Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
I’m sure they have more different versions of these things than anyone can count, but when I unscrewed the kitchen sink aerator, this is what I found inside.
The yellow plastic filter actually has two parts, held together by a minuscule clickstop on the central post. You can pry the whole thing off the main body with your thumbnail or, as in the photo, just pop the top screen off.
Rinse the grit off the screen, snap it back together, screw everything back onto the spout. Done!
It’s amazing how much grit accumulates downstream of the whole-house water filter. On the other paw, having just replaced the water heater, I’m not that amazed.
Once again, the faucet O-ring seals are leaking. This happens about every two years, perhaps due to mineral buildup in the spout body despite the water softener. Fortunately, it’s a dribble rather than a spurt, so it’s not an emergency.
This is a Home Depot (or was it Lowe’s?) faucet, but they do not stock repair parts. Go to FaucetDirect.com, order these parts:
060366-0070A SPOUT SEAL KIT (on the main column)
060343-0070A SPACER WITH O-RINGS (below the valve cartridge)
030126-0070A BUTTON AND SCREW KIT (if you booger the button)
Popping off the button
Of course, order two or three of each, because FD has punitive shipping rates. Ten bucks for a few envelopes of O-rings? Sheesh… but the last time I tried to get ’em locally, they were No Stock. If I’ve got to wait around, I’ll have ’em delivered to my door.
[Update: that comment suggests you can now get ’em from Amazon.com]
The first puzzle is how to get the faucet apart. After making a mess of it the first time, it turns out you poke a small flat screwdriver inside the handle and pop the red-blue button out. It’s held on by two small tabs, one on each side, and if you can just push one then it’ll ease right out. It is not a screw head, despite the recessed slot down the middle.
Poke a 3/32″ hex key in the hole, back out the setscrew a few more turns than you think it takes, pull the handle off.
The plastic cap retainer has two arms holding the escutcheon ring in place. Push inward, remove the escutcheon. The retainer is probably hopelessly jammed into the top of the faucet spout, so if it doesn’t come out, that’s OK.
Loosen the three screws holding down the valve cartridge, pull it straight up and out. You did turn the water off first, right? Remove the plastic spacer plate and three O-rings below it if you can; the plate may not fit through the retainer.
Faucet column
Now, get comfortable on the sink. Pull-and-twist the spout straight up with far more force than you think necessary. It will suddenly fly off and bloosh the water that’s been standing in the faucet column all over the place.
You’re left with a rather grody column and the two offending O-rings. Note the orientation of the silver flange ring at the bottom and the lower white plastic bearing ring. There may be three O-rings stuck to the top surface; they belong inside the spacer plate.
Remove all that hardware and scrub the grodosity off the column.
Hint: if you’re weak of stomach, never look inside your drinking water fixtures, because you’ll never drink tap water again.
I generally soak the spout in vinegar for a bit, scrub it out with a toothbrush, ease the remaining deposits off with a small screwdriver, then scrub the whole thing down with a ScotchBrite pad.
I apply a very very very thin layer of silicone lubricant to the bearing surfaces inside the column, which makes the next step possible.
Put the flange ring, the new O-rings, and plastic bearing rings in place, then slide the spout assembly straight down over the column until it bottoms out with a thump.
Install the new spacer plate & its O-rings, then reassemble all the other doodads in reverse order, turn on the water, and you’re done.
Then forget all the crud you saw in there that you couldn’t clean out.
Surprisingly, the flashlight holding these cells wasn’t damaged.
Judging from the position of the switch, my mother tried to turn the thing on, it didn’t light up, and she just dumped it back in the drawer. Time passed, corrosion never sleeps, and the weak link (fortunately, between the two cells) let the alkaline nastiness out.
Just refilled the continuous-flow ink tanks on my Epson R380 for the first time this year.
In milliliters:
Yellow 35
Light Magenta 40
Magenta 40
Light Cyan 40
Cyan 40
Black 50
Done in that order, the whole process requires only three syringe cleanings.
I haven’t checked lately, but the last time I worked it out, printer ink cost $1.80/ml. Let’s call it $2 nowadays, which means I just squirted nigh onto 500 bucks worth of ink into those tanks.
Much of that seems to go into head cleaning, as I don’t print that many photo-quality images on it. Nevertheless, they don’t charge you any less for ink that winds up in the diaper inside the printer.
I don’t keep track of the ink going into the refillable tanks on my Canon S630, but it’s the same order of magnitude. I have four trios of color tanks and six black tanks for that printer and refill them all when the last set runs low. I’ve been doing that for years with no printhead issues.
Sooo, for not spending a kilobuck a year on ink cartridges, I’m willing to spend 100 bucks for bulk ink, undergo some hassle, and endure the occasional oddly colored thumb…
For reasons that shouldn’t require the least bit of explanation by now, I had to dismantle(*) an old 2-D-cell Maglite. The operative word here is old, because you can find plenty of instructions & pix telling you how to dismantle the newer (post-2001, evidently), cheapnified Maglites. Mine dates back to the early days.
Unlike new(er) Maglites, the switch assembly in this one comes out through the front. An aluminum retaining nut holds it in place, as shown in the first picture. You’ll find directions telling you to unscrew the nut by jamming a pair of needle-nose pliers into the holes, but that’s not how it’s done.
The job calls for a pin wrench!
Measuring the dimensions is no BFD after you’ve got the damned thing apart, but I didn’t have that luxury. Given this was an American product from back in the Olde Days, I assumed everything was denominated in inches, which turned out to be close enough.
Pin Wrench Dimensions
The “Max” dimensions at the bottom are the actual ID measurements from the housing after disassembly, using telescoping gages. I made the wrench to the dimensions on the line just above and they worked fine.
Believe it or not, I found a steel cylinder in my scrap heap that was just exactly what I needed, right down to the 7/8″ bore in the middle. Not only that, it was free-machining steel. Whew!
The inner bore must clear the brass screw head sticking out of the lamp tower in the middle (which rides in a slot as part of the sliding focus mechanism). Once you’ve extricated the switch assembly, you remove that screw with a 2 mm (so much for hard inch dimensions) hex key. If you’re desperate, you can probably worry the screw out by goobering it with the aforementioned needle-nose pliers; it has an ordinary right-hand thread.
I turned the cylinder down in the lathe, then drilled the pin holes. That’s a mistake: the outside edge of the pins is exactly even with the OD of the wrench nose. If you do this, clean up the stock OD & face the ends to get a nice cylinder, drill the pin holes, then turn down the barrel clearance and nose. It need not be perfectly concentric, so stop worrying.
Pin Wrench Drill Clamping
I did the drilling using manual CNC on the Sherline mill, mostly because that’s the only way I could poke the holes in the right spots. The mill doesn’t have a lot of vertical headroom, so I clamped the wrench directly to the table and touched off the X and Y axes to put the origin in the center.
I got it all clamped down, removed the right-hand clamp to touch off on the +X side, then re-clamped it.
Drilling Pin Wrench
Center drill to fix the hole location. Drill 1/8″ about 0.250 deep: 3000 rpm, 10 ipm feed, use a little cutting lube. Do those both in sequence at each hole.
I sliced two overly long stubs from some 1/8″ drill rod with a Dremel cutoff wheel, dabbed JB Weld in the holes, and poked them in. The next morning I sliced them down to about the right length, cleaned up the ends with a file, broke the edges, and the wrench was good to go. The pin length in the drawing was what I’d have used if I could have measured the holes before taking it apart.
The pins were actually on the long side of 60 mils, just an itsy too much to keep the wrench flat on the nut. The next picture shows some gouging on one of the holes, due entirely to not engaging the wrench quite enough at first.
Pin Wrench and Maglite Retaining Nut
I thought about putting flats on the wrench, but simply grabbed it in the bench vise, swallowed it with the flashlight, engaged pins with holes, leaned into the wrench, and unscrewed the ring. It took a lot more force to get those threads turning than I expected, but the ring eventually spun out easily. Right-hand threads, of course; obvious after the fact.
Before you can remove the switch assembly, you must pry off the rubber switch cover, stick that 2 mm hex wrench down the hole thus revealed, and unscrew the setscrew ‘way down inside there. That backs the setscrew out of a recess in the housing that makes electrical contact with the negative end of the bottom D cell. Do that before you remove the ring, lest you forget.
Switch Housing and Lamp Tower Parts
Surprisingly, the blue plastic switch housing seems to be slightly soluble in potassium hydroxide. Who knew?
With the switch assembly out, you (well, I) can proceed to beat the corroded cells out by chucking the housing in the lathe (it exactly seats on the three-jaw chuck’s front face!) and ramming a fat dowel up its snout with a two-pound hammer.
Yeah, genuine Ray-O-Vac Maximum D cells: they all leak if you leave ’em in there long enough. This flashlight worked fine, right up to the point where I checked inside to see how long the cells had been in there. Oops.
I’m thinking of rebuilding it with some killer LED clusters up front; scrap the reflector, rework the switch assembly. Certainly that’d have better heatsinking than those absurd 3-watt LED bulb-like thingies.
(*) Yes, Maglite has a lifetime replacement warranty that even covers death due to battery corrosion. Now, I ask you, what’s the fun in that?
If you’re an alpha geek, this is how you tell time…
Absolute Geek Clock
It’s a WWVB receiver wired up to a CR123A primary lithium cell. The time display is a single red LED, driven by a low-threshold FET. Yeah, you can package it up in a cute little box (which is the picture on hackaday.com), but this is the essence of the thing.
Over the course of a minute, the LED blinks out the hour, minute, year, day-of-year, Daylight Saving Time, leap year, leap second, and some other stuff in binary-coded decimal.
The key to the format is there and the bit format is straightforward:
Long = frame marker
Medium = binary 1
Short = binary 0
You just watch the LED, catch the frame marker, decode BCD data on the fly, convert from UTC to local time, and that’s all there is to it.
Sheesh, it’s only one bit a second: anybody can handle that, right?
Truth to tell, I can hang on long enough to get the minute, but I taper off pretty quickly after that.
Tech detail…
Basically, you get the receiver and CR123 cell holder from DigiKey for maybe fifteen bucks. Wire up a FET (ZVNL110A or some such) to the receiver’s inverted-polarity output, so the LED is ON during the data bit’s active time (carrier drops 10 dB). I blobbed on a 300 ohm SMD resistor, so the total current is maybe 250 µA with the LED on. If you’re going crude, you can probably wire the LED & resistor directly to the receiver’s positive-polarity output.
A primary CR123A is good for 1500 mAh and the average current is maybe 150 µA, so the clock will run for nearly a year. The LED is pretty dim, but perfect for late-night viewing.
Reception is iffy during the day here in the Hudson Valley. At night it’s just fine. Interference from LCD panels with near-60-kHz refresh is a real problem, so it doesn’t play well near PCs.
I put the clock on a shelf where I can watch it when I wake up in the middle of the night: it knocks me out again pretty quickly.
In real life, I put this together to verify my WWVB simulator… but I might just box up a spare for the shelf, too.
We got a boom box so Mom could have background music; the Olde Family Tube Radio was far beyond its Best Used By date.
Prompted by recent events around here, I checked it on a recent visit and, yup, more corrosion. In all fairness, the cells suggest “Best If Installed By Jan 99”, so they’re well past their date, too.
This used to be a whole lot less of a problem when flashlights and radios (without clocks!) were the only things using “dry cells”: when the battery went dead, the thing didn’t work and you replaced the cells.
Nowadays, we expect alkaline cells to supply keep-alive trickle current for memory backup; even after the cell corrodes, it still supplies that tiny current and we never notice what’s happening inside.
I’m beginning to loathe alkaline cells just like I loathe the small internal combustion engines in yard equipment.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 