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.
And kvetching, too
The main aisle at the Trinity contest is a busy place, but that didn’t seem to matter. This guy came ambling along, tapping on the keyboard, walking slower and slower, until he just dropped to a dead stop(*) in the middle of the lane:
Everyone gave him plenty of clearance until he eventually rejoined consensus reality and moved on…
(*) There’s a song about that, but you’re gonna have to find it yourself.
That circuit works pretty well for APRS tracking, I’d say, based on a 23 mile out-and-back ride over the Walkway:
Had I gone further westward along Rt 299, however, the track would end: the bluffs on the east side of the Wallkill River Valley block much of the RF and Illinois Mountain (just to the west of Poughkeepsie) finishes the job. Evidently, nobody runs an APRS iGate or digipeater anywhere within sight of New Paltz…
FWIW, the Walkway’s hand-scrawled notice boards now entreat “Bicyclists: ride SLOW and YIELD to pedestrians.” OK, fair enough, but how about equal time: “WALKERS: keep RIGHT, remove earbuds, and PAY ATTENTION”. It’s amazing how four people can block nearly the entire width of a 25 foot path, then look startled after not hearing a bicycle bell that’s been dinging steadily for 15 seconds…
Those panic buttons in the high school cafeteria still beg the question: who thought panic buttons would be a Good Idea? I recently served as a judge for the Science Fair qualification show and found some variations on the theme.
One seems in good shape, although I don’t know if it’s been repaired:
Several have missing buttons, but the innards seem intact:
In the event of an actual panic, I suppose you simply yank the cage off the wall:
I cannot imagine what logic justified protecting one button and leaving the others to the tender mercies of the student population.
Our tax dollars at work, for sure…
So the Epson R380’s magenta printhead has clogged and cleaning it doesn’t have any effect. I figured I’d pop the printhead out, rinse off the crud, and see if that improved the situation. Turns out, you can’t get there from here…
The first step is removing the printer side panels, which involves sliding a steel strip into the not-really-vent slots along the side to release the catches as described there. This picture shows what’s going on inside:
You must hit that slot in the catch with the strip, so the strip must be no wider than 15 mm = 5/8 inch and tapering the end would certainly help. After I removed the panels, I broke those latch tabs off; the panel has locating tabs that align the edges, so the latch tabs just keep you out.
In any rational printer, accessing the printhead for cleaning would be trivially easy. Epson has a different attitude: KEEP OUT!
My original idea was to release the rod upon which the ink tank carrier slides, then pull the whole thing out, but it turns out the rod is also a shaft that transmits rotary motion from one side of the printer to the other, plus a mechanism to raise and lower the printhead over the cleaning station (and, perhaps, the DVD carrier that I’ve never used). A vast assortment of gears, clips, encoder wheels, and doodads affixed to each end convinced me not to go that route right now.
The left side includes an impossibly delicate rotary encoder disk blocking the end of the shaft:
Prying the spring out of the shaft notch allows it to slide to the right until another spring clip slams up against the inside of the frame on the right side. That clip may be pry-able, but it’s carefully arranged so as to be maximally inconvenient to reach.
The ring holding the gear in place must be removable, somehow or another, even without an obvious hole or tab:
With that encoder wheel blocking the left end of the rod, I gave up.
Then I tried to dismantle enough of the ink tank carrier to release the printhead. The first step removed the tank carrier’s two side panels, both of which use pull-out clips to prevent them from sliding. A view of the removed panels shows the tabs:
The outside panel requires jamming a small screwdriver behind that tab at an awkward angle, then the panel slides downward:
You can release the inside panel with a fingernail near the top of the (unmarked, but obvious) tab outlined in white on the far right side, then slide upward:
The magenta circles mark three screws that secure the printhead plate to the carrier, but it won’t do you any good. The two rear screws require a narrow-shaft Philips #1 driver and you cannot get the screws out through the holes; I managed to get them back in place, but don’t loosen them until you figure out how to remove the assembly holding the electrical contacts for the ink tanks.
That assembly, marked by the six color panels, slides vertically into the rear wall of the carrier and seems to have a latch on the rear wall of the tank carrier. Of course, you can’t access the latch without dismantling the damn printer.
So I put everything back together again and the printer works no worse than it did before. I’m considering connecting a syringe with length of tubing to the magenta inlet port, then forcing a toxic mix of water, alcohol, and detergent through the printhead:
Given that the printer cost something like $15 after rebate, it’s pretty much fully depreciated by now…
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.
Despite the fact that nobody bothers to crack your web passwords, as it’s easier for them to crack the entire server and scoop out everyone’s personally sensitive bits like so much caviar, all websites remind / require you to pick strong passwords. So, when I registered myself on a high-value website, I did what I always do: ask my password-generation program for a dollop of entropy.
It came up with something along the lines of:
Gmaz78fb'd]
You can see where this is going, right?
Pressing Submit (which always makes me whisper Inshallah with a bad accent) produced:
The mumble.com website is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.
Little Bobby Tables rides again!
[Yes, pwnage.]
Being that sort of bear, I tend to make notations like this. Sometimes I’m delighted the next time the inscription sees the light of day and sometimes it ticks me right off…
Much of the energy-saving advantage of CFL bulbs comes from their touted long life. I’d say a year isn’t nearly long enough to reap any benefits…
There is certainly a warranty on the bulb, if only I’d:
They know none of us will get very far down that checklist…
FWIW, the box of smaller CFL bulbs on the shelf says they have a two-year warranty “in normal residential service of 3 hours per day”. I’m sure the number of starts factors into it, too.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 