The New Hotness

While washing our ancient electric crock pot (“slow cooker”), I wondered how corroded the inside of the steel shell had become. A simple nut secured the base plate and unscrewed easily enough, whereupon what I thought was a stud vanished inside the shell.

The shell wasn’t rusty enough to worry about, but the stud turned out to be a crudely chopped-off thumbscrew on a springy rod pulling the base toward the ceramic pot:

Evidently, they pulled the thumbscrew through the base, tightened the nut, then cut off the thumbscrew flush with the nut.

I desperately wanted to drill a hole in a new thumbscrew and repeat the process, but I no longer have a small drawer full of assorted thumbscrews. So I must either lengthen the existing thread just enough to complete the mission or build a screw from scratch.

The thumbscrew is threaded 10-24, I have a bunch of 10-32 threaded inserts, so pretend they have the same thread diameter and tap one end to 10-24:

Jam the new threads on the thumbscrew and jam a 10-32 setscrew into the un-wrecked end:

You can see the surface rust in there, right?

Make a Delrin bushing to fit around the insert poking through the base:

Reassemble the internal bits with permanent Loctite, top with a nyloc nut, and it’s only a little taller than the original nut:

The setscrew let me hold the new “stud” in place while torquing the nut, plus it looks spiffy.

Memo to Self: If it ain’t broke, don’t look inside. Hah!

Surprisingly, both Amazon and eBay lack useful thumbscrew assortments …