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

  • Waterless Urinal

    Waterless urinal
    Waterless urinal

    Our travels took us past a mall, in which I discovered another generation of waterless urinals. The general notion is that the cartridge contains a light oil that allows urine through to the drain, while blocking sewer gases just like an ordinary pipe trap.

    These Falcon urinals smell not at all like the Eau de Outhouse I found in Boston’s Hynes Convention Center some years ago; I suppose there was some pushback from the end-user community…

    IIRC, the Hynes restroom retrofit installed waterless drain cartridges in a standard urinal. Unfortunately, with no flush water to rinse the bowl, the urine simply dried in place with exactly the olfactory effect you’d expect.

    This urinal is obviously a custom-designed hunk of ceramic technology and, according to their copious literature, whizz just slides right off and runs through the Sloan cartridges on its way to the drain. I’m not sure how all that works, but things have certainly improved… or, perhaps, the mall does maintenance much more frequently than Hynes.

    Waterless urinal target
    Waterless urinal target

    Anyhow, that small dot a few inches above the cartridge seems like an aiming target. Speaking strictly as an amateur apiarist, the notion of “pee on the bee” isn’t all that attractive, but I suppose they needed some way to direct the stream away from the inlets …

    Urinal target
    Urinal target detail

  • Failed Switch

    Switch Innards
    Switch Innards

    When I flipped this switch on, it started fizzing and emitting ozone-scented smoke while the lights it controlled flickered. This is not a nominal outcome. I toggled the switch a few times, but it continued to misbehave, so I installed a replacement switch and laid the old one out on the desk for an autopsy.

    It’s an old-school mechanism, as suits the 1930-vintage structure it came from. The lyre-shaped arch with the spring swings back and forth on its tabs, which rest in the small recesses near the middle of the switch body. The peg on the toggle handle engages the spring, thus providing the over-center snap action.

    The switch action takes place at the bottom of the arch, where those two very small tabs stick out. They wipe on the grubby-looking bottom tabs of the oddly shaped flat-brass doodads, the U-shaped ends of which surround the screws that clamp the copper wire to the switch.

    I expected to find a scorched contact or perhaps an insect in the mechanism, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Apart, that is, from the layer of congealed grease covering everything inside. I suspect the grease was applied in the factory to help prevent contact corrosion, but the volatiles are long gone.

    Switch Contacts
    Switch Contacts

    A closeup of the switch contacts shows (what I think is) the problem.

    All the contact points are covered in grease, but the lyre-shaped gizmo looks like it’s been painted: its contact points were black and resisted cleaning by fingernail scraping.

    As nearly as I can tell, all the current passed through a very few high spots that were wiped somewhat clean as the contacts closed. As those spots heated up, the grease melted and flowed over them, increasing the resistance and the heat.

    The switch had been working for many decades, as the BX armored cable in the box had fabric-covered rubber (stiff rubber) insulation. I managed to install the replacement switch without breaking the insulation, but it was ugly in there.

  • What’s Inside This Box?

    Digital Media Player box
    Digital Media Player box

    Got a package from halfway around the world that, I thought, corresponded to a recent eBay order. Opened the envelope and pulled out a box containing … a Digital Media Player?

    That’s odd. I don’t recall ordering one of those.

    At this point, anybody who’s read Frank Herbert’s The White Plague should get the chills. Do you or don’t you open a mysterious package from far away that seems to offer something interesting?

    Pandora might have something to say, too.

    Digital Media Player box - contents
    Digital Media Player box – contents

    Well, open it I did, and found exactly what I’d ordered: a stash of female headers pins. Of course, one can’t tell what else might have come in the package, but so it goes.

    Now I can hand Eks half a lifetime supply of the strips to replace the ones I mooched.

    One other mildly surprising part of the package: it seems we’ve gotten to the point where magnetic closures are cheap enough to replace everything else, including intricate origami tucks. There’s a small steel plate pasted under the flap. Who knew?

    Digital Media Player box - magnetic closure
    Digital Media Player box – magnetic closure

  • A Christmas Season Poem

    Twas the Night…
    By Mary Nisley

    ‘Twas the night before September, when outside the house
    Many creatures were stirring, not just a mouse;
    The garden was fenced all ‘round with care,
    In hopes that deer would never come there;
    My daughter was nestled all snug in her bed,
    While replays of band practice ran through her head;
    My husband was sleeping, and hoped for much more,
    As I settled down for a short summer snore.
    When out in the yard there arose such a clatter,
    I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
    Away to the window I flew like a flash,
    But saw nothing on the deck; what was that crash?
    Then off to the kitchen to flip on the lights,
    To better reveal the outermost sights.
    When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
    But an eight pointed buck: a powerful male deer!
    His head, it was lowered; his mouth, it was red,
    He looked mean and angry, a monster to dread.
    When he moved I saw a most terrible sight,
    His antler was tangled in the fence very tight.
    I ran for my husband, to wake him from sleep,
    He groggily blinked, then from the bed he did leap.
    We dashed to the doorway, but the buck, he was gone,
    One glimpse of my motion made him quite strong.
    We surveyed the garden with the help of a light,
    What destruction was done before the buck’s flight?
    Alas! My poor garden, damage lay all around,
    Two heavy steel fence posts he’d bent to the ground.
    The ruin was total in two veggie beds:
    Stalks twisted and broken, big leaves lay in shreds.
    We pushed the posts upright, unsnarled all the net,
    As we patched the fence up, we felt it was wet.
    Shining flashlight on hands revealed blood on our fingers,
    But it was not ours: could deer blood still linger?
    Sunshine the next morning revealed all of the damage,
    Plus an antler tip broken in the buck’s desperate rampage.
    The rabbits and woodchuck say “Thanks Mr. Buck!
    You’ve opened the garden, it’s our great luck!
    We’re feasting on beet greens, parsley and chard,
    To fatten for winter is no longer hard.”
    We wish you happy holidays, filled with warmth and good cheer,
    And may your next growing season have gardens without deer.

    Folks: I couldn’t make this one up; that is exactly what happened. I believe the buck was grazing on fallen apples from my neighbor’s tree when, in the dark, his antlers tangled in my fence netting. They were velvety, still soft and growing, so when he broke a tip trying to escape, there was blood all over. At 2:00AM I was outside, stringing up twine and drenching it with deer repellent, hoping to keep the rest of his herd from testing my jury-rigged fence.

    Acknowledgments: Thanks to Clement Clarke Moore and his “The Night Before Christmas” for the shape of this poem and for my lines 9-11. His words fit the situation so well that I couldn’t resist using them.

    Ed says: It’s Christmas: we can take the day off from tech, right?

  • Whirlpool Refrigerator Shelf: Drawer Slide Repair

    Refrigerator shelf bracket - inside
    Refrigerator shelf bracket – inside

    The bottom glass shelf in our Whirlpool refrigerator (the “Crisper Cover”) rests on an elaborate plastic structure that includes slides for the two Crisper drawers. Perhaps we store far more veggies than they anticipated, we’re rough on our toys, or the drawer slides came out a whole lot weaker than the designers expected. I’m betting on the latter, but whatever the cause, the two outside slides broke some years ago.

    I don’t know what function the rectangular hole above the flattened part of the slide might serve, but it acted as a stress raiser that fractured the column toward the front. With that end broken loose, another crack propagated toward the rear, so the entire front end of the slide drooped when the drawer slid forward.

    The minimum FRU (Field Replacement Unit) is the entire plastic shelf assembly, a giant plastic thing that fills the entire bottom of the refrigerator. You could, of course, buy a whole new shelf assembly, perhaps from www.appliancepartspros.com, but it’s no longer available. Back when it was, I recall it being something on the far side of $100, which made what you see here look downright attractive.

    My first attempt at a repair was an aluminum bracket epoxied to the outside of the slide, filling the rectangular opening with JB Industro-Weld epoxy to encourage things to stay put. The plastic cannot be solvent-bonded with anything in my armory, so I depended on epoxy’s griptivity to lock the aluminum into the shelf. That worked for maybe five years for the right side (shown above) and is still working fine on the left side.

    Refrigerator shelf bracket - bottom
    Refrigerator shelf bracket – bottom

    The right-side bracket eventually broke loose, so I did what I should have done in the first place: screw the bracket to the shelf. Alas, my original bracket remained firmly bonded to the bottom part of the shelf and secured to the block of epoxy in the rectangular hole. Remember, the broken piece didn’t completely separate from the shelf.

    So I cut another angle bracket to fit around the first, drilled holes in the shelf, transfer-punched the bracket, and match-drilled the holes. Some short(ened) stainless-steel screws and nuts held the new bracket in place and a few dabs of epoxy putty filled the gaps to make everything rigid.

    That’s been working for the last few years. The refrigerator is going on 16 years with only one major repair (a jammed-open defrost switch), so I’ll call it good enough.

  • Fixing an MTD Gas Cap Splash Shield

    OEM plastic post
    OEM plastic post

    MTD used the same design for the gasoline tank caps on our leaf shredder and snow thrower: an aluminum cone (which evidently serves to keep splashes away from the tank vent) mounted on a heat-staked plastic rod molded into the cap. It’s straightforward, but a bit suboptimal for high-vibration yard gadgets.

    The aluminum cone eventually worries its way through the plastic post and falls into the tank, taking the heat-formed button from the post along with it. Trust me on this, fishing those things out of the tank is an exquisite little inconvenience.

    4-40 screw post - inside
    4-40 screw post – inside
    4-40 screw post - exterior
    4-40 screw post – exterior

    The fix is straightforward.

    Chop off the remains of the post, drill a snug 4-40 tapping hole straight through the cap, and tap it accordingly. Secure the cone to the screw with a nut tightened against the head, run the screw through the cap, run a pair of nuts onto it, trim to length, then jam the nuts together so the cone is about where it started out. Loctite on the nuts is a Good Thing, but I don’t know how it feels about gasoline immersion.

    The snowblower cone is getting wobbly; I must make a preemptive strike on it to avoid fishing the debris out of the tank.

  • Hard Drive Magnets for Debris Collection

    Magnetic Staple Collector
    Magnetic Staple Collector

    We took down the deer netting around the garden yesterday, which involves pulling a zillion staples out of the wood posts. I put some salvaged hard-drive head motor magnets to good use: one magnet inside my jacket sleeve to hold the other magnet in place, then just drop staples near them.

    Shazam… no staples in the ground!

    You can actually buy such things, with cute Velcro straps and all, but why? You’ve been saving those magnets for years: put ’em to use!