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

Mailbox Door Rebuild

The flanges around the door of our giant mailbox rusted through, leaving the door to bend along the embossed (debossed? Whatever) lines across the front. Eventually, the bend got bad enough to keep the door from latching closed, but reviews of the current crop of mailboxes suggest they’re even more prone to rusting after even fewer years.

Well, I can fix that:

Mailbox door rebuild – installed

Because the bottom third of the door, basically everything around and below that horizontal ridge, had corroded, the general idea was to stiffen it with an internal plate:

Mailbox door rebuild – interior

The array of small holes suggest the plate’s rich lived experience. Some are even tapped!

External angle brackets stiffen the sides along the corroded flanges and surround the equally corroded pivot holes:

Mailbox door rebuild – exterior

The term “brick shithouse” springs unbidden to mind, doesn’t it? Those spare holes come from previous uses; I decided this application didn’t demand cosmetic perfection and, as a result, the remaining angle stock has no holes at all.

Also, the angle brackets are as long as they are because that’s the maximum throat depth for Tiny Bandsaw™. I splurged on a Proxxon 10-14 TPI blade (for future reference: PN 28172) that cuts aluminum like butter, much better than the stock 14 TPI blade.

The hinge pins used to be rivets. After careful consideration, I replaced them with 1/4-20 button-head cap screws:

Mailbox door rebuild – hinge detail

Yes, the sheet metal now pivots on screw threads, rather than a nice smooth cylinder. The nyloc nut maintains the proper amount of looseness around the battered sheet metal.

While I had the door open, I slobbered hot melt glue over the flag anchor, which should keep it from spitting the ratchet pin into the roadside debris ever again:

Mailbox door rebuild – flag anchor

A pleasant evening of Quality Shop Time, indeed!

The alert reader will note I’m securing aluminum plates with stainless steel hardware on a (nominally) galvanized steel box, thereby forming several batteries with a brine electrolyte from wintertime road salt. My engineering judgement determined this repair will last Long Enough™ and, most likely, succumb to somebody not quite making the curve while accelerating from the traffic signal.

Aaaaand those painted numbers still look pretty good after four years.

2019-09-18
Walnut Husk Fly Damage

A recent Amazon purchase of three 3 lb bags of walnuts from a known-good seller arrived with many damaged nuts:

Damaged walnuts – detail

The damage matches what I read about Walnut Husk Fly infestations: shriveled kernels and terrible taste.

In round numbers, I found 8 oz of damaged nuts in each 3 lb bag, enough to ruin the entire batch. The seller immediately refunded the purchase price for all three bags, so there’s that.

It’s definitely not one of the counterfeit products plaguing Amazon, but I wonder why that lot didn’t fail incoming inspection.

I’m loathe to buy more walnuts for a while, though.

Memo to Self: Always inspect incoming purchases, even from reputable sellers!

2019-09-16
Monthly Science: Weight

Another two months of dots for the record:

Weight Chart 2019-08 – Ed

The eyeballometric slope continues at 1 lb/month.

I started low-key upper-body strength training in June with encouraging results: my biceps no longer require exotic instrumentation for detection and my abs may soon transition from “throw pillow” to “two-pack”.

This is, however, the season of bounteous garden harvests, including delicious corn-on-the-cob and summer squash …

2019-09-01
New Utility Pole

After about a month, a replacement for the fallen utility pole arrived:

New Utility Pole Arrives

This is much easier than digging a hole by hand:

New Utility Pole – auger clearing

Verily, given the right tools, any job becomes do-able:

New Utility Pole – installing

It was fascinating for me and just another day at the office for everybody else:

New Utility Pole – wiring

They nailed the original pole tag to the new pole, complete with the original 1940 nail:

New Utility Pole – pole tag 144701

I expect this pole will outlive me, just as the original pole outlived the folks who built our house.

The most memorable comment came from the person doing the CHG&E damage assessment, who really really wanted this to not be their problem: “Anybody could steal a pole tag and nail it on that pole.” I asked what location their records showed for the pole tag, whereupon the conversation moved on.

Second-place award: no, we were not interested in trenching underground lines 300 feet along the property line, at our expense, to avoid an “unsightly” pole.

For unknown reasons, I was supposed to figure out which telecom utilities had wired the pole, notify them, and wait for them to tack their cables to the new pole. I called both Verizon and Altice / Optimum, got service tickets, and watched them close the tickets without further action. I tried re-opening the Verizon ticket and was told somebody would be there within 48 hours. An Optimum guy showed up, promised a quick return visit from a team with proper equipment, but nothing happened.

I suppose having no customer at the end of the cable removed any motivation to clear their hardware off our lawn, so, after two weeks, I deployed the bolt cutter, rolled up the cables, and scrapped ’em out.

Done!

2019-08-25
Bathroom Drain Rod Status

The bathroom drain rod slipped out of the pop-up stopper, giving me the opportunity to see how well it’s surviving:

Bathroom drain lever – 2019-08-03

After not quite two years, it’s not obviously rotting away.

Life is good …

2019-08-18
Kenmore Model 158: Foot Pedal Pivots

I got an email asking how the Kenmore Model 158 sewing machine’s foot pedal pivots worked. The notes on rebuilding the carbon disk rheostat and conjuring a Hall effect sensor show the innards, but here’s what you need to know to get there.

The pedal has a pair of pivots on the side closest to your foot, held in place with a small screw inside the two feet:

Kenmore 158 – Pedal pivot screw – in place

The screw fits into a notch in the unthreaded pin inserted from the side:

Kenmore 158 – Pedal pivot screw – disassembled

And that’s all there is to it!

Now, as happened to my correspondent, the pin can go missing, perhaps after the screw worked loose. Worst case, you’re looking at replacing both parts.

Being made in Japan (as ours were), the pedal has metric sizes: the unthreaded pin is 4 mm in diameter and 18 mm long and the setscrew has an M4×0.7 thread. You could replace the pin with an 18 mm (down to maybe 15 mm) long M4 screw. The threads would make a gritty pivot, but better than no pivot at all.

Better to get a longer M4 screw with an unthreaded section near the head, hacksaw it to the proper length, file to tidy up the cut end, maybe file a notch for the setscrew, and pop it in place. For tidiness, file off the slot / Philips / hex socket to eliminate the temptation to turn it out.

Worst case, a pair of plain old USA-ian 6-32 screws 3/4 inch long would make a sloppy fit. Don’t tell anybody I said so; that’d be barely better than nothin’ at all in there.

Lowe’s claims to have M4×0.7 setscrews (with a hex socket, not a slot) to secure the pin.

If my experience around here is any guide, however, Lowe’s / Home Depot / Walmart may claim to have metric hardware in stock, but the only way to know is to actually go there and rummage around in the specialty hardware section, inside the big steel cabinet with slide-out drawers filled with a remarkable disarray of ripped-open bags and misfiled parts.

Good hunting …

2019-08-11
Xiaomi-Dafang Hacks: FTP Server for Camera Files
Since the PiHole runs all the time, it now hosts an FTP server to stash snapshots from the cameras onto a 64 GB USB stick. I installed ProFTPD, which Just Worked with a few configuration tweaks:
```
UseIPv6             off
ServerName          "PiHole"
DefaultRoot         /mnt/cameras
RequireValidShell   off
```
The cameras use the BusyBox ftpput command to stash their images (with the hostname prepended), which requires a few changes to motion.conf in the cameras:
```
ftp_snapshot=true
ftp_host="192.168.1.2"
ftp_port=21
ftp_username=$(/bin/hostname)
ftp_password="make up your own"
ftp_stills_dir=$(/bin/hostname)
```
The last line uses a separate directory for each camera, although they quickly ran into the FAT32 limit of 64 K files per directory; reformatting the USB stick with an ext3 filesystem solved that problem.

Fortunately, nothing much ever happens around here …

New Utility Pole Arrives
2019-08-09