Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
An old antique drop-leaf table serves as a plant stand and time reference:
Drop leaf table – in use
While adjusting the clock for Daylight Saving Time, one of the folding leaves … folded, dumping the clock on the floor.
It turns out the latches holding the leaves in place have been repaired / replaced many times since the table left the factory:
Drop leaf table – random latches
I’m certain the latch in the upper right came from my father’s hands.
Although it’s an antique, it’s not a priceless antique, so I had no compunction about drilling out the wood screw holes, installing metric threaded inserts, and converting all the screws to M4 button heads:
Drop leaf table – wood insert
That’s a brad-point bit intended to produce clean-sided flat-bottom holes (modulo a triangular pit from the tip) exactly right for screwing an insert all the way down. The table top just barely fit on the drill press, so I could set the depth stop to make the answer come out right every time.
A dot of low-strength threadlocker keeps the screws from turning, although the table has pretty much reached a steady state these days.
A fairing fragment provided an excuse to practice plastic polishing:
Fairing polish – start
That’s from a EZR-SZ Zzipper fairing ridden about 2000 miles a year since 2001, so it’s spent far too much time in the sun and definitely not gotten all the finicky care it deserves. It’s tinted 60 mil polycarbonate, vacuum-molded into the bubble shape required to fit on a Tour Easy recumbent.
Fairing Flashlight Mount – Mary approaching
On the other paw, Karl Abbe (the guy behind Zzipper) says the typical fairing survives maybe half a decade, so it doesn’t owe us anything.
I applied all three bottles of Novus Plastic Polish in descending numeric order, using snippets of Official Polish Mates (which could be a Krakow escort service) with a vigorous circular motion, ending up with a reasonable result:
Fairing polish – transmission
I cut the smaller chunk from the fairing for comparison. It’s been washed to dislodge loose crud, but is otherwise as-ridden.
The fairing has deeper scratches than Novus can buff out, but removing the surface scuffs and haze definitely improves the clarity:
Fairing polish – clarity
The view from father away:
Fairing polish – clarity
Eks describes this sort of thing as a “Used Car Finish” = high polish over deep scratches:
Fairing polish – surface finish
All in all, a nice result from very little effort.
The basement curtain drain sump pits contained two ancient sump pumps badly in need of replacement, so I got to find out what made their tethered switch floats rattle like that.
Having recently stood up the Main Workbench with its big vise, I could saw without compunction:
Sump pump tether switch – sawing
Which revealed an ordinary snap-action switch:
Sump pump tether switch – opened
Further sawing exposed the rattler:
Sump pump tether switch – parts
Those 1 inch steel balls now nestle in the Big Box o’ Bearings and I’m sure the snap-action switches will come in handy for something.
As a temporary expedient while awaiting more outlets in the basement, I screwed several hundred watts of LED strip lighting to the floor joists so I could see where I was going:
First pass at basement lighting
The switch seemed to run warm, which I attributed to being snuggled up against one of the LED strips, eventually became intermittent, and finally failed with the lights out.
Prying apart the snapped-together case destroyed it, but that didn’t really matter when I saw the innards:
T8 LED power switch
The “intermittent” action came from the melted post on the switch actuator at the top of the photo. The “warm” came from the barely crimped black wire on the right side of the switch, which *might* have had half a dozen strands caught in the flattened crimp triangles.
I replaced it with an identical switch from the assortment that came with the lamps. That one seems to run cooler, although I doubt the crimps are really up to any reasonable quality standards.
In addition to adding basement outlets & lighting circuits, the rest of the house has some electrical wiring peculiarities; the kitchen microwave really shouldn’t share a circuit with the dining room lights.
It’s apparently customary for piano tuners to annotate their work on the keys, starting after the serial numbers on the bass notes at the left end:
Piano tuner notes
After admiring that, you can pop the hammer links off with a prybar:
Detaching piano keys
All 88 keys stack neatly into a Home Depot Extra Small moving box, filling it about 2/3 full, starting with the bass keys on the bottom:
Boxed piano keys
I harvested the lovely wood panels, then the scrapper hauled the carcass to the transfer station. Perhaps it raised the secret chord when it hit the bottom …
Lest you wonder why we didn’t try to contact X, who would surely be interested in a free piano: we did. Believe me, we tried, for many values of X, only to find nobody wants a piano in this day and age.
Mary’s new Sewing Room (f.k.a. The Living Room) has a set of cellular blinds over the windows:
Sewing Room – Cellular shades
They have internal springs instead of pull cords: you just grab the tabs on the lower bar to raise / lower the shade. This worked with one hand for the narrower shades on the sides, but the center shade seemed unusually difficult to move, even with one person on each end.
Then, one morning, the center shade jammed in place about halfway up and resisted all persuasion to move in either direction. So I evacuated all the plants, dismounted the shade, laid it out on the quilting table, and found a sticker showing they were manufactured in 2018:
Cellular shade – data plate
They were surely installed shortly thereafter, so they’re the better part of six years old. Although parts are available for some shades, casual searching suggested replacing all three blinds (because color matching) would require more attention than I wanted to apply in the midst of our ongoing real estate transactions.
Gingerly removing the spring released the tension on the mechanism and a vast array of cords, so I could lay things out and see how the shade was supposed to work:
Cellular shade – cord layout
Four cords support the lower bar, pass through the entire height of the shade, and emerge through plastic guides into the upper bar:
Cellular shade – grommet
All four cords pass around pulleys in the fixed block on the left, to more pulleys in the movable block on the right, then back to the fixed block where they are tied off:
Cellular shade – cord snag
The possibility of successfully re-stringing those cords from a cold start is exactly zero, so I knew I must not fumble anything.
The hook on the right side of the movable block connects to the spring counterbalancing the weight of the shade:
Cellular shade – block missing cord
After considerable pondering, I noticed the upper pulley has four cords on its outer side and the lower pulley has only three. Reasoning by symmetry, I concluded that can’t possibly be right.
Gentle poking at the fixed block showed where the missing cord went:
Cellular shade – errant cord
Apparently the loop slipped off the lower pulley in the movable block, distributed several feet of loose cord somewhere inside the shade, and eventually bound tight around the lower pulley in the fixed block.
Removing the cover from the fixed block confirmed the diagnosis:
Cellular shade – fixed block disassembly
Removing the cover from the movable block shows the cord layout, with the lower pulley still missing one loop:
Cellular shade – block cord layout
Gingerly pulling the loose cord from deep inside the shade, I managed to extend the errant loop back around the pulley in the movable block, then, following the “First, do no harm” part of the Hippocratic Oath, I immobilized all the cords in their current positions relative to all the pulleys / pins / blocks:
Cellular shade – block cords sorted
Which revealed how the cord got loose in the first place:
Cellular shade – block side view
Apparently half a dozen years is enough to warp a thin plastic plate. Who would have expected that?
With the cords sorted out, I eased them off the pulleys, freed the block, and discovered the situation was worse than I thought:
Cellular shade – block warp
Now that I knew what to look for, it was obvious the tiny pin molded into the boss supporting the lower pulley had broken, allowing the cord to slide between the pulley and the top plate. You can see the dark hole vacated by the pin in the first picture of the upper block.
Knowing what I had to do next, I snipped the pin off the other boss with flush-cutting pliers.
Line up the drill press using the top plate to center the drill in the boss, drill a hole suitable for a small screw, and repeat for the other pulley:
Cellular shade – block drilling
At that point, the New Basement Shop™ consisted of empty shelves and full moving boxes, but the drill press and tool chests were accessible. The basement has four outlets, one in each far-distant corner, but I have extension cords and know how to use them; I intend to spray-paint the walls with outlets in the near future.
With the holes drilled, I restored the pulleys / pins / cords to their proper locations:
Cellular shade – cord sorting
Almost proper, as it turned out I put the errant loop on backwards, so I had to go through one completely assembly / test / disassembly cycle.
The two new screws in the pulleys, in addition to the two old screws along the midline, hold the top plate flat against the bottom plate, with the remaining pins seated securely in their holes.
Reassemble in reverse order, tension the spring, snap it on the movable block, and reinstall in the window. I don’t have any pix of the completed assembly, but the shade now works as it should: we can raise and lower it from either end with just a bit of effort.
While arranging the venerable Sears Sewing Table in its new abode, we found the casters underneath didn’t roll nearly as well as they should, which turned out to be due to an accumulation of damage:
Sears sewing table – torn MDF
As far as I can tell, all four casters have been displaced upward, probably because they have no support directly above their stems and any force applied to the wheel has plenty of lever arm against those screws.
The MDF panels on the outside of the table have pictures of wood laminated to their surface, but lack enough structural integrity to keep the screws in place. The plywood, however, survived largely unscathed, although the screws were pulling out.
I poked as much wood glue into the gaps as possible, then applied as many clamps as possible, with wood strips on both sides of the bulge squashing the MDF into a flat sheet. Over the course of two gluing sessions (I need more clamps!) spanning three days, while Mary really wanted to start sewing, the glue cured. I had plenty of time to unbend the brackets and put a more-or-less right angle between their two screw plates.
Rummaging in the box of laser scraps (after finding said box) produced disks cut from various projects that fit between the plywood bottom of the cabinet and the stems:
Sears sewing table – repaired foot – side
The brackets deliberately don’t match their original shape, because their new squareness put the screws into undamaged spots in the MDF and plywood:
Sears sewing table – repaired foot – bottom
The MDF will never be quite the same, but it’s flat on the visible side and the glue (seems to have) consolidated the fragments well enough.
Although those wheels look terrible, the bracket now holds the stem vertically and all four of them roll easily and pivot smoothly.
The laser-cut disks are held in place by pure faith and the overwhelming weight of all the MDF in the table, so they’re not going anywhere. Because the table’s weight now rests on the caster stems, as distributed across the plywood cabinet bottom through the disks, the brackets shouldn’t be subject to excessive upward force.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 