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

Canning Pot Lid Knob Cleanup

Tomato Canning season has returned and my puny contributions involve maneuvering large pots of boiling water and, this time, cleaning up corrosion under the lid knob.

The corroded OEM screw vs. the shiny stainless steel screw:

Canning pot lid knob – OEM vs new screw

The dark rim under the washer remained after hitting the area with sanding pad grits from 320 up through 1200, which seemed sufficient.

The OEM screw had a self-tapping thread, but I’d rather use a machine screw with an insert. Start by lining up the existing screw hole on the drill press and clamping the knob firmly in position:

Canning pot lid knob – hole alignment

Then drill to fit an M5 brass insert, while testing the hole depth:

Canning pot lid knob – insert test fit

Slather the insert with JB Weld epoxy, seat it in the hole, cure overnight, assemble in reverse order, and the lid was ready for the next canning session:

Canning pot lid handle – in use

Yes, those are jars. The process is called canning:

Canning pot lid handle – in use

Get over it, like I had to.

2026-08-24
Kitchen Cupboard Tray Liners

Somewhat absorbent chipboard liners for the small trays / dishes under all the kitchen supplies in daily use:

Cupboard tray liners – installed

The tray bottom matched the flat surface of the top closely enough to let me lay a curve around the perimeter, with some attention to symmetry:

Cupboard Tray – LightBurn curve fit

Then Fire The Laser and it’s done!

For applications where actual symmetry matters, you’d want to lay a quarter of the curve and duplicate it across the midlines. In this case, however, an eyeballometric fit was entirely Close Enough™.

That was easy …

2026-08-18
Home Master CFKDF85GCC-20BB Water Filter Centering Blocks

The Home Master whole-house water filter setup that Came With The House™ has a sediment filter with a 6 to 12 months lifetime and a “catalytic carbon” filter that need replacing every 95000 gallons. Poughkeepsie City water isn’t particularly challenging and our average use suggests a three-year cycle for the carbon filter, so changing them every 18 months seems reasonable.

The filter headers have fingers to center the cartridges, which works well with the relentlessly cylindrical sediment filter. The header’s outlet orifice produces the indented ring around the central hole:

Sediment water filter – outlet

The water flows downward around the outside of the filter and upward through the central hole.

The carbon filter is about the same diameter, but has a smaller diameter around the outlet that apparently doesn’t engage the centering fingers:

Carbon water filter – off-center outlet

The white crud on the black rubber seal is another example of Nisley’s First Rule of Potable Water Plumbing:

Never ever look inside the pipes supplying your drinking water.

Having seen this happen twice, despite my best efforts to keep the filter housing vertical while tightening its screw threads in the header, I laser-cut four acrylic blocks to hold the filter in the center of the housing:

Carbon water filter – centering blocks

They’re 13 mm wide, 15 mm tall, and 6 mm thick, but the next time around they should be taller to help keep them vertical while sliding them into place.

We’ll know how well they worked in about 18 months.

2026-08-11
Fluidmaster Toilet Fill Valve

The Kohler fill valve in the Main Bathroom’s Kohler toilet tank began leaking, but (unsurprisingly) the shutoff valve on its water pipe no longer completely shut off, thus converting a simple replacement into A Plumbing Project. Because toilet shutoff valves sit below all other valves / faucets / plumbing, the pipe can spew a generous amount of water straight up while you’re fumbling with the new valve, no matter how well you (think you) drained the pipes.

So I deployed scrap towels around the pipe, buttered the new valve threads with joint compound, applied various wrenches with appropriate muttering, and swapped the valves without damage to the premises:

Toilet shutoff valve – installed

AFAICT, the chromed pipe and corroded trim plate are original; no possible motivation can convince me to replace that plate. The tattered PTFE tape on the pipe suggests the valve I replaced might have been only a few decades old, albeit with a correspondingly deteriorated washer.

With the water shut off, I replaced the fill valve with a Fluidmaster valve from Box o’ Plumbing Stuff #3; it was new-in-box despite being maybe a decade old. Turned the water back on, fiddled with the float setting to match the Water Line level, and declared victory.

Which lasted until user feedback indicated the new fill valve wasn’t shutting off. After a fruitless day of fiddling about, I replaced the original seal with a repair part taken from Box #3:

Fluidmaster 242 Fill Valve Seal

The fill valve now works perfectly, for reasons having nothing do with the the appearance of either seal, and victory has once again been declared.

Houses, as Gee observed, are trouble.

2026-08-10
Quilting Ruler: Dual Semicircles

Along the same lines as the 45° triangle quilting ruler and the small arc quilting ruler, this one has a nonstandard 6-¼ inch diameter semicircle for the pattern Mary designed for a friend’s quilt:

Semicircular Ruler – on quilt

The 4-½ inch diameter semicircle is there because the larger half needed a handle for easier maneuvering. As with workshop clamps, quilters can never have enough rulers, so that curve will come in handy for something.

Unfortunately, I did not mirror-image the layout like this:

Semicircular Ruler – LightBurn layout

Which would make it correct when seen through the acrylic:

Semicircular Ruler – engraving

Given the very specific use case, I begged forgiveness and was not compelled to get it right.

The LightBurn SVG layout is a GitHub Gist.

2026-08-06
Water Heater Anode Rod Replacement
The Bradford White AeroTherm heat pump water heater that Came With The House™ has been running for three years. Based on previous experience with the same City of Poughkeepsie water, it was time for a look at the anode rod.

Which, as always, required the Greatest Ratchet with a foot of extensions getting the 1-1/16 inch socket down to the rod:

Water Heater Powered Anode – socket wrench

Remember to:
- Turn off the water heater power
- Shut off the inlet and outlet valves
- Open the drain valve to relieve the tank pressure
- Only then loosen the anode rod
Seeing the first few inches justified extracting the rod:

Water Heater Powered Anode – old rod top

Due to low overhead clearance and inauspicious pipe locations, I had to hacksaw the bottom third off to extract the rod:

Water Heater Powered Anode – old rod overview

Water Heater Powered Anode – old rod bottom

With the rod out, draining a few gallons of water into a pan didn’t produce any notable gravel, so I didn’t do a complete flush. Much to my delight, the drain has a ball valve!

Given that this is a fancy water heater and I no longer regard anode rod maintenance as a fun-filled activity, I installed a Corro-Protec powered anode rod for cathodic protection without all the crud:

Water Heater Powered Anode – Corro-Protec parts

The wall wart proclaims 15 mA with a green LED indicating it’s hard at work:

Water Heater Powered Anode – Corro-Protec wall wart

The data plate on the back reports 24VDC 15mA, but, being me, I poked at it with a handful of resistors:

Corro-Protec power supply measurements

The electronics could be as simple as a 24 VDC wall wart feeding a 425 Ω series resistor and a transistor switch lighting the LED for currents a little over 6 mA.

A quick ohmmeter check shows the powered rod electrode is open-circuit with respect to the tank, as it should be without much applied voltage. Applying +24 VDC from the wall wart drives 15 mA into the water: the rod is hard at work.

I’ll take a look at it in a year or so just to see what’s going on in there …
2026-08-05
July 4 2026: Deadfall

Heavy winds during an overnight storm on July 4 2026 brought trees down across Dutchess County and caused widespread power outages. Our little generator justified its existence by preserving our food for about 24 hours, but other folks were without power for three or four days.

A large branch fell across the Carriage Hill entrance:

Carriage Hill Bridge – treefall – 2026-07-07

The terrain and lot layout in Carriage Hill often requires heavy equipment for tree maintenance:

Tree Clearing Crane

Many trees along the Dutchess Rail Trail toppled as their root balls rotated or simply broke off:

Rail trail north – treefall B – 2026-07

Others snapped and took out the fences:

Rail trail north – treefall A – 2026-07

We ride as far from this deadfall as we can:

Rail trail south – treefall – 2026-07

Cleanup continued for weeks and we wish the crews well.

2026-08-04