The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Home Ec

Things around the home & hearth

Shower Faucet Handle Tightening

Some years back I replaced the shower stall faucets; they’d lasted about half a century, which is good enough. The new faucets were American Standard Cadet/Colony (their choice of name, the current Colony valves seem similar) with a nice, smooth exterior. Of late, both handles had become slightly loose and I finally got around to tightening them.

Shower faucet valve stem

The handle setscrews accept a 5/64 inch hex key and pop easily off the stems, revealing the splined plastic (noncorrosive!) mount on the valve stem. The Philips screw in that is what’s loose and allows the whole handle to wiggle just a bit; tightening the setscrew doesn’t help.

Of course, tightening the screw in the cold water stem tends to open the valve, so you must firmly wedge the splined mount. I’m sure there’s a special wrench for that, but I just held it tightly; next time I’ll try a strap wrench.

One would ordinarily dose the screws with threadlocker, so as to never have to endure this dance again, but these screws have coarse threads that engage another plastic doodad that engages two wings on the splined mount. So I guess I must retighten them twice a decade or so.

The handle interiors sport a bit of corrosion (which does not respond to vinegar, so it’s not hard water mineralization), but nothing terrible. The setscrew, mirabile dictu, seems to be stainless steel…

Shower faucet handle – splines

2011-09-28
Corelle Fragments

I fumble-fingered a plate, it fell between my tummy and the counter, and hit the floor edge-on. There’s a lot of energy stored in that stretched-~~glass~~ ceramic layer! [Update: The glass is under compression.]

Shattered Corelle plate on floor

The fragments tend to be slivers rather than chunks, all with better-than-razor-sharp edges:

Corelle slivers

A bit more detail on Corelle in that post…

2011-09-27
Toyota Sienna Bank 1 Oxygen Sensor: Replacement Thereof

So there we were, on our way to the Dutchess County Fair when I noticed the Check Engine light glowing beyond my right hand on the dashboard. We decided to not stop at the fair, drove through Rhinebeck, and returned home without turning the engine off.

The last time that light came on, my Shop Assistant and I were on our way to Cabin Fever in York PA one Friday afternoon in mid-January. The Mass Air Flow Sensor had just failed, rendering the car un-driveable: the engine ran so poorly we barely got off I-81 to drift into a parking lot. Although the local Toyota dealer was just across the road, I replaced that sensor on Monday morning in the Autozone parking lot, half a mile down the road, at 19 °F in a stiff wind with inadequate tools; said Toyota dealer being useless like tits on a bull during the entire weekend.

After the obligatory research, I put the van up on jack stands, crawled underneath, and discovered that the Bank 1 Oxygen Sensor lies behind & below the transverse-and-rotated engine, directly above and front of the chassis cross-support strut, where it cannot be seen or touched from any position. That’s why there are no pictures: there was no room for a camera and nothing to see.

I had to buy a 3/8 inch breaker bar, as the sensor position lacked clearance for a socket wrench, a U-joint, a T-handle, or a step-down adapter from my 1/2 breaker bar behind the special 22 mm Oxygen Sensor Socket. I eventually got the sensor loose and unscrewed it one painful eighth of a turn at a time, with the exhaust pipe preventing a full 1/4 turn, removing and reseating the breaker bar with my fingertips for every single one of those increments.

I ~~deleted~~ all over Toyota’s ~~censored~~ for quite some time thereafter…

It’s been a couple of weeks, the Check Engine light remains off, and I hereby declare victory.

2011-09-20
Silica Gel Drying

So it’s time for the whole pile of silica gel to go into the oven. The various packages suggested something around 12 hours at about 250 °F, so I set the oven timer for 11:59 and let it cook overnight:

Assorted Silica Gels

The granules in the trays go into sealed glass jars, where they will remain dry until needed. The assorted beads & kibble in the plates get bagged up and go in the fireproof safe along with the big bag in the front, where they ought to be good for maybe half a year. It’s a new safe, so we’ll see how that works out; I tucked a note with the weights inside the safe.

I found a “sealed” plastic bucket of assorted packages that I’d dried and weighed a decade ago and then lost in the back of the shelf. It had gained 2 ounces, but the packages have rotted out and the beads weren’t in good shape; they were the consumer-grade bags that aren’t intended to be dried and reused.

2011-09-14
Too Many Deer: Consequences

Fawn eating kiwi leaves

The three pregnant does we’ve seen this season produced two pairs of twins and one set of triplets. That’s just for the does crossing our yard; we’ve seen many others around the area. The fawns are, of course, insufferably cute, but the deer have eaten everything growing on the forest floor, eaten all the tree leaves within reach, and are now working on vegetation that deer don’t normally eat.

Such as, for example, Mary’s long-suffering kiwi plants by the garden and various distasteful flowers in front of the house.

One doe maimed her starboard foreleg in an automobile collision; she was hobbling around for about a week before vanishing. Fawns, who don’t come out of the oven knowing that automobiles make fearsome predators, tend to die young; three of the seven have died on the road within walking distance of the house in the last two months.

Dead fawn at Deer Crossing sign

We recently heard a sharp bang! bang! out front, shortly followed by a police car accelerating along the road. It turns out the officer dispatched this fawn with two shots below the left ear; I think they carry a special .22 caliber gun for this very purpose. No, the fawn wasn’t standing around waiting to be shot; it had just starred in Yet Another car-on-deer collision.

This, according to the local deer huggers, is a much more desirable outcome than harvesting surplus deer and eating them. I haven’t noticed any deer huggers volunteering to pay for damages; that seems to be an externality to them.

A billboard up the road demonstrates their total lack of comprehension: a pastoral scene showing a buck (with a full rack) nuzzling a fawn. Pop quiz: who wrote that book? Bonus: how much interest do actual bucks display in their offspring at any time?

A previous rant on this subject is there.

2011-09-10
New Clamp Pads: FAIL

Well, that didn’t work quite right…

Dislocated clamp pads

I’d waited for a few days for the silicone to cure, then put the clamps back in their home. When I went to use them, the pads were firmly affixed to the plate. Evidently, the copper-loaded silicone gasket compound takes a few days longer than forever to cure, which is not what I gathered from reading the label.

It may well be that adhesive has aged out, because when I went to try it again, the first half-inch inside the tube had turned into solid gum. Yes, it cures inside the tube and not outside.

Other than that, it seems like good stuff; I may pick up another tube and give it a second chance. Who knows? It might be useful in a plastic extruder or something like that.

2011-09-04
Casio EX-Z850 Camera Buttons Repaired!

As described there, the buttons on the back of my pocket camera stopped working, but the obvious laying-on-of-hands repair (i.e., wiggling the cables) didn’t improve things. I later discovered out that two other buttons on the side that didn’t go through the same flex cable were also dead, which suggested that the common failure was on the CPU board deep inside the camera. I gave it to my Shop Assistant with some handwaving about how she could maybe fix it by delving deep inside, tracing the cables, and doing some jiggling: if she could fix it, she could have it.

The first step was to take both covers off, which required a Philips 00 bit:

EX-Z850 front cover removed

Then the side plate comes off, which requires maneuvering the spring-loaded battery latch out of its recess, at which point the lug for the carry strap will fall out:

EX-Z850 battery latch and carrying lug

En passant, we discovered why the clock dies while changing the battery pack. It seems the miniature rechargeable lithium (?) NiMH (?) cell has rotted out:

EX-Z850 internal battery corrosion

Fortunately, it charges in a cradle, so the main battery can remain in place indefinitely. We’ll replace that thing at some point.

The CPU board has two flex cable connectors on the front surface and two on the back. My Shop Assistant released the clamps, removed the cables, wiped down the contacts with DeoxIT Red, gave it a test run with the covers off, and came bounding up the stairs as happy as I’ve ever seen her: the camera worked perfectly again!

Not being used to these things, though, she managed to crack one of the side latches on the far connector. I’ll admit to doing exactly the same thing, so I knew how to fix it: a dab of acrylic adhesive holds the fragment in place with a bit of springiness to hold the latch down.

EX-Z850 connector repair

The connector in question comes from the flash control board, to which those other two buttons (Ex and Drive mode) connect. The inside of the camera is a maze of connections, so I guess that was the simplest way to get the conductors through the body.

She reassembled the camera and it continued to work; we declared the job a complete success.

Shortly after that, I promoted her from Shop Assistant to Larval Engineer, First Instar, and we installed her in her new socket at college, where that camera should come in handy for something.

I think she’ll ace the Freshman Engineering Practicum, wherein her compadres will learn how to solder components to circuit boards, use multimeters & oscilloscopes & other instruments, and generally survive in a laboratory. Maybe she can wrangle a job as a Lab Assistant?

2011-09-03