Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
These Fiskars scissors[Update: they’ve moved to the Gardening section. Try there or there. ] seem to be intended for sewing & quilting, but they work just fine for snipping plastic filament, cutting tape, and severing hangnails…
Fiskars Softouch Scissors
The titanium nitride coating probably doesn’t add much value to the mix, but that’s what they had at JoAnne Fabric when I bought ’em.
Fiskars scissors tip detail
This detail of the tip shows why they’re so great for detail work: each blade ends in a two-way taper to a genuine cutting point. Of course, that means they’ll survive exactly zero falls to the shop’s concrete floor, but they’re fine while they last.
The trick is to sign up for JoAnne sale flyers, which regularly deliver “40% off any one item” discount coupons, then make a targeted shopping expedition. Those coupons account for the green self-healing cutting mat that’s in the background of so many pictures around here, too…
A friend mutters that every time something goes wrong with her house, which (to be fair) isn’t all that often.
However, if you’ve got the itch to fix things, a house will certainly keep you scratching: nearly everything we own has a part or patch from the Basement Laboratory Repair Division!
She has similar sayings about cars, cats, bicycles …
So I finally noticed that the water wasn’t nearly as soft as it used to be, which usually means I forgot to dump a bag of salt in the tank. This time, the water was halfway up the tank, which usually means something’s broken.
The usual cause: crud clogging the filter screen upstream of the venturi that sucks brine out of the tank. The usual fix: rinse the screen.
This time, however, the screen was clean. Pulling the gasket off the nozzle assembly revealed a collection of particles and chunks inside the fluidic channels; this is what the gasket looked like after I sorted everything out.
Original gasket and venturi
The gasket has at least three layers: a stiff red backing, a compliant green middle layer, and a white surface layer with molded channels matching the red nozzle. The two black cylinders are metering plugs with precisely shaped orifices that control the 0.1 and 0.3 gallon/minute brine and rinse flows.
The green and white layers evidently disintegrated into chunks that blocked the nozzle. With no flow through the venturi, the tank could fill until the float valve limited the flow, but the brining step had a very, very low flow and the resin bed eventually ran out of capacity.
I ordered a replacement nozzle and gasket assembly, figuring that Sears (actually, its OEM supplier) might have changed things in a non-compatible way. The old part numbers, which will get you the new equivalents:
Gasket: 7163663
Nozzle + gasket: 7187772
The new parts looked like this:
Replacement venturi and gasket
Surprise! The fancy molded gasket is no more; the replacement is a flat rubber sheet with the appropriate alignment notches and holes. The nozzle assembly might have come out of the same molding machine on the same shift.
I reassembled all the fiddly parts, manually set the softener to its Brine stage, let it suck a few inches of salt water out of the tank, and then returned it to automatic operation. At this point, the water heater is full of hard water and it’ll take a few repetitions of that cycle to get back to normal.
Given the limits of the gasket’s resolution, I’m sure the Batman icon is completely coincidental and sincerely regretted…
This should be obvious, but don’t reach across the build platform of your Thing-O-Matic with the extruder at 215 °C: you might bump the nozzle with the back of your hand.
Scorch mark from TOM nozzle
It never really hurt, but the nozzle tip made a nasty punch mark in the middle of a disk of scorched skin.
Yellow / Light Cyan / Cyan / Light Magenta = 30 ml each
The waste ink container is now a bit more than half full: 90 mm high in a 40 mm diameter cylinder. That works out to 113×103 mm = 113 ml. Given that “high capacity” cartridges for this printer contain 11 ml, I’m looking at 10 cartridges worth of waste ink.
While I was printing handouts for Cabin Fever, the R380 had a brain spasm and announced it didn’t recognize any of its ink cartridges. A power cycle brought it back to its senses and all the continuous-ink cartridges reset themselves to Completely full once again. With another printer, that error message required a complete new set of cartridges, because the printer could (and did!) set bits inside the refill-prevention chips that rendered the cartridges unusable.
After we rearranged the living room, we had a few floor lights in different locations that called for more X10 Appliance Controllers. I’m not a big fan of automated housing, because X10 communication is unreliable with a bullet, but it’s convenient to turn off all the lamps from the bedroom.
Anyhow, the old RCA HC25 X10 Appliance Modules I pulled out of the Big Box o’ X10 Stuff suffered from the usual conflict between compact fluorescent lamps and the “local control” misfeature that’s supposed to let you turn the appliance on by simply flipping the switch. The problem is that a CFL ballast draws a nonlinear trickle of current that the module misinterprets as a switch flip, thus occasionally turning the lamp on shortly after you turn it off.
This has been true since the first compact fluorescent bulbs appeared. The circuitry inside X10 modules hasn’t changed much, at least up until I bought the last round of switches quite some time ago. That’s either a Bad Thing (still a problem) or a Good Thing (everybody knows about it).
The solution (everybody knows about it, just use the obvious keywords) is to cut a jumper on the module’s circuit board that’s obviously placed there for this very reason. In this view, it’s just below the lower-right corner of the fat blue capacitor. If you need confirmation, it’s connected to pin 7 of the only IC on the board.
Snip the wire, move the cut end a little bit, and button the module up again.
Local control jumper cut
Oh, yeah. No user serviceable parts inside is a challenge around here…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 