and 3000 desktop PC's, so my friend learnt all the early DOS Autocad keyboard command hotkey sequences off by heart and only used the mouse when necessary. So he substituted a lot of the mouse usage with keystrokes, which probably is less helpful to you, Pat as it would be a steep learning curve for the relative gain.

 

I tried that, but it starts to wear on that finger too.

When I started in engineering in 85, everything was hand drawn with vellum and pencil.
Towards the end of the 80's, CAD came out, and I remember the microstation setups, where they build large glass-front rooms with giant workstations, so the clients could walk in and marvel at the new technology.
Before CAD, the only computer we had was an old IBM mainframe that was squirreled away in a remote room, with a troll to run it.
It had about six dumb workstations, and ran Fortran, which I am still quite good with.

When the IBM PC hit, they started developing Autocad, and when the 286 came along, CAD systems began to get regular use.
They hired computer monkeys to run the CAD machines, but they had never taken drafting classes, and so the drawings were horrible looking.
They still needed dedicated high speed graphics accelerator cards, which were about $4,000 per card, in order to get enough speed to do CAD work.

There were no mice with IBM PC's in the beginning.
Mice were only used on MAC's.
There was no Windows either; it was all character-based DOS.
For CAD, you used a digitizer, which was a 12"x12" (or larger) pad with a dedicated multi-button puck that was similar to a mouse.
CAD work plodded along at a rather slow pace back in the day, but it was usable.

After about six months of the engineers trying to work with the computer monkeys, they finally fired the monkeys, and they started training the manual drafting guys how to do CAD.
Even the manual drafting guys had no idea how to make their CAD plots look like the beautiful hand drawings.

Nobody had ever used a personal computer before, and so the draftsman and engineers had to learn DOS, and then learn AutoCAD, and it was quite a learning curve.
There was really no set established ways to do CAD at the time, and so various companies experiments with various techniques.
One company I worked at used two different CAD programs, and so you had to learn two different ways to do every command, depending on what program you were using.
Some of the old CAD programs were terrible, and some of the new CAD programs are still terrible.
Most CAD programs are morphing into 3D, but I still use 2D for most of my work.
I have learned 3D quite well, just to keep up and be able to use it effectively.

In the early 90's, I started learning how to do Autocad, and discovered that it was much faster to do my work directly on the screen in CAD instead of using a red pen and marking up plots, giving them to a CAD draftman, having the draftsman introduce lots of random errors, checking a plot to root out all the errors, have the CAD draftsman correct the errors, and introduce more errors, or use a previous file version and re-introduce old errors, etc.

We had sneakernet with floppy disks until about 1994.

Plots were made with the old style pen plotters, and the pens would dry up generally when the plot was almost complete, thus ruining the drawing.
Plots were often a 45 minute affair, and were a huge bottleneck.
There was no such thing as laser or inkjet plotters back then, it was all pen and ink arrangements.

And CAD software was full of bugs, and lockups were common.
There were regular software releases to fix bugs.

Fast forward to 2004, inkjet printers had become reliable, fast, and with high resolution.
Computers and software were infinitely better and faster.
The digitizer pads had been tossed in the dumpster.
Windows was on all computers.
Memory was no longer a limiting factor in CAD work, nor was processor speed for the most part, at least with 2D work.

I use the right hand for the mouse, and the left hand on the keyboard, with pre-programmed commands on the keyboard.
So I basically thrash the keyboard and mouse, and may have a thousand or more keystrokes per hour.
I do that for perhaps 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and I wear out mice (the keyboards hold up pretty well).

I have never counted keyboard and mouse clicks per hour, but I would guess it is a high number.

But as I mentioned before, keystrokes and mouse clicks directly translate into money, and the higher the clicks, the more money you can make.
Being able to do efficient CAD work is everything, and everything is pre-programmed to the hilt to remove any possible delays.

And thus the finger problem.
I have been doing heavy CAD work since 2003 (all my own company CAD work), so I feel lucky my fingers/hands have lasted this long.

My brother just retired from a major shipping corporation as a software engineer, and he had severe carpal tunnel problems, and had to use custom split keyboard, special software, etc.
I don't have carpal, so that is a great thing.

When I got out high school, I worked in a custom van shop, and there was a lot of hand work with fabric, carpet, contact cement, etc.
I remember taping my fingers every day, and having to slow down because my fingernails were pulling out of the skin, and wearing off faster than they could grow.

CAD work beats doing hard labor.
I have air conditioning, music, food and water, a comfortable chair, a foundry forum to blog on, etc.
Ergonomics is critical to avoid repetitive motion problems though, and I go to great lengths to get into and stay in a comfortable position when working.

Long story long.......I think the finger cover is going to work.

Edit:
And if that blog was not long enough....
When I started in engineering in about 1980, the university had an IBM mainframe with punch cards and a line printer.

No screens, no keyboards, no mice, just a big stack of cards and a line printer.
One stack of cards per program.
One set of data cards had to be punched (in the punching machine, which did have a keyboard) for each set of data to be run.

If you dropped your card stack, it may take a while to get it back in order.
Bend a card and the cards would jam and start flying out of the card reader all over the room.

Fortran reined supreme, and took us to the moon and back.
The saying is "Fortran is dead; long live Fortran".
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Pat, have you seen or tried a 5 button mouse? They have an extra button on the left and right sides of the mouse, and they should be programmable as to function. I know I've seen and used one, but it was way before I started using CAD.
Thou I was a desktop support tech for over 20 years, I didn't successfully learn to use CAD until4 0r 5 years after I retired in 2012. Never did learn to type efficiently. Still use the 'hunt and peck' method.

Edit: I see the 5 button mouse is AKA as a Gaming mouse, so you probably have tried one.

 

Chuck-

I saw some multi-button mice, and while some of them felt pretty good, they did not solve the press-and-drag problem I am having.
I am holding my own with the finger protector, although it slows down typing a bit.

The finger protector brings out the fact that the nerve endings in the finger give feedback about the shape of what you are touching, as well as feedback about how hard you are pressing.
With the finger protector on, it is tricky to tell if I am pressing on the wheel or on the mouse button.

I did get a couple of drawings completed in CAD last night, so I am glad to be able to move forward again without further finger damage.
I have a project due Monday, and then continuing work after that for another 6 months, so I need to be able to complete that work without further damage to the finger.
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