Category: Home Ec

During an evening KP session, the kitchen faucet handle jammed at the clockwise (hottest) end of its travel and refused to turn; it continued to move vertically and I turned off the water. This had happened before, so I knew roughly what to expect:

The pointer on the red hot limit safety stop ring should be aimed just right of the front screw, at the 0 position producing maximum hotness. The scale reads backwards, perhaps in units of increasing safety.

In that position, the ring prevents the valve core from turning counterclockwise, which explains the symptoms. With the water turned off (at the ball valves in the basement) and the valve stub tilted vertically, the ring popped loose (it shouldn’t move on its own) and exposed the problem:

Neither Mary nor I recall applying that much force to the handle, but ya never know.

The flanges protruding from the stem prevent you from removing the ring, but a pair of small diagonal cutters will chop right through the plastic. If you’re one of the six people depending on the limit stop to keep the water temperature under control, you probably don’t want to cut the ring out; I have no suggestions on how to repair it.

It’s obvious the splines won’t ever be the same again:

The ring has two sets of splines and they’re both wrecked:

With the ring out of the way, it’s easy to see the trunnion shaft has moved leftward:

There’s essentially no clearance between the shaft and the ring, so it was rubbing against the ring, as evidenced by the red debris left behind when I tapped it to the far end of its travel:

Reassemble in reverse order and it works fine again.

I expect the shaft will resume moving leftward and eventually jam in the notch, probably after abrading the white plastic, but I don’t see how to lock it in place.

Long ago, a wood-base countertop cheese slicer arrived with a tenuous connection between its screw-on knob / handle and the bolt securing the cutting wire. The problem seemed to be boogered bolt threads:

The knob screwed firmly onto a known-good 10-24 screw, not the M5 bolt I expected, so the slicer may be old enough to be Made In America. Ya never know around here.

However, the hex head is essential, because you must hold it while tightening the nut capturing the slicing wire. Not having a 10-24 or even 10-32 bolt in hand, I went full-frontal metric with an M5 bolt.

Even with a full face shield, I don’t like standing in the plane of an abrasive cutting tool, even a piddly Dremel disk, so the slot through the head isn’t the best work I’ve ever presented:

Indeed:

But it’s hereby defined to be Good Enough™ for the purpose.

As you might expect, I ran an M5×0.8 tap into the existing 10-24 knob thread, hand-turning the lathe chuck and lining up the tap wrench with the tailstock.

Drill out the slicer’s frame hole to clear the bolt, re-string wire through slot, tighten jam nut, add a locking nut on the other side, screw on the knob, and it’s All Good:

Ugly, but good.

I expect the re-wrapped wire will break in short order, because you just can’t re-bend steel wire with impunity. So far, so good.