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.
Things around the home & hearth
After a day of snow + sleet + ice, followed by overnight cooling, the bird feeder looked like this:
The ice generally doesn’t bond across the top, so the sheets slide off separately to the front and back. This time, they stayed together and began sliding off to the side.
The next two days were unusually cold and the glacier stopped sliding:
The temperature warmed enough during the day to let the glacier resume sliding, whereupon it fell and shattered on the patio.
While looking for something else, I stumbled across this Amazon offer (clicky for more dots):
Yeah, a trailer load a’ paper. Word.
Long ago, in a universe far away, my buddy Mark One mis-read a unit of measure and ended up with a trailer load a’ Tektronix Thermal Paper. It carried a silver-based emulsion requiring constant refrigeration, so he stashed about a pallet of paper canisters under every raised floor on the IBM Poughkeepsie campus. Even though the raised floor acreage has dropped dramatically, some of it may be there to this very day.
The JB Weld epoxy I slathered on our trusty hand-held cheese slicer a year ago continues to withstand daily washing and occasional trips through the dishwasher:
The bottom is in fine shape, too:
Compare it with XTC-3D epoxy, which admittedly isn’t rated for continuous water exposure, after a year:
JB Weld FTW!
This came about while tinkering up a shade for a repurposed LED downlight:
It’s a 4 inch DWV pipe coupling I bored out to fit the LED housing, which was ever so slightly larger than the pipe OD.
Cutting it off required as much workspace as the poor little lathe had:
Ignore the toolpost handle across the top. What’s important: the cutoff blade poking out of the QCTP, above the orange carriage stop lock lever, extending just far enough to cut through the coupling’s wall before the compound hits the coupling. The compound slide is all the way out against the cross-slide DRO, rotated at the only angle putting the tool where it needs to be and clearing the end of the coupling.
It ended reasonably well:
But, in retrospect, was hideously bad practice. Next time, I’ll make a fixture to hold the fitting on a faceplate.
Removing the failed hot limit stop ring from the kitchen faucet reminded me of a fix I’d done a few months ago. The faucet spout eats the O-rings sealing it to the column rising out of the sink, as evidence by the far-too-many replacements I’ve installed over the years.
The O-ring replacement kit includes a pair of nylon (?) split rings which should provide bearing surfaces for the spout, but the upper ring sits in a groove putting its OD almost flush with the column:
This may be tolerance creep or just a design screwup, but the spout squashes the O-ring much more than (IMO) it should and wears it out entirely too soon.
This time around, I cut a strip of 0.4 mm thick polypropylene (from the Big Box o’ Clamshell Packages) long enough to wrap around the column and narrow enough to fit inside the groove, with the split ring holding it in place. The strip expands the ring’s OD to just barely fit inside the spout, so the spout now bears mostly on the ring, not the O-ring.
Despite measuring the groove OD and the spout ID, I had to cut-and-try several strips to find the proper thickness. Your mileage will certainly differ.
The spout now turns smoothly and freely, without leakage. We’ll see whether the new O-rings last longer than before.
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.
Mary made a batch of veggies in tomato sauce and froze meal-size portions as winter treats. The moist air inside the containers froze into delicate ice blades on the zucchini slices:
A closer look:
The blade cross-sections might be oblong hexagons, but it’s hard to tell with crystals melting almost instantly after the lid comes off. Some of the smaller hair-like blades reminded me of tin whiskers.
Yummy!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 