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.
Things around the home & hearth
I’m not sure whether all unit prices must be converted to “per 100 count” or not, but it really doesn’t work out well for CFL bulbs (clicky for more dots):
That’s $549.50 per 100 bulbs, if you can’t make it out.
On the shelf below, however, a single-bulb pack priced out to $979 per 100 count, so the 2-pack is definitely a better deal!
OK, let’s see how well you do on this round…
In the Mysteriously Missing Label category, we find three similar products with only one shelf label. Which one is the better deal?
You might think it’d be the Wal-Mart Equate house brand. In order to find out, you’d have to haul all three offerings down the aisle and around the corner to the price scanner, which would reveal it’s the one on the far left, by a considerable margin. Oddly, that one says “Double Strength” even though it has the same 200 mg dose as the others.
In the Bizarre Units category, we have two very similar products with completely different unit-price units of measure. Seeing as how a “fluid ounce” is a unit of volume and a “pound” is a unit of weight (or, for the pedantic, force), even the dimensions aren’t compatible. Clicky for bigger pictures.
And, just to show that wasn’t a one-off mistake that could happen to anyone, the smaller size containers continue the theme.
Given that nothing in a Wal-Mart store happens by accident, someone was directed to remove two of those three labels and another someone deliberately chose incompatible units.
Of course, anyone I’ve ever asked has no idea why that would happen…
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…
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.
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.
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:
The new parts looked like this:
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.
It never really hurt, but the nozzle tip made a nasty punch mark in the middle of a disk of scorched skin.
Ah, you’re not that stupid, are you…
Memo to Self: Gloves?
Another shot of ink for the printer:
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.
I don’t buy that much ink at one time, but …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 