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.
Mechanical widgetry
The desiccant in the basement safe:
Continues to work just fine, much better than the first attempt:
The paper scrap gives the weight of tray+desiccant, so when the humidity finally starts going up I’ll have some idea of the average leak rate. Most likely, opening the door for the more-or-less monthly logger readout introduces most of the water vapor…
During a recent rainstorm I grabbed the fiberglass marker pole at the end of the drain pipe to clear a wad of leaves out of the driveway gutters. Unfortunately, that left me with a finger full of glass fibers; it seems the top of the pole has deteriorated. The first tweezer I plucked from the stash around the pencil-oid tool holder hadn’t had its jaws aligned, so after I plucked (most of) the glass using those tweezers, I did a bit of filing and sandpapering:
That’s a millimeter scale in the background: these really are needle-tip tweezers.
A closer view:
It still has a bit of overbite, but it grabs hairs from the bench with no hassle. Given that you can’t get all the glass fibers on the first pass, it’ll come in handy…
Putting the tool length switch atop the tooling plate has the advantage that it’s higher than most of the workpieces, but it also soaks up a bit of precious real estate. Moving it off the plate to the table puts it nearly level with the top of the plate, but at least now I have room for clamp blocks and suchlike:
It turns out that Sherline T-nuts protrude just an itsy above the top of the table (which lets them locate the tooling plate to the slot, for example), so I shortened one by filing it down to size:
Now, I’d like to front as if all that happened in a rational and well-thought-out manner, but the fact of the matter is that I completely used up one 10-32 stainless socket-head cap screw while thinking it was somehow still bottoming out in the slot, before realizing that the T-nut was sticking up. Drat!
The shaft that tilts the mixer head has started walking sideways out of its hole, which is not to be tolerated. Looking up inside the base column shows a locking screw that’s worked loose:
I took the thing apart and filed a flat on the shaft:
And then a dab of Loctite on the screw will prevent that from happening again:
It’s still piddling oil on the countertop. If you have one of these things, always store it with the head tilted upward. That makes the oil run down the column onto the counter, rather than through the planetary gears into the mixing bowl…
The third hand grabbers I have all put bare alligator clip ferrules in the adjustable sockets with a thumbscrew to secure them. Over time, that thumbscrew crunches the ferrule and makes the clip hard to adjust. This has become enough of an annoyance that I rummaged around in the brass tubing cutoffs to find some that fit into the ferrules:
Given the sorry state of the ferrules, they required quite a bit of squeezing and shaping until that tube fit inside, but after that they rounded up nicely.
I suppose I should solder the tubes in place, but …
This Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve feeds water into our furnace, provides an overpressure relief, and prevents heating loop water from re-entering the potable water supply.
The vertical pipe leads downward near the floor, underneath which sits the small plastic bucket I provided to catch the occasional drip. Recently we had an all-hands scramble to soak up a pool of water spreading across the floor from the overflowing bucket, across the aisle, and below the shafts-and-rods-and-tubes-and-pipes storage rack. Evidently the occasional drip became a steady drip while we weren’t watching; not a catastrophic flood, but far more water than we want on the floor.
This is the inlet valve, which is basically a flapper. You can’t see the fine cracks around the central mount, but they’re all over the inner half of the ring.
And this is the outlet valve, which has pretty much disintegrated. Note the outer rim peeled back under my thumb:
A complete new valve is $40, in stock and ready for pickup at Lowe’s, but all I really needed was the failed rubber flapper valves, which they don’t carry. A few minutes of searching reveals the Watts 0886011 Repair Kit, which has all of the interior parts.
Pop Quiz: How much does the repair kit cost?
Answer: Starts at $38 plus shipping and goes up from there. Cheap aftermarket kits run $20 and up, but they’re all out of stock.
Now that, party people, is the sort of thing that ticks me right off.
Perhaps the local HVAC / plumbing supply stores have such kits in stock? To quote: “They may exist, but we don’t have them.”
I don’t see any way to homebrew new flapper valves, so it’s off to Lowe’s we go…
It would seem to me that these things shouldn’t fail after a mere decade of service. I thought that about the CdS flame sensor that crapped out in the middle of a sub-zero January cold snap while I was at Cabin Fever some years ago, too.
My assumption that the basement document safe had an effective door seal turned out to be wrong, so I replaced the bagged desiccant with a tray of granules, sealed the door with masking tape, and tried again:
The jagged black curve shows the Basement Laboratory temperature trending toward the usual mid-50s winter level. The dead-flat horizontal blue line at 15% RH shows the tray of desiccant can keep up with whatever air leakage might occur around the tape and through the floor bolts.
I cannot find the table (that I once had and know exists somewhere) which lists various desiccants and their terminal humidity levels in a sealed container. I’m pretty sure the low humidity means it’s one of the clay-based desiccants, not silica gel.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 