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

Dandelion Weeder Repair

This dandelion weeder was no match for the rugged weeds among the decorative grasses Mary planted along the road out front:

Dandelion Weeder – bent

You might expect the tang to extend well into the handle, but that’s not what you get in a cheap tool:

Dandelion Weeder – ferrule detail

The Bucket o’ Rod-like Materials had a rake handle about the right diameter, so I sawed off a suitable length, set up the steady rest with a bushing, and turned the end to match the ferrule:

Dandelion Weeder – end turning

Pound the ferrule into place and drill the new handle to fit the tang:

Dandelion Weeder – drilling setup

The handle seemed a bit raw and, as it was already chucked in the lathe, got a synthetic string wrap with clear epoxy coating:

Dandelion Weeder – string epoxy

The pourable epoxy is reaching the end of its shelf life, but seemed entirely suitable for the purpose. I wrapped two layers of string around the dry handle, laid paper over the lathe bed, slathered epoxy over the whole affair, and let the lathe turn dead-slow for most of the day to even out the coat.

The next day: hammer the blade mostly straight again, smear JB QuikWeld on the tang and into the hole, gently hammer them together, chuck the blade, apply more epoxy to the ends, and let it turn:

Dandelion Weeder – end epoxy

A careful inspection reveals my casual disregard of the finer points of tool handle craftsmanship, but it came out surprisingly pretty:

Dandelion Weeder – repaired

The blade remains the finest butter-soft cheap steel and still doesn’t extend the length of the handle, but Quality Shop Time™ is not to be sniffed at.

And, hey, nary a trace of 3D printing or laser cutting!

2023-08-07
FitBit Charge 5 Reboot

Wearing my FitBIt Charge 5 tracker in the shower without activating its Water Lock feature occasionally produces odd results, but the most recent mishap ventured deep into the peculiar:

Jammed FitBit Charge 5

Its complete lack of buttons makes the thing completely waterproof, but also means it cannot continue when the touch / swipe interface gets horribly confused.

The recovery process requires snapping it onto its USB charging cable, then pressing the nearly invisible button embedded in the USB connector shell three times, with one second between each press: click hippopotamus click hippopotamus click.

Then it restarts / reboots and eventually all is well again.

Perhaps I can now recall the magic incantation without digging through the online help again, because I am certainly not going to suddenly remember to do the Water Lock dance before showering.

2023-08-03
Gooseneck LED: First Failure

Twelve years ago I rebuilt a gooseneck lamp to carry a surplus LED head:

Finished LED Floodlight

One of its three LEDs just failed:

LED Gooseneck lamp – first failure

Given that I very deliberately glued the whole thing together in the sure knowledge “the lamp should outlast me” and much later built the other LED head into a desk lamp, well, it’s like that and that’s the way it is.

The Sherline will be just a little bit dimmer in all those photos …

2023-07-28
Thanks for the Notification

This year’s MVP health plan has a different “OTC Benefit” than last year, even though MVP is contracting with the same company to provide what seems to be essentially the same benefit.

This arrived half a year after the new OTC benefit card showed up:

MVP OTC Card Expiry

I suppose somebody noticed MVP hadn’t gotten around to telling us they were cancelling the old card, despite its Valid Thru 12/26 notation. Well, the card isn’t exactly cancelled, it just stopped working when all the money evaporated.

This not being my first ride in this particular rodeo, I spent all those sweet OTC benny bucks days after they become valid on the first day of every quarter-year, buying up my stock of overpriced OTC stuff.

In theory, you could buy the stuff elsewhere, but you had to scan each item in the retail store using the worst app imaginable to determine its eligibility and coverage. If the store was in a no-wireless-data phone zone: too bad, so sad.

This year’s program is simpler: you must buy everything from the sole-source supplier, even though it costs four times more than the comparable item at, say, Walmart or even Amazon.

2023-07-25
Kenmore 362.75581890 Oven Igniter: Third Contestant

Although the oven igniter I just installed worked, its 3.0 A current fell below the gas valve’s minimum 3.3 A, which, based on past experience, suggested it would fail in short order. Just to see what happened, I sent a note to the seller, who offered a warranty swap and, after a bit of fiddling, the replacement arrived:

Oven Igniter B – 3.3 A initial current

This one draws exactly 3.3 A, so it just barely meets both its product description and the gas valve’s minimum current.

We’ll see how long this lasts …

2023-07-18
Sunbeam Clothes Iron Salvage
For just under twenty bucks, Mary has a new clothes iron and I harvested the heating element from the longsuffering Sunbeam iron:

Sunbeam clothes iron – heater connections

Per the notations:
- AC Line enters on middle terminal to thermostat
- Thermostat controlled Line on left terminal to heater
- AC Neutral to heater terminal on right
The heater measures 12.6 Ω cold, so 9.5 A → 1.1 kW.

The iron had an insulating sleeve on the thermostat shaft capped with a plastic dial, which makes perfect sense for something in contact with the hot side of the AC power cord.

The IC date codes suggest it’s been around since 2002, so it’s about two decades old. In that time, one of the two electrolytic capacitors succumbed to the plague:

Sunbeam clothes iron – capacitor plague

I think the relay and electronics implemented the iron’s timed shutoff function, but it does seem rather complex for that.
2023-07-05
Eyeglass Case Padding Redux
Confronted with a nice metal eyeglass case that had lost its original liner, I traced the outline on paper and scanned it:

Metal case outline

Unlike the plastic Zenni cases, this one has nice straight edges, so:
- Eyeball a LightBurn rectangle over the traced image
- Round the corners to suit
- Shrink it by a few millimeters to make it fit inside
Then:
- Add a perimeter line offset by the 6 mm required to cover the sides
- Draw a dart in each corner to allow for bending the foam
- Set the perimeter priority to 1 so it cuts last
- Put the original outline to a tool layer to remind me how to do this the next time around
Which looks like this:

Metal case pad – LightBurn layout

Then Fire The Laser into a sheet of EVA foam:

Metal eyeglass case – padding cut

Stuff it into the case, do another one in brown, and the result looks kinda like it should:

Metal eyeglass case – padding installed

That was easy …
2023-07-03