Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
The new shower head’s hose dangled directly in front of the faucet knob, so I conjured a simple clamp to pull the down-going half over to the side of the stall and keep the up-going half away from the faucet:
Shower head hose clamp – installed
The black nylon M6 screw goes into a hole tapped in the plastic cap atop the aluminum extrusion; I was mildly surprised that worked as well as I hoped. It’s basically invisible from outside the shower stall.
Stipulated: laser-cut 3 mm acrylic probably isn’t the right material for the job, but it’s a quick & easy way to discover if that’s the right place to clamp the hose.
While installing those two pieces, it occurred to me the result would be much stronger if the two “jaws” overlapped and had a pair of screws holding them together, so the LightBurn layout includes that idea for the next time:
Shower Head Hose Clamp – LightBurn layout
The Hole Template simplified getting the hole dead center in the plastic cap, because drilling it required an awkward reach across the end of the vanity.
There is zero chance this will fit your shower & hose, but now you have the general idea.
We don’t know what the proper term might be for this part of the machine, but it looks sorta like a nose and the lights form most of a ring around it, so I’m going with “Nose Ring Lights”:
Handi-Quilter sells a ring light for machines manufactured a decade later than ours, but it uses a built-in USB jack this machine lacks.
One of two (apparently) unused M4 holes on the left side of the machine frame suggested a mounting point for a 3D printed bracket:
HQ Sixteen Nose Ring Lights – solid model
The ramp matches the 3° (-ish) mold draft of the machine frame, which I initially ignored by angling the tab, but a tilted frame looked awful; it’s now aligned with local horizontal..
A few iterations got all the pieces & holes in their proper places:
HQ Sixteen Nose Ring lights – iterations
The smaller (rampless) bracket has three LED strips, but a quick test showed more light would be better:
HQ Sixteen Nose Ring lights – bottom view
The lack of a transparent-ish cover is obviously unsuitable for a commercial product, but the key design goal is to not interfere with spreading as much light as possible across as much of the quilt as possible. The black JB Weld Plastic Bonder blobs keep the 24 VDC supply out of harm’s way, which is as good as it needs to be for now.
The bracket has three sides, because the right side of the machine has all the thread guide hardware. Putting anything over there seemed likely to interfere with either thread movement or fingers making adjustments.
Fortunately, the wider bracket doesn’t stick out too far beyond the machine frame and the doubled LED strips create a much smoother light pool:
HQ Sixteen Nose Ring lights – left front view
Yes, the quilt is focused and the LED frame is blurred.
The larger light-emitting area reduces the shadow under the left rod (supporting the ruler foot) enough to be unobjectionable.
A 0.2 mm layer thickness transforms the smooth ramp into stair steps:
HQ Sixteen Nose Ring Lights – PrusaSlicer
They’re inconspicuous after the bracket is installed.
The Chin Light ran on 12 V and these strips require 24 V, so the OpenSCAD code creates a pair of endcaps for the new supply, which is of course completely different than the old supply. Setting that up must await quilt completion.
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Last month it began to flicker and I eventually caught it in the act:
HQ Sixteen Chin Light – first failure
That’s taken with the phone’s selfie camera from the quilt’s viewpoint, which is much too close for the camera’s focus, but you get the general idea.
Pulling it off, putting it on the bench, applying 12 V, and letting it heat up produced this:
HQ Sixteen Chin Light – hot failure
That’s with the voltage backed off to 8 V to avoid burning out the exposure.
Letting it cool a bit:
HQ Sixteen Chin Light – cool failure
You may recall I stuck the aluminum backing plate to the HQ Sixteen’s case aluminum body with some heatsink tape and the thing ran just warm to the touch, so I suspect the initial failure had little-or-nothing to do with overheating and a lot to do with buying stuff from eBay.
That suspicion is supported by having two more of those in the drawer with their failed chips circled.
That’s the gluing “fixture” with enough steel piled on the lid to keep it from moving and machinist vises pushing / holding the hinge fragments in place.
I used the same technique as before, with duct tape aligning the loose pieces and JB Plastic Bonder sticking them together:
Sears Humidifier – right hinge outboard
The other side of that hinge shows the broken section at the end of the molded void:
Sears Humidifier – right hinge inboard
The other hinge has a 3D printed replacement end:
Sears Humidifier – left hinge inboard
The other side shows there’s not much of the original hinge left:
Sears Humidifier – left hinge outboard
I very carefully installed the lid on the newly cleaned humidifier in the Basement Shop, where it flips up and down like anything.
At the start of this year’s humidification season, I will very carefully carry the lid up the basement stairs to the Sewing Room and we’ll see how long it survives in actual use.
The basement came with several LED bulbs screwed into old-school ceramic sockets with pull-chain switches. This adapter had an LED bulb in its socket and another LED fixture plugged into an outlet:
Lamp socket adapter – failed weld
The fixture began flickering some days ago, which I attributed to a problem with its power supply. When both the bulb and the fixture went dark, I had enough of a clue to locate the real cause.
The scorched plastic near the discolored weld nugget on the threaded shell suggests something ran overly hot in there for a while.
Peeling the aluminum shell off reveals the problem:
Lamp socket adapter – detail
Looks to me like the weld started out weak and gradually fell apart as the socket heated / cooled in use, with increasing resistance producing more heat every time.
The LED lamp + fixture added up to 100 W, so about 1 A is all it takes.
When our stick blender (Cusinart CSB-77, with an instruction manual dated 2011) failed, I dropped fifteen bucks on the shortest one we could find, which turned out to be inconveniently long for the shorter member of the user community. The old one recently emerged from the depths of the bench for triage; the failure was in the coupler between the motor and the blade shaft, but required complete disassembly before trying to repair it.
Pry out two obvious plastic plugs, remove two screws holding the top of the handle together, pull the handle apart, and reveal a PCB with a discrete diode bridge and an open-frame switch:
Stick blender coupler – PCB
Fortunately, the wire colors matched my preconception. Unsolder the wires to get that side of the handle off.
Un-bend the tab holding the metal shell to the plastic frame and pull it off, whereupon the frame halves unsnap to release the motor:
Stick blender coupler – shell removed
The white nylon (?) coupler on the motor shaft pries off the splined motor shaft:
Stick blender coupler – motor shaft splines
That black ring inside the coupler should be on the blade shaft:
Stick blender coupler – blade shaft
It apparently got jammed in the coupler when the shaft’s drive dogs / splines (barely visible down inside) ripped up the coupler. I don’t know if that was a sudden failure or the end result of gradually accumulating damage, but the inside of the coupler was badly chewed up.
Dismantling the blade unit requires prying three plastic clips back, one at a time, while pushing upward on the intricate black plastic fitting around the shaft:
Stick blender coupler – blade housing clips
That let me ease a drop of oil down the shaft to what looks and feels like a plastic sleeve bearing near the blade end of the housing; oil should not be needed on a plastic bearing, but it definitely improved the bearing’s attitude. The snap ring securing the shaft is far enough away to prevent me from even trying to remove it, because I know there is no way I can reinstall it:
Stick blender coupler – blade shaft snap ring
Some Xacto knife action removed the shredded plastic to reveal the remains of four slots for the blade shaft’s two drive dogs / splines:
Stick blender coupler – OEM coupler end view
Measuring All. The. Things. produced a reasonable solid model of the slots:
Stick Blender drive coupler – splines – solid model
Removing those from a model of the coupler defined the shape:
Stick Blender drive coupler – PrusaSlicer
As usual, having one in hand let me check the fit and, after a few tweaks, the next one was Just Right™.
The other end of the coupler is a simple cylinder sized for a firm press fit on the motor shaft splines:
Stick blender coupler – new coupler detail
My coupler is chunkier than the OEM coupler, because there was enough room in there and PETG-CF, being weaker than nylon, needs all the help it can get:
Stick blender coupler – new coupler installed
It’s one of the few things I’ve printed with 100% infill. If when that plastic fails, I’ll try something else.
Put the little rubber ring on the blade shaft and reassemble everything in reverse order:
Stick blender coupler – mating ends
The blender works as well as it ever did, while the halves couple and uncouple the way they should, so we’ll declare victory and keep the new blender as a backup.
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The venerable (circa 1993) Whirlpool clothes dryer (LER443AQ0) that Came With The House™ failed in action: the drum occasionally stopped turning (and, fortunately, heating) while the control timer continued ticking along. The symptoms suggested one of the many thermal switches / thermostats / fuses was bad, but because the problem was intermittent, the only practical alternative was replacing all the things.
Which, it turns out, costs about ten bucks from the usual source. I remain unconvinced paying an order of magnitude more for what look to be identical parts will, in fact, bring either different parts or higher quality.
The wiring diagram, which I consulted only after the fact, shows it was most likely the “Not Resettable” Thermal Fuse in series with the drum motor, because the other contestants are in series with the heater and the Operating Thermostat would trip when the blower stopped blowing:
Whirlpool dryer – wiring diagram – detail
The fact that the Thermal Fuse should not “reset” after it trips seems worrisome, but failures are like that.
All those parts are accessible only through the rear cover, but you should definitely vacuum out as much fuzz as possible before popping the cover (with vacuum in hand):
Whirlpool dryer – heater duct top
Of course, all the old parts show fine continuity, because intermittent:
Whirlpool dryer – thermal switches
With the new parts in place, the dryer has chugged through half a dozen loads without incident: so all’s well that ends well.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 