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

Driveway Concrete Vandalism

Driveway drain concrete

Having missed the fall driveway paving deadline, we will have a gravel section in the middle of the driveway until next spring. All the water from the garage downspouts and the back yard runs down the driveway, which dumps it directly into the gravel patch and the new retaining wall’s foundation. That means the gravel patch, at least, will become a mud hole, which I take to be a Bad Thing.

So I bandsawed some 4 inch DWV pipe & fittings in half lengthwise, glued them together as a gutter to capture the runoff and divert it into 80 feet of DWV pipe leading to the bottom end of the wall, then filled the half-pipes with gravel to let us drive right over the whole mess. Unfortunately, the top end of the gravel patch has the driveway ending in broken asphalt, Item 4 gravel, fine gravel, and rubble that make it impossible to snug the pipes up against the asphalt. That means the runoff would pretty much vanish before it reached the gutters.

So I excavated just barely enough gravel to ensure a downhill slope from the remaining asphalt, mixed up a random bag of mortar that’s been kicking around in the garage for a few years, and troweled an apron from the asphalt to the half-pipes. Generally I sign my work, but this kludge need last only a few months and I left it to cure.

The next morning I discovered one of the chipmunks felt the work really needed a signature:

Chipmunk tracks in concrete

That’s OK with me…

FWIW, this is why you need Too Many Clamps:

Clamping a half-pipe joint

2011-11-28
Moen Bath Sink Faucet: A “Laying On Of Hands” Repair

Moen faucet parts

The Moen sink faucet in our black bathroom (so named because of its black tile, white trim, and gray floor) began piddling a few days ago, which seemed odd: Moen says it has a good-for-your-lifetime ceramic valve. So I took it apart, extracting an impressive vector of internal parts in the process.

The “notch” that indicates the hot-cold alignment isn’t particularly obvious, but evidently forward corresponds to the usual hot-on-the-left plumbing:

Moen valve cartridge alignment notch

The retainer clip holding that white stop sleeve in place requires a bit of tweaking from a small pointy probe, but after you expose the hole in that notch the clip comes out easily enough:

Moen faucet retainer clip

With all the frippery out of the way, then “Using pliers, pull the cartridge out of the body by the stem”, which simply did not work for me. No matter what, the cartridge body didn’t budge:

Moen faucet cartridge top

There’s nothing about turning / unscrewing the transparent (looks black here) shell around the stem, so I didn’t try.

Putting enough of the parts back together to keep the cartridge from blowing out in my face (even if I can’t remove it, it’ll certainly blow out on its own), the faucet valve worked fine. You’re supposed to turn the gray pivot retainer 1/4 turn beyond hand tight, which compresses a wavy washer under the retainer. The retainer had been quite loose when I dismantled the faucet, which suggests that either it hadn’t been tightened at the factory or had worked itself loose. That would tend to hold the handle up just a bit, perhaps enough to prevent the valve from completely closing.

After snugging that retainer down tight and reassembling everything, the faucet worked perfectly: happy dance!

I removed the nozzle aerator and found a surprising amount of grit for something that’s downstream of the whole-house water filter and softener:

Bath faucet nozzle grit

Cleaned that out and it’s all good again.

2011-11-27
Vanilla Extract: Commercial Variations

This look at the ingredients found in various commercial vanilla extracts (plus their prices) finally pushed me over the edge into brewing up that DIY vanilla extract.

We’ve been using McCormick vanilla forever, mostly because it has the simplest and shortest list of ingredients:

McCormick Vanilla

Nielson-Massey vanilla seemed about the same, although it’s not clear why it needs more sugar than those “vanilla bean extractives”:

Nielsen-Massey Vanilla

Wal-Mart vanilla doesn’t smell like vanilla, even though it has more “extractive” than corn syrup:

Wal-Mart Vanilla

All three extracts have “Pure” on the label, which (according to Wikipedia, anyway) means that they have at least 13.35 ounce of vanilla bean per gallon of extract. I didn’t weigh the three beans in my 8 ounces of hooch, but I suspect they weighed far less than the regulation 0.834 ounce. Next time, for sure, I’ll go for triple strength extract!

Despite that, my DIY hooch has turned brown and smells pretty good…

These full-frame pix used my new close-up lens gizmo; even with some vignetting the results seem perfectly usable. Normally I crop pix down to the central section, so this will be as bad as it gets.

2011-11-24
Basement Safe Humidity

The discussion about drying my silica gel stash prompted me to toss a Hobo datalogger into the safe along with the desiccant bag. We now have enough data to spot a trend:

Basement Safe Humidity – Oct-Nov 2011

Verily, one measurement trumps a thousand opinions: I was totally wrong about the door seal. Either that or the safe’s contents started out a lot wetter than I thought.

The basement humidity runs about 55% RH, pumped down by a dehumidifier in the summer and ambient air in the winter, which (I think) sets the upper limit. Modulo having hygroscopic stuff like paper in the safe, I suppose.

I’ll toss a fresh bag in there, tape over the door crack, and see what happens during the next month.

FWIW, the Onset HOBOware program doesn’t run under Wine and Wine doesn’t support USB hardware anyway, which is one of the few reasons I have a Token Windows Laptop. I’ve set it up to automagically export the data into CSV files, from which this went into OpenOffice 3.2 for a quick look. Surprisingly, HOBOware is a Java program, but evidently written specifically to avoid portability; they have Windows and Mac versions and that’s all. Worse, there’s no way to extract data from the loggers without using that program, because Onset doesn’t document the interface protocol. Enough said.

Memo to Self: measure it!

2011-11-22
DIY Vanilla Extract: The Beginning

DIY Vanilla Extract

Having bought some low-budget Walmart vanilla extract that smells nothing at all like vanilla, I figured it’s time to get serious about this stuff. Recipes for DIY vanilla extract abound on the Internet, but as nearly as I can tell, the basic idea is to put vanilla beans in contact with ethanol, shake occasionally for a couple of months, then enjoy. Uh, by the teaspoonful, that is.

Quite some years ago I discovered that NYS prohibits the sale of grain alcohol, so you must buy stiff vodka to get high-test ethanol. That glass bottle contains the cheapest 160 proof vodka I could find in the waning years of the last millennium; I figured it was likely to have fewer additives around its 80% ethyl alcohol than anything else in the liquor store. After more than a decade on the Basement Laboratory’s Solvents Shelf (I don’t use a lot of ethanol), a dollop in a saucer burns with an ethereal blue flame: it’s in fine shape.

The plastic bottle originally held some weird alien fruity liquid (which, IIRC, I picked up while doing amateur radio duty at a charity event) and has the desirable attribute of a tight sealing lid. It’d be better to use glass and I suppose amber beats clear, but this stuff will spend its entire life in a dark cupboard with all the other spices. Although some recipes call for sterilizing the bottle in boiling water, I figure any bug that can survive 80% ethanol will shrug off hot water… and the vanilla beans probably aren’t all that sterile, anyway.

A cup of neat vodka, three slit-and-chopped vanilla beans, and away we go. It should be ready for the Christmas baking season.

If this works, I’ll get a substantial quantity of vanilla beans from the usual eBay supplier and make some really stiff extract. Two bucks a bean at the local grocery store: ouch.

2011-11-11
Great Northeast October Snowstorm

Our yard accumulated about 14 inches of heavy wet snow that made a mess of the maple trees. Before I could get the snowblower out of the garage, I had to cut up a stack of branches:

Branches at garage

Yes, there really is that much of a slope leading up to the garage; clearing the driveway immediately after every snowstorm is not optional.

Many of the branches in the back yard broke off and simply leaned against the ones still arched over the driveway:

Branches in back yard

The front yard was a mess:

Branches in front yard

In addition to all that, we had branches down beside the house, in the garden, around the beehive, and, in general, everywhere. Obviously, we have too many maples, but they’re what the previous owners planted (or at least didn’t uproot while that was possible).

The generator bridged 25 hours without power to save the refrigerator & freezer contents and keep the house between 55-60 °F. We survived five days with no phone (shrug) or Internet (eeek!); the cell phone was, as usual, useless because the house sits on a local maximum in a shallow valley below line-of-sight from all the surrounding towers.

The last break in the phone & Internet cables occurred just north of us:

Branches on wires

Those branches came from a tree across the road that put down roots on a slab of rock that just didn’t provide enough griptivity:

Tree down on Rt 376

After three days of diligent bow-saw work and mule-mode dragging, we cleared the yards. The back yard clutter went over the cliff toward our bottomlands adjoining the Wappingers Creek and the front yard timber now sits ready for what we hope will be the town’s pickup:

Branches ready for pickup

Our experience was a nuisance, rather than a disaster, unlike that of many folks in the area.

Now it’s time for the annual fall leaf-shredding adventure…

[Update: Turns out the NYS DOT drew the short straw:

NYS DOT crew grinding branches

Took them the better part of 15 minutes; the larger branches nearly stalled that giant chipper. A tip o’ the hard hat!]

2011-11-07
Harbor Freight Bar Clamp Failure

The squeeze handle that tightens the bar clamp cracked exactly where you’d expect: directly across the pivot hole where the miracle engineering plastic thins down to a precarious ridge. The end of the handle is still inside the clamp:

Bar clamp with broken handle

Nothing bonds that plastic, so, in the nature of a quick fix, I cut a steel strap to wrap around the perimeter of the broken section and epoxied the whole mess together:

Reinforced bar clamp handle

That lasted for exactly 2.5 squeezes and then pulled apart; the epoxy doesn’t really have anything to grab.

ABS isn’t a good substitute for engineering plastic, so this will require a bit of CNC work on the Sherline. I’ll probably carve the first one from polycarbonate, just because I have a sheet of the right thickness, but it really cries out for aluminum, doesn’t it?

Why CNC? Well, I’m going to make a handful of handles and get proactive on the other clamps.

My other bar clamps have much heavier sections in that area, so perhaps the folks supplying Harbor Freight could take a hint? Yeah, but the clamp was cheap, which always conflicts with good. On the other paw, I’ve seen exactly this same clamp priced at not cheap elsewhere.

2011-11-04