Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
It turns out that if you drop a heavy sheet of laminated cardboard in exactly the right spot, you can shear the pot metal handle right off a two-step folding step stool:
Folding step stool – exposed handle
I mean, it’s just a perfect target:
Folding step stool – handle detail
It was a clean break leaving gritty surfaces ideal for JB Weld epoxy and a clamp:
Folding step stool – epoxy clamping
In truth, using epoxy in tension isn’t a good idea, but this is light duty and the repair ought to be good for a while.
Now, as to why I was standing on a two-step ladder fiddling with a heavy sheet of laminated cardboard, that story must wait for a while …
Every tub & shower looks like this after a decade or so:
Old tub caulk
Go look carefully at your bathroom if you don’t believe me.
Tubs have a raised lip around their perimeter, but our downstairs bathroom had a caulk crack that routed water running down the wall under the tile, over the lip, and onto the subfloor beside the tub. This had been going on unnoticed for years, but we apparently take showers differently enough to put a puddle of water on the basement floor.
Some exploratory surgery revealed a patch of rotted subfloor (which is why we know it was an ongoing problem), but no structural damage. A few hours of tedious razor knife and hook work extracted the old caulk, after which squirting new caulk took almost no time at all:
New tub caulk
I screwed a small fan across the subfloor opening to pull air across the wet area:
Subfloor fan drying
A few days dried things out nicely, so I can proceed with a project involving the adjacent shower stall, about which more later.
They don’t install drain pipes like that any more! Judging from the many scorch marks on the joists, the plumber had considerable difficulty keeping enough heat on the fittings for good solder joints.
One doorbell ding came from a guy who sheepishly admitted he had just collided with our mailbox, which sits on the outside of a gentle curve and sticks out, IMO, a bit too far into the street.
This not being my first time in this rodeo, I allowed as how if he’d replace whatever broke, I’d do the fixing and it’d be all good. As it turned out, the only broken part was the foamed-plastic post, which split neatly along its length around the crosspiece hole. After looking things over, I said I’d just epoxy it together and call it done.
That afternoon, I mixed up a generous cup of the casting epoxy I’d been using for coasters and suchlike. It is now well past its best-used-by date and somewhat cloudy, but I figured it would suffice for the purpose; nobody will notice cloudy epoxy on a mailbox post.
I have Too. Many. Clamps. and know how to use them:
Mailbox post repair
He departed, quite literally in tears, over my not raking him through the coals. I figured anybody who’d stop and admit to property damage needed encouragement, not chastisement, and replacing the headlight on his pickup would be more than enough punishment.
An old antique drop-leaf table serves as a plant stand and time reference:
Drop leaf table – in use
While adjusting the clock for Daylight Saving Time, one of the folding leaves … folded, dumping the clock on the floor.
It turns out the latches holding the leaves in place have been repaired / replaced many times since the table left the factory:
Drop leaf table – random latches
I’m certain the latch in the upper right came from my father’s hands.
Although it’s an antique, it’s not a priceless antique, so I had no compunction about drilling out the wood screw holes, installing metric threaded inserts, and converting all the screws to M4 button heads:
Drop leaf table – wood insert
That’s a brad-point bit intended to produce clean-sided flat-bottom holes (modulo a triangular pit from the tip) exactly right for screwing an insert all the way down. The table top just barely fit on the drill press, so I could set the depth stop to make the answer come out right every time.
A dot of low-strength threadlocker keeps the screws from turning, although the table has pretty much reached a steady state these days.
The basement curtain drain sump pits contained two ancient sump pumps badly in need of replacement, so I got to find out what made their tethered switch floats rattle like that.
Having recently stood up the Main Workbench with its big vise, I could saw without compunction:
Sump pump tether switch – sawing
Which revealed an ordinary snap-action switch:
Sump pump tether switch – opened
Further sawing exposed the rattler:
Sump pump tether switch – parts
Those 1 inch steel balls now nestle in the Big Box o’ Bearings and I’m sure the snap-action switches will come in handy for something.
As a temporary expedient while awaiting more outlets in the basement, I screwed several hundred watts of LED strip lighting to the floor joists so I could see where I was going:
First pass at basement lighting
The switch seemed to run warm, which I attributed to being snuggled up against one of the LED strips, eventually became intermittent, and finally failed with the lights out.
Prying apart the snapped-together case destroyed it, but that didn’t really matter when I saw the innards:
T8 LED power switch
The “intermittent” action came from the melted post on the switch actuator at the top of the photo. The “warm” came from the barely crimped black wire on the right side of the switch, which *might* have had half a dozen strands caught in the flattened crimp triangles.
I replaced it with an identical switch from the assortment that came with the lamps. That one seems to run cooler, although I doubt the crimps are really up to any reasonable quality standards.
In addition to adding basement outlets & lighting circuits, the rest of the house has some electrical wiring peculiarities; the kitchen microwave really shouldn’t share a circuit with the dining room lights.
Having had several folks ding our front doorbell in recent weeks, I thought it would be nice if the switch had a light inside and was mildly surprised it didn’t. Taking it apart revealed an even bigger surprise:
Doorbell – circuitry
Much electronic! Many solder!
Obviously, that’s a bridge rectifier (MB6S for the curious) in the middle, with a pair of paralleled 1 kΩ SMD resistors on either side ballasting two white LEDs in series on the other side. As far as I could tell, both LEDs had stopped being diodes, most likely after one failed short and took the other down with it.
Having recently unpacked the small parts cabinet containing SMD LEDs, I could do this:
Doorbell – blue LEDs
While I had the iron hot, I resoldered the fractured blobs attaching the spring contacts to their solder pads. I think the 201107 along the left edge is the PCB date code, so the switch has been in place for maybe a decade.
You gotta admit blue is distinctive:
Doorbell – installed
While taking it off, I discovered it’s the second doorbell button in that spot; you can’t see the bottom screw hole and wood scar when you’re standing at the door. Unless, I suppose, you’re three feet tall, but most folks of that stature aren’t curious about doorbells.
Update: An alert reader provided more information:
I recently bought a doorbell button, Heath Zenith SL-315-1-90. […] My board is different but has the same circuit as yours. In case it’s helpful, I believe your button might be Heath Zenith SL-257-02.
That’s a perfect example of a “brand name” completely detached from its entire history and put to work doing something entirely different. AFAICT, I honored the Heath name by resoldering the poor thing.
Alas, the doorbell switch on the back door turned out to be a dead loss. Perhaps when they replaced the door, the wire got sliced just above the sill plate, leaving a stub in the basement and no way to fish a new wire to the switch. Anybody arriving via the trail from the Vassar College property out back must bang on the door to get our attention.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 